Bad Medicine

by Terry Ledgard

  Regardless of military affiliation, this old man had a brutal gunshot wound. He’d sustained it during the war against the Ruskis, but that was about twenty years back, and it had never properly healed. It had become ferociously infected, due in no small part to the mud, straw and goat shit that had been packed into the wound – I’m not kidding: goat shit was packed into the wound. I had no clue how to treat this problem, so I gave the bloke some money to buy his way back to the American FSB, where I thought they could deal with it surgically. We later learnt that this bloke’s infection was caused by naturally occurring anthrax and smelt so rotten because of the goat shit and gangrene that had started to fester inside the wound!

  With that nasty smell cast aside, I rejoined the humanitarian aid queue. None of my patients showed more grit than this next kid. He was a pre-teen boy, no more than eleven or twelve years old. He’d been carried into the doctor’s surgery by his dad. As far as I could gather, the lad had been having an epileptic seizure for the last six hours. Again, although we didn’t share the same concept of time, I divined that he’d been in bad shape for at least a few hours.

  I asked his dad to lay him down in the embattled doctor’s foyer. His head, eyes, mouth and limbs were spasmodically convulsing. I’d seen this before. My older brother, Bazz, had displayed the same look on his face during his early epileptic years. As a kid, there wasn’t anything I could do to help my Big Bro, but as a highly trained adult medic, I felt that this was my chance to make amends.

  So I got to work. I punched out my primary survey in quick time and planted an oxygen mask on the kid’s face. No change, no surprise. Then, after quick consultation with the commando nurse, I squirted a sedative drug into his mouth. I knew the right dosage to give adults, but kids and teens required an incrementally smaller dosage to reduce nasty side effects, such as cessation of life. As the theory holds, the kid’s convulsions should’ve at least slowed down as the drug was absorbed through the buccal membrane in his cheeks. But they didn’t.

  I quickly ramped up my intramuscular alternative. The convulsions slowed substantially, but not enough to stop the horizontal, gyrating epileptic dance. For the next few hours, he kept convulsing in front of me – spasms escalating as the drugs wore off. The immediate danger was exhaustion of energy reserves, not to mention swallowing the tongue if his airway wasn’t controlled properly. My kid was already beyond this point, so I jammed a basic artificial airway into his mouth. His dad remained by his side throughout the ordeal, keeping the faith. But I was fresh out of sedatives. I had a few ampoules left, but I’d need the rest to sedate my lads if they ever needed it, in any of the million treatment scenarios that might arise. The drugs I’d given the kid should’ve already dropped a full-grown elephant, but they didn’t even touch the sides.

  We tried to arrange a CASEVAC, but the allied choppers were all flat strap. From the three bases in the area, not a single chopper could be spared at this point to save the kid’s life. While I could understand the air controller’s quandary, it didn’t help my situation on the ground. The kid was probably going to die without advanced treatment. I fought the air controller over the radio for about half an hour, but I couldn’t reroute a chopper to collect my lad. It was all to no avail. No help was coming. I felt that I’d failed my Big Bro yet again. I never found out how my epileptic man got on in the long run. I hope he’s still kicking, but I doubt he lasted the night.

  Angry. Helpless. Hopeless. So this is what a failed Kilo feels like. I took a few minutes of time-out. These patients that I couldn’t save were penetrating my armour. Emotion was registering on a personal level. I’d gone into this deployment with the belief that I could save everyone. This ideal was altruistic, but unrealistic. Not everyone could be saved. Disengaging from the confronting nature of war is an acquired skill, and one that I still needed to develop. After a few minutes of resting my head in my hands, I pushed the last job from my mind, and gradually grew colder as the trip wore on.

  While the medical team treated all manner of weird and wonderful injuries at the doctor’s surgery, the commando boys were chilling up on the dasht, and they managed to negotiate the purchase of a live goat with one of the local farmers. By the time our medical work hours drew to a close, the goat was already slaughtered, skinned, spiced and slow spit-roasted on an open fire. The few tiny morsels of goat meat that I got as the greasy serving tray (ration-tin lid) was passed around were orgasmic. After a week’s worth of army rations, the goat was five-star gourmet, easily ranking in the top-ten feeds of my life.

