From where the sniper stood, the Iraqi soldier was only about 50 meters away.    A slight man, boy even; a shimmer of a moustache on his lips and a torrent of jet-black hair on top.  The fool is not wearing his helmet, the sniper thought.  The Iraqi got up – torso, neck and unhelmetted head now above the parapets.  The sniper raised his rifle and slowly brought the boy into the view finder.  The Iraqi, perhaps sensing doom, turned and and with eyes half focussed, looked straight at the camouflaged sniper.  The sniper held steady: no prisoners, that was the rule.  But in the view finder, he saw the boy’s eyes slowly realising what he was seeing; a moment later, and sweat beads were collecting on his brow; tears swloly collected, and a tear drop fell from the Iraqi’s long lashes. 

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The sniper lowered his rifle.  No prisoners, that was the rule; and let no one off.  But by now the two were looking at each other.  The sniper thought he saw a spark of recognition, a hint of gratitude.  No problem mate, he thought; as careless as you are, someone will get you eventually.  But not me, not now.  The sniper quietly hung his rifle on his shoulder, replaced and adjusted his paratrooper’s beret, and turned to run back up the hill, to the agreed pick up rendez-vous.

That was when he heard a crack, as of a dried branch snapping under foot, or a handgun going off at 50 meters.  He felt a deep burning sensation in his left calf, and then another crack, as of a dried branch snapping under foot, or the shin yielding to a bullet.  Teeth clenched in pain, anger and hatred, he turned on the shattered bone, breaking it in two other places, raised the rifle and delivered the fatal shot to the Iraqi boy holding a raised hand gun, still standing where he was, torso up over the parapets, unhelmetted head now splattered all over the trenches.

The sniper pulled himself under the shadow of a boulder.  The movements from now on were automatic.  Stanch the bloodflow; radio in for help; inject painkiller; wait.  Minutes, hours, years later, two of his comrades arrived to splinter his leg and haul his muscular frame up the hill and over to the rendez-vous point.  He was thrown over a mule and carried a couple of kilometres through craggy and dry mountainous paths.  Then an unsteady jeep, driven by an unsteadier youth of seventeen, over still more sinuous mountain paths pockmarked with mortar fire.  He was jostled this way and that, trying to listen to the conversation around him, trying to concentrate on where he was.  But all he could remember was the very last image of the young man he had just dispatched: a torrent of hair, eyes still brimming with tears of fear and gleaming in the sunlight; and a stupid, wicked grin showing yellow crooked teeth. 

At least, that’s what he thought he could remember.

They arrived in the field hospital.  He passed out.

* * *

It’s funny how I have never been able to tell this story in the first person singular.   I know I was there, because of fragments of memory, here and there, that trouble my days and deprive me of sleep at night.  I know because there were witnesses.  And I know because twenty years on, my leg still hurts from the old war injury – I can’t ever say that without recalling Basil Fawlty – and there was only one way I could have got that bullet in the back of my lower leg. 

Because “he” lowered the rifle, and “he” turned to walk away.  Or perhaps run away.  At least, that’s what they tried to pin on me, a year later, when I had recovered, when I had gone back to the Front, when I had refused orders, when I was arrested by the same comrades who had hauled me up the mountain that lost day, when I was lashed and chained and –

The charges of cowardice and attempted desertion did not stick, or I would not be writing this now, in the comfort of my home on the shores of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Lake Geneva.  I’d like to think the military judge had a sense of justice, or of mercy, though the hundreds of others who had been consigned to the firing squad or the hangman’s noose by his hands bore witness to the contrary.  I made believe for many years that my friends did not lie under oath, though I would not have spent six months in the brig and suffered 100 lashes of an electric cable if they had not. 

And I denied, until only recently, that my “honour had been assailed” – a quaint Persian euphemism for rape – or, at any rate, I had persuaded myself that I had been at fault for not having fought harder against the assailants, though I had been shackled and beaten and semi-conscious when it happened.