US ARMY COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, KUWAIT
Everything came back slowly, from a great distance. Awareness, senses, memory – and pain. Oh yeah, there was plenty of that. Everything was so dim and far away that the actual transition to consciousness was not immediately real and for an age he hovered on the far side of a morphine dream unable and unwilling to pull himself back to reality. In the end, the pain made it impossible to hide. Whatever drugs he’d been given were beginning to wear off and Bret Melton had a dizzying, sick-making instant of realisation that he was in pain. Real pain, seated in more places throughout his broken body than he cared to catalogue.
‘Goddamn,’ he muttered.
‘Hurts like a bitch, don’t it, sir?’
The voice was loud and obnoxiously cheerful. Familiar too, in its smooth rap cadences. But he felt as though everything in his head, every thought and memory, had been violently jostled out of place by the explosion that must have put him here.
Where?
His eyelids were gummy and difficult to force open, but force them he did, blinking and raising a hand to rub away the crust that had formed while he slept. Or at least he tried to. His shoulder throbbed abysmally, as though he’d reinjured the old wound picked up so many moons ago at Ranger parachute school. ‘Damn!’
‘Yeah. You’ll want to lie still, until the nurse comes to get you. Don’t go getting no ideas, though – it’s a male nurse. Skinny, ugly little fucker too. He’ll jam a bedpan sideways up your ass if you give him any stick.’
‘Corporal Shetty?’
‘Uh-uh. What’s left of me.’
Their surroundings slowly came into focus. Melton was lying on a cot in a tent. On either side of him lay more men in uniform, some heavily bandaged, some apparently undamaged, at least on the outside. A fine layer of sand covered the plywood floors, and through a flap a short distance away he could see the fierce white light of the desert. He noticed the thrum of a heavy-duty air-con unit, keeping them cool. It looked as hot as a furnace outside. He slowly turned his head towards Shetty’s voice, noticing immediately that the corporal was short one limb. His left arm had disappeared just above the elbow.
‘Yeah, gonna have to work extra hard scratching my ass now,’ he said. ‘And that was my natural ass-scratching hand, too. Least I still got an ass, though. And my nuts.’ He gave his groin a reassuring squeeze with his remaining hand.
‘Where are we?’ asked Melton. His voice was cracked and he reached for a squeeze bottle of water on the small stand next to his bed. It was warm and tasted slightly metallic, but still felt like sweet dew in his parched mouth.
‘We scored an evac slot,’ Shetty told him. ‘Don’t know where from exactly, they’re not saying. But I’d bet Kuwait or Qatar if I had to… if I had any money. Germany is our next stop.’
Now fully awake, if still groggy at the edges, Melton found himself unpleasantly aware of just how much he hurt. His entire body seemed to ache, but here and there, more intense pain warned him of some very special hurts he’d picked up. Shetty seemed to read his mind.
‘You’re not doing too badly, Mr Melton,’ he explained. ‘Doc told me you lost a finger off your right hand. A big chunk of shoulder meat. You lost about half of your Ranger tattoo. And you got peppered with shrapnel and one big hunk of wooden window casement. Had a splinter as big as Florida stuck in your ass, apparently. Doc said that hunk of wood coulda been a thousand years old. Said they shoulda had an archeologist dig it outta your butt.’
Melton forced a weak smile, more in recognition of Shetty’s attempt to cheer him up than from any genuine amusement. He carefully levered himself up on his elbows to have a look around. The tent was about as big as a tennis court and housed something like sixty or seventy cots. All of them were occupied. He was surrounded by a forest of IV lines and blood bags, but very little specialised equipment.
Shetty was on the other side of his cot, propped up on a couple of dirty-looking pillows, one stump of an arm heavily bandaged. He was smoking Kools with his free, intact hand.
‘Glad to have you back, Mr Melton. You’re the only familiar face in here. They got guys from all over, but nobody from my platoon.’
‘How bad?’ asked Melton.
