"Complaining to God of a guilt they did not commit"

Collateral damage--such a neutral, neutralizing phrase. Turning human being into a quanitfiable but meaningless mass. The detritus of powers beyond control--the djinn in the bottle, Nemesis unleashed from parricide, matricide, deicide, genocide.

These limbs whose human trunks lie dead, mute, ripped apart like so much stuffing in a scarecrow. These mothers,fathers, sons, daughters, splayed wide, torn open for none to see, none to view the terror of their nameless deaths.

For we will never admit we were there or meant to be there or were there to perpetrate anything save following orders. They will fill the dreams of their young, the men who came and saw and went away to another land.

This trash... this mass of flesh and bone whose sac the winds dry into terrible flags in the winds of empire.

U.S. Airstrikes Take Toll on Civilians Eyewitnesses Cite Scores Killed in Marine Offensive in Western Iraq [You will need to subscribe or already have done so]

Photo from Mother Jones