by Holly Hart
"What've we got, Sophie?" I call out without stopping. It looks bad, but head wounds always look bad, it's all the blood. And there was a lot of blood. It wasn't quite a slaughterhouse, but it wasn't far off.
"Katie, good – you're here," an exhausted looking Sophie replied. "Gunshot wound, bounced off the skull."
"Bounced?" I ask, surprised. That didn't sound – well – likely.
"Okay, grazed," Sophie concedes. "It's not done too much damage, but he's losing a whole load of blood right now. Here, hold this," she says, thrusting my hands onto the soldier's bleeding head before she'd finished asking. "Maintain the pressure. I need to hook him up to some blood bags. Who's the kid?"
"I'm – I'm –" Brian stammered, clearly rocked on his heels by the disarray of the operating theater. When you're used to the clean, ordered operating rooms back home, Afghanistan's bone shops can come as quite a surprise.
"Spit it out, kid," Sophie shouts over her shoulder, brusquely but not unkindly, as she rustles her way through the fridge.
"How you doing, private?" I ask the terrified young private lying on the operating theater table. His head's grazed from the middle part of his jaw, along his temple and up into his hairline from where the bullet travelled after leaving the barrel of his gun. It's what happens when you try to end it all with a rifle. Harder to aim, especially when you're trembling with fear, anxiety and desperation.
He doesn't reply, not in words anyway, just lets out a horrible, haunting moan, screwing his face up in pain and fear. I pat him on the shoulder, well aware of the futility of my gesture in making him feel better. "It's going to be okay, private. It's just a flesh wound – looks worse than it is."
"Need. A. Doctor…" he pants underneath me, every word an effort.
"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, private." I grin reassuringly down to him. I hope it's reassuring, anyway. I think that's the kind of thing I'd want to see if I was lying on a hospital bed – how bad can your injuries really be if the person treating you is smiling?
Not bad. At least, I hope that’s the impression I’m giving.
"Okay, I'm ready," Sophie says, coming back over with two full bags of blood, plastic tubing trailing off each of them.
"Good. It looks like the flow of blood's slowing down a bit, we should be able to suture him up soon," I reply. My patient squirms underneath me, making it extremely difficult to keep hold of him.
I'm just about to tell him to stop, but Sophie jumps in before I get a chance. "What are you doing?" she asks sternly. "We're trying to help you, but you need to help yourself, okay?"
The young man's eyes are flicking all over the place, never staying focused on a single thing for too long. It feels like he's searching for sources of danger; it's like he's an animal being hunted – prey.
"What's wrong?" I ask gently, lowering my head to his ear in the hope that it’ll seem more intimate and more soothing. "Can you keep still? Can you do that for me?" I ask reassuringly, almost as though I'm talking to a child.
The young soldier stops squirming, sagging back into the hard metal surface of the operating table, but I notice his eyes don't stop their relentless, hunted flickering. His skin is glistening with a light sheen of sweat, and the more I look at him, the more I think that he's not just in pain, but terrified.
"I don't want to die!" he wails in the same plaintive, heartbreaking tone as his earlier moan. As before, it has the same impact on the three of us – Brian, Sophie and myself – as the sound of nails being dragged down a chalkboard. We wince, visibly. I've seen a lot of injuries in my time in this hospital; I've seen a lot of casualties brought through crying for their mothers, but this one is having a far greater impact on me than any of his predecessors, and I can tell it's the same for the other two.
"You're not going to die, private," I reassure him, laying my free hand on his chest and stroking him, doing my best to ignore the fact that his skin is slick with blood. "You don't need to worry about that. We'll have you patched up, stitched up and out of here before you know it –."
He interrupts before I'm finished. "I can't be here anymore," he says, grabbing my arm powerfully for emphasis. "I can't take it anymore." He’s staring up at me with desperate, haunted eyes – eyes which have for the first time halted in their relentless search for a way out. I break away just for a second to look at Brian. I signal to him subtly that I might need help – not now, but maybe. He nods slowly, deliberately to indicate that he understands the thrust of my message.
My eyes return to the gaze of my injured patient. "You've got to help me," he asks, his hands gripping my upper arm again. "I can't go back out there, you've got to stop them…"
"You're not going anywhere right now, soldier," I say, choosing my words carefully. The truth is, I can't stop his commanders sending him anywhere they want him, so to promise anything else would just be lying, and worse, it would be giving him false hope, and that might just lead him right back down this garden path at some point in the future. "We're going to get you better, you understand?"
The tears leaking out the corners of his eyes are streaking through the spatters of dried blood all over the skin on his face, clearing paths of clean skin in the midst of the carnage. "Thank you, thank you," he mutters, and keeps repeating it as his grip on my arm loosens and his eyes close.
"What –?" I start, wondering if he's crashing, before pulling up when I see the syringe in Sophie's hand. "What did you give him?" I ask.
"Morphine. Not much, just enough to take the edge off things. He needs a psych consult; the cut's not that bad, but if we let him go out there again…" she tails off – leaving the warning unsaid, but not unheard.
