Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

He remembered Hassan’s anger; the workbenches where they learnt to mix explosives; the cold and the puffs of snow when they missed their targets; the whooping and joking with other students once he detonated his first bomb. He thought of feeling jealous for not being considered the best — he would make up for that now. And then his breathing settled and he slept.

He took me from the top of the day-sack. He’d kept me there because he thought there was a chance I might be good luck. I had been there for a while and had flattened. The last time he’d used me, he’d poured ammunition into me in a rush.

He pushed me open and looked at the faint words, TOM BARNES , that he’d drawn on my lining. He had used Tipp-Ex to write it after I’d been given to him at the end of training. He pulled me onto his head, smoothed my side down flat and adjusted my cap badge above his left eye.

He was sitting in a small room on a Z-framed camp bed. Attached to it was a domed mosquito net. The other man in the room found his one of me in a grip and pulled it on.

They walked through a courtyard and across the camp. The hot afternoon sun pressed down on my green wool. We went under a camouflage net raised on poles and out into an open area enclosed by the perimeter of the base. To one side vehicles and trucks were parked in rows on the oil-stained sand.

Men gathered. They had kicked up a cloud of dust that hung at knee level. Slowly they found their positions, forming three sides of a square as commanders quietly jostled them into straight lines. Most of them wore berets like me, with the cap badge of a bugle over the left eye.

We stood apart from them. He adjusted me on his head and waited, his eyes squinting against the low sun.

*

A padre walked up to the open side of the square and looked at the three blocks of formed men. Crosses were sewn on his collar and a dark cloth hung over his shoulders and down the front of his camouflaged uniform.

He spoke to them of remembrance and loss, and said they should pray. He told them about a conqueror of death, here in their time of need, who in the presence of death comforts those who mourn.

I tilted forward as he listened to the padre. He wanted to remember and to register the loss but he didn’t feel anything. He inched his head up and looked at the men across the square, friends of the man who’d died. They could feel it; he could see it on their faces. He didn’t want the loss to weaken him, though, couldn’t let himself imagine it was something that might happen to him. That would paralyse him.

The padre continued talking and his mind drifted and he thought about the patrol tomorrow, how best to tell them the plan during orders. His men were doing well but he didn’t want to let up on them; it was too soon and they still had so much to achieve.

They were told to pray together and my leather band flexed around his skull as he mouthed the familiar words. He knew the prayer without thinking and the words hummed out along with those of the men around him.

He wondered if they would encounter the enemy tomorrow; he wanted to be tested and he imagined fighting along a ditch and overcoming them. He was jealous of the platoons that had seen more action. He needed his men to be the best, his platoon to be the most respected.

Now the padre was talking about the man who had died, and he wanted to feel sad but instead felt empty. He didn’t care. All that mattered was scrawled on the orders sheet in his pocket.

The padre finished talking and a man standing to one side lifted a bugle to his lips and played a piercing tune they all knew. His hand jerked up and the end of his second finger touched my wool and he held it there in a salute. The bugle sounded again and they all started to walk away.

As we headed back towards the camouflage netting, someone asked if he wanted a brew. He took me off and sat beneath a tarpaulin on a wooden plank behind a table. He folded me in on myself and laid me on the plastic table cover. They talked and sipped from metal mugs. The sky turned orange and he thought how much like a hotel by the Mediterranean it was. Soon they were playing cards.

*

Later, after they had boiled foil bags of food and poured Tabasco into them, after they’d passed a satellite phone around so each of them could walk to a private corner of the camp and call home, he went to the room and zipped me back in the top of his day-sack. He hoped he wouldn’t have to take me out again.

There were three nurses over you, looking down and smiling. They’d worked around the bay and now it was your turn. One of them talked to you about how you were feeling and what the weather was like. Another said your parents would be back at eleven. They joked and you laughed with them about how one of the nurses had dented her car that morning. The laughing hurt.

One of them dissolved colourful pills into a pink slurry and squirted it from a syringe into a feeding tube that looped into your nose and down to your stomach. You felt the chalky liquid inside you.

I went into you too. I fed into your penis and up your urethra to your bladder. They had pushed me inside when you were unconscious. That was in another country. You were very ill then. They inflated my balloon in your bladder and it held me tight. Your urine trickled out down my silicone tube and collected in a bag at my other end. The bag was replaced every time it was full.

If it wasn’t for me, you’d be lying in a patch of your own piss.

The nurses pulled the sheets from you and started to wash you with flannels. Tender but efficient, they started with your face before washing around the dressings that covered your stumps and your arms and your left hand. They washed under your armpits and then held me up and washed around where I entered you. You could feel me, solid and foreign down its middle. You weren’t embarrassed: there was no other option.

Two of them lifted one side of you, then the other, and washed your back. They pulled away the old clammy sheet and replaced it. You grimaced and one asked you if you were okay and said it wouldn’t be long. You breathed through clenched teeth as the pain seared from your stump. They pulled the fresh sheet beneath you and tucked it under the mattress.

Another attached a bag of brown food to a hook above and the sludge started to slip down the feeding tube through your nose. They checked where the cannula entered a vein in your arm and pushed the plunger on a syringe to give you more relief. They passed you a glass of water and your hand shook as you craned your neck forward to drink. Before moving on, they hooked up a bag full of bright yellow drugs that dripped into you to stop an infection from taking hold. It made you feel horrid.

You thanked them.

They went to the next bed, talking to one another but not joking any more. Whoever was in that bay wasn’t conscious and the curtain stayed closed. You’d been like that when they first cleaned you.

*

You looked out the window. The air couldn’t hold the heat of summer and the clouds were piling up, it would rain and perhaps thunder. But you fell asleep. Your mother and father came later, your brother was with them too. You woke up and talked with them. After a while, your parents went for coffee and said they were seeing one of the doctors at twelve.

Your brother pulled up a chair between you and the window and said, ‘How are you, Tom?’

‘Fine, thanks. Slightly painful today,’ you told him.

‘Where?’

‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’

‘Let me see if I can get someone.’ He looked around the bay.

‘Honestly, it’s nothing.’

You watched him; he’d become so determined. He knew everything about your injuries, every medical term, everything they planned to do to you, what it meant and what the outcomes would be, every last percentage, and he wouldn’t let the doctors and nurses rest or not give a straight answer. You loved him for it.