  Before long, we were on the road again, motoring along the dasht towards the next town. The rolling hills gave way to a neighbouring valley, and a familiar aroma hit my nostrils. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. It smelt like the secret spot behind my high-school sports shed where the cool kids hung out during lunchbreak.

  Ganja!

  Sure enough, as the long procession of vehicles made its way down into the valley, the most majestic scene unfolded before my eyes. The entire valley was a gargantuan field of marijuana, stretching as far as the eye could see. Imagine ten football fields in a row, end on end, planted to the hilt with weed! This heavenly scene was beyond the realm of worldly possibility. No one back home would believe that such a magical place existed, let alone that I’d visited this stoner’s paradise.

  Despite the tactical foolhardiness of the endeavour, my buddy and I convinced our Bushmaster driver to pull over, stopping briefly to snap a shot of our ugly mugs amid the ocean of A-grade Afghan kush. Now that was a Kodak moment.

  After a few weeks of rocking and rolling through the desert, the commandos revisited the area where Todd had been shot. Intelligence reported that this was still a haven for Taliban hoedowns and hootenannies. A group of foot-based commandos patrolled through the green belt below as the mortar team provided overwatch protection from the dasht above. My medical team was attached to the mortar team to support this mission.

  I’d just finished my turn on security piquet when a report came through that a group of two to three Taliban spotters had eyes on our guys down in the green belt and were trying to coordinate an attack. The mortar team scanned the neighbouring mountains and hillsides to identify the targets. At least two spotters, maybe more, were seen bobbing up and down behind a rock outcrop, a bit over a kilometre away. This information was fed up the chain of command, and permission to engage was fed back down almost instantly. Our lads were in jeopardy.

  The mortar crew dialled in the aiming systems and quickly grabbed the nearest free guys to stoke the mortar tubes – myself included. No time to shuffle the security arrangement around; we had to act now.

  ‘Do you know how to stoke, Tezz? Are you good to go?’ a mortar man asked.

  ‘Hells, yeah, homie. Let’s get after it,’ I replied.

  I was the first bloke on the scene, so I got the first crack at the spotters. I grabbed the mortar and let it drop into the tube, kneeling down and covering my ears. Micro-moments later, there was a loud, explosive tink. The round lobbed into the air, hurtling towards the targets.

  We waited and watched for the splash for what seemed like an eternity. A distant boom rang out, kicking up a cloud of dust from the explosion, twenty metres behind the targets.

  The mortar crew made some adjustments and the next round was fired.

  Boom. It landed about ten metres behind the targets this time.

  Final adjustments were made and a few more mortars were fired in quick succession. Boom, boom, boom.

  The mortar mission was over – targets neutralised.

  This was my very first bomb fired in anger, and it all felt so insignificant, so mundane – it felt as routine as cooking dinner or running an errand. I honestly didn’t care that my mortar had probably maimed or killed people. I didn’t harbour any hatred towards the Taliban, but I felt utterly indifferent about dropping a bomb on the enemy. This reaction was vastly different to how I expected that I would feel – which was largely based on the wa
r movies I’d seen. Judging by my hyped-up Hollywood preconceived notions, I thought I’d feel an overwhelming loss of innocence and sense of guilt. But no, I’ve got to pull out my ‘bullshit’ card on the movies.

  Afterwards, we sat around making lunch, cracking jokes and arguing over whose mortar had done the job.

  ‘Look at me, I just got blooded – I’m a real Man now,’ one of the mortar firers joked.

  ‘Fuck off, I’ve seen you play sport before – you’re so unco that any mortar you touch will automatically deviate off course, just because you tainted it with your piss-poor hand–eye coordination,’ I retorted. ‘You didn’t see them running away after my mortar, did you, fucker?’

  ‘You might have fragged them, maybe, Tezz, but I did the deed. I fucking rain threes from beyond the perimeter,’ another mortar firer interjected.

