Extract from debriefing of Colour Sergeant Sean Murphy – formerly attached to British Army SAS Regiment – given to Canadian military post-war.
[Part 5]
People ask me why I call them 'the enemy'. Saying 'Zombie' is a word that I am uncomfortable with. And… I rather not call them 'people' either. That's what they were though. They WERE people.
I shot one seventy-six people between that first engagement at RAF Fairford and getting on the plane from Ireland here to Canada. On Hundred and seventy-six!
Try to imagine how that feels.
I used my M16 assault rifle and then a standard-issue SA80 to take the lives of seventy-six enemy targets. They were dead already, but it didn't seem that way at the time because the people I killed were running, walking and crawling towards me at different times in vastly different places.
I had to kill my comrade-in-arms Underwood when we were in Wales.
There was a kid aged no more than three who was trying to kill me so I killed him first.
I shot a person in a wheelchair outside a hospital near Bristol. I could laugh at that… but I won't. That Zombie on wheels was truly scary.
You think as a soldier that you're only ever going to fight young men your own age, but it was civilians that were the enemy when I escaped from the UK. Young, middle-aged and old men and women. So many kids too. I shot and killed them all so I could live.