I remember that day very well... I was young but the memory is still fresh in my mind. I saw that TWA plane going around repeatedly, trying to land at Beirut's airport (flight path back then, even now on some windy days, had planes flying over our building). I remember looking from my bedroom balcony and knowing exactly why this was happening, and I remember telling myself, "Oh no, not again. Please, not again." I remember the news; the "authorities" didn't want that plane to land in Beirut. We had enough on our plate and couldn't deal with another "incident"; we just couldn't. At one point, the airport authorities drove buses and anything and everything they could gather onto the runway; they didn't want that plane to land. Eventually, they had to give in and the plane landed. For days it just sat there. I remember watching the news and seeing the gruesome imagine of a man tossed onto the tarmac and the pilot's head sticking out of the cockpit window while another person held a gun to his head. Those were very difficult images for me to understand, but then again, I lived in a country that had been torn apart by the ravages of civil war. As we say here, may we remember but may those days never be repeated. Sadly, so much of what we went through back then is now being repeated throughout the region... Very unfortunate when we, as human beings, cannot learn from the mistakes of our past... Very unfortunate indeed...