US ARMY COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, KUWAIT
He was getting used to the chaotic, tumbling, whitewater rush of events, to waking up in different cots or beds, or a plastic picnic chair at some random transit point. Of course, Melton had experienced plenty of hurry up and wait during his time as a Ranger, and although he enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy in his later career as a civilian correspondent, he was, in the end, still hanging around the army, which had raised ‘hanging around’ to an Olympic-standard event, interspersed with short bouts of furious ass haulage and seemingly pointless tail chasing. The thirty-six hours after he awoke in the field hospital featured plenty of each.
He’d been upset on returning from the mess tent to discover Corporal Shetty was gone, evacuated on a medical flight to Ramstein. He was alone again, without friends or colleagues or even a passing acquaintance, until Corpsman Deftereos returned, this time bringing with him a set of three-pattern desert BDUs and a standard-issue brown undershirt and underwear. The young orderly was accompanied by an exhausted-looking female doctor, who gave the reporter a perfunctory once-over, checked his stitches, wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics and signed off a travel order, ripped from a clipboard and pushed into Melton’s pocket.
‘Congratulations,’ she said in a voice devoid of any spark. ‘You win a no-expenses-paid trip out of my ward and on into the next exciting phase of your own personal mystery tour.’
He hadn’t even drawn breath to ask what the fuck she was talking about before the doc was gone, administering more scripts and travels documents like some sort of malfunctioning vending machine. Deftereos at least had been a little more helpful, gesturing for him to stay exactly where he was for the next couple of minutes. Melton felt abandoned and more alone than he had in a long time as the two of them swept out of the ward, and he was on the verge of simply climbing back into his cot when the corpsman rushed back in, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him upright.
‘No, really, you gotta get the hell outta here, right now, sir.’
‘Why? What’s up, Tony?’
‘What, you think they tell me anything? I don’t fucking know – excuse my language, sir.’
Deftereos was babbling, and noticeably distracted. ‘Look, we just got word through that we’re shifting at least a third of our cot cases,’ he said. ‘Corporal Shetty scored a golden ticket with the 86th Airlift while you were out. And you just lucked in with a civilian charter, to London. If I was you, I wouldn’t even be here anymore. I’d be a dust ball, on my way to the fucking helipad. Now go!’
He pushed a small bottle of pills into Melton’s hand. Vicodin. ‘It’ll help, with the shoulder and your finger,’ he added. ‘Don’t worry about your kit. All your stuff has gone ahead. Now you gotta get going too.’
And with that Melton had changed out of his scrubs and been given the bum’s rush out of the tent and into the dust and harsh sunlight, to join a small throng of the walking wounded, all recently displaced and as thoroughly nonplussed as himself. They had just enough time to work up some really wild theories about battles gone wrong, bio-weapon exchanges, hundreds of thousands of American dead and wounded, when a white bus with dark blue Hilton Hotel insignias pulled around the corner formed by a pod of air-conditioned shipping containers a hundred yards away, and a navy chief stuck his head out of the rear door, roaring at them to get their worthless carcasses into the vehicle or they’d get left behind for good.
Bret remembered a short ride out to a vast helipad where civilian choppers of all manner and description vied with US military helicopters for landing and take-off slots. He remembered shuffling onto a Vietnam-era Chinook with Australian aircrew, but missed a lot of that flight after downing two of the Vicodin with a swig of warm, bottled water. He vaguely recalled half an hour spent in some lavish civilian airport where he was at least able to fill the prescription for his antibiotics, at a mark-up of about a thousand per cent.
Melton slept through a C-130 flight to Qatar, and fetched up for a long spell in a giant hangar where hundreds of wounded Marines and soldiers were laid out on stretchers if they were lucky, or if they weren’t, on a makeshift line of bright orange moulded plastic chairs. Groggy from the Vicodin and creeping exhaustion, Melton made his way towards a small mound of duffel bags that had been colonised by half-a-dozen Polish commandos. They all seemed in fine fettle, with their equipment stowed neatly in a pile to one side, guarded by one of their own – a huge blond stone monolith of a man.
