The Drop

‘but I didn’t do enough,’ his voice faltered, ‘I found cover when I had to, I went forward when the NCOs ordered me to, I fired my rifle, I even killed a man, shot him from a distance and found his body when we went forward again. He didn’t look any older than me, but… ’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘That’s all,’ he said, ‘I didn’t distinguish myself. I kept my head down when some of the others were running through the bullets. I moved after they moved. I fired after they fired, I was never the first to get up that hill. I made sure I didn’t get my head blown off. I came out the other side without a scratch. We lost seventeen men. Seventeen dead and sixty four wounded and I didn’t even stub my toe on a rock. When I look back on it now I sometimes feel like I wasn’t really there, the fear stopped me from performing the way I know I could have, the way they’d trained me to. I should have been quicker. I should have been stronger. I should have been first.’
    ‘Christ!’ I shouted in exasperation, ‘is that it?’
    ‘What do you mean is that it?’ he looked at me like I was crazy.
    ‘I thought you’d seen something awful or done something awful. All these years I thought maybe you’d accidentally shot one of your mates, or murdered some Argie prisoners or run away or something.
    ‘Run away?’ he asked me, ‘Course I didn’t fucking run away. What do you take me for?’
    ‘I don’t know Danny, maybe not run away but I thought it was something worse than… well what you’ve just told me. Jesus, your whole life,’ I couldn’t comprehend him, ‘you’ve been so messed up since then and that’s all it’s been about? Just because you weren’t bloody Rambo?’
    ‘I did see something awful,’ he told me calmly, ‘the whole battle was awful, people having their arms and legs blown off, mates from my company getting shot in the head, of course it was awful.’
    ‘But that wasn’t what kept you awake at night?’ I said quietly, ‘was it?’
    ‘No,’ he told me, ‘you don’t get it, you weren’t in the army. The thing that gets you through it is your mates and the fear of letting them down. That’s worse than being shit scared of dying or ending up paralysed or a vegetable. Worse than all the god-awful horror of a battle is how scared you are that you are going to let your mates down when it comes to the crunch. That’s the code. I can’t tell you how it feels when you are standing in the pissing rain next to one of those big, open graves full of body bags, while the padre reads out the names of your friends and all you can think of is “I could have done more”,’
    ‘Did someone say something to you?’ I asked him, ‘afterwards. Did someone say you’d let your mates down, that you’d not done enough?’
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, nobody said anything, but I knew I had and that’s all that matters.’
    ‘Shit Danny, you didn’t fuck up. You did your job. It’s not like you dug a hole and hid in it crying. You moved, you fired your gun, you engaged the enemy and you killed one of them. You weren’t Audie Murphy but Jesus man, who is? If you’d done any more they’d have been burying you on that bloody hill. You were 18 for Christ’s sake. Everybody I know still thinks you’re a total hero just for being there and walking through that. You didn’t fuck up and you have no reason for feeling like a failure. The only thing you really feel guilty about is surviving and I can understand it, but that’s just the luck of war. Thank God you weren’t one of the poor bastards who didn’t come back. We did. Me and ma, we thanked God.’
    ‘I thought you were an atheist?’
    ‘I am but back then I was only a wee bairn, so I prayed anyhow, every night.’
    ‘I know you did and I’m grateful but I tell you there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t relived that bloody battle in my head and wished I’d done better, wished I’d been the soldier I know I could have been.’
    I thought about this for a moment that seemed to stretch out in front of us.
    ‘You still can be Danny,’ I told him firmly, ‘you still can be.’
    The front door to the Gosforth mansion was hanging off its hinges when we got there. I held the gun out in front of me, in case the fifth Russian was still there with Sarah, and walked inside. Danny followed me in. I hadn’t forgotten there were meant to be five of them. I’d been dialling Sarah’s mobile number on and off with Palmer’s