The trooper, John Esposito, never saw the shadowy arsonist throw his flaming bomb, though it was caught on videotape.
To be sure, his writing skills had been honed while he served in the U.S. Army--during World War II as the editor of the Flaming Bomb, the military newspaper at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where he was stationed from 1943 to 1946.
Sylva, in western North Carolina, played a central role, hosting the Ebbing police department (actually a home décor store) and the advertising company across the street from which Frances McDormand's character, Mildred Hayes, hurls flaming bombs.
Students forced flaming gasoline bombs through the steel grates and smashed windows, then started the fire in the agricultural trade office, which promotes American farm products in Korea.
Anatomy and physiology are elegantly explained, not as abstract theory, but as counterpoint to gripping stories about survival against the odds: in frozen rivers, flaming cockpits, bombs, viral pandemics, deep water or outer space.
The two men were putting into place city officials' latest desperate measure to protect the residents of the Short Strand from the paving stones, rocks, pipes filled with explosives and flaming gasoline bombs that come every summer, regular as rain, across a 40-foot-high wall of brick, corrugated steel and chain-link fencing separating them from their Protestant neighbors.
He has a firm grasp of history, whether describing the cavalry assault of Hulegu Khan and the ensuing Pax Mongolica, or Parthian fratricide and the volleys of flaming naptha bombs and jars of bloodsucking flies catapulted at Septimius Severus from within the besieged walls of Babylon.
Disorder is generally good for the security business, of course; Janusian markets its services with a brochure that shows a flaming gasoline bomb in midair and asks, "Should you have known things were going wrong?" But the recent bombings have sent some clients fleeing the country.
I've seen, in the bohemian Exarchia district, a troupe of black-clad 15-year-olds distrupt a whole street full of similarly bohemian cafe-goers on a Saturday night, using petrol bombs and flaming rubbish bins, simply because "creating mayhem" is their doctrine.
The group has also posted video of protesters lobbing flaming petrol bombs at security forces who appeared to respond by firing tear gas.
Even goofier was the second main poster, which had Batman triumphantly standing outside an apparently bombed building that has a flaming bat-signal in the middle.
