March 1991

March 1991 is presented through the aftermath of a missile strike on a plant, as the interval between wartime destruction and reconstruction. Three weeks after the war ended, the site was still a landscape of wreckage: survivors had been hospitalized, accessible bodies removed, and the inaccessible dead left among the ruins. The account makes the passage of time visible in the changing remains, which begin to seem as old as the nearby ruins of Babylon.

The Ruins After the Strike

For the time being, the plant was left much as it had been twenty-four hours after the missiles struck. Reconstruction remained a future prospect; the immediate work was the limited removal of survivors and reachable dead. The bodies that could not be accessed continued to shape the site even when they could not be seen, as their smell became intolerable.

The approach of summer altered that condition. Heat accelerated decay, while flies and small rodents worked among the remains. Dust settled over the cracked concrete, and sun and wind softened its exposed surfaces until the damage was difficult to distinguish from the baked earth around it. The landscape's appearance thus registered both recent violence and the natural processes already covering it.

A Landscape Made to Look Ancient

The narrator compares the plant's relicts to the ruins of Babylon, only a few miles away. The comparison does not make the industrial wreckage genuinely ancient; it shows how dust, weather, and distance can make a recent catastrophe appear to belong to a much older past. In this antique landscape, the plant's broken machinery becomes difficult to separate visually from the earth surrounding it.

That shift in appearance also marks a shift in attention. The scene begins with death and an unbearable smell, then moves toward the subdued surfaces of concrete and soil. The devastation has not been repaired or explained, but its most immediate signs are being altered by time and exposure.

Scavenging Before Reconstruction

Once the smells had fallen to a bearable level, and the dogs picking through the ruins showed no sign of becoming even mangier, local people began exploratory visits. These first scavengers encountered devastation so extensive that even those with technical knowledge could not identify what the wrecked machinery had once done.

They gathered whatever could be sold, traded, or adapted for domestic use, then left. Their limited recovery of usable objects stands in contrast to the scale of the ruined plant: the site offers fragments with practical value, but no clear account of its former function. March 1991 therefore fixes the aftermath at a point before reconstruction, when the ruins are already being weathered into an apparently ancient landscape and searched for whatever can still be used.