Anatomy of a Soldier

by Harry Parker

  He gently moved his head to one side and then swept me down his cheek before rinsing me in the cup again. God, he was glad it hadn’t been worse. They were lucky to have him; he was himself, he could talk, he could see. Unlike some on the other wards. As awful as it was, he thought, they still had him.

  ‘Are you sure I can’t get you anything more to eat?’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Dad, I’m fine.’

  ‘Hold still.’ He flicked me down in short strokes along the top lip.

  ‘Adam had a burger brought in today, but it didn’t make me want one. I think it’s the AmBisome.’ His son looked at the bag of yellow drugs. ‘The doctors say it’s like Domestos.’

  ‘No wonder it makes you feel so shit.’ He pulled me down the other side of the face. ‘How high do you want these sideburns?’

  ‘Not too high.’ His jaw moved below me as he spoke. ‘The doctors say I’ve got to be on it for another week.’

  ‘Stick with it, Tom.’

  He dropped me into the cup and the foam and hairs floated off my blades. He took the towel and dabbed his face dry. ‘Clean as a whistle,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks. It feels good.’ His son raised a hand from below the covers and felt his chin.

  ‘I’d better get going. It’s gone ten,’ he said. He shook me in the cup and left me with the can in a small cupboard by the bed.

  ‘Night, Dad.’

  21

  I am a Camp Cot, Folding. My NSN is 7105-99-383. I was one of the first to arrive at the base. They unloaded me from an ISO container and threw me in a pile with all the others. Around us, an excavator was filling protective walls with rubble and helmeted men erected antennas by a command post. A watchtower was being constructed on top of an old building.

  The camp expanded and a line of tents sprouted along a wall as more men arrived. When helicopters landed, the world turned brown and a thin layer of dust collected on me. The new men were issued kit from the piles and I was picked up and carried to a small room cut into the wall of an old courtyard. A man unfolded me and my canvas stretched taut on my aluminium frame. He attached a dome that held a mosquito net to my four corners. This was the first man I ever supported.

  I was used as a goal. I was blown over by the downdraught of helicopters. My legs sank into the mud when the rains came.

  After a few months he left and another man replaced him. This one stayed longer. During the months he slept on me, he became lighter and his skin more deeply tanned. Time dragged for him and nerves kept him awake towards the end, when he was so close yet couldn’t imagine being safe.

  The next man landed in a helicopter, came into the room and dumped his kit beside me. Then the camp was attacked and he ran out to help. Like the others, his days followed a pattern of shifts, meals and attacks. He pulled on his heavy body armour, day-sack and helmet, and walked out with his rifle and was gone for hours. When he came back he was hot and elated or exhausted.

  Men nudged him in the night and told him it was his turn to man the ops room. He would sit up on me and push his feet into flip-flops, sigh and walk across the dark courtyard.

  He sometimes slept on me during the day, when it was so hot he sweated the shape of his body into my canvas. After he woke, he wrapped a green towel around his waist, filled a red tub and stood in it, pouring water over his head with a mess tin.

  When it became even hotter and the room was an oven, he dragged me out into the courtyard and slept under the stars. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep and hooked earphones in and looked up through the gauze netting at the sky.

  There was another bed like me in the room. His friend slept in that one. When their shifts overlapped, they chatted and laughed, read their post to each other and shared food from parcels. Once he returned and two camel spiders had been dropped on top of me and were crawling over his sleeping bag. He told his friend how funny he was and said he’d get him back.

  In the room around me, cardboard boxes were stacked and ripped open. The men delved into them and chose foil packets they took away to eat.

  He sat on me and stripped his rifle down to clean it and the gas parts left oil marks on me. He checked and replenished his ammunition. Sometimes he zipped the net closed to make me his private space. He lay on his sleeping bag with a head torch on and read a book.

  *

  One night, after he had been busy all day and his skin was grimy and he was too exhausted to wash, he removed his combat boots and socks and let his white feet expand and cool on me. He thought about the patrol he’d just finished as he looked up at the endless stars.

  He wondered if his men could have outflanked them and he relived pulling the trigger and the puffs as his rounds had slammed into the compound in the distance. The sound of metal travelling through the air filled his head again: the fizzing of ricochets; everyone gasping for breath after he’d sprinted and thrown himself into cover.

  He thought about what he’d said on the radio, how he’d commanded his platoon, how he’d described the situation to Zero. He could still hear his men’s shouts amidst all the confusion. He remembered crouching in the ditch and trying to work out what was happening, trying to piece the battle together. The enemy had disappeared. He should have followed and caught them but he chose to be cautious since air support was on its way.

  He put his hands under his head and against me. There was still dirt between his fingers.

  He couldn’t stop it all going around in his head. It had been a chance to be bold, to close and kill – but they’d disappeared into the fields and trees among the confusing compounds. He imagined himself being brave among the tight walls and neutralising them at close quarters, leading his men relentlessly forward.

  He thought of the jet flying over and the thrill as it disintegrated the wall and one of his men whooping from along the ditch. He replayed everything as he should have fought it, decisively and without hesitation. He promised himself that next time he would.

