Anatomy of a Soldier

by Harry Parker

  They worked on your left stump, cleaning away the earth and debris that had been blown into you. They bent all their concentration on you and slowly you were brought back from the edge. You were not a whole to them, just a wound to be closed or a level on a screen to monitor or a bag of blood to change.

  A surgeon pulled away from you and blinked in the lights and looked around at the team. ‘Okay. He’s more stable. Bleeding now stemmed in both legs,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave the left leg traumatic amputation as is for now. But I’m worried about the exposed femoral in the right thigh. I will work on that with Lisa. Peter, are you happy with his status?’

  ‘Yes, Gill.’

  ‘Okay. Can you patch up the lesions on the arms? I also want to do exploratory on that left forearm wound. I think it could’ve caused nerve damage. If you’re happy to make a start with that as well.’ She looked at the next man. ‘Tim, I think we’re going to have to cut that finger away. And then sew it up if you don’t mind. That’s the least of his problems.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel,’ he said and went to rescrub his hands.

  ‘Once that’s all done I want to have another look at his groin. I think we’ll probably have to do an orchiectomy and I want to get it right – he’s been extremely lucky in that department.’

  *

  After a few hours they were less worried. People talked calmly as surgeons stretched their backs. Finally, the woman made notes on a clipboard and two people administered drugs.

  I was still in you, still breathing for you. Your chest rose and fell as the mix of gases passed through me and down into you. Your arms and lower body were covered in white plastic bandages and protruding pipes that pulled the discharge from your wounds. Yellow iodine discoloured your skin and black ink showed below dressings where lines had been drawn. A blue sheet covered you.

  You were moved to a room with other men who also had tubes, like me, that held their gormless mouths open. None of them were conscious. They were still, apart from the rise and fall of their chests dictated by machines. It was dark in the room, an air-conditioning unit rumbled in the corner and monitors flashed above each body. The bodies were disfigured, too, and did not fill the beds as they should. The green blankets were flat where limbs should have been.

  Nurses moved between the beds and prepped them for transit. Once a machine beeped and flashed red and nurses came and then more people and the machine continued to sound a single note. A crash cart was called for. They were frantic, then frustrated and finally desolate. The bed was wheeled out and never came back.

  They were pleased with how you were doing. They changed your drug dosage but kept you sedated and moved you to another room, ready for transit. The nurses who looked after you wrote in your logbook and felt strongly about you, even though they had never met you.

  A man wearing a combat uniform came in, a green beret folded in his hand. He was shocked by the misshapen bodies in the beds lined against the wall and the stillness of them. He sat by you and said a few words but was self-conscious. He patted your hand before he left. ‘Stay strong, mate,’ he said quietly.

  Later, a team of doctors and nurses arrived and stood behind each bed, flicking through clipboards and looking at X-rays. They moved around the room until they stood over you.

  ‘Stable enough for transit. He should stay sedated.’

  ‘We must get him back. The lesions on the right leg need plastics soon.’

  ‘Let’s do another set of bloods before he goes. And increase his sedation for the flight.’

  ‘Okay, get him on the flight tonight. Air Support Team Bravo, I think. That’ll give them two unconscious and three walking.’

  They moved to the next bed. One remained and took readings from the machines above you. She moved a dial on the mechanical ventilator and the mix of gases that passed through me changed. She pressed a vial onto a cannula that hung from your wrist and filled it with blood. It wasn’t yours but a combination from eight different people.

  *

  That night you were prepped for transit. Nurses and doctors came and talked through your injuries. They told the transit team everything they could, each item adding to your fragility and the risk of getting you home. They set about you with practised efficiency. My end was pulled from the mechanical ventilator and pushed into a portable unit. They stood over you and nurses said, ‘On three: one, two, slide,’ under their breaths as they carefully moved you across to a new bed.

