The barma team would gather at the front of the lead wagon at a VP and go forward in their formation, with the only noise above the hum of the Mastiff’s engine the synthetic yelps of the Vallons as they sent down their radar beams and caught the ones that bounced back at them. When a Vallon sang really loudly it meant it had picked up a significant metallic reading in the ground. They would halt, all kneel, and the man who had picked up the reading would place his Vallon behind him, take out a screwdriver and paintbrush from the front of his body armour, and chip and brush away at the earth to see what it was. Most of the time it was a bolt or nail, sometimes a spent rifle cartridge. Sometimes, though, they would come to the plastic sheeting that covered the pressure plate of a device or the garish yellow plastic of a fertilizer container containing the main charge.
And then everything got complicated. If there was a way around the bomb, they would mark and avoid it, but if not Tom would get on the radio up to battle group and begin the long process of getting a search team and ATO out to them to blow the device and take any forensics from it. The wait was mind-numbing. Often they would have to sit around for six hours while a team was flown up from Bastion and then driven out to them. If they were lucky, there would be a team already in Newcastle, and they’d be there quicker. The boys would just doze in the wagons, reading magazines or playing on their PSPs. In Tom’s Mastiff Dusty would dig out one of his Bernard Cornwell books. He was becoming daily more obsessed with medieval England and planning to get a tattoo of a crusader knight on his back when he returned from tour. He told Tom about it.
‘It’s gonna be gleaming, boss. I’ve already got a sketch from the artist. On my left shoulder blade, about A4 size. It’s this knight just after a battle, dressed in white, kneeling at an altar and holding out his sword in offering to it. He’s got this jagged cut on his arm, which is the only bit of red in the picture. It is going to be fuckin’ mint; I can’t wait.’
Tom really liked Dusty. He liked them all, but Dusty and Davenport were his favourites. He had the greatest bond with Trueman, but Tom was still a bit overawed by him and by his talismanic presence in the regiment. But with Dusty and Dav it was different. They were both younger than him, Dusty twenty-two and Dav nineteen. They were becoming like younger brothers, and there was no hiding anything from them: they saw, whether they were in the Scimitar or the Mastiff, his every doubt, every fear, every moment of bravado and recklessness. His personality and his command were stripped bare in front of them. The other members of the troop usually felt his presence over the radio, where he sounded authoritative, calm and detached. But in the turret with them there was no hiding.
On one particularly bad day on Canterbury they found six suspect devices in one field alone. When they finally got back to Newcastle, having marked them so the locals wouldn’t drive over them, Tom was greeted by the CO. ‘Well done, Tom. Good work. I can only begin to imagine how tedious that was.’
Tom managed to fight down his frustration; he had spent most of the day almost weeping with it. ‘Thanks, Colonel. The boys were all over it. They’re getting damn good at barma. But our luck’s going to run out sooner or later. There’s just so many of those things. One day we’re going to miss one.’
The CO nodded. ‘Don’t you worry. I’ve got a plan to solve Canterbury once and for all. We’re getting a REST up from Bastion, and they’re going to come out with you in a few days to blow all the devices in that field.’
‘What, all of them?’
‘Yep. I’m sick to death of this route. We’re going to clear it, and even better we’re then going to put a nice big checkpoint slap in the middle of it. Well, not massive, but enough for a section. Brigade have just given it the go-ahead.’
And so three days later they were sent back to the field with a Brimstone team to clear it. While the ATO was on one of the devices Tom chatted with the RESA, an officer from Nigeria who spoke at a thousand words a minute and had a nervous tic of wrinkling his nose every few seconds. He soon explained it. ‘I can see you noticing my nose, buddy. Don’t worry about it. Think I’m going to get cured by a shrink who they’re getting out to Bastion in a few weeks. Not just for me; there are a few other guys apparently as well. It’s weird; it just developed a couple of weeks ago. I don’t notice I’m doing it until I see people looking at it. Hope it’s not permanent.’ He paused as Dusty handed him a brew. He sipped from it, the steam billowing around the cramped wagon where they sat among the search team’s kit. ‘Christ that’s good. Thanks.’
