Last night, my neighborhood felt like a war zone, with the cracking, popping, and banging of fireworks, occasional screams and shouts, and thickly accumulating smoke. The experience brought back memories—my own and my family’s:

Gettysburg, 1863: In the words of my great-grandfather, who was 16 at the time: “On the first day of the Gettysburg fight, our corps was 30 miles to the S.W. We marched all night & reached the field in the forenoon on the 2nd day’s fight….Our Division was ordered to the relief of Sickles Corps & it took the hill in fine shape…Our regiment lost heavily in this charge in killed and wounded. Among the killed was James Bailey [also about 16], who came from England with me & enlisted at the same time…We fell together, struck by splinters of the same shell. We lay where we fell—he dead, I wounded, until daylight of the next morning, when I was carried to a field hospital.” Great grandfather was wounded again, and taken captive twice, before the end of the Civil War.

Northern Israel, 1977: I arrived at Kibbutz Dafna, a communal farming settlement in the northern Galilee, very close to Israel’s border with Lebanon. I was 22, out to see the world, and I had just signed up at an office in Tel Aviv to be a volunteer kibbutz worker.

This was country where Jesus once walked and taught. But during the time I lived at Dafna, a multifactional civil war was raging in Lebanon, just to the north, and that country was descending into bloody chaos. Machine gun fire from the nearby hills of Lebanon was a constant background sound, supplemented on the worst days of fighting with frequent bomb explosions. When the fighting came too close to Israel, Israeli fighter jets shrieked low overhead—as fearsome as the Nazguls in the Lord of the Rings movies, but real and terrifying, even though I knew I was not their target.

This was also a time when the PLO had stepped up its incursions into northern Israel. Once, near the end of my night shift at Dafna’s boot factory, the guards caught a terrorist just inside Dafna’s high barbed-wire fence. It also wasn’t long after my arrival at Dafna that I learned that many of its residents were victims of yet another war: about eight or ten were survivors of the Holocaust, and some remained deeply disturbed by their experiences.

When I arrived, my head was full of romantic notions about the world, and I was as self-centered and naive as any young person. Initially, these manifestations of war fit so effortlessly into my idealistic mental picture of Israel, the brave nation fighting the world for its survival. At first they seemed like the glamorous backdrop to the screenplay of my own bit part in Israel’s history. Things were so black-and-white, and one-dimensional, and all-about-me then! But as I came to know the people around me and to share a little of their experiences, even I began to understand, little by little, about the fear and suffering inflicted on all the peoples of the Middle East by the deadly business of war.

Kuwait, 2006: My 22-year-old nephew K, who is a Navy hospital corpsman, spent most of last year at a field hospital in Kuwait, caring for wounded people evacuated from Iraq. One day, an old friend of K’s arrived as a patient. This young man had enlisted in the Marines at the same time that K enlisted in the Navy. He had been hit by a bullet during fighting in Anbar Province, and has been paralyzed by his injury.

It seems to me that if you have had so little experience with real war zones that you’re drawn to recreate them with fireworks, then you are lucky indeed.