Battle Scars

by Jason Fox

  Bloody hell, I thought, revelling in the potential of a battle. It might get tasty out here.

  Our work was due to last for a few days and the atmosphere was fairly benign at first; civil, in fact. Very little seemed to be happening. A couple of local leaders even came out to meet us on the back of a pick-up truck, presumably to relieve their boredom. Dressed in robes, waving and smiling like representatives from a local tourist office, they guided us around the streets, pretending to be surprised by our appearance, claiming they were ‘so delighted’ to meet us Brits, cheesy grins and all. Nobody took that crap on face value though. It was understood that a stack of AK-47s were positioned within reach, and everybody remained alert, but the atmosphere was still fairly agreeable. When we later stumbled across a small cache of opium, we left it alone for procedural reasons. In that neck of the woods, it was understood that modest batches of gear were used for currency.

  I knew the matey vibe wouldn’t last for long. A couple of days later, our team arrived in the same town at sunrise for more patrols and quickly became marked by ‘dickers’ on mopeds. They raced through the streets and alleyways at high speeds, churning up heavy plumes of dust, their noise changing the mood among the lads. I felt the tension rising without anything of note actually happening, but when we were later sent into the maze-like thoroughfares for a series of searches and door-knocks, the edginess intensified. Various major stashes were discovered: we found drugs in one hole, guns in another. Shortly after midday, several calls came through that two pick-up trucks had been burning around the streets with a mob of blokes in the back. One report claimed to have spotted machine guns, and despite the intensifying events I felt frustrated. In the afternoon sun it had become swelteringly hot and dusty. Meanwhile, the local soldiers I’d been working with had hardly proved themselves to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. I found myself explaining a number of basic procedures to them over and over as we set up a fairly simple defensive position in a large courtyard. Grumpiness set in. I was getting down, fed up. Bored.

  Bloody hell, I thought. Nothing’s happening. I’m trained up for warfare. I’m itching to get into some sort of scrap …

  I turned to Mark, the other British soldier who had been working alongside me for the day, and moaned, ‘Mate, this is mega-boring …’

  He nodded, laughed, and sat against a wall, finding a sliver of shade in the heat. Mark was older than me and much more experienced. He had probably suffered this routine a million times before. Meanwhile, I should have known better than to tempt fate.

  Dude, be careful what you wish for.

  Our situation changed in a heartbeat. From across the town I heard the faint, skittering, but oh-so-distinctive sound of gunfire. Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup. Our troops had been dispatched into different locations across the settlement and some of them must have stumbled into a dust-up. That pick-up truck, most probably. Radio-crackle alerted us to an incoming communication: ‘Contact! Wait out!’ yelled a voice. And suddenly the rounds became amplified; they had moved closer. BUP-BUP-BUP-BUP-BUP-BUP! Our group was surrounded by four walls, each one probably twenty feet in height, which protected us from any stray fire, but I could hear the zipping bullets as they whistled overhead and bit into the dusty brickwork behind us. I readied my gun and ordered the local troops to fan out towards each of the several streets leading from the courtyard. The area we had positioned ourselves in was set at the heart of the town and all arteries fed into it.

  Another call came through on the radio. This time we were informed that the other units were making their way to our centralized location and we should hold our position. I looked across at our defensive set-up and threw a wobbly. I couldn’t believe the God-awful ineptitude of some of the inexperienced locals working alongside us. One lad was looking around absent-mindedly, slack-jawed, his machine gun drooping towards the floor, but as I started towards his space, yelling that he needed to get some brains about him and face forward, I heard the sound of an approaching engine. A battered pick-up truck with several enemy fighters hanging from the back had turned into one of the roads leading towards our position and was racing towards us, picking up speed.

  Oh no …

  For a second, I seemed stuck, rooted to the spot in surprise.

  I was actually OK being bored, doing nothing, in a courtyard surrounded by idiots …

  Here we go.

