Candy

Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, US Army, in his book, ‘House to House: An Epic Memoir of War’ recounts this tale from one of his 2004 experiences in the Iraq war:

“…a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.”

[Reproduced from The New York Review of Books, 20 December 2007, ‘Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs’ by Michael Massing.]