The Odd Angry Shot by William Nagle Page A

compartment. The ramp behind me gives way and I roll, half-crawl, slide down into the dust and run for the ditch at the roadside.
    Further up the road one of the APCs is burning. I hold my green sweat rag over the end of my nose, then take it away. Still bleeding, I think, as I look down at the crimson patch on the dusty green cloth.
    â€˜Ambush?’ questions Rogers.
    â€˜Think it’s a mine,’ comes a voice from further up the road.
    â€˜If it’s a mine, what are the tankies shooting at?’ yells Rogers.
    â€˜Fucked if I know,’ yells someone in reply.
    The shooting stops as quickly as it began. A crew member from one of the vehicles at the rear of the column, his overalls more red than black, comes and lies in the ditch beside us.
    â€˜Hit a mine,’ he says blowing his nose on a dirty green rag and then stuffing it back under his pistol belt.
    â€˜Any casualties?’ asks Harry, offering the crew member one of my cigarettes.
    â€˜Two dead, one wounded. A whole fucking crew gone,’ hisses the crew member in reply, ‘and we’re short to buggery of crews.’
    â€˜What was all the shooting about?’ asks Rogers.
    â€˜A couple of woodcutters started to run when the mine went up,’ replies the crew member. ‘We thought they were Charlies.’
    â€˜Probably were,’ says Harry, inspecting the mark on his cigarette where the sweat had dripped from his nose onto the paper, ‘stupid buggers.’
    â€˜Who knows?’ says the crew member. ‘Anyway, they’re in about two hundred bits now.’
    We move past the now stationary line of armoured vehicles. Harry’s water bottles slap into the small of his back as he walks. The smoke from the burning vehicle drifts thinly into the air. We can smell the raw flesh of the casualties as we draw closer to the ruined metal mass lying across the road.
    Two bodies lie in the red dust of the road surrounded by spreading patches of crimson. Someone throws a camouflage-pattern shelter over one and an oil-stained canvas over the other.
    The wounded crew member lies in the dust about twenty feet from them. Two medics are bending over him, working frantically. I notice a crimson trail leading from the burning vehicle to where he lies in the dirt.
    â€˜Shit, he must have dragged himself over there when it went up,’ says Rogers.
    â€˜Give us a hand will you, mate?’ yells one of the medics, turning his head and nodding at the group of us standing at the roadside. About six of us run forward.
    â€˜How is he?’ asks an Armoured Corps captain pushing between Harry and myself.
    â€˜Lost his left leg and hip,’ answers the medic closest to me.
    â€˜And his balls,’ says the other medic not taking his eyes off the huge burn dressings he is using to try and stem the blood flow.
    â€˜Will he make it?’ asks the captain. I notice that two watery lines are drawn on his dusty face.
    â€˜Not if Jesus came down and held the saline bottle himself,’ mumbles the other medic from behind clenched teeth.
    The dying face; tears pouring, nose running, blood spitting. Remember when you thought, what if he does make it, what if they give him a nice new tin leg and get him on his feet again, how do you tell some randy typist that you’re sorry you can’t screw her because you lost your manhood on a dirty road in a place called grid reference one-eighty-three-one-nine-six? She’ll look sorry in her sweet suburban way and she’ll be busy the next time he asks her out:
    â€˜Sorry, I have to wash my hair,’ or ‘I’m having dinner with my girlfriends’…Excuses, excuses.
    Half a man. And so much more of a man than any one of the smug bastards safe at home who stand in the streets and scream to stop the war. Ask him if he’d like to stop the war, smug bastards. At least he came. No fair weather protests for him. And you knew that every dust-covered,