Shetty’s eyes clouded over slightly. ‘They fucked us up three ways from Sunday, sir. The lieutenant’s dead, Sarn’t Jaanson, everyone in my squad. About fifteen guys all up, most of ‘em in that alley. There just weren’t nowhere to go. You and me, we got blown clear into a little shop. That’s what saved us.’
‘Holy shit,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry, Corporal. I really am.’
‘I know, sir. You’re a good guy. The boys, they liked having you along with them.’
A jet flew low overhead, the screaming whine cycling up quickly and shaking Melton’s rib cage from the inside out. The dull thud of chopper blades emerged from the tail end of the cacophony. He tried to move around to face Shetty but only succeeded in hurting his left shoulder. Waves of grey washed out his vision and a thin layer of sweat broke out all over his body. He started shaking.
‘Take it easy, sir,’ said the wounded non-com. ‘You’re going to be a while getting better.’
Somewhere down the row of cots to his left a man began screaming. There was no warning, no cycling up. His shrieks suddenly filled the entire tent and brought two orderlies running. Melton turned his head as far as he dared but could only see what was happening in the very limit of his peripheral vision. The medics appeared to inject the soldier, and a few seconds later he slipped back into unconsciousness. The reporter gave up and eased himself onto his pillows.
‘So, you know what’s been happening here, Corporal? Or back home? Anywhere?’
Shetty drew on his cigarette and shrugged. Melton wondered idly how he’d managed to get one in and light up. There were no oxygen tents nearby or flammable chemicals that he could see, but he was sure there had to be a rule against smoking in a hospital tent. Yeah, there would definitely be A Rule.
‘You were out of it a coupla days, sir. You missed a lot of stuff. We’re fighting Iran and Iraq now. Expecting to have to fight pretty much everyone between here and wherever we’re bugging out to-probably Europe, maybe the Pacific somewhere. But the Kuwaitis and the Saudis aren’t too happy about that, so it’s all up in the air. And it ain’t just us. Israel has called up all of its reserves. Everything they got is ready to go, on a fucking hair trigger, is what I heard. Had my first walk outta here just this morning. Over to the mess tent. Guy there, a reporter like you, he told me the only reason the Arabs ain’t invaded Israel so far, or tried to, is the bomb. That Ariel Sharon, he went on Al Jazeera and just straight up said, “Yep, we got it, in fact we got over two hundred of ‘em”, and then he read out a list of cities they’d nuke if anyone so much as looked at ‘em wrong.’
‘Holy shit,’ muttered Melton.
‘Yeah. Rules are changing. Even so, the Israeli army is fighting right now. They’ve gone into those Palestinian areas – what is it again? – that Left Bank Gaza joint, I can never keep that shit straight. Anyway, Israelis have put a world of hurt on ‘em. They’re fighting Hamas, the PLO, a whole bunch of fruit-and-nut-bar Islamic whackjobs. They pretty much hammered Arafat’s guys flat. But Hamas is shooting loadsa rockets at ‘em from Lebanon or something. Everyone thinks they’re gonna get nuked.’
Melton felt dizzy and had to sip at his water bottle and lie back with his eyes closed. ‘What about Iraq?’ he asked. ‘What’s happening with them? You said we’re fighting Iran too now. I sort of remember something about that before getting clobbered, but it’s all hazy. My head feels like mush, you know.’
‘Well, they ain’t allies or anything. It’s more like a street fight where everyone’s piling in. Do you remember the Iranians had sent all them little speedboats into the Gulf waters, half of them suicide bombers? They got some good fucking licks in early, too, before we started sinking anything that didn’t belong to the Coalition. They got a coupla our cruisers, sank a British destroyer, tagged some Australian boat full of clearance divers. It was fucking chaos for an hour or so, and then the skies were full of fucking MiGs: Iranian, Iraqi. Our guys were raking ‘em out of the air, but these things are unloading hundreds of bombs and missiles, and some of ‘em got through. Fucking scuds start landing on us – well, not us here, but right on some port where the Brits were fighting a bunch of Republican Guards and those Fedayeen motherfuckers. Those fucking scuds, man, they don’t discriminate – they’re dropping like rain, killing everybody. Iraqis, Brits, a buncha Marines who happened to be in the wrong place. It’s fucking madness. A brawl, not a war.’
