We’ve started by making my very own ghillie suit. This helps to disguise you from the enemy so that if they look your way they just see a mound of grass, not a person. Sarge has taught me how to make one using one of his old army boiler suits and some fishing net. Sewing the suit is quite tricky because the net is coarse and keeps slipping out of the needle but Sarge has made it fun by singing rude songs that he learned in the army. I can’t write down the words as they are very naughty but the way he sings them, with this silly pretend posh accent, makes me laugh so much I get the hiccups. This morning I got them so bad I almost messed up my stitching.

Sarge stopped then and got me a glass of water. When he came back his face was all serious and he said that there was a reason why we were doing what we did, that there was still a battle to be won. He told me some more about his big war then. He said that if he did it again he wouldn’t be fighting the Iraqis. Instead he would take his gun and wave it in the face of George Bush and his ‘reetarde retard son’ and ask them to fight like soldiers. Sarge calls them criminals. He thinks they should be in jail and that it’s their fault that he shouts in the woods and that I have no mother. He looked away as he said that and changed the subject. Talk of the dead mother in the desert always makes him sad. I wish he would tell me more but he won’t. My whole life he’s told me exactly three bits of information about her.

1. That he met her in the big war.
2. That she came from a place called Baghdad.
3. That she died in the desert.

All the other stuff I know about her comes from my head, from the stories I told myself after seeing the photo of her. I found it one day a few years back when I was bored and wanted something to read. The library van hadn’t been because it was snowing out so I had a look through the books in Sarge’s room. One of the titles caught my eye because instead of words it was just squiggly shapes. Sarge told me later that this was Arabic, the language of my mother, and that the squiggly shapes were the title of an Arabic poem. I opened up the book to see if there were any English words inside, and I saw that Sarge had written in the pages of the book, next to the squiggly poems. I felt a bit funny then because some of the words he’d written were sad and I thought it best if I didn’t read them so I closed the book, but when I did the photo fell out. There were three people in it, all sitting round a table: an old man with a crinkly face and a grey beard, a plump, smiley, middle-aged woman in a long red dress and, in the centre of the two, a young woman with dark hair. When I looked closer I felt all funny because even though this was an old photo and the people in it were wearing strange clothes, the woman in it looked like me, just a bit older. She had my thick black hair, my weird eyes that turn from black to yellow-green depending on the light and the same brown skin. I’d never seen anyone else who looked like me before. Sarge has fair hair and pale skin, the people from the village are all pale or pink, even the characters in the books I read are too. But it was more than that. The girl in the picture had my face.