"I know," I sigh, my cramping hands getting to work after I notice the flow of blood from the deep cut on his head has mostly halted, "he'll die. They'll get him, or he'll off himself – it's only a matter of time."
"Isn't… Isn't there anything we can do?" Brian asks in an astonished tone of voice. "There must be something!"
"Pass me the thread, will you?" I ask him, deliberately avoiding his question for a second – just to give myself time to think. The thing is, he's going to have to realize what it's like out here: hard, stressful and unrelenting. I had to; he will, too. He hands it to me, eyes downcast.
I clean the wound gently with a clear disinfectant spray, making sure there's nothing left inside it that could cause an infection. Luckily, if you can use that word to describe this kind of injury, the bullet didn't go through any cloth, so there's no need to dig that out. Scraps of fabric always cause problems. I start stitching up the wound and my long-practiced fingers make light work of it. Within minutes, the job's done. I silently thank Sophie for putting him to sleep – it's always quicker when they don't move.
"Listen, Brian," I start, with no great idea of where I'm going. "We can't do much, not out here, anyway. It's better we tell you now, you know?"
"What do you mean?" he asks plaintively, looking like I've just stolen Christmas. "Of course we can; we've got to help them – isn't that why we're here?"
I sigh. It is, and it's not, all at the same time.
"I don't want it to be this way, believe me," I say, watching Sophie glumly clean up the bloody waste that's left strewn all over the operating theatre. "But it's true. There aren't enough of us, you must have seen that – this isn't a job we should be doing, it's supposed to be a doctor's job."
"Yeah, but surely –."
I cut him off. "Surely today’s just a one-off?"
He nods, slowly, as though he's afraid of being caught out.
I laugh bitterly. "I wish. No, there aren't enough staff, and there are too many soldiers for us to take care of."
"Are more coming?" he asks hopefully. "I mean," he jumps in quickly – to forestall what he must expect is going to be a biting response from me, "I'm new, so maybe they are sending more, if they sent me?"
I think it's the look on Brian's face, more than anything, that breaks me. I don't mean to b
e cruel, he needs to know the truth, but watching the hope die in his eyes when I reply to him brings home all the stress, fear and tension of the last few months, right then and there.
I shake my head sadly. "No, kid. We asked for ten –"
He finishes off the rest of my sentence, hanging his head. "And you got me…"
Chapter Seven - Mike
I hate hospitals.
I like Katie, but I fucking hate hospitals. I think it's the smell – that acrid, clean, almost acidic scent that you don't get anywhere else. Lucky for me, they’re letting me out. And this place has been a shit show today. I saw, God – I don't know how many guys on trolleys being wheeled past me towards the operating theater earlier, bleeding out their guts. I won't miss it.
I just need a nurse, anyone really, to check me out.
"Sergeant?"
My head spins around at the sound of the unfamiliar voice.
"Sergeant Mike Carson?" a man dressed head to toe in Army dress greens asks – and as he looks at me, all I can think is that he has the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen in real life.
Still, it must be serious – the only time people stick a dress uniform on, in my experience, is when someone's telling your family you're KIA, or about to get court-martialed...
"Yes, sir?" I reply, the shock of what I just puzzled out reverberating through my skull as I do my best to snap to attention. My subconscious mind recognizes a few things about the man that my conscious brain doesn't register right away. First things first, the officer – whoever he is – doesn't have a name tag on his uniform. That's very Delta Force…
"At ease, sergeant. You don't need to act like that around me, you understand?"
I nod, though I don't take it too seriously. In my experience, listening to officers too often is a pretty good recipe for getting yourself killed.
"Do you know why I'm here, Mike? I can call you Mike, can't I?"
You already have… I think, but don't say. "No, sir. Yes, sir."
Best to stick to the fundamentals. I don't even know why I'm experiencing such an immediate, visceral dislike of the officer standing in front of me. I've never met the man, but he reeks of the kind of ‘you go ahead and fight, I'll just stay back here and lead’ attitude that marks out so many of his comrades.
"Son," he begins, and all I can think is whether he really has to call me that – it feels demeaning, "the President's heard about you, and he sends his deepest condolences for what happened to your friend –"
"Tommy," I interject firmly. His name needs to matter, it needs to be remembered, and if no one else wants to bother, then I certainly will.
“Uh, yes," the officer continues, slightly less self confidently, "Tommy. I'm here to tell you that you've been awarded the Purple Heart for your injuries."
The news doesn't surprise me. After all, everyone gets a Purple Heart once they've suffered an injury in the field – it's no big deal. What does surprise me is what the fancily dressed officer says next.
"And the Joint Chiefs are putting you up for a Silver Star - for bravery in the field."
I certainly wasn't expecting him to say that. My leg gives way, and I end up sitting on my bed with a bit of a bump. Lucky, I think absentmindedly to myself, he gave me permission to stand at ease.
