Man Down

by Nathan Burrows

  When he’d managed to retrieve the rifle from under the seat, he looked towards the back of the helicopter just in time to see the last of the FP team jumping off the ramp and into the dust cloud outside. Adams was standing near the back of the ramp, clutching a folded stretcher in his hand and looking back towards the inside of the helicopter. As Nick struggled to his feet, he saw Adams disappear into the cloud as well.

  Bollocks, he thought as he broke into a run through the cabin. The bastard’s got a head start on me. Nick passed the loadmaster and jumped off the ramp onto the soft ground before running through the cloud of dust that the helicopter had thrown up. It was ridiculously difficult to run through the earth, which was talcum-powder soft on the surface but damp and heavy just underneath.

  Nick broke through the edge of the dust cloud and saw the FP team in a semi-circle just outside its reach, all facing outwards and looking down the sights of their rifles. Looking around, he could see Adams about fifty yards away, running towards a WMIK — a lightly armoured Land Rover named after its weapons mount installation kit and known as a ‘wimmick’ — that was parked at the edge of a compound. As he ran after him, Colonel Nick realised that either Adams was busting a gut to get there first and make a point, or he was in a lot better shape than he’d given him credit for.

  Colonel Nick arrived at the vehicle only a minute or so later. Adams was deep in conversation with a soldier with a small red cross on his arm — the patrol medic — but as he watched, they wound up the conversation. Nick had missed the handover. Two soldiers were sitting by the WMIK, one with a bandage around his upper arm and another with an oversized, filthy bandage swathing his head. Both walking-wounded. Trying to get his breath, the Colonel gasped at the medic.

  ‘Right, what’s the story?’ Neither the medic nor Adams appeared to hear him. The next thing Nick knew, Adams was shouting at the two walking-wounded casualties.

  ‘See that helicopter?’ Adams yelled at them, pointing in the direction of the Chinook with a trembling hand. The two soldiers nodded in reply. ‘Well, fucking go over there and get on it sharpish. Straight line, here to there, watch the downdraft.’ The two wounded soldiers started to get to their feet.

  ‘No, wait. I need to triage them,’ Colonel Nick said, now more in control of his breathing.

  ‘No time, sir,’ Adams replied. ‘If they can get to the helo, then they’re good. If they can’t then we’ll pick them up as we go by. There’s a Cat A in the wagon. He’s the priority.’ Adams started to assemble the stretcher, kicking the struts that locked the canvas in place.

  ‘I said, wait!’ Colonel Nick barked. The wounded soldiers both looked at his rank slides, and then back at him. The Colonel knelt down and started to examine them. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Adams and the medic were struggling to get the casualty out of the back of the WMIK. Another couple of soldiers were rushing over to help them, so he returned his attention to the task at hand.

  Colonel Nick finished his examination of the walking-wounded casualties a couple of minutes later. It was a fairly rudimentary examination, but it would have to do under the circumstances. The one with the huge bandage on his head was hiding a painful looking but superficial crease in his scalp and the other had a fairly deep wound to his arm, either from shrapnel or possibly a round. Neither of them was bleeding badly, so weren’t in any immediate danger from their wounds.

  He replaced the bandage over the second casualty’s arm, noting with satisfaction that his humerus seemed intact, and checked for a radial pulse while he looked around to see where the next casualty was.

  With a surge of anger, Nick realised that the stretcher was halfway back to the helicopter already. He could see Adams and the ground team struggling through the soft earth, kicking up dust clouds behind them. He’d not even had the chance to examine the most seriously wounded casualty in the relative quiet of the area that they were in. Too late, Nick realised that he should have looked at him first.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Nick said to his two walking-wounded colleagues. They got to their feet and started making their way towards the Chinook.

  As they walked towards the waiting helicopter, Colonel Nick became more and more angry with every step. He was the senior officer on the ground, he was the senior clinician, and he’d effectively been disobeyed in the field. By a fucking nurse as well. He could see in the distance the stretcher being loaded onto the helicopter, with a couple of the FP team helping to manoeuvre it over the top of the machine gun in the middle of the ramp, and one of the FP team running from the helicopter towards his group. As the soldier got closer, the Colonel realised that it was the new Staff Sergeant.