‘No worries. Lance Corporal Miller dishes up the meanest brews in theatre. Don’t you, Dusty?’
‘Bugger off, sir. I swear your brew obsession is killing me. When I joined the army I thought it was going to be all about slotting people. But all I actually do here is get the fucking kettle on.’
‘Poor old Dusty. I offer to do them, but apparently my brews are awful, so he won’t let me anywhere near it. He loves it really.’
‘No I don’t, boss; I hate it. Having said that, better than having to drink the rancid filth you produce. What is it with officers and brews? It’s like drinking cat piss. All I’m gonna be able to do is work in sodding Starbucks when I leave the army. Ridiculous. Officers all leave and become barristers; me and the lads leave and become baristas.’
The RESA laughed and continued, ‘The thing is, this tic makes me look like I’m a cocaine fiend. I’m going to go back home and everyone will think I’ve been on a drugs binge all the time out here. Come to think of it, wouldn’t be a bad idea. Probably make everything a hell of a lot easier.’
Tom nodded. ‘I know. Everything might start to make some kind of sense, for one. Because who knows what kind of fucked-up reality this is out here. When did it first happen?’
‘About a day after we lost two of our lads. Well, one of them. The other’s an amputee – left arm. Down in Sangin. Messy. There was nothing left really of Danny, one of my staffies. Staff Sergeant Thorburn – hear of him? Epic bloke. Just the best.
‘What happened – IED?’
‘No, never. That would never have happened to Danny; he was the best searcher I ever met. Sixth-sense kind of good. He just knew where and when there was stuff in the ground. Like a sniffer dog. Incredible talent. And in this team, not wanting to brag, we’re all good.’
In the corner of the Mastiff one of his team, who was dozing, didn’t bother to open his eyes but just mumbled, ‘Too right, boss.’
‘There you go, ringing endorsement. No, no IED. Well, not one in the ground anyway; suicide bomber. Bloke dressed as a woman. Because of all this cultural-sensitivity bollocks and the fact that the lads are so scared of offending these twats by even looking at their women, the infantry boys on the cordon for our search job just let this bomber through, too scared to look at her – I mean him – let alone stop and search him. Anyway, suddenly he just runs at us, this fucking burka bloke, while we’re monging it in the shade of this compound wall, and before any of us can do anything he just evaporates in this massive bang. Next thing you knew there were just blokes everywhere, and bits of blokes. I thought we were all dead, all eight of us, but it was just Danny and Phillips, one of the new lads, who got it. The clean-up was fucking dreadful.’
‘Christ, mate, I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks. Anyways, the tic started the next day.’
Dusty said, ‘Fuck me, sir; that sucks.’
‘Yeah, pretty bad day at the office. All that was left of the bomber was his spine. It was picked almost clean. Looked like a finished spare rib. That was all I could think about when I saw it. That night we were back in Bastion, and after I’d been to the hospital to see Phillips I went to the scoff house. And guess what?’
‘Spare ribs?’
‘Exactly. When I saw them I started crying and had to leave. Luckily it was dark outside so no one saw me.’
‘I’m sorry, mate. I really am.’
‘It really pisses me off, this cultural stuff. I’ve told my lads to ignore it. All this shit
about having to sit cross-legged when you talk to the locals and not being allowed to use your left hand, or right hand, or whatever one it is when you shake their hand or point. Who sits cross-legged anyway? It’s ridiculously uncomfortable. Last time I did it I was listening to my teacher read Thomas the Tank Engine at primary school. And they expect us to do it as fully grown men with all this body armour on? They’re having a laugh; you need to be some kind of contortionist or sex pest to do it.
‘I mean, it’s not as if we’re going to go into a room, sit cross-legged with some greybeard, and he’s suddenly going to be like, “Hey, this bloke’s just like me, brother from another mother.” Bollocks he is. You’re still going to look like an alien to him. It’s like Martians coming to invade London, and their cultural adviser telling them that they can blend in seamlessly and hide the fact they’re ten-foot-tall intergalactic five-headed mutants by wearing a bowler hat, carrying a copy of The Times and calling everyone old bean. It’s just bollocks. And all because some tosspot in the MoD says we’ve got to do this shit. He’ll probably get an MBE out of it. And because of all this crap no one stops this suicide bomber, and Phillips gets his arm blown off. Nice one, Whitehall. Thanks a fucking million.’
