The old man doesn’t know the prisoner very well, but knows the kind of man he is. He has seen his kind many times before, but this man has something different. A resolve, a steeliness - that is bound tight by mental darkness. A girder dropped down a desolate well. There is something about the prisoner that made the old man want to visit, to want to lend a hand. Much of it can be down their similarities, he supposes. But the prisoner has asked him to do something, something he is not completely sure he should do. The old man knows too well, that heated actions rarely have positive consequences, and he desperately doesn’t want the prisoners life to worsen thanks to even more poor choices. The old man feels he must open the letter, although he is not sure whether it’s out of trying to do the right thing or to satisfy his curiosity. Either way, he feels his finger slipping into the envelope and tearing it open, before he had even decided whether or not he was going to do it.
He pulls out a few sheets of lined paper, folded neatly thrice. Handwriting all in block capitals. Dag’s eyes flit across the first few words, and he already knows he will read this document to the end.
2
“Dear Kayla,
This letter is one that I never expected to write, and I’m sure is one that you never expected to receive. I suddenly find myself with some time on my hands, and it has forced me to address elements of my past that I have put off for far too long. My intention, in the long run, is to become a better man and to set the record straight. Please indulge this note and consider the contents, because I feel it is important that you hear what I have to say. I always hoped I’d be able to tell you this in person, but I may never get the chance, and that brings us to where we are today. My name is Ben Bracken - it may not be a name you recognize. You know me better as the man who killed your husband.
As a prologue to what is to follow, please can I tell you that not a second passes without the weight of what happened pressing down on every inch of me. It informs every decision I make, gnaws at every part of me, and drives me sleepless long into the night. I can’t shake it. I hope by the end of this note you will understand a bit more, but let me please get another thing straight. Be under no illusions. I’m not writing to you asking for forgiveness - I’m not a man who deserves that. I’m writing to you for two reasons. Firstly, I feel you should know the truth, and secondly, it feels like, after all this time, the right thing to do.
From the outset, I will promise a few things. Blunt honesty is one of them. I’m not renowned for being much of a fantasist, nor am I a man who will embellish unduly. I will tell it like it was, and I will try not to leave anything out. Another thing I will promise is my regret. In case it doesn’t come across in my written words, my mind is sodden with regret for what happened. If anything sounds too blunt or matter-of-fact, that is me ‘the soldier’ speaking. Me ‘the human being’ struggles with guilt full-time. My final promise is that after this note, I will never contact you again. I’m gambling on it reaching you, but I don’t want anything in return. Not a thing. But you will know the truth, and that is my only concern.
I’m going to pretend that you know nothing of the events leading to your husbands death, so I will give you the facts as I know them and experienced them. You may have been fed a pack of lies, for all I know, so please let’s start afresh.
I met your husband after I’d been at Camp Bastion for a couple of months, very soon after it’s opening in 2006. I had recently been promoted to Captain, and your husband had been added to my squadron after my previous communications officer finished his final tour (that’s no metaphor or euphemism - he literally had finished all his schedule tours of action and was destined to return to the UK).
Steven (even writing his name is difficult) arrived, but unlike most other newbies, he was comfortable with his calling, and eager to learn. He wanted to be the best of the best, and to give him his credit, he was indeed excellent at his job. He was a wonderful addition, and I was very glad to have him. He had an enthusiasm and matter-of-factness that made him great to be around.
Something that soldiers judge each other on timelessly, is the ability to act under pressure. Some greenhorns simply hear the word ‘hostile’ in their earpiece and frankly, shit their pants. Everything they’ve ever learned goes out of the window, and they are more like baggage when it comes to a pressure situation. If you can imagine being smothered under enemy fire and having a six foot toddler with you, you kind of get the idea. This was never the case with Steven - he was alert, composed and well-drilled. He looked like a born soldier, which is a ridiculous cliche that gets overused whenever the newspapers pen a hasty obituary. I never read Steven’s so it may be in there.
