Anatomy of a Soldier

by Harry Parker

  ‘Well done,’ she said.

  ‘That was close,’ the man who had made me added. ‘You’re already getting the hang of it, though. It’s good stuff, Tom.’

  We shuffled back along the bars to the chair and you carefully lowered yourself into it.

  The man ducked back under the bars and pushed his Allen key into one of my bolts and you felt it twist through me. ‘I just want to turn your foot out a bit,’ he said and loosened a bolt and then another. He adjusted my foot.

  ‘Thanks,’ you said. ‘That looks better.’

  ‘How did everything else feel?’ he asked.

  ‘It slightly feels like I’m falling over the front of the foot, if that makes any sense?’

  ‘Okay, try this.’ He rotated another of my bolts and the toe of my foot dropped.

  ‘The above-knee side should be fine at the moment. We’ve got it on the most stable settings. As you get better we can make it a bit more dynamic.’

  You stood again and they watched you walk slowly up and down the bars. She told you not to overdo it but you wanted to keep going. Once you didn’t lift me high enough and I scuffed the floor and nearly tripped you over. She told you to concentrate on taking evenly spaced steps, to keep your back straight and think about engaging the muscles in your bottom.

  Your knee started to shake in me and you sweated as your back ached and you felt dizzy. You saw how red your face was in the mirror. The pain that had been masked by concentration started to swell and you collapsed in your chair and said you’d had enough.

  She sat on a stool next to you. ‘Well done, Tom. A good start. When do you next go home?’

  ‘End of the week,’ you said, then pulled out a piece of paper and showed it to her.

  ‘Great, we’ve got three more sessions. Looks like you’re almost ready to come out of the bars. Then you can take them home and practise.’

  ‘It was great to be upright. It made me feel so much more human.’

  You pulled off the other leg and then me and propped us against the wall. The relief from the pressure throbbed painfully and you rubbed your hand up and down your thigh and removed the foam insert from your stump. Underneath, the bottom of the sock was bright red against the white cloth.

  ‘Blimey,’ she said and looked down at the end of the stump as a drip of blood fell onto the carpet. ‘Did you feel that happening?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ you said. ‘I don’t have much feeling at the end of the stump.’

  ‘Take off the sock and let’s have a look. I’ll just get a bag.’

  You peeled the sock off your knee and the sodden end flopped off your skin. Blood had flattened your hairs and squelched them up around the stump. ‘Shit. That’s not good, is it?’ you said.

  ‘Mike, you’d better come and look at this.’ She held out a plastic bag and you dropped the sock into it. She knelt in front and looked at your stump. ‘It’s bled quite a lot.’

  ‘What do you think?’ you said. ‘It’s the wound that’s taken ages to heal, but I thought it was nearly there. Seems to have opened up again. Will it stop me from walking?’

  ‘I’ll mark where it is on the inside of the socket,’ the man said, ‘and we’ll see if we can make a bit of room to accommodate the area.’

  He picked me up and ran his hand down the inside of me, then took a ruler and measured the position of a dome of blood that was slowly forming into a new drip on the front of your stump. He held a ruler in me and drew a round circle with a blue marker. ‘It’s about there,’ he said. ‘I reckon if I make a space, it’ll allow more room for the scarring.’

  He took me to the workshop again and ground down my surface to create a cavity that would keep me from pressing too hard against your wounds. And then he carried me back to you.

  ‘Don’t let it get you down, Tom,’ she was saying. ‘That’s pretty normal. These things take time, and a little bleeding can actually improve healing in the long term.’

  ‘So I can stay at it,’ you said.

  ‘Of course. We’ll keep an eye on it. You’ll need to be careful because you can’t feel it, but it’s only surface scarring that’s been damaged.’

  ‘I made some space in the socket,’ he said, handing me to you.

  You ran your hand over my plastic and the new gap he’d carved out. ‘Thanks, Mike.’

  ‘Best get that seen to upstairs, Tom. One of the nurses will cover it for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Kat. See you tomorrow,’ you said.

  *

  I was left next to my pair, propped against the wall with all the other legs. You came back the next morning and sat on the bed and looked at me across the room. You were tired and ached. You felt around your stump at the scab that had formed over night. You’d been healing so well and I’d opened you up again to the elements and the chance of infection. You worried about regressing.

  She walked in and rubbed alcohol gel on her hands from a dispenser on the wall. ‘Hi, Tom. How did you sleep?’

  ‘Bit stiff this morning. I can definitely feel it in my back.’

  ‘You’ve spent the last ten weeks in bed and a wheelchair, so your body will take some time to adjust,’ she said. ‘Right, let’s get them on.’

  You pulled me on and hoped I wouldn’t damage you again. You walked me along the bars and managed a few steps without holding on. She handed you two black walking sticks that wobbled under the pressure you leant through them. She told you to come out of the bars and you shuffled a slow circuit of the room, concentrating all the time on controlling me. And then you felt a wetness in me and around the skin of your stump. It was cold and even though it didn’t hurt, you knew I was pressing in against the scab and making you bleed again. You tried to ignore it, shuffling on as she gave instructions.