‘Witam!’ Melton smiled in greeting, before holding up his hands to forestall a Polish-language landslide. ‘Sorry, that’s all the Polish I know. Besides piwo and piekna dzie … dzi…’
‘Dziewczyna?’ The small, wiry, heavily moustachioed man grinned back at him. The men’s sergeant, judging by his chevrons. ‘Not much beer or beautiful ladies around here, my friend. Just stinky American boxheads, yes? Apologies if you are boxhead too. I say it with love in my heart. And sorrow too, great sorrow. Please sit, you are wounded, yes?’
Two of the Poles crabbed around and Melton eased himself down on a couple of kitbags. They seemed wonderfully soft.
‘Boxhead? No,’ he grunted with relief at getting off his feet. ‘Not for a long time, anyway. Wounded, yes. Not too bad, though, just missing a few bits and pieces.’
‘Nothing to stop you enjoying piwo or dziewczyna then?’
‘No, nothing that bad. My name is Melton, by the way. Bret Melton. I’m a reporter, or was…’ He shrugged awkwardly and trailed off. It was simply too much effort to go into his CV, to explain his shift from Army Times staffer to itinerant freelancer for a slew of British media outlets. ‘You guys been waiting long for transport?’ he asked instead.
‘Eight hours. Not long. Some here have been waiting many days. Some have died here – not joking now. I am Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz, I do not joke. Pleased to meet you Melton By-the-way… Okay, that was joke. Polish joke, yes? The best kind. By Pole.’
Milosz flashed him a blindingly white grin and raised his eyebrows with such comic йlan that Melton couldn’t help laughing out loud. It hurt his shoulder dreadfully but he gave into it anyway. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed the abandon of real laughter. It seemed to loosen up Milosz’s men as well, with some of them smiling and nodding, as their own tension and stresses eased off a little.
‘We are going home soon,’ the sergeant said. ‘But you, my friend, where do you go now?’ The man’s eyes were dark pools of sympathy.
‘London, I think,’ said Melton. ‘That’s what my travel chit says, anyway. After that, well, I don’t know that there is an “after that”.’
‘No,’ agreed Milosz, nodding as though Melton had revealed some deeper truth. ‘Maybe nothing after that, no.’
Leaning back and taking in his surroundings, the reporter couldn’t help but dwell on how things were unravelling. There had to be nearly a thousand guys crammed into the baking heat of this hangar at the edge of a temporary base in the middle of nowhere. A lot of desert MARPAT, which meant Marines. Mixed in with the MARPAT were some army and air force personnel dressed in three-pattern desert BDUs like the fresh set Melton wore.
Marine, army or the few navy and air force he saw, all had the same look. The long stare, the slumped shoulders, postures crumpled in upon themselves. A few were crying openly, quietly, regardless of the severity of their wounds. Here and there, Melton would spot a soldier looking at a snapshot or a Marine watching a saved video file on his laptop. Some were by the door, chainsmoking for lack of anything better to do.
One soldier, from the 101st Airborne, had a collection of dog tags in his fist. He rocked himself back and forth until someone passed him, at which point he’d ask, ‘Who should I give these to, do you know?’ Even when he got an answer, he didn’t seem to hear it. He’d go back to rocking, back and forth, until someone else walked past.
A female Marine over by a Coke machine covered in Arabic script was smiling, flirting with a half-comatose man on a cot. ‘When I get home to see my baby girl, it’ll be all right. She lives in North Dakota with my grandma. I heard they made it.’
Oh boy, Melton thought, taking in the glazed green eyes of the Marine, a lance corporal. She looked right past him, not seeing anything but her dead girl smiling back from the past.
