Will Cathcart at LitHub:
Cormac McCarthy had provided me with a context, even a language, to internalize the things I saw and cannot unsee. Segments of human beings were stacked along the road between the smoking-bombed-out war machines.
“The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.”
Kherson is now free. But it will never be free of what happened. “A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.” At the birth of the war, the only ostensible difference between the men killing each other was that they were killing each other. And one side wasn’t interested in killing us. Now, these men are divided by their “kit” and an eternity of violence.
more here.