My War Memoris: Facing a Sniper at Eighteen (Chapter 28.)

 

My War Memoris- My First Lesson in Geometry: Facing a Sniper at Eighteen

Zip-zip.

Two slugs of hot lead slammed into the mud exactly two inches from my right knee. They were spaced about two inches apart, too. Very tidy. Very professional. I stared at those two little smoking tunnels in the wet earth as if they were peepholes into another, warmer world. Those bullets were meant for me. Not some abstract “enemy” in a textbook, but me—a kid who, until last week, was mostly worried about girls and bad haircuts.

"Keep your head down, rookie! Lower!”

That was Zdravko. My company commander. He was out on a perimeter check and had the distinct misfortune of being right there when I decided to test the laws of probability.

"He’s been there for a month," Zdravko said, his hand pressing my shoulder deeper into the muck. His voice was calmer now, almost parental, like he was explaining how to plant potatoes instead of how to keep my brains inside my skull. "He’s a nuisance. Buzzes around our ears, shoots at anything that pokes out. Lucky for us, he hasn’t hit anyone yet, but he’s hell on our sleep schedule."

He’d yelled that first time because he was scared. It was that instinctive, fatherly bark you give a toddler running toward a busy street. Zdravko was from Našički Markovac, a place where people don't use many words but have a very firm grip on a shovel. It’s a funny thing about war. With surgical precision, it carves leaders out of the quiet men you’d barely notice in civilian life.

While the "mama's boys" back at the barracks were playing soldier and flipping switches at the gate—claiming they were too important for the front or too busy with college—men like Zdravko, Jura, and Gajo just locked their front doors and picked up rifles.

These were men of the soil. They knew how to fell trees until their palms were nothing but calluses. They knew how to plant crops under a sun that tries to melt your brain and how to herd cattle through rain that doesn't end for weeks. Not only that, but they knew how to be hungry all day without making a Greek tragedy out of it. To a man like that, war is just another dirty, exhausting job that needs to be finished. No philosophy. No extra adjectives.

Zdravko reacted a full second before those bullets hit the mud. He doesn’t just hear gunfire; he feels a ripple in the air. Me? I was just a kid on an accelerated course in survival. The difference is, in college, when you fail an exam, you can go home and cry about it. Out here, you don't even have time to cry before you become a statistic.

The rain was coming down as a dull, damp mist. Our ponchos were heavy, stiff, and made us move with all the grace of rubber penguins. Our “home” was a deep trench, a natural gash in the earth carved by some long-forgotten creek. Now, that creek was our lifeline, the only thing keeping the town of Ivanovac from the people on the other side.

We arrived last night under the cover of darkness. It was quiet, if you ignore the sound of the rain, which was thankfully too thick for mortars but perfect for the paranoia of an infantry raid. The high command had finally realized that charging forward was suicide—the other side was dug in deep with more iron and more meat. The mission was simple: blend into the landscape and stay alive.

Small puddles drained down the trench walls, but my comrades—those silent engineers of the mud—had already dug drainage channels. The water flowed past us while we huddled in an improvised bunker made of logs and sandbags. There was room for four lucky souls inside, while the six of us rotated on guard duty.

I spent the whole night leaning against the edge of the ditch, staring into the dark until the tall, yellow grass started playing tricks on my eyes. The sniper was out there somewhere, sitting on high ground, being patient. You never knew when he slept, when he drank his coffee, or when your profile finally showed up in his optics. They’d warned me about him last night, but I figured they were just talking. People always exaggerate in war stories, I thought.

Then I saw the two holes in the mud.

Okay, so it was personal. That guy was actually trying to kill me. For the rest of the day, on that little six-foot stretch of trench exposed to his view, I decided to become an earthworm. Crawling became my primary personality trait. My plan for the next twenty-four hours: stay low, don't make waves, and wait for the relief shift like it’s the Second Coming.

So it goes.