House clearance is never an easy task, Best Beloved. I mean clearing houses of their armed occupants by force, going door-to-door, window-to-window, street-to-street. It’s the most dangerous, draining, bloody business, and you’ll find few soldiers who like it. Even fewer commanders, and no politicians: because if there’s one thing guaranteed to ratchet up the casualty rate, it’s urban warfare. All the fancy tactics and manoeuvres go out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun, O Best Beloved. You’re left with nothing more than a slugging match.
You never know where the next shot or blast will come from. That’s part of the problem- bullets go through walls, which is very inconsiderate of them, and makes taking cover extremely difficult, especially if someone you can’t see opens up from the other side of the wall you’re hiding behind. You can be hit from above, below, all sides, at any time, and again at any other time. And again. Floor after floor; house after house.
If you decide to reduce the problem by reducing the houses to rubble, you’re only giving the enemy more places to hide. Look at Fallujah. Look at Sarejevo. Look at Beirut. Look at Monte Cassino. Look at Stalingrad. Look anywhere you care to look that has had its guts smashed out and fought over and died for.
Most armies take the business of training for this sort of thing extremely seriously, and only actually engage in it if there really is no other choice (apart from not fighting, but let’s not get into fantasy). NATO and others have discovered, repeatedly, that in most firefights only two percent of the combatants actually fire their weapons with the conscious intent of killing the enemy. Only two percent, out of all those engaged, after all that expenditure of money, time and sweat. Only two percent: hardly anyone there really means it. Imagine the waste in bullets alone! How inefficient, Best Beloved! Since these studies were done, a great deal of effort has been spent on increasing that percentage. The High Command, like all managers, wish to reduce inefficiency. They want to encourage the remaining ninety-eight percent to think and act like the special ones.
Of that two percent, about half have what you might call hero quality. One percent of the total of those engaged. These are the men with a grasp of the bigger picture, an innate sense of leadership, regardless of what it might say on their shoulder flashes, and a desire to protect their comrades. Above all, a coolness, a detachment, no matter the chaos. If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs, and then kill them. Or at least, kill the right ones. This is what heroes are made from. And this percentage is so small that it is almost certainly a matter of predisposition.
This might be difficult for civilians to accept, when they’ve finished killing Bin Laden with their mouths. After all, are not all “our boys” heroes? At the very least, are they not simply ordinary men called upon to perform extraordinarily, in the most horrific of circumstances? This is what it is supposed to be like: a kid from humble origins joins up because of nowhere else to go, and finds it in himself to be a hero- yet is forever wounded by the terrible things he witnesses, himself a victim of the horrors of a war fought to sate the greed and incompetence of others. War is Hell. It is not supposed to be a matter of statistics or genetic tendency. But the High Command know differently: they want us all to be like the special two percent.
Detachment, alertness, automatic killing. The training is designed to create this predisposition in hitherto ordinary people.
Now, how the Tiger got his stripes, Best Beloved. We have been in action for over five hours, and my entire section has just been deafened by the detonation of a Javelin shoulder-mounted missile in an alley. Javelins are anti-tank weapons, but also very good at destroying bunkers and houses. And good at kicking up a tremendous volume of dust from the dry khaki stones of the alley walls, and the powdered shit of the alley floor. Our lungs are caked with this dust, and the deafening has reduced us to the use of hand signals. We would be using these in any case, as the thing one immediately notices about any engagement is the intense noise. People shout, but they could be shouting the latest stock prices for all we can tell.
We huddle in what was once a dining room, the splintered table lying in two halves on either side of the vacant doorway. The shell casings of the Minimi light machinegun being fired through the doorway by my lance corporal are pinging off the walls and floor of the room with the timbre of tiny prayer bells; I must imagine this sound, because as I said I can barely hear a thing. The Minimi sprays the door and partition wall of the room opposite, and the jagged, black-edged holes burst out of the dusty plaster. The door handle disappears beneath the spray, and I rush forwards to smash the door open with my rifle butt. As I do this, another man springs across and hurls a grenade into the room beyond the door. We crouch, there is a dull thud, and then I run at the door, kick it wide open and fire a long burst into the room.
The collateral damage is lying in two heaps on the floor of what turns out to have been the kitchen. The shredded civilian clothing on one heap suggests that once this was a woman. Another woman, more intact, is lying close to the sink, a huge pool of dark blood already racing outwards towards the skirting board. Her eyes are half-closed, and a fine, pink mist pops up from her lips. Then she turns her head to face a cupboard and stops breathing. There is no sign of any weapons. We pause for an unforgiving minute.
In my mouth is acrid, chemical smoke, sweat and mud. Also the tin of adrenalin, and now the tang of blood. I feel alive.