To Melton, they looked beaten. Like men and women with nothing to live for. Milosz and his small band of brothers, however, they were still tight and looking forward to something. Home, family, a simple fucking ride out of the furnace. It was enough to keep their spirits up. Melton shook his head. Any place where soldiers gathered in great numbers always ended up reeking of sweat and stale breath, cigarettes, ration farts and something more elemental – an animal smell of violence waiting to turn loose upon the world. But that musky scent had turned rancid and cloying in here. Even Somalia wasn’t this bad, Melton recalled. The Rangers on the whole weren’t beaten, nor were those pogues from 10th Mountain, who’d done better than anyone ever thought they would.
Desertions, he thought. These folks will desert or simply collapse if someone doesn’t give them their spines back real soon.
The giant metal fans droning away at the edge of the hangar merely pushed the vile atmosphere around, a gaseous slough of ill feeling and desolation. He was familiar with this. It was what happened when men faced the hopelessness of their circumstances and shrugged away any chance of redemption. It was what happened when men who were used to fighting for their lives gave up and said, ‘What’s the point?’
Milosz left him alone for a few moments. But perhaps uncomfortable with the brooding presence that had just insinuated itself into his little group, he toed Melton’s boot to regain his attention. ‘So, Melton By-the-way. You have a theory, yes?’
It was such a weird, unexpected question that Bret shook his head as if a bug had crawled into his ear. ‘Sorry. What do you mean?’
‘A theory, about the Disappearance, no?’ the sergeant elaborated. ‘I am interested in theories. Real theories with science and learning, not bugaboo magic, for explanation. Like these Muslim pigs and their stupidity about Allah’s will. So, your theory. Tell me.’
Melton opened his mouth to say something but simply shut it again, shaking his head. Fact was, he’d heard any number of bullshit explanations and crazy-talk gibberish about what might have been behind the catastrophe. He’d heard as many backwoods Christians lay it all at the foot of God as there were bug-eyed imams rejoicing in Allah’s vengeance on the infidel. He’d heard whispers of secret government experiments gone wrong, black-hole laboratories, portals to hell, and alien space-bat biology missions that had scooped up hundreds of millions of lives with something akin to a giant butterfly net. He hadn’t given any of them a second thought.
‘I don’t know, Sergeant,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t even begin to know what happened, or why, or whether it can ever be reversed. I figure the best analogy is we’re like ants whose nest got hit by a lightning strike, or by a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. We’re ants - what would we know about anything? Either of those things, they’d be the end of the world to us, but you stand outside the situation, you get the context in a way that we don’t have, and it’s probably something really simple… that we’re a thousand years from understanding. Possibly we’ll never understand it. My bet is that a thousand years from now we’ll be living in caves again, banging rocks together for a living.’
The Polish non-com narrowed his eyes and dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘This is a wise man,’ he said to his troops. ‘You see, he knows what he cannot know and does not pretend otherwise. This is wisdom, Jerzy.’
Milosz pointed to a younger, black-haired youth and spoke in a rapid garble of Polish. Melton had the impression he was repeating what he’d just said. The young commando shrugged, conceding a point.
‘So what about you, Sergeant? No theories for you?’
Milosz smiled sadly. ‘It is like you say. People groping through the dark, grasping at this and that, trying to explain what cannot be understood. My question, I ask it of people because it tells me how they are now. Whether they will get through or not.’
‘You think people will “get through” based on whether they believe in conspiracy theories, or magic, or the will of God?’
‘No. People will survive this because of luck. If you have no food to eat, no warmth in the deep of winter, it doesn’t matter whether you think little green men or Mohammed broke your world. You will still die frozen and hungry. But if you have enough to eat, just enough, and if you have some shelter and safety – again, just enough – then maybe your living or dying might have something to do with whether you fall to madness and superstition, or whether you hold on to your rationality.’
A small, indulgent grin sketched itself onto Melton’s weathered features. ‘You’re a materialist, then? Of the dialectic school? I thought Poland was done with all that.’
