The Things You Can’t Forget: My First Encounter with a Child Suicide Bomber

There are certain things in this world that shouldn’t exist, things too grotesque to be real, too monstrous to comprehend. But there I was, standing in the middle of the rubble, staring at something that should never be. A boy. Barely 7 or 8 years old. He wasn’t even old enough to grow into the kind of man who would ever make a real choice, but he was standing there in front of me—shaking, his body wrapped in the vest of his impending doom.

You’d think I would’ve seen it coming. I should’ve known, right? We’d been through enough of this godforsaken war to recognize the signs, the whispers in the wind, the quiet before the storm. But this time, it hit me harder than anything ever had.

He was just a kid. His face was smudged with dirt, eyes wide, mouth trembling like he couldn’t even process what was happening to him. And there he stood, in the middle of that dusty hellhole, the one thing I never thought I’d see—child soldiers—but this one… this one was different. He wasn’t armed. Not with a gun, at least. No. This boy was armed with something much more terrifying.

The sound of the blast was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t just the boom of an explosion. It was the world exploding. The air itself seemed to shudder, and the shockwave hit me like I’d been slammed into a wall. My bones rattled, teeth rattling in my skull. The ground beneath my feet buckled, like the very earth was trying to swallow us whole.

Dust clouded the sky. The air turned thick, like trying to breathe through a blanket. For a moment, I couldn’t even hear my own screams. It was all muffled, like being submerged under water. The world became a blur of dark and light, the kind of confusion you only get from too many explosions going off in too short a time. I felt the heat of it, burning my skin. And then, when the dust finally began to settle, I saw the crater.

A fucking crater.

It wasn’t a crater from a bomb or mortar. It was the crater from him. That boy. That child. The flesh, the blood, the bones—scattered like grotesque confetti. There was nothing left of him that resembled what he once was. His innocence torn apart, literally and figuratively, by the evil of a war he couldn’t understand. And what does the world have to show for it? A crater, a mass of shredded body parts, and the stench of burnt flesh.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.

The smell—it’ll haunt me forever. The metallic stench of blood mingled with the acrid scent of burning flesh. The charred remnants of something once so… alive. The earth was damp, soaked with more than just water. It was drenched in what remained of him.

And the sounds—god, the sounds—I can’t get them out of my head. The scream he didn’t get to finish, that high-pitched whine in the air that you hear right after an explosion. His scream was supposed to be the last thing he ever uttered, but that detonation cut it short, slicing through the air with its merciless finality. But the sound lingered. It twisted into a ringing in my ears, like I could still hear the moment he became nothing. That… thing... that I could never unhear.

His eyes… that’s what does it to me. I can’t look away from them. The sheer terror that filled them, like he didn’t want to die. That fear was more real than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. But he was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet. And now, his face, that last glimpse of a child who didn’t deserve any of it, is burned into my mind.

It’s the silence that follows, that deep, heavy silence that you can’t escape from. It’s the weight of a moment that you can never take back. But the part that fucked me up the most? It wasn’t the blast, it wasn’t the aftermath—it was the freeze that hit me. My body shut down. My mind screamed. I should’ve moved. I should’ve done something. But I couldn’t.

I stood there. Staring at what remained of that kid. Frozen.

I could taste bile in my throat. The world spun around me, twisting and stretching until I thought I was going to be sick. My legs didn’t work. My body didn’t work. My brain? Fucking broken. My heart, too. But not for the reasons I thought. It wasn’t the blast. It wasn’t the fire. It was the horror of it. A child. A child. How the hell does a kid get caught up in this mess? How the fuck do we let this happen?

Nightmares followed. Nightmares. I thought I could escape, but they always found me. They always dragged me back to that moment. The dust. The meat. The crater. And his eyes.

Every night when I close my eyes, I’m right back there. In that hellhole. I can hear the dull thud of another explosion in the distance. I can feel that heavy pressure on my chest. I can still taste the dirt in the air, feel the burn of my lungs as I try to breathe through it. I can still hear that scream, that terrified cry that never quite fades away. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how far I run, it always drags me back.

People talk about war wounds. They talk about scars. But let me tell you something—there’s shit that doesn’t heal. There’s damage that runs deep, so deep you can’t even recognize it. Some scars, they don’t show. Some wounds? They never stop bleeding. Some things, no matter how much time passes, will stay with you, like a shadow you can never outrun.

So I live with it. Every goddamn day. I’ll never forget that boy. The crater. The meat. The terror in his eyes. That’s a debt I’ll never get to pay. War doesn’t have endings. It just leaves broken people, scattered pieces of innocence, and the nightmare of a thousand kids, just like him.

Some scars aren’t visible. But they’re there. Always.