Iraq. Mosul. 2016. A sunburned American artilleryman at a firebase in Mosul. The young soldiers manning the artillery had been children the last time I’d been in Mosul in 2006, embedded with a unit of the American army. The vast base I’d stayed in, FOB Marez, had been razed to the ground and barely a trace remained. In my years of embedding with the U.S. military, artillery was seldom employed in urban centers because of the fear of civilian casualties. With the Iraqis leading the fight, the squeamishness about casualties had lifted, and fire missions were called in every few minutes, executed with great care by small crews of teenage boys.