The sergeant turned back to me.
"You still all right, sir?" he asked, the stress apparent on his face.
"Yes," I said, but in truth, I didn't really feel that great. I was cold yet sweaty. "How are the men?" I asked him.
"Don't worry about the men, sir," he said. "I'll look after the men."
"How many are injured?" I asked.
"A few. Minor, mostly," he said. "Just some cuts and a touch of deafness from the blast." I knew what he meant. The sergeant turned away and shouted at the desert-camouflaged figure nearest to him. "Johnson, go and fetch the bloody medic kit from Cummings. Fucking little rat's too shit-scared to move."
He turned back to me once more.
"Won't be long now, sir."
"You said on the radio there's a CAT A. Who is it?"
He looked into my face.
"You, sir," he said.
"Me?"
"The CAT A is you, sir," he said again. "Your fucking foot's been blown off."
1
FOUR MONTHS LATERI realized as soon as I walked out of the hospital that I had nowhere to go.
I stood holding my bag at the side of the road, watching a line of passengers board a red London bus.
Should I join them, I wondered. But where were they going? Simply being discharged from National Health Service care had been my overriding aim for weeks, without any thought or reason as to what was to come next. I was like a man released from prison who stands outside the gates gulping down great breaths of fresh, free air without a care for the future. Freedom was what mattered, not the nature of it.
And I had been incarcerated in my own prison, a hospital prison.
I suppose, looking back, I had to admit that it passed quite quickly. But at the time, every hour, even every minute, had dragged interminably. Progress, seen day by day, had been painfully slow, with painful being the appropriate word. However, I was now able to walk reasonably well on an artificial foot and, whereas I wouldn't be playing football again for a while, if ever, I could climb up and down stairs unaided and was mostly self-sufficient. I might even have been able to run a few strides to catch that bus, if only I had wanted to go wherever it was bound.