“Here, over here… there’re PBs over here!”
After quickly searching the small hut, which was empty, we approached the main one where half the platoon was now gathered. Five black civilians were in the hut. One, in a clean white shirt, was lying on his back, rolling back and forth in pain. His comrades, once they saw they weren’t going to be shot, started gabbling frantically to one another and to our black tracker who was listening to them with a frown on his forehead. They were all talking at once with wide eyes and frantic arm gestures. After a minute they began to slow down a bit.
“Why did they run away?” Doep almost shouted at the tracker who in turn shouted at the four who were now quiet. They gabbled back, all talking at once again with wild hand gestures, pointing at the kraal and their injured comrade writhing on the floor in front of us.
“They say that they had been drinking beer and were on their way back home to this kraal when they saw us coming and, not knowing who we were, they were scared and ran away.”
“Are they SWAPO?” Doep snapped, glaring at them.
“No, they say that they are not SWAPO and that they live at this kraal and these two live in a kraal not far from here.”
I bent down to look at the old man lying rocking on the floor, his face screwed up in pain. His tan-coloured pants were saturated in blood from the knee down. I signalled to him to ascertain where he was hurt. He pointed to his knee and then to his grey head, at a tuft of hair scuffed up where a bullet had grazed him, making a small open furrow in his scalp. Then he pointed to his hip. I pulled his shirt aside and also found a nick in the soft flesh just below his hip bone that was hardly bleeding, fortunately only a few millimetres deep.
“Shit, this old guy is fucking lucky,” someone commented behind me.
I pulled up his baggy trouser leg as he grimaced and wailed in agony. “Give me the scissors,” I said to Kurt, the platoon medic, kneeling next to me. I cut the trouser leg off above the knee to reveal a horrible wound. A bullet had gone right through the middle of his shinbone ten centimetres or so below the knee, shattering the bone completely. The bottom half of his shin had shifted and lay at a grotesque 45-degree angle to the top half. It seemed to be attached only by a few bits of skin, with a huge black bullet hole in the centre. It did not appear that an artery had been hit because the bleeding had slowed and the blood oozed only slowly from the jagged wound.
He groaned in pain as I laid my hand on it. “Where’s that Sosagon?” I had quickly taken control of the situation. Not because I knew what I was doing but because no one else seemed to want to do anything. Kurt was standing by and seemed happy to let me do what I could to help the old man, whose face was contorted in pain. Kurt emptied the contents of his medical bag on the floor and handed me the syringe of Sosagon. I quickly popped the seal off and lifted the old man’s arm, looking for a vein, while Kurt began to set up a glucose drip. Even though I knew that Sosagon was supposed to be given intra-muscularly, I decided that the situation called for drastic measures, so I was going to slam this old boy into the clouds above because he was going to need it when I tried to move that leg back into place. I found a vein on his skinny arm and slowly drew some blood back into the syringe, mixing it with the liquid painkiller, then shot the full dose into his vein.
“Give me the other one!” I said motioning to the second Sosagon syringe that lay in the medical heap. Kurt looked at me with a strange look but said nothing and handed it to me. I was working quickly as if I knew what I was doing while everyone stood silently around, observing. I took the second syringe and plunged it into a vein in his other arm, mixed blood and pushed the plunger all the way down. I didn’t know too much about what I was doing but what I did know for sure was that a shot of Sosagon intravenously into ‘Papa Joe’, the main vein in the arm, knocked you instantly into another world. I also knew that a person could handle two shots, because I had once watched a red-headed, freckle-faced senior on our last bush trip in Ondangwa slam two full syringes of Sosagon one starry night. He’d sat rocking on the sand walls of our Fireforce base, staring up at the night sky until he fell asleep and we had to carry him to his tent. He seemed fine the next day at parade.
Instantly the old man was as high as a kite and even broke into a slow smile. He began pointing this way and that in some explanation that I took to be saying that he lived somewhere else. His speech became slurred and I could see in his eyes that the old boy was heavily stoned as his lids hung halfway over his eyeballs. That was what I had wanted.
I lifted the bottom half of his shin that flopped loosely as I moved it. I picked it up with two hands as gently as I could and shifted it so that it was aligned with the top half. I could clearly see the bottom half of the bone, red with congealed blood. I could feel the two ends of broken bone grind against each other as I pushed them together. I had to repeat the process a couple of times until it all seemed to fit into place, bringing with it a small flood of fresh blood. The old still grimaced and moaned in pain, his eyes tightly shut, but he was able to handle it. I cleaned the sticky blood from around the wound and poured some antiseptic liquid which Kurt handed me into the wound.
“Get sticks for splints!” I called. It it seemed a logical thing to do. Even a boy scout should know this. Make a splint.
Some of the guys quickly returned and handed me an assortment of sticks that I broke up into what I thought to be suitable splints. I placed two field dressings on either side of the wound and then bandaged them tightly into place with a long bandage. Then I put some two-foot sticks on the outside to hold the flopping bone in place and wrapped them tightly too, making a firm splint. The old man, tripping on the morphine proxy, gripped my wrist tightly and babbled on again, looking deeply into my eyes with what seemed like heartfelt gratitude. Even with no medical training, I knew he would probably die if he did not get proper medical attention and even then he would probably lose the leg. I had actually done nothing but put his leg in place and bandage it tightly. I irrationally wondered for a moment whether it had been my bullet.
Lieutenant Doep had just got off the radio, cancelling the gunships and reporting that we had shot a PB. I stood up and looked at him. He nodded at me. We stared at each other.
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked, still in charge as the acting medic.
Doep looked at me blankly. “We should take him with us. It’s probably only 40 clicks to the South West African border,” he said, knowing it would be impossible to carry the old guy 40 clicks.
“We should get a chopper to carry him back to Oshakati to the hospital. We shot the poor bastard. We can’t just leave him here,” I insisted.
I quickly learned the reality of war when Lieutenant Doep looked at the old man silently, then at me, and then away from my gaze.
After a minute, I said again, “What are we going to do, lieutenant?”
“Leave him here. We can’t take him with us… we’re in Angola. Come on, let’s move out!”
He did not even mention the ridiculous idea of having a chopper come all the way, over 40 clicks, to pick up the poor old bastard after we had shot him by mistake. I shook my head and made a disgusted sound and looked down at the old boy who was now happily smiling, still looking up at me.
Kurt had hooked him up on a drip and was showing his friends that they should keep it held high and remove it when it was finished. I left a heap of bandages and ointments and another Sosagon from the other medical bag and told them to give it to him again in his thigh when it started hurting again. I also left a pile of glucose sweets and sour sweets from my rat pack.