Losses

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes, and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol, tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’