Harry Parker - Anatomy of a Soldier

And then you were back. You expanded from a scrap of consciousness to a head and nothing registered but disorientation and you knew with sudden certainty that you’d been decapitated. You couldn’t feel your body. You opened your eyes to make it real. All you saw was the baked mud and the light pouring in from each side. Your eyes were massive with fear above me and then you shut them, crushing them together against it.

It was never going to happen to you and now you would stand up and dust yourself off. This happens to others, you managed to think, but the pain started to build and you couldn’t move.

Anxiety overwhelmed you.

You wanted your body but it wasn’t there. Your tongue licked across your teeth and you felt a chip and a blade of grass and grit at the back of your throat. You wanted to turn over and check how badly you were hurt but neither arm nor leg moved. But the pain did move. It built and obliterated any other feeling and dragged you farther away from yourself. It wasn’t real yet but the potential of it shocked you and you feared it. It fought through the whirring fuzz that had replaced your body, coming with the anxiety and building with the fear. Your mouth creased above me. You whimpered.

The dust drifted away and behind you a man stood up. Another looked at you and didn’t get any closer. He wanted to help but you looked odd and inhuman distorted on the ground and he’d frozen. You were bent and covered in rock and dirt with body parts twisted or missing, and he couldn’t make sense of it.

Another soldier ran up from the rear and started shouting. You could hear him through the pain and recognised the voice telling them not to get any closer until they had cleared the area. And you wanted them now — to just get here now. And then your radio sounded in your ear and the initial confused reports were deadened by buzzing pain. It was about you this time — it was never meant to be about you. You heard them describe what was happening and wanted to be part of the conversation and tried to lift your hand to press the switch but there was no hand, no arm in time and space, just buzzing pain.

You heard them say your zap number: BA5799 had been in an IED strike.

And then that was all background and you realised it was hard to breathe and a weight seemed to press against your chest and you were drowning. You didn’t have enough breath to get to the surface and your chest screamed silently as tension crushed it. And then you were gone.

The detectors swept alongside us and then past and they chucked them down and rolled you onto your back. Your head lolled in your body armour and your helmet fell off. They said, ‘Sir, sir … Tom … sir?’ but you didn’t respond.

I had dropped back onto your chest. My discs rested there now and flashed in the sun. On each of my discs your information is stamped: O POS, 565799 BARNES T, CE . You were dying and when you did one of my discs would stay with your body, the other would go for notification. That would have been a certainty but now they were with you and trying to stop it happening.

They cut away your clothing and applied your tourniquet above the footless stump that was only sharp slivers of bones, dark red and filled with mud and dirt below your shredded trousers. They twisted its handle until it was tight and stopped you bleeding. They found open wounds on your other leg and pushed a tourniquet up into your groin and you had one on each leg. They realised you weren’t breathing and they breathed into you.

You came back and it was dark and pain and you tried to open your eyes but you were sightless as you fought the pain and gritted your teeth. They held a clear bag of fluid above us and pulled you out of your body armour and cut away your combat shirt and you were lying naked on the cracked earth. I still rested on your chest and their hands left streaks of your blood on your white body where they handled you.

You started pleading with them. Save me, please, you said again and again and then you asked them to make it stop and you lifted your head and it waved around blindly. They hushed you and made you rest it back down and you couldn’t see them wrapping dressings around you and strapping your leg while the pain increased until it was all of you.

You had imagined being brave if you were injured. It was always a wound from a bullet and you would have fought on, commanding your men in the battle, and afterwards you would have walked back into camp with a dressing over it and would have been a hero. But there was nothing brave about this, no dignity. You were broken and utterly pathetic lying in the dust as they crouched by you and tried to stop you bleeding out. Pain reared again and it was dark and you had never felt so utterly alone. You pleaded with them once more but it was too much and you were unconscious again.

They dragged us onto a stretcher and carried us across the field, a man at each corner and another jogging alongside holding up a bag of fluid. I had dropped around your neck and my discs rested on the green canvas stretcher staining with your blood. They left your helmet and armour and shredded day-sack on the bloodstained dirt next to the small crater. As they lifted us out of the field, one of the men behind picked up your things and brought them with him.

You came back and you were scared again and you bit something hard against the pain, it was the arm of one of the men who was carrying you. He swore at you.

You felt the stages of the journey to the helicopter. You knew from your training and watching it happen to others that you were in a vehicle and it was driving back to camp and then you were outside and could hear the whistle of the helicopter and it was all agony.

You didn’t say any brave words and there were no thumbs up, you just whimpered and pleaded in the blindness. You were loaded onto the helicopter and you wanted it to take off immediately. Why wouldn’t it take off? And then the whine escalated and we were airborne and out over the desert.

You were certain you were going to die. This is the end, you thought, and the pain pressed down on your chest and you were gone again. The men in the helicopter worked on you. They had to restart your heart when your body couldn’t cope with the blood loss and trauma and it gave up on you.

Four times they shocked you and each time you came back and begged them to make it stop and then you pleaded with God to save you, it was your last option. I’ll do whatever You ask, you thought, and gritted your whole body against the agony.

And you summoned anything you had left, any last hope and life you had to stay — to stay in the helicopter, to stay with the pain, to stay alive.

But you went again.

You came back once more. We were being carried from the helicopter and you knew you were outside but it was all darkness and pain and you tried to lift your head and then we were inside and it was over and you let yourself go. You had nothing left.

*

They didn’t have to split me up and my tags stayed on my chain. I was taken off you by doctors before they operated and placed in a plastic wallet with your other records.

I fluttered off the stick they had pushed into the ground above the graves of the two young friends. Other flags were planted in the cemetery on the hill that overlooked the shimmering grid of irrigation and the patchwork of green fields, but I was the newest.

I flapped in the hot air blowing in off the desert.

Below me, where the land stretched away from the desert to the large river in the haze, stood the soldiers’ camp. It was a solid rectangle built around old compounds with vehicles and towers and the mortars that sent bombs high into the air. The soldiers sometimes played, kicking up dust and celebrating when they scored a goal. And beyond the camp, in the village, specks of people moved around the market strip and out into the fields.