I Wanted to Be a Fighter Pilot

On Wednesday 30 September, we spent nearly two hours discussing When the Sparrows Grow Anxious at an event in Lincoln, England. Ali Seidabadi joined online, along with participants from the United States, Germany, Australia, Canada and other cities in England, while others gathered in the hall.

Subash Chellaiah, director of the Lincoln Peace Centre, welcomed everyone with a few opening remarks. He spoke about listening to the experiences of ordinary people during war—families who, behind the statistics and news reports, are trying to carry on with their daily lives. Nick Owen, director of NOP and the event’s organiser, then led the programme. After a brief introduction, he invited Ali to speak.

Ali read a short piece, followed by a very engaging question-and-answer session. His dear daughter interpreted for him and this is what he said.

I Wanted to Be a Fighter Pilot

When I was a child in primary school, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. In 1980, Saddam Hussein, then the dictator of Iraq, invaded our country and occupied part of it. I was nine years old, and I still wanted to be a fighter pilot. Now I had an even stronger reason.

The war went on. In November–December 1986, when I was fifteen, I altered my birth certificate to make myself eighteen so I could volunteer to go to the front. I did it so neatly that no one noticed.

I still wanted to be a fighter pilot!

After military training, I went to the front line at Shalamche. It was near Khorramshahr and Abadan, about two hours from Ahvaz, where life was a little more normal.

I usually took one day’s leave a week and went to Ahvaz. I would buy a book, go to the cinema, have a cold ice cream and walk along the Karun River in the evening. Then I would return to the front line.

I read my schoolbooks in the earthen bunkers, especially when I was alone on guard duty.

One day, I was on leave in Ahvaz, and I still wanted to be a fighter pilot. Iraqi planes came to bomb the city. I was outside a large hospital. I ran back and forth with the frightened crowd, watching the bombs fall. Eventually, I grew tired. I sat down on the ground, leaned against a wall and waited for a piece of shrapnel to hit me. In those days, we called such a death “martyrdom”.

As I sat there, I saw a man running towards the hospital. He was carrying a child, and blood was dripping from the child’s legs. After he passed me, I turned to watch them. The child’s face looked uncannily like my one-year-old brother’s.

That bombing did not kill me, but it killed and buried my dream of becoming a fighter pilot. That year, I had the same nightmare several times. The scene repeated itself in my sleep, except that the wounded child was my brother. I came to hate the thought of becoming a fighter pilot.

I had not had that nightmare for years. It returned in the summer of 2025, then again in December 2025–January 2026, and once more in February–March 2026.

Around that time, quite by chance, I began writing every day. At first, I wrote in response to friends on Facebook who kindly asked how I was. I could connect for only a few minutes at a time, at great expense.

Gradually, the pieces took shape. They were shaped by what was happening in my country, my own experience, and the questions and concerns of my friends around the world.

This book grew out of those days and nights. Writing it took up much of my time, and thinking about it filled the space the nightmares had occupied. Sometimes I wrote while listening to missiles, drones and aircraft.

Through experience, some people had learned to distinguish, quite precisely, the sounds of small drones, missiles, explosions, our own air defences and attacking fighter jets. Among all those different sounds, I recognised only two—the two that had stayed with me since my teenage years.

The sound of our own air defences, and the sound of the fighter jets I had heard outside that hospital, where I had resigned myself to death.

During the forty-day war, whenever I heard those sounds, I was immediately taken back to that moment. My nightmare came alive again, and I remembered that I had once wanted to be a fighter pilot.

But I no longer do.

Ali’s reading was received warmly by the 20 participants who joined him that night: and we were honoured to be able to facilitate the evening.

If you were interested in Ali’s piece about being a fighter pilot, you might also be interested in this. A different perspective from a different age and land .