A loud, low moan is almost masked by a wooden clatter from the next room, connecting with the kitchen via double swing-doors. Then there is the clicking sound of someone trying to free a jammed breach mechanism. I smile to myself. Crouching, I edge to the doors, unclip a phosphorous grenade, and after a decent interval lob it between the doors. I double back and watch the intense white light burst through upon us.
A man rushes through the doors, enfolded in fire from hair to ankles, screaming like an animal. I shoot him and he falls, setting fire to the very same MDF cupboard the dead woman is watching. We wait for a second or two. Then we fire a few rounds through the swing doors, their white gloss paint chipped and peeling.
I get up and move in a crouch through the doors. There is no one else there, and the curtains and carpet are very much on fire. I motion to my section, through the half open swing doors that are now blown partly from their hinges, that the room is secure. Then I notice that an outside door is open, an oblong of white sunlight blending with the phosphorous inferno.
Back in the hall, four men are charging up the stairs while another pair cover them by shooting up through the floor of the landing above them. I imagine I can hear this. I move cautiously towards the open door. My caution is largely due to the presence of our own support section in the street outside, their belt-fed machine guns trained on the front of the house.
Kneeling, I peer through the doorway, to find I am shielded from the street by a brick outhouse. A flight of dull concrete stairs runs down from the doorway, away from the street. Dark red stains mingle with the dust upon each stair. At the foot of the stairs, lying on his back, is a man.
He is middle-aged, thickset, with an impressive black moustache and short black hair. Almost a crew cut, but not quite. He is wearing a greyish-blue T-shirt, and faded blue jeans, and new-looking Reebok trainers with inflatable uppers. He has a belt partly made up of a fake silver bandolier, and a small tattoo on his right upper arm. The tattoo says “MUFC- Red Devils”. The front of the man’s jeans are burnt away, and the front of his legs are a mixture of black and red, and smoke is rising from them. His groin is burnt black. In the middle of his belly is a round hole, from which blood is oozing. Alongside him is an empty RPG launcher.
I walk down towards him, and level my rifle. I look along it into his eyes, which are a dull hazel. He flicks them closed, and then open, and then stares levelly at me. I stab him with my bayonet, deep into his stomach. Then again, then again. Then again. Then my bayonet catches in the ground beneath him. I heave at it, and kick him hard. The bayonet snaps in two. I reverse my rifle, and bring the butt down on his face. I feel- what should I feel? Ashamed? Terrified? Sorrowful? I feel nothing but satisfaction.
I am sure that for the overwhelming majority of soldiers, the experience of combat is a deeply scarring one, from which they never truly recover. For them, war really is Hell. They return to their families changed forever, dehumanised what they have seen, felt and done. Better men than me?
When I was not much more than a boy, I was out walking near my home when I encountered a large toad sitting on the path. It moved away slowly, and I noticed a wound on its back, where perhaps a crow had pecked it. Its innards were protruding, and it would not have been long before it met an agonizing death from infection. I raised my boot above its head and stamped down hard. It died instantly, and I felt nothing beneath my heel, no resistance at all. When I related the story to my family, I dwelt upon my desire to end the toad’s suffering, to put it out of its misery. This was a mercy killing, I said. It was nothing of the sort. I killed it because I wanted to, because I wanted to be there at its death, to see it die. Because I enjoyed it.
I mentioned the two percent. It is, they say, a terrible thing to kill another human, and humans instinctively avoid it. Or rather, most do. Some don’t. There is the one percent of the total, who are heroes, who defend their fellows, and their cause. Then there is the other one percent, the other half of the deliberate killers. The half to which I belong. We are not heroes, but psychopaths. We kill because we enjoy it.
Detachment, alertness, automatic killing. I am predisposed.
I watch the brains of this nameless man drop from my rifle butt. It is not supposed to be this way, is it? War is Hell, and we must never forget, and all soldiers are heroes. But really, very few are. Most are just regular people, trying to get over their fear. And then, there are the people like me. I have always enjoyed killing, and pain, and mayhem. This is my element. People like me are not supposed to be out there defending the freedoms of people like you. We are not supposed to be given guns and carte blanche to use them. But sometimes we are, O Best Beloved. Oh, yes: sometimes we are.
© Chris Fyles, 2008
Two Percent was read by Max Berendt at the Liars’ League War & Peace event on Tuesday November 11, 2008.
Chris Fyles has now had two stories accepted by the League, and he's getting cocky. Moreover, he's got stuff coming out in Scotland, has just made a film, and is particularly proud that his elegy to his cat is being included in an anthology. It's what Tigger would have wanted.
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