The First Stone Read online

  Simon is awaiting orders, when his thoughts are interrupted by a British captain who has crawled onto one of the truck beds. He’s standing among the wounded, who still haven’t been moved. “What the fuck are these people doing here?” yells the officer. “Who let them in?” He looks around reproachfully, as if he’s expecting one of the doctors or nurses to raise a hand and make a guilty confession. Then he continues. “They’ll have to be moved to the field hospital at Camp Bastion. We don’t have the capacity to treat them here.”

  Simon knows the captain is right. He also knows there aren’t enough helicopters to carry the wounded thirty kilometers to Camp Bastion, maybe just the worst cases. They’ll have to load the wounded back onto the vehicles that brought them here. That thought came to him right when the officer gave the order.

  The officer stands on the bed of the truck for a moment to thank the team of doctors, nurses, and medics. “See this here,” he says, “this is proof that we have achieved our goal. Our strategy is working. Look at them!” He points at the wounded covering the area in front of him. “They come to us when they need help. They know who the real enemy is. They’re showing their faith in us. This, ladies and gentlemen, this is Hearts and Minds at work. We’ve taken a huge step forward today. Thank you for your help.”

  Along with the other medics, Simon begins moving the wounded still lying on the ground. The silence that he only just cursed ends. He and the other medics are suddenly surrounded by women, old men, and children screaming in their faces while grabbing at them to try to force them away from their relatives. Simon lets go of a stretcher and waves them off. “Camp Bastion, Camp Bastion!” They clearly don’t understand his words or his intentions. Pantomime won’t help here. They think the wounded are going to be sent home without treatment.

  “Interpreter! Interpreter!” he yells, although he sees no interpreter anywhere. He tries to defend himself. There’s nothing he can do now. The officer climbs back onto the truck; an interpreter standing next to him tries to explain the situation. “We cannot treat you here! You have to go to Camp Bastion. It’s a real hospital! Do you understand me? We want what’s best for you!” The interpreter translates the sentences one at a time, trying to make his voice sound as urgent as the captain’s.

  The wounded lie apathetically on the ground. The problem is their relatives. They don’t care about the words—or they don’t believe them. A wild desperation has taken over, and they’re screaming accusations at the truck where the captain is standing. One of them grabs a rock and hurls it at the truck. The interpreter is the first to run. A rock hits the captain right in the middle of his chest; he ducks, only to take a direct hit in the forehead. He abandons his exposed position and jumps off the truck.

  Simon is shoved from all sides. A woman stretches her hands toward his face, and before he can read her intentions, she scratches his cheek. It hurts—and his shock over the unexpected attack causes him to strike out instinctively. He hits her on the shoulder. While there isn’t much force in the blow, it’s just enough to make her step back and, dazed, sit down. Two other women in burkas throw themselves at him. They almost push him on top of one of the wounded on the ground, but he frees himself with a hard jab of the elbows.

  He has no idea how many people there are, but the number is overwhelming. He can sense the panic. Hand-to-hand combat with a bunch of murderous women was not part of his training—and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that they’re in a similar state of panic. In blind fury, anonymous women, their faces hidden under burkas, stretch out their hands toward his face. If he doesn’t get out of there, they’ll scratch out his eyes. He decides against striking back at them and tries, instead, to use his hands to protect his eyes. They push toward him even more violently. His heart pounds wildly. He feels a kick in the shinbone, and then another right in the balls. Moaning, he doubles over. Self-preservation prompts him to move his hands to his crotch, but he dare not leave his eyes unprotected. Now he’s being shoved from all sides, as if the women are trying to knock him down. Someone tears at his hands, trying to get to his vulnerable eyes. He lets them push him to the ground and turns onto his side, rolling into a protective ball so his back takes all the blows. His eyes are all he’s thinking about. They keep kicking him, nails scratching at his face and hands tearing at his hair.

