"The Greedy Ones" Made Me Think

There was something else I was going to write about today - but that was before I read Michael Yon's piece entitled "The Greedy Ones" on his web site. This really made me stop and think. Think serious things about life and love and people and friendships and how you never know how things are actually going to turn out.

It came from Poland, a message, via email—zzzppt. They were searching for her, a woman with whom I had recently made friends of the sort one finds while traveling abroad in wild nations. She had disappeared. The investigators had found my contact information in her hotel room.

Now, that is what you call an opener. From there Michael Yon goes on to describe, in a knowing manner, what happens with a car bomb or the suicide bombings that are happening in Iraq now. There is a photo in the article also of empty shoes. Sometimes the only thing left behind by the victims of a car bombing or bombing is their shoes.

The morbid part of me always wanted to know what really happened in a car bombing like those happening in Iraq and elsewhere. Now I know. I am glad I know, because this makes the happenings, the deaths over there, the senseless killing even more real and far more senseless. More ruthless and cruel than what I had already imagined in my unknowingness.

Beneath a photo of the shoes which was taken by an unknown soldier after a car bombing (read the article, please, to get the full text of everything that happens) are the words, "Empty shoes can always be found after car bombs rip through victims, and normally the genitals of the terrorists remain intact." Serves them right. Let them have their "seventy-two virgins and two youths" (that's right two youths) and not be able to do anything about it! How fitting it is.

Read the article. Let him explain everything as only he can in this poignant piece as he mourns for a friend.