Without warning

‘Dziewczyna?’ The small, wiry, heavily moustachioed man grinned back at him. The men’s sergeant, judging by his chevrons. ‘Not much beer or beautiful ladies around here, my friend. Just stinky American boxheads, yes? Apologies if you are boxhead too. I say it with love in my heart. And sorrow too, great sorrow. Please sit, you are wounded, yes?’

Two of the Poles crabbed around and Melton eased himself down on a couple of kitbags. They seemed wonderfully soft.

‘Boxhead? No,’ he grunted with relief at getting off his feet. ‘Not for a long time, anyway. Wounded, yes. Not too bad, though, just missing a few bits and pieces.’

‘Nothing to stop you enjoying piwo or dziewczyna then?’

‘No, nothing that bad. My name is Melton, by the way. Bret Melton. I’m a reporter, or was…’ He shrugged awkwardly and trailed off. It was simply too much effort to go into his CV, to explain his shift from Army Times staffer to itinerant freelancer for a slew of British media outlets. ‘You guys been waiting long for transport?’ he asked instead.

‘Eight hours. Not long. Some here have been waiting many days. Some have died here – not joking now. I am Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz, I do not joke. Pleased to meet you Melton By-the-way… Okay, that was joke. Polish joke, yes? The best kind. By Pole.’

Milosz flashed him a blindingly white grin and raised his eyebrows with such comic йlan that Melton couldn’t help laughing out loud. It hurt his shoulder dreadfully but he gave into it anyway. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed the abandon of real laughter. It seemed to loosen up Milosz’s men as well, with some of them smiling and nodding, as their own tension and stresses eased off a little.

‘We are going home soon,’ the sergeant said. ‘But you, my friend, where do you go now?’ The man’s eyes were dark pools of sympathy.

‘London, I think,’ said Melton. ‘That’s what my travel chit says, anyway. After that, well, I don’t know that there is an “after that”.’

‘No,’ agreed Milosz, nodding as though Melton had revealed some deeper truth. ‘Maybe nothing after that, no.’

Leaning back and taking in his surroundings, the reporter couldn’t help but dwell on how things were unravelling. There had to be nearly a thousand guys crammed into the baking heat of this hangar at the edge of a temporary base in the middle of nowhere. A lot of desert MARPAT, which meant Marines. Mixed in with the MARPAT were some army and air force personnel dressed in three-pattern desert BDUs like the fresh set Melton wore.

Marine, army or the few navy and air force he saw, all had the same look. The long stare, the slumped shoulders, postures crumpled in upon themselves. A few were crying openly, quietly, regardless of the severity of their wounds. Here and there, Melton would spot a soldier looking at a snapshot or a Marine watching a saved video file on his laptop. Some were by the door, chainsmoking for lack of anything better to do.

One soldier, from the 101st Airborne, had a collection of dog tags in his fist. He rocked himself back and forth until someone passed him, at which point he’d ask, ‘Who should I give these to, do you know?’ Even when he got an answer, he didn’t seem to hear it. He’d go back to rocking, back and forth, until someone else walked past.

A female Marine over by a Coke machine covered in Arabic script was smiling, flirting with a half-comatose man on a cot. ‘When I get home to see my baby girl, it’ll be all right. She lives in North Dakota with my grandma. I heard they made it.’

Oh boy, Melton thought, taking in the glazed green eyes of the Marine, a lance corporal. She looked right past him, not seeing anything but her dead girl smiling back from the past.

To Melton, they looked beaten. Like men and women with nothing to live for. Milosz and his small band of brothers, however, they were still tight and looking forward to something. Home, family, a simple fucking ride out of the furnace. It was enough to keep their spirits up. Melton shook his head. Any place where soldiers gathered in great numbers always ended up reeking of sweat and stale breath, cigarettes, ration farts and something more elemental – an animal smell of violence waiting to turn loose upon the world. But that musky scent had turned rancid and cloying in here. Even Somalia wasn’t this bad, Melton recalled. The Rangers on the whole weren’t beaten, nor were those pogues from 10th Mountain, who’d done better than anyone ever thought they would.

Desertions, he thought. These folks will desert or simply collapse if someone doesn’t give them their spines back real soon.