  And then these thoughts merged into details of tomorrow’s mission. And he was back out in the network of fields, moving between other houses and locals, and he tried to decide how best he should clear the area. He had so little time to prepare; he’d have to give orders early and his men were exhausted already. He was overwhelmed by it and he reached for his alarm clock to set it an hour earlier. And then he remembered another thing he should tell them about the mission and the planning went on and on in his head.

  And as often happened with the men that slept on me, he remembered a place far away that didn’t involve any of this. He was sitting on the lawn at his parents’ house in the cool sunlight, and the dog was trying to lick him as he laughed and played with it.

  Then he was heading into town and he thought of a girl. She wasn’t right for him, but somehow, out here, she seemed to be. And he recalled other girls, some that he’d only glanced at, or shyly said hello to over loud music in a club. Some he’d blown it with. He wondered if they were right. Did any of them think about him out here? He hoped so. And he wished he was with one of them.

  Finally he slept. It was a deep sleep of fatigue. He hardly moved all night but his ribcage expanded and contracted on me and he sweated. A buzzing mosquito, trapped inside the net, landed to extend its proboscis into him and suck blood up into its abdomen.

  The stars twisted across the sky. Someone walked by in the dark and woke up the man in the camp bed next to us. He got dressed and went to keep watch. And we were alone in the courtyard.

  *

  He was already waking before his alarm clock rang. It was the brightening sky that made him turn over on me, and the chill that made him pull his sleeping bag up. It was a half-conscious bliss, being elsewhere, and the day ahead didn’t exist, only dreams of home that slowly corroded as he woke and realised he was lying on me, inside the netting, and a different sun was rising above him.

  He coveted it: the longing to be back where he was safe and didn’t have any responsibility and wasn’t trained to do any of this. Where he didn
’t have to lead anyone out of the gate again. He wished he didn’t have to. It was his private moment of cowardice before the day became real. He let it fester and was embarrassed, even though no one would ever know.

  He hardened himself against it and it was gone, suppressed within him. He unzipped the net and swung his legs out, itched his thigh and left to wash himself and prep his gear, to take his men out there beyond the walls and try to make a difference.

  *

  The rhythm of shifts, patrols and downtime went on unbroken and became normal for him. But it did end. It ended before it should have, after he’d encased himself in armour, picked up his rifle and walked away from me one evening.

  He never returned. Someone else came and cleared all his belongings from around me. They took the sleeping bag that smelt of him and packed it with everything else into a cardboard box. The man in the other bed was still there and he felt the absence.

  After a few weeks, another man arrived to take his place and the rhythm continued. When he left, others came and I supported them one after the other. They were excited at first, apprehensive as they struggled to understand, sometimes disillusioned or resigned and always superstitious in the weeks before they were replaced.

  Much later, after they’d gone and the sun had bleached my cloth, other men started to use me. They spoke another language and their uniform was different and they didn’t think of this as a distant country.

  22

  I was in a pack of fifty in a drawer. A man opened it and lifted me and six others out onto the table. He turned on the machine, which flashed, whirred and clunked. He sat and looked at a screen and pressed the trackpad. Then he slid us into the guides of the tray.

  Rollers caught the first of us and pulled it down into the machine and the cartridge jerked across its surface. This happened four times and then I was at the top. The rollers dragged me in and I was under the printer head as it swept across me.

  It propelled tiny jets of ink onto my surface, forced out of the cartridge by superheated explosions. It fired millions of these from its microscopic nozzles in spurts of primary colour that grouped to form an image on me. At first it was hard to know as I lurched down and each new strip appeared on me, but then I was ejected into the out-tray.

  The ink dried quickly on my glossy surface. I was a photo now. The man sitting at the desk and switching off the printer was in me, dancing in a dark room with lights that had flared around the lens of the camera that had taken me. In me he looked younger. There was another man with him. They both were dancing and smiling at each other.

  He pushed me together with the other photos, looked at his watch and walked out of the building to a car. He laid me on the passenger seat with his phone and started the ignition.

  He drove quickly. He was worried about how he’d react when he saw his friend. He’d been dreading it. He had heard from his friend’s brother that it was bad, that Tom had now lost the other one as well. He wondered if Tom would still be like he was before, when they were best mates. He looked down at me and remembered the night I was taken. He smiled. God, he’d been a dick that night. They both had – she wasn’t worth it – and they’d hugged and made up in the morning.

  He thought of training; perhaps he should’ve printed one of them together during training. It didn’t matter. He hoped I’d cheer him up.

  It was bright, so he put on sunglasses and turned up the radio.

  *

  He was apprehensive as he walked into the hospital, holding me in his hand. He asked for directions at a desk and went down more corridors. He hated the smell of hospitals.

  A woman called out to him and he hugged her. She explained that visiting hours hadn’t started yet, so they went to a chrome canteen and queued for a coffee. When she opened a red handbag he insisted on paying. He didn’t like coffee but drank one with her anyway.

