I do not just loathe the stench of high explosive, I have come to loathe the attitudes of people who use high explosive for their own purposes: insurgents, terrorists, the intelligence services of a dozen countries, governments which target towns and cities and always have a ready apology when they kill the wrong people. High explosive means hospitals with blood on the walls and corridors, and ordinary people like you and me, lying on the floor or on a gurney, ears ringing with the noise of the explosion, nostrils filled with the stench of it still. The screams of others who are worse hurt than us. The fear and despair of the small number of doctors who have to deal with so many life-or-death cases, and know that they are condemning many of them to a slow, painful death.
. . .
The idea that some civilians are decent and righteous, while others deserve everything they get, or else should not have been in the way, seems to me to be intolerable. I hope I never did think that attacks on civilians - any civilians - were justified but now I know for certain they are not. Having been through the first and second Gulf Wars, and watched the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999, I do not really care any longer what the cause is. It is the civilians on the receiving-end who matter.
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