The bullet had missed the baby but gone through the placenta. One such casualty arrived shot in the abdomen. This sick competition reached its nadir towards the end of my time there when it appeared that one particularly vicious and inhumane sniper had a new target of choice: pregnant women. Another surgeon told me that he’d heard that the snipers were playing a game: they were being given rewards, such as packs of cigarettes, for scoring hits on specific parts of the anatomy. Also, despite the snipers having telescopic sights, we rarely saw the head shots that would have resulted in an instant kill. The same thing was happening with patients shot in the upper limbs and chest – the injuries all seemed to be on the same side, in clusters.

One day we would receive patients who had all been shot in the left groin area on other days six or seven would arrive shot in the right groin. As the days went by, I noticed there was a weird consistency to the injuries we saw coming in – the patients all seemed to have been shot in the same part of the body. On that first day, all 11 patients who had been shot survived – but only after a solid 18-hour shift at the end of which I fell on to my bed absolutely exhausted. I immediately agreed to give evening lectures, plus hands-on instruction for any surgeons who wanted it, where I could show my “best moves” – introducing them to new techniques, or little tricks such as how to hold their hands or instruments to save time on the table. The doctors told me they had been losing a lot of patients with wounds to the major arteries they needed significant training. On that first day alone in M1, 11 civilians shot by snipers were brought in.

Photograph: Courtesy of the David Nott Foundation Nott on an early mission in Sarajevo, 1994.

Make nott the brave ears