Rain

by Barney Campbell

  Throughout the night they worked on the vehicle. The rain had turned the ploughed earth into shin-deep mud. The boys had to dig underneath the wagon to allow work to take place on the track. The more it rained the more the vehicle subsided into the mud. Slipping and sliding around it, their red head torches the only light in the dark, they moved with slow, lumbering steps, cursing their bloody and blistered hands as they dug and grappled with the track. Brennan moved among them, lifting them out of the mud, taking their spades off them and hurling himself into a digging frenzy. He didn’t shout at them or swear and made sure there were constant brews coming from the BV in the back of his wagon.

  Every effort to drag the vehicle out of the mire failed. At 0400 the REME Samson, trying to drag it out to allow the boys to work out of the field and on the slightly firmer earth at its edge, managed to throw its track as well. Staff Sergeant Prideaux, caked in mud and nearly crying with frustration, went to report to Frenchie in the back of the Sultan. Frenchie received the news calmly; he had personally prepared himself to be here for another week at least. ‘Right, Sergeant P. Just come in here and have a brew. If anyone needs one, you do.’ He poured a flask and watched Sergeant Prideaux, a bear of a man, slump onto the seat opposite him and drain the steaming mug.

  Frenchie got onto the radio. ‘Charlie Charlie One, this is Zero Alpha. Sitrep. We will be here for a few more hours yet, I’m afraid. Five One has thrown a track as well.’ He could imagine the sighs from each of the turrets along the column. ‘So we’re going to be here for a while, and I reckon dawn is the time for the attack. Our Widow callsign,’ he looked over to the FAC, who nodded back, ‘assures me we’re going to have an Ugly on station in the morning, but we’re only going to have it from 0600 to 0800. And then who knows what will happen. I expect a running battle with shoot-and-scoot gunmen. Four Zero roger so far. Over.’

  Clive, zombie-like, choked his response: ‘Four Zero roger so far. Over.’

  ‘Zero Alpha. All callsigns keep your sitreps coming in. As long as we have our route secured by Four Zero to the north we’ll be fine. Keep your drills slick. Don’t expose yourselves unnecessarily. Watch your arcs. Out.’

  As the darkness melted away from black into morning Tom was still lying next to his wagon. He had started, slowly, to lose the hallucinations and felt a tiny measure of strength crawl back into his bones. Davenport sat next to him, now and again holding a water bottle to his lips. The water had had three sachets of diarrhoea powder in it, to get his salts and sugars up. His trousers were still around his ankles. He felt as if he had nothing left in him. His head was a bit clearer, and he had regained his voice.

  Davenport shook his shoulder. ‘All right, boss, we’ve got to get you in the turret. It’s dawn now, and we’re in the open here. Come on, let’s get you up.’ He pulled Tom’s trousers up and helped him off the stretcher. Groggy, as he steadied himself against the side of the wagon Tom looked over to the east where the faint shape of the sun had appeared behind the thick purple cloud. He just wanted to sleep. It was all he wanted. Then above his head the crack of a bullet whipped past. He forgot all his weakness and a thrill shot through him.

  ‘Contact! Fucking hell, Dav. Contact!’ Like a ferret Davenport slipped into his driver’s hatch in a single fluid jump as Tom scrambled up the side of the wagon, his hand, still oozing pus and blood, scrabbling for purchase on the congealed vomit on the bar armour. More rounds now winging over his head, he finally dropped into the safety of the turret, where Dusty was traversing desperately.

  ‘Fuck, boss, fuck. Where the fuck are they?’ Tom poked his head out the turret and looked to his left and right, the commanders of the other three wagons doing the same. Still helmetless, he strapped on his ANR. The net was going crazy. Trueman was sending a contact report up to Zero. To his left Jesmond’s cannon roared, and tracer streaked from its barrel towards a compound two hundred metres away. ‘Dusty, traverse left, traverse left!’ The turret whipped around. ‘Steady, steady. On! Compound with green door. You got it, you got it?’ He looked through the sights to check what Dusty could see. Just over the lip of the wall a black shadow appeared, and then came a muzzle flash from it. The shadow dropped. He couldn’t believe he had actually been looking at a man trying to kill him. ‘I’m on, boss. I’m on!’ Dusty screamed. ‘Lasing. Two forty.’

