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Authors: Anthony Shaffer
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pajamalike robes and women in their burkas. I was even getting used to the feeling of the drops of sweat condensing and trickling down from the top of my chest to my underarms. I let my weapon drop down toward my seat and contemplated pulling out the bag of lollipops Dave had given me to toss to the kids we were passing.
We hit a slight grade, slowing down a bit. Fully half the structures in the neighborhood we were passing through were bombed down to the foundations. Others had been rebuilt. I had to admire the fierce determination of a people who had been at war, some for their entire lifetimes.
Then I saw him emerge from the throng. The slightly built boy just ahead of us, running out of the crowd and toward Dave’s vehicle, just about 50 meters in front of us, bomb in hand.
I instinctively swung up my M-4 from resting with the barrel down between the seam of the door and the dashboard, thumbed off the safety, and aimed.
Then, suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. The shiny object fluttered in a sudden wind. Bombs don’t flutter. I hesitated, my mind rocketing over the possibilities. The device the boy threw was blue and silver. Then I caught sight of a familiar logo.
It wasn’t a bomb. It was a silver-and-blue Capri Sun juice container.
A freakin’ juice box. Just like the ones my son drank when we were at Boy Scout camp together right before I left.
I lowered my rifle, slumped back in my seat, and let out my breath that I had instinctively held for the past few seconds. The kid was fading back into the crowd, but I caught his eye and stared at him. He looked to be about the same age as Alexander.
Clearly, he had been trained to pull that kind of stunt. The idea would be to create bad press if we shot him, or it would lower our threshold of concern so that after we had dealt with kids tossing juice boxes a few times, we would relax our vigilance. This kid didn’t get it. He was being used and had almost ended up dead.
Only the wind gusting at that very second had saved this boy’s life. I hoped he wouldn’t try that again. Inshallah . God willing.
What a place. I thought back on my past training. I’d been schooled as a spy to take on a First World adversary, like the Russians or the Chinese. The way I had been trained, intelligence—even clandestine intelligence—was a gentleman’s game. The idea of using a weapon or ending up in combat … well, we didn’t go there. I’d been told by an old-school instructor at the Farm in one of my first training sessions that spies didn’t need guns because if you couldn’t talk your way out of a situation, then you weren’t worth your salt.
Apparently, he’d never been in combat.
Even in the 1990s, the armed forces hadn’t faced the fact that war had changed. Our enemies were just as deadly, but different. Now I was fighting an enemy that used children as a method of weapons delivery. This was alien.
Nevertheless we all had to damned well get used to it. We were facing an adversary that hid behind the innocent and targeted those who could not hope to defend themselves. I realized we had to get back on the offensive. George Patton’s rule: The best defense is a good offense. We had to take the war to the enemy because if our adversaries were more worried about survival, about waking up to see the sun the next morning than about planning ops against us, they wouldn’t have the will to attack us.
The realization was like a hard slap across the face.
I called the first vehicle on the Motorola gray brick.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“Yeah … what the fuck! We had our hands on the door ready to bail! Did you see the kid?”
“Yeah,” I answered back into the radio. “I saw him,” and I glanced over to Julie, “and he nearly died.” There would have been no way I would have missed at that range.
After another thirty minutes, we finished the mission and went back to the ****** to collect the third vehicle. After we
We hit a slight grade, slowing down a bit. Fully half the structures in the neighborhood we were passing through were bombed down to the foundations. Others had been rebuilt. I had to admire the fierce determination of a people who had been at war, some for their entire lifetimes.
Then I saw him emerge from the throng. The slightly built boy just ahead of us, running out of the crowd and toward Dave’s vehicle, just about 50 meters in front of us, bomb in hand.
I instinctively swung up my M-4 from resting with the barrel down between the seam of the door and the dashboard, thumbed off the safety, and aimed.
Then, suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. The shiny object fluttered in a sudden wind. Bombs don’t flutter. I hesitated, my mind rocketing over the possibilities. The device the boy threw was blue and silver. Then I caught sight of a familiar logo.
It wasn’t a bomb. It was a silver-and-blue Capri Sun juice container.
A freakin’ juice box. Just like the ones my son drank when we were at Boy Scout camp together right before I left.
I lowered my rifle, slumped back in my seat, and let out my breath that I had instinctively held for the past few seconds. The kid was fading back into the crowd, but I caught his eye and stared at him. He looked to be about the same age as Alexander.
Clearly, he had been trained to pull that kind of stunt. The idea would be to create bad press if we shot him, or it would lower our threshold of concern so that after we had dealt with kids tossing juice boxes a few times, we would relax our vigilance. This kid didn’t get it. He was being used and had almost ended up dead.
Only the wind gusting at that very second had saved this boy’s life. I hoped he wouldn’t try that again. Inshallah . God willing.
What a place. I thought back on my past training. I’d been schooled as a spy to take on a First World adversary, like the Russians or the Chinese. The way I had been trained, intelligence—even clandestine intelligence—was a gentleman’s game. The idea of using a weapon or ending up in combat … well, we didn’t go there. I’d been told by an old-school instructor at the Farm in one of my first training sessions that spies didn’t need guns because if you couldn’t talk your way out of a situation, then you weren’t worth your salt.
Apparently, he’d never been in combat.
Even in the 1990s, the armed forces hadn’t faced the fact that war had changed. Our enemies were just as deadly, but different. Now I was fighting an enemy that used children as a method of weapons delivery. This was alien.
Nevertheless we all had to damned well get used to it. We were facing an adversary that hid behind the innocent and targeted those who could not hope to defend themselves. I realized we had to get back on the offensive. George Patton’s rule: The best defense is a good offense. We had to take the war to the enemy because if our adversaries were more worried about survival, about waking up to see the sun the next morning than about planning ops against us, they wouldn’t have the will to attack us.
The realization was like a hard slap across the face.
I called the first vehicle on the Motorola gray brick.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“Yeah … what the fuck! We had our hands on the door ready to bail! Did you see the kid?”
“Yeah,” I answered back into the radio. “I saw him,” and I glanced over to Julie, “and he nearly died.” There would have been no way I would have missed at that range.
After another thirty minutes, we finished the mission and went back to the ****** to collect the third vehicle. After we
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