Maybe, after Sept. 11, you began scouring the skies at the sound of a low-flying airplane.
Maybe, after the U.S. attack on Iraq last week and with the terrorist alert inching up the color spectrum, you began to think twice about going to malls and grocery stores.
Maybe someone in your neighborhood is in the armed forces.
Maybe.
But the windows of your house didn't shatter from the deafening sound of enemy aircraft.
And you didn't have to wait at a bus stop where a suicide bombing had occurred two days before.
And your civilian best friend, brother, father, aunt, second cousin -- fill in the blank -- wasn't a casualty of the crossfire of war.
After all, you live in the States.
But for some Penn students, the realities of war -- like the one the United States is currently fighting -- are not oceans away.
They are right next door.
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"It was like any normal city," College freshman Hadassa Sigel says. "You went where you wanted to go."
And then the bombings started. And all of a sudden, Jerusalem "became a city where... there were soldiers everywhere," she says.
"My parents would tell me, 'Don't walk down that street'" -- but it was the street she lived on.
"It's like saying, 'Don't take Locust. Take Walnut.' It doesn't make any sense."
But there's still a reason for it.
"One of my classmates died in a bombing... that made me very aware that I am alive.... She won't get to grow old, have a life, have a career, have a family. And I will."
For the past two years, the suicide bombings in Sigel's city have instilled a persistent fear -- the kind that envelops your daily life.
"I never imagined that fear would be an emotion that you could live with.... You still boarded the bus because you had to," Sigel says. "But you were really nervous to do it. You looked around all the time... at anyone wearing a big coat. And you would watch them on the bus to make sure they weren't a bomber... becoming some kind of soldier yourself."
She explains the ephemeral sense of danger:
You might walk down the street at night. It's dark. You keep looking over your shoulder. Were those footsteps?
But then you walk into your house, lock the door -- safe.
It's "this idea of living with fear 24-7," Sigel says -- a fear that most Americans don't know.
A lot of Americans don't see the need to go into Iraq, Sigel says, which "comes from ignorance of what terrorism can really do."
And what it has done.
"It's kind of this feeling. You want to stand in the middle of the street and just scream and scream... screams of 'please make it stop,'... 'please don't make my life this scary.'"
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But you could never do that.
"You have to worry about anything you say being monitored... intelligence catching on to you and taking you to be... tortured," says Khalid Hadeed, an Engineering junior.
He was 8 years old and living in Kuwait during the first Gulf War.
And so his family hid.
"We got these chemical sticks," he says. "You bend them, and they make fluorescent light. The darkness gets into your home. Everyone's quiet all the time. It's just fear all the time. It's always around the corner."
But you're never really out of sight.
"My uncle appeared on some TV station, and he insulted Saddam and within, I don't think it was a minute, we got a phone call from Iraqi intelligence."
Hadeed's mother got on the phone. Terrified, she lied to the intelligence officer, "He's just my brother. We don't agree with him at all. We love the Iraqis. We hate the Americans."
"As soon as she set down the phone, within 30 seconds, we were out of the house," Hadeed remembers.
Although his family attempted to evade the fighting armies, he managed to see plenty.
"People's houses were demolished. Homes were looted, oil wells set to fire. Our home got vandalized," he says. "There was this huge convoy of tanks and trucks that were retreating from Iraq and got bombed by American airplanes.... One of the [Iraqi] soldiers started taking down signs that pointed to the names of the places in the country... replaced them with Iraqi names."
But the war in Hadeed's homeland is far away this time.
"The way I perceive the ideology behind this war is that it's an inherently racist war.... It's just the hypocrisy," he says. "The bulldozers Israelis use to bulldoze Palestinian homes are American-produced."
But he doesn't "feel very encouraged to be vocal." Intelligence is always out for you, he says. "I feel like I'm already defeated."
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But when you're on the front line, you don't have the option to feel defeated.
Wharton graduate student Onne Ganel, an Israeli, was 18 years old during the first Gulf War.
And a soldier.
"When you're in Israel... you get used to stuff really quick."
"You had to do patrols with a charcoal suit, so if there were missiles coming... you were protected. I remember them being very hot," he says matter-of-factly.
After all, conflict in the Middle East is a matter of fact.
"If [bombs] are going to fall on you... there's nothing you can do about it."
"I remember... my dad coming home exhausted from war.... He was a medic. He brought his buddies home in body bags. That was a bad job," he says.
Ganel remembers driving one night and hitting a parked car outside a home. When he knocked on the door, a woman answered.
"Her son was in Lebanon.... She immediately assumed the worst -- that her son was hurt," he says.
That may seem like an irrational assumption. But over there, well, it's just a part of life.
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And to really live, there has to be something worth dying for, says Wharton graduate student Marko Vucemilovic.
"It was... exciting because we were fighting for our freedom.... It was the proudest moment of my country."
Vucemilovic was 17 years old and living in Croatia when his country entered its war of liberation.
His people had a purpose -- but it was still war.
"There's just you and your family huddled up in a little basement somewhere waiting for the bombs to start."
And rest assured, they will start.
"First, you hear a buzz like a... train on a collision course. [Then it's] somewhere in the vicinity of your house. All you hear is noise coming from all directions, getting louder and louder and louder."
"You just freeze. You pray to God that it's not your house.... You can run.... You die anyway," he says. "When you're getting bombed, your control of your own destiny is limited to nothing, to pure luck... like a little baby."
You begin to see the world differently.
"People you thought were strong are not strong. People you thought were weak are actually really strong. Just like in real life."
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For Penn students, even while America wages war, real life hasn't stopped.
Everyone's windows are intact. And the hustle and bustle on Locust Walk continue uninhibited.
