GORI — Each crunching step she took on the broken glass covering her floor was a bitter reminder of Nana Mamukashvili's son, dead at 21 from a Russian warplane attack.
Georg was a soldier — but not one of those in the nearby breakaway republic of South Ossetia where Georgian and Russian forces were locked in battle. Instead, the war came to him.
He was down the street from the family home on Saturday, patrolling a road that President Mikhail Saakashvili was to travel later that day. Then the bombs exploded, killing him and more than 20 others, setting the neighborhood ablaze and blasting out the windows in the Mamukashvili house.
His 80-year-old grandmother, Sofia, blames the leadership of both Russia and Georgia for the violence.
"Oh, well done, Putin; oh how clever you are, Saakashvili," she said, weeping.
Gori is just 15 miles from Tskhinvali, the South Ossetia provincial capital that was the scene of the worst fighting. Thousands had already fled Gori by the time Saturday's bombs struck.
But Georg's grandmother, mother and uncle couldn't bear to leave.
"We are waiting here to die. This place is going to oblivion," Nana said in the wrecked front room.
"Where do we have to go? Why and how can we go anywhere?" asked Sofia.
They spent much of Sunday on the street. It's too painful to stay inside: Georg's spare uniform hung in the corner and a photo of him as a smiling child was on display.
Fine shards of glass coat the floor. Through tears, Nana said walking across it tore at her heart.
The bombing was one of three separate attacks on Gori on Saturday. The victims — at least 28 dead and more than 200 injured — overfilled a local hospital's morgue and wards.
An Associated Press reporter who visited the town shortly after the strike saw several apartment buildings in ruins, some still on fire, and scores of dead bodies and bloodied civilians. The elderly, women and children were among the victims.
Doctors said some of the injuries and deaths were consistent with those caused by cluster bombs.
"You wonder what weapons are used when you see torn limbs, beheaded corpses, bodies torn in three, sometimes just a mess. Not a person, a mess," said Nick Kipshidze, chief physician at University Hospital in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, who was co-ordinating a clean-up operation in Gori.
The Mamukashvilis said they had not heard of the cluster bomb rumors, but were convinced the Russian bombers would return.
"If they can take away our Georg just like that," said Nana, snapping her fingers, "What's stopping them finishing us all off?"


