Rain

by Barney Campbell

  Trueman said, ‘Yeah, sir, that’d be great. The lads would like that. Who knows, we might even go out for a drink afterwards. I know Brum quite well; there’s a few good places in and around the area.’

  Tom smiled at the strangeness of their stiffness with each other. ‘Christ, Sergeant Trueman, we’ll have to see about that drink. Pretty revolutionary stuff that. What would people say? No, that’d be good. On me.’

  ‘Fuck that, sir. No one’s going to serve you; you look barely out of nappies.’

  ‘Bollocks. I look like a steely-eyed dealer of death.’ He proudly tugged at the straggly down on his cheeks and neck.

  ‘You look like Compo. Hate to say it.’

  ‘No, I look like Patrick Swayze.’

  ‘He died last year, sir.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, the new Patrick Swayze. The second coming of Swayze.’

  He left Trueman shaking his head into the dregs of his brew and went on to Jesmond and Thompson’s wagons as a gold film hovered in the east, and the dead land started to come to life again.

  At midday the squadron arrived back in Newcastle. They had been out on the ground for four weeks without fresh food, showers or washing their clothes, which now hung off them like curtains. In their ragbag collection of civilian quilted jackets, woolly hats underneath helmets, and gloves and mittens meant for tobogganing but in fact used to pull triggers, disassemble guns or fix thrown tracks, they looked like tramps. With dirt driven deep into every pore and crevice they had christened themselves the Dust Devils.

  Tom had loved living off the wagons in the desert; it had been so simple. He didn’t have to think about what to wear, about what time to get up, about how to get to work, about any of the hundreds of trivialities that encumber the minds of billions of people every day. It had been a pure, austere existence of the most brutal simplicity. Keep warm, eat when you can, try not to get killed. Sleep when you’re not doing anything else. In the four weeks he had changed his boxer shorts twice and had kept the same trousers throughout. In the turret the gimpy dripped oil onto his upper thigh, so the permanent dark stain made him and all the other car commanders look as though they had wet themselves.

  He always wore two pairs of socks, two T-shirts, his combat shirt, then his woolly jumper, and on top of that his CBA. It was too cramped to wear the Osprey inside the Scimitar, and so all the squadron wore the older flak jacket-style CBA. This offered far less protection but was lighter and, crucially in the boys’ eyes, looked far allyer, as it marked them out from everyone else. Scimitar crews were the only people in theatre for whom the army had managed to get an insurance waiver for not wearing the better Osprey. Behind the front plate of the CBA, which covered his heart and left breast, Tom had his father’s letter, transferred from the Osprey.

  Around his neck dangled his dogtags and the St Christopher he had taken from home. Every morning in the desert he had kissed it and in his sleeping bag said one of the prayers he remembered from the booklet the padre had given them at the start of tour: ‘O Lord, you know how busy I must be today. If I forget you, do not forget me.’

  The squadron parked their wagons and clamoured to go to scoff, but Brennan ordered them to wash, shave and change beforehand. ‘Look at us,’ he chided them, as he addressed them after Frenchie had congratulated them on the epic, violent and, amazingly, since Ransome, casualty-free patrol. ‘We look like Fred Karno’s Army. And no one in that scoff tent is going to thank us Dust Devils dragging in our filthy clothes and putting dirty hands onto serving spoons. Think again, fellas. Plus, we stink to high fucking heaven. So, we all wash. No man goes in unless he’s looking immaculate.’

  And so to a chorus of moaning the squadron traipsed back to their tents and took freezing showers, the dust mixing with the water and forming trickles of mud down their white bodies. They tore their faces to shreds as razors blunted themselves on thick matted beards. Eventually they were clean and shaved with pink if bloody rash-ridden faces, their bodies luxuriating in fresh clothes as they sat in the scoff tent and stuffed themselves with fresh food, heaping piles of vegetables into their mouths. They spent the afternoon tending to the wagons, rebombing them, cleaning them up, getting them good to go again. And then they all went to their tents and slept for twelve hours straight.

  Tom lay on his cot in the tent, almost feeling guilty that he wasn’t with the squadron back up north but then quickly suppressing that thought and glorying in the soft duvet. It had been only twenty-four hours since they had arrived back in Bastion, having cabbied a lift with a Chinook mail flight, but already he was getting used to it, and the month in the desert seemed an age away.

