Читать книгу Battle Scarred - Anthony Feinstein - Страница 8

A distant war

How goes the war? As I toil away at the bottom of the hill in a ramshackle collection of old brick buildings, prefab huts and trailers, out of sight of the gleaming new edifice perched on the heights above, the war seems very far away. It is never completely forgotten, but rather hovers as some vague threat, a source of subliminal disquiet.

Every now and then reality is forced home when we admit a soldier direct from the front lines. They all look alike: heavily suntanned, bleached hair, lean, tense and bemused to be back home, clothes and kit covered in a fine sand. Their dishevelled look is the counterpoint to our smartly pressed linens, perfectly creased trousers and boots so shiny a man can look up his nose when he peers at his toes. Psychotic conscripts are quickly discharged – their parents are summoned, or they are put on a train with a one-way ticket. Add an escort if voices are telling the boy to follow the moon. But those traumatised by war remain. We are, after all, a military unit.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, combat fatigue, shell shock, call it what you will – this is our bailiwick. Here we aim for a cure, but it is not easy. The histories we obtain from these men bring home the pain of a distant war. Their emotional wounds run deep. One such a patient is John, a rookie signalman with a month’s operational service behind him.

One morning a patrol sets out from Ondjiva, a South African base inside Angola. A couple of armoured cars are protecting lorries carrying supplies and John is in the front vehicle. It is a dangerous road and a few kilometres into the journey his vehicle drives over a landmine. The ground thunders and up rears his transport like a wild steed. Men are thrown through the air and fall into the minefield. The second armoured car and a lorry suffer the same fate.

Two men land on mines. One of them is killed outright, the other is left severely wounded. He is lying a few feet from John, who has been badly winded. John also has a loud ringing noise in his head, but to his relief he notes he is relatively unscathed. A few cuts and bruises, that is all. At first he wants to run to safety, but just as he is about to spring up it dawns on him that he is lying in a minefield. There are no sappers in the small convoy and no one can move until they arrive to clear the landmines. So John must wait.

The chimes in his head grow softer. Now he can hear the man next to him moaning. He peers through the smoke to take a closer look. Dear God, what a mess. The man has been eviscerated. Bowel spills out like a string of giant sausages. A leg is broken too, the bone sticking up through the skin, a white shard in a sea of blood and guts. John’s first instinct is to crawl over and offer some help. But he cannot move. What if he crawls over a mine? Another look at the mess alongside him confirms his fate if he miscalculates.

It is more than he can endure. He shuts his eyes. He wishes he could shut his ears too, anything to block out the sound of the wounded man’s whimpering.

The rear of the convoy has deployed around the shattered vehicles. An attack often follows a landmine blast. Is that what will happen now? If so, I am done for, John reasons. He is scared and thirsty. He searches for his water bottle, but the blast must have dislodged it from his belt because he cannot find it. The sun beats down. When he next opens his eyes and cranes his neck, he sees that other men litter the area, paralysed like he is. He does not feel so alone now, but none are closer to the badly wounded man.

He takes another peek. Flies are swarming over the shiny, gooey mess that extrudes from the man’s belly. Their buzzing mingles with the groans. To his horror, John sees the man open his eyes. It cannot be – he is conscious! They look at one another.

The wounded man is trying to say something? What is it? … Water. The man is asking for water. John wants to tell him he has none, but he cannot get the words out. Hard as he tries, he cannot speak. His voice has deserted him. He brings a hand up to his throat to feel for an injury. There is none.

He starts to feel panicky. He wants to scream out: Help! Help this man beside me, who has been turned inside out.

But he cannot make a sound. His voice has deserted him. Not so the wounded man, who pleads softly for water, his eyes boring into John’s. ‘Water, water,’ he rasps. To which John can only respond with silence.

