Spare

Colder, heavier rain started to come down. The instructors shouted that we should imagine our helicopter had just crash-landed behind enemy lines, and our only hope of survival was to go by foot from one end of the moor to the other, a distance of ten miles. We’d been given a meta narrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic to Muslims.

Our mission: Evade the enemy, escape the forbidding terrain.

Go.

The truck roared away.

Wet, cold, we looked around, looked at each other. Well, this sucks.

We had a map, a compass, and each man had a bivvy bag, essentially a body-length waterproof sock, to sleep in. No food was allowed.

Which way?

This way?

OK.

Bodmin was desolate, allegedly uninhabited, but here and there in the distance we saw farmhouses. Lighted windows, smoke curling from brick chimneys. How we longed to knock on a door. In the good old days people would help out the soldiers on exercise, but now things were different. Locals had been scolded many times by the Army; they knew not to open their doors to strangers with bivvy bags.

One of the two men on my team was my mate Phil. I liked Phil, but I started to feel something like unbounded love for the other man, because he told us he’d visited Bodmin Moor as a summer walker and he knew where we were. More, he knew how to get us out.

He led, we followed like children, through the dark and into the next day.

At dawn we found a wood of fir trees. The temperature approached freezing, the rain fell even harder. We said to hell with our solitary bivvy bags, and curled up together, spooned actually, each trying to get into the middle, where it was warmer. Because I knew him, spooning Phil felt less awkward, and at the same time much more. But the same went for spooning the third man. Sorry, that your hand? After a few hours of something vaguely approximating sleep we peeled ourselves apart and began the long march again.

The exercise required that we stop at several checkpoints. At each one we had to complete a task. We managed to hit every checkpoint, perform every task, and at the last checkpoint, a kind of safe house, we were told the exercise was over.

It was the middle of the night. Pitch-black. The directing staff appeared and announced: Well done, guys! You made it.

I nearly passed out on my feet.

They loaded us onto a truck, told us we were headed back to the base. Suddenly a group of men in camo jackets and black balaclavas appeared. My first thought was Lord Mountbatten being ambushed by the IRA—I don’t know why. Entirely different circumstance, but maybe some vestigial memory of terrorism, deep in my DNA.

There were explosions, gunshots, guys storming the truck and screaming at us to look down at the ground. They wrapped blacked-out ski goggles over our eyes, zip-tied our hands, dragged us off.

We were pushed into what sounded like an underground bunker system. Damp, wet walls. Echoey. We were taken from room to room. The bags over our heads were ripped off, then put back on. In some rooms we were treated well, in others we were treated like dirt. Emotions went up and down. One minute we’d be offered a glass of water, the next we’d be shoved to our knees and told to keep our hands above our heads. Thirty minutes. An hour. From one stress position to another.

We hadn’t really slept in seventy-two hours.

Much of what they did to us was illegal under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which was the goal.

At some point I was blindfolded, moved into a room, where I could sense that I wasn’t alone. I had a feeling it was Phil in there with me, but maybe it was the other guy. Or a guy from one of the other teams. I didn’t dare ask.

Now we could hear faint voices somewhere above or below, inside the building. Then a strange noise, like running water.

They were trying to confuse, disorient us.

I was terrifyingly cold. I’d never been so cold. Far worse than the North Pole. With the cold came numbness, drowsiness. I snapped to attention when the door burst open and our captors barged in. They took off our blindfolds. I was right, Phil was there. Also the other guy. We were ordered to strip. They pointed at our bodies, our flaccid cocks. They went on and on about how small. I wanted to say: You don’t know the half of what’s wrong with this appendage.

They interrogated us. We gave them nothing.

They took us into separate rooms, interrogated us some more.

I was told to kneel. Two men walked in, screamed at me.

They left.

Atonal music was piped in. A violin being scraped by an angry two-year-old.

What is that?

A voice answered: Silence!

I became convinced that the music wasn’t a recording, but an actual child, perhaps also being held prisoner. What in heaven’s name was that kid doing to that violin? More—what were they doing to that kid?