ISR: The Eyes of a Dying Empire: How America Watched the World Burn—One Thermal Feed at a Time

I. Prologue: The Empire That Watched Itself Die

A drone orbits over a parched village outside Kismayo.
The feed is clean.
The horizon shimmers with heat distortion.
A funeral procession moves through a dirt path — twenty men, a pickup truck, one bundle wrapped in white linen.

Ten thousand kilometers away, in a converted trailer in Nevada, an Airman squints at the screen.
They’re on hour seven of the shift. A half-drunk Monster and a tray of Taco Bell wrappers are the only evidence of life in the room.

They zoom in.
The faces are indistinct — shadows in the midday sun.
One heat signature is flagged.
A man with a slightly off gait, lagging behind the others.
The system cross-references old phone metadata.
A partial match.
His cousin once called someone who used to run guns for al-Shabaab.
The analyst hesitates.
Then tags it: POI – pattern match, confidence 67%.

The feed continues.
No one speaks.
No one prays.
The death has already happened.
This is just the ritual.

The empire doesn’t flinch.
It doesn’t mourn.
It doesn’t intervene.

It observes.

In the twilight of empire, when belief has rotted and mission has collapsed into inertia, what remains is the surveillance.
ISR — Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance — becomes both the instrument and the pathology.
It maps the ruins in real time.
It archives death with perfect clarity.
It gives the illusion of control long after the ability to shape outcomes has vanished.

America, once a republic, now sees like a ghost.
Drifting above its own warzones, cataloguing the collapse.

It doesn’t speak.
It doesn’t act.
It watches.

And in watching, it dies — with its eyes wide open.

II. The Architecture of Surveillance: How Empires See

Empires don’t conquer the same way they used to.
They don’t plant flags, build statues, or burn capitals anymore.
They watch.

They hover.
They listen.
They track heat, metadata, movement.
They observe patterns, and authorize violence from thousands of miles away, often without a uniform ever touching the ground.

ISR — Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance — is how modern empires extend power without presence.
It’s not a doctrine.
It’s a substitute for doctrine.
A nervous system without a brain.

From Eyes in the Sky to Eyes Everywhere

ISR began with cameras bolted under U-2s and F-4s — taking snapshots of enemy formations and terrain from 70,000 feet.
It evolved into real-time telemetry, SIGINT extraction, pattern-of-life analysis, and lethal targeting.
Now it’s a network — a web of platforms, protocols, and sensors that sees more than any human can meaningfully interpret.

• MQ-9 Reapers loiter for 24 hours, watching a house in Helmand until a man steps out to piss at the wrong moment.
• RC-135 Rivet Joints vacuum up phone calls over the Sahel.
• U-28s circle like vultures, tracking heat signatures for a Tier-1 direct action team waiting to breach.
• RQ-4 Global Hawks drift over the Pacific, watching islands militarize in slow motion.
• A C-12 with an off-the-books ISR package flies out of Djibouti, surveilling a border no one will publicly admit exists.

The acronym soup doesn’t matter.
The platforms don’t matter.

What matters is this: the American war machine doesn’t need to be there.
It just needs to see you.

The Illusion of Total Vision

ISR sells itself as clarity — “real-time eyes on target,” “full-motion video,” “left-of-boom deterrence.”

But it’s not clarity.
It’s coverage.
Total coverage.
Every angle. Every time. Every place.

That kind of vision becomes addictive.

It creates the illusion that the empire knows what it’s doing.
That decisions are grounded in truth because the feed was HD.
That killing is clean because the angle was good.
That action is justified because the man’s heat signature matched the one from last week.

But what it really creates is a culture of watching without comprehension.
Decisions made from above, by people who no longer understand what they’re looking at — only that the camera feed confirms their authority.

Surveillance as Sacred Cow

The ISR-industrial complex is the most quietly protected pillar of the defense budget.
Bombs get debated. Troops get questioned. But no one touches the ISR line items.

Why?

Because no one wants to be the politician who blinds the empire.

ISR promises:

• No boots on the ground
• No body bags
• No Black Hawk Down moments
• Just intel.
  Just eyes.
  Just data.

Congress doesn’t need a body count if it gets a confidence score.

Lockheed, Raytheon, L3Harris, and a dozen others have made billions on this promise:

“We’ll make sure you never have to feel another war.”

Just fund the eyes.
We’ll do the rest.