  ‘Sir!’ Partridge shouted as he got to within a few feet of the casualty party.

  ‘Staff,’ Nick replied, putting as much authority into his voice as he could so that he could be heard over the noise of the rotor blades a hundred feet away.

  ‘Get a fucking move on, sir!’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, get a fucking move on, sir.’ Partridge looked at the two casualties before yelling at them, ‘Double fucking time, boys. Now!’ The two wounded soldiers broke into a run towards the helicopter, closely followed by Partridge. Colonel Nick stood for a second, not quite believing what had just happened before he started running after them.

  As Colonel Nick climbed onto the ramp after the others, he felt a hand on the back of his body armour drag him further on to the ramp as the helicopter started lifting before he’d even got both feet off the earth.

  Ronald McDonald looked down the length of the cabin just in time to see Colonel Nick being unceremoniously dragged onto the rear ramp by Kinkers. The loadmaster had one hand on the scruff of the Colonel’s neck, and the other on the strap that now attached them both to the main body of the helicopter. Ronald felt the helicopter lift and turned his attention to the stretcher that Adams and a couple of soldiers had dragged towards the front of the cabin.

  Ronald knelt down by the head of the stretcher and looked at the casualty lying in front of him with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. Right then, he thought. Best crack on. Lizzie was opposite him, busy with an oxygen mask. Further towards the rear ramp, Adams was sitting on the canvas seat, trying to undo his helmet. He was drenched with sweat and had a face like a proverbial beetroot. Next to him were the other two casualties that had climbed onto the helicopter by themselves. Ronald barely glanced at them. Walking-wounded, and as long as they were walking, they weren’t that badly hurt. If they stopped walking though, that was when Ronald would be more interested in them.

  As Lizzie slipped the oxygen mask over the casualty’s face, Ronald pressed the power switch on the monitor to turn it on and clipped the oxygen probe to the stretcher casualty’s finger. Turning his attention to the soldier, Ronald had a quick look at his chest to see how well he was breathing. Satisfied that the casualty’s airway was doing what it was supposed to be doing, Ronald lifted up the edge of the bandage while he waited for the oxygen probe to take a reading.

  It took him a couple of seconds to process what he could see below the bandage. There was what looked like jelly mixed with blood underneath, oozing out in between fragments of bone. Ronald had only seen brain tissue before in medical textbooks, but he’d never seen it before in a real casualty. He looked up at Lizzie and could see by the horrified look on her face that she’d seen the same thing that he had.

  Ronald got to his feet and stumbled over the tightly packed FP team to reach Adams, who had finally managed to get his helmet off and was taking a long drink from a plastic bottle of water. He looked fucked. Ronald tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention and leaned in close to shout in his ear.

  ‘Adams!’ Ronald shouted. ‘His fucking brains are coming out.’

  ‘I know,’ Adams replied. ‘Get him.’ He pointed towards Colonel Nick, who had managed to get to his feet and was making his way down the cabin. Ronald caught the Colonel’s eye, raised his eyeb
rows, and pointed at the casualty, hoping that the doctor would pick up on the urgency.

  The Colonel shrugged his medical bag off his shoulders and threw it onto a seat before picking his way through the feet of the FP team towards the stretcher. Ronald joined him after a few seconds, leaving Adams where he was. Leaning in close to Colonel Nick’s ear, Ronald shouted, ‘Sir, there’s exposed brain tissue under the bandage!’ He watched as the Colonel looked towards the monitor on the floor and processed the information.

  ‘Tell Jarman to get a tube ready,’ Nick said. ‘His sats are going off.’ Ronald looked at the monitor and saw that the oxygen saturation was reading as eighty per cent. The normal reading was over ninety-five per cent or more with an oxygen mask on. He could see that Lizzie was already getting the intubation kit out of the bag, so Ronald walked past her back toward the front of the helicopter.

