Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Lennox said, looking at the mess on the ground.

‘Luke!’ shouted Flannigan. ‘We’ve got to get Charlie out of here. We’ve got to go!’

‘Bosh!’ Dooley said. ‘Fucken killed the bastards. Dirty Taliban scum. See ye! Fucken see ye!’

‘Holy Christ,’ said Lennox.

Scullion was looking at the dead ANA captain and Flannigan tugged him by the arm. ‘Just leave it, sir. A no-use traitor bastard.’

There were rose petals on the road. Luke saw them and the blood running into the dust at the edge of the orchard and his eyes were stinging with sweat. Suddenly he came up and pushed Scullion nearly off his feet. He grabbed his shirt and pulled him in and locked eyes with him. ‘You caused this. You fucken caused all of this.’

‘Leave it, sir,’ Dooley said, pushing the captain back and separating the men. ‘Let’s go.’

Scullion was wild in the eyes. ‘This is

yours

,’ Luke said, walking away from him. ‘Good fucken work.’ He waited a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Moving out!’ There was screaming coming from the

hujra

and the women appeared in the road beating their chests, raising their hands. Dressed for the wedding, they cried for their sons.

The Canadian and Private Dooley walked ahead to secure the retreat and Luke ordered a couple of the others to carry Mark’s body. The dead soldier’s hair was matted with blood and white dust and his pal from the regiment was holding his hand and weeping. Dooley opened the passenger door for Scullion and he got in without a word. He wasn’t there, Dooley said later. ‘The lights were on but nobody was at home.’ Luke and Flannigan walked back up the road from the

hujra

, their rifles pointing at the village. And when they reached the bridge Luke cast his eyes at the school and saw a line of children’s faces at the open window.

‘Charlie base. This is call sign 722. Over.’

AIRLIFT

Beside the whop-whop of rotary blades, Luke stood with the commander at the edge of the convoy. ‘There will be a full investigation,’ Emory said. ‘Questions. Big fucking questions.’ But Luke wasn’t listening. The camouflaged underside of the Lynx lifted away, creating a wind that blew the dust into a dense cloud. ‘You chose to leave his body,’ said the commander. ‘He was Afghan National Army.’

‘He was not one of us.’

‘We are all one of us, Captain.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We are forging on. Nobody’s going back. We are fifty-nine miles from the delivery point and that is where the action is. Major Scullion will stick with the platoon and we can discuss his jolly outing into bandit country back at the base.’

‘As you wish, sir.’

‘It’s not as I wish. What I wish is that the British army did not harbour such fucking idiots.’

‘Yes, sir.’

BANN RIVER

The operation had to be completed that night and they were in the Vector moving towards Kajaki. They said little, feeling everything, eyeing one another and hanging their heads as they breathed in the hot aftermath. They would remember Scullion sluicing himself with sterile water, but was it fury, confusion or regret that dimmed his eyes and made him grunt and rub his

sodden hair until it tufted into spikes?

The old life was over and Scullion knew it. As the vehicle bumped along and then rejoined Highway 611, he recalled that he’d once imagined the world could be put right and made whole. He had been a man who liked the era he lived in and was well suited to it. He loved the metaphysics of the new wars, where one spoke of freedom, of delivering security, but as he put down his head and meshed his trembling fingers he pictured slain Bosnians by a shopping precinct in Srebrenica. He saw corpses in burnt-out cars on the Basra Road and rebel soldiers lying dead by a runway north of Freetown, their eyes open to democracy. He saw those boys in the orchard. And it was all a mystery to him now, all at an end, the resolutions, agreements, interventions, because the people who police the world are never ready for the world’s ingratitude. Eight construction workers in Teebane, blown to pieces by the IRA. His first acquaintance with gore. A culvert bomb on the Drum Road. His platoon got to the crossroads in minutes from the barracks in Omagh. That’s what the journalists don’t see. That’s what the politicians and the mothers never see.

Luke was staring the other way.

‘You all right, Charlie?’ Flannigan said.

When he turned his eyes they were clouded with failure. ‘People let you down, son. They do bad things.’

Luke had come to the end of his own dark corridor in the mountains and Charlie Scullion was merely a name he would give to the mistakes that led him there. He had suspected in Maiwand that the major, despite his stories, his reputation, was not up to the job, and he had looked away as the enemy made an opportunity of their weaknesses. Luke and Scullion were not so different as either hoped: they ran their battle from the centre of

some persistent idea of themselves as good men, and, in this way, they resembled the politicians who paid for their boots and gave them their language. Luke wasn’t sure how a life works, how your story accumulates and regresses, how it speaks, how it hides, but he’d know it eventually. As the vehicle rumbled on and the daylight dwindled, he knew he had played his part in the disaster at Bad Kichan.

‘It sounds bad,’ Lennox said, ‘because I feel sorry for the Scottish lad, but I’m just glad it wasn’t one of the platoon.’

‘It was bad luck, that’s all,’ Dooley said. ‘The soldier stepped forward at the wrong time.’

‘It was more than that,’ said Flannigan. ‘It was bad everything. It was just bad.’

Scullion stared at the ground. It was Operation Grapple. The Croats were trying to cleanse the Bosnians from the Lašva Valley. Three hundred people were murdered in a cinema in Vitez and the boy next to me, Second Battalion …

‘How old was the kid today?’

‘He was twenty-one.’

The convoy joined the decoy units for the final push. They went past canals and villages and climbed to the high fields around Kajaki Sofla. Crossing the Helmand, they took turns to look out and see the beautiful green of the river and the many sunflowers growing on the banks. They got their full battle kit on and Scullion looked up and told them to affix their radios and bring out the light machine-gun.

‘The Mini-Me?’ Dooley said.

‘There’s two here,’ Scullion said. ‘Let’s get this over with. Docherty brought in two after the last stop.’

Kajaki was one big choke-point, a lot of vehicles waiting to

go in and a lot of Terry down there. This was the fight they had come for and it had to be over quickly. Night fell and Luke could hear the Chinooks moving ahead of them, softening up the gun positions around the hills. The men fixed their bayonets and checked their ammo outside under a hanging herb that smelled of peppermint. Scullion came with information about Taliban gun-mountings in the town but he didn’t offer any speeches. He just looked into the desert.

Scullion put his hand on Luke’s shoulder. He didn’t respond, but when he looked up he hated the expression in the major’s eyes. It was dark now and a burst of red and orange appeared over the tops of the trees. Scullion clapped Luke again and the younger officer widened his eyes. ‘Please fuck off, Major. It’s my only request.’

‘We have a battle to fight,’ Scullion said.

‘Then fight it.’

Luke climbed up and examined the scene from the top of the Vector and thought of the little town of Bethlehem they knew at school, the white buildings on the hillside and the stars. Except this was godless territory and the night ahead would be brutal. ‘We better get a few rewards after this,’ Dooley said. ‘A few shakes of the choccy-tree. The lads have been through the mill today and a few beers might be in order.’