Ash rain lit by the green glow of lightning cracks against the windows like a fallen tree, my heart harrumphs, skips a beat, remembers when a short-range Frog missile hit the perimeter in rain at night, struck the same chord of fear, and in the morning we found the scattered remains of a camel and I wondered then if camels mourn their dead as elephants do; visiting the boneyards of the savannas again and again, grasping their relative’s tusks with the gristle of their long wrinkled gray trunks as if to say, I am here, I remember you, I will never forget you.
In his Author’s Note, Brown writes: “While their deaths were not widespread, Bedouin camels were among the casualties of artillery fire, bombing campaigns, and death by unexploded bombs, particularly the widely used rockeye variety of cluster bombs. According to [an international physicians group}, ‘A population of 800,000 sheep was reduced to 10,000; 10,000 camels were down to 2,000; and, of 3,000 horses, many of them Arabian and thoroughbred race horses, fewer than 500 could be found in Kuwait at the end of the war.’”
