When I was 9, we ran away from Kuwait because a friend of my father saw the Iraqi tanks move in and called him using a radio phone.<p>We put random stuff in the back of one of the toyota pickups that were used as runabout in the construction site, drove to the harbor, and my dad traded the car for an empty container on a cargo ship.<p>We lived in the container for 2 or 3 days until the ship got to Egypt, to which we disembarked, and we managed to get family to buy us plane tickets to Italy - bit of a feat pre-internet, I remember that for some reason, buying a plane ticket remotely could be arranged, but not a ferry ticket which is why we flew home rather than sail there via Sicily.<p>We get to my grandparents' house in Italy, and only then they explain to me what was going on.<p>That's the closest I ever have been to a war zone, and would like to keep it that way.