  ‘Loaded fire. Smash it, smash it!’ Tom flicked the selector switch at the back of the gun from safe to automatic, and then poked his head out of the turret again. Dusty sent six rounds in a remorseless beat towards the compound as in unison Trueman and Jesmond both joined in, their cannons shredding the wall. Some rounds flew over the top, but most beat into it like pickaxes, dust and rubble flying. The guns pounded Tom’s head even through the headphones. He was amazed at the speed of their response.

  No return shots came, and silence settled again over the wagons, the last of the rain steaming from their Rarden barrels. Fumes filled Tom’s turret and made him heady with adrenaline. His heart bounced up and down, and an ecstasy took him by the throat. His first contact. He heard a loud bang away to the north, and the net sprang into life again as Clive screamed, ‘Contact RPG!’ The first bang was followed by two more. It all fell into place. It was exactly as Frenchie had predicted.

  For the next forty minutes the squadron came under concerted attack. Another gunman opened up at 3 Troop from the south but kept shifting his position before they could bring the turrets to bear. SHQ and the scene around the stricken wagons came under contact as well, rounds dancing over the heads of the working party, who sheltered in the hole next to the track. The rounds bounced off the wagons with flat claps as Prideaux and Ealham lay in the watery filth at the bottom of their hole, but despite everything they passed out, unconscious with exhaustion.

  It took forty minutes for the Apache to come on station, when all contact stopped, the gunmen melted way, and the boys started the painstaking work on the wagon again. But when the Ugly left, the attacks started again and continued all through the morning. From tiny murder holes bored through the compound walls overnight, snipers rained a sporadic, harassing patter of bullets at the wagons with impunity. Whenever the turrets swung towards them they just moved to a new position. The Taliban moved like bees attacking a great clumsy bear, shifting from compound to compound, sometimes firing from a hundred metres, sometimes from four hundred. Once they had fired from one murder hole, they would move by motorbike to the next location, always covered by other buildings. Around ten of them kept up this petalling movement, never allowing the column to rest.

  Frenchie and Brennan, in the back of the Sultan, flinched each time a round smacked into its side as Frenchie constantly tried to coax air support from Brigade. When he got some again the attacks melted away, and the helis hovered over the town with the whole squadron willing them to find a target to destroy. But none appeared; the moment a heli arrived the gunmen hid. Nothing was happening in the town that day. No farmers were in the fields, no children played. The place was completely given over to the contact.

  Progress on the vehicles continued, even under fire. Frenchie himself helped out, leaving Jason in charge of the squadron to help fix the track of One Two. It started to rain again, and the shooting subsided a bit. The boys kept working, their dull eyes blinking over chain-smoked cigarettes.

  In the south Tom gathered his car commanders in the lee of his wagon. He was still retching, still needing to shit twice an hour, but he felt re-energized. He looked at Trueman, Jesmond and Thompson, filthy, unshaven, all somehow still grinning. They all smoked and shared out some boiled sweets as Tom and Trueman discussed the stag roster. Tom decided he could sacrifice two guns. They had to get some sleep and agreed that two crews would kip for two hours while two crews would stag on, and rotate like that. The wagons were close together anyway. Tom could see the relief in their eyes at the prospect of sleep, any sleep at all. They had been awake now since the morning of the move out from Bastion – forty-eight hours without sleep for most of
them.

  They went back to their turrets, Trueman and Thompson to sleep, Tom and Jesmond to keep methodically scanning their arcs, firing now and again at the occasional muzzle flash. Two hours later they swapped, and Tom and Dusty slumped in their seats over their sights. Not even the distant RPGs or Trueman’s cannon only five metres away from them could wake them. For a hundred and twenty minutes they fell into a coma, their brains completely shutting down, their mouths dribbling stalactites of drool.

