Dead Eyes in a Live Face

Sometimes Twitter conversations turn into something meaningful. Here's part of a conversation I had with a new friend on Twitter today. Some brief and twitter-style thoughts on guilt and responsibility over civilian deaths in war as well as this photo:

Payments to the relatives of dead civilians, Afghanistan, 2009.

I'm in the blue shirt. It's Afghanistan 2009. We are paying villagers after one of our Apache gunships killed 5 or 6 members of a family in an orchard. You would think a detail like that would stick, that you would remember how many men, woman and children were killed, exactly how many. But I don't. You do enough deployments and details, bodies, tend to blur.

I've seen plenty of dead eyes in a live face in my life. They were here this day, in this mountain village, dead eyes in a live face, looking back at us as we gave them money for their people we killed. This is war and it will never be any different.

Peace.