Man Down

by Nathan Burrows

  ‘Er, Adams?’ he said a couple of seconds later.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘I’m sorry about what I said. I’ll make sure I say the same thing to the others as well. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘We’re all good, Ronald. That would be the right thing to do, though. You’re allowed to be upset. Wouldn’t be human if you weren’t,’ Adams replied. ‘I just said exactly the same thing to Lizzie. Now come on, let’s get these bags packed.’

  The two men worked together in silence for a few moments, replenishing the medical bags with the equipment that had been used during the flight back to the hospital. Each bag had a contents list which they worked their way down. If something that was on the list wasn’t in the bag, then they’d go and get it from the wooden shelves that were lined with box after box of medical equipment.

  ‘Did Lizzie tell you about the helicopter?’ Ronald asked Adams. ‘I forgot to mention it.’

  ‘No,’ Adams replied. ‘What? Has Flight Lieutenant Davies broken it or something?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. There’s a load of bloody bullet holes in it, though.’ Adams stopped what he was doing and looked at Ronald.

  ‘Seriously?’ he asked.

  ‘Yep, there’s a line of them along the bottom. Davies was saying it was probably when he took off and banked around. No one heard anything, and he didn’t realise until we got back.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Adams said. ‘That could have been nasty.’ It wasn’t just the thought of people on board the helicopter being hurt that got to Adams. He was only too aware that a single round in the wrong place could bring an aircraft down. It had happened before the previous year in Iraq with a Hercules transport plane that had been brought down by small arms fire.

  They both fell silent, lost in their own thoughts as they repacked the bags for the next shout. About twenty minutes later, they swapped bags and quickly started going through them again. Nothing could be left to chance. Adams looked across at Ronald when they had finished.

  ‘Right then. Let’s get these back into the tent and go for some coffee.’

  Lizzie wrapped the towel around herself as she stepped out of the shower. What a day, she thought. She couldn’t wait to get into bed and go to sleep. Although the camp cots that they were given weren’t exactly beds as such, they were comfortable enough. Lizzie couldn’t work out why they’d all been issued with mosquito nets, though. She’d not seen a single mosquito since she’d arrived, and talking to one of the environmental health techies in the hospital, there probably wasn’t one within about a hundred miles. Still, she reflected, they gave them a bit of privacy.

  Lizzie walked back into the accommodation tent where Emma was just getting undressed. There were normally four of them in the room, but one of their roommates was back in the United Kingdom on her ‘Rest and Recuperation’ week — one of their favourite topics of discussion in the evenings was what they had planned for their R&R — and the other one was working nights.

  ‘Shower’s free, mate,’ Lizzie said. They only had one female shower in the block. The hospital had more women working in it than most military units, but they were still far outnumbered by the men. There’d been at least one embarrassing incident in the showers despite the signs on the door.

  ‘Cheers, Lizzie,’ Emma replied. ‘Is the shampoo still in there?’

  ‘Yeah, fill your boots.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. I should be getting a parcel in the next few days off my mum with some more,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘No worries.’ Lizzie waved her hand and sat down on her camp cot. ‘How’s she doing?’ Just before Emma had left for Afghanistan, her mother had been called back to the local hospital to be told that she had a suspicious looking shadow on her mammogram. As far as Lizzie knew, she was the only person who Emma had told.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell when you only get twenty minutes a week on the phone,’ Emma replied, ‘and according to her letters, everything’s fine. Which I know it’s not.’ Lizzie paused for a second, not quite sure what to say. She looked at her room-mate’s face and decided not to say anything. If Emma wanted to talk about it, she would.

  Once Emma had left for the shower, Lizzie took the towel off and put her pyjamas on. She reached into the plastic box under her cot with most of her possessions and retrieved her diary before starting to write.