John is not sure how long he lies there. He has to close his eyes again. But now he covers his ears too, desperate to shut out the entreaties of a dying man. This is how the sappers find him. They peel John’s hands from his ears. He starts at their touch and opens his eyes wide in terror. The man alongside him is dead and the sappers are shooing away the flies, but he can see it is a hopeless task for the swarm is too dense. John wishes he had died too. There is no joy in surviving this. Guilt has stolen his moment of salvation.

And still he cannot speak.

John is flown down to the psychiatric hospital in Pretoria. The referral note is curt: ‘Eighteen-year-old male. Mute, physically well.’ And that is all we are told.

My first impressions of the man are favourable. He has pleasant features, is of slight build and has a quiet, deferential manner tinged with melancholy. No crushing grief here or florid displays of distress. He communicates by writing and that is how I learn of what transpired on the road from Ondjiva.

The challenge is to get him to phonate before he can speak, but we are unsuccessful in this. Colonel de Jager takes over from me. We need a more experienced hand here, he explains. These are deep waters. I could not agree more, but experience comes up short too. Not a decibel escapes John’s lips. The weeks turn into months.

Meanwhile, Commandant Yang returns from another Iron Man course. His arm is in a cast and he is in a lot of pain, Iron Man quantities of pain. Lucky he has the constitution to soak it up, he tells us, never mind the absent certificate of proof.

‘What is a stupid certificate anyway?’ he asks angrily. ‘Just a fucking piece of paper, that’s what.’ With that out the way, he turns his ire on John, proclaiming to smell ‘something fishy’. The commandant always smells something fishy. Or else he smells a rat. Either way, life reeks. As far as he is concerned, how do we know John is not faking it? Stands to reason, opines big-hearted Yang, this could be his passport out of the war. If he starts talking again, we send him back. So he clams up.

The Commandant’s treatment envisages all sorts of punitive tasks for John. ‘Stop wrapping him in cotton wool,’ he exhorts. ‘Give him the shithouses to clean. With a toothbrush. Put him on parades. Send him on long runs. Up steep hills. I mean his legs work, don’t they? So rough him up a bit. Put a pea under his mattress, for fuck’s sake. That should make things uncomfortable for the little prince. No pain, no gain.’ Here Commandant Yang pauses. A smile darts across his face and is just as quickly gone. You can see the cogs working upstairs. Just let me get my hands on this shirker, you can see him thinking.

But the Colonel has heard enough. ‘We will do just the opposite,’ he instructs. ‘Let us acknowledge that our theraphy has not worked. Perhaps time with family will give the boy his voice back.’ John’s parents live on the coast in Port Elizabeth, nine hundred kilometres away. I am instructed to take him home.

I do not relish this task. John is an only child and his parents have been told very little of what has transpired. They know he is in Pretoria receiving treatment, but for what ailment? Psychological mutism is a difficult concept to convey over the telephone, so the diagnosis has been kept from them. They have, however, been reassured he is not in any medical danger, which is partly comforting but cannot assuage their worry.

We fly to Port Elizabeth in an army Dakota, an old jalopy, draughty and noisy. We are the only two passengers. There are no windows and the interior is gloomy. From time to time the pilot leans back and shouts out the name of a town we are passing over, marking our progress south-east.

John sits opposite me. He is glad to be going home and has written me a note of thanks. He looks at me and smiles weakly. I smile back. It is a long flight and the smiling peters out. We touch down around midday and taxi to a stop. I am the first to step out the plane.

At the bottom of the stairs stands an elderly couple. Are they John’s grandparents, I wonder, but no, they turn out to be his mom and dad. They had him late in life, their miracle child, long after they had given up any hope. This is going to be more difficult than I thought. There is a look of panic on their faces.

I introduce myself and they stammer something in return. Is it George and Grace? No matter, because they are not looking at me but around me, searching for their son, who is shadowing me so closely that for a moment he is lost to sight. I step aside and they all come together suddenly like some kind of conjurer’s trick. There is a moment of stunned silence as a parent’s worst fear gives way to relief, a release so profound that Mom and Dad shrink a little, right there before my eyes on the tarmac.

