the very next sufferer.
‘I’m not a jellyhead, I’m all right!’ I twisted round to look at her.
‘I know, but it’s my job to make sure you lot know.’ She stood up and walked back over to her desk to put down her medical stuff. ‘Right, you’re done. You can get dressed. Seven days light duties and antibiotics.’
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. We might get sent back out and I’d be stuck in camp. I started to argue with Emma. ‘But …’
‘Don’t care.’ She pointed at me to shut up.
‘Seven days light duties and I want you back here tonight after you’ve showered. Go easy – I want to check those sutures are still in place.’
By the tone of her voice, I could tell arguing with her wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I changed tack. ‘You just want to see my arse again …’
‘Your arse looks like a rancid badger’s right now,’ she giggled. ‘Believe me, nobody’s going to want to see it.’
I laughed back as I opened the tent flap to leave. Then the thought of walking back into the cookhouse stopped me. ‘You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’ I asked.
Emma looked me straight in the eye. ‘I took the Hippocratic oath.’
I had no idea what that was but it sounded serious, which was good enough for me.
Chapter Six
As I walked over to the cookhouse, the familiar sound of generators humming and vehicles revving filled my ears. The Tannoy kicked off again, ‘Standby. Standby. Firing. End of message.’ Sure enough, another 70km Sniper kicked off and whooshed over my head. I couldn’t be bothered to look up and watch it disappear into the sky without my sunglasses on. Besides, the most important thing on my mind just then was getting a brew.
Whenever we got any time off from being on patrol or on fatigues, it was always brew time. No doubt about it, the army would grind to a halt without tea. Even our ration packs had enough brew kit in them to supply all the Queen’s garden parties put together.
The cookhouse was the centre of our world. As well as having a brew on 24/7, we also got fed there, but more importantly it was where the telly was. BFBS, the British Forces Broadcasting Service, beamed in the soaps, news, music channels and, even better, football. There were always lads sitting in the cookhouse day or night. Just hanging around, chatting, watching telly, or reading all the three-week-old newspapers and magazines lying about.
The FOB was just a big square fort really, a bit like the US Cavalry outposts in the westerns I used to watch on Sunday afternoons. Only, instead of wood, they were made of Hescos. Hescos are massive, drum-shaped sandbags with a wire frame and they stood as tall as me. The engineers filled them with sand and stacked them up to make the FOB’s perimeter walls, then they made buildings with them for protection against IDFs (indirect fire, rocket or mortar attacks). We didn’t actually sleep in the Hesco buildings. We slept in tents surrounding them. We’d be too hot otherwise.
There was no air-conditioning and barely any plugs either. We used Solar Power Monkeys to keep our iPods and laptops charged up. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of sun, if you know what I mean. I hadn’t seen a single cloud since I’d been here. We were in the middle of the desert with nothing around us for miles. It was all generators, water wells and powdered milk. But you know what? It was great, I loved it. I even got thirty minutes of free phone calls home every week.
I pushed through the tent flap and into the cookhouse. Big mistake. About twenty lads all stopped chatting, farting and watching the telly, ready to take the piss out of me. There was a general chorus of ‘Wey hey!’ Then all the funnies started.
‘It’s the man with two arseholes!’ shouted Si with a big fat grin on his face.
‘Not good, mate,’ jeered Flash as he looked up from his magazine. ‘Women ain’t going to be impressed with that war wound.’
‘Guinness Book of Records for you, mate,’ shouted Jonesy without even looking away from the television. He was a lad from another platoon and he was a bit strange. No one understood his so-called joke, but then again we never understood what he was on about.
I felt the colour rise in my face as the piss-take continued. ‘Nah, don’t! Leave