  *

  They were pleased with how you’d united with me. The next weekend they let you take me home and told you to practise each day. You showed me to your family and described all my various parts. They were happy for you and saw your excitement. They said how amazing I was, but you didn’t put me on.

  You lay on a bed that was downstairs and stared at me propped against the sofa, thinking how unfair it was that for you to progress, I had to damage you. You looked down at the scab that was so small on your stump but caused so much anxiety. What if it became infected and you had to go back to hospital? You couldn’t bear to be a broken body in hospital again with them all looking down at you. You rolled over and ignored me.

  When you got back to the centre she asked how much you’d used me at home. You lied to her. She told you to put me on again and during the following weeks you improved. The feeling of achievement and progress started to overcome the anxiety. There were others at the centre and you wanted to be the best, measuring yourself against them and sacrificing your stump to be quicker and more nimble.

  Each time you sat down to remove me, you hoped it would be all right but knew it wouldn’t. I always damaged you and you despised me as you prodded the gunky scab and the blood that had soaked the sock again.

  But I was too addictive, we went quicker and farther and you kept coming back for more. You walked across a room and you realised you no longer had to think about each action of swinging me forward. It felt like I was part of you.

  We fell, as we always did whenever you had a burst of confidence, and I twisted below you and collapsed to the floor. Each time you reacted with a lifetime of learnt experience and your stump jolted inside me as your brain braced your remembered foot out. I sheered away from you, pulling across your stump to an unnatural angle, and then you were in a heap with me bent painfully below you. She was there to help you up.

  You went home again and did use me. We staggered through the dead leaves of the garden in slow loops, sweat darkening your T-shirt. Your family watched us out of a window, you bent over the sticks and me kicking up the leaves, and it made them happy. But they hated the damage I did to you even more than you did.

  We went back to the centre and it snowed. Yo
u decided not to get into your wheelchair one morning and you slid your stump down into me from your bed and walked out of the ward. The automatic doors swung open and you went into the physiotherapy department.

  ‘No chair, Tom?’ she said.

  ‘Morning, Kat.’

  ‘Take a seat, I’ll be with you in a mo.’

  You sat on a treatment table and felt proud of the freedom I’d given you.

  ‘Where’s your other stick?’ she said as she walked back over.

  ‘Binned it,’ you said. ‘Thought it was a little geriatric. One stick can be carried with a touch of flair.’ You spun the black stick through your fingers, lost control and just managed to catch it before it hit her.

  ‘All right, steady,’ she said, shielding herself from the rotating stick. ‘We give you two for a reason, Tom. It makes you stable while you learn, keeps you balanced.’

  ‘It’s fine, really. I feel ready.’

  ‘Well, it’s good you’re feeling so confident. I thought we could do a few full flights of stairs today.’

  ‘Great, gravity-assisted work at last,’ you said as you followed her out.

  We were at the top of the stairs. You dropped me onto the first step and started to place your other leg down but it was so steep you thought you were going to fall. The right leg caught next to me and began to bend too early. You lost control and snatched at the banister.

  ‘Don’t lean back,’ she said. ‘It’s like skiing. You’ll have more control if you stay above the legs.’

  ‘If it’s like skiing, this is definitely a black run,’ you said, pushing yourself away from the banister and positioning me in the centre of the step.

  ‘Well there aren’t any blue runs, I’m afraid.’

  You dropped me down again and jarred into me. I was bending – we were going down too quickly and you jolted through me again and again. Then you leant back away from the fall and the knee buckled out and I twisted. You gasped and grabbed for the handrail.

  ‘Steady, Tom, steady. Hold it there,’ she said.

  You were sitting down on a step.

  She sat down beside you. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You really do need to lean forward. It will give you more control and keep you better positioned for the next step. I know it feels strange,’ she said. ‘But the knee joint needs to clear the previous step and you’ll get better resistance from the hydraulics. Watch,’ she said and walked down past you, exaggerating the placement of each foot.

  You sat on the step with your hands on your hips. You try bloody leaning forward, you thought. It’s easy to do that with real legs, you try doing it with prosthetics. How the hell do you know what it’s like? And you were about to tell her this but then stood up and descended more slowly, trying to lean forward.

  It was exhausting and you hauled us back up the stairs and descended again. She made you do it until you were breathless and I was so full of a mix of sweat and blood that I started to slip off you. She said you’d done well, and you used your wheelchair for the rest of the day.

  *

  You improved on me but you became thinner. The pressure I exerted on you, and the weight you lost from the energy I used, made your stump shrink. I could no longer support you properly and you jarred painfully into the bottom of my socket. After one session, when you told her it was unusually sore, you took me off and she saw that your stump was purple. She took us back to the man who had made me.

  I rested next to you as he wrapped plaster strips around your stump and made a new cast for what would become my replacement. That was the beginning of the end of me. Slowly you outgrew all my parts and the man switched them over until I only existed as separate components in a cupboard and you’d progressed to a high-activity leg and a carbon-fibre socket.