Eyes Without a Head

This is the heart of the tragedy:

The empire has built the most sophisticated surveillance network in human history —
but it doesn’t know what it’s looking at.

It can watch an Afghan village for a year,
track a Somali smuggler across five cell towers,
record a Syrian funeral in 4K infrared…

…but it can’t tell you why those people picked up guns.
Or what they believe.
Or why killing one of them creates three more.
Or why the same village keeps reappearing in mission logs like a cursed GPS coordinate.

The American empire does not see like a god.
It sees like a machine.
And the machine doesn’t ask why.

It only marks the next target.

III. Eyes in the Dust: Metadata, Blood, and the Human Cost

A child runs across a courtyard in Idlib.
She’s seven.
She’s barefoot.
She’s not the target.
She’s just caught in the frame.

The Kill Chain Begins With a Dot

To the camera, it’s not a child.
It’s a movement artifact.
A dot in a heat signature.
An anomaly in the expected pattern of life.

She’s near a man.
The man is the target.
The man once called a phone that once called a phone that was once inside a Toyota Hilux with a mounted DShK.
The man matches a facial image from five years ago, two provinces away.
The man might have a weapon.

Or a shovel.

Or a crutch.

The analyst sees the child.
She logs it.
The man steps behind a wall.
The child vanishes from the feed.

Target reacquired.
Confidence: 72%.
Strike authorized.

The bomb drops.
The feed goes white.
The child becomes a number.
Or not.
Maybe she’s listed as “collateral,” or maybe she’s simply not logged.
No body, no post-strike footage, no confirmation.

Just another point of data —
A blip in the dust.

ISR Doesn’t Kill. It Classifies.

It’s easy to think of ISR as just the eyes.
But eyes lead to hands.
Hands push buttons.
And in the American kill-chain, eyes are intent.

When the feed tags someone, the burden of proof shifts.
The camera does not lie.
And yet, it lies all the time.

Some truths from inside the system:

• “Pattern of life” isn’t science. It’s narrative inference.
• “Military-age male” isn’t identity. It’s a shape with two legs.
• “POI match” isn’t guilt. It’s a maybe with paperwork.
• “Imminent threat” is a magic phrase. It means someone signed off.

And once someone signs off?

The drone doesn’t wait.
The GBU doesn’t hesitate.
The empire presses enter.
And a person becomes metadata.

Civilian Casualties as a Systemic Feature

It’s not the exception.
It’s not a mistake.
It’s baked into the model.
Collateral damage is not if.
It’s acceptable levels of when.

Numbers that matter:

• Over 90% of drone strike casualties in Afghanistan were not the intended targets (The Intercept).
• In Somalia, “signature strikes” hit based on movement patterns alone.
• In Syria, a post-strike review found zero posthumous confirmations of enemy affiliation in dozens of fatalities.

The camera sees everything.
But it sees without memory.
Without context.
Without care.

The White Butt Incident

After a few drinks, [redacted] told you once, offhand.
Not thinking.
Not remembering the clearance.
Just talking.

[redacted] was flying co-pilot on the [redacted] that night.
Running the ISR suite.
Watching the feed.

They were monitoring a hostage compound — [redacted] national, intel from local assets, blurry resolution, partial confirmations.
No one was sure if the hostage was alive.
No visuals.
No facial match.
No heat signature clean enough to confirm.

Until the woman moved — bent to grab something.
And [redacted] called it.

“It’s her.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw her ass. It’s white. They’re all [redacted]. That one’s white.”

That’s how the Tier-1 guys greenlit the assault.
That’s how the door got kicked in.
That’s how the op happened.
Because [redacted] saw a white ass in infrared.

She was rescued.
It worked.
They called it a win.

But that story never left you.

Because if a woman’s life can hinge on a moment of racial contrast
in a 720p thermal feed
streaming from a turboprop flying 25,000 feet overhead…

…what happens to everyone who doesn’t get noticed?

Targeting Without Humanity

The deeper problem is this:
There is no curiosity inside ISR.

The system is not built to understand.
It’s built to filter, sort, and act.

• It knows if someone steps out of a building at the wrong time.
• It knows if a truck leaves at 0300 instead of 0500.
• It knows if a cell phone turns off every Friday at noon.

But it doesn’t know why.

• Why that building holds a wedding and a funeral in the same week.
• Why that truck leaves early — maybe there’s no bread.
• Why the phone shuts off — maybe it’s prayers. Maybe it’s power outages. Maybe it’s trauma.

