Smile for the Camera: ch. 3 - In the Head
The faceless policeman who fired the first shot never regretted what he did. Even thirty years on he didn’t regret it, though he tacitly accepted that he was on the wrong side of history at the prompting of his children. At the time, though, he was doing a job: he was upholding the law, and that meant he was in the right, one of the good guys. The rioters were clearly breaking the law and disturbing the peace, blocking traffic and making regular citizens scared for their lives. They were obviously in the wrong. They didn’t have the authority to do what they were doing; they weren’t the government. They hadn’t asked permission to protest, either, a clear violation of the law. How could the rioters be in the right? Moral authority resided solely with the government.
Standing on the walkway, up above it all, he watched the rioters below with his rifle at the ready, the stock pressed against his shoulder. Behind him, a line of clear plastic riot shields marched down the road towards the rioters, the men who held them had their batons at the ready. There were men down there he’d known for years and others he’d only met that morning, but they were all brothers, and he cared for their safety as well as his own. He wanted all of them to go home to their families unscathed.
So when the protesters began to throw back the tear gas and threw bricks and rocks and cricket balls, and shoot paintballs and pellets at them, his cheek touched the stock, same as the officers to his left and right did. And when he and the man beside him had to dodge out of the way of an errant firework and were hit by more paintballs, his finger touched the trigger; the other officers did the same. And when twenty, forty, a hundred rioters decided to run at the riot police below, wielding blunt and sharp weapons, while other rioters attempted to storm the walkway, he knew they had a good chance of overwhelming the officers, and images of them being trampled and brutalized and killed flashed through his mind; his finger twitched; five pounds of pressure was all it took.
He shot at a man wearing a white N95 mask and a yellow construction helmet.
Nobody cared that he fired the first shot; they didn’t yell at him in the moment or afterwards when he was finished with a twenty-eight-hour shift. In fact, they congratulated him for doing so. His superiors patted him on the back, saying the whole situation was a powder keg that would’ve blown up no matter what. There was a war on, and the rioters were dissidents trying to sow discord, lower morale, and lower support for the brave troops in Taiwan. Their superiors did tell them not to load rubber bullets, after all. He even got a medal.