Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

I tracked them across the field and my operator informed the troops that there was another insurgent and described the bicycle with weapons hanging on it. He said they had moved to a small building tucked under some trees. He took a grid and changed my flight profile so I could maintain a fix.

My sensor zoomed in on the dark doorway and the thermal signature of the man crouching beside it and the hot barrel of his weapon. Another figure ran from the building and I lost it under the trees.

My pilot told them that one enemy had left the building but they still had four confirmed. They discussed rules of engagement and then permission came and I arced around and a command passed through me to the ordnance attached to my fuselage. My camera wobbled as my weight changed and the missile dropped away into the haze. My cross-hairs hovered over the building. One of the white shapes was walking beside the building and then crouched down.

My image flashed and fuzzed and noisy pixels of white burst out. I readjusted. The heat strike was at the centre of where the building had been. They widened my aperture again to show the smoke boiling out of the trees. And then my sensor was turned to focus on the road where a small white speck was moving away and I magnified on it. It was a motorbike travelling down a road, its engine heat building as a sharp white dot.

They reviewed the rules and decided not to engage. Then my sensor array rotated under my nose, back to the impact.

The building no longer had a shadow and earth had been thrown around the strike mark and was dark where it showed against the hot surface of the field. I continued to circle above as the blast area cooled and my sensor operator sent a damage assessment. I loitered and then my turboprop whirred and I climbed away.

Thirty-six minutes later I was needed again, forty-three miles away. My operator clicked a mouse on a grid. I received the command and changed course and flew myself north to help.

In the beginning, I was mostly in the Atlantic. I evaporated and travelled as moisture across the ocean towards an island where I formed part of a grey cloud that scudded across winter fields. Soon the fields turned white and were crisscrossed by black lines and dotted with red squares. The temperature changed and I grew too heavy and fell as snow, drifting slowly down until I settled.

A day later two figures came. I was on the ground so they towered towards me. The first walked slowly with a stick in each hand, kicking his legs forward through the snow that squeaked as it compacted. Even though it was cold he was sweating and his breath billowed.

The other figure followed along behind, picking her feet up and folding her arms around herself. She smiled and talked to the man. ‘Keep your back straight and push through your glutes. Try not to abduct your right leg. That’s it — better,’ she said.

The man walked on towards me, leaving dark holes in the snow where he carefully planted each stick.

‘Don’t flick your leg like that. You’re arching your back again.’

‘I’m bloody trying,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I’m an amputee, not Scott of the bloody Antarctic.’

And then his foot caught, he teetered for a second and fell forward. His sticks rattled against his metal legs as he landed face down into me.

She laughed, bending over with her hands on her knees. ‘You look like Scott of the Antarctic now,’ she said.

He grinned, lifted himself onto his elbows and caught his breath.

‘Do you need help getting up?’ She walked over to him.

‘No, I’ll be fine. Just give me a moment.’

He started to pull me together in his hands until I was formed.

‘I can see what you’re doing,’ she said.

‘What? I’m just getting up.’ He grinned as he pressed me into a ball. Then he forced himself up with a grunt, staggered to get his balance and threw me with his free hand. I was airborne.

‘That wasn’t even close,’ she said as I sailed past her.

The man wheeled around with the impetus of the throw, overbalanced and fell again, laughing. I rolled in the snow and slabs of me broke away before I came to a stop.

She reached down, pulled snow together and made a ball of her own. She stood over the man, who was still laughing on his back as he swept his arms up and down to make the shape of an angel.

‘You can’t throw that at me, Kat. I’m a defenceless amputee,’ he said, ‘and it would be against the physio’s code of conduct, not to mention the Geneva Convention.’

‘You started it, Captain Scott,’ she said and threw the snowball into his face.

They both laughed and he spluttered snow from his mouth.

He slowly stood again, she handed him the sticks and they walked off, now getting smaller. He was grunting with effort but still smiled as she followed behind him.

‘Push through your glutes, squeeze that bum. That’s better.’

Soon they left me. It was warmer the next day and I melted.

I was on my side among the low branches of a bush. An explosion had blown me there.

It was night and they were black against the rubble they clambered over. One of them turned on a torch and a cone of light illuminated fragments of wall and stone. The beam jumped across the jagged remains and was lowered into a gap and made the debris glow from within. It flicked off.

They didn’t talk much but the sound of bricks and mud being pushed away and rolling off the pile continued all night. A few times they joined one another, working frantically, and then they dragged another dark shape from the rubble and carried it down onto the field. Once they stopped and sobbed together. But they kept going and dawn slowly saturated the landscape.

There were three bodies lined up at the edge of the wheat field. The man and woman still worked on the mound, her bright blue shawl hanging low and her hands grey with dust. He called her over and she stumbled across and hysterically pulled rocks away and reached in and wailed.

They pulled the final body out and laid it with the others. She knelt by its head and reared back and forth and then curled her face down into her hands and stayed bent over the body.

He stood over her and looked at the horizontal parade of bodies and then up across the field and saw me. He walked through the wheat that pulled at his long white shirt, now marked with chalky dirt. His arms were covered with scratches and blood smeared his hands. His face was hollow and eyes glassy above the wisps of grey that snaked from his cheeks into his beard. He pulled me from the bush and flipped me up onto my wheel. I was badly dented but I still worked.

The green shoots brushed against the frame that held my wheel as the man pushed me back across the field and I left a line where I flattened the crop. He dropped me on my leg supports and crouched down by one of the bodies. He put his arms under its shoulders and dragged it towards me. It was stiff and awkward and the corpse knocked into me and I fell over.

She looked up and asked him what he was doing and they argued. She tearfully pleaded with him not to go — it was too dangerous. He ignored her and tugged me back up. He tried to pull the body into me again but it flopped out. The man clamped his teeth in frustration as he pushed the front of my tray forward across the ground, trying to scrape the body up. But it sagged and folded and wetness filled the man’s eyes at the indignity of it all.

The corpse was half in me, with my front end under it and my handles sticking up in the air. He managed to pull it farther into me and the distended head bounced off my metal side. Dried blood showed around its ears and nose and was red in its mouth. And then he pushed my handles down and I scooped it all up and the body squashed back into me and hissed air from its buttocks. Its limbs were bent unnaturally over my edge and a foot was turned back on itself.