The system doesn’t ask.

Because asking breaks the frame.

The Empire Builds Graves From Metadata

To kill well, you must know who you’re killing.

To kill efficiently, you only need to think you do.

The American ISR complex excels at efficient killing.

• It tracks without touch.
• It monitors without memory.
• It confirms with confidence scores instead of names.

And in that system, the human dies long before the strike.
They die as a possibility.
They die as a thumbnail.
They die as a risk factor in a drone feed.

You want to know how an empire dies?

Not with defeat.
Not with surrender.
But with silence.
A silence so deep it echoes across oceans.
A silence that comes from watching everything,
and understanding nothing.

IV. Watching Without Seeing: Strategic Blindness in HD

The camera never blinks.
But it also never understands.

That’s the paradox at the heart of American power in the 21st century.
It has never seen so much, and known so little.

Surveillance as Substitution for Strategy

Once upon a time, the United States had diplomats.
It had historians.
It had people who spoke the language before sending in the gunships.

Now?
It has feeds.
It has heat maps.
It has pattern recognition software that flags a funeral as a high-value gathering because fifteen men showed up at the same compound two days in a row.

The vision is total.
But the understanding is absent.

What replaced it is ISR:
A doctrine of observation without context, of data without wisdom.

You don’t need to know why someone picks up a rifle.
You just need to track when they do.
And be ready to drop a GBU-12 on their cousin’s roof the next morning.

Tactical Awareness vs. Strategic Illiteracy

It’s the empire’s most seductive lie:
If we see it, we understand it.
If we monitor the movements, if we map the networks, if we watch every door and track every SIM card — we will know.

But watch long enough, and you realize:

• A man walking in circles is not a courier. He’s drunk.
• A signal bouncing between three towns isn’t insurgent comms. It’s someone driving with their hotspot on.
• The guy who switches phones every day isn’t a terrorist. He just runs a black-market SIM business.

But none of that matters to the machine.
Because once you’re in the frame, you’re patterned.
And once you’re patterned, you’re justified.

The Feedback Loop of Empire

This is the brutal logic of ISR:

1. Surveil a region long enough, and you’ll always find something.
2. Treat everything you find as a threat.
3. Destroy that threat.
4. Surveil the aftermath.
5. Find the next pattern.
6. Repeat.

It’s not just morally broken.
It’s strategically catastrophic.

The empire mistakes motion for success.
It mistakes surveillance for presence.
It mistakes resolution for clarity.

You can watch a village for five years and still not understand why they hate you.

Afghanistan: Twenty Years of Watching Nothing

Case in point: Afghanistan.

• Over 80,000 ISR sorties.
• Hundreds of thousands of hours of FMV (full-motion video).
• Facial recognition. Heat mapping. License plate logging.
• Entire cities watched from orbit.

And it didn’t stop a thing.

Not the collapse.
Not the corruption.
Not the Taliban’s return.

The feed stayed clean.
The maps stayed updated.
The signals were all logged.

And no one in command understood a damn thing about what was actually happening on the ground.

The empire watched Kabul fall from a drone 20,000 feet up.
And still didn’t know how or why it happened.

Because you can’t bomb a worldview.
And you can’t win a war you never bothered to understand.

Surveillance Without Memory

The other problem?
ISR doesn’t remember.

It archives, but it doesn’t learn.
Everything is timestamped, databased, and discarded.

It can recall an IED blast frame by frame
—but not the context of why the convoy was even on that road.

It can replay a heat signature
—but not the social fabric that made that compound a safehouse one day and a wedding venue the next.

It can detect a shift in patterns.
But it can’t ask why the pattern shifted.
Or whether that shift matters.
Or whether it’s just noise.

So it logs everything.
And understands nothing.

The Empire Staring at Itself

Here’s the deepest irony:

The empire is no longer surveilling the world.

It’s surveilling its own decay.

It watches Afghan allies fall off landing gear.
It watches Marines dying at Abbey Gate.
It watches PMCs torch intel as embassies collapse.
It watches elections spiral.
It watches itself — in glorious 1080p — and calls it “awareness.”

But there’s no strategy.
No policy.
No doctrine.

Only feeds.
Only motion.
Only noise.

Like an old man in a nursing home staring at the TV —
thinking that watching is the same as living.