Melton was about to say, ‘What about Washington?’ when he remembered that Washington was gone, or empty at least. Instead he asked: ‘So, what happened? Is it sorted now?’
Shetty smiled without humour. ‘You know how I said the rules have changed? Well, of course, there ain’t nobody in Washington to prod us in the ass with no 12,000-mile-long screwdriver. General Franks, he just gets on the blower to some admiral back in Pearl – he’s like the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or something – and Franks says, “I’m gonna kill these motherfuckers if it’s cool with you”. And the admiral didn’t have to run it past no senate committee or congressional circle jerk. He just goes, “Yeah, sure, kill ‘em all.”‘
Shetty drew in the last of his smoke, and with one quick little move, almost like a magic trick, he twisted and squeezed out the butt between his fingers, before pocketing the remains to throw away later.
‘So?’ asked Melton. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s happening right now,’ said the nuggety corporal. ‘Navy and air force turned around, dismantled the Iranians’ air defence net. Then they demolished their fields. Last I heard, Baghdad and Tehran were getting taken apart by cruise missiles, and…’ – he leaned over as if to impart some grave national secret – ‘I heard there’s a hundred or more B-52s flying in from the Pacific right now and they’re gonna carpet-bomb what’s left of both cities. None of this pinprick surgical-strike bullshit. We’re just gonna smash ‘em flat. Give those raghead motherfuckers something to think about next time they feel like pissing us off. Lets the Chinese know the big dog’s still in the yard, too. I heard they tossed a coupla missiles over Taiwan’s way this morning.’
Melton tried to take it all in. He doubted there were a hundred B-52s available now, but he suspected that Shetty probably had the broad outlines of what was happening more or less right. Everything was beginning to unravel. The politics of it were pretty much irrelevant. All that mattered now was getting the hell out and hunkering down somewhere safe. But where?
He drifted off into a long fitful doze and when he awoke, Shetty was sleeping, the ward seemed quieter and the bright, hard edge had come off the day outside. Melton felt a little better, a little less muddle-headed and fragile. He still hurt all over, but being able to identify the injuries behind his pain allowed him to put each of his many hurts into a box and file it away. It didn’t decrease the pain, but it sure helped dealing with it. Pain could be endured a lot more easily when you knew where it came from and when it was likely to recede.
‘Mr Melton, you’re awake. That’s good.’
Bret turned his head carefully towards the male voice. A thin, exhausted-looking corpsman, with deep purple smudges under his eyes, appeared to have just noticed him and was advancing with a clipboard. He looked to be of Italian or maybe Greek extraction, and was obviously running too close to the ragged edge of a complete physical breakdown. It was a look you got used to around soldiers. When you saw it on rear-echelon personnel, however, it was never a good sign.
‘What’s your name, son?’ Melton asked him. He had about fifteen years on the kid, and probably had more time in service than him too, so he felt comfortable taking the liberty.
‘Deftereos, sir. Tony Deftereos.’ Then he seemed to remember himself. ‘Hospital corpsman, 15th MEU, sir… I’ve been told to watch out for you.’
‘You’re navy? What are you doing here?’
‘Oh, you know. Chaos. Madness. The usual. My ship got hit by a jet ski.’
‘A what?’
‘A fucking jet ski, sir – pardon my language. Full of explosives. So here I am, looking after you, as per my orders.’
‘From who?’ asked Melton, somewhat nonplussed.
‘Corporal Shetty, sir. He said he’d stomp me if he woke up and found out anything had happened to you.’
Melton looked across at the maimed black soldier lying in the bed next to his, and realised that Shetty was the closest thing he had to family or friend. At least in this part of the world. Possibly anywhere. He felt that familiar, irrational swelling of affection for someone he didn’t really know, beyond having faced mortal danger with them.
‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it, Corpsman,’ Melton said with a smile. ‘Corporal Shetty is a gentle soul, a friend of lost animals and small children. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.’
Deftereos looked most uncertain. ‘Well, I promised him I’d keep an eye on you, sir. If you feel up to it, the doc would like you to answer some questions for him.’
‘I’d shrug, but I’ve got a big hole in my shoulder and it really hurts. What d’you need to know?’
Deftereos took him through a standard post-trauma questionnaire, which wasn’t all that different from the experience a civilian might have answering an ER survey at hospital, except for the questions about exposure to chemical or biological weapons and so on. By the time they were done, Melton felt a little hungry and asked if he might have something to eat.
The corpsman checked a note at the end of his bed and nodded. ‘Nothing heavy, sir. A cup of soup maybe, to begin with.’
‘Thanks. Listen… Tony, wasn’t it? You hear anything from back home about what happened? Have there been any developments in the last few days while I’ve been out of it?’
A sad shake of the head was the initial reaction to that. ‘No, sir,’ Deftereos replied. ‘Nobody’s had any word out of home. And the news coverage we were getting – you know, satellite photos, webcams and stuff – it’s drying up, because of the firestorms over there. Some whole cities have gone up. Not just a couple of blocks here and there – the whole thing, sir. They reckon the clouds are like a nuclear winter or something over Europe. Like when Saddam torched those oil wells in the last war, only much worse.’
Melton remembered that from before he checked out. He recalled resting in the alleyway, looking straight up at a hard blue sky and wishing some of those clouds would drift south and cool things down a bit. He tried to recall some more details but it was like pushing those same dirty, polluted clouds around the inside of his head. Nothing really cleared up.
‘I’m not feeling too bad,’ he told the corpsman. ‘D’you think I could get up and walk over to the mess tent for my soup?’
Deftereos grimaced slightly. ‘In fact, I was gonna ask if you could, sir. We’re real shorthanded here. Doc’s written that you should be mobile by now. You got no leg or spinal injuries, nothing internal. Just have to watch your sutures on the shoulder and some stitching on your rear end, where they took out some real big splinter. You’ll have to move slowly, is all. I’m sorry, sir…’
‘That’s fine,’ grunted Melton as he pulled himself up. ‘If you could just give me a hand up, that’d be great.’
He bit down hard on the pain that welled up as he rose from the bed. No stranger to injuries and discomfort, he knew he’d have to get used to moving around with both. He was very much a non-essential part of this operation and considered himself lucky to have made it this far. It seemed a lot of the boys he’d been covering hadn’t. A mild headspin unbalanced him and he leaned against Deftereos, but it passed with a few deep breaths.
‘You gonna be okay, sir?’ asked the corpsman.
Melton nodded. ‘I’ll be fine, Tony. You get back to looking after your patients. Just give me some directions.’
Deftereos pointed at the main tent flap as a puff of wind caught it. Melton could see a throng of uniformed personnel hurrying in both directions outside. ‘You head out, turn left, and move through three intersections, then it’s on your left again. About a hundred and fifty yards. You won’t miss it.’
Melton thanked him and began the slow shuffle out of the tent. It remained quiet in there, with most of the wounded men sleeping in their cots. A few orderlies and corpsmen moved about checking on them. Some were in scrubs, others in their desert fatigues, a mix of various services, something that wouldn’t normally happen in an army combat support hospital. But regardless of their branch, not one spared him as much as a glance. He was walking and mostly in one piece. He just wasn’t a priority.
He felt adrift, disconnected from the world. He understood Shetty’s feelings about not wanting to let go of the familiar. Melton had never been part of a unit that’d been shattered before, but it sounded like that’s what had happened to Euler’s platoon. He’d embedded with them, nearly died with them, been right there in amongst them as they fought their way through southern Iraq. It had been such a bullshit mission in one way, rushing forward to engage the Iraqis who’d attacked them, just to give themselves enough elbow room to get the hell out of Iraq when the war was all but called off by events – or just the event - back home.