  But the driver ahead seemed just as shocked by the encounter. He slammed on the brakes and reversed into a U-turn before heading away, with the guerrilla fighters positioned at the truck’s rear directly ahead of me. Several of them shot wildly during the retreat, their bullets kicking up the dirt around my feet, and as I returned fire the bloke to the left of me fell to the floor, his gut torn through with bullets. The guy to my right was also rolling around, screaming in agony while clutching a wound in his leg. Somehow I had escaped unscathed. When I looked up, I caught a glimpse of the same clueless local soldier, still slack-jawed, his gun lowered. The idiot was staring back at me in disbelief.

  ‘Shoot, you moron!’

  The noise of gunfire was deafening. I moved across the road, meeting Mark, the pair of us blasting the speeding truck as it disappeared from view, overwhelmed by a rush of euphoria, relief and the just-under-the-surface stress of my first scrap. I had hit at least one enemy target and was struck by a huge surge of adrenalized satisfaction as the noise and dust of the skirmish drifted away. I’d dodged death, which left my head buzzing in disbelief, and I had fought effectively under heavy stress rather than spinning out. Right then I knew I had the potential to operate well with the people around me.

  I’d always understood that how I handled fear in battle would define me as a soldier. If I treated it as a negative emotion, something to be avoided at all costs, I might fail or make a reckless decision. In those frantic seconds, I could have easily crapped my pants and gone into a flat panic – most people untrained in battle would have lost it – the stress then contagious among some of the inexperienced men we’d been working with. Everybody would have flapped and our casualty numbers might have been much, much worse. Instead, I had used the fear to focus myself; it helped me to remember everything that I’d needed to stay alive in a gunfight. Working on the edges of emotion had felt all right; more than all right, in fact. There was a weird realization that I had actually enjoyed the battle, but I couldn’t figure out quite why.

  I’d understood one thing, though: scrapping it out in The Brotherhood seemed huge. Proper. I had meaning, I had fought the good fight and defended my country while protecting its people at home.

  The other British lads soon piled into the square, bullets cutting overhead. Several local soldiers had been hit, but our boys remained unscathed. I counted them all in as they jogged into our formation, arriving from different entry points, taking up positions in all-round defence and awaiting the next attack. We weren’t safe yet, but just having everybody around me – people I could trust, fighters I knew wouldn’t look back at me slack-jawed when I ordered them to do something – delivered a huge sense of security. A warm, fuzzy feeling enveloped me. As we all gathered behind a derelict wall for cover while planning out our next move, I felt The Brotherhood’s security blanket for the first time. Those flashes of self-doubt and insecurity that marked my early weeks in training were replaced by a sense of quiet confidence. I could cut it in combat. I was capable of scrapping alongside the best.

  I had officially joined the ranks.

  I’m sure there’s at least one bloke in The Brotherhood who might have felt indebted to me for saving his life. I honestly couldn’t tell you who, or why, though. It was part of my job to bail out whoever was alongside me if ever they found themselves in trouble. The difference between living and dying during a battle might have been nothing more than me getting the drop on somebody before they’d had the chance to shoot at one of us. I probably dragged teammates away from a bullet, or pulled a colleague back from an IED device, simply by placing a hand on
his shoulder, but the details are so sketchy because the actions were always instinctive. Thought rarely came into it.

  The moments where The Brotherhood rescued me were less forgettable. I remember patrolling one village with narrow alleyways and high walls, as part of a group that was working under darkness. I stepped around the corner and heard a whisper behind me, a recognizable voice. It was one of my teammates.

  ‘He’s got a gun …’

  I was confused. Yeah, we’ve all got guns …

  And then the barking rang out. I was face-to-face with a murder hole, a small circular gap in the brickwork with enough space for a gun muzzle to poke through. The shooter was shielded by heavy stone and could fire freely without risk. It was an assassin’s dream, like shooting fish in a barrel. Bullets ricocheted around my frame. Instinctively, I pressed my back against the wall, like a circus performer pinned to a wheel as a knife-thrower landed blades all around them. I was able to shoot back, but I knew a one-in-a-million shot was required to catch a target that tiny, and in the chaos I couldn’t see an immediate escape route or any form of cover, until a voice shouted out from across the alley.

