Mirwais Kalay was the last settlement on this morning’s patrol, but they should have reached it long before now. Chris had been to this Kalay twice before, both times on market days. Now it was much quieter. It was a smallish settlement, made up of about thirty compounds loosely clustered around a central crossroads. There were fewer than twenty villagers in sight. Despite the heat, a handful of vendors were still operating from blankets on the ground, heaped with dusty vegetables.

So far, the patrol had been successful, apart from the timing issues. They had encountered no resistance this morning, and the locals they had spoken to had been reasonably positive about British presence. Yet Chris couldn’t help feeling disappointed about the lack of action. Although he felt guilty about wishing for violence, the truth was that he had spent most of the past four weeks feeling slightly cheated. It was hard not to see his tour to date as series of let-downs. He’d trained to deploy as a full-strength platoon, but on arrival he’d been informed that the platoon would be splitting into two multiples with just fourteen soldiers in each. The idea was that the multiples would alternate between patrolling and defending a set of small checkpoints. Every couple of weeks, the two multiples switched tasks.

Chris had spent the first fortnight in the checkpoints, getting increasingly bored with short local patrols and trying to keep his patience with the constant solicitings of his corrupt Afghan National Army commander, Sergeant Abdullah. Sergeant Abdullah was in charge of the eight Afghan soldiers that made up the ANA supplement to Chris’s multiple. He was a fearsome sight, hefting an American M249 machine gun and draped mayorally in belt after belt of ammunition. He was also a predatory homosexual. This had been the big surprise of the tour so far – that the puritanical Afghan culture had a series of loopholes which more or less allowed for homosexual activity. As far as Chris could tell, anything an Afghan male got up to on a Thursday didn’t really count. It was on Thursdays that Sergeant Abdullah was most likely to leer at him and murmur ‘Bes-yaar khoob’, translated for Chris by the giggling interpreter as ‘very good’. Sergeant Abdullah also kept a small white kitten in the leg pocket of his trousers, which he liked to stroke suggestively in the direction of his favourite members of the British unit – most notably eighteen-year-old Private Marrak from St Ives, whom Abdullah had nicknamed ‘Anar gul’, or ‘flower of the pomegranate tree’. Marrak was so traumatised by all this that Chris actually arranged for him to swap places with Private Barker from the other multiple.