Boys with Guns
“Do you mind if I record this?”
“It’s fine, I guess.”
“Don’t even look at the microphone. Just pretend like we’re having a conversation.”
“Okay.”
“What was it like in Iraq?”
“Hell. I mean, not all of it was bad. There were some days when the little kids would come up to us with soccer balls and we’d play. Those were the good days.”
“And the bad days?”
“There were mostly bad days.”
“What was the worst?”
“We’d been attacked a few days before… Lost a couple of guys, good guys… Anyways, we were on patrol and all of us were on edge, you know, because of the attack. So this kid runs towards us, he was around twelve or thirteen, no older than Jamie. And he sticks his hand in his pocket. So we’re all really jumpy, right, because that’s what gunshots do, they make you nervous. And he pulls out this gun. And we’re screaming at him in English ‘Drop the gun,’ and we keep yelling and yelling but he doesn’t understand. And he’s just waving this thing around…”
“Did you shoot him?”
“Turns out it was just a toy gun… It was just a toy gun.”
Kristin Ronzi is part of the editing team at EastLit as well as a contributing writer to The Artifice. Her pieces have been featured in Anak Sastra, The Anthem, and Penny Dreadful among others.
Photo credit: http://www.iraqichildrensart.org/