"A Silver Star?" I croak, throat suddenly dry. "Sir, I don't deserve that. I just did what anyone would in my place. I don't want it."
He looks at me with a surprisingly kind twinkling in his eye. I wasn't expecting that kind of empathy from the man – at least from what I've experienced of him so far. It makes me think that perhaps, in the midst of the anger and grief that’s come over me since Tommy’s death, maybe I’ve misjudged the man…
"Sergeant, I'm not sure how much you remember what you did out there, but trust me – you're a hero."
"I don't think so, sir," I mumble, voice barely audible.
"Trust me, if you hadn't done what you did, your whole company would have died."
"Tommy did, sir," I mumble, tears prickling my eyes as the memory of the friend I've lost comes to the surface of my mind, overpowering everything else going on in my brain.
Surprisingly, the officer sits on the bed next to me, placing a hand on my shoulders. Looking at him through blurred eyes, I see something jump out at me on his uniform that I haven't noticed before – a little silver star. He’s been there, I realize – he’s done things no man should have to, to protect people who will never know. I know, right then and there, that I can trust him.
"Yes, Tommy did," he replies, emotion heavy in his own voice. "And that's going to eat away at you for the rest of your life. Trust me – I know."
Suddenly, seeing the little insignia on the left-hand side of his chest, I know he's telling the truth. He's been there, been in my shoes before.
"But trust me, Mike – you are a hero," he says, punctuating each of the last three words by stabbing his finger into my chest. "What you did up on that hill saved an entire company. They had hundreds of Taliban primed to take the FOB, and you and your partner stopped them. Tommy died so that those men could live."
The little stabbing motions of his finger against my chest are, weirdly, what sends me over the edge, and I break down into tears, Tommy's face the only visible constant in my new blurred reality, a thousand happy memories colliding against the truth of his death. He holds me, not saying another word, just allowing me to sob into his heavily medalled uniform. After a few minutes, I don't know quite how long, I pull myself together, drying my eyes on a tissue pulled from my bedside table.
"Do you want me to sit with you, Mike? I've got nowhere else to be. I've got all day."
"Thank you, sir, but I'd like to be alone – if you don't mind," I reply softly, all antagonism towards the man dissipated.
"You got it, soldier," he says, respectfully touching his head in a caring salute, then pats me on the shoulder, allowing his hand to linger, and leaves the room.
***
I haven't cried in a long time, not since I was a kid. And even then, I'm not sure I ever cried like this, like a floodgate's been opened, and years of pain and emotion stored behind have flooded out in one long, cathartic flow of torment. I forgot how tiring it was – crying. I feel like I've run a marathon, or gone six rounds in the ring.
I think it's the sobbing, the way your stomach clenches and crunches over and over and over. The worst thing about it is there's nothing you can do to stop it, you just have to wait, ride the pain. If you fight it, it's just going to come back, and harder.
I'm wiping away the tears when I see her, and if anything, she looks worse than I do. I smear my face with the back of my hand one last time to hide as much of the evidence as I can, but there's no hiding my red, puffy eyes. She's resting on a desk with her head held in her hands, and I watch as she stands there, unmoving, for a whole minute. I realize that she is in a bad way – and that I need to do something about it. It's not a conscious choice, not really, it's more of a drive, or an instinctual urge. I walk over to her, all thoughts of why I initially wanted to find a nurse – to get my discharge from this hospital sorted out – dashed from my mind.
"You okay?" I ask in what I hope is a consoling tone of voice. The last thing I want to do is make it any worse for her, but I don't trust myself to talk much more, not right now.
I don't think she realizes it's me, not at first anyway, because she stands up ramrod straight, surging back into position like she's being propelled by a taut elastic band. She turns to look at me, her face naturally returning to a professional, detached glaze, but like me, there’s no hiding the puffiness of her eyes.
"You've been crying," she says, looking up at me with soft, wet eyes. My heart breaks, and I don't know whether it's just because I'm emotionally vulnerable right now, after – after the visit – or whether it's because she looks so distraught. I suspect it's the latter. I don't try and hide it.
"I have," I agree. "It's good to cry sometimes, I think," I say, hoping to let her kno
w, maybe too obliquely, that she's got a shoulder to cry on if she needs it. I'm not good at this, though – the emotional stuff, and I don't want to overstep my bounds. At the end of the day I'm just a soldier. I've never tried to be anything else.
Katie takes up my offer. Honestly, I wasn't expecting it. She takes a furtive look around, and my eyes can't help but follow hers. I think she's checking to make sure there's no one else left in the ward, and there isn't. It's getting dark outside, the sky has that heavy shade of grey that hits in the moments before dusk falls, and no one who doesn't have to be here would bother.
Apparently satisfied that we are alone, she collapses into my arms. I'm not expecting it, and I have to brace my shoulder and arm so that the walking stick can share some of the burden. "I'm sorry," she says immediately, realizing from my momentary shudder of pain that she's hurt me, and tries to break away.