Places

Though I lived in three different countries and worked in several more, I am not terribly well-traveled. Most of the travel I’ve done in my life was within Europe or North America.

Even so, I now realize that there’s a growing list of places I visited that have since become targets of military action:

• Lviv, in Western Ukraine, known from Austro-Hungarian times as Lemberg: I visited in 1983 or 1984 I believe. Since 2022, it’s been attacked several times by Russian drones or missiles;
• Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, which I also visited back then, was briefly the target of military action in 1991, during Lithuania’s less-than-fully-peaceful divorce from the former USSR;
• Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where I briefly did some consulting work back in the mid 2010s, has been targeted by Iran in the most recent war between Iran and the combined US-Israeli force;
• Dubai, the same, targets even including civilian locations like a hotel or the international airport.

I suppose I could also add to this some cities in Romania that I visited often, including Timisoara and Bucharest, which saw brief bursts of regime violence during the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.

Then again, I should count myself as one of the lucky ones. For me, these remain relatively distant places, distant memories. For others, it’s home.