The blast obliterated his senses. As he started to claw his way out of the blind and numb blackness back towards a slowly convulsing consciousness, he whispered, ‘Mum.’ Then he pleaded meekly to his motherless god. As the dust cleared in the desert breeze and his sight began to return, he saw among the rubble several feet away and knowing but not understanding it was his, most of a man’s leg. Then the agony began. Not just pain from his semi-cauterised stump, but also from the multiple shards of shattered rock and steel shrapnel that had penetrated his muscles, chest and gut.
‘We’ve got you,’ the medic said as he shot morphine into him. The corporal, who had been patrolling ahead of him not ten feet away, urgently applied field dressings to the stump thinking all the while, ‘Fuck, it could have been me. Bastards.’ The medic turned his attention to the froth of bright red bubbles forming on the outside of his combat gear. In seconds he realised that a large sucking chest wound was a full-blown flail chest. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, silently hoping he could work fast enough to save him.
Two years at the Academy; the Sword of Honour (or Damocles?); his second tour in that beautiful wasteland. And now, blasted into separate pieces by the overpressure, his future was shrouded in a dusty, red mist. For him the war was over and so was his peace.