Arwa Damon's Iraq: Suffocating in a cloak of sorrow By Arwa Damon, CNN Senior Intl. Correspondent
Baghdad (CNN) -- It was an odd splash of color that jumped out from the drab gray shades of the dusty battleground in Iraq: a red shoe smaller than my hand, adorned with a pink ribbon and bow.
The sickening cacophony of war -- the crackle of gunfire, thud of artillery and bone-shaking tremors of air strikes -- drifted into a background haze.
I stood there staring at the shoe. The image remains so vivid in my mind I could paint it on a canvas from memory.
It was dusk on one of the first days of the November 2004 battle for Falluja. U.S. military commanders would later describe it as the most intense urban combat since Vietnam.
The shoe lay in a rubble-strewn yard amid the mustard yellow debris of a partially destroyed, single-story home in a poor part of the city.
My world froze right then.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/17/world/meast/iraq-damon/index.html
long, intense, and no happy ending...
