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But in the end…
Nothing had happened.
“If I’d shot her, sir,” I asked with my eyes staring straight ahead, “and it turned out that she didn’t have a grenade, how would that have made us look?”
The officer glared at me like he wanted to kill me. “You said you saw an RKG – ”
“Thought I saw, sir – ”
“DO NOT INTERRUPT ME!”
I stood there in silence.
“Now that grenade is still out there, just waiting to be used to kill other soldiers. Good fucking job, Henriksson.”
“Sir, I don’t know that she had a – ”
“From now on, when you’re given an order, you FOLLOW THE FUCKING ORDER!”
For the first time, I dared look him in the eyes.
“She was a woman, sir,” I said coldly. “I don’t kill women.”
A vein popped out so far on his forehead that I thought he might have a coronary right in front of me.
He leaned in two inches from my face and said in a low, vicious voice, “Well, you can think that one over while you’re in the brig for the next two weeks, CORPORAL Henriksson.”
Before I’d walked into his office, I’d been a sergeant.
He’d just busted me back down three ranks – a serious demotion.
Not to mention two weeks in the on-base prison.
I didn’t care.
I would have gladly served my entire tour of duty in prison and been busted back down to a private.
In fact, you could even say I was lucky. I could have been court-martialed and drummed out of the military, or been sent to prison for much longer.
But we were in an active war zone and they needed warm bodies on the front lines. Plus, there was the minor detail that I’d actually taken the shot and just missed. All of that caused my commanding officer to limit my punishment.
Besides, he wanted me back out on the front lines as soon as possible. Serving in Afghanistan was a far harsher sentence than sending me back to a cushy prison in Sweden.
The jail time didn’t faze me. Nor did the demotion or the black mark on my record. I was just relieved I hadn’t killed the woman.
But the episode with my commanding officer left a bitter taste in my mouth.
His words kept ringing in my head:
Your actions today made our entire outfit look bad in front of the Americans and NATO!
That was the thing he was most upset about.
Not that I could have killed an innocent person.
That moment in his office was the first time I hated being in the military.
It wasn’t the last…
