The man, whose name was Salim Nafi, took the grenade. Salim was well known to all of us: he stood out in any crowd. People thrown in with him for the first time would whisper, behind their hands, “Who is that man?” What made him unforgettable was his incessant belching. He sounded off like a broken-down calliope, and with the regularity of a metronome. The fumes of his emissions were like those little dark green clouds that hover above the decomposing body of a beached whale. His proximity withered leaves, stunned small birds, and moved strong men to tears.

Something was also wrong inside Salim’s head. The valves that opened to transmit messages to the brain in microseconds were in his case jammed for relatively long periods.

Now he blinked at the grenade in his hand as if he had never seen anything remotely like it before, and I knew then, as the adrenaline kicked in, that we were all in serious trouble. Calmly the Colonel said, “Hold it a minute,” and moved in on him, but it was too late. Salim pulled the pin. He reared back and threw it a mile, holding on to the grenade.

The troops let out a wild collective yell and led by Qazwini took off, mostly in my direction. I fought against the human tide to my father—terror brings out the best in some of us—as he struggled to separate the grenade from the grenadier. The seconds were ticking off. I saw blue flames and smelled sulfur; I was that close to the abyss. I saw Ish-Chayl pull a grenade from his belt. In a blur almost too fast for the eye to follow he slammed it against the side of Salim’s skull. The man crumbled; before he hit the ground the Colonel had the bomb. Too late to help, I stood there transfixed as he whipped it into the wadi. Following through he swarmed over me, pulling me down and under him as the grenade exploded somewhere out there.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yeah. You?”

He nodded, shifting his attention to Salim, who lay there, rigid as any proper corpse. A pair of hands like catchers’ mitts pushed me aside. The General stared down at the motionless dogface with a look of keen satisfaction.

“He will be buried with full military honors,” he said sonorously.

“He’s not dead,” Ish-Chayl told him.

“Not dead?” Qazwini repeated unbelievingly. “We do not have a body count?” He kicked at Salim. “How,” he asked, “can we have a great army without a body count?”

“We’re not at war yet,” the Colonel said.

“Is he not badly wounded?” His jaw shot out in the direction of the Colonel. “You trying to fuck me out of a body count?” He glowered, fingering the howitzer at his belt. “Do not bad wounds deserve consideration?”