The Ambulance (Warning Rated R- Graphic)

I really appreciate all the nice words, comments and PM's from members of the BSB concerning my postings from my Desert Diary. Since there is interest, I will continue to post.

Be aware that this one is different from the rest in that it contains a graphic description of war. If you are offended by this, do not read further. Moderators, if this is inappropriate, please delete it. I thought of putting it in the secured "Politics" area, but it is not political in nature.

The Ambulance

 

 

I saw the God Of War last night. Proud and angry, boldly outshining anything around with a fiery orange-red, he stood alone. Larger than ever before, this is the closest Mars will ever come to Earth this century. It is ironic that I note this occurrence at three in the morning, in the moonbathed chill of the Saudi Arabian desert.

 

In a further twist of irony, while the rhetoric, military buildup and political chestbeating heat up, here at the 4^th battalion the training emphasis is on the Army’s Fifteen Count Manual Of Arms. Yessiree, crucial task for our crucial wartime missions. Entire companies fell out this morning for the HQ directed drill and ceremony practice. Snap and pop men, snap and pop!

 

Oh yes, today is also Division ‘Safety Day’. THERE WILL BE NO ACCIDENTS, we’re ordered.

 

I cut myself shaving this morning. There goes the program….

 

-Desert Journal Entry, 1990

 

 

That night I stood in the chill wind blowing out from somewhere far off in the bleak desert bringing with it the grit and the sting of the land, whose invisible needles and pebbles fly through the air and make each minute an irritating eternity. The war’s opening act would be happening soon and it was unlikely that I would survive the the opening curtains in this theatre. I knew enough of what was going to happen to resign myself to a sweaty, dirty end. There is no glory in one’s own death.

 

I stood there open eyed at the night, taking it all in. This war: how different from the Panama Invasion I parachuted into less than a year before, my only other frame of reference, where it was block by block house to house room to room where it was just me and my squad, finely oiled machinery that glided through our bellicose motions with each man knowing exactly what to do and doing it because in this game when the cards are on the table it is either put up or shut up and you don’t get a second chance. Of course, this too is owed to the millions of hours spent in training and rehearsing and practicing and causing bitter weariness to set in and wanting nothing more to say ‘stopenoughisenoughtimeout’ because the little leave we did get was just enough to mend the body and not enough to mend the mind.

 

In this scenario (how the Army loved that word, so antiseptic) it was just wide open spaces of rock and sand so big you could see into the next mapsheet and entire battalions seem insignificant when swallowed up in the wasteland, and an individual will get agoraphobic because there is no reference he may use to judge anything, even success. A trench or a bunker is simply a hole in the stony ground and and there is still nothing there to pin your efforts to and nobody really wants this godforsaken desert anyway; you’ll just leave it tomorrow, for the armour plated beetles and King Kong scorpions to reclaim, for another hole somewhere else in the sand. The desert is either concrete-hard white rock with a fine layer of moon-like dust on top, the remains of a once sea-floor pushed up into the sky millions of years ago, an aggregate of millions of seashells and crustaceans calcified, concretized in the bleaching sun, or endless waves of tan, dirty gritty sand with no end and endless depth.

 

And the sand absorbs blood, not like pavement where it pools and runs seeking the lowest point. People bleed a lot, ten pints of blood they say, spongy flesh steeped in it, saturating the space between the cells and that’s why bodies leak really; it doesn’t squirt unless you hit an artery, but slowly drains like a sodden sponge held up lightly on one end, the juices run out.

 

I recalled that ride one night during Panama when taking enemy wounded, kids really, stupid kids pulling a stupid stunt with that immortality of youth with no thought to the consequences. Mess around kiddies and Big Daddy Bush will send the Airborne to straighten you out. No problem at all, except it’s one hell of a spanking. Each one of them all shot up, heading back to the the neighbourhood clinic and wounded collection point slowly threading our way through no-man’s land in an open HUMV with bodies stacked in, crammed in, and I was holding a pressure bandage on one and and an IV bag for another while the medic ‘squeeze it, squeeze it squirt that s*** in him he’s losing it’ two fingers plugging a sucking chest wound and slapping him with his other hand ‘live da***t, live!’ but I couldn’t watch, it was too close, the teenager’s face six inches from mine as I kneeled on that crowded truckbed, so I turned away unable to look yet mesmerized by the the other just across from me with a chunk of skull missing over an eye. I knew head wounds bleed a lot and wondered why this one didn’t, because all I could see was edges of white bone and brain perfectly intact, a wedge of forehead neatly removed by a bullet. This kid was dying, dripping holes everywhere on his naked body, and it further confused me why it took so long, not like in TV-Land where you’re shot-you-fall-you-die, but slowly, each breath his last, too long pauses in-between and for each his throat stretching like a bullfrog’s, his body fighting death, wanting that oxygen, distending itself to unbelievable proportions in an effort to feed itself with his eyes rolling white into the back of his head, swollen tongue sticking out to free his airway. All the while leaking, his red fluids draining steadily into the vehicle so that when the tailgate was opened, the blood splashed onto the street like melted snow off the back of a pickup truck.

Edited by rivet