  Finally, in the late afternoon, things started to improve around the bogged-in wagons. After managing to fix the Samson, Prideaux, with his immense strength and unflagging determination, turned back to Ealham’s Scimitar, finally replaced its rear idler, and the boys heaved the track on to it an hour later. They had been static now for twenty-four hours. Bullets still sang around them, but amazingly no one had been hit. At 1800 the column started to move again, and limped its way out of the cluster, the tracks of the wagons struggling to get going again, grinding through the mud that had glued the running gear over the past day. Three Troop at the back moved out with their turrets facing to the rear as deterrents against any final contact.

  None came, and soon the column was back in the safety of the open desert, heading north. The town refilled with children and its normal bustle resumed as scared families emerged from their homes. The farmer whose field they had been stuck in took his plough again to the furrows and evened out the earth around the hole. By dusk he had levelled the field again. It was as though they had never been there.

  The further they got from the town the worse Tom began to feel again. The illness returned after its slight abatement, and as the wagons went through the dark moonscape of the desert he had to shit over the side of the Scimitar, Dusty holding him by his shoulders and Davenport keeping the pace as steady as he could. Over the intercom Tom murmured, ‘Christ, this is undignified,’ and he and Dusty laughed deliriously at his wretchedness.

  Eventually, with thinning clouds scudding across the moon, the exhausted thread of vehicles pulled itself over the final rise before Loy Kabir. FOB Newcastle was a beacon in the middle of the silvery town. Lit by floodlights, it stood out for miles. Around it was no light at all: no street lamps, no electricity in the compounds. It was as though no soul existed outside it.

  At 0200 the column pulled in to Newcastle, where the CO was waiting. Laughing, he clapped Frenchie on the back. ‘Well, you did it, you madman, you did it.’

  Frenchie looked at him vacantly, his hair woollen with dust. ‘Thanks, Colonel. I can’t quite believe how, but we bloody did it. It’s all down to that man really.’ He pointed to Prideaux, who was sitting on the front of his Samson wolfing a bowl of stew that the RSM had made sure was prepared for their arrival.

  The REME staff sergeant noticed them, braced up in acknowledgment of the CO and raised his bowl. ‘Never again, sir. I’m off to go and join the Taliban. At least those twats don’t have any vehicles to fix.’

  All around, the boys ate, the food not touching the sides of their throats, sitting beside their vehicles as though scared to leave them after the shelter they had provided during the contact. Their eyes blinked underneath the floodlights, making them look shell-shocked. Tom was the last to get out of his wagon, methodically shutting down the turret with Dusty, unloading the gun and switching off the radios. He wearily climbed down, and as the CO came over to welcome him he braced up to attention, then his legs buckled and he fell unconscious to the ground, face first onto the sand. The boys lifted him on a stretcher and took him to the medics.

  For four days he was quarantined in a small compound at the rear of the FOB, which while still inside the wire felt as though it was miles away. Eight small rooms looked out onto a central yard, and he was alone. The others who had been ill were only there for a day; his cut hand had combined with the D & V into a full-blown illness. His room was furnished with a camp bed, a bucket and a jerrycan of water. In the middle of the muddy yard were four latrines. Tom lay naked on the camp bed, the bucket next to him for when he couldn’t make it outside in time. He had his pistol with him, and a T-shirt and trousers were on a small ledge next to a few books left by previous occupants, but Tom didn’t have the energy to read them and simply lay there, losing all concept of time, only registering night when he felt cold and had to get into his sleeping bag.

  The doc and a medic came to see him every morning to take his blood pressure and temperature and bring him more water and a tiny bit of food. Tom lost nearly a stone, and on the fourth day he could see his ribs poking through his skin. Gaunt, with a week’s beard, his muscles felt empty. That afternoon Trueman appeared, alone, unsolicited and against all the rules. He stood at the entrance to Tom’s hovel. ‘Knock, knock. Hi, sir. You look in a shit state. Like what you’ve done with the place. What is it, Helmand chic?’

  Tom could only mumble weakly, ‘Hello, Sergeant Trueman. What are you doing here? Don’t come any closer; you’ll get this wretched plague.’

