The Odd Angry Shot by William Nagle Page B

her on the forehead and told her I loved her.’
    â€˜What then?’
    â€˜I stood at the end of the couch again and told her I loved her, walked out the door, joined the army the next day and here I am.’
    â€˜Shit! What did you do for a living before you joined up?’
    â€˜I was a painter, as in pictures. I even had one or two exhibitions.’
    â€˜I’ll be fucked.’
    â€˜Yeah. I was, well and truly,’ says Harry sliding down from the sandbags and picking up the bundle of washing. ‘Well and truly.’
    THE afternoon sun is stifling. Out of the corner of my eye I am watching Harry pull small shreds of dead skin from his cracked lips.
    The stagnant water, home to countless mosquitoes, sits soft and vomit-like in the bottom of the disused irrigation ditch, lapping over and seeping through the lace eyelets in our boots. A wet, sour-smelling line of thirty infantrymen.
    â€˜I’ll bet the leeches are having a field day,’ whispers Harry, shifting his legs and disturbing the congregation of large blue flies that have found a resting place on his ammunition pouches.
    â€˜If they bite you they’ll end up pissed,’ says Bung, his hand hooked over the shiny black butt of the M-60 that sits on its bipod like an inquisitive lizard held to its keeper by the crumpled belt-chain of linked ammunition.
    â€˜Four fucking hours we’ve been in this sewer,’ snarls a twenty-year-old infantryman as his finger scrapes the collected dust from inside his nostrils.
    â€˜Well I hope they get this over before five o’clock. I’m taking a bird out to dinner,’ cracks some wit looking at his watch, his face a study of mock annoyance.
    â€˜Bloody hard to get a taxi at this hour of night too,’ he adds as an afterthought.
    â€˜Well, I don’t know about you,’ says Bung, ‘but I think I’ll go home and watch television. If I’m lucky I might even catch a war movie.’
    â€˜Shit. Can I come over?’ asks the nose-picking infantryman.
    â€˜Only if you promise not to pick your nose in front of the women. They don’t mind getting their gear off and a bit of perversion, but they do draw the line at nose picking.’
    â€˜OK. Can I bring my whip?’ asks the nose picker.
    â€˜Now look,’ says Bung,’ these girls are all novice nuns on holiday and I don’t want you coming over and boring them to death with dull things like whips.’
    Quiet laughter passes up and down the line of ten or so within earshot of the conversation. A series of popping sounds snaps us back from the far-away mood of the hopeless discussion.
    â€˜Mortars!’ screams someone farther up the soggy line of men. No sooner has he spoken than the earth around us erupts, showering us with large clumps of earth and sending waves of screaming shrapnel over our heads.
    â€˜Kiss your arse goodbye,’ sneers Bung as he plunges into the foul water at the ditch bottom, dragging the machine gun after him. Its linked belt snaps down the ditch side like a length of golden intestine, following him into the slime.
    A shower of water and mud, mingled with broken rifles and ripped, green-cotton-wrapped limbs, bursts into the air about thirty feet from where Bung’s gun group lies half-submerged.
    Then it stops. The only reminder of its savage visit is the cordite smoke that hangs in the air, and the metalpunctured bodies of the wounded.
    One of the medics is dragging a casualty over the lip of the ditch, pulling the man after him by the collar. He reaches the flat ground at the ditch front and rolls the man over. A dirty green shirt is ripped from tail to neck revealing a white back spotted with small, contusionringed holes, from each of which runs a rivulet of blood.
    â€˜Where’d they come from?’ asks an infantry sergeant, sitting bent double on the edge of the ditch, his face squeezed into a thousand pain wrinkles as he cups his