The hospital tent opened up onto a thoroughfare, a wide street of sand in yet another huge military camp, laid out as always in a grid pattern. Soldiers and Marines moved about in groups of two or more, all in full battle rattle, many with a bad case of the thousand-yard stare. Melton blinked at the raw power of the sun after the relative gloom of the tent’s interior. The field hospital enjoyed the benefit of a slight rise in an otherwise flat landscape, affording a view of the frame tents, generators and vehicles. The combat support hospital was attached to a number of other units in the area, near as he could tell. A five-ton truck rolled past him, filled with body bags, the bumper number clearly defined. HHC 703rd MSB.
‘Jesus,’ he muttered, watching the REMF vehicle roll down towards a container. ‘I’ve died and gone to the rear.’
The truck stopped in front of the container, where a detail of soldiers waited. With great care, two soldiers at a time would remove a single body bag from the truck and carry it into the container. Melton could see a refrigeration unit attached to the side. A couple of soldiers from 3rd ID glanced at the body, then looked away. Melton overheard them talking as they passed.
‘Those poor dumb bastards really got zapped,’ one specialist said.
‘Glad I wasn’t there,’ the other, a private first class, replied. ‘Stupid fucking mission anyway.’
‘Amen to that,’ Melton said under his breath.
He gazed over a vista of thousands of tents and makeshift arrangements of prefab huts, motorised trailers, converted shipping containers, vehicle parks, supply depots and chopper pads. A cluster of antennas sprouted next to a tight knot of command vehicles and shelters. The camp had to cover a couple of klicks of real estate, thought Melton. He cautiously craned his head skywards, and was able to pick out the twinkling points and occasional contrails of at least a dozen jets flying Combat Air Patrol.
‘Division main will want that on the double,’ someone said to an underling. The underling nodded to the soldier, who was standing in the back of a communications shelter. Melton read the bumper number without thinking: 223 Sig BN.
‘Guess that commo puke didn’t have to worry about shooting himself in the foot after all,’ he thought aloud. ‘I must be at 3rd ID’s main camp.’ Now where that was exactly, he had no idea.
The ground was rockier, harder, than he remembered from that last big post. It made walking a little more treacherous for someone with his injuries, but it also meant that there was marginally less grit and sand in the air. From the lowering position of the sun, he estimated the time as being quite late in the day, maybe 1600 hours or more. His watch was missing. There was only room enough for foot traffic in this part of the base, and it was heavily congested. Everyone was fully armed, as though expecting the enemy to appear around the corner at any moment, but people made way for him as he shuffled off in the direction of the mess tent.
It was slow going. His whole body was stiff and every movement seemed to threaten new rips and tears in those parts of him that had already been sundered apart and put back together. Melton desperately wanted to know what had happened while he’d been out of it. What had become of ‘his’ platoon? Who’d lived and who’d died? And what had gone down in the wider world? The little he’d picked up from Shetty and Deftereos wasn’t reassuring. He had the impression of a world that had already tipped over the brink and was now falling towards destruction.
It took him a while and a good deal of discomfort to cover the short distance to the mess and he felt worn out when he’d done it, but satisfied too, as if he’d proved to himself that he wasn’t a total cot case. Pushing in through the flyscreen doors, he found about half of the tables occupied by service men and women whose working routines obviously had them out of synch with the bulk of the camp. He recognised Marines and army personnel, and some foreign uniforms, possibly Australian special forces. There was even a table of USN sailors looking very much out of place. The hum of the room was subdued, with many of the diners watching a television that hung from a pole near one end of the space. Nobody appeared to be enjoying the show – some sort of news broadcast.
Melton was desperate for information, but also weak with hunger. His appetite had come roaring up as he’d shuffled towards the mess and its familiar smell of fried meat, grease and instant coffee. He was salivating heavily now, and his stomach actually seemed to twist itself into a knot in an effort to move him towards a fold-out table where a female on KP duty smiled at him.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ the specialist asked. Melton couldn’t read her name-tag. It was covered by her body armour. ‘We got some burgers and fries that are sorta fresh. And you look like you need feeding up.’
