5. Carl
5. Carl
It’s hard to say what hit my senses first after the blast. The heat, the dust, the noise, the pressure. The wave literally rushed through me. I didn’t see the light. My life didn’t flash before me.
Everything just went very quiet.
Time stood still for a couple of seconds, then the adrenaline started pumping its way through my body at speed and I was back. Back in the moment, knowing that if I didn’t move fast I risked being shot at.
Instinctively I patted myself down. The uniform on my right arm and my stomach felt sticky to the touch. I couldn’t feel a thing, but I realized I must be wounded because when I pulled away my fingers they were covered in blood.
Jobbo’s voice as he shouted a damage report into the radio sounded strange and echoey through the buzzing sound that was ringing in my ears.
I hauled myself up to face Danny. He had gaping chunks of flesh missing on his right arm and hand, and he was bleeding from deep shrapnel wounds to his face which was blank with shock.
He was staring past me. I turned my head to see that his gaze was focused on Sarge, lying on the ground next to us, his leg blown clean off below the knee. His teeth were clenched together and he was moaning in pain.
I was still stunned and half deafened by the explosion, but Sarge needed me and I was going to do everything I could for him. My brain fizzed into action.
‘Sarge,’ I heard myself say. I didn’t recognize my own voice, it sounded so distorted. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ I told him. ‘It’s just a scratch.’
He laughed, and turned to look at me. Then he stopped laughing, and tears started to roll down his face. The sight of Sarge crying was far worse than the sight of his bloodied, brutally truncated leg.
He tried to sit up but I held him down. ‘Stay still. We need to get a tourniquet on you.’ I knew from my first-aid training back home that I needed to apply pressure to what was left of the limb.
I dug into my sleeve pocket for a bandage. Grimly, I pulled back the scorched remnants of Sarge’s trousers and, doing my best to ignore the horror of the blackened fabric, drenched with his warm, pumping blood, I eased the bandage under his thigh and pulled it tight.
‘All set,’ I said. I forced myself to smile at him, despite the fact that my insides were cramping, my whole body shaking with the fear that he might not make it. That I might not be able to save him.
‘How you doing back there?’ Jobbo yelled.
‘All good,’ I lied, looking across at Danny’s ashen face.
All this time Danny had been sitting next to me and Sarge, not uttering a sound.
‘Danny? Danny, mate, are you okay?’ I asked.
He didn’t respond.
‘Hang in there,’ Jobbo yelled. ‘Backup’s on its way.’
‘You hear that, Danny?’ I said. ‘We’ll be out of here in no time.’
Sarge was swearing under his breath. I turned back to him and saw that he had started to shiver. I shrugged my jacket off and felt a sharp stab of pain in my stomach.
‘Are you okay?’ Sarge asked as I winced.
‘I’m fine,’ I told him, laying my jacket across his chest. ‘Don’t worry about the rest of us. We’re all fine.’
That was the moment I realized I couldn’t see Fridge.
I called his name but there was no answer. ‘Jobbo,’ I called out desperately. ‘Can you see Fridge?’
Before he could respond I saw a military vehicle screech to a halt beside us. The quick reaction force.
‘You see, Danny,’ I said, ‘I told you everything’s going to be okay.’
He blinked then and let out a long sigh, as if for all this time he hadn’t dared to breathe.
I patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re all right.’
He nodded and I hauled myself out of the way so that the lads with the stretcher could set it down next to Sarge. I watched as they pumped a shot of morphine into him and scribbled a large M plus the time on his forehead, so the doctors who treated him later would know what he’d been given and when.
The time they wrote on his forehead was 5.23. I’ll never, ever forget that time.
Because as they lifted Sarge up on to the stretcher, that’s when I saw the body lying in the mangled wreckage of the Warrior. It was maybe a hundred yards ahead of me, the arm at a weird angle to the rest of the body, and covered in blood.
I knew straight away it was Fridge.
I could tell by his hair and his body and his tattoo – a tattoo I knew so well, it might as well have been my own. It was his wife’s face, drawn next to an outline of a tiny baby’s foot.
Billy’s foot.
I had drawn that outline while Fridge gently pressed his son’s foot on a piece of paper the day Billy was born.
‘Fridge!’ I screamed. Then again, ‘ Fridge! ’
Desperate to reach him, I tried to haul myself up but a strong hand on my shoulder forced me back down.
‘Not so fast,’ the medic said. ‘We need to get a dressing on your stomach.’
I craned my head to look at Fridge.
‘Fridge,’ I called out.
I felt the medic push a needle into my arm.
‘Fridge,’ I called again, my voice now barely a whisper.
Fridge.