Get Some

by Daniel Birch

  When I got out of the office I felt shocked, not only from what I had just heard, but at what my friend Tommy had been through.

  I was walked down a long corridor. There were men in pain waiting to be airlifted out of there, but more concerning were the men who said nothing. I dared not look either side of me as I walked through. These poor men, I felt sad for them, but I also felt proud that men could be so brave.

  They were, they are, our fucking heroes.

  When I got outside of Tommy’s room, the captain looked at me funny as I froze.

  ‘It’s here, Mr. Graziano, your friends room is here. You can go in.

  You ok, sir?’

  I couldn’t breathe I was so nervous, I had flown thousands of miles to see him but I was afraid now. I didn’t know what I would say. My mind had frozen. How could anything I had to say possibly null the pain of what this man, my friend, had had to endure?

  ‘Just give me a minute please, Captain, would you?’ I asked as I slowed my breathing down a little.

  ‘Certainly.’

  The captain walked off to give me some time but stopped about ten paces from me.

  ‘You know, Mr. Graziano, when I asked him, asked him if he had any family to call, he said he had nobody, nobody but you and a girl called Emma, I believe. Gonna give you some advice. At the moment you’re all he’s got. He’s felt alone for a long time. Bottle whatever you’re feeling, sir. We call it ‘soldiering up’. Get in there and see him. The kid has been to hell and back. He needs familiar faces.’

  I opened the door. Tommy was laid out wearing nothing but union jack boxer shorts. He had a Walkman on. I could hear the music – it was Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way’. He was nodding his head to the music. I paused for a second as my eyes scanned all his scars. He looked like he had been tortured for years, not months. His body was a sight of bandages, stitches, cuts and bruises. I saw his hand, his left hand, it was minus two fingers.

  What the fuck had happened to him? Who did this?

  It was at that moment that I’m not ashamed to say my eyes just filled up.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Joey’s mother used to tell Joey off for having a go at me doing what I did. She was a great woman. She still tried to tell me not to do bad, which I could never promise her or Joey, but then she always would say it was all part of God’s plan and that things would come good.

  I don’t believe in many things. People believe in shit their whole lives. Now I ain’t knocking them. Whatever your beliefs, if it gets you by and serves a purpose, then believe, and don’t let nobody tell you otherwise.

  So what do I believe in? For one I believe you make your own luck in this world; you get out what you put in. Nobody ever gave me a handout. I know I went about shit the wrong way before Emma came into my life. Joey had tried for years, not that he had ever given up on me. Joey used to say what I could be, what I could do, but I could never see it. I think I took advantage of the fact that I knew he would always be there for me, no matter what I did.

  When I met Emma she opened my eyes. I knew this girl had the answers. Eventually I said I would try and live my life right, leave this game behind. I don’t know if it was the Sociology degree which made

  Emma more understanding of me or what, she just knew shit, shit I didn’t know. I don’t know if that was from books or whatever, I just think women do, they really know a lot of shit, shit us men just don’t get.

  Emma never told me to get out of the game, not in so many words, but she told me the game would kill me, and after many a late night talking, and sometimes arguing, I saw the light.

  The thing was the game didn’t want to let me go.

  Reflecting on my life in that cell that morning did good and bad things to my mind. The good part consisted of plans for the future, you know? It may not sound big to some, but for me making Emma happy, doing right by my child to be, and getting an honest job, God damn that seemed like some good shit to me. Shit that would give me balance.

  But what about the bad I hear you ask? Well, sometimes you have to do bad to get the good, and I’ll tell you, I was about to do a whole bunch of bad to some motherfukers. I’ve heard people before battles in my unit. I’ve heard them getting psyched up about ‘bringing the noise’ and ‘bringing the pain’, all the usual bravado before going in and getting some in the field.

  Not me.

  I wasn’t about bringing the pain.

  Pain?

  Hell no. I was about bringing death. I had my mind made up; I couldn’t die in some mud hut in Iraq.

  No sir.

  On this day I was all about bringing the death.

