John Birmingham - Without warning

‘Sure, Specialist,’ Melton replied. ‘Tell me what happened.’

A Marine stepped forward. ‘Hey, need a recorder, Mr Melton?’ he asked.

The reporter took it and smiled. ‘Just call me Bret.’

When the dog tags were connected to formerly breathing, living, loving people, the army specialist moved away. The batteries were low, but an Australian commando contributed a set of triple AAA batteries. Bret then talked to the Marine who’d loaned him the tape recorder, until the tape ran out. He ejected the mini-cassette and passed the recorder back to its owner, who had a boy, a girl and a horse called Eagle back home, but the man shook his head.

‘No, Bret, you keep it,’ the Marine said. ‘You need it more than I do.’ He fished around in his pocket and pulled out some fresh tapes. ‘I don’t have anyone to record messages for anymore.’ He then stood up, squared his shoulders, and moved out of the hangar. At the bay doors he collected a rifle and a helmet from another Marine, and they walked out into the searing Qatar daylight.

Melton had no idea where he would place the interviews, or what form they might take. But he kept scribbling and taping, encouraging people to talk about… well, about whatever they wanted. And they did.

‘So the bastard was up in the ceiling,’ one Private Adrian Bennet said. ‘He popped four in my squad before we finally figured out where he was hiding…’

‘Our convoy got cut off,’ a Native American army private by the name of Piewesta told him, shaking her head. ‘We took a hell of a lot of fire and my friend Jessie, she was in the back of the Hummer when we got hit. She didn’t make it.’

‘That was a helluva mess,’ someone added. ‘You with 507th Support Battalion, right?’

Piewesta nodded.

‘The bullets came flying from everywhere,’ an Apache pilot, half of his left foot missing, recalled. ‘Hell of a thing, Bret. I thought I was home safe after knocking down those three Iranian helicopters, but then all of this ground fire comes up. Like being trapped in a mason jar full of lighting bugs. Just wasn’t my day to be flying.’

Melton noticed that the pilot didn’t mention his gunner. Probably didn’t make it, he decided.

‘She just wouldn’t sink,’ a sailor from the USS Belleau Wood said. ‘That Iranian sub put three torpedoes into her, but she wouldn’t go down. We were trying to get the fires under control when we got word to abandon ship. We could’ve saved her but they said resources were tight. Better to scuttle her.’

A Tarawa class LHA lost – scuttled. The US Navy hadn’t lost a ship that large in combat since World War II.

The sailor smiled. ‘We got that fucking Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the Nimitz got us some payback on that bitch.’

‘Hell, yeah,’ someone else said. Others took up the chorus: ‘Hell, yeah! Payback!’

He heard a seemingly endless stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies materialising out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing towards them, then suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high-explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the thousand-year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.

Night had fallen, and half of the hangar’s floating population had been spirited away before he finally stopped. Both hands ached, but his missing finger tormented him with a particular ferocity and the wounded shoulder throbbed with a deep, agonising bass line from his having sat hunched over the notepad for so long. But Melton thought he had enough material for a whole book, including a wrenching series of personal stories about what people had already lost. Families, home, friends, everything.

He made an effort to gather testimonials from the handful of Europeans present, such as Milosz and his men, and some British tankers whose Challenger had been crippled by a buried mine. Fact was, their stories would sell the piece in whatever form it took, the domestic market for American stories having literally disappeared. When the Poles finally got their ride out, he was reading back over the tale of a Scottish infantryman who’d been separated from his platoon in al Basra for two days, but whose main concern remained the fate of his family’s trout farm after a week of acid rain had killed off the entire stock. They all shook hands and wished each other well.

‘Make them understand that there is a new Poland,’ said Milosz as they parted.

Melton looked around at those who remained. Not quite so many tears now. A few of them were snoring, sound asleep, jerking in the fit of a nightmare somewhere in their past. He heard a couple of guys laughing about a canoe trip they had been on – how drunk they’d been, and the silly idiot with the yellow swimming trunks who wouldn’t fall into the raft full of college co-eds.

It was mid evening; a cool, almost chilly night, alive with the rumble of distant air operations. He was tired and very hungry, and getting shack-whacky, having been trapped inside for so long, even in such a large building. The last thing he’d eaten had been a protein bar, four hours earlier, and he just knew the table service in this place was going to suck big-time. Until his transport batch number was called, there was nothing for it but to wait. Having lost the pile of Polish duffel bags on which he’d been resting contentedly, he’d since moved to one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs dotted about the facility. He remembered the poncho liner, which he still had, gifted by the specialist on KP back in Kuwait.

Melton wrapped himself in the woodland-green camo snivel gear as the earlier desert heat turned to night-time frigid. It was there, half asleep, haunted by visions of the mortar attack that had put him in hospital, that Sayad al Mirsaad found him.

‘You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!’ Kipper was incredulous, outraged even. In fact, half-a-dozen emotions blasted through him like a hot desert zephyr on finding out that the military had arrested the elected city councillors, but mostly his feelings arranged themselves around ‘incredulous’ and ‘outraged’. ‘You can’t do that. It’s… it’s…’

‘Wrong?’ offered General Blackstone.

‘Yeah, that’s right. It’s wrong. It’s fucking wrong in so many ways I can’t even begin to count them. What, you guys couldn’t get your own way so you just threw the switch on a military coup? For Christ’s sake, you’re dealing with a bunch of frightened, fucked-up nimrods who take three hours to decide which sort of cookies they’re gonna serve up at council meetings.’

‘We knew you’d understand,’ McCutcheon replied, without a hint of irony. ‘That’s exactly why we put ‘em in the bag. They really do argue about the cookies, don’t they? I watched them do it last week. Amazing, man. Truly fucking amazing. Anyway, while they’re banging heads over the catering arrangements, PEOPLE ARE DYING.’

The last part of his routine he delivered in a parade-ground roar, emphasised by pounding a fist down on a stack of folders that burst out from under the blow in an explosion of paper. Kipper jumped and looked over to Blackstone, but the general remained impassive. It was a bad-cop bad-cop routine.