Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

In the room around me, cardboard boxes were stacked and ripped open. The men delved into them and chose foil packets they took away to eat.

He sat on me and stripped his rifle down to clean it and the gas parts left oil marks on me. He checked and replenished his ammunition. Sometimes he zipped the net closed to make me his private space. He lay on his sleeping bag with a head torch on and read a book.

*

One night, after he had been busy all day and his skin was grimy and he was too exhausted to wash, he removed his combat boots and socks and let his white feet expand and cool on me. He thought about the patrol he’d just finished as he looked up at the endless stars.

He wondered if his men could have outflanked them and he relived pulling the trigger and the puffs as his rounds had slammed into the compound in the distance. The sound of metal travelling through the air filled his head again: the fizzing of ricochets; everyone gasping for breath after he’d sprinted and thrown himself into cover.

He thought about what he’d said on the radio, how he’d commanded his platoon, how he’d described the situation to Zero. He could still hear his men’s shouts amidst all the confusion. He remembered crouching in the ditch and trying to work out what was happening, trying to piece the battle together. The enemy had disappeared. He should have followed and caught them but he chose to be cautious since air support was on its way.

He put his hands under his head and against me. There was still dirt between his fingers.

He couldn’t stop it all going around in his head. It had been a chance to be bold, to close and kill — but they’d disappeared into the fields and trees among the confusing compounds. He imagined himself being brave among the tight walls and neutralising them at close quarters, leading his men relentlessly forward.

He thought of the jet flying over and the thrill as it disintegrated the wall and one of his men whooping from along the ditch. He replayed everything as he should have fought it, decisively and without hesitation. He promised himself that next time he would.

And then these thoughts merged into details of tomorrow’s mission. And he was back out in the network of fields, moving between other houses and locals, and he tried to decide how best he should clear the area. He had so little time to prepare; he’d have to give orders early and his men were exhausted already. He was overwhelmed by it and he reached for his alarm clock to set it an hour earlier. And then he remembered another thing he should tell them about the mission and the planning went on and on in his head.

And as often happened with the men that slept on me, he remembered a place far away that didn’t involve any of this. He was sitting on the lawn at his parents’ house in the cool sunlight, and the dog was trying to lick him as he laughed and played with it.

Then he was heading into town and he thought of a girl. She wasn’t right for him, but somehow, out here, she seemed to be. And he recalled other girls, some that he’d only glanced at, or shyly said hello to over loud music in a club. Some he’d blown it with. He wondered if they were right. Did any of them think about him out here? He hoped so. And he wished he was with one of them.

Finally he slept. It was a deep sleep of fatigue. He hardly moved all night but his ribcage expanded and contracted on me and he sweated. A buzzing mosquito, trapped inside the net, landed to extend its proboscis into him and suck blood up into its abdomen.

The stars twisted across the sky. Someone walked by in the dark and woke up the man in the camp bed next to us. He got dressed and went to keep watch. And we were alone in the courtyard.

*

He was already waking before his alarm clock rang. It was the brightening sky that made him turn over on me, and the chill that made him pull his sleeping bag up. It was a half-conscious bliss, being elsewhere, and the day ahead didn’t exist, only dreams of home that slowly corroded as he woke and realised he was lying on me, inside the netting, and a different sun was rising above him.

He coveted it: the longing to be back where he was safe and didn’t have any responsibility and wasn’t trained to do any of this. Where he didn’t have to lead anyone out of the gate again. He wished he didn’t have to. It was his private moment of cowardice before the day became real. He let it fester and was embarrassed, even though no one would ever know.

He hardened himself against it and it was gone, suppressed within him. He unzipped the net and swung his legs out, itched his thigh and left to wash himself and prep his gear, to take his men out there beyond the walls and try to make a difference.

*

The rhythm of shifts, patrols and downtime went on unbroken and became normal for him. But it did end. It ended before it should have, after he’d encased himself in armour, picked up his rifle and walked away from me one evening.

He never returned. Someone else came and cleared all his belongings from around me. They took the sleeping bag that smelt of him and packed it with everything else into a cardboard box. The man in the other bed was still there and he felt the absence.

After a few weeks, another man arrived to take his place and the rhythm continued. When he left, others came and I supported them one after the other. They were excited at first, apprehensive as they struggled to understand, sometimes disillusioned or resigned and always superstitious in the weeks before they were replaced.

Much later, after they’d gone and the sun had bleached my cloth, other men started to use me. They spoke another language and their uniform was different and they didn’t think of this as a distant country.

I was in a pack of fifty in a drawer. A man opened it and lifted me and six others out onto the table. He turned on the machine, which flashed, whirred and clunked. He sat and looked at a screen and pressed the trackpad. Then he slid us into the guides of the tray.

Rollers caught the first of us and pulled it down into the machine and the cartridge jerked across its surface. This happened four times and then I was at the top. The rollers dragged me in and I was under the printer head as it swept across me.

It propelled tiny jets of ink onto my surface, forced out of the cartridge by superheated explosions. It fired millions of these from its microscopic nozzles in spurts of primary colour that grouped to form an image on me. At first it was hard to know as I lurched down and each new strip appeared on me, but then I was ejected into the out-tray.

The ink dried quickly on my glossy surface. I was a photo now. The man sitting at the desk and switching off the printer was in me, dancing in a dark room with lights that had flared around the lens of the camera that had taken me. In me he looked younger. There was another man with him. They both were dancing and smiling at each other.

He pushed me together with the other photos, looked at his watch and walked out of the building to a car. He laid me on the passenger seat with his phone and started the ignition.

He drove quickly. He was worried about how he’d react when he saw his friend. He’d been dreading it. He had heard from his friend’s brother that it was bad, that Tom had now lost the other one as well. He wondered if Tom would still be like he was before, when they were best mates. He looked down at me and remembered the night I was taken. He smiled. God, he’d been a dick that night. They both had — she wasn’t worth it — and they’d hugged and made up in the morning.

He thought of training; perhaps he should’ve printed one of them together during training. It didn’t matter. He hoped I’d cheer him up.

It was bright, so he put on sunglasses and turned up the radio.