  A few minutes later, Emma came back dressed as Lizzie had been earlier with only a towel. Lizzie carried on writing as Emma put her pyjamas on, thinking about how Emma didn’t care about being naked in front of any of the other women in the tent. Mind you, Lizzie thought, if she had a figure like Emma’s she probably wouldn’t care either. Lizzie paused, wondering again how best to write about the bullet holes to the helicopter in her diary. In the end, she decided to go with a vague reference to ‘damage to the underneath’. When she was reading it back in the future, that would be enough to remind her what had happened. But if someone else was reading it, they wouldn’t know what the damage was from. The only problem with this plan is that it didn’t give her the opportunity to write about how the damage had frightened the shit out of her.

  The two women chatted about nothing in particular for the rest of the evening. It wasn’t as if they could chill out in front of a television and have a couple of glasses of wine, after all. Lizzie was waiting for Emma to bring up the subject of the soldier who’d died earlier that day, but she didn’t. Lizzie thought that perhaps, like with her mother being unwell, Emma didn’t want to talk about it now. She would when she was ready, so Lizzie didn’t press it.

  ‘You ready for lights out, mate?’ she asked Emma a while later.

  ‘Go for it,’ Emma replied. ‘I’m knackered.’ Lizzie crossed to the door of the tent and turned out the lights. A soft glow from some floodlights outside gave her just enough light to get back to her cot without stumbling into anything. She climbed into her sleeping bag and zipped up the mosquito net.

  ‘Night then. Chat tomorrow,’ Lizzie said. Emma mumbled something in reply, but Lizzie couldn’t make it out. She lay back, made herself as comfortable as she could, and went straight to sleep.

  At some point during the night, Lizzie woke up. Crap, she thought. One thing she didn’t need was bloody insomnia on top of everything else. She turned over in bed and saw Emma sitting on the edge of her own cot, her hands covering her face.

  ‘You okay, Emma?’ Lizzie whispered.

  ‘Nope,’ Emma said. She took her hands away from her face and Lizzie could see through the faint light that her face was streaked with tears. ‘I’m not okay.’

  Lizzie unzipped her sleeping bag and mosquito net and went over to sit next to Emma, putting an arm around her shoulders as she did so. Emma started crying properly, the sobs wracking her body.

  ‘It’s not fair, Lizzie,’ Emma sobbed. ‘It’s not fucking fair. He was only a kid. He was younger than me.’

  ‘I know,’ Lizzie said, remembering her earlier conversation with Adams. ‘It’s shit. It’s not fair, you’re right.’ Lizzie stroked Emma’s hair as if she was a small child, and said nothing else. Emma would just have to cry it out. A moment later, Emma continued.

  ‘Do you know what the worst thing is?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t even know his bloody first name. I was there when he died, and I don’t even know his first name.’ Emma started sobbing again as Lizzie held her tightly. ‘I looked at his dog tag before I zipped up the body bag to get his proper name, and all it had was an initial on it.’

  The two women sat there for a while in the near dark, until Emma started to calm down.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ she said to Lizzie. ‘Bit stupid, really.’

  ‘Not at all, Emma,’ Lizzie replied. ‘For fuck’s sake, not at all.’ Emma reached out to grab some tissues from the cardboard box that served as a bedside table and blew her nose.

  ‘God, I must look a mess,’ Emma said.

  ‘Now come on, you look lovely.’ T
hey looked at each other. Lizzie continued, ‘Do you know what the really funny thing is?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If we were lesbians, this is the bit where we’d fall into bed and have amazing sex.’ Emma looked at Lizzie, with a mock horrified expression which soon gave way to laughter. Composing herself, Emma looked down at her lap, and then back up at Lizzie.

  ‘Lizzie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Kiss me,’ Emma said. Lizzie laughed and slapped Emma on the leg as she got up and walked back to her cot.

  ‘Go back to bed, you silly cow.’ As they lay there in the darkness, Lizzie carried on, ‘Do you know what Adams said to me a couple of days ago?’

  ‘Er, Lizzie? He’s spoken for. And your boss. That’s wrong on both counts.’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He said something about seeing Squadron Leader Webb trying to look down the front of your scrubs without you noticing.’

  ‘Oh, piss off, Lizzie,’ Emma laughed.