  On this day I would have to become something else. Step outside of myself. If only for a while I had to become death. I shifted all my emotions, all my feelings of love for her, I couldn’t carry all that on this journey, I hid it deep inside, and I would save it for when the time was right.

  Time was against me. But I was stronger now. Not only did I have food inside me, but now I had an AK47 and a combat knife…nice! But the real treat was the grenade, oh sweet Jesus I was excited when I saw that bad boy. It felt like Christmas.

  You see there are grenades, and there are grenades. And then there are incendiary grenades, and they are beautiful.

  An incendiary grenade basically fucks up everything onsite, period.

  Designed primarily to destroy vehicles and artillery, they are the bad boys of the grenade family. These bad motherfuckers work using a chemical reaction which lets out crazy heat, a heat caused by the thermite inside, and when the thermite goes pow!, it produces heat in excess of 2200 C. Now that’s a lot of heat, enough to ruin anyone’s day.

  So I got the gun, grenade and blade, but I also had the fucking body in my cell. I had a quick walk around before deciding what to do next, I had to think ahead, think clear. After killing the guard I had a few moments where I wanted to pull some Rambo shit, but I knew if I did I would be out-gunned and out-manoeuvred.

  So I stalked my prey.

  I crept downstairs and saw the other guard asleep in the truck. I could have slit his throat quite easily, but I didn’t. I looked outside from a downstairs window and there were around six men, all listening to a radio which was on low volume. They were all armed. The only way was to use the grenade, but I knew I had to be at a safe distance because these fucking grenades have way too much boom for me to have outrun them in my condition. I could walk fast but there was no way I was running anywhere. I couldn’t use the grenade inside either, no fucking way. I knew I would be incinerated. I really doubted whether these fucking idiots knew what these grenades could do because to carry one on a grenade belt in a country at war was like walking around with a fucking TNT necklace at a firework display. Not clever. Still, their stupidity was my gain.

  Tiptoeing back up to my cell I knew what I had to do. Every morning these fuckers had a routine, I don’t know why but they did, and what they did was when Haircut turned up, which was every day. He would stand and shout shit at them, and they would go in a room downstairs. They would talk and after around ten minutes they would all fuck off and do different shit like head off in trucks somewhere or, if it was a ‘beat Tommy day’, they would come up here and randomly kick my arse while a few stayed on guard downstairs.

  I needed a plan. I couldn’t act now; it would have to be in the morning.

  Plan A was to hide the body, hope to God they didn’t notice, and wait until they went into that room to talk their gibberish. Upon their going in the room, I would quietly make my way down the stairs, head for the door, then out, sneak round the outside of the building, get a safe distance, then hurl that grenade like a fucking Olympian thrower, and hopefully that would do it.

  Plan B wasn’t really a plan; it was the Rambo option. In simple terms, to go fucking postal.

  One thing was for sure, there would be some fucking boom-boom at breakfast.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Opening his eyes Tommy wiped his eyes
and face. His face was covered in soot and powder and his body was covered in rubble.

  It was now light. He could smell fire and hear a few groans nearby.

  The first thing he saw once he opened his eyes was a huge mass of smoke. He could breathe though. He tried to move his body and wiggled his toes to make sure he wasn’t paralysed. To his relief the toes moved perfectly. His body had seemingly come through the events relatively unscathed - there wasn’t even any huge pain in his body, apart from the odd pains of the torture,

  Now Tommy had a new challenge, to see if he could free himself. His feet were free but his legs were covered with rubble. He only had one arm free and, quickly but carefully, started to move a few rocks and rubble from his other arm. Now he had two arms free. He sat up, slowly moving the rubble from his legs. He then dragged himself backwards away from the rubble and examined himself. He seemed ok.

  It was time for me to get the fuck up on my feet. I sort of told myself cheesily ‘Get up soldier!’ You know what I mean. So I did. I rose to my feet. I was wobbly at first but stayed stood. I stood with a sort of pride, a sense of achievement that I had stayed alive. Ok so my plan didn’t work to the dot but fuck it, I didn’t give a damn how I was free, and alive was alive. The other thing on my mind was that I had to get up before anyone else did, because if Mr. Haircut or any of his fucking posse found me they would surely finish me off, and fuck that.

