Sullivan

Sullivan is a first-class soldier in the narrator’s unit whose actions connect the violence of a night engagement with its aftermath. He identifies a fleeing Iraqi man, helps the narrator treat the wounded man, and later becomes both a radio operator and a trusted witness to a civilian death caused by friendly fire.

Identity and Field Role

During a night operation, the unit deploys across a field under a curfew order directing soldiers to shoot anyone still outside after dark. When a man runs from a garden, the soldiers spread out to intercept him. Sullivan spots him as he gets up and runs again, about thirty metres away, and calls out his position. Dallas, a newly arrived soldier, pursues him; the rest of the team opens fire. The narrator does not shoot because Dallas crosses the line of fire, but the man is hit and falls wounded.

The narrator is responsible for treating him. As the narrator searches for an exit wound and packs gauze into the entry wound, Sullivan is asked to press down on the dressing. His role is immediate and practical: he helps hold a wound closed while the narrator continues the treatment. The scene places Sullivan inside the same sequence of events as both the shooting and the effort to keep its victim alive, without indicating what he thinks about either.

Witness to Friendly Fire

After the unit withdrew from the firefight, it returned to the area that evening, but nothing happened. The lull did not erase what had taken place that morning: Sullivan told the narrator that he had seen the old woman struck by the unit’s gunfire. The narrator accepted the report because he trusted Sullivan’s honesty, reasoning that Sullivan would not have said it unless he was sure. His testimony turns the woman’s death from an unseen possibility into a confirmed consequence of the shooting, and makes Sullivan a crucial witness to the harm inflicted by his own side.

Practical Help and Radio Relay

During the firefight’s aftermath, Sullivan’s role is part of a chain of mutual support rather than the shooting itself. The narrator had left his medical kit in a ditch and, as the unit moved toward the next ditch under covering fire, Dallas ran to retrieve it. The kit also held the narrator’s night-vision goggles, making its recovery more than a matter of convenience: he recognizes that losing the equipment would have stayed with him. The episode does not assign Sullivan the rescue, but it frames the practical cooperation among the soldiers that surrounds his other actions.

Later, Sullivan is in the turret of Evans’s truck, responsible for radio communications. When the narrator refuses an order to return to the patrol, Sullivan relays that refusal to Lieutenant Evans, then transmits the narrator’s answer without dressing it up: he is not coming. Evans accepts this, and about ten minutes later the rest of the soldiers return to the road. Sullivan’s brief message makes him the channel through which open insubordination reaches command, while his plain delivery preserves the confrontation rather than concealing it.

Narrative Function and Trust

Sullivan’s importance lies less in any account of his private motives than in the narrator’s reliance on what he sees and reports. The old woman’s death had not been witnessed by the narrator; Sullivan’s later statement supplies the knowledge that the firefight’s immediate confusion could not. The narrator makes his confidence explicit by grounding belief in Sullivan’s restraint: he would not have spoken unless certain. That trust gives the report unusual force while keeping the scene’s moral consequence sharply bounded. Sullivan establishes that friendly fire killed a civilian, but the account does not turn him into an interpreter of the event or claim that certainty can undo it. Across these episodes, he is a dependable point of contact in a world where actions happen quickly and their meanings arrive afterward.