  ‘Foxy, over here!’

  Two of my teammates had crouched down behind a tree. The call snapped me out of a mental freeze and I moved my arse over, tap-dancing across the alley in a cartoonish dash. I ducked down alongside them, our hiding spot safe from the sniper’s angle of attack.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said, breathing hard. ‘So what’s the plan now?’

  ‘Reckon we should walk around to the other side of the building and lob a grenade at the bastard inside?’ offered one bloke.

  Excited by the idea, I nodded, and we edged our way to the rear entrance of the murder hole, which was at the back wall in a small brick hut, then threw an explosive through the window, our shooter looking the other way. When the bangs, smoke, and dust had faded, our point man announced he was going to clear the room. It was my job to run through the door afterwards, which was now hanging from its hinges, before taking down whoever was inside – if he was still alive.

  ‘Are you with me?’ the point man asked.

  Yeah mate, we’re with you.

  We raced into the crumbling building, guns up, but in the rush there was a near disaster. One bloke, Warren, had a 66mm rocket-launcher strapped to his back with an elastic cord. The weapon extended beyond his shoulders and was much wider than the door frame we were running towards, and before the rest of us had time to follow him in, both ends of his weapon had caught on the outside of the wall. Warren must have been three feet inside the building before the elastic yanked his arse backwards and twanged him to the dirt. Fortuitously, our target, when we found him, was dead. We sat in the smouldering remains of the murder hole, a corpse slumped by our feet, laughing our heads off at a calamitous two minutes of action. Sometimes, cracking up was the only thing stopping us from freaking out.

  12

  To my mind, a solid, battle-ready soldier needed a good sense of humour because there was plenty to unsettle the mind, or damage one’s confidence, while working in war. Having too much time to think as we waited for the next mission to begin could be tough. And we were forever waiting for the next mission to begin – waiting, and waiting, then waiting some more. Operations cranked into gear: the men readied their kit, a chopper’s rotary blades started whump-whump-whumping and the adrenaline amongst the group peaked, everyone telling stories and cracking jokes … only for the mood to suddenly cool off.

  A whispered rumour spread amongst the team. The target has moved.

  And then, inevitably, we were told to stand down. Anyone fancy a wet?

  Talk about a massive downer. Life between missions could be mind-numbing, a never-ending roller coaster of boredom and inaction at the low end, which was later punctuated by Is-this-my-time-to-die? anxiety at the higher frequencies, usually as we readied ourselves for battle. The waiting had become one of the unifying factors of base life. The Brotherhood was close not only because the intensity of fighting was so stressful on the body and brain, but also because there was so much time to wait between missions. We had nothing to occupy ourselves with other than talking and opening up – well, as far as the blokes were able to. Sometimes we spoke about the nice things at home, like our family, the kids, or the football, though that got boring pretty quickly. Inevitably, we talked about the bad things, too – the break-ups, the divorces, the feuds – and there was always a lot of that to chat through, all of it in that familiar, unemotional tone. Life with The Brotherhood made the tours much more manageable.

  In war, the mind moved at a thousand miles an hour. We ran in and out of compounds, not knowing if the next footfall might trigger an IED blast, shredding our limbs and manhoods to a bloody pulp. We sprinted from ditch to ditch, the rounds whipping over our heads. We convinced screaming, hysterical colleagues that a grisly leg wound was ‘easily fixable’ for their weekly five-a-side football match in England, when in actuality it was hanging off at the knee with next-to-no-chance of ever being stitched back on. When my brain moved at those speeds for extended periods of time, it adapted. It settled into a rhythm. It wanted to work at a thousand miles an hour in the downtime, too, which was dangerous because blokes with a mindset like mine looked for distractions in dull situations. On the base, in our rest periods, we would thrill-seek and search out something that might take the edge off our boredom.

