than miles, and she didn’t quite know what to do about it. The thought of seeing him again filled her with anxiety. She knew that this trip had changed something between them, it had stretched the elastic of their relationship thin. She wasn’t sure it could spring back this time. Did she even want it to?
Being here was a very different kind of working away. Their phone calls were always snatched seconds. When she did get time to call, the signal often dropped, leaving them to play frustrated phone tag with each other. When he was away for work at conferences, they could chat leisurely. Him from his safe snug hotel room at the side of some motorway. Her from their bed, with their son sleeping soundly nearby. Their conversations consisted of errands to run, Jamie’s school day, their work days. The logistics of their married life together. Here, the calls were clipped, short. Checking in. Are you and Jamie okay? Is it bad there? She couldn’t talk about her day. What would she tell him, about the lives she saved? The ones she lost? She didn’t want to think about them, let alone try to form words, to explain them to a man who worked in a safe office all day, watching the clock for meeting times, not for giving time of death. It narrowed their conversations. She couldn’t help but feel mad if he moaned about his day, about things that Kate had already realised didn’t matter in the grand scheme. Neil got mad that she was so closed off and cagey about her life there. Other times she could feel the resentment in his voice, as though she were away on a girly holiday and he had been left holding the pre-teen. They could fill a book with everything they couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember the last time she had told him she loved him. She pushed it to the back of her mind, she had to work now. Some puzzles were easier to solve than others. Long distance relationships weren’t easy. They both knew that, but it wasn’t forever.
The chopper landed, the metal glinting in the early morning scorch of the sun. Kate grabbed her hair, pulling it tighter into her ponytail, and raced to meet the stretcher. She snapped a pair of gloves on as she ran, though she wasn’t sure how sterile they would be given the sand flying around. Her colleagues at home would balk at some of the makeshift operations set up in these tents. The medicine was the key though, patching people up, getting them home. The rest was done as best they could under the circumstances. It wasn’t all pretty and clean here. In this environment, fighting death was bloody, messy and fast. Split second decisions were crucial.
‘What do we have?’ she asked the army medic pulling the patient out on the gurney, keeping his head dipped below the spinning chopper blades.
‘One dead in the field, two injured. This one is Captain Thomas Cooper, his unit was ambushed. Multiple injuries, IED, left leg. Flatlined twice on the way here, his vitals are shot. He has shrapnel injuries to his leg and torso, he hasn’t been conscious since impact.’ The medic glanced across at her. ‘We need to move fast.’ Kate nodded, running alongside the trolley as they raced for the trauma tent.
‘What meds has he had?’
‘We started him on a course of strong antibiotics and 10mg of morphine. We had no time for anything else, we had to get him out of there.’
It didn’t look good. Cooper’s eyes fluttered, and Kate noticed what a beautiful shade of green they were, the contrast made all the starker against his deathly pale skin and blood splattered face. They raced into the tent, transferring him from the stretcher to one of the hospital treatment tables. He never made a murmur. Kate grabbed a pair of scissors from her kit and cut away the remnants of his trousers, showing torn black boxers underneath. His left leg was a bloody mess. They had to stop the bleeding, or he would lose his life too. Looking at his right leg, she saw shrapnel protruding from his bloody wounds. These were comparatively superficial wounds; had he not been running flat out, she surmised that both legs would have hit the homemade bomb and been in the same state. The only reason this soldier had any leg at all was the position of his running body as the blast hit. She got to work, barking out orders to the staff running around the bed next to her. The whole tent was a hive of activity, and Kate blocked the noises out. On her first week here, she had been useless. She was no stranger to traumatic injuries, but the relative silence of the wards and operating rooms back home was a world apart from the sounds that surrounded her on a daily basis now. Strapping grown men, screaming, calling for their mothers, their wives, their gods, helicopters and booming sounds of bombs nearby, gunfire in the distance. All of these sounds had taken some adjustment, but now she tuned them out, was able to concentrate on what her colleagues were saying, the heart sounds she listened to in damaged chests, the gurgles and moans from the bodies she tended to. Kate ran over to Trevor.
‘The Captain’s not looking good. We need to stop the bleeders in his chest and right leg too. He’s lost a lot of blood.’
Trevor nodded, working on another patient as he listened to his colleague and one-time student.
‘You have this Kate.’ As she turned to run back, he shouted after her.
‘Kate, save him if you can. He saved two others in the field, his troop only made it out because of his actions. Only one died, and he will be angry enough about that when he comes to. We owe it to him.’
Kate ignored the slab of thick tension that nestled in her throat. ‘Roger that.’
‘They used a kid as a human shield Kate, the sniper had to take them both out to save our men. An innocent kid. No one else gets to die today.’ Kate ran back to Cooper. She thought of her earlier phone call with her son. Worrying about him missing football practice, whether he had eaten breakfast. A world away from being used as a weapon in a war he didn’t cause or belong in. A mother had lost her child today.
***
Hours later, the tent was quieter, calmer. The gunfire in the far distance had abated somewhat, and the silence was almost eerie. Kate was exhausted, covered in dirt and grime that had mixed with the sweat of her frantic exertion to save lives in the middle of a warzone. They needed to be ready at a moment’s notice, but the adrenaline of the last few hours had kicked in now and she knew if she went to bed, she would just lay awake looking at the ceiling of the tent, so she stayed. Sarah Fielding, a combat medic assigned to this unit, was at a nearby desk sorting through personal effects ready to bag and tag. They tried to save what they could, to either give back to the soldiers, or send back to their families. Kate went to the small kitchen area and grabbed a strong coffee, sitting down on a chair near the desk.
‘Hi Sarah, you okay?’ Kate asked tentatively, sipping at the strong hot drink. She felt the jolt of caffeine lick through her limbs.
‘Yeah, I just hate this job,’ Sarah replied, frowning. Kate noticed a familiar piece of clothing.
‘That the Captain’s trousers? Mind if I look?’
She shrugged. ‘No, bag it up for me would you, when you’re done? I still have a pile to get through and I need to get my head down.’ Sarah looked across at her, smiling weakly. ‘You should too.’
Kate nodded, taking the possessions from her colleague. ‘I will, I can’t settle yet. You go.’
Sarah placed a hand on her shoulder as she passed, squeezing it in appreciation. ‘Night Kate.’
‘Night Sarah,’ Kate said over her shoulder. The Captain was still unconscious, whether from the sedation or his injuries remained to be seen. They had stopped the bleeding, and he was stable. For now. Glugging at her coffee, she set it down on the desk and started to go through her patient’s belongings. He had the usual field stuff in his pockets, along with a wallet. It had escaped the blast. His mobile phone was shattered, so she itemised it and put it into the bag. Opening the wallet, she looked through, feeling guilty for going through his personal possessions, but it needed to be done. Sometimes, all families got back were the contents of their loved one’s pockets and bags, and even a half-eaten packet of mints was a comfort to a grieving mother. Photos and letters were the gold though. Looking through the wallet, she found amongst the cards and money a little stack of snaps. She frowned as she thumbed through them. They were all of him and his friends, in various barracks and war zones. No family pictures, no smiling mother and father, no rosy cheeked children cuddled by a proud wife. She noticed how handsome he was, smiling into the camera, laughing into another. His playful side showed, a man goofing