He finished the drink and broke into a broad grin. ‘Still, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined, right?’ He clambered out of the wagon, and Tom joined him as they watched the ATO complete his work on the bomb and prepare to blow it.
Tom had lost count of the number he had seen being blown, but he still loved it, never able to resist craning his neck out of a wagon or over a wall to see the explosion and feel the shock wave buffet his face. This one was a hundred metres away, and so he didn’t even make a nod to taking any cover; he and the RESA just stood there in the open. He saw, almost in slow motion, the great plume of dust soar into the air, dissipating out a hundred feet up, a moment of creation. He saw the shock wave ripple over the dust towards him, go under him, and at the same time felt it pass through him, and then a split second later the boom hit his ears. He found it a purification, blowing away his imperfections, a kind of elemental purging of his body. A little death and then a rebirth.
They worked on the devices all day, and by evening they had cleared the field. At dusk a troop of engineers arrived to build the new checkpoint and a platoon from Eiger came up to help guard the build, through the night and into the next day. The new PB was called Yukshal, after a farmer who had been killed by an IED in the field three days previously. Three Troop headed off back to Newcastle to deliver the Brimstone team back to another tasking.
Tom and the RESA sat together at scoff that night, eating beef stew and rice. Tom was sad to see him go.
‘Take care, will you? I don’t know how you boys do your job. I mean, for us, sure we’re out on the ground every day, but when we come across a difficult situation, there’s always people to help. Like in a contact I can get a fire mission or an AH strike. If we find a bomb, we phone you guys up. But you guys, there’s no one above you to help out. You have to do the job yourselves. I take my hat off to you, mate. I really do.’
‘I’d never thought of it like that. I know what you mean; it’s quite lonely not being able to get a grown-up to come and help. That’s why I love it, I suppose. Better go and get the gear together. Heli leaves in half an hour. You take care, yourself; you’ve got quite an AO up here. And those IED-layers know their stuff. They’re good. Tread lightly.’
‘Shall do. Thanks, mate. You do the same.’
They got up to go. Outside in the frosty dark they breathed sharp, painfully cold breaths. They split, the RESA to go and pack and Tom to see the boys. Tom called out to him, ‘Hey, what was your name again?’
‘Kwekwo. Michael Kwekwo.’
‘Got it. Well, really good to meet you. Safe journey.’
An hour later he was in the boys’ tent, heard the heli come in and felt the canvas of the tent get beaten by the downdraught. He hoped his new friend would be all right.
Three nights later, at the daily battle group six o’clock conference, broadcast to all the PBs, Tom sat at the back of the crowded ops room as Jules Dennis read out the events of the day in theatre. ‘In Battle Group Centre South this morning, two kilometres north of PB Majid, there was one KIA from a daisy-chain IED and two Cat A casualties. The KIA was the RESA who was with us a couple of days ago working with Tomahawk Three Zero. Captain Michael Kwekwo.’
Tom didn’t so much as flinch. He looked ahead, calm and impassive, fixed on Jules’ lips as he carried on his update. The news wasn’t somehow a surprise. Standing behind him, Trueman put his hand forward and squeezed his shoulder.
Dear Cassie,
Thank you so much for the parcel. I can’t tell you how good it was to get it. The Christmas decorations are hung up in my tent. Talking of which, it’s quite a pad, I have to say. There will be thousands of student digs back home that won’t be a patch on this. One of the engineers here knocked up a bookshelf with about a hundred books on it, left here from previous tours. Some of the lads come in to borrow the books; it feels as though I’m the librarian in The Shawshank Redemption. But I haven’t got a blackbird for a friend. Nor am I going to hang myself. And top work with the Christmas pudding. That didn’t really last long; we absolutely wolfed it.
