Later, when I saw where he had been standing, I was amazed that he was able to speak at all. “But of Washington itself, nothing remains.”
BAM! I'm hooked! Such a compelling paragraph. Written in a way that is both tightly written and also humanizing to the characters and the situation. I like that we're following people who have a military background (and thus were able to get most of their shit together in a crisis), but that even they were not able to conceive of the damage done until later.
It reads so much like real life. When these huge events happen nobody is ever able to fathom the scope of it at first. Even those prepared (as much as possible) for the idea of something on that scale happening.