He was popular with the men in our unit, and very quickly so. He was immediately reliable in the field, and people latched onto him like a beacon in a storm, but it was his human side that people really gravitated towards. On an army base, thousands of miles from home, with genuine combat always near-present, at times it can feel a bit like a psychiatrists waiting room out there. People wandering about in an uneasy state, agitated, nervous, scared, pumped, stressed - it was a gala of warring emotional states at times. Steven’s cool head and easy ear elevated his status and respect quickly. People sought him out for a chat, or to get his take on things. He almost became a resident agony aunt. Throughout this period he became one of my very best friends.
In addressing where I was at this point, I was a man who was emotionally impermeable. I had shut down that facet of me, as my military persona had grown. I saw psychiatric weakness or softness like a huge crack in a wall - a point of weakness which the enemy could exploit to let the pain rain in. I had plastered over that crack as thick as I could, and would not let anybody in. Steven saw this and, with no fuss whatsoever, and with no ill-intentions, eased me open like an oystercatcher would a clam shell. I resisted at first, but Steven later told me he could see what being that way had done to me. I was a resentful, hateful mess. I was livid at life. I was single-minded and brutish with scant regard for the joyous variation life has to offer. I was the perfect soldier, but a far from perfect man.
It started over a quiet beer in the pub tent. Bastion had an array of fast food outlets (including a McDonalds and a KFC, if you can believe that) but I always fancied something a bit more home-cooked. If was going to be fighting for England, I felt I might as well eat like it. So we found one of the tents was set up more like a village pub feel, and felt myself naturally gravitate there. Years prior, I spent hours and hours of my infancy on the floor around my fathers swaying feet, which dangling off whatever barstool he happened to be perched upon. I used to count the ridges on the contours on the soles of his boot. I taught myself to tie and untie shoelaces. Occasionally nuts and crisps would be passed down to me. It felt an extremely happy period, but on reflection I was little more than a loyal dog. But like a loyal dog, I was happy, so I hold no resentment. As an adult, I now cling to pubs like they are a much-welcomed oasis. An island of calm.
We had a beer and this lad in my unit cut right to core of me. He said he could see that there were murky clouds over my head which were mopping up some kind of sadness, but that it was this same sadness that was stopping me from moving forward in life. I never took leave - didn’t want it. I wanted to keep my head down and lose myself in the fight. I was well decorated, and a successful soldier. But out in the real world, that counted for very little - but it was my focus.
The truth is, Kayla, that above the veneer, shrouded in a haze of booze, faux-pride, combat-hardened exoskeleton, I’m an utter sham. I use whatever I could to build a moat around my fragile centre, and Steven saw this. I have always been a man riddled with principles arranged in jet black and ice white - but there was a time when these principles were eroded and somewhat blurred. I met a girl once, in 2002. In a nightclub. I was still at Sandhurst, and I was on weekend leave, and had come back up to Manchester for the weekend to see the folks and sink a few jars.
With some of my old school friends, we ended up o
ver near Canal Street. It was a good night and all, and we were in this gay bar. I had never had a problem at all with other people’s sexual choices - and in any event, contrary to popular belief, the army kind of smashes that kind of unimportant navel-gazing out of you. It’s of no consequence what side of the sexual fence you reside. In hostile territory, anybody wearing the union jack is your friend. There was a girl there who I can only assume was accompanying her gay friends. Again, this was all very normal - in fact it was one of the reasons we used to go there sometimes. You used to be able to meet the odd nice girl in the gay district who was there with her friends, too timid to go off by herself. I know that sounds terrible, and illustrates us as rather predatory, but it wasn’t anything like that.
I met Steph there that night, and was very smitten right away. My exterior crumbled, the army man in me both fighting off the attack of desire, while the regular joe in me simultaneously harbored, and urged it to blossom. For a simple bloke, it was a dangerous concoction. We hit it off in a nuclear way. I would come back to see her 5 consecutive weekends in a row.
We were in contact during the week too, when she wasn’t working or I wasn’t training. And it was in one of these conversations that she told me - she was pregnant. The floor fell out from under me. I was horrified, uncertain, hurt, frightened, shocked, despairing - but above all, I was delighted. My world was assigned a meaning aside from the army. A purpose I had not predicted or foreseen, yet certainly didn’t realize how much I would welcome. I didn’t know how delighted I had been until the very next conversation we had, two days later. She told me that she had “got rid of it”.