  All around me were little fires; the whole place was more or less flattened by the grenade .I walked around slowly and saw some feet under some rubble. I figured the guy under was injured or dead so I nicked his shoes. My feet were bleeding and had sores, so the feeling of having shoes on my feet after God knows how long felt like pot noodles to a piss head. Isn’t it funny how you take the smallest things such as footwear for granted? It felt like an amazing find, I have to say.

  So there I was, the lone survivor of the blast, the last man standing so to speak, walking around the rubble searching for anything I could scavenge.

  That’s when I saw him.

  That’s when I hit the wall.

  He moaned in pain as I came across him. He was sitting there with a huge boulder on his leg which had all but crushed it. There was bone and flesh all squashed and flat. His leg looked like road kill. He was crying out in his native tongue when he saw me. He looked at me in disbelief.

  I knew what he was thinking at that moment. How the fuck, out of all the people in there, had I survived? I wondered that too. But I walked over and sat beside him, not knowing of my intentions at first.

  It was Mr. Haircut. He was in pain, great pain, and he was scared.

  Fucking beautiful.

  The wall I referred to was a place in my mind. I felt relieved and very much overcome with joy that I was free and alive, but now I had this man, Mr. Haircut, the man who had tortured me, sitting there as helpless as a child in front of me, begging, crying, and dying.

  I had come to the wall, the place were I could walk away, walk away from this mess and try and find my way home, or move forward, past the wall, and do whatever it was in my heart to do. I had a fire burning up within me.

  A fire of vengeance.

  In all my years being involved in this business, I was proud to say I’d never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it. Ok, I’d killed a few but, with good reason, and they were all bad. It’s an occupational hazard in my game. The guys I had clipped had tried to kill me but, nevertheless, killing a man is serious shit, and when you do it, I really think you lose a piece of yourself every time.

  However, it was in mind that if I should find anyone breathing, they would die.

  Someone once told me that one day in this game I’d hit the wall, and it didn’t matter which way I went. I could turn back, or climb over it, but in terms of taking a man’s life who couldn’t defend himself, the wall was a symbol of choice.

  If I killed this man and embarked on what I felt in my heart (my mission of revenge) I would have climbed it. Once over there, there was no going back. What innocence I had left would be long gone. I always had my limits, the point I wouldn’t go beyond, that was my wall.

  The point of no return.

  Mr. Haircut was just the beginning, I’m not proud of it, but it had to be done. Some people believe in an eye for an eye, I believe in an eye for two eyes, and maybe even more, depending what has been done to me. No matter how cold it may sound, I had to kill this fucker. He had tried to kill me, and to me this was fair game.

  For the first time in my life I wasn’t just climbing over this wall into the unknown, I was breaking it the fuck down, along with anyone who stood in my way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Well, I bet you have some questions going around in your head, eh?’ Tommy almost sniggered as he spoke, but the snigger wasn’t the friendly kind, more a devilish snigger laced with hate.

  Tommy circled the man, slowly. Mr Haircut’s eyes followed Tommy as he walked around him, circling his prey.

  ‘I honestly don’t know what to do with you, y’know. Fucking killing. All this shit’s new to me, you see. But let’s get one thing straight, you are gonna die. So whimpering or whatever the fuck ain’t going to do shit. I’m just trying to figure out how to do this shit. Getting my bearings so to speak. The only question I guess is if I do it quickly or creatively. Right now I have to say I’m leaning towards the creative, sadly, doesn’t look good for you at all.’

  Tommy sat down as he continued to speak. He was relaxed and spoke quietly, almost whispering.

