“Now,” Alan announced three hours later (by which time we were supposed to have memorized the names and functions of about forty weapons), “we’ll go outside and get cracking on what we call the ‘awareness path.’ You’ll find the suits on that table; put them on and I’ll see you outside in two minutes.”
Alan went out for a smoke with some of his pals while we clambered into navy blue overalls conceived for extra-large-sized men. Through the glass doors I could see the Defenders smoking, heedless of the rain, kidding around amongst themselves. Then I saw Obelix, Roger and Toby set off for the woods, guns slung over their shoulders, an image that looked sinister and foreboding. I had rolled up my navy blue overalls at the wrists and the ankles the best I could, but I felt strangely humiliated having to wear them. Now that we had on identical uniforms we looked like a group of convicts. We stared at one another with sudden wariness, a bunch of unwitting victims of something that was yet to happen.
The earth was soaked, blackened with peat and chestnut leaves.
Toby explained to us that now we had to set out along a path and things would happen. We would have to react accordingly, bearing in mind what we had just learned.
“Don’t be afraid, whatever you hear, don’t panic. Everything we use in the scenarios is harmless, no one can get hurt. Go on, off you go now,” said Keith, pointing to a path leading through the trees. “And good luck.” He grinned.
We set out, hampered by the extra-large suits, timid and hesitant, like Little Red Riding Hoods who know they’re about to stumble upon the wolf. Although we knew perfectly well that this was only a scenario, we pushed on unsteadily, clinging together.
At the first volley of gunfire we all flung ourselves to the ground. We landed one on top of the other—a human pyramid of legs and arms tangled together—flattening ourselves, heads down, the whiff of wet leaves in our noses.
“No, no, no!” yelled Toby. “What are you all doing on the ground? You’re a perfect target like this. What would it take to do this, for example?” He raised his rifle and mimed a mass execution.
“No, when you hear this kind of shot, from a low-velocity weapon, you’ve got to find shelter behind a tree, a bush. Your only hope is to hide. Throwing yourself to the ground is the worst thing you could do. Come on, get up, let’s get a move on.”
We laughed. It didn’t even take a second to see that Toby was right.
“What idiots,” someone said.
“Automatic reaction,” someone else added.
Smeared with mud, we got up and continued to advance, our ears pricked, ready to detect the slightest signal. As we kept walking, the wait became nerve-wracking. Then suddenly, four sharp shots, close together. I ran for all of one and a half seconds, then dived again, flattening myself onto the frozen ground. The others all did exactly the same. Toby emerged from the bushes shaking his head.
“No! I told you, that’s not an option. You have to learn to think when you hear gunfire, not panic. You have to try and work out, first off, where the shot’s coming from, and then, by the sound, you will have identified the type of weapon being fired. For example, what kind of gun you reckon that was?”
Nkosi, Jonathan and Liz Reading seemed the most prepared. They stammered some of the names and numbers we were supposed to have memorized. Toby merely shook his head disapprovingly.
“Nope. Sorry. It was a Beretta. A handgun. Anyway, come on, keep moving and keep your ears open.”
We were hit again and again. First, going past Toby, we were caught in a cross fire, then by a sniper with a high-precision rifle, then by an M-16 and lastly by a grenade. Unfailingly, we ducked down each time, without trace of a strategy of any kind. Each time we leapt as if a heavy shutter slammed down as soon the shot fired and all our bodies wanted to do was disappear. There was no way of ramming any other reaction into our brains. It didn’t help to remind ourselves the guns were fake.
The sequence was identical for the entire awareness path: we would get up from the ground, learn what we did wrong, and then go for more. Another bang, another leap, more mud, more leaves in the nostrils.
At one point I even held my breath, thinking I could get away with just playing dead.
Dinner found us all lined up, plates in hand, in front of the usual buffet of roast meat and pale, frozen veggies.
Nkosi beckoned me to sit at his table, next to Jonathan Kirk, the American journalist who lived in Bogotá, a forty-year-old who definitely worked out at the gym a lot; square jaw, sandy hair and that bespectacled-superhero look that some women find attractive. To break the ice and get it out of the way, we joked about our failure on the awareness path. Nkosi, however, went on to recount a hairy five minutes he’d spent in Sierra Leone at a checkpoint held by trigger-happy rebels. Jonathan Kirk seized the ball and in turn described a demonstration in Jakarta where bullets had been flying everywhere. This ping-pong braggadocio between the two went on for a while. It wasn’t the least bit interesting.
“Maria leaves for Kabul on Monday,” Nkosi said to Jonathan, as if giving me the cue that it was finally my turn to recount a dangerous adventure.
I nodded, offering no further explanation. Jonathan smiled. Nkosi cleared his throat.
“She’s doing a story on arranged marriages,” he continued.
“A good friend of mine lives in Kabul,” proffered Jonathan. “He used to be a correspondent for the Financial Times, but now he works for an NGO. You may know who he is—Steve Gilmore? He knows everyone there. I’m sure he can give you a hand.”
