Afterward

In Carlisle we humped past two dudes eating another dude. No big deal, right? Dudes (and the occasional girl I guess) were the only things to eat for a hundred miles in any direction. They watched us come up for a mile from the porch of a house that had burned long ago. They were old. Two old men, decked in the standard rags and plastic bags. There was a firepit between the porch and the muddy washout where the road once was, a crude spit, half a guy (or half a human anyway, all burnt up you couldn't tell) speared and roasting. It was small enough to be a child, looked like, but - everybody knows - cooking makes a body smaller by half. The air smelled like sweet pork roast. The old guys made no effort to conceal the dirty work, but they stopped preparations to leer at us going by, watching with raw, grey eyes as the company made its way. They were probably thinking about which one of us they could rip out of line...to grace the spit for breakfast, maybe. Nobody ever mentioned it again, but I remember later on in camp it was a big deal, the first crazy thing we'd seen at war.