  ‘I’m of the thinking, Mr. Haircut, that seeing as though you guys took your time with me, it’s only fair I reciprocate. Show you that same undivided attention that you showed me.’ Tommy ran his fingers through his own hair, wiping some more powder off his face in an attempt to tidy himself up. ‘Unless…unless you have any…information perhaps? Information on how you come to have me in your custody?’

  Mr. Haircut spoke, panicking and shaking as he stuttered his words out. ‘I was doing my job, I was under orders, orders, you a soldier you....’

  ‘So what if I’m a soldier, so that gives you the right to torture me? The motherfucking Geneva Convention ring any bells?’

  ‘But sir, I, er, we, thought you were...er, but, the man who gave you to us ….’

  ‘Ah, now we are getting somewhere. The man, tell me about the man who, how did you put it, gave me to you. Explain that. Explain it all.’

  Tommy noticed that there were some cigarettes hanging out of Mr. Haircut’s trousers. Tommy knelt down as Mr. Haircut squirmed, thinking Tommy was going to do something.

  ‘Relax, Fuckhead. I wanted your cigarettes. Now I need a light. Shouldn’t be difficult.’ Tommy walked over to a little fire caused by the grenade. He knelt again, lighting his cigarette in the flames. He turned back to his captive.

  ‘Now…talk.’

  Going into a lot of detail, Mr. Haircut spoke of how he and his group , known simply as ‘Annah’, meaning ‘ The Answer’, had been dealing with various groups and factions. They were against the war. They were basically against everybody. They hated their own corrupt government, the U.S., England, basically everyone who in some way, as they saw it, caused harm amongst their people.

  Tommy sympathised with that. He couldn’t understand the war either. As Mr. Haircut continued, he went into detail about how Annah had to do deals here and there to raise money for its cause. One of his bosses had met a contact who had met a contact who wanted drugs which they had in abundance. In return, the contact would give them money. However, an additional deal was struck whereby the contact also promised them a soldier who would fetch a high price and expand Annah’s circle of influence yet further.

  It was Annah’s objective to process the soldier, find out who he was, and sell him to the highest bidder, whether that be the Iraqi Army or some other group who wanted to parade a British soldier on TV. Mr. Haircut explained it was just for money, nothing personal.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Aft
er a short but interesting chat, me and Haircut were done. Now it was to more pressing matters. I could hear a few more moans and groans so I decided to have a walk around and see who else was still breathing. After all, Mr. Haircut wasn’t going anywhere soon so I figured I’d leave him to stew for a while, the least I could do in return for how he had treated me.

  Being in that room I hadn’t had the foggiest idea of how big or small the place was where I was being held captive. It wasn’t massive, however it was of a decent size. Haircut told me it was an old fuel depot for the Iraqi Army which he and his buds had converted into their very own operations centre. It was fairly simple, but now flattened.

  I walked through the rubble, well I limped rather than walked, but I also knew I had to get the fuck outta here. Odds were this place was well known, so some fucker would be by here sooner or later. It was fair to say I would make sure everybody was dead before I left. My main point was I was going to try and find my American cellmate. Even if he was dead, he deserved a proper burial. Haircut said he wasn’t handling him and didn’t know where he was. I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not.

  Walking through all the building’s rubble, I managed to get an AK47 rifle, a favourite with the Iraqi militia, as well as two handguns. Got me a Desert Eagle and a Glock 9, nice! All had ammo in them. The Eagle had about half a mag, the Glock a full clip, and the AK47 was empty but I managed to find ammo on the floor so I loaded it up appropriately. I love AKs. I remember my sarge used to say ‘just point ‘n spray, and you’ll ruin their day’. Fucking amen to that.

  I spotted my first victim. He wasn’t under rocks, but one of his arms was missing. He was groaning something. I wasn’t gonna waste my ammo – fuck that. I knelt over him. He was saying something about Allah.

  ‘Oh really?’ I said. I wasn’t interested, and at this point the very thing which made me human left me momentarily. People have asked me what if feels like to kill. well I would say it depends. Doesn’t feel good, I’ll tell you that but, y’know, when some fuckers hurt you or yours, I would say it ain’t that fucking bad either.