A Sniper’s Dear Mother

The consequences of an RPG taking out a sniper.

Misrata, Libya. April 2011

There is nothing like being caught in the rifle scope of a trigger-happy sniper to make you question your life choices.

Well, that might be true for some people, but not for me. The truth was that the clank of bullets hitting the frame of my ambulance had driven away all thoughts except, “It could be any moment now.”

Our medical team had been trying to reach a hospital on the front lines, near the city’s western edge, when we realised that we’d gone too far. The next thing we knew, we’d fallen into the crosshairs of a sniper who held our lives in his hands with the power vested in him by his weapon. 

The sun was high as we drove through the empty streets of that wounded city. The air stank of cordite from recent firefights. The walls still standing after the Gaddafi forces’ incessant shelling were pinpricked with wounds that looked like galaxies of black stars and angry planets. The one who controlled this city would win the war. 

The sniper, one of the many government soldiers surrounding the city, shot at us only twice in thirty seconds. He was taking his time. There were no side alleys to dive into from that naked street. We would have to go back the way we came, which would leave us at the sniper’s mercy for a full five hundred meters.

Our driver swung back, exposing the ambulance’s rear end to the sniper. That left me, the one in the back seat, as the clearest shot.

What did I do? I took out my camera, put my head down, and started recording as another bullet clanked against the ambulance’s metal frame.

Could he see what I was doing in his rifle scope? I didn't know. I just hoped my camera lens saw the soldier. Scratch that: the killer. Bullets have rules they never break. Less could be said of the soldiers who become killers.

So, unlike in cinema clichés, my life didn’t flash before my eyes. Except for the tinge of guilt that hummed inside me like a tuning fork—for repeatedly putting myself in situations like this—I was totally immersed in the present. 

Looking at the video now, I can see my team leader, Dr Hamad, patting the driver’s back and telling him not be scared as he sped away, still in reach of the sniper’s bullets. 

The drama might have taken less than a minute in normal time, but its gravity was of that of a lifetime that didn’t end until we dove into a side road. 

***

“War is the real obscenity.” -Larry Flynt, Hustler.

After working in more than a dozen conflict zones around the world, including seven Arab Spring countries at the heights of their uprisings—and after these springs crashed into cold winters—I can’t find a more apt quote about war.

In war, extreme becomes the routine. Emotions reign. I have good reason to hate that sniper who tried to kill me as I rode in an ambulance. Hate that was compounded after I witnessed the “Vascular Sniper” cases, our nickname for the pattern of injuries we had been noticing since we’d arrived in the besieged city. 

With a lot of time on their hands, snipers become imaginative. Head shots were no longer the measure of a savvy sniper, nor even best practice. Snipers now vied to be the best at hitting arteries and veins. Most famously, the femoral artery in the thigh. This killed two birds with one bullet. First, the wounded soldier dropped out of battle, with the Grim Reaper sucking his soul like water down a plughole. Second, valuable human and logistical resources were redirected to the evacuation and treatment of the wounded, as opposed to the rectangular hole in the ground needed to deal with dead ones. What a beautiful world we live in.

The rebels neutralized that sniper the same day. They played cat and mouse for four hours, during which the sniper took out five lives. Finally, the rebels destroyed the whole floor he was on with RPGs.

 I met one of those rebels in the hospital when they returned with their wounded. He told me there wasn’t much left of the sniper, but, miraculously, his phone had survived. The rebel handed it to me. It was a black Nokia. The old kind. It could have been another ad for the durability of these old phones, but what captured my interest was not the phone’s sturdiness. It was one of the contacts in his phone: Dear Mother.

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel bad that he would never speak to his dear mother again. That his dear mother would not find enough left of his body to fill a grocery bag. Or worse, that she will always wait for him, refusing to believe that he was truly dead. 

To this day, I still think about his Dear Mother and millions like her all around the world.

Indeed, Mr. Flynt. War is the real obscenity, especially when even the Dear Mothers are not spared.

Video: A Sniper Shooting at our Ambulance in Besieged Misrata

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