  Shots are fired. The hands let go immediately and the kicking stops. He dare not get up or abandon his protective position. His back aches and his scratched face stings. His crotch throbs, making him feel like he’s been holding his breath too long. His brain has short-circuited.

  It all happened with a suddenness that makes a door slam inside him; locked behind that door is everything he has ever learned. If he had an auto-injection syringe, he’d jam it into his own thigh and glide away on a wave of morphine.

  More shots are fired. Simon realizes that he can’t just lie there on the ground in the fetal position. He has to act. He’s a soldier. A rifleman and a medic. Without his rifle and assaulted by those he tried to help.

  He gets up on his knees. Damn, it hurts all over. This must be how the first stage of stoning feels, a merciless surrender to an uncontrollable mob for whom the whole body is a target. Death will occur as the cumulative effect of countless blows, an all-encompassing pain that grants the body no refuge where it’s unscathed.

  He stands up, swaying. The wounded are still lying all around him, but the relatives who brought them here are gone; he can see them running away, a large, frightened, bellowing crowd, constantly changing direction: mothers holding their children’s hands, old men who can barely walk, boys stopping every moment in defensive positions and then yielding again to the collective terror that has overtaken the mob.

  British and Danish soldiers arrive from various points and take up threatening positions, ready to fire their rifles. He must have been hearing warning shots. The sight of the combat-ready soldiers cropping up all over the place causes the stampeding crowd to keep changing direction.

  The sun has come up. The sky is blood red, and the air around him seems to intensify, while the darkness wanes and the brightness of the floodlights fades. At first he believes it’s the dust kicked up by the fleeing crowd. Then a strong wind hits him in the face, and he feels sand in his eyes. Sand whirls high into the air, as if a hidden centrifuge somewhere in the gravel has been turned on. Lifting his gaze, he sees a cloudy wall rising toward the sky beyond the camp’s bastion of HESCO bales.

  A sandstorm is coming.

  14

  The wounded can’t just lie there in the middle of a sandstorm while the sand blows in over them. Grains of sand will get under their clothes. It would be fatal if all these severely injured civilians—who haven’t been treated or bandaged yet—get dirt in their open wounds. Simon knows that from his training. It’s not so bad having your organs hanging out of your abdominal cavity, but it’s fucking bad if dirt gets into the wound. This isn’t just a sandstorm. It’s an infection storm.

  “Tarps!” he yells. “We need tarps!” He’s not the only one who’s had that thought. Others, who, like him, have risen shakily, are yelling the same thing. The door to the clinic, where personnel have barricaded themselves during the tumult, opens. They’re running out of the clinic now to get a quick report on the situation. More shots are fired, and Simon hopes that it’s only warning shots. Because the clinic is already full, they drag the wounded over to the waiting area; at least there’s a canopy and a wall, making it easier to screen off the area with the tarps.

  Several of the medics still lying motionless on the ground are carried into the clinic. They’ll get first priority. A Danish nurse who recognizes Simon wants him to come into the clinic when she sees his bruised and scratched-up face, but he refuses. This is more important. They need everyone right now. Soldiers arrive to help while officers bark confusing orders. Only minutes remain before the sandstorm rolls in.

  The wind gusts are so strong that he has to spit sand out of his mouth. Once it s
tarts, the sand gets into everything. You can wash sand out of your hair for days—there’s even sand under your foreskin. You can practically hear the grains grinding against each other when you take a shit, as if you have a cement mixer up your ass.

  A group of soldiers runs in with tarps that flap loudly in the wild wind as they raise them in a semicircle around the clinic’s wall. The soldiers then hammer pegs into the wall and the ground below. That’s where Simon ends up. Along with two other soldiers in the crowded clinic, he grabs blankets and mattresses to close any gaps between the tarp and the ground. The tarp flaps violently in the wind, and he hopes it holds. The storm rages outside, as if the whole camp is about to be torn to pieces. Soldiers help carry patients into the improvised shelter, and then they pull back. Simon realizes that he’s the only one with ten severely wounded people, among them old men, women, and children. The other medics must have sought refuge behind the clinic’s closed doors. He dare not leave the shelter of the tarp to call for help. He starts to crawl among the wounded with his medical kit to see if there’s anything he can do.

