Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

I was there as BA5799 ran along the wall. My overhanging rim cut his vision as a black horizontal blur and my chinstrap bounced up against his stubble as he pounded onto each stride. I was his window on soldiering: the straps that held me to him framed the action.

Above me the wall burst open and dust hovered as he ran towards the field. A shock slapped around me and in his ears and then another, closer. He held his rifle in one hand; the other was clenched in a fist that he drove forward as he skipped around a log and down a track and then he was on the hard mud and crawling through the field to his team commander.

Soldiers were kneeling in the corn and firing their weapons. My weight pulled his head forward but the muscles in his neck were trained so that he didn’t feel me. I made him comfortable and safe in this environment and he raised his head above the leaves and tried to make sense of it. The fear that had flooded up at the first crack was now pushed away and converted by adrenaline. And he wanted to understand everything that happened and control it and exist in it.

Metal passed above me and he heard it, sharp and claustrophobic. It was a roof of sound that pressed down and crushed the world around BA5799 until it was only his forearm pushing him up, the rifle he lifted into his shoulder and the knee that he stepped out; my rim bumping into his weapon sight and his finger curling around the trigger; the flash in the distance that he aimed at; the cracking above and the thump and then the squeeze and the clumping punch of the rifle in his shoulder as he fired again and again.

Cones of sound churned the air and his left eye squinted shut below me as he took aim and fired again, his forehead pressing against the pad that held my dome of composite material on his skull. I trapped heat and sweat started to pool among the hair I’d matted flat and dripped over his brow into his eye.

One of the men in the field shouted as he rolled onto his side to change magazine. Then he was up, back in the fight. The team commander next to us shouted at him to fire at the base of a bush at the end of a compound. A flashing pricked in the shadow and then the crack of rounds sprayed above us and the world crushed in even tighter. He ducked and I was hidden in the yellow stalks again. The men around returned fire, escalating the violence.

I swivelled as he looked back. On my rear, above where his bare neck extended from his body armour, he had written BA5799 O POS in black marker. And now that writing pressed into his day-sack as he looked at the compound where his other men waited for him to decide. They needed him now and he knew he must drag himself out of the tunnel of noise and heat that was the small patch of leaves he’d flattened. He thought of the enemy and where they might be, what they were trying to accomplish. The fear that they might try and cut off his platoon flashed through him — just do something before they do — and he cupped his hand around his mouth.

‘Move back to the FUP. Make sure three-two go with you,’ he shouted to the men in cover behind us and pointed over at a ditch.

A man acknowledged this with a wave before ducking back through a doorway in the compound as bullets cracked past and then peered out again.

BA5799 shouted again and his jaw pushed down against my chinstrap. ‘We’ll give you rapid fire in thirty seconds.’ Then he turned back to the team commander. ‘Rapid fire in thirty, Corporal Monk,’ he said.

There was a lull as the men around him inserted fresh magazines and the combat became an exchange of single bangs and cracks. The team commander crawled up into the line. BA5799 lifted his head again and looked out across the field but couldn’t see the enemy. He pressed the radio switch on his shoulder and updated the network, speaking into the microphone that jutted out from me and curved in front of his mouth.

‘Hello, Zero, this is Three Zero Alpha, I’m going to withdraw from Compound Kilo Five Four back along the cleared route to the FUP,’ he said. ‘My intention is to break contact and return to your location. Request air cover. Over.’

A calm metallic voice sounded in the earpiece squashed between me and the side of his head. ‘Zero, Roger, that’s clear. Air cover already tasked. Should be with you any minute. Over.’

‘Many thanks. Out.’

Then he glanced down at his watch and it was time. The team commander shouted at his men and they were up, their weapons kicking in their shoulders and brass spinning out into the green stalks.

He turned and saw the two teams spaced out and running across the open ground and sliding into the ditch. They were exposed and in danger. He clenched his teeth and we were up again, the rifle pulled back against his shoulder as he added his weight to the battle, knocking up into my rim with each pull of the trigger.

He looked at the ditch over to his left and saw the helmets appear near the sluice gate. Then they were firing and one of them called for rapid fire and their weapons burst and spat. The battle had a new geometry.

‘Corporal Monk, go. You’ve got rapid from three-one,’ he bellowed to the man kneeling to his right. ‘Move now!’

They started to run, lifting their weapons up and peeling behind those who still fired, out of the field and back along the wall. The team commander waited and signalled to BA5799. ‘Sir, move, I’ll cover you,’ he shouted, his face angry below his helmet.

‘No, you go first. Go. Go. I’ll be right behind you.’

The soldier turned and followed his men. Then it was only us standing in the corn. He fired wildly once more at the bushes and compound walls across the field, then he sprinted after them.

They were ahead of him in the unseen hail and running over the open ground. Noise told him everything: the men firing from the ditch and the metallic clang as the sluice gate was hit, a whining ricochet, and the machine gun pulled up out of the ditch, its bipod unfolded, filling the air with metal and trying to dominate the battle.

But there were cracks above us and BA5799 knew the enemy was still fighting. He crouched and ran and gripped and breathed and clenched his teeth in a grimace. He started to feel the weight of his kit as his legs burnt and I bounced on his head and he longed to be down in cover. The men in front were dropping into the ditch ahead until he was the only one left exposed and then a round cracked past me and he jumped down the slope into safety.

I knocked back as he jolted to the bottom and turned over, gasping for breath. A soldier knelt in the middle of the ditch and counted him in.

‘Good you could join us, boss,’ he said and grinned. ‘We’re all here.’

‘Thanks, Sarnt Dee,’ he said, his chin pushing into the damp leather pad of my strap. He reached up and pulled me back down over his forehead.

‘What’s the plan, sir?’ the man said.

I rotated as he looked over at the end of the ditch where his men were tucked over their weapons firing or swivelling down into cover to reload or change position. The symphony of battle changed as the cracks slowed and then stopped.

‘Cease fire, Corporal Carr,’ he called. There were more bangs as his men fired a few last rounds and finally it was quiet.

He turned back to the man. ‘I think they may have had enough of us, Sergeant Dee?’

‘Or it could be them,’ he said and pointed up at the helicopter drifting in high above.

‘True,’ BA5799 said. I pulled back on my chinstrap as he looked up and another angular helicopter hovered into view, the landscape vibrating.

Still breathing hard, he pulled a map from a pouch on his armour and read a grid into his radio before discussing the helicopters and the platoon’s route back. The men around him were lined up along the sides of the ditch, red-faced and hot and sucking on their drinking tubes as their chests heaved.