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Imagine.

You're a young officer.

You slide the holster and sidearm off your belts and deposit them in your desk drawer.

You walk to the arch-third floor windows outside your office door and

look out over the crowd gathering outside the iron front gates.

It's your job to serve as your country's eyes and ears on this corner of its restless empire.

In the five years you've been stationed here, you've never liked this building.

It's cold and drafty.

It feels like an outpost and it is.

But now with violence sweeping the country, you appreciate its protective bunker-like quality.

A uniform junior officer joins you at the window. You ask him.

How many are there now? Do you think?

At least 150. Probably 200.

And I can't tell if there are more beyond the wall, but more are starting to come this way from across the square.

You are icy calm.

But just a few hours earlier you felt sick as you watched it begin.

The lollest mix of joy and rage among the rioters as they hurled bricks at the fortified police headquarters across the town square.

The gleeful defiance of authority had ordered.

And their gate gave way.

The mob flooded in.

You knew it wouldn't end there.

...