Three years have passed since I stood in a tiny market in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through a chaos of smoke and running feet at the scores of dead heaped about the blood-slick earth. I tried but failed to count the corpses: the explosion of the mortar shell had sent long sheets of the market’s ramshackle metal roof slicing through the boisterous crowd, instantly reducing what had been people to limbs and torsos and bits of tissue. Already, burly men had begun piling scraps of flesh and bone on these blackened sheets of steel, flinging them into the bed of an ancient dump truck. Nearby, an enormous fellow in a black overcoat wept bitterly over the twisted torso of a woman lying at his feet, while two smaller men struggled to hold him back; imprisoned in the bear hug, he turned his great head toward the sky, and as I watched the cords in his neck tense and his mouth gape I realized that though my eyes were filled with carnage and my nose with the stench of cordite my ears could hear nothing. Following his stare I gazed upward and, just as the enormous, hate-filled scream broke through my consciousness…

Read the full text of this article in Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War.