We both acknowledged after a long tumultuous conversation that it was probably for the best, and that we were in no fit state to raise a child. We barely knew each other - never mind that, we barely even knew of each other. We never spoke again after she ended the call and I listened to the static hiss of rejection on all fronts. I realized I had been listening to that same crackle for 10 minutes before I came to my senses and hung up.
I was at sea with clashing emotion. The decision may well have been the right one, but surely, as co-producer of whatever creation adorned her womb, I was entitled to be a part of the decision? I could see a future ahead of me, that I would never know. It’s like a fork had been placed in the road of my future and I had been forced down one of the roads, while so close to the other, I could visualize it. I could feel it. I could feel parenthood.
No non-parent will ever understand this. A funny switch flicks deep inside an untouchable recess in you, and a torch is lit forever, as a connection with your child is created. It doesn’t matter if the child is embryonic or fully borne - that sense of purpose, protection, duty and LOVE is overwhelming. It changes everything about you, but also crystallizes your very essence at the same time. It makes you a person. It gives you a reason.
Perhaps it’s because, as humans, we are built to procreate, and by creating children, we are therefore fulfilling our own point of existence. But that feels like it would cheapen the dizzying euphoria, and blunt the searing point of excited purpose. My own excitement was short-lived. No sooner had I been given the almighty news that I had created life, but that same life was taken away from me.
Imagine, for a second, being given a purpose and then having it stripped away from you before you had even had the chance to experience it or were allowed the exhilaration to set in. But even saying that withers the weight of the utter crushing sorrow that came next. My child, was taken from me. Killed. Poisoned, and flushed away. I will never forget the bitter taste of hate I felt after the shock had subsided. I taste it every time I think about it. I’m gagging on it now. My mouth fills with it every time I see a child in any kind of danger. I sometimes cannot read the paper without wanting to spew venom-specked bile all over it.
I’m waffling. I know this. I’m sorry for the filibuster, but, in a selfish way, this may prove hugely helpful. Steven helped me with this so much before... But even as I ramble , I know I am struggling to get around to the nitty gritty, and as I feel it loom ever closer, anything and everything feels like a better topic. But I know that isn’t helping you at all. In fact, if you have read everything in this letter leading to this point, you have done everything I asked when I first started writing - and I’m grateful. So, without further ado...
Loosely, but also oddly succinctly, we were caught up in an awful situation involving a murder hole. ‘Murder hole’ is a particularly vicious expression, but the reality is worse, I promise you. They are almost mythical in stature within the infantry, and ground excursions are always all the more tense because of them. Simply put, think of a house on a street. Now, in that house, think of the wall that faces the street - think of a hole in it, through which you can poke the barrel of a gun and point it indiscriminately at the street. You can’t see what you are aiming at, but you can see the crowd, the rush of people, and the occasional flash of British army camo. That’s usually enough to act. Murder holes are the perfect way to satisfy a lot of urges - none of them good - but if you are a Taliban fighter with a shot at a prize scalp, this is a very safe way of doing it.
As the guy on the ground that may be wary of a murder hole, it’s a seriously unsettling experience. You can’t see them. You can’t hear them. You can’t feel them. But then there’s a pop and a spit of gravel, as the muzzle bucks in the hole, and someone in your vicinity goes down. And that person that goes down is rarely the intended target. I’ve seen women and children become the victim of this more often than I’d care to mention. The aftermath is dreadful, and the worse thing is, you can’t find it. You can’t find the hole to stick your own barrel down - for a hundred reasons. Too much is happening, there’s a civilian down, or a comrade is hurt, more bullets are hailing from that same tiny somewhere, and, let’s face it, we are talking about a war torn environment. There are hundreds of bullet holes, cracks and faults in the walls on your average street, and the last thing you want to do is stick the pointy end of an assault rifle down the nearest one and spray an innocent family’s living room full of hot metal. All you can do is get down and get away - as fast as you can.
