Karbala, Iraq: American soldiers from the 1-36 Infantry, 1st A.D., engage an Iraqi who fired an AK-47 rifle from the window of a house on this short stretch of road where scores of Mahdi army militia were killed. Moments earlier, after sprinting past an unexploded roadside bomb and across a wide road as a Bradley gave suppressing fire from its deafening cannon, the soldiers caught their breath against a wall just as an RPG nearly hit them.

As fighting subsided two weeks later, with more body parts inevitably littering the area, a stray dog was seen in the middle of the street chewing on a human arm. "There’s nothing else for them to eat," said an American Special Forces sniper who watched the scene through his high-powered scope, "there’s no other meat in town."