  The new team wheeled you out through a blue corridor, towards double doors. They were urgent and professional and cared only about the next ten hours: making sure they could get you to safety and hand you over to another team that could do more than just keep you alive.

  We left the air-conditioned building and were wheeled to an ambulance through the desert dusk. We drove for a few minutes and the nurse next to us monitored the machines and checked your levels. When we stopped the rear doors opened and we were pulled out below the bright rectangular opening of an aircraft. Its engines whistled and lights pulsed on each wing. The air was buffeted by the warming jets and moved the fine hair on your forehead. They pushed us up the ramp into the rear of the fuselage and secured your bed to anchor points on the floor.

  Other stretchers came and were strapped down. Then men on crutches, or with bandaged arms or a dressing over an eye, boarded the aircraft and were helped by medics into seats near the front. The whine of the engines was muted as the rear door lifted shut. The transit team moved between the beds checking the sedation and outputs were acceptable. The aircraft taxied and took off.

  You travelled four thousand miles but didn’t need to think and I was part of a system of tubes, valves, pressure gauges and screens, powered by microchips and overseen by people who supported your life.

  The aircraft landed and the rear door lowered.

  The tarmac was wet and streaked with vertical reflections; some flashed blue and red from a line of vehicles that waited. It was much colder. Fluorescent jackets glowed as people ran across to the rear door. The wheels of the stretcher skittered on the ground as the team jogged with us to the back of an ambulance. The falling rain was foreshortened to white rods against the stone sky. They pulled us into the ambulance and doors were closed.

  Blue flashed through the window as we drove. Soon the vehicle slowed and started to turn corners, yellow streetlights now in the window. The siren changed pace and tone and we swayed from side to side and then accelerated again.

  The siren was switched off and we stopped. Doors opened and banged shut. There was a shout and then we were pulled out and the stretcher’s wheels dropped down below us and we were taken into a new building, through glass doors that slid apart automatically, and down cream corridors with safety notices and lists of departments. As we were pushed on the lists changed but we always headed for the intensive care unit, swinging around corners until a man tapped a code into a pad and frosted glass doors, imprinted with ICU, opened. We stopped alongside a bed.

  The reception party was waiting there and they plugged you into a new set of pipes, wires and tubes. Machines blinked on and displayed your output and I was pressed into a new ventilator.

  And then the air support team walked away from us. They looked tired. One put his arm around another and smiled as they left through the sliding doors.

  *

  They decided to operate and we were taken into a theatre with white tiled walls. They opened the dressings and dirt and stones fell out of your wounds onto the table. They debrided your flesh, pulling away the dead and dying parts that we could not sustain. They cleaned up infected areas and sent bloods away. Plastic surgeons made assessments and worked on you.

  After four hours they wheeled us back to the ICU. Nurses cleaned you again. Your skin had yellowed and your head rested at an unnatural angle.

  Once the nurses were happy, the glass doors opened and a doctor brought in a man and a woman who were not wearing medical clothing. They were ushered across the ward until they stood
next to our bed. The man looked down at us with determination. The woman clutched a red handbag and looked drained and shocked. The man’s arm held her firmly to his side and he pressed her tighter. The doctor started to talk about you and introduced them to the team who looked after you.

  They stayed for a long time – saying little – but the doctor came back and told them they should really get some sleep. We were left alone.

  They returned many times and sat by you and waited. The woman would steal a chance to touch your hand when no one was looking, worried she was doing something that was wrong or might damage you. Often they would watch us being wheeled away to the operating room. They felt helpless. They were always there when we came back.

  *

  Seven days and four thousand miles after I had been inserted into you, you changed. They weren’t expecting it but your eyes flickered and your tongue started to push against me as you gagged around my pipe. You tried to force me out and were afraid you were drowning. The nurses hurried over as your heart rushed in sudden panic and the machines above alarmed.

  Doctors were called in to examine you. My balloon cuff was deflated and they gently pulled me out of you. You were mumbling and confused as I passed your teeth. I was left on a table and the man and woman were brought back in to be with you. She held your hand.

