The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  10

  Simon has no doubts. They need him now. He keeps the laminated Action Card he received during medical training in the breast pocket of his flak jacket, but he doesn’t need to consult it. Everything is just as it should be, including the first command, which doesn’t appear on the card: the area must be secured before he can approach the wounded. “Cover me!” he yells.

  He has his heart rate under control. He can see Michael’s life on a screen in front of him: there isn’t much red left in the semicircle—if it isn’t completely gone already.

  “Wait, wait!” It’s Schrøder. The ditch they’re in is a straight shot, so Simon can spot him a little farther down. Schrøder waves preventively. “We have to locate the fire first.” He looks around. “Where the hell are they shooting from?”

  The shooting is intense. Up on High Ground, the 12.7s fire back. As the armored carrier’s sharpshooters, Dennis, Jonas, and Sebastian are working the heavy machine guns. Down here they can’t so much as stick their heads up out of the ditch. The ditch’s borders are slick, and there’s water in the gully. Simon can feel it seeping into his boots, his socks clinging heavily to his feet.

  “Fire is coming from several directions!” yells Iraq Robert. “From behind, too. They let us slip through. We’re under fire from three sides.”

  Trying to see how Michael’s doing, Simon sneaks a quick peek over the edge of the ditch. He hears a bullet break the sound barrier right outside his left ear. “Fuck! I just almost bought the farm!”

  Though his pulse is racing, he’s still alive. He tries to get his breathing under control. Deep breaths in. Count to four. Exhale. His skin feels as if it’s burning up beneath his uniform.

  “Simon, control yourself! Wait!” It’s Schrøder again.

  They’re still under fire—and it could be coming from any fucking direction. Every bush, every poplar tree, every wall provides cover. He longs to hear a deafening blast that will wipe out all these invisible enemies in one glowing flash. But he needs to focus on Michael.

  Suddenly there’s movement to his left.

  “Cover me! Cover me!” Jakob scrambles up the side of the ditch. “I’m bringing him in!”

  “Stay here, you!” Schrøder gives the counter-command, but Jakob is already sprinting toward Michael, who’s lying only eight meters away. Mads, Troels, and Nikolaj rise halfway out of the ditch and start shooting intensely in the direction they believe the enemy fire is coming from. Lasse, Daniel, and Iraq Robert follow suit, then the rest of them. An enormous risk, but it’s now or never. They’re over twenty men shooting wildly, so superior in gunfire that they can take down anyone, at least for those crucial seconds it will take for Jakob to reach the wounded and drag him to safety in the ditch.

  That’s all they’re thinking about in this moment. They have to survive the next few seconds. And then a few more. Beyond that, everything blurs into an unknown they would normally associate with the far-distant future. But it’s now that decides—shot for shot—whether they even have a future. There’s only one thought, rising like a glowing red pillar up their spine: fight!

  Sidekick has set aside his video camera in the ditch. A green light glows. It’s filming. He stands up, his rifle in his hand. The little man shoots.

  They’re just starting to feel that enemy fire is waning, when the next round of thunder barrels in. Jakob’s been hit. They hear the loud thud as he lands. They return fire more fiercely than ever. All hell breaks loose on High Ground. Schrøder yells into the radio. They can’t hear what he’s saying because of the static. He seems to be repeating his request. More static. He clenches his fist and then crawls over to Simon. “We have to get these two evacuated—or they’re going to die on us.”

  “I can’t send a 9-liner until we’ve established HLZ.”

  Now they’re speaking in code. A “9-liner” is the request for evacuation of the wounded by helicopter. “HLZ” stands for “helicopter landing zone.”

  “Send it anyway. They can land up on High Ground. We’ll send more information later. We need them here as soon as possible.”

  “You know it can take up to ninety minutes.”

  “Let’s hope not. By then they’ll be able to evacuate all of us on one stretcher.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Schrøder shakes his head. “Nothing.” There’s something he isn’t telling them.

  Rising on one elbow, he gives them the sign that they should hold their fire. They stop immediately and watch him attentively. Their faces are unrecognizable. They’re wide-eyed, and their mouths are half open, as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the air and they’ve given up breathing through their noses.