  Clipping the cord dangling from his helmet into the communications cable, Ronald flicked the switch to talk to the rest of the crew.

  ‘This boy’s not well at all. Can we get a message to the hospital, get them to prep for a bad one.’

  ‘Roger that,’ he heard the pilot reply. ‘Will do. We’ll get a shift on.’

  Ronald felt the helicopter tilt forwards by a couple of degrees and sensed the increase in power as the pilot put his foot down, or whatever it was that they did in the front to make the thing go faster.

  Squadron Leader Andrew Webb was not a happy man. As he sat outside the back entrance to the Emergency Room in a cheap canvas chair, he re-read the latest bluey — a pre-stamped letter for military personnel and their families — from his wife while he sipped a cup of tea. Normally, the early evening was his favourite time of day as the temperature was far more comfortable and he could sit outside without sweating too much, but this evening he didn’t get the normal sense of peace from the easing temperature.

  According to the letter from Leanne, his wife, their youngest was being what she called ‘a little shit’ at school. He was only eight, and every time that Webb went away he played up one way or another. Apparently, this time he’d got into a fight at school over whose turn it was to take a penalty at an after-school football club. Being eight, it was probably not much of a fight, but it had still led to his youngest being banned from the club. And the bathroom tap was leaking and Leanne wanted to know what to do about it.

  ‘Call a fucking plumber,’ Webb said to himself as he got up to get rid of his cup, folding the bluey and putting it into his back pocket as he did so. The TRT had been out for about an hour and should be back soon unless they’d diverted to the other field hospital that the Canadians were running up at Kandahar. They should have heard if this was the case, though. He walked back into the Emergency Room, and over to the desk at the back putting his cup on the side as he did so. Picking up the phone, he dialled the hospital Ops Room.

  ‘Squadron Leader Webb here,’ he said. ‘In the ER. Any news on the TRT?’

  ‘No sir,’ the Ops Officer replied. ‘Nothing heard as yet. We’ll give you an ETA and update as soon as we have one from them. There’s some crap weather between us and them at the moment, so it could be affecting the comms.’

  ‘Right,’ Webb said. ‘Make sure you do.’ He put the phone down without another word and turned to survey the Emergency Room. Apart from an army medic fiddling with something in the corner of the room, it was empty. He knew that all the people he would need when the TRT got back were all within a couple of minutes, so he wasn’t too bothered. It wasn’t as if they could go anywhere, anyway. He sat back down in a chair and retrieved the letter from his pocket to read it through again.

  ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do about a leaky tap from three thousand miles away anyway?’ he mumbled to himself. All the personnel in the hospital got the same welfare package as everyone else in Bastion, which was a paltry twenty minutes on the phone and thirty minutes on the internet. And that was if the bloody connection was working. Webb certainly didn’t want to waste any of the valuable time on crap like household repairs, but that seemed to be all Leanne wanted to talk about, anyway. She’d probably got a list of things for him to do pinned to the fridge for him to work his way through when he finally got his R&R in a month or so. What he wanted was to go home, relax, have a drink or three, and lots of sex. With his wife. He read the letter again, knowing that he was being unreasonable, but he was still pissed off.

  Webb was reaching for a blank paper bluey from a pile on top of the desk, thinking that he might as well pass the time writing back to Leanne over another cup of tea, when the phone on the desk rang. He picked up the receiver.

  ‘ER,’ he said. ’Squadron Leader Webb.’

  ‘Sir, it’s the Ops Officer down the corridor. Just got word that they’re about fifteen minutes out.’

  ‘Any update on casualties?’

  ‘No, sir. Nothing as yet. Three on board, that’s all we know. The original call came in as a Cat A and a couple of Cat C’s, but there’s been no update from the medical team.’

  ‘Okay, thanks. Is there a Tannoy going out?’ Webb asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. Any second now.’

  A few seconds after Webb had put the phone down, he heard the loudspeakers spring into life with a clipped request from the voice he’d just heard on the telephone for the trauma team to return to the ER. Knowing that the peace was only going to last for a few more seconds before the room was full of people, most of whom were supposed to be there, and a fair few who weren’t, he opened the fridge and took out a large bottle of cold water.

