The feeds on all the monitors were essentially the same: No cameras or lights were permitted near the scene, so the best the networks could offer was a correspondent standing behind a barricade, seen through the greenish tint of night-vision lenses. Night clouds mostly obscured a half-moon, which periodically became visible through a break in the cover and added an eerie light tint to the picture. I clicked between stations, pausing only long enough to hear correspondents explaining in dramatic whispers that absolutely nothing was happening. The stations all tagged their broadcasts F. This was taking place in real time.

I was still savoring that slice of pepperoni when the night lit up. Two quick flashes, like flashbulbs going off, reflected off the cloud cover, followed almost instantly by a series of explosions. I recognized the sound of cannon shells blowing the shit out of a structure. Then came the instantly recognizable tattering of automatic weapons.

“Well,” Frankie sighed, “there goes the neighborhood.”

A few of my colleagues muttered an impressed “Jesus Christ” or “Holy shit” (no connection intended), but otherwise the office was completely silent. The images reminded me most of those televised pictures from Opening Night in Baghdad when Bush the Lesser launched his invasion of Iraq in 2003. But on a considerably smaller scale, as if this were the Disneyland version.

The firing continued in a cacophony of short bursts for 67 seconds. I timed it. Habit kicking in. I heard at least six distinct explosions. I recognized the strategy; my old squad leader, Sgt. Matt Hill, had called it “The Big Bang Theory,” which he defined as “What blows up ain’t coming down.” We had our own expressions for it: battle porn, shootin’ the shit, tickling the Taliban. We used to bet, really, on how high a 105mm howitzer could make a house jump. But the meaning was simple: if you pour overwhelming firepower into a target, all the good guys get to go home safe that night.

No one in that house was going to survive. Which was the intention. The assault ended with a few sporadic shots, as if the last few firecrackers were catching up. Then a cloud of gun smoke rose slowly into the night sky, like the residue of a fireworks display, to the loud silence of ending combat. A few seconds later those clouds got a lot darker and uglier; I recognized that too. Gun smoke was giving way to smoke and flames from the fires that had started. I half anticipated hearing the whines of fire trucks, but instead commentators began telling us loudly and excitedly that they knew absolutely nothing about what had just happened and were going to repeat that in as many different ways as possible for the next few minutes.

“You okay?”

Howie must have sneaked up on me when my mind was in the middle of that battle. “Yeah, ’course. Why?”

He shrugged. “You’ve been sitting there holding on to that slice with your mouth open for a couple of minutes now.”