Beslan, Sept 1 2004.

[Occhidiangela]

I think the world mostly forgot. I did not.

I remember Belsan rather vividly. Could not get away from the images for about three days. I was standing double watches, due to an Air Force personnel change, and me doing some in situ training.

The coverage of that bloody mess, which was piped into our ops center on Sky, CNN, Al Jazeera, and a few other feeds continuously for about three days, made a strange contrast to the close air support we were providing to skirmishes in Iraq and elsewhere, and a few of the missions I was watching on live video feed as it happened. Macabre, to say the least.

The current drumbeat of cross factional bombings in Iraq, which we can expect to go on for a number of years at this tempo, is a different version of using blood to make a political point than Blesan, but I think it's of a similar kind.