Sergeant Riley

The sergeant’s belly blew out just as he turned to speak to me. He’d taken a tumbling 7.92 from an IRA shooter that I guessed was up in the roof space of the derelict houses across the street.

The problem was to go to ground within seven nanoseconds without making the sergeant’s plight any worse. But I just fucking pushed him over a hedge into a garden and jumped in after him. The other squaddies were hunkered down scoping along the rooftops lookin’ for this guy. They take out the dividers between the houses so they can run from attic to attic and escape into a waiting car after they pop us.

I had a shell dressing out and down on Riley’s belly and it was a real dirty wound – blood and piss and shit all glomming around his insides doing their evil work. I looked at my guys – all down in this garden and the next one over—making these quick glances at me to see if I’m giving any hand signals. They know what to do—19-year-olds are quick and perky at these things. They know what to do. I flash them the usual—stay low, scope up. Perkins has the radio and he’s on it. He knows what to do.

There are no more shots and I know the guy is gone already.

Riley is glazed and coughing up blood. I want to tell him everything’s gonna be Ok but it isn’t, but they do good work up at the Royal and I’ve seen these things get fixed in the past. My combats are filthy with blood and fecal matter and bits of bone embedded but I’m too hyped to vomit. I feel so inadequate. Your brain runs all the protocols but in the end you’re just left with a dying man and it’s always your fault. It has to be your fault—that’s what they pay you for.

Sirens in the distance. I have Riley taped up – he’s clutching me and wheezing . . . I’m trying to get him into the recovery position without spilling his guts onto the lawn.

“Jesus Boss,” he says . . . “Jesus Boss.”

“It’s OK sarge. They’ll have you shipped in no time.”

I love him. He’s a West Country man – unflappable – he knows how to work the boys – when to hurt them—when to let up – when to diss them – when to drop a kind word in their ears. We’re a group of terminal cynics. We have this constant love-hate thing. I try to distance myself from it all and let Riley do the close-in work.

You have to keep your distance from the men because all they do is bitch and moan and if you get with them before you know you’re bitching and moaning yourself. We only allow bitching two ranks up. The men bitch about sergeants. Riley bitches about captains . . . I bitch about majors and colonels.

Riley has a way of saying “saving yourself Sir” when we’re into the Johnny Walker and he’s diatribing every officer in the British Army. He lets me off lightly because I take the same shit as he does . . . and because so far I’ve kept everyone alive. I often wonder why I seconded to this mob from Canada.

I guess because in Canada we don’t get to kill anybody but here we do. But, it’s not really that. A body is a body. You lose your anger when you see them all still. There’s a ratchet thing in our brains that counts. We have this idea that if you kill enough of them there will be no more to hurt you—but there always are . . . and we know that. We have to play these head games to keep from screaming. We are neurotic . . . perhaps sometimes a little psychotic.

Aid to the civil power—that’s what we’re doing. All we want to do is get drunk, get laid, sleep for eons. Sleep is the elusive angel of our lusts. We never get enough sleep. We never have enough men. Everyone laughs at us – the IRA, the RUC, the protestants, the Catholics. We never do anything right. We are too little too late.

And now Riley is dying – this big 40-year-old man gutshot and I’m just a kid. It could have been me but it’s not and I don’t want to be gutshot either. Through and through in the upper arm maybe . . . a no-boner in the fleshy part of the thigh . . . perhaps a little side-shot – like a modern version of a Heidelberg saber scar. All honorable service.

Riley won’t get a medal for this. We’re not fucking green berets with purple hearts flowing out of our asses. This is a hard army. You don’t get medals for nothing in this army. Riley didn’t do anything heroic and that’s the nub of us.

We’re anti-heroes. We are anti-Gung Ho. The last thing we care about is heroism. All we do heroism-wise is drag a wounded comrade off the street. The rest is all fear. We crawl from house to house, hearts beating, bowels loose, sweating till we stink like pigs, heads pounding, We are the anti-heroes. We practice making ourselves very very small. We want to be small and skinny and insignificant. Every cell of our bodies screams out TARGET TARGET TARGET when we’re on patrol.

We laugh at Green Beret movies—we don’t give a fiddler’s fuck for patriotism. We put in time. We see people walking down the street minding their own business and feel we’re there for them. That’s all. When you’re picking up legs and arms and eyes off the street then you get religion for a week and go out on the hunt. Then you’re feral and filled with hate. Then the hubris floods out and you take risks. You go into houses and manhandle people and their pleas ring hollow in your ears.

Because you know they’re players—every fucking one of them.

But you can’t prove it—and you know you’re a recruiting agent every time you rough someone up and sometimes back in barracks you just vomit and vomit because you shouldn’t do that to people. That’s what Johnny Walker was invented for.

You can lose yourself in that . . .

. . . when you’re young.

-30- Kingston Ontario May 17, 2004.