Sometimes I feel like the only weak one.

I was five when the 9/11 attacks happened in 2001.

Since then, every day on the news I would hear about American soldiers dying in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be honest, it didn't mean much to me. When you hear about death like that, all the time, every day, it just flies past you. When you're five you're too impatient to be worried about what the grey-haired lady is saying on the TV. I didn't even know where America or Iraq or Afghanistan was or what the hell was going on. I thought 9/11 was just some scary movie mum was watching when I wanted to watch Play School.

Now that I'm older and I sort of understand what's going on, I'm horrified that I've been hardened towards death. I hear about people dying left right centre - war, random murders involving God-willed decapitation, etc. It flies past me now. It's like that for all of us, all of us who have seen and heard of this Iraq War before we were old enough to understand, whilst we were young enough to become immune to death.

We watched a documentary on the events of 9/11 in year seven, and it scared the living daylights out of me - it was the first time that this war hit home, for some reason - the smoke, fire, panic of the dramatic re-enactment and the stock footage of the actual event. My classmates watched deadpan, expressionless, even bored, watching something that claimed so many lives.

I just feel like we've been hardened against something we really should fear, immunized from something we really should experienced. I think we're being protected from what we really should know.