‘Yes, I am a material thinker, like my father, a mathematician. And you are no boxhead, Melton.’
‘It’s foolish to assume that just because somebody puts on a uniform and takes orders, they turn off their brains. You didn’t.’
‘Excellent,’ beamed Milosz. ‘It is good to talk like this, Melton. So much of soldiering is crudity and ugliness, yes? But there is more to the profession of arms, and to life itself. We soldier so our children won’t. For us, guns; for them, books and easier lives.’
Melton gestured helplessly. ‘I never had any kids. Gotta say I’m real happy about that now.’
He didn’t look back over at the Marine lance corporal as he spoke. She was still talking about her daughter in North Dakota. Someone came over, checked the man on the cot, took his pulse. The orderly then pulled a blanket over the man’s head and made a note on the clipboard, but the lance corporal didn’t notice.
‘But if I had,’ he continued, ‘and they hadn’t disappeared, I don’t know that they’d be looking at an easier life than I had.’
‘Not now, no,’ conceded the Pole.
Three trucks pulled up at the vast hangar bay doors and soon able-bodied troopers began unloading more litters from their rear cabins. Corpsmen and a few nurses appeared and hurried over to help, but otherwise there was no appreciable reaction to their arrival. Men still sat and talked in low voices in their own small, closed groups. Country-and-western crooners still clashed with speed-metal shrieks and hardcore rap from dozens of portable stereos. Listless card games of hearts and spades continued without pause. The bleep-blee-bloop of Game Boy systems never faltered.
‘And what now for you guys, Sergeant? Home to your families?’
Milosz nodded, but there was a severity to his expression that belied any sense of release or deliverance. A couple of the other Poles appeared just as sombre.
‘Home, yes. We hope.’ He waved his hands in the air, a concession of helplessness. ‘If we have not been forgotten. Or abandoned. Or lost… But we may not see our families even if we do get home. There will be much work to be done. Our sort of work.’
‘Fighting.’
‘Of course. You have seen what happens when things go bad, Melton. In Polish history, there is much fighting – Russians, Germans. Who knows who will come now? Maybe Tartars and Ottomans again. Once, even the Swedes invaded. I doubt they would again. They are a soft people now. But not everyone is soft, no? The jihadi pigs I am fighting in Afghanistan, they are crazy men, but hard. The Iraqis – not so hard, but bad, and led badly. Weak men are often the cruellest. And Russia, a sick place, but still peopled with ruthless commissars and tyrants. This Putin, watch him. He is an iron fist hanging over all of us.
‘So yes, Melton, fighting. Always fighting. Fighting big, between states, and small, between people for little things. Food, water – basic things. My brother, I spoke to him for three minutes on American phone yesterday. Nothing he has to eat for two days. Just some dried crackers and a little tinned food for his children. Nothing in market. It is like communism again. And now, with the poison clouds, no harvests, I think.’
His men were nodding, and Melton wondered about their grasp of English. If he recalled correctly, GROM operators had to have a working knowledge of at least two languages other than Polish. He supposed there was a fair chance all of these men did speak English with some fluency, given the anglophone nature of the Coalition. And doubtless this was a topic that had been chewed down to the gristle among them. He wished he had taken notes, or recorded the sergeant’s lament. He was sure he could sell a story based solely on snatches of interviews taken with the men in this hangar, or with those men and women with whom he’d travelled to get here. An old, nearly burnt-out spark flickered somewhere inside him and he reached inside his jacket pocket, searching for the Sony digital recorder he kept there. It was gone, but he had a pen and a notebook that he had lifted off someone’s desk over the course of his journey from Kuwait. His writing hand was uninjured, but holding the pad in his heavily bandaged left hand was awkward.
He looked at the lance corporal by the Arabic Coke machine. Don’t end up like her, he swore to himself.
