Sunnydale Recycling

Excerpt from “The Sniper’s Sister,” by Rachel Howard

Feb 14 at 11:11pm by jon

We’ve added Rachel Howard’s link to our badly organized - but carefully collected - blogroll. She writes wonderful pieces about dance for the San Francisco Chronicle. But this is from a tw0-part piece she wrote about her brother’s leave from service in Iraq:

There were photos of Emmet holding a stray puppy his platoon had adopted, of his teammates loaded with 40 pounds of hand grenades in specially equipped vests, of the crew arrayed around the Stryker vehicle, the soon-to-be-dead platoon leader at the edge of the shot. Nothing remotely Abu Ghraib worthy, to my immediate relief.

And yet Emmet’s stories kept coming, about cars rushing toward the convoy, no way to tell if they were carrying bombs or if the driver was just plain scared. About swooping in on houses via Blackhawk in the middle of the night with only the most rudimentary language skills to help the soldiers find weapons, and physical force to fill in where words couldn’t. About women holding dead children in the street, little more Emmet’s team members could do but bandage wounds and stare with stricken faces.

Excerpts here.

Entire SF Chronicle  article (in two parts: Part I here, and Part II here).