The Archive Will Outlive You: Memory, Metadata, and the Post-Empire Feed

The strike is over.
The feed ends.
The operator logs out.
The pilot hits shutdown.
The analyst clocks out and hits the drive-thru.
The compound is gone.
The bodies are dust.
The names were never known.

But the footage?
That stays.

Somewhere, in a bunker in Maryland, it spins on a drive.
Somewhere, in a server farm in Utah, it sits compressed, tagged, timestamped.

And it will be there
forever.

A Dead Empire’s Greatest Legacy: Storage

Forget marble statues.
Forget crumbling embassies or old glory faded on the flag.

The archive is the only monument the modern American empire will leave behind.

• Petabytes of raw ISR footage.
• Decades of drone feeds.
• Full-motion videos of funerals, firefights, soccer games, market days, weddings, raids.
• Heat maps of people who never had names in the system.
• Metadata on lives no algorithm ever bothered to understand.

It’s all still there.
Not watched.
Not studied.
Just kept.

Because the system doesn’t know how to delete.
It only knows how to hoard.

The War Logs No One Wants

Future historians — if they exist — won’t read diaries or listen to oral testimonies.
They’ll mine the feed.

They’ll scrub through grainy Reaper footage of a family fleeing into a field.
They’ll isolate a woman waving her arms at the sky.
They’ll try to match the coordinates to a crater.
They’ll pull the SIGINT intercepts of the man who ran to her.
They’ll cross-reference the IMEI numbers.
They’ll pull the kill report.

“Vehicle engaged. One HVT confirmed. Four EKIA. One possible CIVCAS.”

They’ll pause the tape.
Zoom in on the child in the passenger seat.
And ask:
Why?

But the empire will be gone.
And no one will answer.

Bureaucracy as Legacy

Every strike has paperwork.
Every feed has an index.
Every kill has a code.

And somewhere, in a secure system:

• A lieutenant logged that a man was neutralized.
• A colonel signed off on the “proportionality assessment.”
• A contractor annotated the video.
• An AI flagged the footage as “notable” for internal review.

None of them knew his name.
None of them cared.
But now he lives forever in a file system he never knew existed.

His life, his death — rendered as reference material.
An invisible bibliography of empire.
A war not remembered by people,
but by servers.

Surveillance After the Collapse

And here’s the part that should scare the hell out of you:

The ISR system does not need the empire to keep functioning.
It doesn’t need belief.
It doesn’t need justification.
It doesn’t even need war.

It just needs power.
Electricity.
Storage.
A budget line no one bothers to read.

The war machine can die,
but the watching will go on.

• Satellites will continue to orbit.
• Drones will keep training algorithms.
• SIGINT systems will still collect.
• The feed will still exist.

Even if no one is left to watch it.

Even if no one remembers why it started.

Even if the only thing being watched…
is us.

There Is No Grave for the Watched

That’s the final cruelty.

The people killed in these feeds?
They don’t get graves.
They don’t get names etched in marble.
They don’t get stories passed down.

They exist only in metadata.
In pings.
In blur.
In heat.

A body on screen.
A report on a screen.
A figure logged.

And then… archived.
Forever.

But there is no marker.
No eulogy.
No return.

The Archive is Not Neutral

Don’t believe the lie that storage is passive.
That the system just “keeps” things.

The archive is ideological.
It encodes the empire’s values in how it stores, tags, retrieves.

• The man is not Ahmed.
  He’s “EKIA_23-04-19_BD_Kunar.”
• The woman is not Mariam.
  She’s “PAX_unconfirmed_secondary.”
• The child is not Fatima.
  She’s “thermal anomaly — sub-30kg estimate.”

And so the feed doesn’t preserve memory.
It erases it while pretending to record.

The empire pretends it’s documenting the world.
But it’s really just documenting itself.

Its fears.
Its assumptions.
Its language of violence.

The archive is a mirror.
And what it reflects is rot.

When the Lights Go Out

Someday, the lights will flicker.
The budgets will dry up.
The servers will crash.
The satellites will decay.

And what will be left?

A hard drive.
A logbook.
A burned disk labeled “Target Package 481 — Somalia — 2021.”

No context.
No witness.
Just footage.

Just silence.

And somewhere in that silence,
a girl runs barefoot across a courtyard
—
her heat signature still clean.

VI. Ghost Crews: The Afterlife of Watching

They don’t look like warfighters.
Not really.
You’ve met them. You’ve shared beers.
They wear Vans.
They have bad tattoos.
They text too fast and laugh too hard and can’t sit with their backs to the door.

