No Worse Enemy by Ben Anderson

Author:Ben Anderson [Anderson, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781851688630
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Back at the base, Captain Sparks wrestled with the biggest surprise of Marjah, the highly-skilled snipers. The tiny roof I’d seen being turned into a watchtower was now walled with sandbags but even so, a marine had been shot there. Two marines had been shot on the roof of the main building. The snipers were in well-concealed positions, roughly three hundred metres from the base. One sniper had fired just four bullets during those first two days and hit three marines. Locating someone so patient was hard enough but there were also marksmen nearby, who followed each sniper’s shot with a few single shots from their AK47s, confusing anyone who thought they knew roughly where the first shot had come from.

Captain Sparks stood outside the base, trying to work out the sniper’s positions. There was another crack. ‘Did he just shoot the sandbag? It sure looked to me like he shot the sandbag’, he said. ‘He did’, said a marine in front of him. Sparks had walked out of the big double doors that led into the courtyard and stood on the verandah, studying the watchtower. In front of him were a line of marines in full combat gear. It looked ceremonial; as if a king had come out of his palace to survey his land and the sentries had assembled to protect him.

Another crack filled the courtyard. Captain Sparks looked up. There was another crack. ‘Is that Koenig firing?’ he asked.

‘It is, Sir.’ Lance Corporal Koenig was one of the marines lying down behind the sandbags.

‘There’s no holes in the Afghan flag yet. Semper Fi’, said Sparks as he walked inside. ‘The sniper is the most psychologically effective weapon on the battlefield, because there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Stay low, keep your heads down’, shouted one of the marines on the verandah. Their eyes were fixed grimly on the sandbags at the top of the watchtower. There were different theories about where the snipers were; Captain Sparks was sure they were two to three hundred metres north-west of the base, hiding somewhere in the pork chop. ‘So there’s nothing we can do about it until we clear it’, he said.

Captain Sparks walked into his room and began putting on his helmet and his body armour, his chest rig, stuffed with sixteen magazines of ammunition. As he walked through the door, he passed a marine standing in the corridor looking lost. ‘Bozman, stay motivated!’ he said, like a gym instructor rallying a sagging spin class.

Above us, the cracks of the competition between marksmen continued. Its structure was polite, like a conversation between strangers; back and forth, back and forth, sometimes in single words, sometimes in sentences. Often, the participants waited minutes to take their turn. In between, there was an awful silence. It was careful, considered and cerebral. There seemed to be rules, tricks, feints and a mutual respect that suggested an etiquette. Occasionally, of course, someone at either end collapsed into a lifeless heap.

‘It’s not Enemy at the

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