Report: Obama Administration To Announce Civilian Casualties From Drone Strikes

Who do we become when we die? Our identities are such fragile, personally curated things: we go through life as children, then students and peers, and sometimes switch to a vocational preference. A person becomes farmer, shepherd, mechanic, soldier, baker, homemaker, brigand, or bandit, or backyard bomb-maker -- whichever strikes us by calling or necessity. People assume narrower identities, a lover for an afternoon, a wedding guest for a weekend. Perhaps it's the wrong wedding, the wrong place, the wrong people, and whatever mish-mash of identities, they end with a hellfire strike and a grim, clinical finality. The bodies become "military-age males," the rich matrixes of interwoven identities collapsed into two categories, a fatal guilt decided abroad in the moment of impact.