A 17 year old is blown up in a bomb attack. His father is asked to identify him from a pile of flesh with a human tongue on top.
This is one of the accounts, told in the man's own words, that a Belfast project is compiling to create a "museum of human stories".
An Crann/The Tree opens its new office in central Belfast today. The project's director, Mr Damian Gorman, says the centre will provide a "safe space for people to say their thing until they think it's said".
Mr Gorman's immediate task is to create such a space from three soulless rooms in an office block. The project has funding for about half its plans and intends to publish a book, entitled At War with Ourselves, based on personal accounts of the last 27 years.
The idea evolved from Mr Gorman's work with community groups. "I think there is nobody who could really embody the story of the Troubles in themselves. What happened here is a splintered story and everyone who lives here carries a shard of it inside them."
During one community group meeting in west Belfast he wondered aloud what it would be like to be shot. One woman said she would tell him. She wrote about driving to work on a sunny morning in 1974 when a car pulled up in front of her and her friend, and a man jumped out with a machinegun.
Her best friend told her to lie down in the back of the car. "I remember the bullets hitting me and lifting me off the seat ... I remember thinking I'm too young to die." She was the only one to survive the attack.
Mr Gorman says people have questioned the merits of a project which might dig up painful memories. "People say the problem is not that we remember too little, it's that we remember too much." But he argues the testimonies provide an account of human experience that each side might use to understand the other.
"I could not imagine the stuff I've heard a woman describing her husband being shot on the sofa beside her, saying this is what it looks like, this is what it smells like.
"These things are undoubtable. They're undeniably true and, to put it crudely, they're a great resource." He is determined to get testimonies from both nationalists and unionists.
With funding from the Community Relations Council and the Central Community Relations Unit, the project will also be applying to the International Fund for Ireland.
The US consulate is forwarding all letters to President Clinton from children in Northern Ireland. And the project has funding to build a video archive of personal accounts.
In one of the written accounts a woman addressed her dead father. "You lived for 11 days after the bomb," she says, writing about how frightened she was, as a 12 year old, of his charred face. "I made a scene when they wanted to take me in to see you in the coffin."
She wrote it while her children were out playing. Then she cried for a week.
Much of the material is kept in a huge old safe which came with the office. Mr Gorman thinks it is an appropriate home. "We'd like to be able to open some kind of place in the year 2000. But there's no rush to it. It's growing as it should at the moment."
An Crann/The Tree is at 10 Arthur Street, Belfast. Tel: 08 01 232 240209.