I haven't thought about this for a long, long time.
But the recent events in Syria triggered a memory tonight.
It was the summer of 1985, July I think, and I was living in Tehran. The Iran-Iraq war was in full swing and every night Tehran was bombed by Iraqi aircraft.
First the city went dark in a heartbeat and a short time later the anti-aircraft fire would begin. It wasn't really effective because the Iraqi aircraft flew so high, but it was impressive.
We would go up on the roof of the building and watch the thousands and thousands, it seemed, of tracers being fired by the anti-aircraft guns.
I can't describe it. It was awesome and awful at the same time.
And we could sometimes just see the Iraqi jets as tiny specs of light passing overhead.
Then the booms came, always in twos. It seems that each Iraqi jet carried two bombs.
Since they flew so high the bombs could land anywhere.
One night one bomb exploded a hundred meters or so to the north and another exploded a little nearer to the south
This was the first time they had exploded so closely.
We ran downstairs to go to the bombsite to the south to see if we could do anything to help, as did hundreds of others in the neighborhood.
As we were running southwards we encountered others who were running northwards with their hands covering their mouths and noses shouting "Go back! Go back! Chemical bomb!"
So we, as well as most everyone else, turned around and ran a distance northward and then westward that we thought would be safe. There was, after all, the other bomb to be considered.
After a while the news began to spread that it wasn't a chemical bomb. It was safe.
We then went to the southern bombsite to see if there was anything we could do to help. There were almost always wounded and dead to be dug out from the rubble.
That night we were only confronted with a big, big hole in the garden which was in the center of a group of apartment buildings and a lingering sour smell in the air.
It turned out that the bomb had found its way into the huge septic tank which served the group of apartment buildings around the garden it was in and had exploded when it hit the bottom.
And that was my one, and fortunately only, direct experience with a "chemical bomb."