I was a boy living in Berlin, I met a soldier who described to me and a friend how he and his oppo were caught by a sniper in Belfast. He painted a terrifying picture of seeing the whole of his partner's shoulder explode like JFK's head in the Zapruder movie.
They were effectively pinned down with his partner crying and asking for his mother, and were both afraid of the very real prospect of being sniffed out and finished off by the sniper's people.
They were quickly rescued by an armoured vehicle and so lived to tell the tale. And the tale, by the way, was told not with any sense of derring-do or bombast, but with humility. The fella was impressing on us that combat was a deeply unpleasant business and he had been through three minutes of bleak, mortal terror before escaping .