I survived a missile strike in the Strait of Hormuz, but my friend has not been found

Another missile strike in the Strait - another life lost, another friend vanished. The reports speak of a war beginning, but I see something else: a confusion of jurisdictions. The missile is fired by a state claiming sovereignty over waters; the sailor dies serving commerce that crosses all boundaries. The political question and the human question are not the same. One concerns the authority to control passage; the other concerns the value of a life. To speak of the one as though it answered the other is the gravest of errors.

Sunil Puniya - on his first sea job, they say. The young go to sea for wages, for experience, for the horizon. They do not go to become tokens in a dispute over jurisdiction. The missile does not ask which question it is answering; it simply strikes. But we must ask. We must distinguish. The political theorist may debate the legality of the strait; the theologian may speak of martyrdom; the philosopher must insist that no political claim justifies the extinguishing of a life that was seeking only to work, to learn, to sail.

My heart aches for the friend who has not been found. The sea swallows what it takes, and the authorities will write their reports. But in the library of human suffering, each loss is its own volume. We must not let the commentary of statecraft bury the original text: a life, a hope, a friendship - gone.

Diary Entry

“Survived.” That’s the verb they’re using now. “I survived a missile strike.” It’s a good verb. Active. Heroic, even. It suggests agency. A story of grit. A tale for the grandkids.

But let’s audit that verb. “Survived.” What did you survive? A missile strike. Who fired the missile? Unclear. Why was it fired? Unclear. At what? An oil tanker. Carrying what? Oil. For whom? Unclear. But the verb is clear: you survived. The focus is on the individual endurance, not the collective insanity that made the endurance necessary.

And your friend. Your friend “has not been found.” That’s the other verb phrase. “Has not been found.” Not “is missing.” Not “is dead.” “Has not been found.” It’s a phrase of administrative patience. It suggests a search is ongoing, that there’s a paperwork process in a tidy office somewhere, that a status will be updated in due course. It turns a violent, sudden absence into a clerical oversight.

Shell shock was two words. Now we have “survived a missile strike” and “has not been found.” We’ve added syllables and removed the cause. We’ve added bureaucratic distance and removed the war. Because it’s not a war. It’s “the Iran war.” No, it’s “the start of the Iran war.” Even that’s too clean. It’s the start of another chapter in the endless, nameless, profitable thing we don’t call a war anymore. We call it a Strait. We call it a tanker. We call it a job. “Sunil Puniya was on his first sea job.”

His first sea job. Not his first voyage, his first job. He was working. On a floating bomb carrying the lifeblood of the machine that will eventually, inevitably, need to create more phrases like “has not been found” to describe its other employees.

They’ll find him. Or they won’t. They’ll upgrade the phrase to “presumed lost” or “declared deceased.” More syllables. More Latin. The weight that’s removed is the weight of a young man on his first job, who learned the hard way that some job descriptions include missile strikes.

And the machine will note the loss, file the form, and send the next tanker out. With the next young man on his first job. And the language will get longer, and smoother, and even more comfortable. Ask yourself why.

Diary Entry

Another flare in the Strait of Hormuz - another ship struck, another life lost to the ceaseless friction of empires. The name “Sunil Puniya” will not echo through the halls of Parliament, nor stir the conscience of a continent grown weary of distant explosions. But it should. A first voyage, a last voyage - the arithmetic of war reduces all to numbers, yet it is the individual stories that reveal the true cost.

I have seen this pattern before - 1914, 1939 - when the machinery of conflict grinds forward, indifferent to the men caught in its gears. The Strait is not merely a waterway; it is the throat of empires, and when it tightens, the world gasps for oil and blood in equal measure. The missile that found the Skylight did not discriminate between veteran and novice. War never does.

They will call this “managed tension.” A neat phrase for a messy reality. Managed by whom? Not by Sunil Puniya, now lost to the depths. Not by the families who wait in vain for word. The sea does not return what it takes, and diplomacy too often arrives only to count the dead.

We stand again at the edge of a precipice, peering into the fog of what comes next. History offers no comfort, only warning: when the Straits tremble, the world shakes. And yet - we persist. We must. For the alternative is surrender to the chaos, and that I will never accept. The beaches, the landing grounds, the straits - they are all the same in the end. Places where men decide, by action or inaction, what kind of world they will inhabit.

Tonight, I drink to Sunil Puniya. And I resolve that his story - not the missiles, not the politics - will be the one I remember. The rest is noise. The man is the truth.