“Ah, yeah, Steve Gilmore,” said Nkosi. “I think I know the guy. Wasn’t he based in Nairobi about five years ago?”
Jonathan and Nkosi discussed Steve Gilmore for a while. I learned he had just divorced his wife, a brilliant CNN correspondent who had moved to Shanghai and whom they both described in glowing terms. They then turned back to me to bring me into the conversation, in the hope I would say something, anything, as long as I contributed to this map of names, places and adventures that seems to bind all correspondents who live in war zones.
“I heard Steve lives in a rambling old palace in the center of Kabul,” added Jonathan. “I ought to have his number somewhere, I can give it to you if you like. And then what’s-his-name will probably be there too, the BBC correspondent, the one who was in Tehran—you know who I mean.”
“Actually, I’ve never been anywhere like that. I mean, I’ve never gone to a war zone in my life,” I said, dismantling the vegetable compositions on my plate. I looked up at him evenly.
“I did some photojournalism in the past but I’m more of a food photographer now. I do cookbooks, gourmet magazines. Sometimes I illustrate food articles for the papers.”
Nkosi and Jonathan looked at me, their eyes blank.
“It’s by sheer chance that I’m going to Kabul,” I added quickly. “This is something completely out of the ordinary for me. Actually, I’m really nervous.”
Nkosi and Jonathan smiled feebly, trying to figure out whether I was putting them on.
“No, really. It’s true,” I said, smiling back at them, as if to reassure them that it was okay, that my confession had not embarrassed me, that being an ordinary person who doesn’t live surrounded by gunfights and kamikaze attacks is not something to be ashamed of.
“So, all this, I mean, the classes, their scenarios…” Jonathan darted a look at Nkosi. “I mean all that we’re doing here must seem completely nuts to you.”
“Nuts? No, why? If anything it makes me even more aware I haven’t got a clue as to what awaits me.”
Nkosi shook his head and laughed. He poured some wine in my glass and then raised his, as if to invite me to a toast. I think in a way he was impressed I had outed myself. I guess it took guts, among war correspondents.
I glanced at Mike over at the back, who had chosen to eat alone at a table by himself. He had brought a book to read and was avidly turning the pages. I envied him. I could’ve done with a bit of peace and quiet myself.
Roger had a businesslike attitude about injuries and wounds. He treated the human body as if it were something that could easily be patched up, at least temporarily. He said there was always something you could do to keep the victim from dying. For a few hours anyhow, until you got to a hospital.
“What would you do if, let’s say, your casualty’s intestines were hanging out?”
No one had a clue, nor was anyone inclined to put a hand up with a suggestion. How could we? For all we knew, in every war movie the soldier holding his entrails in his hands is a goner. That’s usually the scene where he dies in his buddy’s arms. End of performance.
But no, Roger reassured us, the intestine is just like a sausage.
“You can stick it back in, no problem. All you have to do is push it back in and tape it.”
Moans and murmurs of horror and disbelief.
“Yep. Regular tape. The paper one’s actually best, but duct tape’ll do. But if it’s bleeding,” he warned us, “it gets a bit trickier because a bleeding intestine will last no more than six hours. In this case you just tie it with string.”
“Tie it how?” someone asked meekly.
“I told you,” said Roger, “just think of sausages, the way they’re tied up. That’s all.”
He mimed winding string, knotting it and pulling it tight.
“Severed hand? Rinse, wrap in damp gauze and put it in a plastic bag. If there’s any available, use ice. Never put a severed limb in direct contact with ice or you risk burning it. You have no idea how many hands and fingers could have been reattached if this simple procedure had been followed.”
I was struck by this new way of conceiving the human body. If only a couple of days before I had still been thinking of it as a complex and fragile apparatus, so tenuous that it made me swoon, now, thanks to Roger, my vision had begun to change. The body, I was beginning to see, was something you could put your hands into without fear. More like a thick slab of meat in the kitchen that you could cut open, stuff, tightly truss and shove in the oven.
Roger insisted, “The human body is more resilient than you can imagine. It takes a lot of damage to shut it down. When you give first aid in an emergency situation always remember you have more time than you think. It’s rare that a casualty will die on you. Do your assessment, think, don’t rush and then do all that you need to do without panicking. Ninety percent of the time, you’ll succeed in getting your casualty at least to a hospital.”
It felt reassuring. I took a mental note that this was the most important information I’d learned so far.
Roger added, “A few years ago a team of scientists tested the resistance of the human body in the lab on that of a pig. Of all the animals, the pig’s system is the most similar to ours. Well, they did everything they could to it for a whole day. They shot it four times in the chest, they cut off its ears, they severed its legs, performed a tracheotomy, cut out a huge piece of intestine, took out part of the stomach, took out a lung. Guess what—by the end of the day the pig was still there. Yup, Porky gave no sign he was ready to bite the dust.”
In the following days we began the more intense part of the training, what the brochure called “traumatic scenarios under controlled conditions.” Horrific events were carefully staged every afternoon—explosions, shoot-outs, accidents of all sorts. We had to get into our extra-large overalls, by now stiff with mud, and go outside to put into practice what we had just learned in the morning in Roger’s first-aid class.