  We all sat around ribbing each other and peacocking about whose mortar got the goods. But the reality is that none of us would ever know, and it didn’t even matter. It’s a team effort to fire a mortar mission, and we’d all just contributed to saving the bacon of our boys patrolling through the green belt.

  Pretty soon, the tedium of the waiting-and-watching game settled in. While there was always some sort of excitement happening, it only occupied a small fraction of the time. Most of the days were spent sitting around talking shit. Every daily activity was suffixed with the word ‘ops’. Back in Australia, the endless stream of training missions were always followed by the word ‘exercise’, but in Afghanistan we were on active ‘operations’, so ‘ops’ became the catchword of the day. There were a multitude of ops that would go down on a daily basis.

  Breakfast Ops. Lunch Ops. Dinner Ops. Piss Ops. Shit Ops. Wank Ops.

  Name a bodily fluid, there was an official operational designation for it. And each of these operations took on an entirely different complexion outside the wire. Take Shit Ops, for example. Back in Australia, you can drop a deuce and flush it away without giving it a second’s thought. Afghanistan was a different story. There were no flushing toilets, no long-drop dunnies, and no latrines. So, when nature called and you had to take a dump, there were only two options. You could dig a shallow cat-scratch and backfill it, or lay cable right on top of the terra firma and drop a rock on the whole gruesome mess – but there was usually undesirable splatter associated with the latter. In either case, you were forced to witness the aftermath of your stinky crimes against humanity. This put us on such intimate terms with our own shits that we started naming them.

  The ‘shit of a thousand wipes’ was a semi-firm bowel movement that you couldn’t seem to clean away from your ring-piece, no matter how many times you wiped. The ‘green-apple splatters’ was the name of the diarrhoeal abomination that usually accompanied a minor upset stomach, and it always found a way to spray onto your shoes and lower pant legs. But, by far, the rarest and most revered type of shit was the ‘Bung Fritz’. The Fritz was a term reserved for that hardened and fully formed thirty-centimetre-long and ten-centimetre-diameter monster that had been brewing in your intestines for an entire week. And this type of deuce was only possible through the congealing effect of the standard-issue ration-pack cheese. It took a superhuman level of patience and defecatory abstinence to incubate such a beast. But the spoils went to the victor, and the wins to those who dared, for the damn few who were brave enough to endure such a ring-stinging bowel motion. A third-party adjudicator would have to confirm the almost fatal faecal dimensions of a ‘Bung Fritz’ boast, but the creator was always awarded legendary status and showered with praise by admiring fans if he was deemed successful.

  9

  FAT KID

  After a brief stint back at base to reload and recover, the SAS were called out on another mission: to quell the rising Taliban presence in a strategically important area. Thankfully, I’d done enough time and paid penance for my earlier torch mistake to earn a spot on this outing. The rugged Afghan terrain made driving over long distances to reach the dangerous region a ridiculously slow and tedious journey. But, after a few days of driving slower than old people fuck, we finally arrived in Taliban territory. The convoy of vehicles drove into a suspect village, ever vigilant for signs of a contact. Some cars were stationed above the town in an overwatch position, while others continued into the township – my car included. The overwatch team spotted a duo of fighting-aged males carrying weapons and called in their position over the net (radio). My car came to an immediate halt, alongside a beautiful flowing stream in a deep, sandy ravine. A team of snipers gave chase to the suspected bad guys from somewhere above my riverside vantage point, as my car’s team dismounted and tracked back the way we’d come, on foot, to investigate the commotion. The highest-ranking bloke on my car started running off, but doubled back when he remembered he couldn’t leave the vehicles unattended.

  ‘Tezz, you stay here and watch the cars – we’re gonna patrol around this bend; it looks like there might be some bad guys on our ass,’ he said. ‘Oh, and keep an eye out to the north-east of the ravine; no one’s cleared that far yet so we don’t know what’s up ahead.’

  Awesome. Watch the cars. I felt like the fat kid who always got picked last for a scratch match game of schoolyard sport.

