Bravo, Peter! Well done ...

Courage ... in the face of insanity. Yup. That's what it takes.

'It was like being in hell'
[Ottawa] Citizen columnist Peter Zimonjic lives in London and was on a train travelling into Edgware Road station yesterday morning when the terrorists hit. As he told his story to Paula McCooey, he was in obvious shock.

Peter Zimonjic, The Ottawa Citizen

The train I was on was the Circle line. I got on the train, and we left Paddington station at 8:46 a.m. I was on the train for a few minutes. We were cruising along in the underground tunnel when another train passed us and exploded, exactly opposite us.

Our train car filled up with smoke. Having done some first aid training, I said "look everybody relax, it's going to be OK."

A few minutes later someone came through the car, asking us if we had any first aid training because people (on the opposite train) were in trouble.

I and another guy smashed the window and jumped across (to the other train). The first thing I attempted to do was give CPR to someone who was lying unconscious on the floor. Unfortunately, he was dead. A person next to him, both legs blown off. She was dead. The person next to her, a gentleman in his 50s, was dead as well.

There were a few people there that were alive and they were bleeding. I ended up taking off my shirt, ripping it into bandages, tying them around people so they would be OK. There was lots of blood and the smell of burning flesh, the sound of upset people.

I was incredibly distraught but focused on helping the wounded. There was blood everywhere. There's people with legs missing, there's people with heads missing. And then after a while, it suddenly became clear that the train, the car that I was on, was completely destroyed. The roof was gone. The floor was gone. The walls were gone. The window was gone. It was a complete and total mess. And we realized there must have been a bomb.

I was in the train for an hour and a half, by the time I got out, by the time I got past police and gave my statement.

I've taken first aid training before, I've taken lots of first aid courses. So when you take first aid courses, they tell you how to use certain equipment, how to be in a certain situation. You know, this is a situation where you had no first aid kit. You were ripping off your shirt to take care of people. There was no oxygen. There was no IV. There was no bandages. There was no nothing. Everyone was covered in debris. You moved debris to help one person, and end up jabbing another person in the side. It was awful.

To be honest with you, I think I will be dealing with this for a while. There was incredibly horrific screams of desperation. It was absolutely awful. It was like being stuck in hell. There were people screaming in pain. People pinned under equipment and were dying of blood loss, trapped next to people who were already dead.

They say that when treating people in pain, (it's important) to say their name over and over. I ripped off my shirt and made lots of bandages and spoke their names, and just dealt with them until emergency services arrived. It was almost exactly an hour in a tunnel, underground.

People in London had expected this to come for a very long time. I myself had expected this to come.

I wrote a column for the Citizen ("Waiting for the inevitable: Londoners who ride their crowded subway every day, know that a Madrid-style attack is just a matter of time," March 13, 2004) about how I've always known that if you are going to attack the trains in London, attack them by bringing bombs onto the rush hour traffic.

There is nothing wrong with me physically. Psychologically, I think it is going to take a while for me to adjust to the images I have seen today.

Who knows why we were a target. Britain is part of the Iraq invasion force, that has upset some people. Britain is a free market democratic society, and that also makes us a target.

But it's not going to change the way I travel at all. If you want to live in a city like London, you have to live your life the way you always would live it.