Mom is crying now. Dad places an arm around her shoulder. John doesn’t move. He seems lost. His father takes a hesitant step forward and then stops. He looks at me as if to ask: May I embrace my son? ‘Please,’ I say, my voice thickening, and I withdraw quickly, embarrassed by this deference. It is me who has no right to be here.

John’s parents take his silence very well. It is clear they feared something much worse. He looks fit and tanned. He is walking, he can run, he has his smarts, he is alive! What matter a small thing like speech? They will help him through it – Mom assures me there is nothing like home cooking and love.

She clasps my hand. ‘Thank you, Doctor, thank you.’ She is still crying. Dad has my other hand. He is shaking it vigorously. I am overwhelmed by his effusive gratitude. What have I done to deserve this? After all, I am just the chaperone who drew the short straw, the novice psychiatrist, a conscript like their son. The war is a shameful mess and I am sorry for their misfortune, their broken son and for handing him over like this.

But I say none of this.

Back at 1MIL bad news is waiting. The army is packing me and the Warthog off to the front lines. Up in northern South West Africa there is a garrison town called Oshakati, home to the largest military base in the war zone. We are to run a psychiatry triage service from there and screen the troops for post-traumatic stress disorder. The Warthog will go first and I will relieve him after a few months.

I am full of trepidation. Not so the Colonel and his sidekicks. They are bubbling with excitement and feeling very chuffed. We are implementing the PIE principle in the treatment of emotional trauma, they tell me: Proximity – to the battlefield; Immediacy – treat quickly; Expectancy – let the soldier know with no uncertainty that he will be returning to the front lines.

But first, cures are to be found at the hands of beginner psychiatrists. Even this is overstating our qualifications. I am not a psychiatrist. I have had just six months’ exposure to psychiatry and now I am to be a one-man unit managing combat stress in a war zone. Are we not rushing things? Hell no, I am told, we are at war, man. War! There is no time to lose. And no place for the faint-hearted. Stand tall! Straighten your shoulders!! Tighten your buttocks!!! Pack your bags and seize the moment. You leave shortly.

I start the long goodbyes. My anticipated melancholy is, however, held at bay by something quite unexpected – sex. Lots of it, and with a passion bordering on frenzy. There will be none for the next three months, so I go about it with gusto. If I am not packing, I am fornicating. A neurotic libido has been let loose and sex is a marvellous distraction. A good lay can blot out everything and there is no shortage of willing partners. War is a potent aphrodisiac, or perhaps it is the pending separation that drives our motors. Whatever the reason, I am not about to waste time in analysis. I simply accept that fortune has smiled on me at a difficult time.

On the day of departure I am enervated. I stand on the tarmac on a cold, dreary morning. It is raining. Before me looms the backside of a monster Hercules transport plane. The ramp is down and a giant anus beckons. Together with hundreds of other recruits I enter the cavernous interior. I am like Jonah in the belly of the whale. Soon we are airborne.

No one is saying much for we are all too tense. I pass the time by looking at photographs given to me by recent lovers. They are inscribed. Some of the messages are cryptic, referring in oblique ways to weeks of great passion. They make me smile. It already seems long ago.

A few hours later we land just south of the war zone and stagger out into the blinding sunlight. Trucks are waiting to transport us to a holding camp where we will spend the night. We each receive a can of bully beef for dinner. The place is like a prison, surrounded by barbed wire. We sit in the sand and wait. The atmosphere remains subdued. When night falls we crowd into a large, bare room without electricity.

I open my canned dinner. It smells off. I shine my torchlight into the contents. Dried puke looks back at me and I toss it away. There is nothing for it but to wait for morning to come. We lie down to sleep on the concrete floor. The night is cold. A few of the hungrier, more foolish men have eaten the canned bilge and their cramps start in the early hours. Soldiers stagger around in the dark with the runs, belching loudly, groaning, squeezing off Gatling-gun farts. A scuffle breaks out after one man is drenched in a shower of vomit.

