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He went off to his war as a young man who believed in a raft of ideas labeled progressive, who believed that people were basically decent and wanted to live in peace in democratic societies.

The war threatened his beliefs.

He found an appetite for murder, and he had trouble with this fact. He saw U.S. soldiers kill prisoners without a qualm. He saw average people, French and Italian, turn into killers once the fragrance of “liberation” floated over their towns and villages.

On the American election day, a man is found against the metal bars of a window, arms spread in the crucifixion style, feet firmly on the ground, his face hidden by a pig mask. Children walk past on their way to school. A few days later, a man is found at dawn dangling from a bridge. His severed head is located wrapped in a black plastic bag at the Juárez monument to newsboys in the Plaza of the Journalist.

Like many such tales in the city, it was written up for the daily paper by Armando Rodriguez, who has this very morning, a week after the severed head was left at the monument to journalists, filed his 907th story of the year, and then he takes ten hits from a 9 mm as he warms up his car, his young daughter beside him, in order to take her to school.

The burned body is dumped at the police station, arms severed at the elbow, each hand holding a grill lighter.

He has been strangled and then burned with cigarette lighters.

He has been shot with an AK-47.

A message left with the carcass denounces the dead man as an arsonist.

At the time the crisp body is found, the local police get death threats over their radios.

The cops take down the blanket on which the accusation against the dead was painted, that he was an arsonist.

Then a message comes over their radios to put it back up, pronto.

They do.

This police district is very productive in producing dead policemen.

Since the killing began warming up last January and the first message was posted of cops to be killed, this area has been rich in dead police.

Back then, the message, placed over a funeral wreath of flowers, contained the names of seventeen agents, identified by surname, code, and sector.

For those who continue not to believe: Z-1 Juan Antonio Román García; oficial Martín Casas, Z-4 del distrito Aldama; Adán Prieto, Z-3 del distrito Babícora; Eduardo Acosta, Z-4 del distrito Chihuahua; oficial Arvizu, Z-6 del distrito Aldama; oficial Rojas, Z-5 del distrito Benito Juárez; oficial Rojas, del distrito Cuauhtémoc; Originales Z-4 del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Balderas, Z-3 del distrito Aldama; oficial Villegas, Z-3 del distrito Delicias; oficial Casimiro Meléndez, del distrito Babícora; Evaristo Rodríguez, oficial del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Silva, Z-5 del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Vargas, del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Guerrero, del distrito Cuauhtémoc; Gerardo Almeralla, agente de Vialidad; y el oficial Galindo, del distrito Aldama.

Since that greeting, many on the list have died. Or quit. Or fled.

This is something new and yet something old. This is what Eric Severeid saw in June 1944 on the day Rome was liberated from the Germans. He was thirty years old and battle hardened by all the reports he’d filed from China and Britain and North Africa and Italy. He’d bailed out of a plane on the Chinese/Burma border into jungle controlled by the Japanese and made it out alive. He’d seen men die. He’d learned there was a chasm between his educated beliefs about the war and the feelings of the soldiers who had to fight and die in the war. So when Rome was liberated, he already knew about killing and evil and violence and things he never really wanted to know, and now knew he could never forget. He left a brief page in his memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, published in 1946:

At midnight I wandered toward my hotel and in the moonlight came upon two tired American paratroopers from Frederick’s regiment, who were sitting disconsolately on the curbing. They were lost, had no place to stay. . . . I took them to my room