Two or three Defenders took turns playing the casualties. Each one wore different gear—military jackets, Afghan caps, camouflage cargo pants, turbans—and mixed them together in imaginative ways that unapologetically suggested potentially aggressive ethnic groups. They also had a variety of latex pros-theses (the sort that might be used by a special-effects crew in a horror film), which were strapped to their legs, chests, arms in order to simulate multiple fractures, stumps, gaping wounds. To add verisimilitude they also squirted jets of blood with a little pump to produce arterial hemorrhages in large quantities.
There were different themes, all carefully staged by invisible set designers. The first one we came across was a very realistic road accident—two cars had crumpled into each other, one driver slumped over the wheel, the horn blaring, the other trapped under the seat.
On a different occasion we stumbled upon a refugee camp where a gas-cylinder explosion had caused third-degree burns to a group of crazed and drunken militiamen (for this one the set was dressed with tents, a campfire and guns stacked against a tree). On another occasion we encountered a shoot-out at a checkpoint, and here the victims were lying facedown in the mud by the barrier, in puddles of blood.
We were usually split up into small groups. We always ventured out with the same hesitant gait, expecting the worst. Invariably, after only a couple of minutes along the country lanes, all sorts of explosions, loud bangs and catastrophes would be sprung on us, followed by piercing screams. This was the signal that some disaster had taken place and our help was needed.
We would run to the site of the incident, shouting (rule number one: approach only if it’s safe to do so, always announce your presence, Roger had recommended), and rush to help the victims. There was no time to determine who was the most seriously injured, or to pick the victim who presented fewer complications. It was pure chance that threw rescuer and casualty together.
With his seasoned Viking air, Obelix was, out of all the Defenders, the one I had begun to nurse something akin to a feeling for. During our daily scenarios I’d happened to pick him as my casualty more than once and this—unknown to him—had made him strangely familiar to me.
The day of the car accident, I rushed to the crumpled car and found my casualty slumped over the wheel, his face and hair spattered with blood, his foot planted on the accelerator. The horn was blaring and the engine was roaring, racing, lending a distressing urgency to the scene.
It wasn’t until I approached, yelling at the top of my lungs, “I’m here, everything’s going to be all right now. I’ll get you out of there,” that I recognized him. His hair was caked with blood—clearly a head wound.
On this particular occasion Obelix was drowsy but awake (during the exercises the Defenders had the option to decide whether to remain conscious, pass out, or die in the arms of their rescuer, depending on the gravity of their wounds and the efficiency of the rescuer’s assistance).
“Don’t panic, this is only an exercise, try to think,” I kept repeating to myself as I felt the adrenaline pumping and panic seizing me by the throat.
First off, I cut the engine (rule number two: check for any danger to yourself, the injured person or others around you). I grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him off the horn. He fell back against the seat, his head slumping against the headrest, and silence descended at last. I checked to see if his airway was clear and he was breathing. I also made sure that the head wound was only superficial and quickly stanched it with a bandage before the sight of all that fake blood could make me faint. Then I inspected the body for other wounds, while he kept moaning in a slurred chant that everything hurt and he was surely going to die.
Roger had taught us that you had to feel the torso, running your hands under the jacket to make sure there was no blood. I had to get my hands under his shirt to do so. I felt his warm, clammy skin. As I brushed his body I became aware of the intimacy of the gesture. It unsettled me.
“Nothing here either,” I said out loud. I then ran my hands along his thighs and legs, trying to touch his body lightly, impersonally, in the same way airport personnel search passengers at metal detectors. I noticed a protuberance on his shin. I touched it and realized something was out of place. I took out the scissors from the first-aid kit we carried in
a pouch and cut through the fabric of his trouser leg to see what was underneath. I did it with a show of self-assurance to counteract the embarrassment I actually felt at what I was doing.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be all right, you’re fine,” I whispered to him the way I’d seen camp doctors do in movies.
“Aha. It looks like there’s a fracture here,” I declaimed, staying in character for the scene we were both playing. A latex prosthesis strapped to his leg revealed lacerated flesh and a bone poking out of his shin.
At this point, Obelix was still sitting back against the driver’s seat while I was trafficking with his trousers. He kept flopping his head repeatedly onto his chest as if to hint he would be better off lying down. And, of course, the bandage I had tied around his temples had come undone and the gauze was dangling over his face.
“Now, in just a minute we’ll get you out of here, all right?” I offered tentatively. Obelix did not reply.
“I can’t fix up your leg unless you’re lying on the ground,” I explained.
He ignored me. Nevertheless, I managed to get him over my shoulder and haul him out of the car, adopting the method we had been shown in the lesson on casualty evacuation. There was actually a way, by using leverage on arms and shoulders, by which even someone of my size could move a man of Obelix’s bulk.
“You’re hurting me like that, you stupid bitch,” he snarled as I was helping him to drag himself along.
It shocked me that he would insult me. I had assumed personal affront wasn’t part of the game.
End of Manners Page 5