For someone who grew up amidst the sound of bombs, television coverage of the missile attack on Iraq -- or anywhere -- brings vivid childhood memories to mind. These in turn lead to questions about what possible justification there could be for bombing children. PNS editor Andrew Lam is a journalist and short-story writer based in San Francisco.

Watching CNN recently I saw an Iraqi night sky emblazoned with American missiles and felt as if I were watching a replay of my own past. I resisted the impulse to cover my ears or change the channel and listened to the familiar sound of bombs exploding.

Growing up in Vietnam, I developed a habit of covering my ears whenever I was frightened. My eyes would stay wide open but I couldn't bear to listen -- even to ghost stories or firecrackers. My relatives laughed at this peculiar reaction, but they understood the reason for it -- I had survived the Tet offensive in 1968 in the Mekong Delta.

I was only four and half, but the incident remains as vivid in my mind as a movie. That night, the last night before the year of the Monkey, my family and I gathered in front the ancestral altar to burn incense and pray to our ancestors for prosperity and peace. My father, an officer in the South Vietnamese Army, was away and Mother allowed us children to stay up past midnight to celebrate the new year. We ate sweet jasmine soup with logan seeds before going to bed and drifting happily into the world of dreams.

Alas, not for long.

An hour or so later an explosion shook our house, shattering all the windows. We children scrambled out of bed screaming and huddled in the hall way in our white pajamas.

This nearby bomb signaled the beginning of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.

My mother led us all to the bomb shelter made of sandbags behind our house, built only a few months earlier by my father. It did not shield us from the noise or, for that matter, the terror.

I remember bursts of gunfire and random explosions that left horrible echoes like thunder, yet they did not drown out the shouts of soldiers and the shrieks of women and children in other houses.

Much of what followed was chaos and confusion but I remember my mother taking her post at the shelter's door with a grenade in her hand, determined to toss it at anyone who dared come to harm her children. How terrified she was, I'll never know but I remember her cowering each time a bomb exploded even as she refused to move.

By dawn, my father returned with some soldiers and rescued us, taking us to the army compound with him. The battle by then raged elsewhere. In Sadec, a day or so later, dead bodies littered the streets and some houses were burnt to a crisp or bombed to smithereens.

We survived but that was the first time I saw dead bodies. I remember holding my great uncle's hand as we watched the bluebottle flies hovering over the bloodied corpses under a scorching sun. Neither one of us managed to utter a single word.

At five, I was fully aware that we were at war though I did not know why. All I knew was that destruction and extraordinary violence could come raining down at any time. My nightly prayers to Buddha until we left Vietnam in 1975 were that the bombs should stop falling and that peace should come.

When I was ten years old my father took me to Quang Tri, a city destroyed by bombs -- not a single house survived. The craters, ten feet deep and fifteen feet wide, turned into ponds after the monsoon, with wild flowers growing wildly at their rims. Children swam in some, others had been turned into fish farms.

Quang Tri was all rubble and debris. As we drove around I saw an old woman who sitting behind a window. She sat with the ease of years, but she looked at nothing now, the neighborhood gone, and the wall that held that window was the only thing left standing of her house. I remember waving to her. But she did not wave back.

That afternoon, flying back to Hue from Quang Tri in a helicopter, I saw a landscaped full of round holes. It looked like the surface of the moon. "Why does the land look like that?" I asked the Vietnamese pilot. "It's America's gift to Vietnam," he answered, "pockmarks made by bombs."

That answer comes reverberating back as we learn of bombing -- in Iraq, anywhere in the world. I can't help but think of the children who live under those exploding bombs and wonder if the adults ever explain to them why they must suffer so? And what could those adults possibly say that wouldn't make them think the adults were all mad.

War is a very strange thing. How it comes about. How it ends. I don't think that even if I live to be a hundred years old that I would ever understand it. All I know is that I could still hear them in my dreams sometimes, those horrible bombs, echoing rhythmically across the oceans and continents.