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The stench has invaded my pores and become a part of me. I am light-headed from lack of sleep, my lips are parched and my feet are swollen after standing all night. Walking half the night — three steps in one direction, two in the other — has obviously not given me the exercise I need. I think about taking off my boots. I bend down to do so, see the yellow muck on the floor closely and give up on the idea. I stretch my arms and concentrate on the reading material instead.

The scribbling on the walls is in three languages and the writers have used a variety of materials. I can read two of the languages, the third I have to guess. I can make out the etchings done with nails. The dried rust is probably blood, and I don’t want to think what else they might have used.

There are hammers and sickles and date trees and fifteen varieties of breasts. Someone, who seems to have managed to bring in a ballpoint pen, has drawn a driveway, lined on both sides with apple trees, leading to a little house. My predecessors in this place had a lot to say, both personal and political.

I was lashed one hundred times and I liked it.

Pray for an easy end.

Asia is red with the blood of martyrs.

Asia is green and may Allah keep it this way.

Roses are red. Violets are blue. This country is khaki.

Screw the First Lady, not this nation.

Scream on the first lash. And don’t faint because when they start again they will count from one.

Dear son, I did it for your future.

Major Kiyani is my bitch.

Lenin lives.

I love Nadia.

Lenin was a faggot.

A Persian couplet I can only vaguely decipher: the lover, long tresses, snakes. I think I get the picture.

I think about contributing my own two bits. Something like…“On a very hot evening Under Officer Shigri had a flash of brilliance…”

Not enough space on the wall.

The silent drill conspiracy that Major Kiyani is trying to unearth was a fucked-up idea, which, like most fucked-up ideas, was conceived at the end of a very hot day in the Academy. We were taking potshots at a Bruce Lee poster in Bannon’s room after a busy day on the parade square. All the heat that our bodies had accumulated during the drill rehearsal suddenly started to seep out, the starch of our uniforms stuck to our bodies like rough glue, sweat ran like lizards crawling over our flesh, our feet had suffocated and died in their shiny leather coffins. Bannon’s room, with its overefficient, noisy air conditioner, was the obvious hideout. Bannon had designed his room like a bunker; there was no bed, just a king-sized mattress on the ground, covered by a camouflaged canopy he had improvised with four bamboo sticks. On the floor, a little fat Buddha sat on a copy of Stars and Stripes. The Buddha had a secret chamber in his stomach where Bannon kept his supply of hashish. His uniforms hung neatly in the door-less cupboard. The only liberties he had taken with his designer bunker were the air conditioner and a life-size poster from Game of Death, which covered the entire inside of the door. The poster was a shot from the climax of the film, after the last surviving villain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, had managed to get his paw on Bruce Lee’s right ribcage, leaving four neat, parallel scratches. Bruce Lee’s hands, in classic defensive posture, were spotlessly clean; his mouth was yet to bleed.

The official reason for our regular visit to Bannon’s room was that we were working out the details of our silent drill display for the President’s inspection. We needed to review the squad’s progress, plot every single manoeuvre and work on our inner cadence.

But we really ended up there every day after the parade because Obaid loved to put his cheeks against the air conditioner’s vent and I wanted to play with Bannon’s Gung Ho Fairburn Sykes knife and listen to his stories of Operation Bloody Rice in Vietnam. He had done two tours of duty, and if he was in the right mood he could transport us to his night patrols and make us feel the movement of every single leaf on the Bloody Rice trail. He embellished his stories with a generous smattering of Cha obo, Chao ong, Chao co, probably the only Vietnamese words he knew. He called his slippers his Ho Chi Minhs. Obaid had his doubts.

“What was a drill instructor doing hunting down commies in a war?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” I would say, and then go on to show off my own knowledge of the subject, culled from two classes on the history of the Vietnam War. “It was war, Baby O, the biggest that America fought. Everyone had to fight. Even the US Army priests and barbers were at the front.”

But today Bannon was in one of his dark, knife-throwing moods. It was difficult to get a word out of him if it wasn’t about the pedigree of his Gung Ho. We lay under the camouflaged canopy. An unlit joint dangled from Bannon’s mouth as he held his Gung Ho from its tip and contemplated its path towards Bruce Lee.

“Give me a target,” he said to no one in particular.

“Third rib from the top,” Obaid said without moving his cheek from the air conditioner’s vents. Bannon held the handle of the knife to his lips for a moment. Then his wrist flicked, the knife circled in the air and ended up between Bruce Lee’s third and fourth rib. “Damn. The air conditioning,” he said. “Gung Ho works best outdoors.” He suggested switching the air conditioning off and having another go. But Obaid wouldn’t have any of that. Obaid went for Bruce Lee’s right nipple and drew a blank, hitting the blue space above his right shoulder.

I removed the knife from the poster and walked backwards, keeping my eyes locked on Bruce Lee’s right eye, my assigned target. When you do short-range targets it’s usually your own eye that fails you, not the way you handle your weapon. The target has to exist in the cross hairs of your eyeballs. If the target doesn’t live in your eye, you can keep your hands as steady as you want and you can hold your breath till you turn blue but there is no guarantee that you’ll get the target. As the knife left my fingertips, I shut my eyes and only opened them when I heard Bannon going, “Oh man, oh man.” I got up from the mattress, walked to the poster, removed the knife from the iris of Bruce Lee’s right eye and threw it over my shoulder towards Bannon. I didn’t have to look back to find out that he had caught it. Obaid shouted: “Don’t be a bloody show-off, Ali. It’s only a circus trick.”

Bannon put the knife back in its leather sheath and lit his joint. “In Danang we captured this gook who had killed nine of my men with a knife. The man was a fucking monkey. He hid in the trees; for all I know he swung from tree to tree like a fucking Chinky Tarzan. Nobody ever saw him. He got ‘em all in the same fashion, during the patrol. Our guys would be out there with their M16 targeted at the bush, ready for an ambush, they would hear a branch move, they would look up and then swishhhh.” Bannon jabbed two fingers at his Adam’s apple. A red rope was tightening in his eyes, his speech was slightly slurred. The air conditioner was refusing to exhale the thick hashish smoke in the room.