  ‘Well, it proves that it’s not just me that’s noticed Webb’s got a thing for you. And Adams would know, being a bloke.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘He’s probably playing with it now.’

  ‘Adams, or Webb?’

  ‘Maybe both of them? Maybe they’re having a competition in their accommodation to see which one–‘

  ‘Lizzie. Just shut up and go to sleep,’ Emma said. ‘You’ve got a filthy mind. If the single men of Cyprus knew where you’re going for your R&R, they’d be quaking in their boots.’ Lizzie smiled in the darkness and rolled onto her side.

  ‘I hope so. Night, Emma.’

  ‘Night, mate.’

  17

  The next day dawned in exactly the same way that every day dawned in Afghanistan in the summer. Hot. Colonel Nick looked down at his watch with disgust. He was slow today.

  He’d started running around the perimeter of the base a couple of days after he’d arrived at Camp Bastion. It was almost exactly ten kilometres along a hardened track that had been topped with gravel to make it easier for the Force Protection patrols in their Land Rovers to stay on track. Although there weren’t any mines within Camp Bastion, or at least there were none that had been found, it was still reassuring to know that the ground was safe.

  Colonel Nick had spent a week or so up at Kandahar before being able to get on a helicopter flight down to Camp Bastion, and there were areas there that were still active minefields. And inside the wire. They were all clearly marked, but he couldn’t help but wonder who had marked them and whether or not they really knew what they were doing.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead, which was a fairly futile thing to do. His lungs hurt, his legs hurt, his head hurt, and he was about five minutes slower than his best time over the ten kilometre track. This was not a good start to the day. Looking at his watch again, he decided that he should just accept the crap time and slow up a bit for the last couple of kilometres. No point getting too hot this early on.

  As he jogged, he thought over the events of yesterday. They’d all sat in the coffee shop after the kit had been put together and had what Adams had called a ‘cold debrief’. It wasn’t exactly much of a coffee shop though, more of a portacabin with a fat, sweaty civilian serving instant crap in polystyrene cups. Lizzie had tried to lighten the mood by asking for a flat white and three cappuccinos, but the miserable bastard behind the counter hadn’t even cracked a smile. Mind you, Colonel Nick had thought, the poor bugger probably heard a different version of the same joke a fair few times a day.

  The cold debrief was apparently a run through of the day’s events, looking at what had worked well, and what hadn’t worked well. Adams had explained the debrief process to Colonel Nick not long after he’d arrived, trying to sell it as the latest crew resource management technique. Aircrew used it all the time, apparently. Any incident at all got torn apart in a cold debrief, not to apportion blame as Adams explained it to him as if he was a stupid child, but so that the team could learn and improve.

  Well, that was a load of bollocks as far as Nick was concerned. He couldn’t see a bunch of aircrew using it after they’d made a smoking hole in the ground. He’d sat there, thinking that it was a complete and utter waste of time, but played along anyway. At least they were only going over the most recent job, as opposed to the earlier one where he and Adams had words. Nick needed to get on with the others, at least on the surface.

  The Colonel tried to wipe the sweat off his brow again, but only really succeeded in moving the sweat around his face. He squinted to see how much further he had to run and figured it was probably about a kilometre and a half. Christ, this is tough going, he muttered to himself.

  He thought about Adams and Lizzie as he carried on pounding the gravel, spurts of dust puffing up behind each step. They were a strange pair, he thought. More like an old bloody married couple than proper professionals. Adams was always ‘mate’ this, and ‘mate’ that, even with the juniors. They rarely called him sir, and there was no real respect on either side as far as he could see. Adams would have been weeded out pretty quick at Sandhurst, Nick thought with satisfaction. He probably wouldn’t even have made it as far as the front gate. And what the fuck was all that ‘must have landed on the T wave’ bollocks about? He was a nurse for God’s sake. Nick was just waiting for the first time Adams called him ‘mate’. He had his response ready and waiting.

