The Necessary Story of My Brother

Some people say he was shot after he raised his hands to show he was not armed. I have seen this happen to others; it was not what happened to him. 

He was shot after having turned in the direction of the sniper, as if he had heard something, as if, perhaps, he had heard someone call his name. Confusion was on his face when he fell. It may have been the sniper who shot him, as some say, or it may have been someone else. The sniper was about one hundred meters away, so it is not likely that he would have heard the sniper shout his name, even if the sniper knew it, not with the noise of firearms discharging and people yelling.

Why do I dwell on the possibility that he heard someone call his name? Certainly I did not hear his, or anyone’s, name shouted, and no one else claimed to have heard it. But it was his time, I think, and I believe he knew this. Something—if not someone shouting at him, then something else—attracted his attention. 

It was true that he did not have a weapon in his hand. His pistol was in the holster he wore on his belt. He was trying to help a young man who had fallen, a boy even younger than himself, and he was using both hands in the effort to lift him onto the poncho other medics had spread beside the wounded boy. This is what he was occupied with when he suddenly stood up and turned toward the sniper. He was a medic himself, so it was not unusual for him to help the other medics. In this action, he had rushed forward with the first line, but then stopped to assist the boy who had fallen. I do not know what drew him to this particular boy, for others had also gone down. I do not know who the boy is, or was, and I do not know what became of him. My brother was wearing an American army camouflage cap, with its green and black and brown pattern, like leaves fallen in a wet forest, when he was shot, and the cap dropped from his head even before he struck the ground.

It was midday and the heat had not yet reached its full intensity. We could see the dust and sand in the farther reaches of the sky, carried by the wind that had begun to blow in from Africa. The sun was already dimming, going from a preternaturally white light to an orange orb behind the curtain of dust. I sipped from a water bottle, waiting with the second assault line to be told whether or not we would be needed. We could feel the static electricity in the air pushing in before the wind. My nose bled from the dryness.

He had completed almost a year at the university when he left to join the armed wing of the resistance. In school he had studied biology and had dissected the cadavers of animals, so it was natural that he would be assigned the duties of a medic.

He left the university because he could no longer afford his education, having moved out of his parents’ house a month before. He left his parents’ house after witnessing the murder of his cousin whom he had been visiting. His cousin was one year older than he was and lived only three lanes away. They had played together as children and were more like brothers than distant relations. He and his cousin were alone in the house when four men from a different faction came in. In an instant, his cousin was on the floor, blood spurting from the incision in his throat. My brother made a move to try to help him, but two of the men grabbed him and told him they would do the same to him if he did not remain still. He watched his cousin’s life pulse out of his throat, as if it were finished with this body and needed to find another.

My brother should have died too, he said. I don’t think he ever told anyone else how his cousin died and what he himself saw. He was ashamed of having treasured his own life so much that he was not able to ease his cousin’s way as he died.

He told me this in an attempt to assuage the guilt I felt because I had not intervened when one of our leaders beheaded a prisoner. He assumed I had been afraid, and I had been, but also I did not know what was the right thing to do, and so I did nothing. But having witnessed my disquiet afterward, and then confiding in me his own about his failure of courage, he invited me to become closer to him, even intimate, certainly more than an acquaintance. Perhaps he was asking me to take his cousin’s place in his heart.

He became known, even famous, for his bravery. Because he insisted on accompanying the fighters on the first line of assault when most of the other medics stayed with the second line or in the reserve, he was near when a fighter was injured. Many would have bled to death had he not been present to tie a tourniquet or apply a compress. He bought morphine on the black market with his own money or money he collected from individual fighters. It was an “investment” in their own lives, he told them, and he was able to reduce the shock and pain when they were wounded. (Who knew where the morphine that was supposed to be part of every medical kit went.) Under fire, he held the hands of dying men for whom he could do nothing else. I remonstrated with him for risking his life in this way. “What can I do?” he said. “They need someone. Who else will do it?”

And the men he helped were grateful. Several credited him with saving their arm or leg from amputation. One young officer offered to write his father, who owned several businesses, to ask him to make a place for my brother when the campaign ended.

Young women—some were only girls—having heard about him from their brothers or their brothers’ friends, wrote him, indicating their availability should he ever find himself in the town or city where they lived. Some proposed marriage or told him they wished to bear his child. He did not respond, but told me he did not want to encourage their fantasies. He did not have the time for an intimate relationship or even a dalliance, he said. Also, he did not want to be distracted from what he believed he had been called to do: alleviate the suffering of the injured and dying as best he could.

When our leaders offered to put him in command of a troop of fighters, he thought about it for a day, then turned them down. He was doing what he was meant to do, he said, and didn’t want to do anything else. But he had another reason: he didn’t want to order men to their deaths, trying to achieve something he no longer thought they could achieve. “Do you remember when we overran that position where they’d hidden their mortars? We were ecstatic and I, like everybody there, yelled, ‘Victory is ours!’ though I had no idea what victory meant. After all, we knew they would soon counterattack and drive us back. ‘Victory!’ I shouted, even though I could no longer imagine conquering anyone.”

Were he to become a commander, he said, it would be only to try to save his own life, for our commanders lead from the rear. He could join an opposition faction, he said, and try to bring about a cessation to all this…this…what was it? “This way of living. This way of existing. That would be the logical thing to do. Listen to me. I sound like I’m still at university. No, no matter what I might decide, if I did anything but what I am doing now, I would be betraying our fighters. I would be betraying myself.” Then he said, impishly, “If I became a leader, I would lead my troop in revolt.” He could see that I was surprised and appalled and he laughed, as though what he had just said was a joke. “But I do not have the heart to break with all of those who have nurtured me.”

It was his time, I believe, and a part of him knew and acquiesced. He feared dying, but he did not resist death’s summons. What good would it do to argue, to refuse to expose himself to the enemy’s fire? What could he do other than die performing the tasks he had set himself? It was his time and he was afraid and he may have stopped to assist the fallen boy because he, my brother, wanted to avoid moving forward where he would be closer to having to confront his own death.

The night before the action in which he was killed, we did not talk about war and the loss of friends and comrades, but told each other stories of our childhoods. They were entirely dissimilar, our childhoods. His father was a cleric and mine a shopkeeper. He had four brothers and sisters and I had only a younger brother. My mother died soon after I began secondary school; his was still alive. He remembered many happy occasions with his family and at school where he played football and chess; I remembered my father not having enough money to buy everything we needed, to say nothing of what we wanted. Yet we had become brothers.

The bullet that killed him, that went in his left eye and minced his brain, was a ricochet. We reconstructed what we thought must have happened that resulted in his death. The shooter had probably intended to kill an officer, for it was a lieutenant who was shot first, the bullet passing through his abdomen and out one of his kidneys, then hitting a large rock and exploding. One of the fragments hit another fighter in the leg. Another went in my beloved brother’s eye. He had just stood up to see who had called his name.