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He said he was open about what he had done and he had no regrets. Like the Jabarah brothers, the ISIL fighters he saw through the scope of his sniper rifle were on the wrong side. “Those people chose their path and I chose mine,” he said. “I have a pretty clear conscience about it.” His sister Anita said the family was proud. “Do I think he did the right thing? Absolutely,” she said.

Reflecting on the 223’s disastrous first operation, Krsnik didn’t blame Gallagher, but said he had been out of the military for a decade and had never taken part in a gun battle. “I don’t think he was ready to be put into that situation, to be thrown right into the firefight.”

Giddings also took issue with the way the operation was conducted. He said taking only half the unit to clear the village went against a commitment they had made to always fight as a group. Asked what went wrong, he responded: “Basically, I would say eagerness to fight. Working with a tabor of Kurds who we never worked alongside, lack of language skills. Leadership was poor.”

He agreed that Gallagher should have shot the suicide bomber who approached him instead of trying to speak to him. “I think John shouldn’t have gone that evening, personally, but that is retrospective,” he said. “John was a good soldier but his command of basic Kurdish was poor and he found it hard distinguishing between Kurdish and Arabic. I believe he shouldn’t have been at that firefight.”

In Carder’s living room, the cards that school children sent her on Remembrance Day were bundled in a box on the floor beside the piano, with the condolence letters from politicians and strangers. Out the window the lake glimmered under the bright spring sun.