We are off to a rocky start.

The morning dawns crisp and clear. Not even the penitentiary surroundings can dull the beauty of the sunrise. I look through the wire as the horizon turns pink and a light breeze washes away the fetid smells of the night before. The vista would be even more alluring if I wasn’t so hungry, but there is nothing to eat. A few of us slip away and go foraging. We find an inn-cum-bar not far from the camp. We wolf down breakfast and amble back in silence.

The hours pass idly as the heat builds. Around midday a swirl of dust appears in the distance. Our convoy has arrived. A Jeep leads the lorries into the camp at breakneck speed. Corporals are screaming: ‘Hurry up, hurry the fuck up.’ They are greatly agitated. Why the sudden haste, given the desultory pace thus far? Some of the men who ate the bad food are moving very slowly. They can barely lift their kit and they are in no mood to be told what to do. They answer back in a fury stoked by their aching guts. The scene is chaotic. Amid the pandemonium a stentorian voice bellows out, ‘Shaddup! Shaddup! Every one of you cunts, shaddup!’

We are greeted by a scruffy, pasty-looking major who I’ll soon get to know much better. He gets out of his Jeep waving a clipboard and a sheaf of papers. He wastes little time in telling us of the hazards that lie ahead. His language is the vernacular of war – red zones, ambushes, ammo, terrs, clicks, victor yankees – a barely comprehensible lingo. Among his papers is a list of men’s names divvied up according to their postings. I am one of six personnel assigned to Oshakati. We are each given a measly sandwich and magazines of live ammunition.

Our convoy sets off. We sit dumbly in rows on either side of the lorry, the canvas flaps pulled down and tightly secured. Air cannot circulate. Some of our escort have their shirts off and torsos glisten in the sauna-like conditions. The man opposite me has dozed off. The vehicle lurches. His head snaps back and then forward. He cracks his nose on the barrel of his rifle and blood spurts. We are all too lethargic to move. Even the bleeder, awake now, looks listlessly at the bright red drops that splash onto the floor, where they quickly congeal, turning crimson and then a dullish brown.

We arrive at Oshakati in the late afternoon. The base shimmers under a blazing sun. Thousands of conscripts would rather be elsewhere. They have set up home in a dustbowl, sand as far as the eye can see, their lives coated with layers of sweat and axle grease. I drop off my kit and go take a shower. The dirt and grime peel away under the powerful jets of cold water and with it the lingering fragrance of some exotic perfume, a final reminder of a dark-haired Cypriot beauty.

Stepping out for some fresh air en route to Oshakati.

Hunger and fatigue, not libido, compete for my attention now. I find a bed, even though it is not yet dark. I climb under the mosquito netting – my plan is a short nap before dinner. My last memory is of men singing, laughing and dancing. Scenes of unbridled joy in the midst of purgatory? Can it be? But it turns out my recall is accurate. While I was lost to the world the night passed in revelry. The departing medical corps, their tour of duty over, threw a huge party and everyone got plastered.

I am given an office in the sickbay. Here I will give therapy to the emotionally wounded. It is a bleak room. Shoved up against a wall is a metal desk with one drawer missing, the other locked and no key to open its secrets. The surface of the desk is badly scratched – florid scatology, phalluses and pudenda are everywhere. This is the desk they have given to the army psychiatrist, a Rosetta Stone of obscene messages, frustrated desires and perverse cravings. Between patients I scrutinise its detail, marvelling at the outpouring of smut and unbridled lust uncontaminated by a clean thought.