  “We’ve practiced this a thousand times. We can handle it. Michael and Jakob will make it. We’re going to smash these fucking assholes!” They respond with a roar. It’s unbearable to think about the two men lying there with their limbs torn apart, bleeding to death before their very eyes.

  Schrøder gives Daniel and four others the order to cover Simon while he tends to the wounded. Simon sends the 9-liner before they crawl up out of the ditch. He puts an “x” on line four, which means the landing zone is hot and they’ll need an armed escort. He looks up at Schrøder. “We mark the landing spot with smoke?” Schrøder nods.

  Then it’s up the gravel path. Now they’re really taking their fucking chances. But what else can they do?

  “Make sure they hear a supersonic bang if any turbans pop up,” yells Schrøder behind them. Although the noise is deafening as they resume firing, it’s not loud or intense enough for Simon. It’s a sign that they’re taking care of him.

  Simon crawls forward behind Daniel, who’s crouching. Behind them, Mads is firing away, along with Clement, Troels, and Mathias. They’re also stooping as they crawl backward, their automatic rifles blasting away. Simon doesn’t turn around. He can already see that Michael, lying motionless a few meters away, must be done for. He’s not so sure about Jakob, though. For the first time, it isn’t an exercise—now he has to pass his test. He starts to think about Aske. He’d already forgotten about him. Maybe that’s the way it will always be. Nothing is routine when it comes to death and mutilation. It’s always the first time. Just let him live, just let him live, just let him live. The words echo inside him.

  He’s there.

  He kneels next to Michael, destroying the perfect blue semicircle in the gravel path. Michael is facedown. Turning him over, Simon discovers that his eyes are wide open. His face is undamaged, although his lower jaw has dropped open. Michael has nice, regular teeth with no fillings. There are some grains of sand on his cornea. Neither his pupils nor his eyelids move as Simon waves his hand over them. He presses a finger on Michael’s lower lip, although he knows it’s pointless; the lower lip doesn’t respond. There’s no blood circulation. He places his cheek against Michael’s gaping mouth. Nothing. There’s no reason to check the pulse on his neck or his wrist. Michael isn’t breathing. His heart isn’t beating. The letters of the acronym from his paramedics course flash though his mind. Is Michael A, V, P, or U? He’s just plain U—totally unresponsive.

  He stares down at the bloody remains of Michael’s shattered lower body. All that’s left of his pants are threads, with a splintered piece of thighbone sticking out. Below his flak jacket, his entrails have spilled out into a shiny glutinous mass, something Simon can’t immediately identify, as if a stranded octopus’s once-powerful limbs had been reduced to a hopeless mess. Michael must have bled profusely before he died. His lower body is glazed in thick-flowing blood, the ground beneath him dark with it. His body is in one piece, but Simon fears that it will break in two when they try to lay him on a stretcher. It reeks of blood and guts. And shit. His sphincter let go when he stepped on that roadside bomb. Michael is totally KIA. Killed in action.

  He has to concentrate on Jakob. A thunderous wall of sound envelops him. It’s the five others providing cover.

  Simon knows exactly why Jakob is lying
there. Little brother was trying to come to the rescue of big brother, Michael, his protector, who disappeared in a cloud of blood. He didn’t hesitate for a second. His survival instinct was switched off, if he ever had one at all, the little shit.

  Jakob’s eyelids tremble, as if he is asleep and dreaming. His face, ghostly pale, is covered in small dark-red spots. It looks as if it has been drizzling blood—but the cloud that burst was his own body.

  Simon places his hand on Jakob’s neck. The respiratory rate is less than ten. External bleeding? There aren’t enough bandages in the world to stop it. His pants are black with blood. Simon wraps a tourniquet around each leg just below the hips. The legs can’t be saved, though. He’s sure of that. Still, he must do what he can to stop the bleeding. Internal bleeding? Definitely. Probably none of Jakob’s internal organs are where they should be. Abnormal neurological state? He repeats the medical terms. There’s a certain calm in them that he needs. Altered consciousness? One would certainly say so, since the patient is unconscious. The rest is apparent. It’s a body barely holding on, a body that shouldn’t still be living, as far as he can determine.