Steven was indeed the victim of a murder hole, in a way. We had been on a dusk excursion across the province via air, when our Apache was hit with a small volley of bullets. They pinged and whizzed only briefly, the air in the cabin spitting hot poison for a split second, but a cruel ricochet within the cabin sent a stray bullet through the copilot’s visor. He buckled and fell forward, across the central controls. At that time, it was probably the most unlucky casualty I’d ever seen in combat. The helicopter went down fast, as we struggled to get the copilot off the column. Whoever fired the shots made himself a hero. One man with a peashooter, essentially, took down one of Her Majesty’s prize eagles. It should not have happened, but fate has a strange way of spinning you a rum one.
As we went down, our perspective shifted as the chopper angled onto it’s side. As I looked out of the open window, all I could see was faces watching. We fell into a crowd of people - a busy evening market scene was disrupted by 18,000 pounds of twisted metal. We hit a building as we fell, which slowed our descent. It saved my life - and Steven’s. It pitched the falling tin can upright, nose pointing to the sky, and we were saved because the impact threw us. It jolted us out, and we dropped 10 feet to the tarmac. Another twist of fate - everyone else was strapped in. We were lazy, and weren’t. We fell out and they stayed in - which wasn’t much use when it went up in eager flames.
The crowd fanned as we dropped and rolled, narrowly avoiding the falling chassis of the chopper, and all the other rags of blazing hardware that were dropping from above. We weren’t unscathed at all - I had a series of cuts in my scalp, so that even now when I shave my head, my hair grows back in a giraffe-style patchwork until it gets long enough. My right ankle was, if you’ll excuse the vernacular, fucked. I would eventually find out it was fractured, but at the time I barely noticed it. Steve had a flesh wound to his che
st, not too deep, but deep enough to really sting and scar. But aside from that, he wasn’t in too bad a condition, and, considering he had just survived a helicopter crash, he looked remarkable.
We were out and away from the immediate crash site, but we couldn’t stall - we knew the gunfire had come from this vicinity, and that, seen as hostiles, we were surely sitting ducks. A crowd was forming, andI could sense our safety becoming ever more compromised. Dizzy and disorientated, we headed away from the centre of this village as quickly as we could, trying to find the backstreets off the central drag.
As we stumbled along, keeping close to the walls of the street, trying to get our bearings amid the melee, there was a little barely audible spit. Like a gasp from somewhere, the Grim Reaper himself breathing sharply from the Netherworld, excited at the close-proximity of another soul to take. Steven stumbled, but we carried on moving - wobbling, whirling, two steps forward, two steps back. The hubbub of the crowd was growing, and distant gunshots began to echo. As we trawled the street, we noticed the entrance to a sewer, embedded in the dusty pavement. I levered it open with my rifle muzzle, and the stench wafted up to us from the murk below. For want of a better expression, the smell was a barrage of hot shit. It’s seared into my nostrils, filling my sinuses with it’s filth, so that now, I can’t even drive through good old English countryside for fear of catching a whiff of something manure-like, and be transported back to the moment we dropped into that Helmland sewer.
As we landed in that infinite cesspit, the reek was unbearable. Steven was with me, and we both looked at each other to communicate one very prescient sentiment: ‘We have to get out of here’. Looking up, through the sewer access grid, we could see the purple sky we had fallen from. Glancing below... it was unspeakable. We started to move through waist deep water, that was thicker than normal water, and well... chunkier. Bits and pieces floating into my feet and hands, each time triggering a weakening gag reflex. I was wading, following the darkness, trying to put the unfriendly light behind me. I was throwing up as fast as I could take breaths. But as I trekked, I noticed that the distance between me and Steven was lengthening. For a couple of moments, I kept pressing, hoping that my pace would help spur him on. But it wasn’t working. Worse, he was slowing. I dropped back to him, and asked how he was. He said he was fine, but thought he had pulled a muscle in his abdomen. This alarmed me immediately. Under pursuit from a lynch mob, I would have thought only about tearing my hamstring from the bone would slow me down, never mind a pulled muscle.
Ben Bracken: Origins (Ben Bracken Books 1 - 5) Page 9