  Someone grabs his hand and he knows what it means: someone understands that he’s there to help. It’s an old man with a dark, sunken face and a henna-colored beard. His hollow eyes seek Simon’s. Then the old man squeezes his hand again, and he notices how tough and spotted the hand is, hard as wood and yet warm. Simon carefully squeezes back. They share a sudden solidarity created by the raging storm outside.

  The man’s kirtle is covered in coagulated blood with a thin layer of dust on top. Simon wants to snip open the robe and examine the wound. But the old man, guessing his intent, makes a defensive motion with his free hand. Then he closes his eyes, and Simon can feel the man’s hand go limp. He realizes immediately that the man has died. An entire human life, like a soap bubble, has burst in his hand. Gone. Done. He barely has time to register it. And so the contact between them that had just begun dissolves again. They could have gotten to know each other, not despite the barriers between them, but because the clasp of the old man’s hand told him there were no barriers.

  The storm continues raging against the tarp. He crawls around, checking the pegs holding it in place while he adjusts the blankets to stop dust from getting in through the gaps that appear every time the stretched canvas flaps in the wild wind.

  Five of the patients are women. There are three old men, including the one who just died, and two children. Most are unconscious. The silence is the same as before, but now he’s relieved by it. Anyway, he couldn’t understand what they would say or answer them. If they all succumbed to their pain, and their screams merged with the sandstorm’s wild thunder, he’d fall apart. This way he can work in peace. He surrenders totally to the little routine he has learned and feels the calming influence the medical descriptions have on him, a litany of Latin terms that helps him focus and keep his hands steady.

  It’s half dark beneath the tarp, so he lights his headlamp. He realizes, though, that the light will blind the patients when he bends over them. They won’t be able to see his face; still, he needs to see clearly when examining their wounds. He turns his headlamp on and off according to where he’s looking. He wants them to know that a person is bending over them.

  Some of the patients are already bandaged; others never made it that far, and Simon does what he can. Those who are awake follow him with their eyes. He has no idea what they’re thinking, and he’d rather not speculate about it. He is merely his hands and his flimsy medical expertise. Nothing more. He recognizes one of the children, a girl with a broken foot. A tourniquet has been wrapped around her ankle to stop the bleeding, but her foot will probably have to be amputated. She’ll drag herself around on crutches for the rest of her life. Or will she get an artificial foot she can learn to walk around on?

  He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how long the sandstorm will last, either, or how long he’ll be alone with these patients under this tarp. But he knows one thing: after a tourniquet has sat for a couple of hours, there will be unbearable pain. He has heard stories about patients struggling to tear off their tourniquet, even though they know that without it they’ll bleed out. They’re driven to the point where they prefer death to the pain. And what if that happens to the girl? How much morphine can a child tolerate? Has she already had an injection? He wasn’t treating her, so he has no idea.

  She opens her eyes and stares up at him. She’s about six years old and her eyes are green. Her face conveys no sign of fear, possibly because of morphine. He takes her hand and squeezes it gently. She does the same, fixing her gaze on him as if to reply. He strokes her gently on one cheek, his touch causing a faint smile. Then her gaze becomes unfocused, and once more she slips away.

  He crawls over to the next patient. It’s a woman, wrapped in the remains of a tattered, bloodstained burka that also hides her face. Her chest rises and falls, a sign that she’s still living. Simon knows this one is critical, but he will break all Afghan taboos if he starts to examine her. She will lose her honor—possibly even be expelled—if a foreign man sees her body or touches it. Still, he can’t just let her fucking lie there and die.

  He looks around. Is anyone watching?

