On August 7, 1998 car bomb explosions at US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya killed 257 people and wounded over 4,000. This was the event that kind of woke me up to terrorism, al-qaeda, and bin-laden. It was a huge news story back in 1998, along with the Clinton scandal of course. It was one of the numerous attacks that led up to 9/11 (along with the 1993 wtc bombing and the 2000 USS cole bombing).

I remember this one.

Even though it was domestic, I think the first "terrorist like" thing that affected me was Oklahoma City in '95. Of course, these incidents were all tragedies in their own right, but at the time, I tended to view them as isolated incidents.

I remember this one.

Even though it was domestic, I think the first "terrorist like" thing that affected me was Oklahoma City in '95. Of course, these incidents were all tragedies in their own right, but at the time, I tended to view them as isolated incidents.


yeah that's true about OKC, I should have said international terrorism. I used to go with my dad to the federal building downtown because he used to go there to put money in his credit union I believe, and I remember the increased security and being scared to go to there because of the Oklahoma City bombing.

On August 7, 1998 car bomb explosions at US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya killed 257 people and wounded over 4,000. This was the event that kind of woke me up to terrorism, al-qaeda, and bin-laden.  It was one of the numerous attacks that led up to 9/11 (along with the 1993 wtc bombing and the 2000 USS cole bombing).


With me the wake-up came on 23 October 1983, when the Marine Barracks in Beirut was blown up.  I was entering my final month of boot camp at the time, and it shook all of us badly.  220 Marines, 18 Sailors, and 3 Soldiers were killed in the blast.  That was 23 years ago yesterday.

There was also the Achille Lauro in 1985.  In that, a ship was hijacked by members of the Palestine Liberation Front.  Passenger Leon Klinghoffer (an elderly Jewish American man in a wheelchair) was shot and thrown overboard when they were refused the right to dock in Syria.

Other then the assorted kidnappings, the next thing to affect Americans was probably the 1993 WTC bombing.  This was really the first time in recent years that foreign hijackers did an attack on US soil.  6 people were killed, and over 1,000 were injured.

Terrorism has always been there, they just rarely struck in the US.  Most of our terrorism until the last 15 years has been domestic in nature, like Oklahoma City and Waco.