  He wrote 'WEBB' in large angry letters on the label with a red marker pen and put the bottle down onto the desk, knowing that the fridge would be empty within a few minutes of everyone else arriving. He’d tried a note saying ‘ER Personnel Only’ on the front of the fridge, but it hadn’t seemed to make a blind bit of difference.

  Webb stood with his hands on his hips as the Emergency Room started to fill up within seconds of the announcement over the hospital public address system. He watched as a few of them wandered over to the fridge and took out bottles of water, but no one touched his bottle on the desk. He nodded at Major Rob Clarke as he walked in, and watched him start to organise his nurses. Clarke might be a miserable old bastard, Webb thought, but he knew his stuff and was good with the juniors so he’d give him that at least. When Webb was sure that all of the required team members had arrived, he took a deep breath and shouted.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. Listen in!’

  20

  Colonel Nick stood on his own in the corner of the Emergency Room, trying to keep his expression as neutral as possible while he watched the medical staff bustling around the Cat A casualty. Within a few minutes of arriving at the hospital, the soldier with the head injury had been anaesthetised — although that was fairly pointless as far as Nick was concerned. He was fucked. Even if he survived long enough to get back to the United Kingdom, the chances were he would either die later down the line of an infection picked up along the way, or just spend the rest of his life drooling in a wheelchair and shitting into an adult-sized nappy. Not much of a life, really. If the soldier was a horse, it would be a quick bolt gun to the back of the head and job done.

  The casualty’s likely prognosis wasn’t what was bothering Nick, though. It was Adams. Or more specifically, Adams’s absolute failure to appreciate the chain of command in the field. Look at him, Nick thought as he watched Adams talking to the pretty little blonde nurse from the Emergency Room. What a fucking hero he thinks he is. Nick had been considering ‘having a chat’ with Adams for a while, and what had just happened in that field had convinced him that he couldn’t wait. He walked over to the two nurses and when they didn’t acknowledge him, he cleared his throat.

  ‘Oh, hello sir,’ the female nurse replied. ’Sorry, didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Adams, let’s go,’ Nick said, fixing him with a hard stare. ‘Leave this lot to it.’

  ‘Yep, okay. I’ll see you later, Emma. We’l
l talk then.’

  ‘Cool.’ Nick saw the look the two nurses exchanged, and his anger grew. Was Adams having a sniff, or was he just mates with the woman? It didn’t matter either way to Nick, but it irritated him, anyway.

  The two men left the Emergency Room and started walking in silence down the long central corridor towards the TRT tent. As they passed the doors to the observation ward, Nick turned and pushed Adams towards the doors.

  ‘In here, Adams,’ he said as he gave the nurse a shove in the small of his back to get him through the canvas flaps leading to the empty ward. To Nick’s surprise, Adams didn’t complain, but just pushed the doors aside and walked through them.

  Inside the observation ward were two neat rows of empty beds, unmade, each with a bedding pack on the mattress. If this ward was full of casualties then something, somewhere, had gone badly wrong. But for the time being, it was just the two of them in there, which was just how Nick wanted it. Adams took a few steps further forwards and then turned to face Nick.

  ’So,’ Nick barked, making Adams jump. The nurse flinched and took a step backwards, giving Nick the impression that Adams thought he was about to take a swing at him. ‘So, Adams. What part of the chain of command don’t you understand?’ Adams didn’t reply but glared at Nick. ‘I asked you a question, soldier,’ Nick continued, making sure that his anger came through.

  ‘I’m not a soldier, Colonel,’ Adams replied. ‘I’m an airman.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Nick replied. ‘I could still charge you for disobeying an order.’ To Nick’s surprise, Adams started laughing.

  ‘Sorry, Colonel,’ Adams said. ‘I thought we were in here to talk about how you fucked up out there, so we wouldn’t have to do it in front of the others.’ His anger building, Nick took a step forward.