  For example, the single lads found a lot of temptation in the female members of the British military. Whenever we wandered across the base, or hung out at the mess or in the gym, girls often came over to say hello, ask questions or flirt. And because me and most of the blokes I worked with had our own rooms, it was fairly easy to sneak anyone inside for a bit of fun – as long as we were discreet. Most of the time, the Officer Commanding turned a blind eye to any sex noises echoing around the corridors when we were off duty. They understood that we needed to let off steam, and as long as it didn’t affect the working practices, our misbehaviour was considered harmless.

  There was only one year in war where I was actually single and happy to mess around, and for those intimate moments I would leave whatever awful battlefield I was stationed in, escaping the violence and stress. During that time, sex on a military tour became a release, and I came to the realization that killing and shagging were the two most extreme things a person could do, instincts that operated at opposite ends of the primal spectrum: love and hate; creating life and ripping it away. Performing those acts so close to one another brought a sense of balance, for me at least. When I later left the military, I picked up a book which confirmed my feelings. Cheerily entitled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, I’d bought it because I knew that war had messed with my head and I wanted to learn how. In a chapter entitled, ‘Killing at Sexual Range: The Primal Aggression, the Release, and the Orgasmic Discharge’, the author explained how fighting and sex had long been linked. In the animal kingdom, it was why the toughest lion got all the mating privileges, but when it came to warfare, the author reckoned killing and shagging were both ‘rites of manhood’. He claimed a lot of soldiers liked firing a gun because it gave them a sense of sexual power. The book even revealed how one Vietnam vet admitted he’d left the US army because he was becoming ‘consumed’ by killing in the same way a person might have been consumed by sex.fn1

  ‘To some people carrying a gun was like having a permanent hard-on,’ wrote another vet. ‘It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.’

  But killing never felt like a sexual release for me. It was a part of the job. And sex for me, when it happened on that one tour, was also different. It wasn’t about love. It meant escapism, a distraction from the stress that played upon my nerves during night operations and during gunfights.

  Inside the sleeping quarters the mood was no different. There was a rowdy type of misbehaviour at play. ‘Door Wars’ was a game in which the sole intent was the humiliation of a mate, becau
se laughing at one another helped us to pass the time more quickly. Somebody might have lost a few teeth during a scrap and their inevitable rinsing would begin, long before they’d even disembarked from the helicopter, gums still pissing blood. Pictures of hillbillies with rotting, wonky gnashers were downloaded in an office, printed off and then stuck to the victim’s door. If the new decor wasn’t noticed immediately, the rules of the game meant that those pictures stayed in place for the entire tour. This was bad news for Dave. One day he admitted to shagging a ladyboy in Thailand. Within hours, a portfolio of some seriously hardcore porn had been plastered to his quarters. Dave was so tired that when he returned to his bunk the new artwork went unnoticed. Despite his grumbling, it remained stuck to his walls for months. Though secretly he probably quite liked it.

  Other games had a more deep-seated meaning; they involved trust, which was vital in war and a binding component within The Brotherhood. There were plenty of unwritten rules amongst the men, on or off tour, and there were plenty of things that you could or couldn’t do. It didn’t bode well if someone lied to the group for any reason. White lies and little fibs were fine, but full-on untruths caused big problems. They were known as ‘integrity shouts’, and losing one meant losing the faith of mates and colleagues. This idea was rooted in discipline: how was I supposed to rely on the person fighting alongside me in an ugly contact situation if they had bull-shitted people at the base? Unsurprisingly, those incidents were very rare.

  To enforce that ethos, games between the lads, such as ‘Queen’s Eyebrows’, became code-of-honour pledges that everybody took really seriously whenever they were played, mainly because a soldier was effectively swearing upon the Queen’s life. If his promise, or claim, fell through, he’d have to sacrifice his eyebrows as punishment. Robocop was worse: we would shave off the front part of someone’s hair – that always exposed the liars (but it also put people off taking up the challenge in the first place).