Absolute discomfort

When we’re not sick, we for­get the aches, the drowsi­ness, the strug­gle to have con­trol over our faculties.

I think I am talk­ing about what it will be like in the next week dur­ing in-camp.

No mat­ter how much I pre­pare myself men­tally for the train­ing, it never seems ade­quate for the grad­ual shock of being knee deep in mud, baked in the sun under the kevlar hel­met that now col­lects evap­o­rated sweat on its under­side, buzzed by a hun­dred mos­qui­toes and stung by ants just as stunned to find your limb isn’t a plant. You can talk about it to death. But the shock comes from hav­ing to stay that way, assaulted by the heat, the itch and the damp­ness for hour after debil­i­tat­ing hour.

Then comes night. Your eyes strug­gle to adjust. Every­thing is a blur and fum­ble. They give you night vision devices which only shows every­thing up as green in colour, and gives you motion sick­ness. The mos­qui­toes seem to mul­ti­ply expo­nen­tially. The vol­ume of their buzzing increases sev­eral hun­dred deci­bels it seems. The ground is damp when you sit on it, and you are still sweat­ing. Worse, your uni­form begins to stink as bac­te­ria grows on the fab­ric. Three more nights to go.

Every sin­gle square inch of your body is irri­tated. You grad­u­ally become aware of the immense acreage of your skin. A few red­dish welts appear on of all places, your knuck­les. The god­damned mos­qui­toes really know where to sting where it irri­tates most. Knuck­les, between fin­gers, ears, mid­dle of your back. You’d put more repel­lent on if not for the fact it keeps get­ting washed off by your own sweat and the chaf­ing that is already turn­ing your skin red-raw.

You tell your­self you’d love nature if only nature loved you more.

Your nose, if you were for­tu­nate enough not to have a cold or flu, is assaulted by the plethora of dif­fer­ent smells. First up, your stink­ing uni­form. That unmis­tak­able sour­ish smell. Then, repel­lent. Then, the mud. Then, the sour­ish smell of the sol­dier next to you. You try to block every­thing out, but you can’t, and you can’t sleep because of that. They tell you to sleep, because there’s a mis­sion in two hours, and you’re des­per­ate to sleep, but can’t…

A few loud buzzes by mos­qui­toes look­ing for the next best place to sting after scor­ing all your knuck­les, two ears, eye­lids and lips, and you’re just putting down your arm from wav­ing inef­fec­tively at them when a whis­per goes up “wake up wake up, get ready”. There’s a few muf­fled grunts in reply, and some sol­diers in your sec­tion fall back to sleep, but their mates rus­tle them up again. You stand up and pick up your weapons and gear as qui­etly as pos­si­ble, but nev­er­the­less clang­ing every pos­si­ble thing against every pos­si­ble hard sur­face, prompt­ing another whis­per from the dark “shhhh. quiet”.

You lis­ten half asleep to instruc­tions and then excuse your­self to stum­ble sev­eral meters from the group to take a leak. You will your urine to pass quickly, so as to min­i­mize the chances of any insect invad­ing the insides of your pants. You stare at the dark to make sure you have been piss­ing down­hill too. And of course, you excuse your­self just before pass­ing urine, to make sure any slum­ber­ing spirit has vacated the area just in front of you.

The next few hours you trudge quickly with your tac­ti­cal team, hop­ing the guy lead­ing knows where he’s going. Your back aches to high heaven, your smell has turned a dif­fer­ent kind of sour, you are hun­gry and the welts on your body are swelling as your pores open up again.

You walk for what seems like many hours. You see the dim blue light of dawn. That pause in the weather just before the sun rises. It may rain or it may shine. Either way, there is a strange morn­ing breeze. You feel refreshed. It takes a bit of the sour smell off. The men in front of you sud­denly make fran­tic hand sig­nals. A thumbs down sig­nal fol­lowed by a flurry of hand sig­nals. Enemy in front. 100 metres. Entrenched. GPMG. Sec­tion two left, sec­tion three right, sec­tion one stay with me. You are awake now.

There is a fizzing sound and a sud­den smell of burn­ing cord. You are more awake now, because in 4 sec­onds a flash bang grenade (thun­der­flash) explodes at your feet. You and your mates are pushed instinc­tively into action. Thumbs flick switch from safety to semi on the rifles and you raise your weapons, point and shoot three round bursts at where you think the enemy is, because you haven’t seen them yet. Some­one sees them and yells direc­tions. The bat­tle starts and ends about ten min­utes later. You are exhausted, thirsty, but very awake. You smell burnt gun­pow­der all over, and it’s still com­ing from your weapon. It is a com­fort­ing smell. If it’s rain­ing, you like the warmth of your rifle. If it’s dry, you like the smell.

You get a bit of a rest over the ‘ene­mies dead bod­ies’ while the sup­port team comes and patches the injured up, counts the dead and replen­ishes water. You check your­self and dis­cover you’ve torn a trouser leg and your knee is bleed­ing and your knuck­les are cut up. You pour a bit of water over your wounds and joke about it to the guy next to you who seems to be in worse shape, so you shut up. You are asked to ‘stand down’ after half an hour, and you finally take off your hel­met, drink a whole bot­tle of water and fum­ble through your back­pack look­ing for some­thing to eat. The sup­ply train comes and dis­trib­utes more ammu­ni­tion and food and the next hour is spent reload­ing bul­lets into mag­a­zines and wait­ing for fur­ther orders. By now, the sun is up and angrily dry­ing up your sweat, mat­ting your hair and hard­en­ing your uni­form. If it’s rain­ing, the drops pelt your skin through your uni­form and you feel as if your under­wear has shrunk two sizes.

And you have to do it all over again for the next three days.