  Jessie poked his head through the door. ‘Hi, sir. Dunno if you want to join us, but me and the sarge thought it’d be a good crack to go over to the American scoff house tonight over in Leatherneck and try out their burgers and stuff. You keen?’

  Tom weighed up what he should do. Bugger it. He’d spent the last four months with these men sweating, shivering and bleeding. Of course he’d go. ‘That sounds great, Corporal Jesmond. Are you sure I won’t cramp your style though?’ I sound like his grandmother. ‘Give me two minutes and I’m with you.’

  ‘No dramas, sir; we’ll be in the wagon.’

  Tom pulled on some trousers and a shirt, adjusted his beret in the mirror and went outside to the Land Rover, lights on, that the boys had requisitioned. Where had they got that? Well, ask no questions, hear no lies. He got in the front passenger seat next to Trueman. Five of the boys were in the back, and he picked them out by their bickering and laughing: GV, Jesmond, Dusty, Ellis and Thompson. He immediately felt happy.

  Trueman drove the Land Rover through the silent Bastion while the boys chattered in the back. In the American camp they parked the wagon up and went into the cookhouse.

  It was like Disneyland – burgers, free Cokes, ice cream, more ice cream than they’d ever seen before – and they ran amok through the food on offer. As they ate Tom looked at the boys, watching their intricate set-in-stone interactions and smiling at the bizarre little family that he and Trueman had fostered over the last few months. They argued with each other; they laughed at people outside their group; they talked with disdain about some regiments and with great respect about others. They ate more than they had all tour and a couple of hours later piled back on board the wagon.

  Trueman turned to Tom and, with a mischievous glint in his eye picked out by the bright white lights outside the cookhouse, said, ‘Right, boss, fancy some fun?’

  ‘What do you mean?

  Jesmond said from the back: ‘He means, sir, fancy some fun?’

  A spark of fear ran up Tom’s spine. Did they mean fun as in brothel fun? He had heard rumours about ISO containers in various corners of Bastion that were run as brothels by camp rats. Were the rumours true? He couldn’t possibly go along with it if they were.

  Sensing Tom’s discomfort, Trueman steadied his nerves. ‘Relax, it ain’t that bad; just a game we used to play when we were back in Bastion on the last tour, that’s all. A bit of a war against the REMFs.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I mean, sir, that we go around Bastion fucking up some fat REMFs. Watch, it’ll be fun.’

  Tom, intrigued now, said, ‘Well, OK then, but I still don’t know how this is going to work.’

  Trueman laughed to himself and reversed out of the parking space. ‘Just watch.’

  They drove through the sprawling camp, dark and lit only by the occasional flashing lights of a plane or heli landing over on the runway. They passed soldiers walking to and from various places, who would hold their thumbs out speculatively, hoping that a wagon would stop and give them at least a tiny bit of a lift. Trueman ignored all of them until they saw ahead of them a pair of large, scruffy soldiers. He sprang into life, delighted. ‘Here we go, sir; classic Bastion rats! Look at them fat fucks. Shirts untucked, waddling around. Wouldn’t know a rifle if it hit them in the face.’ He shouted back to Jesmond, ‘Here you g
o, Jessie; some custom for you.’

  ‘Gotcha, Freddie. Right boys, get ready. REMFs coming up.’

  Trueman slowed and pulled up alongside them. They were indeed pretty woeful specimens, fat, scruffy, with bulbous flesh drooping over their waistbands.

  Trueman wound down his window and said, as though talking to an old lady on his street back home, ‘You must be knackered, fellas. Fancy a lift?’ Tom started to cotton on to the plan and giggled. Trueman elbowed him in the ribs to shut him up, but they’d bought it.

  ‘Oh cheers, mate. Nice one,’ they said, licking their lips at not having to expend any more calories wandering around the camp.

  The two soldiers walked to the back of the wagon, and Dusty pushed down the tailgate. ‘Hop in, fellas.’ He smiled, and the fatter of the two heaved his leg on board. Just as he stepped up, Dusty whispered, ‘Now!’ and Trueman floored the accelerator, pulling away from the REMF, who fell off the tailgate flat on his back in the dust to howls of laughter from the boys as the wagon sped away.

