“Well, I suppose it must be possible,” Alex Kelly mused to his young listener. He sipped at the coffee and gazed across the newspaper’s small break room, looking at nothing in particular. “You do something long enough, particularly something like combat journalism, and you’re bound to change,” he casually continued. “It’s not something you plan for, it just -- happens.”

“How do you feel about death?” Ron Taylor abruptly asked. He leaned back in his chair, his fingers idly tapping at the rim of his cup. “I mean, over the past 20 years you’ve been all over the Mid-East. You’re bound to have seen death.”

“Oh, many times.” He absently gave a slow, reflective nod of his head. “Many -- many times.”

Taylor nodded wisely with the elder man. “Probably too many.”

Kelly glanced at him. “One death is too many -- and a million don’t seem like enough,” he thoughtfully shared. “I still don’t get it, though,” he had to admit. “War.” He shook his head, refusing to delve any deeper than this. “If nothing else, it keeps me employed.” He downed the last of his coffee and got to his feet. “That shit over in desert-world gets stupider by the day.” He sighed, recalling the sum of text and footage he had relayed just two years before.

“What was it like?”

“What was what like? War or death?”

Taylor shrugged at him. “Well, both, I guess.”

“Oh. Well, war’s not really the problem,” Kelly assured him. “It’s the people, especially the ones you know. One day you show up at the office and someone’s missing. You go out to interview a contact you’ve been working with for the past few weeks, only to find a crater or a gutted frame where his home used to be -- where a family used to live... Then there are the unburied dead -- walking through streets littered with bodies... ...Bodies that have laid there for days -- weeks...” He gave his head a convulsive shake, wanting only to dispel the memory. After a few moments, he took a breath and continued. “You become numb, I guess -- inured to the whole thing. And you actually begin to realize -- that people are dying here, and dying because they must. War is perpetuated by death.” He gave the kid a wry kind of smile. “Let’s face it. If nobody dies, it’s not a very good war.” He shook his head. “Then you end up someplace like here, in the heartland of the good ol’ U.S. of A. -- and you wonder... You wonder what gonna happen next...”

Taylor followed Kelly toward the newsroom. “So, how did you handle it?”

Kelly opened the door. “What makes you think I did?”

Dan