  He’s surprised at how steady his hands are.

  Jakob moans. A faint whimper that could have come from an animal. A, V, P, or U? In his mind, Simon places an “x” next to P, for “pain.” He takes out the auto-injection syringe and gives him a shot. He’s not sure it’s necessary, but if Jakob comes to, he’ll be a problem during transport. There’s no time for comforting anyone, just the long, demanding trek. They’ll have to drag two heavy, unmanageable bodies up to High Ground, the only place where a helicopter can land. He unpacks two emergency stretchers. He looks at his hands again. They have their own life, dictated by routine, and he has no idea where it comes from. I’m good at this, he thinks, suddenly feeling uplifted.

  Then he hears them again. Rounds of fire. He’s been lost in a tunnel, focused solely on what has to be done. He looks around quickly. Shots are coming from the bushes over there—and from the qalat to the right—but it’s not as intense as it was before. The boys are in control of the situation. He hopes.

  “Your heart rate will be at two hundred, and you’ll taste blood in your mouth when you have to drag them through the cornfields,” they said during paramedical training.

  They get to work: eight men to lift, four surrounding each body. The big guys like Adam and Clement, Troels and Mads, take care of Jakob. The others form a circle around them and fire away. The emergency stretchers, like hammocks, swing from side to side, when they aren’t being dragged across the ground. Årslev, Gustav, Tobias, and Nikolaj struggle with Michael’s heavy, motionless body. He’s going home, but his number is up. No need to handle him like a newborn.

  Shooting wildly, they retreat from the ambush. As they near the foot of the ridge—where their vehicles await—the roar of the 12.7s drowns out everything else. Simon loves that sound, even though it’s hard dragging the heavy bodies up the hill.

  All of them know that the Taliban are notoriously inept marksmen who rely more on Allah than their own accuracy when they’re fumbling with the triggers on their Kalashnikovs. Trained sharpshooters could have easily taken out the Danes, one by one, especially here on the hillside where they were so damn exposed. Yet, they never saw a single enemy fighter, only flashes of gunfire, constantly changing locations. The accuracy of the gunfire was simply lacking.

  Simon staggers up the hillside, step by step. Like him, the others are red-faced and sweaty. Heart rates must be at about two hundred. He has the same taste in his mouth that he gets at the dentist when they’ve been working on his gums, and they tell him to spit and he spits red into the sink.

  Sidekick has been filming the entire time. They’ve all had their helmet cameras on, but he’s been searching for the right angles, zooming in and out. The camera never shakes; Simon sees something heroic in his stubborn perseverance. He knows firsthand how therapeutic it is to hold an automatic rifle in your hands—a profane feeling of immortality, as if the rifle guarantees that what happens to others will never happen to you. The world can’t touch you. You’re death’s equal. Maybe a camera makes you feel the same way.

  They’ve reached the top. Clement’s nose is bleeding, thanks to his soaring blood pressure. Blood trickles down his chin, and his flak jacket is splattered with it, as if he took a direct hit in a fistfight. They toss the smoke grenades, and thick blue smoke barrels out. They’ve marked the landing area, so there’s nothing else to do but wait for the helicopter. The wind is completely still, and the smoke rises like a column into the air before slowly dispersing. The blue of the smoke looks bright against the sun-bleached landscape, as if a painter with no sense of nuance has used a brush too freely. Like orange flames and flowing red blood, blue smoke is a part of war’s reckless palette.

  They stand there waiting, tired and drooping, drained of any desire to fight. They smell shit. It’s coming from Michael and Jakob—but they also know from training that some soldiers shit their pants in battle. Their uniforms are all stained. While they were lying in the ditch, the fabric soaked up moisture from the muddy clay. They glance at each other’s soiled clothes. Clement and Troels waddle strangely, as if they have a load in their pants. They’ll be fighting for a spot in the open showers—but tell it like it is? Fuck, man, I shit my pants? They can curse, they can strike out in frustration, they can even cry in front of each other. There are no barriers between them. But this is taboo.