Melton raised an eyebrow at Milosz and asked, ‘Would you mind? I don’t have any of my gear. My newspaper is gone, but I’m still a reporter. I shouldn’t be sitting here on my ass feeling sorry for myself – I should be telling stories. Your stories. Would you mind?’
‘Of course not!’ the sergeant cried out, holding his arms wide. ‘I am always interesting in hearing myself talk. And these, my poor little bastards, they have no choice – they have to listen. Why should they suffer alone? Yes, Melton, of course you can tell my stories. Where should I start? With our attack on the Mukarayin Dam? Yes, that was us. We flooded Baghdad. Everyone thinks it was Green Berets, pah, Hollywood pussies! It was GROM.’
Melton couldn’t help glancing around to see if any Army Special Forces were around to hear that remark. If they were and heard, they didn’t make themselves known.
Still struggling with his pen and paper, Melton came up short. The Polish special forces were not an old and venerable outfit. They had only been established in 1991. But they already had a rep as a very closed-up shop. You rarely heard about them, and they never did press. Yet here was one of the senior enlisted men, suddenly happy to give up details of a mission that he would have denied even happened a week or so back.
Milosz had no trouble translating the American’s puzzled look. ‘Do not be surprised, Melton,’ he said. ‘Everything has changed now. I will tell you about Mukarayin because it suits our purposes.’
‘How so?’
‘It is like I said – there will be much more evil in the world soon. There is already, yes? My country, she has suffered more than most through her history. But not this time. Or not without making others suffer for what they might do to us. I will tell you about Mukarayin because you will tell the world, and then she will know that we Poles, we will not be ploughed under again. You know what most people see when they imagine Polish Army? They see horsemen galloping off to charge Hitler’s tanks. Brave, but stupid, and doomed. But now, if you tell them about Mukarayin, in future when people think about Polish fighting man, they maybe think about that dam blowing high into sky and that mountain of water flooding out and drowning city of Baghdad. They will think twice about wishing evil upon us, yes?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Melton. ‘I think they will’
It was more than he had imagined writing about. He’d been more interested in Milosz’s story of calling home and talking to his brother, of being trapped in the broken machinery of a vast war machine, suddenly cut off and alone in a hostile world. And he did do that interview, but he also filled half of his notebook with stories from every man in the sergeant’s extended squad – GROM usually operated in teams of four – about blowing the dam that flooded Baghdad.
As he did so, the strangest thing happened. A small audience began to gather around them – just two passing Cav troopers at first, but increasingly building up into a circle of attentive listeners that drew in even more men and women by virtue of its novelty. After ten minutes Melton was sure that over two hundred people surrounded them, perhaps the majority of the walking wounded in the hangar space. The Polish operators spoke into a rapt silence, but occasionally someone would call out, confirming a detail of their story, or others would clap and cheer like believers at a revival meeting.
The specialist from the 101st Airborne stood over him, his fist full of dog tags, his eyes clear now. ‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Specialist?’
‘Can I… Would it be okay if I told you…?’ The soldier held up the identity discs. There must have been twenty or more of the tags, some with blood and skin on them.
‘Sure, Specialist,’ Melton replied. ‘Tell me what happened.’
A Marine stepped forward. ‘Hey, need a recorder, Mr Melton?’ he asked.
The reporter took it and smiled. ‘Just call me Bret.’
When the dog tags were connected to formerly breathing, living, loving people, the army specialist moved away. The batteries were low, but an Australian commando contributed a set of triple AAA batteries. Bret then talked to the Marine who’d loaned him the tape recorder, until the tape ran out. He ejected the mini-cassette and passed the recorder back to its owner, who had a boy, a girl and a horse called Eagle back home, but the man shook his head.
‘No, Bret, you keep it,’ the Marine said. ‘You need it more than I do.’ He fished around in his pocket and pulled out some fresh tapes. ‘I don’t have anyone to record messages for anymore.’ He then stood up, squared his shoulders, and moved out of the hangar. At the bay doors he collected a rifle and a helmet from another Marine, and they walked out into the searing Qatar daylight.
