I was drinking and shooting and talking about women.
That was how it started.
It was never going to end well.
I was drunk that night. I like to think that it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been, but fuck, I was drunk every night.
We came across a family of Bosniaks making their way through the woods. A family trying to survive. Who knows where they were escaping to, or why they'd chosen that night in a war that was already two years old.
There were three younger men. Several women, I don't even remember how many, from teenagers to a couple of grandmothers. Then there was the grandfather. I remember him. Jesus, I remember him.
None of them were armed.
The first thing that happened was the murder of the three younger men. My guys, my band of happy thieves, tried to rile them, tried to make them fight, but they were having none of it. They seemed to think that if they kept their heads down and avoided confrontation, they might be allowed to pass unhindered through the forest.
In the end, all that keeping their heads down meant, was that they each got a bullet in the top of their skull rather than the forehead. That was the moment when I started to sober up, but it took a while.
Genuinely hadn't seen it coming. Thought my guys were having a bit of fun. It was cruel, yes, but I was drunk, I was one of them, I was laughing with them. After the three shots, the three bloody exploding heads, after the screams from the wives and daughters, the alcohol started to weep slowly from my system. I didn't think of myself as one of them after that.
They didn't immediately notice. Too busy enjoying themselves.
They made the grandfather watch. I think that was what they took the most pleasure in. The humiliation of the head of the family. The respectable leader, brought to his knees as his family was put to death and shame.
They raped the women. Gang rape. I sat and watched. What a useless, pathetic, complicit sack of shit. They were laughing, having fun. The animalistic nature of the horde.
I sat there intending to do something. But what was it I was going to do against four guys with guns?
I couldn't even lift my camera.
'Come on, Tommy.'
I can still hear them. The first exhortations to join in. One of them said it, then they all did, in the same high pitched mocking voice.
'Come on, Tommy!'
I could have run. Maybe they would have shot me in the back, but they were drunk, there were trees, they all had their trousers at their ankles. Odds were in my favour.
I can barely claim any honour, but I know I didn't run because I thought I should do something. I can't turn my back on these people, I thought. I'm the west. I'm representing the west here. All of it. The responsibility of the NATO alliance rests on my shoulders. I should do something.
I sat and watched, that's what I did. Getting less and less drunk with every second.
If that was it, if it had ended there, I'd still be living with it. I'd still be consumed by what a bloody awful, pusillanimous arsehole I'd been. A coward.
If I couldn't have saved those people, I ought at least to have died trying.
The mood turned. I don't know what it was that turned it. Perhaps they'd had enough. They'd had enough sex, enough fun debasing the Bosniaks. Or perhaps they'd finally realised that there was someone there who was neither a victim nor a perpetrator. There was a witness.
What happened next plays in my head on a continuous loop. Over and over and over. Like a television drama, stuck on the same ten-minute scene, playing in the corner of every room you're ever in. You can try to ignore it all you like, but it's loud and demanding. It insists that you watch it.
Look at me! it screams. Look at what you did.
They encouraged me to join in. They wanted me to join in. At some stage they realised they needed me to join in. That was when everything changed. I was no longer to be defined by my pusillanimity.
I never knew their names, these four guys I got drunk with for a few nights in the forest. They told me they were John, Paul, George and Ringo. Funny. John was the leader, that was all I knew him as.
John aimed his gun at me. Suggested that I might like to take a turn. He offered me one of the women. The prettiest, curled in a heap on the forest floor, clothes torn, blood on her thighs, dirt on her face. Tears running through the dirt. Not yet at the place where she could shut down and accept that she would be better off dead. Still wanted to live.
'Do it,' he said.
I couldn't speak. I didn't look at her. I shook my head.
'Tommy,' he said. 'Come on, come on. Look at her. Now do it.'
I didn't look at her.
He smiled. He pointed the gun at the pathetic abused woman on the forest floor.
'I can tell you don't care about yourself, Tommy,' he said. 'But you don't want her blood on your hands. Now do it.'
I didn't move. Sat there, head down, just as pathetic and paralysed as I'd been for the past half hour.
He kneeled down beside her and put the gun at her head.
'Tommy,' he said, and just like that his tone had changed. He'd been mocking beforehand, and suddenly, there it was. Business-like. Mundane, almost, but full of threat.
'Tommy, you need to have sex with the girl. Now.'
I looked at her at last. Looked her in the eye. She never spoke, but her look said everything. She was begging me. That's what her eyes were doing. Begging me. What did she care if another man raped her, if another man came inside her? She didn't want to die.
I got to my feet. One of the other three started a slow hand clap and then they were all laughing, clapping slowly in unison. John wasn't laughing. He kept the gun at her head.
Her eyes begged me. Her eyes said, come on. Rape me. Don't think that I care. I don't care. It's not rape, not really. I want you to do it. Come on. Come on! Please!
I stood there. The laughter and the clapping increased. I was wearing jeans, no belt. A button, a zip. What was I thinking? Right there, at that moment, what did I think was going to happen?
I was never going to be able to have sex with her, whether I'd decided that I was going to do it or not. I couldn't.
I'd been sitting there in fear and abject poverty of spirit, consumed by self-loathing, for all that time. And now they were laughing at me and mocking me and threatening this woman, and the responsibility of whether or not she lived was on my shoulders. It was up to me to enter her. To fuck her. On their command.
I couldn't get an erection. I was never going to be able to get an erection. Did I think that by dropping my trousers they'd feel some sympathy for me? By showing them that I was incapable, that they'd let her go?
The clapping stopped, the laughter increased ten fold. The look in her eyes became ever more desperate. In a final pathetic gesture, she even squeezed one of her dirty, bite marked, bloody breasts in an effort to get me excited.
I fell to my knees. It felt like my penis shrivelled into nothingness.
John put a bullet in her head.
'You could have saved her, Tommy,' he said. 'But you're not a real man.'
He put a gun in my hand. That seemed strange at the time. He took a gun from one of the others — think it was Ringo — and put it in my hand.
'Kill the old guy,' he said. 'If you don't, the other women will die. If you kill the old guy, I'll let them go. You think you can do that much for me, Tommy?'
I had a gun in my hand. That's the moment I think most about when I think about that night. The moment he gave me a gun, knowing I would do nothing with it other than what he was telling me to do.
I should have shot him. John. I should have shot John when I had the chance. Then I would have died. Or I should have turned the gun on myself.
Except, I believed him. The whole idea was to mock me further, to complete my humiliation. He fully