  You recognised her and your relationship to them both.

  A nurse picked me up, pushed the foot pedal of a bin and threw me into a yellow surgical waste bag.

  I was no longer part of you.

  6

  I am an olive-green thirty-litre day-sack. BA5799 bought me from a surplus store in a garrison town while he was still in training. During my first exercise he tried to get me dirty so I no longer looked new but battered and experienced – not how he felt but how he wished he did.

  He packed me countless times with radios, blank and live ammunition, warm clothes and bladders of water, with rations that he pushed down my sides. Everything had a place and was individually waterproofed. He used me as a seat on cold wet training areas. He crawled up streams and fired his rifle into trenches and men pretended to be dead.

  He stuffed me with metal weights that were wrapped in towels and ran out over the hills as I slapped up and down against his back.

  He wrote his number on me in black ink that faded as we waited to be deployed. Again, I was on cold wet training areas and he attacked positions on small grassy hillocks while people in red raincoats walked past with their dogs. He was killed and wounded a number of times and joked with the other men as he was carried through the casualty evacuation chain. He drank tea until exercise control told him he was alive again. Once a man in a luminous vest shouted, ‘You’re dead, sir.’ He was annoyed to be out of the game so early and threw me down in the gorse in frustration.

  We spent more time training. And then his room started to fill with new equipment and he named it all with a marker and laid it out across the floor. He redrew BA5799 over the faded black lines on me.

  One morning he put into my top pocket things that could take his mind off what was ahead: a book, his iPod, along with his documents and passport. He dropped his dog tags over his head and folded a beret, pushed it in and zipped me closed. We left the camp on a bus while it was still dark and boarded a plane.

  *

  When the plane landed we were part of a single file of men, all carrying day-sacks, that extended down the steps onto a wide apron. It was hot and his shirt soon dampened next to me. We walked through a city built on a grid with prefabricated windowless buildings and tents, refuelling dumps and blast protection walls, dog cages and fire points. Heavy vehicles rumbled past and small groups of soldiers strolled back to their accommodation, their uniforms sun-bleached and their hair long.

  We were ushered into a hangar filled with bunk beds. Instructions were shouted and everyone filed down the rows to find a bed. The high ceiling hummed with the noise of three hundred people. BA5799 chose a bed and slept.

  During the next few days he waited in queues to collect equipment. He sat in briefings about the place we had come to and what to expect and what not to get bitten by. He went to the cookhouse and ate from plastic plates and I was put on the ground between his legs. He sat with a small group of men, took a notebook and pen from my top pocket and listened as a man gave orders and they discussed the coming days.

  Then he went back to the hangar and pushed me under his bed and started to make adjustments to his kit.

  A man on the bunk above rolled over, pulled earphones out and watched. ‘You all right, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Not too bad, thanks. How’s things, Rifleman Plunkett? Aren’t you meant to be at the welfare briefing?’

  ‘Snipers are doing it with A Company.’

  ‘How did your ranges go today?’

  ‘All good. Just want to get out there now. Apparently the lot we’re taking over from are having a pretty rough time,’ the man said.

  ‘I’m actually off tonight,’ BA5799 told him. ‘I’m going forward to do the company handover with a few of the command team.’

  ‘Do you know when the rest of us are coming forward?’

  ‘Nothing confirmed yet. It looks like the relief in place will start in five or six days. The plan is for half the company to go out by heli and the rest by road move. It depends on the amount of lift available,’ BA5799 said.

  ‘Hope I go by heli. Road convoy would be a rubbish way to start the tour.’

  ‘I’ve heard it can take over twenty hours.’

  He continued to repack his gear and taped around the rim of his helmet. Then he pulled open a black tourniquet from a plastic bag. He checked it and wrote BA5799 O POS on it before slipping it into his left thigh pocket.

