‘You gonna be okay, sir?’ asked the corpsman.

Melton nodded. ‘I’ll be fine, Tony. You get back to looking after your patients. Just give me some directions.’

Deftereos pointed at the main tent flap as a puff of wind caught it. Melton could see a throng of uniformed personnel hurrying in both directions outside. ‘You head out, turn left, and move through three intersections, then it’s on your left again. About a hundred and fifty yards. You won’t miss it.’

Melton thanked him and began the slow shuffle out of the tent. It remained quiet in there, with most of the wounded men sleeping in their cots. A few orderlies and corpsmen moved about checking on them. Some were in scrubs, others in their desert fatigues, a mix of various services, something that wouldn’t normally happen in an army combat support hospital. But regardless of their branch, not one spared him as much as a glance. He was walking and mostly in one piece. He just wasn’t a priority.

He felt adrift, disconnected from the world. He understood Shetty’s feelings about not wanting to let go of the familiar. Melton had never been part of a unit that’d been shattered before, but it sounded like that’s what had happened to Euler’s platoon. He’d embedded with them, nearly died with them, been right there in amongst them as they fought their way through southern Iraq. It had been such a bullshit mission in one way, rushing forward to engage the Iraqis who’d attacked them, just to give themselves enough elbow room to get the hell out of Iraq when the war was all but called off by events – or just the event - back home.

The hospital tent opened up onto a thoroughfare, a wide street of sand in yet another huge military camp, laid out as always in a grid pattern. Soldiers and Marines moved about in groups of two or more, all in full battle rattle, many with a bad case of the thousand-yard stare. Melton blinked at the raw power of the sun after the relative gloom of the tent’s interior. The field hospital enjoyed the benefit of a slight rise in an otherwise flat landscape, affording a view of the frame tents, generators and vehicles. The combat support hospital was attached to a number of other units in the area, near as he could tell. A five-ton truck rolled past him, filled with body bags, the bumper number clearly defined. HHC 703rd MSB.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered, watching the REMF vehicle roll down towards a container. ‘I’ve died and gone to the rear.’

The truck stopped in front of the container, where a detail of soldiers waited. With great care, two soldiers at a time would remove a single body bag from the truck and carry it into the container. Melton could see a refrigeration unit attached to the side. A couple of soldiers from 3rd ID glanced at the body, then looked away. Melton overheard them talking as they passed.

‘Those poor dumb bastards really got zapped,’ one specialist said.

‘Glad I wasn’t there,’ the other, a private first class, replied. ‘Stupid fucking mission anyway.’

‘Amen to that,’ Melton said under his breath.

He gazed over a vista of thousands of tents and makeshift arrangements of prefab huts, motorised trailers, converted shipping containers, vehicle parks, supply depots and chopper pads. A cluster of antennas sprouted next to a tight knot of command vehicles and shelters. The camp had to cover a couple of klicks of real estate, thought Melton. He cautiously craned his head skywards, and was able to pick out the twinkling points and occasional contrails of at least a dozen jets flying Combat Air Patrol.

‘Division main will want that on the double,’ someone said to an underling. The underling nodded to the soldier, who was standing in the back of a communications shelter. Melton read the bumper number without thinking: 223 Sig BN.

‘Guess that commo puke didn’t have to worry about shooting himself in the foot after all,’ he thought aloud. ‘I must be at 3rd ID’s main camp.’ Now where that was exactly, he had no idea.

The ground was rockier, harder, than he remembered from that last big post. It made walking a little more treacherous for someone with his injuries, but it also meant that there was marginally less grit and sand in the air. From the lowering position of the sun, he estimated the time as being quite late in the day, maybe 1600 hours or more. His watch was missing. There was only room enough for foot traffic in this part of the base, and it was heavily congested. Everyone was fully armed, as though expecting the enemy to appear around the corner at any moment, but people made way for him as he shuffled off in the direction of the mess tent.

It was slow going. His whole body was stiff and every movement seemed to threaten new rips and tears in those parts of him that had already been sundered apart and put back together. Melton desperately wanted to know what had happened while he’d been out of it. What had become of ‘his’ platoon? Who’d lived and who’d died? And what had gone down in the wider world? The little he’d picked up from Shetty and Deftereos wasn’t reassuring. He had the impression of a world that had already tipped over the brink and was now falling towards destruction.

It took him a while and a good deal of discomfort to cover the short distance to the mess and he felt worn out when he’d done it, but satisfied too, as if he’d proved to himself that he wasn’t a total cot case. Pushing in through the flyscreen doors, he found about half of the tables occupied by service men and women whose working routines obviously had them out of synch with the bulk of the camp. He recognised Marines and army personnel, and some foreign uniforms, possibly Australian special forces. There was even a table of USN sailors looking very much out of place. The hum of the room was subdued, with many of the diners watching a television that hung from a pole near one end of the space. Nobody appeared to be enjoying the show – some sort of news broadcast.

Melton was desperate for information, but also weak with hunger. His appetite had come roaring up as he’d shuffled towards the mess and its familiar smell of fried meat, grease and instant coffee. He was salivating heavily now, and his stomach actually seemed to twist itself into a knot in an effort to move him towards a fold-out table where a female on KP duty smiled at him.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ the specialist asked. Melton couldn’t read her name-tag. It was covered by her body armour. ‘We got some burgers and fries that are sorta fresh. And you look like you need feeding up.’

He shook his head but smiled. ‘You got any soup?’

She turned towards the giant metal pots sitting on a big field oven behind her. ‘Got some beef stew in one of them, sir. I could add a bit of water if you like. That’d almost be like soup, wouldn’t it? Just chunkier.’

‘Chunky is good,’ said Melton.

The Army specialist even helped him over to a table where he could watch the TV, which surprised him. No one was ever cheerful to be put on KP duty.

A minute or two later he was sitting on a poncho liner she’d loaned him, trying to ignore the sharp pain from his butt sutures while dunking a bread roll into the thick dark stew of chuck steak and vegetables. His Ranger buddies would have given him a ration of shit for accepting the snivel gear, but his ass hurt, and as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t a Ranger anymore.