  She told him how it was all going. She looked tired, he thought. He showed her me across the metal table and she smiled, and said what a good picture I was, but didn’t look properly. He told her again that he would do anything they needed. He’d been wonderful for Tom, she said, he was really looking forward to the visit. But she had to go now: half the extended family was coming today and she needed to control them. Tom found visitors quite trying.

  He wondered if Tom would find his visit trying.

  And then he was in the ward. A nurse smiled and led him past bays that were already filling with visitors. He saw the wounded. He knew they were soldiers, like him; he could tell by the way they looked and joked. He thought about the place that had damaged them; he would have to go back there soon.

  The nurse pointed to the corner where Tom was sitting in a bed by a window. He looked over and smiled and then grinned.

  Tom grinned back.

  It was the other man printed on me but he was so thin and fragile that it didn’t look like he’d be able to dance now.

  He wanted to give him a hug but he was scared of damaging him; his skinny arms and neck made his head seem skull-like. So he sat down next to him. ‘Hello, mate,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, mucker. It’s good to see you,’ Tom said. He squeezed a rubber ball in one hand. The other hand was under the blanket. He had the bed sheet up to his waist. His top half was bare and he was sweating.

  ‘Hot in here, then, or are you just trying to trap one of the nurses with your hunky body?’

  Tom smiled and glanced over at the nurses’ station. ‘Haven’t fallen in love with any of them yet. I get a bit of a fever with the anti-fungal drug they have me on,’ he said, pointing at a yellow bag that hung from a hook. ‘It makes me feel pretty awful actually.’

  ‘Yeah, your mum said. I just had a coffee with her.’

  ‘How did you think she was?’

  ‘Seemed fine, mate. But what do you expect? You’ve really given her a bit of a nightmare, haven’t you?’ He smiled. He didn’t want to turn away from his friend’s face but he could sense the gap where his legs should have been.

  ‘Do you want to see?’ Tom said. He’d noticed his discomfort.

  ‘No, don’t worry.’

  ‘It’s no problem. Here, look.’ He leant forward with a grunt and drew the sheet back. ‘This one was the traumatic amputation during the incident.’ The left leg stopped below the knee. It was covered in plastic and swollen under the dressing. A tube snaked out from under the plastic. ‘The pipe there pulls all the gunk out of the wound. It’s meant to promote healing and prevent infection.’ Tom nodded at a machine hanging by the bed next to a bag of urine. ‘That thing sucks it out. See the canister of blood and pus?’

  ‘Nice, mate.’

  ‘Yup. And this one they had to amputate a couple of weeks ago. It was badly infected. That’s why I’m still on this anti-fungal treatment.’ He placed his good hand on a mass of white bandages that ended above the knee.

  ‘We heard all about it, mate. You were the talk of the town.’ He stared at it and the pipes that led up from his groin. There was a whiff of antiseptic.

  They chatted. He could tell his friend was weak and supported by medication. His mum had hinted as much. She’d said he could be confused but was fighting hard and sometimes seemed surprisingly lucid.

  *

  But he was still Tom and asked questions about outside. He wanted to know all about his pre-deployment training and his girlfriend, and what everyone had been up to. So he told him about a party and said they’d all asked after him. They talked for an hour and when Tom started to look tired he said he’d better be off. He didn’t want to incur the wrath of his mum.

  ‘Please stay, mate,’ Tom said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘Just a bit then. Hey, I brought you these.’ He held me up and handed him the pile I was in. I was in Tom’s hand and he shuffled through us slowly, resting each on his stomach. He picked me up and paused.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ Tom said but his voice caught.

  ‘What’s up, mucker? Are you okay?’

  ‘Nothin
g. Could you pull the curtain, please,’ Tom said quietly and twisted away. I bent under his thumb as he held me.

  ‘Sorry, mate. I thought …’ He stood and pulled the curtain whooshing around on its rail. It blocked out the laughing and chatting of the other visitors.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Tom said. He tried to look away, embarrassed, and his eyes filled and glistened.

  ‘I’m really sorry, mate.’ He sat back down next to the bed and clasped his hands in front of him. ‘I thought they might make you remember better times.’

  ‘They do, mate. They do. Thank you.’ He had turned his head away and glanced down at me as a tear trickled across the bridge of his nose and dripped onto the sheets. ‘It’s just hard,’ he said. ‘And I’m stuck in here with all these people helping me that I never wanted to meet. I didn’t want their help. I’m stuck in this fucking bed.’ His voice nearly broke and he shook silently.

  ‘Sorry, buddy. I should’ve thought it through.’

  ‘It’s fine, mucker. I suppose I hadn’t been forced to think about it yet, that’s all. This is all so unreal, mate. It’s not me, this broken body, it’s just not me. Not yet.’ Tom turned back to his friend. There were wet tracks down his face. He smiled. ‘I’m the bloke in this photo – dancing. I’m a runner, a soldier …’ and his voice faded and the smile crumpled into a sob. ‘Not this cripple,’ he managed to say and gestured down the bed.

  ‘Mate, you’re no cripple.’ He rested his hand on his friend’s bandaged arm.