They’re not infantry.
They’re not JSOC.
They don’t brag.
But every one of them has watched someone die.
Over and over.

Some of them called the shot.
Some of them tracked the heat bloom after.
Some of them logged the footage for review.

And now they can’t sleep right.
Now they drink alone.
Now they see grainy figures when headlights flash at night.

Casualties of Proximity

They were never in-country.
That’s the line people use to dismiss the trauma.

But they were closer to the dead than almost anyone.

• Closer than the general watching from the Pentagon.
• Closer than the politicians tweeting condolences.
• Closer than the journalists reading the Pentagon’s statement.

They were in the feed.
They lived inside it.
Sometimes for 18 hours at a stretch.

They watched men die by fire and fragmentation.
They watched children bleed out in the rubble.
They watched dogs barking next to the bodies.

And then they had to
tag the footage
catalog the strike
write the report.

“You Drink Because the Feed Doesn’t End”

You remember the guy who did a rotation in Colorado Springs.
The one who used to work DGS [Distributed Ground System]—Air Force ISR analyst.
He told you something once you never forgot.

“The thing that messes you up isn’t the kill. It’s the loiter.”
“It’s the hours before. The pattern. The waiting. The conversations. You start knowing them.”
“That guy, the one we hit? I watched him eat breakfast three days in a row. I watched him play with a kid. I watched him take a shit behind a shed. Then I watched his ribs come apart.”
“You drink because the feed doesn’t end. Even when you log out, it’s still rolling in your head.”

He drank until his hands shook.
Then he stopped drinking.
Started running.
Then he stopped that too.
Now he just sits.

“ISR Has a Soundtrack”

Another one told you this:

“I can’t listen to music anymore.”
“I used to put on albums during long missions—back when we’d just loiter for hours. You’d sync the movement to the rhythm. You’d pattern-match in 4/4 time.”
“I was tracking a guy in Syria. Had Bon Iver playing. He stepped out of his compound right as the bridge hit in ‘Holocene.’ That’s the moment we hit him.”
“Now I hear that song and I see his legs folding. I see the dog barking and running in circles.”

You start to realize:
the feed wasn’t just visual.
It was scored.
And now the music is a ghost too.

What the Brain Wasn’t Meant to Hold

Humans aren’t supposed to see that much death.

Not from a distance.
Not with no consequence.
Not without being able to scream.

Because that’s the thing.
They couldn’t react.

They couldn’t cry.
They couldn’t flinch.
They couldn’t say, “That’s a child.”

They had to log it.
Annotate it.
Mark the timestamp.
Write the report.
Mark it “CIVCAS_Secondary_Probable.”

They became clerks of violence.
Witnesses who weren’t allowed to grieve.

And that does something to a person.
It hollows them.
Turns them into file cabinets full of ghosts.

Post-Traumatic Surveillance

Some come home and can’t stop watching.

They compulsively check doorbell cams.
They set up motion sensors.
They track their partners’ phones.
Not out of malice —
but because the brain never powered down.

You ask them why.
They say:

“I just feel better when I know where things are.”
“If I can see it, it’s not a threat.”

They’ve become their own persistent ISR asset.
Forever orbiting their own lives.
Mapping safety like a predator.
Hunting for calm that never comes.

Silence as Doctrine

None of them can talk about it.

There’s no therapy script for:

“I watched a man be vaporized because I tagged his metadata wrong.”

There’s no chaplain handbook for:

“I saw a woman burn alive and then had to brief a colonel on why the strike was still valid.”

There’s no TED Talk for:

“I knew what that kid looked like the day before we killed him. I watched him eat. I watched him sleep.”

So they say nothing.
They joke.
They drink.
They make memes.
They disappear.

Some go into contracting.
Some vanish into the Midwest.
Some become exactly what the feed was watching for.

And no one checks in.
Because they weren’t “at war.”
They were just watching it.

The Quiet Killers of the 21st Century

The most dangerous people the empire produced
weren’t SEALs.
Weren’t Rangers.
Weren’t drone pilots.

They were watchers.

Analysts.
Intel officers.
Civilians with TS/SCI and a headset.

People who sat in a dark room,
tracked a compound for 72 hours,
watched people sleep,
and then said “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

And then went home.
To no parade.
No story.
Just nightmares and insomnia
and playlists they can’t listen to anymore.

