A Woman's Witness

We hid in the swamp when the shooting started. My children clung to me in the water and muck while the battle raged along the road. I could see our house from where we hid. Soldiers—I couldn't tell whose—went through it. When we came back, the furniture was broken, food taken, blood on the floors. Our neighbors were dead. Jason Russell dead in his doorway. Young men we had known since they were boys, dead behind walls and in ditches. The war came to our homes that day. There was no battlefield, just our town become a slaughter.