  GV shouted back at them, ‘That’s right, get some fuckin’ dust down your necks, you fat chippy cunts.’

  ‘Again, again!’ said Dusty, like a little boy asking to go down a slide at a playground.

  ‘OK, OK, just let me get some distance from those lads. What do you reckon, sir? Good crack, eh? Sir? You all right?’ He looked to his left and saw Tom shuddering with laughter, bent double in his seat, unable to say a thing.

  Trueman raised his eyebrows. ‘Fuck me, it’s funny, but it ain’t that funny. Officers! I’ll just never understand you lot.’ He looked ahead, and a hundred metres away his headlights picked up another waddling group. ‘All right, Dusty, round two coming up, dead ahead. Get ready!’

  The next evening they were ready to go. Their kit was packed in the tents and their flight to Kandahar was at midnight. They spent the day bouncing around Bastion, having brew after brew with mates from other regiments and hearing how things were going in the rest of theatre. Tom had forgotten how cocooned they had been up in Loy Kabir; he loved hearing all the stories from the friends from Sandhurst he bumped into, and their take on the past months.

  At dusk they gathered with other units on the Bastion football pitch for a memorial service for a corporal who had been killed four days before, whose body was about to be repatriated to the UK. A chaplain ran through the brief formulaic service, six hundred soldiers dutifully listening to words about a man they had never met, but still polite and attentive, feeling as though they ought to have known him. He had been killed by an IED near Babaji in an explosion that had wounded three others. Tom listened to proceedings with his nose scrunched up in denial. He didn’t want to think about this any more. All he wanted was to go home.

  The corporal’s platoon commander stood up to give the eulogy. It was standard stuff – about how good he had been at his job, about what he had done in his career – and the lieutenant was no orator. He kept fumbling his words; he hadn’t even bothered to learn them off by heart and read shakily from a piece of paper, which fluttered and rasped in the wind. It was an entirely forgettable speech, and Tom felt sad that this was all the send-off the man was getting from Afghanistan. But after the officer came a lance corporal who introduced himself as the dead man’s best friend; they had joined up together and had served all over the world living out of each other’s armpits.

  The lance corporal’s speech was short and seemingly off the cuff. He needed no notes, and with a series of jokes and memories rammed home to the entire assembly how special this man had been to him. He ended with ‘I just wanna say that Carl was the kind of bloke that glues a platoon together. Without him a platoon falls apart. Look among you now. You know who the guys are in your own unit. The ones that make you laugh. The ones who are never down. The ones who always start the banter. The ones always first through the door, first to help with the barma. Well, Carl was that bloke. And we only ever realized it after he was killed. Look around you now and think who that bloke is in your platoon. And when you’ve found him look after him. Because you won’t realize how important he is until he’s gone.’ His voice, which had started clear and booming, was faltering. ‘I mean that. Just look after those guys.’ He broke off, composed himself, turned and walked smartly back to his comrades, who dragged him close and hugged him.

  The chaplain finished off the service and then two 105s blasted blank rounds into the sky in violent salute. The assembly broke up, and 3 Troop went to their tents to get ready for the flight. Tom walked back alone, having lost the lads in the crowd, and thought of Trueman, how he was just the person described in the speech. He’d never really thought about it before.

  At midnight they flew the short distance to Kandahar. As they walked off the Hercules, all around them was the hum of a huge airfield. Two jets scorched their way into the sky, and immediately they felt the change in atmosphere from the restrained, almost austere Bastion to the military baroque of the American base. They were corralled into buses and driven to a huge warehouse sixty metres long packed with bunk beds. There was room for maybe four hundred soldiers in there, and it was about half full. They stumbled through the half-dark to find an area to bed down in, climbed onto some bunks and fell asleep using their daysacks as pillows.