Two chairs that could have been borrowed from a brothel go with the desk – they too are metal, with shiny red-plastic seats. And that is it. There’s no bookcase, couch, wall hanging or filing cabinet. Just an offensive desk and a pair of sluttish chairs. It’s the most depressing room I have ever seen. Ten minutes in this atmosphere and you might want to put the muzzle of your R1 into your mouth and splatter your brains on the wall behind. The foil to good cheer and high spirits, that’s my office – the Shrink’s Chamber of Melancholy.

Luckily I am not busy in my first week. Psychopathology is on vacation and there is time enough to read my desk and wonder about the poor sods like myself who had nothing better to do than commune with a tired piece of chipped furniture. My studies of the desk are interrupted: Could I please join my colleagues in the sickbay? There are many patients to see and if the psychiatrist is not occupied, perhaps he could change caps and become an internist for a while? Reluctantly I disengage from a story of bestiality and amble off to do my bit.

In the apartheid army the law dictates that black and white do not mix, except in the sickbay. To my surprise, many of my patients are black, and it is my first exposure to these soldiers fighting on the ‘white’ side of apartheid. The majority are with 32 Battalion. Most speak no English and just a smattering of Afrikaans, so communication is more often than not impossible. Separate development, even up here at the tip of apartheid’s far-flung arm, ensures we live very separate lives.

In keeping with the politics, disease segregates too. From what I can discern, social order in this community has collapsed. How else to account for the fact that nearly all these soldiers have venereal disease? The medical corps struggles daily with swampy groins full of ooze – the gonococcus has found a home here in Owamboland, the chaos of war offering the perfect environment. It is a putrid business. The soldiers walk in, or rather, the more advanced cases hobble. Taking a history is unnecessary – most of them just point to their groins when you ask what the problem is. Some simply drop their pants and keep smiling in embarrassment while you reach for the penicillin injection. But look beyond those brilliantly white, toothy grins and you see a deeper malaise, one that penicillin cannot address. Moreover, treating the men without the women ensures this is one battle the apartheid army cannot win.

Given that illness follows the racial divide, what then ails the white man? Here the answer is more complex. The boss, the capo di tutti capi, is the career soldier, a few of whom are hardcore hypochondriacs. Like moths to a flame, they are attracted to the sickbay. They may be a minority, but what they lack in number they make up for in groans and moans. Their groins may be spotlessly clean, but their complaints are equally monotonous and for the most part trivial – catarrh, dandruff, boils, snotty noses and boozers’ bad breath.

The conscripts, on the other hand, present a different picture. They have been sent to Oshakati by the thousands, boys barely out of school. They will spend twelve months on the border with nothing to look forward to except going home. Not surprisingly, they are in great shape, arriving fresh faced and supremely fit after months in an infantry or artillery base. These lads do not clog the sickbay with phantom ills. But they cut themselves and their wounds must be sutured, and they fall and break bones that need setting.

When they are stretchered in with eyes screwed shut to hold back the tears we take note, because there is no entitlement here. It startles and unsettles us when we see these young men in distress struggle to respond to the lieutenant doctors with the same respect and obedience they show their officers in the infantry corps, some even trying to salute as they stand gingerly on their one good leg. You see, there is no such formality in the sickbay. Illness and disease dilute rank, introducing an easy camaraderie between the conscript doctors and their orderlies. But no matter how you try and put the infantryman at ease it is seldom any good. He has been drilled into submission by all those months in Upington – by the time he is shipped off to Oshakati his reactions to the doctor’s epaulettes are Pavlovian.

Every now and then you connect with one of these soldiers and it goes beyond the usual doctor-patient relationship. There exists a silent bond between conscripts – doctor and patient alike – who are not here by choice and whose only aim is to get out of this jam alive. So we patch up these lacerated and fractured bodies, and we do so with a sense of mission. For these boys are just like us, except less fortunate. We do whatever we can to make it a little easier for them, from writing notes ordering a few days’ extra sick leave or light duties for a while, to something as small as slipping them an iced Coke from our large fridges. We count it a small victory against a system that holds us all captive.