At a local union hall in Tucson, I met two funny, gentle, welcoming men, and we spoke for an evening about their lives at Raytheon. (I have elected not to identify them.) One of them, a quiet man with an easy, endearing laugh, worked in assembly, where all the pieces come together before a weapon goes out the door. His story of going to work at Raytheon sounded to me like the Platonic ideal of the American working family in the postwar industrial boom. His father had a good job at the plant, and he wanted to be just like his dad. He started out as a custodian, working his way up to his current position.

The other man, who had been a machinist for years, was proud of his work, too. He described at first a line of reasoning that politicians use too: that better precision-guided weapons help countries avoid hurting anyone they’re not trying to. For him, though, the thing that he said made him most proud about working at Raytheon was helping to keep American servicemen and women safe. The company makes a point of hiring veterans with combat injuries, which reminds him of whom he’s working for and why. He feels it when he sees the gigantic photos of service members that the company hangs in the most prominent parts of the plant. The photos, he explained, are of relatives of Raytheon workers. When he’s at work, the notion of helping American servicemen and women is not abstract. It’s almost tactile.

The company’s impact is considerably more abstract from the C-suite. On the most recent earnings call, an analyst asked Raytheon executives about the Saudi arms sales. His concern was whether “issues in the Middle East at the moment and specifically Saudi Arabia” could have “any negative ramifications for your business.” The answer was, in essence, Don’t worry. The company’s chief executive, Thomas Kennedy, reminded analysts that Raytheon has customers in over 80 countries. Raytheon’s chief financial officer, Anthony O’Brien, then chimed in to add that the Saudis accounted for just 5 percent of the company’s revenue.

About a year after the strike, the Joint Incident Assessment Team, a body composed of coalition members that analyzes the legality of its own airstrikes, released a statement saying that the pilots had bombed the well site in Arhab because they thought it was a ballistic-missile launcher. It’s an excuse that strains credulity; ballistic-missile launchers do not look very much like drilling rigs. On the other hand, Saudi pilots are known to prefer flying as high as they can for fear of ground fire, and that makes them more likely to misidentify what they’re bombing. And thanks to American aerial refueling, the Saudi jets could engage in “dynamic targeting,” meaning they go out and look for things to bomb.

It had been two years and a month since the strike by the time I made my way to Yemen, and then up to Arhab in rebel territory, after months of negotiations; I had to get permission from the Saudi-backed government in the south and from the Houthis in the north. I needed to fly into Saudi-controlled Aden and make my way by road to rebel territory. I was made to dress in traditional Yemeni clothes and chew khat in order to sneak through the checkpoints, though I’m not sure whether this was necessary for my own safety or for the amusement of my fixers. I arrived in the north to find other journalists who had simply gotten in cars in their safari shirts.

I had expected the scene of the attack to be sterilized by the time I arrived. But the bomb site still looked like a bomb site: bits of headlight housings, things that looked like spark plugs, curled pieces of rubber that I assumed had once been tires. There were craters a few feet from the well, then a few meters away another one, some a hundred meters away or more. People had run far. The tank from the water truck still lay smashed against a bank of rocks; it looked like a giant soda can shot through buckshot and then crushed by a giant hand. The chassis was still there too, twisted up on the rock. Both of them were too heavy, or too pointless, to move. Villagers kicked around the rocks, nudged pebbles aside with their shoes and handed little things to me that felt much heavier than they looked. These, they said, were from the bombs.

My first morning in Arhab I spent in a classroom with 30 or maybe 50 people, maybe 60. Many had obvious and horrifying injuries, while others were brandishing ID cards to show me. I didn’t at first understand, and then my translator started saying, “That’s his brother”; “That’s his son.” They had come anticipating that they would need proof. That the American might not believe they lost who they said they lost. I had never been in a room with so many grown men in tears.