She remembered her first kill as if it was yesterday. He was a figure rising from behind a wall, gun in hand. The four hundred metres between the end of her rifle and the man in the sights compressed until he was no longer a distant enemy soldier. The scope magnified his features and she could see he was somebody’s son, somebody’s father, somebody’s husband. She slipped her finger from the trigger and raised her head. Her perspective changed from a restricted view of the man to a vista that took in a tree-lined road leading to a small fort. An armoured vehicle headed down the road, a squad of men marching behind. If she didn’t take the shot the man behind the wall would shoot at the patrol. Lives were in her hands. During training, her instructor had cautioned her not to overthink it, not to dwell on the morality of the act. Still, she was aware she was, for that one moment, God.

She lowered her eye to the scope once more, pulled the trigger, and the man went down. A figure crumpling in the haze, a mirage blurring the air as he died. Was that his spirit departing his body or merely a spiral of dust kicked up as he fell? She didn’t know, but later, lying on her bunk at the base trying to get to sleep, she thought back to the moment of the man’s death and wept. Then the next day she tried not to think of it again. She stuck the memory in a little box and pushed it to the far recesses of her mind. It’s what soldiers did.

Silva could count the number of local friends she had on one hand: Itchy, also discharged from the army for his part in the death of the Afghan boy; a woman who was a doctor whom she’d met on a run; a girl at the Royal Mail who’d been in the navy. Life in the military provided a ready-made family, but once you left you were on your own, all of a sudden shorn of the common thread which had sustained friendships through the most horrific of circumstances. Civvy Street seemed mundane and trite after the streets of Kabul, everyday worries trivial or even offensive when you considered the situation in other parts of the world. When you had pulled a trigger and ended an innocent young life.