Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

– Van The Woes of an American Drone Operator gepubliseerd in Der Spiegel

Een intrigerend verhaal van een soldaat die zich niet langer kan distantieren van gevolgen van zijn werk.

Foto: soldaat via Shutterstock