He shook his head but smiled. ‘You got any soup?’
She turned towards the giant metal pots sitting on a big field oven behind her. ‘Got some beef stew in one of them, sir. I could add a bit of water if you like. That’d almost be like soup, wouldn’t it? Just chunkier.’
‘Chunky is good,’ said Melton.
The Army specialist even helped him over to a table where he could watch the TV, which surprised him. No one was ever cheerful to be put on KP duty.
A minute or two later he was sitting on a poncho liner she’d loaned him, trying to ignore the sharp pain from his butt sutures while dunking a bread roll into the thick dark stew of chuck steak and vegetables. His Ranger buddies would have given him a ration of shit for accepting the snivel gear, but his ass hurt, and as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t a Ranger anymore.
‘You ain’t a Ranger with that haircut.’
Melton turned to see an air force sergeant, at the same time noticing that the remains of his Ranger tattoo were clearly visible on his left shoulder. For some, those would have been fighting words, but Melton just wasn’t wired that way. The sergeant inhaled a chilli mac and green beans with a good-natured grin as Bret reached his hand over to shake.
‘Reporter these days. Bret Melton, Army Times - or I was until last week,’ Melton said. ‘But no, I’m not in the army anymore.’
‘Sergeant Anderson – Michael Anderson,’ the man replied. ‘But you can call me Micky if you want. You look pretty badly shot up there, Bret – mind if I call you Bret? You get caught up with the Marines?’
He shook his head. ‘Nope, 5-7 Cav. At An Nasiriyah.’
The sergeant nodded sagely but said, ‘Didn’t hear about that. But then, there’s been a helluva lotta fighting here and there. They’re still patching my C-130 back together after all the fire we took from the Iranians on our way here. Co-pilot didn’t make it. Hell of a ride, I’ll tell you. Two burning and two turning, and I don’t mean jets. Your guys, the ones you embedded with, they okay?’
‘Afraid not. We got caught in a bad spot. They mortared the shit out of us… I don’t even know how we got out.’
The realisation had just struck him. He really had no idea why he was alive. Shetty hadn’t explained how the two of them escaped, only that they’d been blown into a building of some sort. A shop or something. One of the other platoons must have fought their way over to drag them out. Hadn’t they lost air support just before the mortars started to fall…?
He found himself slipping away into reverie and consciously pulled himself back into the present. ‘Sorry, Sergeant… I mean, Micky. I’ve only just woken up. Been out of it since we got hit. But no, I don’t think many guys made it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anderson said quietly. ‘But at least you weren’t with the Marines at Abadan. Man, what a fucking mess.’ He didn’t explain further. Another forkful of chilli mac effectively silenced him.
Melton gingerly dunked his bread into the rich broth of beef stew and tried to focus on the TV screen. He recognised BBC World’s business news presenter, Dharshini David, on the screen. Her normally dark, full lips seemed pale and pressed tightly together, and her eyes were haunted and nervous. It was hard to hear what she was saying, but a tagline rolling across the bottom of the screen and a small picture window hovering beside her head gave him the impression that there had been a massive banking collapse in Europe. The little video window carried footage of black-clad riot police, whom Melton recognised as French CRS, baton-charging a huge crowd laying siege to an old colonnaded building. He assumed it was a financial institution that had run out of money. The scene switched to London, where even bigger crowds waited, a lot more patiently, outside a large Barclays bank in the City. A man in a dark blue suit made some sort of announcement to them and they reacted with catcalls and jeering, but there was no violence. The presenter then threw to an interview with a frightened-looking woman who was nursing two children.
‘Any idea what that’s about, Micky?’
Sergeant Anderson glanced quickly over his shoulder at the television and shrugged. ‘Something about the banks falling over.’ He grunted in disgust. ‘Welcome to my world. I haven’t been paid yet – not that it matters, since my ex gets half of it. Or… she used to, I suppose.’ He stabbed at his food. ‘But at least I’m not going hungry.’
Yet, thought Melton.