  They awoke disorientated and dehydrated, and stepped out into the mayhem of daily life in Kandahar. Bastion, they immediately realized, was a masterpiece of military planning: neat ordered rows of tents with wide roads and drainage ditches immaculately dug, almost Roman in its symmetry and order. Kandahar by contrast was a jumble of sprawling huts and winding roads, like a shanty town, with huge warehouses and hangars strewn randomly around. American soldiers and marines mingled with civilian contractors with huge paunches and bull necks wandering around behind sunglasses grafted onto their faces. Trueman and Jesmond immediately and entirely true to form bridled at the American scruffiness and made sure all the boys looked smart, like mothers at school gates doing up ties and combing down fringes. All the while in the background jets took off; an A-10, teeth painted on its nose, buzzed the airfield.

  Even this little bit further south it was ten degrees warmer than Bastion and felt amazing to be back in some sort of sunshine again. The troop went down to the Boardwalk, a great wooden hexagon built around a basketball pitch lined with coffee shops, T-shirt shops, doughnut shops and burger bars. It was indeed the paradise that Tom had heard it to be, and the boys fell upon it. Tom walked around on his own, enjoying the feeling of being in transit and not required to do anything or think for himself save only when to eat and sleep. They were to fly out at 0200 the next morning and so with the whole day to waste he mooched through the Boardwalk shops, amused by a lot of the stuff available.

  Clearly the Americans hadn’t yet fully got to grips with the delicacies of local-population-centric counter-insurgency. One T-shirt featured jets with Gothic script beneath clamouring, LASER-GUIDED DEMOCRACY! GET SOME! GET SOME! Another had the Grim Reaper riding atop a tank, a third a skeleton chomping a cigar and shooting a machine gun from the hip. Yet another had the cross hairs of a rifle overlaid on a Taliban silhouette; TALIBAN HUNTING CLUB OPEN SEASON, it proclaimed. One echoed a phrase from Vietnam, shouting out, again in Gothic script, YEA THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH I SHALL FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM THE EVILLEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE VALLEY. Another posed the delicate question, HEY TALIBAN, HOW ABOUT I OPEN A GREAT BIG CAN OF WHOOP-ASS … IN YOUR FACE?

  Tom went to the counter and handed over a torch he wanted to buy. Fumbling for dollar notes in his pockets, he looked at the shop assistant. She was about his age with black hair in a neat ponytail and a small slightly upturned button of a nose, deep-brown skin and the kind of smile he hadn’t seen in months. ‘There you go, sir. That’ll be nine dollars fifty.’

  He couldn’t speak at first. He hadn’t spoken to a girl in weeks, and he stared at her, eyes on stalks.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir; are you OK?’

  Tom went red and blurte
d out, flustered, ‘Yes, sorry, quite all right, quite all right. Away with the fairies, I’m afraid.’

  She laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ said Tom, trying to claw back a shred of confidence.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She had a chirpy, happy voice with maybe a tiny Southern drawl in there. It was beautiful. ‘I guess you English are just kinda funny, that’s all.’

  ‘Funny peculiar or funny ha ha?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Christ! What an idiot. ‘Um, I mean are we funny like we’re strange funny, like a monkey might be funny, or funny like in joke funny? Oh, forget that; I suppose a monkey might be both types of funny.’ What am I saying? He was behaving like a total prat. He couldn’t believe that the sight of a girl had reduced him to this state.

  ‘I mean funny both ways.’ She smiled and then, tilting her head to one side inquisitively at Tom’s own laughter, said, ‘Now why am I so funny then?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re not funny. I mean, you might be funny ha ha but not strange funny. You’re very nice. It’s just, well, I haven’t spoken to a girl in months, and it’s quite a weird feeling.’

  ‘Oh really, where you been?’

  ‘Up in this town in Helmand called Loy Kabir. It’s in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn’t go there. Pretty overrated as a holiday destination.’ Why can’t I just shut up? This is utter bilge. But he carried on: ‘The locals aren’t terribly friendly. Weather’s awful. No galleries, exhibitions, theatres, no nothing. And the food? Don’t get me started. Dreadful.’

  ‘You can say that again. You ain’t carryin’ an ounce of fat. You look like a skeleton.’ She paused as if to try and pluck up the nerve. ‘A nice-lookin’ skeleton, but still a skeleton.’ Tom looked to his right and caught his reflection in a mirror. She was right. He was very, very thin. He looked like a brain on a stick.