  Nick wondered if there was any history between Adams and Lizzie. He didn’t think there was, but you never knew. Maybe a drunken fumble one night after Exchange Drinks in one of the Messes. He couldn’t see anything more than that, if at all. Lizzie didn’t strike Nick as the sort of woman who would go for that type of encounter, though. And as far as that idiot ‘Ronald’ MacDonald went, Nick had tagged him as gay within about ten minutes of meeting him. At least he wasn’t one of the ones who flounced about. They had a few of them in the Army, and they couldn’t bloody touch them anymore. Nick was sure it was the same in the Air Force as it was in the Navy.

  He glanced at his watch again, sighed, and tried his best to pick the pace up.

  Adams was sitting in the TRT tent, trying to complete a crossword in one of Lizzie’s magazines, when he was disturbed by the flaps to the tent bursting open. He looked up to see Colonel Nick walking in, sweating profusely.

  ‘Hey, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Good run?’ Nick looked at Adams with an incredulous expression.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he replied. ‘Too bloody hot.’ Nick walked over to the fridge in the corner of the tent and opened it to grab a bottle of water. ‘Want one?’ he asked Adams.

  ‘No, ta,’ Adams said. ‘I’ve just put one out. Hey, I’ve got a question for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Six letters, “Cuts up in the office”, starts with an “S”,’Adams said. Nick took a long drink from the bottle of water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘Shreds,’ Nick replied.

  ‘Bugger, of course it is.’

  ‘Why are you doing Lizzie’s crosswords for her, anyway?’

  ‘Just to piss her off, really,’ Adams said.

  ‘Aren’t the answers in the back though?’

  ‘Well, they are. But that would be cheating.’ When Nick walked off towards the main door of the tent grabbing a towel as he went past the laundry pile, Adams was sure he’d heard the Colonel swear under his breath.

  A few minutes later, Adams jumped as Lizzie burst in.

  ‘Oi, you bugger. So, it is you. Stop doing my bloody crosswords.’ She swatted her hand at Adams's head, who put the magazine down on one of the camp cots and threw the pen on top of it. He raised his hands in mock surrender.

  ‘Alright, alright. Calm down. I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘Well don’t, you twat,’ she said. Adams laughed in return.

  ‘Oh, you’re such a lady,’ he replied. ‘Make yourself useful and put the kettle on.’

  Lizzie walked over to the kettle and flicked the switch bef
ore looking curiously in the cups on the sideboard.

  ‘Are these clean?’ she asked.

  ‘Relatively speaking, I suppose they are,’ Adams replied. Lizzie carried the cups to the sink at the back of the tent and started to rinse them under the tap.

  ‘Where’s the Colonel?’ she asked him. ‘Ronald said he saw him going for a run earlier.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s back,’ Adams said. ‘He came through a while ago, looking like a beetroot, and went for a shower I think.’

  ‘Bloody mad if you ask me,’ Lizzie said. ‘Running in this heat. It might be early, but it’s still sodding hot.’

  ‘Well, he is Army. Tough guy and all that.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘When he gets back, we need to go down to the line. The helicopter’s been fixed apparently. And there’s a new FP team taking over, so we need to go and try to make friends with them. Can you get Ronald from wherever he’s hiding?’

  ‘He’s farting about in the Emergency Room. They’ve got some sort of training session on down there that Major Clarke’s running.’ Lizzie finished making the tea and walked across to where Adams was sitting. She put the tea down next to him. ‘I’ll go and get him, then,’ she said, grinning, ‘while you load the kit into the back of the wagon in case we get a shout.’

  As Lizzie walked out of the door of the TRT tent, Adams sighed. He should have seen that coming really. He picked up the magazine and reopened it to the page with the crossword that he’d been doing. The Colonel would be back soon. He could help with the kit.

  Lizzie tried not to be too annoyed with Adams as she walked down the central corridor of the hospital towards the Emergency Room. She’d been trying to find out who was doing her crosswords for the last couple of weeks and had narrowed it down to either Adams or Ronald. Her money had been on Ronald though, as half the answers were wrong anyway, and she figured that Ronald wouldn’t think to look in the back of the magazine for the answers. She’d given Adams a bit more credit, but she was wrong.