Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

He pushed his hand up under my rim to itch his hairline. His ears whirred in the sudden silence and he puffed his cheeks out as adrenaline coursed through him. He called in three of the men and spoke to them.

‘We’ll keep one team static to cover the platoon until we’re back in sight of Route Hammer. Stay on the cleared path. Just peel through each other. One foot on the ground at our rear.’ He looked at two of them and they nodded that they understood. ‘I’ll control the withdrawal. Sarnt Dee, you lead us back. Use the route we agreed in orders. Go firm before we cross the road and then we’ll roll back into camp.’

‘Roger, boss,’ he said.

*

He looked at the paths and walls that had seemed so different last night. He saw where he’d been lost and smiled: all the threatening shadows and looming shapes had disappeared. He checked back towards the tree line for the enemy but the landscape was empty. One of his teams huddled behind a mound dredged from a ditch and covered the platoon as they filed away. Above, the helicopters banked off to another task.

It was quiet and the sun baked the earth. He yawned. He had survived the morning and his adrenaline was gone. No one had been hurt and they’d all get back to camp. The combat had been brief and the energy slumped out of him as he sent a message for the next section to go firm.

The soldiers by the mound clipped up bipod legs, lifted their weapons and followed down the path as another section pushed out along a fence ahead to cover the next phase of the withdrawal. His men moved to his command and he studied the landscape and felt a rush of pride at the privilege of leading them in this place.

Farmers were in the fields and watched the men moving past them and BA5799 greeted them with the only words of their language he could speak. He knew another attack this morning was unlikely if the locals were out.

The sun had sharpened and beat down on me and his head was hot and sweated into my pads. His clothes smelt and chafed where his kit pressed in. His shoulders ached under the straps that pulled them back and he felt thin and spent under the weight of it all.

But he could do it; he could endure it, and more. He had wondered why people thought soldiering was romantic, and knew if they swapped places with any of his men most would crumple under the pressure and fear, the smell and heat. But he could feel the romance now as he watched the single file of men, with their day-sacks and helmets and antennas, bobbing up and down across this foreign land.

They moved back into the area of abandoned compounds near the base. The platoon had stopped along the track, waiting for the covering teams to catch up. He was the last man and before we pushed between two walls he turned to survey the flat fields and sparse lines of trees out to where the enemy had been. On a road in the distance, a man on a motorbike was watching us. I shook from side to side as he sighed and then walked on into the maze of walls.

He went through the platoon from the back and smiled and nodded at every man as he passed. They crouched by walls or sat on rocks to take the weight off their backs. Their faces were exhausted and grimy with dirt. He knew and trusted each of them. They were his: he could order them into danger and they would go, but he also belonged to them and would lead them there. Each grin and nod, every gesture was trust and the bond that had tightened again that morning.

They stood as he passed and followed him, peeling the platoon through itself so it reversed order. He stopped by the last man waiting beside a ruined building. ‘All good, Sarnt Dee?’

‘Good, boss. Home time, I think,’ he said and glanced back. ‘I’ll count us through.’

‘I’m starving,’ BA5799 said. ‘I cannot wait for breakfast. I’ll lead us back in.’ And he walked on out into the field.

He led his men towards the camp. The tops of the watchtowers showed above the road and he saw the flag and antennas. He thought about breakfast and the walls of the base rose up on the horizon as we approached. I had pressed into his skull for hours and he adjusted me and then looked back at the single file of men spaced out and moving from the ruins.

His boots were treading below me, pushing out over the dry, cracked mud and brushing through the yellow grass. We came to a dip in the ground and in a flash there was no longer any romance.

*

Later, after he’d been taken away in a helicopter and I was no longer with him, the platoon had collapsed back to the camp. One of the men carried me into a room and put me in a cardboard box. Someone was writing on it with a black marker: Captain Tom Barnes BA5799 — WIA .

He looked over as they tapped down the lid above me. ‘Do you think he’ll make it, Sergeant Dee?’ he said.

‘Not sure, mate. Looked pretty bad to me.’

I existed for a fraction of a moment. I was created by an explosive reaction from a device that functioned to form me. I passed through rock, through mud, through dust, through the air, through the sole of a boot.

Through a man.

I stamped through them all, folding them in shock and pressure and dragging them up with me.

I am also noise. Try bang, try boom, try dull thud-thump, try ker-krump, try piercing ping puncturing perforated drum.

I crushed him against gravity.

He couldn’t stay whole and I disintegrated his foot, slamming through it and bursting it open: foot and boot fragmenting in my wake. I forced them up with the dirt I punched up. Up in my supersonic swell, tearing straight through skin.

Trashing all that should be sacred.

I was all around him and in him and through him: flaying a finger off, flashing flesh from a forearm, blasting a boot buckle deep inside him.

I ripped up his leg, flapping his calf off in my wind. I stripped his trousers away and his penis fluttered in my storm. I pulled open his testicle. I dragged bone deep into his thigh, pushing through pink flesh and vessels, bursting open grey globules of fat.

I went through him, shocking his nerves and muscles and jarring his spine, crushing him in his armour. I beat through his diaphragm and collapsed his lung — and up — up his back, compressing his skull and banging it into his helmet. And over him with dust and dirt, into the sky in a pyre of bubbling, boiling brown.

He would have snapped if I had existed for any longer but he flexed in me and then flipped and clattered to the earth.

And then I was spent and wind dragged in to replace everything I’d blown out, all fleeting and invisible except for what I’d lifted, which now rained down around him, and my bang rolling out across the landscape.

It banged around us and lifted you with it. Rock, mud and bone thrashed past me as I swung out around your neck on my chain. Your face was stretched in shock next to me as we existed inside the shaft of violence. It flogged through us and you bent with it, flipping over so my chain was across your cheek and my metal discs floated up next to your helmet. All you felt was the flash, the dull thump, and being spun and airborne in an instant. All you knew was that something was wrong.

And then I clinked against the hard earth as you dropped back down from above. Sensation exploded from the bridge of your nose, overwhelming synapses and neurotransmitters and buzzing through you, too vast to be pain yet.

Your body bounced and slumped as debris and rocks pattered around us. There in the dust, my two metal discs hung from your neck and rested on the ground below your chin. You were face down and your forehead pressed against the inside of your helmet, holding your face away from dry grass.

Shock annihilated everything and you were gone.