the culture shock of me reading an American author and seeing that word used so casually?

It gets worse.

SHE DIED BECAUSE OF A MISFIRE THAT MAY NOT HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN A MISFIRE.

The actual target was the building behind her home. Two missiles of 24 missed, striking her home, killing her, her husband, and their housekeeper, and blinding their daughter.

This by itself would be tragic and inexcusable. But it goes a step further:

Her house was previously destroyed in American bombings in 1991. In protest, she used pieces of it to make a mosaic on the floor of the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. The mosaic was of George H.W. Bush (who would have ordered those bombings), and the intention was that nobody would be able to enter the hotel without stepping on his face, which is a massive insult in Iraq. (Anybody else remember the hero who threw his shoes at Bush II?) It was a piece of protest art. Something supposedly protected and enshrined in American values and law.

And there are rumors that the “misfire” was deliberate, and was retaliation for the mosaic.