Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

Each time you sat down to remove me, you hoped it would be all right but knew it wouldn’t. I always damaged you and you despised me as you prodded the gunky scab and the blood that had soaked the sock again.

But I was too addictive, we went quicker and farther and you kept coming back for more. You walked across a room and you realised you no longer had to think about each action of swinging me forward. It felt like I was part of you.

We fell, as we always did whenever you had a burst of confidence, and I twisted below you and collapsed to the floor. Each time you reacted with a lifetime of learnt experience and your stump jolted inside me as your brain braced your remembered foot out. I sheered away from you, pulling across your stump to an unnatural angle, and then you were in a heap with me bent painfully below you. She was there to help you up.

You went home again and did use me. We staggered through the dead leaves of the garden in slow loops, sweat darkening your T-shirt. Your family watched us out of a window, you bent over the sticks and me kicking up the leaves, and it made them happy. But they hated the damage I did to you even more than you did.

We went back to the centre and it snowed. You decided not to get into your wheelchair one morning and you slid your stump down into me from your bed and walked out of the ward. The automatic doors swung open and you went into the physiotherapy department.

‘No chair, Tom?’ she said.

‘Morning, Kat.’

‘Take a seat, I’ll be with you in a mo.’

You sat on a treatment table and felt proud of the freedom I’d given you.

‘Where’s your other stick?’ she said as she walked back over.

‘Binned it,’ you said. ‘Thought it was a little geriatric. One stick can be carried with a touch of flair.’ You spun the black stick through your fingers, lost control and just managed to catch it before it hit her.

‘All right, steady,’ she said, shielding herself from the rotating stick. ‘We give you two for a reason, Tom. It makes you stable while you learn, keeps you balanced.’

‘It’s fine, really. I feel ready.’

‘Well, it’s good you’re feeling so confident. I thought we could do a few full flights of stairs today.’

‘Great, gravity-assisted work at last,’ you said as you followed her out.

We were at the top of the stairs. You dropped me onto the first step and started to place your other leg down but it was so steep you thought you were going to fall. The right leg caught next to me and began to bend too early. You lost control and snatched at the banister.

‘Don’t lean back,’ she said. ‘It’s like skiing. You’ll have more control if you stay above the legs.’

‘If it’s like skiing, this is definitely a black run,’ you said, pushing yourself away from the banister and positioning me in the centre of the step.

‘Well there aren’t any blue runs, I’m afraid.’

You dropped me down again and jarred into me. I was bending — we were going down too quickly and you jolted through me again and again. Then you leant back away from the fall and the knee buckled out and I twisted. You gasped and grabbed for the handrail.

‘Steady, Tom, steady. Hold it there,’ she said.

You were sitting down on a step.

She sat down beside you. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘You really do need to lean forward. It will give you more control and keep you better positioned for the next step. I know it feels strange,’ she said. ‘But the knee joint needs to clear the previous step and you’ll get better resistance from the hydraulics. Watch,’ she said and walked down past you, exaggerating the placement of each foot.

You sat on the step with your hands on your hips. You try bloody leaning forward, you thought. It’s easy to do that with real legs, you try doing it with prosthetics. How the hell do you know what it’s like? And you were about to tell her this but then stood up and descended more slowly, trying to lean forward.

It was exhausting and you hauled us back up the stairs and descended again. She made you do it until you were breathless and I was so full of a mix of sweat and blood that I started to slip off you. She said you’d done well, and you used your wheelchair for the rest of the day.

*

You improved on me but you became thinner. The pressure I exerted on you, and the weight you lost from the energy I used, made your stump shrink. I could no longer support you properly and you jarred painfully into the bottom of my socket. After one session, when you told her it was unusually sore, you took me off and she saw that your stump was purple. She took us back to the man who had made me.

I rested next to you as he wrapped plaster strips around your stump and made a new cast for what would become my replacement. That was the beginning of the end of me. Slowly you outgrew all my parts and the man switched them over until I only existed as separate components in a cupboard and you’d progressed to a high-activity leg and a carbon-fibre socket.

I was at twenty thousand feet and had been airborne for five hours. I am an unmanned aerial vehicle. I cruised at 165 knots and the wind howled around me. A thermal buffeted me, my aileron twitched and I levelled out in a holding pattern above a grid I’d been sent to because the troops below were in contact. I was there to support them. I had already dropped that afternoon in the north, where other soldiers had needed me.

The ground was pale through the thick atmosphere but the sensor mounted on my bulbous nose could detect through it, magnifying heat signatures into a monotone image I transmitted to my operators. One had just started his shift and had a can of Coke beside my control panels.

I am a communications platform and information bounced through me. The excited soldiers below sent radio signals. I transmitted them on to a satellite above that in turn rebroadcast them to the dish next to the air-conditioned cabin of my ground control station.

My sensor registered the light shapes of the soldiers lined up by a wall and the white heat that splashed from their weapons. They sent a message through me that indicated the enemy’s location. After the 1.5 seconds it took for a command to arrive from the control station, my gyroscopically stabilised sensor rotated away from the soldiers and tracked across the grey lines of the fields and cool black channels of water. It settled over a square and the V of a dark shadow. And then my magnification flicked out to show a wider area and the square was one among a patchwork of grey and white walls.

It flicked back in and I circled above and then saw their thermal shapes. Heat streaked off the walls around them. My controller told the soldiers on the ground that he had positively identified the enemy. There were two signatures and I sensed another two as I arced around. He said he’d keep eyes on and the silent battle continued below.

My controller sent me an instruction and the numbers on my readout tumbled as I descended to 7,550 feet. He switched my sensor to white-hot, inverting my image, and now the little figures by the wall showed as black shapes. This wasn’t as clear so he switched it back.

A flash of white streaked across my image and then one of the small ghostly figures was flat on the ground. My sensor-operator sent a message that an RPG had been fired and it looked like an insurgent was down. I banked around the area and my sensor zoomed out again and I could see the enemy in relation to the soldiers who needed me. Then I flicked back in and the prone figure was joined by another who pulled him into a dark shadow. And they were all there, huddled in a white blob.

My controllers were restless and one calmly asked the soldiers if they wanted me to engage. They told him to wait and their message was distorted by the background sound of bangs and breathing. The controller informed them that the enemy was breaking contact and he kept my cross-hairs over them as they slowly withdrew. They disappeared behind a wall and I was commanded to swing wider and then I sensed them again. One figure turned and spat heat from his weapon. They crossed into a field and my pilot transmitted that he still had visual.