What’s really strange, on the book front, is that I’ve hardly read a thing all tour. I had thought I would read voraciously, especially given the fact that there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of inactivity out here. So often you’re just waiting, waiting, for ever, for something to happen, and you desperately need something to pass the time. My gunner Miller reads his historical novels every spare second. Sergeant Trueman’s working his way through all of Nick Hornby. But I just haven’t so much as picked up a book. I mean, I read half of one about Robin Hood, but that’s no great claim really. If you’d asked me before tour I would have said that I was going to read all the great novels at this seminal time in my life, blah blah. But it just hasn’t worked out. And I did English at Cambridge! I brought out Paradise Lost to read on tour. Cringe! In fact all I read are the newspapers that Mum sends out and lads’ mag after lads’ mag. You would be appalled. I read them all: Loaded (old school), Front (the best one, as it uses girls with no, um, how do you say it, ‘enhancements’), GQ (a bit poncy, takes itself far too seriously), Bizarre (just plain weird) and of course the infamous Zoo and Nuts. I reckon I could take an NVQ in Lads’ Mags Studies at the end of tour, I have read that many. We have a stack about a foot high in the front passenger footwell of our Mastiff (basically a big armoured truck), and in the Scimitar (a kind of little tank) we’re about to move into there’s a place behind my head in the turret that we’ve already earmarked as storage space.
Oh my God! I have reviewed what I have just written. This is just ridiculous. How can I be talking about this! I have had the finest literary education in the country and here I am reading articles like ‘100 greatest abattoir accidents’, ‘Tangerines that look like monkeys’ or pieces about naked Bulgarian mud-wrestlers. This has to stop.
And it is freezing out here. I’m sleeping inside two sleeping bags at the mo, and fully clothed as well. During the day it never gets above freezing, and we’re not even at Christmas yet. Luckily it hasn’t snowed yet, and I hope it never will, as it’ll be a nightmare finding IEDs, and when it thaws and melts the ground will just turn to glue. It’s quite busy out here at the moment – we’re bouncing all over the area – but largely I’m keeping myself out of trouble so don’t worry about that.
I am sorry this is so short; it’s written in the back of the Mastiff, and we are just outside a school that I’ve driven my boss to so he can chat with the local elders about education provision in the area. How random is that?
So pleased you are around in Feb for my leave; can’t wait to see you again.
All love,
Tom xxx
Mate,
Quick one, written outside a school where the CO is having a shura wit
h some greybeards. We’re guarding the cordon in Mastiffs. Utterly, utterly bone. We’ve been on route clearance/security for a month now, and we swap over back onto Scimitars thank goodness in a week. It’s actually been all right this last month, ups and downs but generally OK. It’s been good to bed into the AO fully and get accustomed to the town itself before we start to push out at the FLET for the rest of tour. And that’s what’s going to happen; you can feel the lift in tone. Basically since September there’s almost been a de facto truce, or at least a slight lull, and it’s about to seriously ramp up. Just in the last week there’s been a change of tempo. For one, there’s been a hell of a lot more drone assets given to us; almost as indicative of a scrap oncoming as it would have been in WWI when extra ladders were delivered to the trenches. You can feel it in the ops room. A few weeks ago it was quite chilled in there, but now Ops and Int are running around like blue-arsed flies, and when you try to catch them for a moment they evade all your questions. So basically all the boys know something’s about to kick off.
To be honest I’m looking forward to getting back onto the Scims. The Mastiff is a great, great bit of kit, don’t get me wrong, and is about the only reason we’ve still got freedom of movement in the AO, but the thing is its invincibility makes the boys complacent after a while; they know they’re not even going to get so much as a scratch if they hit an IED, and so their drills start to lapse. We’ve kept ours up pretty well so far, but you know when they start to drop off. Yesterday I had to bollock one of my best lads, Jesmond, for slack drills. He should have barma’d a VP but just drove over it, saying ‘Risk it for a biscuit’ over the net. Luckily there was nothing in the ground. I lost it with him. He’s an awesome soldier but I think I just let my frustration get to me. Your reserves of patience can only take so much. In a sense the reason I went so mental with Jesmond is because I was angry at myself, as I know I’d have done the same thing as him.
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