  ‘No fear, sir. I’m staying right here. Funny thing is, Dusty, who basically spent three days living a metre away from you, is absolutely fine. Constitution of an ox, him. Here’s some post that arrived for you. He threw over a couple of e-blueys, and Tom’s eyes lit up. ‘Ha! Knew that’d raise your morale.’

  ‘Thanks, Freddie,’ said Tom, scrabbling up the letters from the dust next to his bed and seeing with delight they were from Constance and Will. He felt a pang that there wasn’t one from Cassie. ‘That’s awesome. How are the boys?’

  ‘Bored. We’ve just been on the wagons tinkering since we got back in. Rumour’s going around we ain’t going to use them much anyway and get on those Mastiffs. The leader’s working out some kind of rotation, from Mastiffs to Scimitars.’

  ‘What, so we go through all the hassle of getting those things up here, and we’re not even going to use them?’

  ‘I know. I know, boss. Everyone’s pretty pissed about it. Anyways, I’m going to love you and leave you; don’t want any more of your toxic fumes. When you going to come back to the fold?’

  ‘Soon, I hope. As soon as I can keep some food down without vomming it up. I feel like properly jack lying here monging it.’

  ‘Don’t, boss. You can’t help it. I had it on the last tour and was out for eight days. Just a matter of time before I’m where you are anyway; everyone gets it at some point. No hurry though, yeah? The Taliban ain’t gonna run away within a day. They ain’t going anywhere. Take care then, boss.’ He looked around the dim bare room, lit only by whatever light came through the tiny doorway. ‘Try not to go too stir-fry crazy in here.’ And then he left.

  Tom looked at the e-blueys with glee and read Will’s first.

  Dear Tom,

  Mate, it was really good to get your bluey a couple of days ago. I’m glad things are OK and I really hope you guys are staying safe. It’s weird; just as you guys are getting used to being out there I’m finally starting to get used to being back. It’s been a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be. On tour all you looked forward to was POTL – we would dream about it and have huge conversations about what we were going to do, where we were going to go, what we’d eat, etc. – but when it came to it, and we were free to go after the medals parade, I just couldn’t make up my mind what to do with myself. It was ridiculous; six months of minute-by-minute decision-making and there I was completely unable to make any decision at all. In the end I went with two of the other subbies to this hotel on Lake Como, the kind of place where honeymooning couples go, so we looked a bit strange as a group of three lads. We basically spent the entire week getting absolutely slaughtered every day. We would open the day with a drink, drink through lunch, pass out for a couple of hours and then smash on through supper. I don’t think we were model guests necessarily, but it helped us to unwind a little bit.

  At the moment I’m back in Mum’s flat in London, doing nothing. I wake up at about ten, sit on the sofa watching Jeremy Kyle in my boxers, watch about three DVDs, and
then go out and get hammered with whoever’s around. It helps you remember. It’s so strange how quickly you lose stuff from tour. My tan has gone, and I’ve put on all the weight that I lost. Essentially I now look as though I’ve never been away at all. And you start to forget it all so quickly – the heat, the dust and the noise. But when I drink, somehow it all comes rushing back then. But don’t worry; I’m not a complete dipso (yet!).

  I go over to Headley Court quite a bit to see the wounded lads. They’re the only people I’ve seen since I’ve got back who you don’t need to explain anything to. I just sit by their beds and we read the magazines that I’ve brought along in silence for about an hour. It’s funny; the last time I saw them they were in pieces, bloody and mauled as we put them onto whichever MERT after whichever contact. And now they’re in this anodyne ward, wearing tracksuits with their stumps and scars, looking immaculate as though they’ve always had them. At the moment the adrenaline is carrying them through, the adrenaline of coping with their new lives and meeting the new challenges of trying to walk again on their new pegs. But I wonder what happens in a few months, or years, when they can walk really well, or as well as they will ever be able to. They’ll reach the point when they realize the exact extent of what it is they can do, and the huge unattainable expanse of what they can’t do, and I wonder what it will be like to come up against that wall. Yeah, they’ll go and do marathons and climb the Matterhorn or whatever, but it must be truly a lonely moment when they realize they’ll never, never, never, be able to pick up the remote control for the telly again or play kick-around in the garden with their son.