  It doesn’t look like it. He pulls up the burka, which is stiff with coagulated blood. She has a long dress on beneath it. He can see from the lines in her face and the skin on her neck that she’s in her mid-thirties or around forty. Her age is difficult to determine, but she’s married and probably already had half a dozen children. He’s not sure that lessens the disgrace any.

  It’s crazy, he thinks, that I have to sit here with a guilty conscience because I’m trying to save her life.

  Although she doesn’t look especially heavy, scrawny as she is, to just pull the loose-fitting, floor-length dress off her body strikes him as insulting. He chooses instead to cut it open. She’s not wearing any underwear. Her exposed body lies before him, two empty breasts falling to the sides on a bony rib cage. Up to the right, close to her shoulder, he discovers an entrance wound, the source of the bleeding. The bleeding has stopped. He turns her over carefully to find a fist-size exit wound on her back. It makes him feel sick and powerless. He doesn’t want to think about the damage the bullet caused on its way through the body. How does he know it wasn’t one of the Danes’ bullets—that he’s not the one who fired it? He places a compress on the wound and dresses it. Then he administers some morphine. Hopefully she won’t come to until she’s at the field hospital in Camp Bastion, where they’ll have the sense to tell her relatives that she was treated only by women doctors and nurses.

  Having examined all of them, he sits for a moment listening to the storm. Is it weakening? Must be wishful thinking.

  And then he does another round.

  15

  Several days later, Afghans are still turning up. Although the soldiers think they know every nook and cranny of the camp, there are unexpected hiding places everywhere: gaps between the bastion’s HESCO bales, a space beneath a container or under the floor of a tent. It’s a large camp, only partly occupied by troops’ tents or containers housing offices and residences for private security people. A large, empty area borders the bastion’s walls. They are relatives of the wounded who, in a panic, fled during the sandstorm.

  The unfortunate combination of tumult and an unexpected sandstorm hasn’t made anything easier. While fleeing, some of them turned on the soldiers, whom they perceived as pursuers. The soldiers felt forced to defend themselves, resulting in one death and several wounded.

  As the storm abates, they find Afghans hiding all over the camp, including the covered walkways connecting the tents. Like grains of sand, they’ve penetrated the entire area, even the large, high-ceilinged mess tent. They don’t touch anything—they just huddle together in corners or under tables. Once found, they surrender. The soldiers approach them with rifles raised. They have no idea what to expect, but no one resists. With bowed heads, they allow the soldiers to herd them together.

&
nbsp; A British officer in the mess tent—this time it’s a colonel—conveys the same message they got before all hell broke loose.

  Their relatives will be getting all the help they need. There just isn’t enough room or sufficient medical facilities in Camp Price. Everyone wishes them only the best, and their relatives are now at the field hospital in Camp Bastion, the large military camp where they can handle everything. Several of them are already recuperating and will be sent home soon. Transportation will be provided for those who need it.

  “We’re asking you to trust us.” The interpreter concludes his translation of the British colonel’s speech. “We have only the best intentions. We have done everything humanly possible to save your relatives. We bring peace. We wish you no harm. We’re here to help.”

  They are given a meal before being sent home. Chicken in curry sauce with rice. They eat heartily.

  Yet they keep appearing, worn out and desperate, a hunted expression in their eyes. It was dark when they were let into camp. The trucks’ cabs and flatbeds were packed with people, both the wounded and their families. Although they were counted, those numbers can’t possibly be correct. Most importantly, the guards had to see to it that no men of a weapon-bearing age were let in.

  When the soldiers find them, either because they give up or during yet another inspection, they’re told that no one wants to harm them and that all the others are home now. They sit silently, staring down. The soldiers ask if they know of any others hiding anywhere—and if they do, could they please tell them.

  “We are your friends,” the soldiers say.

  They answer with the same blank stare.

  Afterward, they’re put in the back of a military truck and, under escort, driven down to the Green Zone, where they are allowed to leave. They vanish without turning around. No one waves. No one says goodbye. No one says thank you. They just stare down at the ground.