The Troop

Q: “Hungry.”

A: Yes, sir.

Q: That’s the word you heard Newton Thornton say before you shot him?

A: Yes, sir, it was. He said he was hungry.

Q: He said it just like that?

A: No, sir. I suppose he said it more quietly. And there were some pauses in his speech. He said something like: I’m very very… hungry.

Q: If he said it so quietly, are you certain he said it at all? It was night, on the ocean. The weather reports for that evening indicated high winds.

A: That’s all true, sir. It was windy and choppy. But the Big Ears picked his voice up loud and clear.

Q: I’m sorry?

A: The Big Ears is what we call it. It’s a parabolic listening device: a big dish, basically. Looks like a satellite dish. It’s for long-range acoustical assessment, which is really just a prissy way of saying it helps us hear what we wouldn’t be able to hear naturally.

Q: And the Big Ears told you that Newton Grant said: I’m hungry?

A: Correct.

Q: So what?

A: Repeat that, sir?

Q: I said, so what? He was hungry. He’d been on an island for days. Nothing to eat. Wasn’t it reasonable that the boy might be hungry?

A: Yes, sir, he may have been. I suppose it was the way he said it.

Q: The way?

A: Yes, sir. He said it in a way that sounded like he was somehow more than just hungry. Hungry as you or I would know it, anyway. Maybe those starving kids you see on TV pledge drives might know that kind of hunger. But even them, I’m not sure. He sounded like he’d eat his own arm off if he could just bring himself to cross that line.

Q: Pardon me, Lance Corporal Ellis, but that sounds paranoid.

A: I suppose it does. I think a lot of us were jumpy. We kept hearing things.

Q: Out on the boat?

A: No, I mean internally. Rumors. Stuff was starting to leak out about that psycho doctor’s lab. They’d found some of those awful videos. The one with the poor gorilla or whatever. We were jumpy. That sort of stuff you can’t just aim a gun at and eliminate.

Q: But you did.

A: I did, yes. But the boy said one of our trigger words.

Q: Explain that.

A: We’d been given orders. The chief petty officer came into the snipers’ bunks and told us if anybody came off that island and spoke one of those trigger words, we had authority to open fire. Hungry was one of them.

Q: Any others?

A: I can’t entirely remember. Worm, I’m sure was one. Infected.

Q: And so because a very hungry boy on a boat said he was hungry, he got himself shot.

A: He was infected, sir. That much was made clear in the aftermath. And from what I’ve heard about some of the others, a bullet was an easy way to go.

Q: You didn’t answer my question.

A: With all due respect, you didn’t ask a question, sir. You made a statement, sir. I’ll tell you this: I never trained as a combat sniper thinking one day I’d shoot a young boy on a boat. That’s not why men join up. We’re supposed to be doing it for God and country and… Jesus. It haunts me. I heard people use that phrase and I never quite understood. Honestly, I thought it was a bit histrionic. But I get it now. I know what it is to be haunted. That boy’s face haunts me, sir, and it will until the day I depart this world for whatever’s waiting for me.