I Hate Martin Amis et al. by Peter Barry Page A

shooting my first victim, my first real victim. It was a man. He was running across an intersection. I fired. He fell. He didn’t move. I didn’t either. I remained staring through the sites, stunned. I’d killed someone, and I’d done it without a moment’s thought. It could have been a training exercise. I just had time to spin around and spew onto the bare floorboards behind me.
    When I turned back, the man lay crumpled on the pavement, face down, one arm reaching out above his head, the other squashed beneath his body, his legs neatly together and quite straight. Electrical activity in his brain must have fizzed and crackled to a halt. His blood was creeping, slow as lava, towards the edge of the pavement. He was dead. I was numb. Time passed.
    No one was to be seen. This was scarcely surprising. I’ve heard sniper victims are often left for hours where they fall, until someone decides an incident happened sufficiently long ago for it to be safe to venture out into the street to retrieve the body. If someone is obviously dead, it does seem pointless risking a sniper’s bullet in order to go out and claim a corpse. This is understandable behaviour. Human nature being what it is, this isn’t surprising. I wish it were. I’d like to see someone behave in a manner that did surprise me, that made me say, ‘Now, I’ve never seen anyone behave like that before.’ But I can’t see it happening. The predictability of human beings is all too predictable.
    I lay on my stomach looking down on the scene, again aware of the cold and the taste of vomit in my mouth. I forced myself to lie still. I expected something to happen, but nothing did. I peered through the telescopic sights at a concentrated area, then lowered the Steyr an inch or so and took in the broader view. All remained quiet. Eventually I edged back from my vantage point. When I was out of sight I rolled over and sat up. I was stiff with cold. I couldn’t stop shivering. I lit a cigarette, leant against the wall at the back of the room, hugging my knees to my chest, my rifle propped at my side.
    And that’s how it happened. That was number one. I was no longer a virgin.

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    I told Santo that night back at camp. I’m ashamed to say I felt a little boastful – proud of what I’d achieved, yet guilty at the same time. He insisted on toasting my first kill with several glasses of Slivovitz, and shouting at anyone who’d listen that the Englishman had shot his first Muslim. My back was slapped by many people, including some I’d never seen before. I saw Nikola sitting a few yards away. He didn’t congratulate me, just sat and smirked as if he didn’t believe a word of it. I ignored him. I watched Santo instead. He’d wrested my rifle off me, placed it across his knees and, with the blade of his knife, was busy scratching a small line, the first one, about half an inch long at the end of the butt. ‘I do it near the base,’ he said, ‘because you must leave room for all the others.’
    Now that I have number one carved into my rifle – a whitish scar against the green stain of the plastic butt – and supposedly the person who’ll always have a special place in my heart, I have become like all the others. I am reassured. Now we are brothers.

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    M ost days there are wounded in the camp. They’re passing through, being moved to Pale or, in the more serious cases, to Belgrade. I feel I’m not the only one who doesn’t like having them around. Being forced to listen to their moaning, their groans of pain and the way they sometimes scream makes me feel uncomfortable. I prefer the wounded to remain at the far end of my telescopic site, several hundred yards away. Here, they often lie on their camp beds, motionless, as if they’re already dead. One of them was being carried past me on a stretcher the other evening, and he