American troops cheered the bombing they knew would kill Iraqi civilians below.

Evidence

Around five in the morning, one of the first air campaigns of the war began, and they watched the bombing of Safwan Hill from inside the truck. They put on their night-vision goggles and peered out the back, as munitions lit up the desert sky into fireballs of red and orange. They roared. “They were unloading on that mountain,” Sami told me, “and we were cheering like it was the Fourth of July. I’m thinking, Jesus, what are we about to do to these people? I wrote a letter to my dad the next day: ‘Dad, they’re about to murder everybody in this place.’” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 192

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of troops cheering a bombing ‘like it was the Fourth of July’ while one of them privately thinks ‘they’re about to murder everybody’ is a compact, striking anecdote.
• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of American soldiers’ moral ambivalence in the Iraq War, and to the reader’s reading about how ordinary people become complicit in violence.