My Long War

Don't wait until Sunday: And so with the fighting over, it seemed as if finding that body was the thing to do. I was a reporter, and I needed a corpse for the newspaper. Ashley asked Capt. Read Omohundro, Bravo's commander, and he gave us a dozen guys. They liked us now; we had been through hell with them, seen their buddies die. They wanted to help us. So we took a dozen guys and walked back up the street we had come down the day before. By then, you hardly noticed the wreckage, there was so much of it. Long piles of white rocks and dead wires and sliced-up cars, some of them still smoking. A ruined world. Nothing like the way we had found it coming in, when it looked more or less like a normal town. The Marines had blasted everything: every building, every car, even if there was no one in it; every single person, even if we hadn't seen him. Now the town was quiet. Nobody said much. It had been many days since I had heard my own footsteps. It was only then that I thought something might be wrong.