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Terrorist Attacks in Paris (Person Present During Attacks Point of View)

Reid Turtoro
Nov 16, 2015
2 min read

I woke up that morning in the mundane world. I was relieved for the fact that I did not have work that day, as I would probably go for a bit to eat and then I had tickets to a show at the Bataclan theatre later on that night. I went for lunch at La Belle Equipe, my absolute favorite restaurant. However, later that night everything took a turn for a worse, when a series of 7 terrorist attacks took place. I was caught up right in the middle of it. According to CNN, La Belle Equipe was attacked at around 9:30 that night, I had been there just hours before. Unfortunately, that would not even come close to being the scariest moment for me that night. Just four minutes later during the show at the Bataclan, three armed terrorists entered. At first I did not believe what I was seeing, did not want to believe what I was seeing. But when the gunshots rang out, I knew that this was real. People were dropping all around me, so I fell to the floor as to appear to have been shotten as well. Luckily, I was able to join a group of others who was able to crawl to a room upstairs, unnoticed. We waited there for 2 or 3 hours, listening to the occasional extra gunshots below and shouting from the terrorists. After a while, there were tons more gunshots and two loud explosions, but after that everything went quiet. We hear footsteps coming up the stairs, but were relieved to see that it was the police there to save us. I don't remember much else from that night, only going home and reading an article on Newsela about it the next day. The article stated that, "France's Defense Ministry said French warplanes had launched a ferocious retaliatory assault on targets in Raqqa, Syria." I had survived the beginning of a war that was about come.