In the Crossfire

on waiting for war

The view of Amman from the Citadel.

It’s early on a Saturday, and Amman is quiet under a vivid summer sky. Still in our pajamas, my husband, Nick, and I sit in the living room of our U.S. Embassy-furnished apartment with our dog, Boo. We are sipping our coffee, enjoying fresh air from the open window, and waiting for a war to start.

The calico cat that’s been visiting us for breakfast and dinner steps gingerly into our yard, and Boo cries to be let out to play. Boo has never heard of Gaza or Hamas or the Golan Heights. She has no sense of anything beyond this apartment, much less of the fact that the body of former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh—or whatever is left of it—is cooling in the ground somewhere across the Arabian Desert, draped in the flag of Palestine; that Tehran has vowed revenge for his assassination and their own humiliation; that a carrier strike group and fighter jet squadrons are steadily moving toward us. She has no idea of the Israeli Defense Forces’ raids just across the Jordan River in the West Bank, of the children being slaughtered alongside militants.

“We need to make a plan for her.” I say it to Nick, but my eyes are on Boo, whose eyes are on the cat. “In case the State Department orders us to leave.” 

To get Boo out of Jordan, we’d need health certificates, titer tests, proof of rabies boosters. All that takes time, and I’m afraid of not having any. Wars can spread like wildfires, jumping rivers and freeways and engulfing homes without warning. 

“We’re, like, five steps away from that happening,” Nick says. “And anyway, it probably won’t. They haven’t even evacuated the Embassy in Beirut yet.”

Nick is right, of course, that Beirut would go first. They are much more in the line of fire than we are. The Israel-Lebanon border, where the IDF and Hezbollah are trading blows, is about 80 miles from Amman, less than the distance between New York and Philadelphia. While that would feel uncomfortably close in the U.S., in this part of the world it might as well be another planet, more than far enough for us to feel safe. But Jordan is also wedged between Israel and Iran, and whatever Tehran unleashes to avenge the Hamas leader’s killing, it will soar straight over us. 

And when it does, what next? 

I take a sip of my cappuccino. “I’m not sure I agree with that analysis,” I say. It’s as though we are back at Georgetown, debating theoretical matters in the classroom—but a competent debater would present a counter argument, and I have none. Fear is all that substantiates my disagreement. It’s almost certain we’d have notice of an impending evacuation. Yet no one anticipated what happened in Cairo in 2011, when things fell apart so quickly that Embassy families were forced to leave pets behind.

“I suppose you would still be here for a while, even if I have to go,” I say. “Boo would stay with you while we worked on getting her out.” 

When an Embassy is threatened, children and spouses are the first ones ordered to evacuate; employees only go if the situation continues to worsen. We don’t address the fact that in that case, we’d be separated indefinitely. Nick and I can handle time apart—we’ve done it before.

We both know I’d sooner stay and roll the dice, but if things got that bad, I wouldn’t be given a choice. I would be put on a plane whether I liked it or not.

It could happen so fast.

For days, I sit on the couch in the living room, incessantly toggling between the New York Times and Al Jazeera and the BBC. I refresh their homepages every hour, scanning past stories about Tim Walz and the stock market, looking for news of Iran’s response, hoping for the suspense to end.

“U.S. URGES ITS CITIZENS TO LEAVE LEBANON ON ‘ANY AVAILABLE TICKET,’” the headlines say. The subtext being: anywhere is better than here. Secretary of State Blinken tells the G7 that an attack could come in 24-48 hours. I hear from friends that flights to and from Amman are being canceled, with some airlines refusing to fly to the region at all. Texts fly in Embassy group chats about unaccompanied minors stranded in D.C., about the chances of making it to Frankfurt or Doha and finding a way to your final destination from there. Can you get out on Lufthansa? They ask. What about Turkish or Austrian?

For now, the cancellations are an annoyance. It’s airspace closures that should worry us. That is, if what happened in April is any indication—it was the grounding of commercial jets that signaled an aerial attack was imminent. That time, we had warning. The Iranian drones will reach Jordan’s airspace in T-4 hours, T-2, T-1. There was time to get every last passenger plane out of the sky. The score was settled without a single fatality. It was an ersatz ballet, choreographed and predictable.

But this time there are more dancers—not just Iran and Israel, but Hezbollah and Hamas. I fear they will start improvising, knocking into each other onstage until the ballet devolves into an all-out brawl. 

So I stay glued to the news, looking for signs of what’s to come. I watch videos of Israel’s Iron Dome lighting up the sky like fireworks as it shoots down rockets that were aimed at civilians, and I hope to god it does not fail. 

“What would you do if you were Iran?” Nick asks me one evening. We’re in the car somewhere in West Amman, snaking through traffic on our way to dinner. 

It’s a morbid thought experiment, but Nick and I like that sort of thing. We are certified foreign policy geeks, each having attended one of the top U.S. graduate programs for international security. Instead of football or basketball, we talk deterrence theory and military history around the dinner table. Getting into the heads of murderous dictators is our favorite sport. 

“I’d let Hezbollah do my dirty work,” I say. “Let them draw Bibi into a conflict in Lebanon, then strike when he’s sufficiently distracted and his resources are committed elsewhere.” 

“That’s kind of clever, actually,” Nick says.

I’m both flattered by the compliment and disturbed at my own callousness. At home in the U.S., we could play these strategy games knowing that whether our predictions were wrong or right, the outcome would have no effect on us. We do not have that luxury this time. It no longer feels like a game when you’re playing to decide how worried you should be, when you’re playing for your neighbors’ lives and the lives of their families.  

But I suppose whenever we’ve played these games, it was for someone’s life.

Maybe we should never have been playing at all.

Days later, I am still sitting in the living room, refreshing the news. Victims burn as tents bombed in Khan Younis. Israeli jets break the sound barrier over Beirut. Iran will respond at “right time” to killing of Hamas leader.

I read these ghastly headlines while surrounded by a curation of beautiful things—my books, my bentwood rocking chair, my pottery from Egypt. They are trophies from a life well lived, and they could all be ash tomorrow. One miscalculation is all it takes. And what heirlooms sit broken in the rubble of Gaza? How many wedding photos lie ripped and fading in the sun? 

I imagine the Americans at Embassy Beirut, surveying their own living rooms, considering all the pretty things that won’t fit in the “go bags” they’ve no doubt been advised to pack. A go bag is for essentials to see you through emergency evacuations—a change of clothes, some water bottles, a couple energy bars. Maybe a crisp hundred dollar bill and a fifth of Johnnie Walker to bribe your way past roadblocks. Go bags aren’t meant to hold wedding photos or Egyptian pottery. Memories are too heavy to put on your back and run with.

I should have a go bag, but I can’t bring myself to pack one.

Instead I sit in my living room, staring out the window at the clear blue skies, waiting for a war that may or may not come.

As a friend used to say: we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.