www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fouvwilGWc

Luckily for my general levels of bile this morning, Em and I missed this game, as we were at a party for a friend deploying this week to go fight some of the worst people in the world. Therefore, I’m giving him my man-of-the-match award for doing the real hard work.

For seven months, Fallujah had been controlled by jihadis who had held the city in a Medieval thrall. And now the Marines were taking it back, six thousand of them, on foot in the middle of a November night

Gunfire rang out, and we scrambled for the walls on the sides of the street. The insurgents knew what they were doing, they were bracketing us with their shells, dropping them to the left and the right. They were getting close now.

Four men stepped from the darkness. They were not part of Bravo Company; I hadn’t seen them before. They wore flight suits that shimmered in the night and tennis shoes and hoods that made them look like executioners. The four men wore goggles that shrouded their eyes and gave off lime-green penumbras that lightened their faces. With the shells exploding I got off the wall and rejoined the captain in the street, shaking in the knees, and I listened to him tell the executioners the location of the snipers. Up ahead, he said. One of the four men mumbled something but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see their eyes through the green glowing but one of them was on the balls of his feet, bouncing, like a football player on the sidelines. Coach, he seemed to be saying, put me in the game.

The four men peeled off into the blackness without a sound. Moments passed and the shelling stopped. And then the sniper fire stopped. We never saw the men again.