  Next he took six small cardboard boxes and split them open. Copper-coloured cylinders clinked onto the plastic-covered mattress and he lined them up in rows of ten and then thirty. Some were tipped with red phosphorus and he added these one in every five. He pulled six magazines from his grip and started to fill them. He pushed the rounds through the jaws of the magazine with his thumb; he rolled each one to make sure it was seated correctly, depressing the spring until the magazine was full.

  A voice shouted across the hangar.

  ‘Listen in, everybody. The advance party is leaving now. Chopper’s early and the colonel wants you out there. Quick as you can. We need you at the heliport in five minutes.’ The man was walking along the rows of bunk beds. ‘That means you, boss. Does anyone know where Sergeant Collins is?’

  ‘No idea,’ BA5799 said and swore under his breath, then he started to fumble with his kit. He put the loose bullets in his beret and rolled it before stuffing it into my top pocket. He was agitated, his ritual interrupted. He pulled on his body armour and swore again as he dropped a magazine that clattered on the floor.

  The man slid down from the bunk above to help him. He was topless and his arms were tattooed with a regimental cap badge. They closed zips, stuffed his sleeping bag under the lid of his Bergen and clipped it shut before the man lifted it onto BA5799’s back.

  ‘Thanks, Rifleman Plunkett,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make sure the CQ gets your grip and it comes forward, boss.’

  ‘I don’t even know if I’ve got everything I need,’ BA5799 said and patted his side pouches.

  ‘You’ll be all right, sir – this is all you’ll need for now,’ he said, grinning and passing him the rifle. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Damn, where are my goggles? I’ll need them for the heli.’

  ‘Here, take mine. I’ll just go diffy a pair,’ he said and reached into the side of his own Bergen.

  ‘Cheers, Plunks. See you on the other side.’

  BA5799 walked out of the hangar and stepped into a Land Rover, holding his rifle in one hand and me in the other. The engine ticked over until two other men joined us. Once they were both in and their kit was piled on top of me, the door slammed shut and we drove back towards the airport.

  We e
ntered the heliport, dismounted and walked to a Portakabin that was surrounded by T-walls of concrete and covered by a dome of mortar protection. Men stood around a bin smoking. BA5799 placed his Bergen with the others.

  ‘Where to?’ a man with a clipboard asked.

  ‘Three for Patrol Base 43 – Barnes, Webb and Dale,’ BA5799 said.

  ‘Collins not with you? Says here there are four for PB43.’

  ‘Sergeant Collins is on his way – we weren’t expecting the chopper to be leaving so soon. We’ve only just been told.’

  ‘Well the airframe’s been delayed. He might be lucky if he gets here soon,’ the man said and made a note on his clipboard.

  *

  They waited on benches. It was hot and several men slept. Others arrived and the line of Bergens lengthened. A man appeared, flustered, and said he’d been on the phone with his wife and had no idea. They told him the heli had been delayed and it was just another hurry-up-and-wait. I was between BA5799’s legs and he took the beret from my pocket and continued to fill his magazines with the rounds. Helicopters churned the air and hot engines distorted the ground crews as they pulled out refuelling pipes. They huddled away when the aircraft lifted again into the steel sky.

  The man with the clipboard stepped out of the cabin. ‘Right, we’ve got an airframe in ten minutes. PB43 first and then District Centre – I need the bags and pax for PB43 on last. Are you Sergeant Collins?’ he said to the man next to BA5799. ‘You made it then. You four at the back and get off as quick as you can – nobody likes waiting around at PB43, it’s one of our hottest HLSes at the moment. Pilots are a bit twitchy about it.’

  BA5799 extended my straps, pulled me over his body armour and put his helmet on. Men prepared their kit, stubbed out cigarettes and readjusted their Bergens.

  The helicopter floated down onto the concrete and its two rotors flattened. A row of soldiers disembarked from the rear, carrying their bags towards the reception area. Two attack helicopters landed beyond and were refuelled.