This man is my new hero. [Stolen from Saheli Datta]
My only chance was to stay calm, I told myself.
“Moo mishkilleh, ana sahafi,” I shouted — pidgin Arabic for “don’t worry, I’m a journalist.”
It didn’t make any difference. I was frog-marched through the throng at a rapid clip, an Arab TV crew filming what was shaping up to be a juicy scoop —
a live execution of a Westerner.
Mindful that these might be the last shots the world ever saw of me, I did my best to look stoic. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, although a fist from someone in the crowd did, punching me in the head and ruining my attempts at serenity.
. . .
By the time we reached our hotel, the pain in my posterior had long since gone. Reaching into my left trouser pocket, where a patch of blood was slowly spreading, my translator pulled out a small piece of shrapnel that I assumed was the only thing that had hit me.
Were it not for the advice of a BBC TV crew that had also been at the scene, I might never have bothered going to a hospital.
Ten hours later, a medic from the British Army’s field hospital at nearby Shaibah Airfield set the record straight. As an X-ray photograph showed, the shrapnel was merely a fragment of a full-size bullet that had lodged perilously close to my hip bone.
