Just another evening

I have not cried in perhaps ten years. But tonight on short notice BC and I picked up Hussein and his wife, and in the back seat of my car he leaned over to her and said, "we are going to the hospital. Dhiyar, our son, has been shot." The wail of a mother in distress has a piercing note. I clutched the steering wheel, bit my lower lip, and drove as fast as I could without adding a sense of panic.

When we got to the hospital they were wheeling out a bodybag. I crossed my fingers and closed my eyes, and asked what room he was in. But it wasn't him in the bag, it was some other poor sod. Dhiyar was upstairs. We waited outside for him to get out of surgery. I sat down on a bench, and it struck me, "I sat here six months ago when my friend "Jack" was shot."

Before I came out here I didn't know anyone who had died violently, or been shot. Now several times a week there is someone else. Most often it is just tangential, someone you met once but don't really remember, someone a colleague once worked with, some random name from some random unit, and you pretend you can remember a face. But sometimes – often by any standard I was used to before coming here – it is someone you know. Most often you dismiss it. But sometimes the cry of a mother tugs at your soul.