  33

  I was at twenty thousand feet and had been airborne for five hours. I am an unmanned aerial vehicle. I cruised at 165 knots and the wind howled around me. A thermal buffeted me, my aileron twitched and I levelled out in a holding pattern above a grid I’d been sent to because the troops below were in contact. I was there to support them. I had already dropped that afternoon in the north, where other soldiers had needed me.

  The ground was pale through the thick atmosphere but the sensor mounted on my bulbous nose could detect through it, magnifying heat signatures into a monotone image I transmitted to my operators. One had just started his shift and had a can of Coke beside my control panels.

  I am a communications platform and information bounced through me. The excited soldiers below sent radio signals. I transmitted them on to a satellite above that in turn rebroadcast them to the dish next to the air-conditioned cabin of my ground control station.

  My sensor registered the light shapes of the soldiers lined up by a wall and the white heat that splashed from their weapons. They sent a message through me that indicated the enemy’s location. After the 1.5 seconds it took for a command to arrive from the control station, my gyroscopically stabilised sensor rotated away from the soldiers and tracked across the grey lines of the fields and cool black channels of water. It settled over a square and the V of a dark shadow. And then my magnification flicked out to show a wider area and the square was one among a patchwork of grey and white walls.

  It flicked back in and I circled above and then saw their thermal shapes. Heat streaked off the walls around them. My controller told the soldiers on the ground that he had positively identified the enemy. There were two signatures and I sensed another two as I arced around. He said he’d keep eyes on and the silent battle continued below.

  My controller sent me an instruction and the numbers on my readout tumbled as I descended to 7,550 feet. He switched my sensor to white-hot, inverting my image, and now the little figures by the wall showed as black shapes. This wasn’t as clear so he switched it back.

  A flash of white streaked across my image and then one of the small ghostly figures was flat on the ground. My sensor-operator sent a message that an RPG had been fired and it looked like an insurgent was down. I banked around the area and my sensor zoomed out again and I could see the enemy in relation to the soldiers who needed me. Then I flicked back in and the prone figure was joined by another who pulled him into a dark shadow. And they were all there, huddled in a white blob.

  My controllers were restless and one calmly asked the soldiers if they wanted me to engage. They told him to wait and their message was distorted by the background sound of bangs and breathing. The controller informed them that the enemy was breaking contact and he kept my cross-hairs over them as they slowly withdrew. They disappeared behind a wall and I was commanded to swing wider and then I sensed them again. One figure turned and spat heat from his weapon. They crossed into a field and my pilot transmitted that he still had visual.

  I tracked them across the field and my operator informed the troops that there was another insurgent and described the bicycle with weapons hanging on it. He said they had moved to a small building tucked under some trees. He took a grid and changed my flight profile so I could maintain a fix.

  My sensor zoomed in on the dark doorway and the thermal signature of the man crouching beside it and the hot barrel of his weapon. Another figure ran from the building and I lost it under the trees.

  My pilot told them that one enemy had left the building but they still had four confirmed. They discussed rules of engagement and then permission came and I arced around and a command passed through me to the ordnance attached to my fuselage. My camera wobbled as my weight changed and the missile dropped away into the haze. My cross-hairs hovered over the building. One of the white shapes was walking beside the building and then crouched down.

  My image flashed and fuzzed and noisy pixels of white burst out. I readjusted. The heat strike was at the centre of where the building had been. They widened my aperture again to show the smoke boiling out of the trees. And then my sensor was turned to focus on the road where a small white speck was moving away and
I magnified on it. It was a motorbike travelling down a road, its engine heat building as a sharp white dot.

  They reviewed the rules and decided not to engage. Then my sensor array rotated under my nose, back to the impact.

  The building no longer had a shadow and earth had been thrown around the strike mark and was dark where it showed against the hot surface of the field. I continued to circle above as the blast area cooled and my sensor operator sent a damage assessment. I loitered and then my turboprop whirred and I climbed away.

  Thirty-six minutes later I was needed again, forty-three miles away. My operator clicked a mouse on a grid. I received the command and changed course and flew myself north to help.

  34

  In the beginning, I was mostly in the Atlantic. I evaporated and travelled as moisture across the ocean towards an island where I formed part of a grey cloud that scudded across winter fields. Soon the fields turned white and were crisscrossed by black lines and dotted with red squares. The temperature changed and I grew too heavy and fell as snow, drifting slowly down until I settled.

  A day later two figures came. I was on the ground so they towered towards me. The first walked slowly with a stick in each hand, kicking his legs forward through the snow that squeaked as it compacted. Even though it was cold he was sweating and his breath billowed.

  The other figure followed along behind, picking her feet up and folding her arms around herself. She smiled and talked to the man. ‘Keep your back straight and push through your glutes. Try not to abduct your right leg. That’s it – better,’ she said.

  The man walked on towards me, leaving dark holes in the snow where he carefully planted each stick.

  ‘Don’t flick your leg like that. You’re arching your back again.’

  ‘I’m bloody trying,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I’m an amputee, not Scott of the bloody Antarctic.’