"On Sunday, a Marine tank fired 18 rounds into a house a suspected insurgent was firing from, said Jeremiah Day, a combat engineer from Minnetonka, Minn. 'And afterwards the guy was still standing,' Corporal Day said. 'It was like Scarface or something.'
"That same day, Brent Bourgeois, a 20-year-old lance corporal from Kenner, La., said he had seen an American helicopter fire a missile at a man with a slingshot. 'Crazy, huh?' the corporal said."
These two lines were quoted on Danny Schechter's News Dissector weblog. While I searched for the Times story in which these quotes appeared, I found Jeffrey Gettelman's report from Sunday: "War's Full Fury Is Suddenly Everywhere"
"Insurgents flooded onto the roadway, masks over their faces, machine guns in their hands. They began to fire at approaching Humvees. The neighborhood around us scattered into a mosaic of panic. Women slammed gates behind them. Cars shot gravel from their tires as they raced away. And we were just 20 minutes outside the [Baghdad] city center in a place that up until the last few days was as safe as any.
"In Kufa, a palm-lined town on the Euphrates, bearded Shiite militiamen who swear their allegiance to a rebel cleric are driving around in police cars. American officials had just bought those police cars. American soldiers had just trained the policemen who had been riding in them.
"In the Khadamiya neighborhood, one of the prettiest spots in Baghdad, men passed out grenades where just days ago children sat under umbrellas, licking ice cream. It was stunning how natural it looked, how quickly armed men seemed the norm, how nobody seemed to bat an eye, even though the heart of Baghdad now looked like the heart of Kabul.
"The atmosphere in Iraq has completely changed. In just a week, a fading guerrilla war has exploded into a popular uprising. 'Six months of work is completely gone,' said a State Department official working in southern Iraq. 'There is nothing to show for it.'"
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