  The lads raced off and disappeared from view behind me, as I scanned forward. There was a blind bend about one hundred metres to my front, and the unpatrolled section of high ground above the ravine to my left. I was on my own. The sounds of the gorgeous flowing river gave me a strange and eerie sense of calm and tranquillity now that I was by myself. I jumped up behind a .50-cal. machine gun and pointed the muzzle towards the unsecured ravine bend to my front, but I still needed to cover the high ground to my left. My eyes methodically scanned back and forth between the obscured dangers ahead and the risk of an attack from my upper-left flank. The wide axis and elevation of my arc of fire was too great to handle with one weapon: if I pointed the .50-cal. at the bend in the ravine, I was in danger of fire from my left flank; if I pointed the gun at my left flank, I was in danger from the ravine. Before I had a chance to overthink the situation, a call came over the radio.

  ‘Kilo, Kilo. Be advised: there’s a fighting-aged male with a suspected weapon traversing the dasht above your position. Do you copy?’

  ‘Roger,’ I replied. How the hell can I cover this whole axis of fire by myself? Fuck it, I’ll give it a crack.

  I repositioned the .50-cal. machine upwards to protect my upper-left flank – where I thought there was a good chance of being shot at from the fighting-aged male. Then, I laid my M4 rifle on the turret, pointing towards the bend in the ravine, with the safety catch off so I could quickly react if shit got hectic to my front.

  ‘Kilo, the fighting-aged male is one hundred metres from your position on the dasht to your left. Keep your eyes peeled. How copy?’ the radio crackled.

  ‘Roger that.’

  My heart was tap-dancing inside my chest; my breathing was shallower than a politician’s promise. In that moment, my mind dangerously wandered away from the task at hand.

  This Taliban bloke only has an AK. I’ve got more firepower at my disposal than the Yanks did during the Cold War – I’m gonna be so fucking embarrassed if this dude slots me.

  But no one appeared over the crest of the ravine to my upper left, yet.

  I listened to our snipers’ heavy breathing over the radio, as they chased the two Taliban targets along the hillside.

  Crack, crack, crack.

  A gunshot rang out, somewhere above me – it was so loud that I flinched. I scanned my upper-left flank, wondering if I’d been shot at by the fighting-aged male. But there was no movement above me. I looked down and checked my body armour, just to be sure I wasn’t hit. I was all good.

  Our snipers had taken a pot shot at the two fleeing bad guys, but missed. The sound of the gunfire seemed dangerously close due to the acoustics of the ravine. The snipers’ laboured breathing filled the radio waves as they continued the pursuit.

&nbs
p; ‘Kilo, the fighting-aged male has broken off, and is now moving away from your location. Do you copy?’ the radio asked.

  ‘Roger, got that,’ I replied. Phew, that gunshot must have scared him away.

  Our snipers closed in to a lethal range to engage the Taliban runners.

  Crack, crack . . . Crack, crack, crack.

  More shots rang out, somewhere above me. The snipers had dropped both the bad guys with headshots. I heard the hasty rustling of paper fill the radio waves as the snipers removed valuable intelligence from the bad dudes’ corpses.

  When all the excitement had died down, my team returned to our vehicle. ‘How did you go, Tezz?’ my car’s boss asked. ‘Sweet as a nut,’ I replied, burying the excitement behind my calm exterior.

  After a long, rollercoaster ride through the Badlands of the battle-torn Uruzgan province, we returned to base when the mission was completed.

  Back at base, the American surgical team hadn’t had a moment’s rest in our absence, dealing with a barrage of mass casualties while we’d been away. A few hours after we got home, the emergency bat phone rang again. A group of British soldiers had been poleaxed by a Taliban ambush and were due in by chopper at any minute. A trio of injured Pommy blokes soon arrived at the American FSB, sandy-brown desert-camouflage uniforms almost unidentifiable through the blood stains. Two of the blokes were almost certain to lose limbs, while the third had half of his nose missing and was going to lose one of his eyes. Rather than surgical intervention, our job was to stabilise and then move them forward to more specialised medical care, which we did – ricky-tick. By all reports, these boys had been fucked up by the Taliban. Another unit had to be sent in to destroy their abandoned vehicles, to deny the enemy valuable equipment and intelligence.