Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Syracuse, NY

Last spring I worked with the Iraq Peace Team in Baghdad. The US was invading then, and its bombardments were killing thousands � some within shouting distance of our hotel.

It seemed too then that, if I weren’t buried under tons of hotel rubble, my demise was most likely to come from the shattered and hurled glass of the hotel windows. I found myself dwelling on a verb that seemed � aptly or not — to capture the process: “eviserate.”

As it turned out, all of our team of about 25 survived. Our hotel, while routinely shaken, was never hit. In early April, however, a US tank shelled the hotel across the street from ours, killing international journalists. I didn’t see the shell hit, but moments later I saw flames consuming a corner of the building. News reports said the shell came from a US tank about a mile up river. It wouldn’t have taken much of a miscalculation for the shell to have hit us.