AS Private Josh Boon squeezed the contents of an IV drip into the arm of a wounded colleague, a shot echoed down the valley.

"Oh, f---, I'm hit," was his first thought, one he relayed to those around him, as he rolled up his sleeve to see an almost neat entry-and-exit wound on his forearm.

"There was blood pouring out," Pte Boon said. "I'm not sure if it was the adrenalin but it didn't hurt. Well, not too bad. I just pulled out my tourniquet, picked up my gat (rifle) with blood all over it and went 'right, where is this prick?' "

The shooter was an elusive Taliban sniper who had just landed four hits on three members of Combat Team Delta, part of the Australian mentoring taskforce in Oruzgan's Chora Valley.

All with just two bullets.

The first shot ricocheted off one Digger's body armour, into another soldier, piercing his bicep. The second shot, a few minutes after the first, struck Pte Boon, a combat medic, while he sought to help his wounded mate.



After passing through Pte Boon's arm, the bullet struck his wounded mate's rifle that he had slung over his shoulder, sending a piece of metal fragment into his back, which surgeons later decided to leave there.

"It sets off metal detectors, which is pretty cool," said Pte Boon, a member of the Darwin-based 5th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment. He has few doubts that the sniper was aiming at the head of the first Digger wounded, which was just below his arm when the bullet struck him.

The wounded pair were taken by Medevac helicopters to the main Australian base with Pte Boon sucking on a morphine lollipop that he said gave him a licence to flirt with the nurses on his arrival at the hospital.

After surgery, Pte Boon's next, albeit less violent, battle began.

His commanding officer wanted him to go home, but getting an early exit a third of his way through this nine-month tour was something the 21-year-old from Perth was never going to accept.

"I pretty much joined (the army) because I wanted to go to war," he said.

"I wanted to know how I would react if I was in a firefight, or if I was shot. Would I freak out and be a little bitch or man up?"

He convinced his superiors that his wound would heal, but his injured mate was sent home, having lost part of his bicep.

Knowing that the sniper was still out there only steeled Pte Boon's resolve to stay, plus the confessed "adrenalin junkie" says there's more adventure to be had on the battlefield despite him still suffering some effects from the wound.

Since arriving in late September, he has seen his fair share of trauma, mainly Afghan victims of the Taliban's indiscriminate primary weapon of war, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have been responsible for 12 of Australia's 22 military fatalities in Afghanistan.

But it's not as dangerous as he thought. "The country looks exactly like I imagined, but it's pretty quiet. You think you are going to Afghanistan and all this s--- is going to go down but it's pretty tame compared with what I expected."

Pte Boon was back out in the field less than a month after the December 30 sniper incident and the Sunday Herald Sun joined him last week for a patrol to the same vicinity where he was shot.

Australian military officials say they are unable to confirm whether the sniper is still at large.

An operation a week after Pte Boon was shot led to the discovery of a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle - the type of weapon believed to be responsible - and the arrest of an Afghan man.

Whether it is the sniper and his weapon is another matter. The .303 rifle was once standard issue in the British and Australian armies and, though not as ubiquitous as the Kalashnikov, it was a popular choice of the Afghan mujahidin for fighting the Russians during the 1980s.

Leading last week's patrol was Lt Reg Dunthorne, who said it was a matter of debate whether the sniper was still prowling around, but there were plenty of other threats, primarily IEDs.

Not that they seem to worry Pte Boon.

"On my first patrol I was thinking about my training. If you see a pile of rocks, it's an IED. If you see a ribbon in a tree, it's an IED. But there are ribbons in trees everywhere, upturned dirt everywhere and piles of rocks everywhere. If you worried about it that much you would never finish a patrol. It would just take too long."

The reason the Chora Valley has proved problematic is the lack of a local figure able to galvanise community support against Taliban insurgents.

"Any tribal leader who has stepped up has been killed," said Australia's commanding officer in the region, Maj Marek Janiszewski.

An added problem is that the dominant tribe is the Ghilzai, the most famous member of which is the fugitive, one-eyed leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar. "I guess some people are hoping he comes back," Maj Janiszewski said.

On this day, however, the area is quiet and the sniper's rifle remains silent, something Pte Boon said he found frustrating. "I was hoping to get some revenge."