  “There’s a water tank in the APC,” says Schrøder. “Go around back and wash yourselves. The rest of us can turn our backs.”

  Behind them the ramp to one of the carriers has been lowered. They don’t look.

  Jakob moans from the emergency stretcher. His arms reach out imploringly while he mumbles incoherently. He’s wide-eyed, the whites shining in the blood-splattered face. Simon suddenly feels negligent; he should have rinsed the wounded’s face. Kneeling next to Jakob, he starts to administer cardiac massage, though he has an irrational fear of cracking his rib cage. The seriously wounded body seems so fragile to Simon. He removed Jakob’s flak jacket a long time ago—no reason to drag around the extra ten kilos in the stretcher.

  A trickle of blood comes out of Jakob’s mouth, as if he’s vomiting the last remnant of life. Simon uses the arm of his uniform to dry his mouth and then sticks his fingers into the oral cavity to make certain that the tongue is in place. He’s about to place his mouth over Jakob’s to give him mouth to mouth, when the wounded man shoves his hands against Simon’s chest, as if to push him away. Instinctively, Simon moves back. Jakob’s gaze is focused now, first on Simon and then on the others standing in a circle around them.

  “Little brother,” says Mads, his voice shaking. “Hang on! You’re going to make it!”

  “Hang on! Hang on!” The others chime in, their voices building to a powerful chant.

  Jakob opens his mouth. “Ten,” he says thickly. “Nine, eight, seven . . .” It’s as if his dying heart is counting down. The chorus of voices stops abruptly.

  “Jakob,” pleads Mads, as if begging him to stop.

  “. . . six, five, four, three, two . . .” Jakob hesitates for a moment. His eyes open even wider, the whites visible around his irises. “One,” he says. His head falls to the side. His eyes stay open.

  Simon is still kneeling next to Jakob. The others kneel in a circle around the dead body. “It’s not true,” says Mads. “I didn’t just hear that.”

  Simon shakes his head. “I heard it, too.”

  They stare at each other. Did Jakob just count down to his own death? It didn’t happen. That’s the unspoken agreement they come to in this moment.

  Simon has gone toe-to-toe with death, and death won. He knows it already: it won’t be the view from High Ground he’ll remember later, the ditch or the gravel road where they set off the roadside bombs, or the clay walls where the enemy was shooting. It will be Michael’s and Jakob’s mutilated bodies. That’s how he sees Afghanistan no
w, a landscape of leg splints, perforated bodies, slimy intestines winding their way out of an abdominal cavity, a blown-out jaw exposing the inside of a mouth.

  They hear the sudden sound of a helicopter approaching and look up. It’s a large Chinook with two whirling propellers, but the Apache helicopter that accompanies it whenever they request “armed escort” isn’t there. They were looking forward to seeing it pound the ragheads with a 30 millimeter. This has really been one fucked-up day.

  As the Chinook kicks up the dust, they rush forward with the two emergency stretchers. Simon has reported both men WIA, wounded in action. He remembers the advice from his medic course: never report anyone KIA—not even if you have to pick them off the ground in pieces. You’ll only have to drag them home yourself, which means a dead man on the floor between your feet in the personnel carrier. Think that’s good for morale?

  He watches the medical assistant and the doctor exchange a quick glance before they carefully lower Michael and Jakob into the helicopter; he knows they’ll ignore both of them on the trip to Camp Bastion. There won’t be any attempts at resuscitation. He just delivered two corpses, and everyone knows it. He gives them an appreciative thumbs-up to thank them for their help.

  If this were Call of Duty, the screen would go red. Michael and Jakob have given their lives. They’re gone.

  11

  They’re heading back toward camp. The whole time the gunners have been firing down into the Green Zone. Now they’ve stopped and the only sound left is noise from the engine. They’re on their way home. A dust cloud forms in front of them as three Humvees hit the brakes. Two unshaven men hop out of the vehicle at the front. They’re in shorts and sneakers. One has a bandana on his head; the other is wearing a helmet he’s shoved behind his neck.