Melton had no idea where he would place the interviews, or what form they might take. But he kept scribbling and taping, encouraging people to talk about… well, about whatever they wanted. And they did.
‘So the bastard was up in the ceiling,’ one Private Adrian Bennet said. ‘He popped four in my squad before we finally figured out where he was hiding…’
‘Our convoy got cut off,’ a Native American army private by the name of Piewesta told him, shaking her head. ‘We took a hell of a lot of fire and my friend Jessie, she was in the back of the Hummer when we got hit. She didn’t make it.’
‘That was a helluva mess,’ someone added. ‘You with 507th Support Battalion, right?’
Piewesta nodded.
‘The bullets came flying from everywhere,’ an Apache pilot, half of his left foot missing, recalled. ‘Hell of a thing, Bret. I thought I was home safe after knocking down those three Iranian helicopters, but then all of this ground fire comes up. Like being trapped in a mason jar full of lighting bugs. Just wasn’t my day to be flying.’
Melton noticed that the pilot didn’t mention his gunner. Probably didn’t make it, he decided.
‘She just wouldn’t sink,’ a sailor from the USS Belleau Wood said. ‘That Iranian sub put three torpedoes into her, but she wouldn’t go down. We were trying to get the fires under control when we got word to abandon ship. We could’ve saved her but they said resources were tight. Better to scuttle her.’
A Tarawa class LHA lost – scuttled. The US Navy hadn’t lost a ship that large in combat since World War II.
The sailor smiled. ‘We got that fucking Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the Nimitz got us some payback on that bitch.’
‘Hell, yeah,’ someone else said. Others took up the chorus: ‘Hell, yeah! Payback!’
He heard a seemingly endless stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies materialising out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing towards them, then suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high-explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the thousand-year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.
Night had fallen, and half of the hangar’s floating population had been spirited away before he finally stopped. Both hands ached, but his missing finger tormented him with a particular ferocity and the wounded shoulder throbbed with a deep, agonising bass line from his having sat hunched over the notepad for so long. But Melton thought he had enough material for a whole book, including a wrenching series of personal stories about what people had already lost. Families, home, friends, everything.
He made an effort to gather testimonials from the handful of Europeans present, such as Milosz and his men, and some British tankers whose Challenger had been crippled by a buried mine. Fact was, their stories would sell the piece in whatever form it took, the domestic market for American stories having literally disappeared. When the Poles finally got their ride out, he was reading back over the tale of a Scottish infantryman who’d been separated from his platoon in al Basra for two days, but whose main concern remained the fate of his family’s trout farm after a week of acid rain had killed off the entire stock. They all shook hands and wished each other well.
‘Make them understand that there is a new Poland,’ said Milosz as they parted.
Melton looked around at those who remained. Not quite so many tears now. A few of them were snoring, sound asleep, jerking in the fit of a nightmare somewhere in their past. He heard a couple of guys laughing about a canoe trip they had been on – how drunk they’d been, and the silly idiot with the yellow swimming trunks who wouldn’t fall into the raft full of college co-eds.
It was mid evening; a cool, almost chilly night, alive with the rumble of distant air operations. He was tired and very hungry, and getting shack-whacky, having been trapped inside for so long, even in such a large building. The last thing he’d eaten had been a protein bar, four hours earlier, and he just knew the table service in this place was going to suck big-time. Until his transport batch number was called, there was nothing for it but to wait. Having lost the pile of Polish duffel bags on which he’d been resting contentedly, he’d since moved to one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs dotted about the facility. He remembered the poncho liner, which he still had, gifted by the specialist on KP back in Kuwait.
Melton wrapped himself in the woodland-green camo snivel gear as the earlier desert heat turned to night-time frigid. It was there, half asleep, haunted by visions of the mortar attack that had put him in hospital, that Sayad al Mirsaad found him.