Notes Quite rough, and straight off the keyboard. The soldier is named for Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, two of the highest profile idiot right wing commentators in the USA.

I heard the crunch of running feet on the gravel fire track early enough that I could lay the long gun aside and raise the sub machine gun. I stepped back so I was partially shielded by a tree and waited.

Seconds later he rounded the corner a hundred or so metres away at a full run. He had the look of someone who had been surviving in a forest for weeks and he didn’t have the orange armband that was the daily colour for friendly forces. “Halt!” I shouted as loud as my suddenly very dry throat would allow.

He hardly faltered as he raised his gun- a submachine almost identical to the one I’d snatched from an air drop the day before. I got off a three round burst, but judged it badly. All three kicked up dirt in front of him. But one kicked up and caught him in the right shin. He fell and tumbled, ending up sprawled on his back far from his weapon.

“Don’t! Fucking! Move!”

He was still dazed. The pain from his shattered shin hadn’t started to register. “Fuck you! Show yourself, coward!”

“Hands where I can see them!”

“You’re English? Ain’t you? You fags are next when we’ve finished with the French. We’re going to wipe all you islamofascist lovers out!”

“Haven’t you heard? Your country doesn’t exist any more. You won’t be doing anything more than dying.”

“I’m not afraid of dying. The Lord my God will judge me.”

“Will he? What will he think of raping a ten year old after making her watch her family being killed. What will your Lord God think of that?”

For a moment there was fear and doubt on his face. “That wasn’t me.”

His right hand had been moving around all the time. No doubt he was going for his back up weapon. I’d steadied my aim after the first burst and was now confident I had the middle of his chest perfectly targeted. “Tell that to the folks coming to meet me. Some of them are related to that girl. All of them have lost someone to you cunts.”

He stopped on the way to his weapon. This time I fired a three shot burst into his chest. And then another to be certain.

When the squad found me again I’d laid him out for burial and taken his name for the records.

I killed Corporal Glenn O’Reilly in a forest in the South of France five days after his countrymen detonated nuclear weapons within their own borders. The country he had been fighting for had ceased to exist in a dozen mushroom clouds.