Closing the File

You can’t undo it.
You can’t unsee it.
You can’t log out for good.

But maybe, just maybe,
you can name it.

Maybe writing it down
is how you stop the ghosts
from multiplying.

Maybe memory
can be a form of mercy.

Even if the empire never gave you any.
Even if the feed still lives in your head.

VII. The Last Feed: Obsolescence, Empire, and the Death of the Watchers

There will come a day when the feed goes dark.

Not because the satellite failed.
Not because the drone ran out of fuel.
Not because the analyst missed the pattern.

But because
it doesn’t matter anymore.

Because the empire that built it
has collapsed.

And no one is left
who cares what the camera sees.

Surveillance is a Colonial Technology

Every empire watches.
That’s how it breathes.
How it maps.
How it classifies, codifies, controls.

The Roman census.
The British map.
The Soviet dossier.
The American drone.

Surveillance is not just a tool.
It is the ideological architecture of dominance.

It says:

“We see you. We know you. We own the story.”

But when the empire dies
—the feed doesn’t become free.

It becomes abandoned.
Still running.
Still blinking.
Still harvesting ghosts.

Like a surveillance satellite
circling a planet
no longer transmitting.

The Cost of God’s Eye

ISR was supposed to be a revolution.

Precision.
Clarity.
Discrimination.
Proportionality.

The marketing was slick.
The generals bought in.
The media played along.

“We don’t carpet bomb anymore. We target.”
“We’re not blind. We’re exact.”
“We know.”

But that was always a lie.
Because the god’s eye never sees like a god.
It sees like a weapon.

It looks at a wedding and sees a gathering.
It looks at a cellphone and sees a signal.
It looks at a child and sees noise.

And when it fires, it doesn’t grieve.
It logs.

Kill confirmed.
Feed tagged.
Clip saved.

The Empire That Forgot to Learn

It’s been two decades.

The empire has seen:

• Iraq collapse.
• Libya implode.
• Syria burn.
• Afghanistan fall.
• Yemen starve.
• Somalia blur into drone fog.
• Niger destabilize.
• Ukraine spiral into proxy.

It watched all of it.
In high-definition.
In multiple angles.
With overlapping metadata.

And it learned nothing.

Because it didn’t want to learn.
It wanted to observe.
And punish.

And that’s why it will die.

Not from a lack of strength.
But from terminal misperception.

AI Will Watch the End

The final insult?

The watchers won’t even be human anymore.

AI is already tagging feeds.
Already pulling patterns.
Already recommending strikes.

And the people who built the machine
will retire.
Move to Florida.
Open a consulting firm.
Never think about it again.

But the machine?

It’ll keep watching.
Long after the uniforms are folded.
Long after the briefings end.
Long after the flag falls.

It will watch automatically.
Indifferently.
Perfectly.

Until the lights go out.

What They’ll Find

One day, a new power will rise.

Maybe not a state.
Maybe not a government.
Maybe just some curious scavengers.

They’ll break into a hardened vault.
They’ll fire up a cold server.
They’ll see the archive.
They’ll open the last feed.

And they won’t see strategy.
They won’t see policy.
They won’t see justice.

They’ll see a man kneeling in dust.
They’ll see a woman screaming at a wall.
They’ll see a child chasing a goat across rubble.
They’ll see a drone crosshair.

And they’ll ask:

“Why was this saved?”
“Who watched this?”
“Who let this happen?”

And there will be no answer.
Only tags.
Only blur.
Only ghosts.

The Epitaph

Here lies the feed.
The eye that saw everything.
And understood nothing.

Born of fear.
Raised in silence.
Killed by irrelevance.

You watched the world burn.
But never once noticed your own hands.

Final Notes from the Watchers

You think of [redacted].
You think of the White Butt Incident.
You think of the cold look in her eyes
when she told it like it was a story about paperwork.

You think of the guy in Springs who drank to stop dreaming in infrared.
You think of the woman who deleted every playlist with Bon Iver on it.
You think of the analyst who drew smiley faces in the margins of kill reports,
just to remember how to feel.

You think of all the people who logged on,
saw horror,
flagged it,
and then logged off.

You think of the thousands who watched it all happen,
but were never allowed to say what it meant.

You think of them now.
You think of yourself.
And you write.

Because maybe the only way out
is memory.
And mercy.

And maybe
—just maybe—
the feed dies
when we stop watching.