The Wall(21)

I don’t think I ever saw our company in a better mood than during those seven days training. It really was like a holiday, or a holiday camp, because there was a structure, the unforgiving structure of shifts, but also the change of location, the extra freedom of having Help, and, crucially, new faces. The Defenders who’d been there longer than I had knew their opposite numbers, their shift twins, but I only really knew Hughes. The rest of the other shift I’d met solely on those drunk, civilian-frightening train journeys at the end of our deployments. It was entertaining to see how closely they paralleled us, with a new one (like me), a funny one, a grumpy one, one who needed to be told everything three times. They even had one whose hobby was whittling, just like Yos.

I was nervous when I started my first turn on the training section of Wall, or fake-Wall. To mix things up we would do three days of nights and three of days with a complicated mixed swing-shift in the middle. Our section started on nights, which was both good and bad, since it meant we were getting the hardest part over straight away, but on the other hand was more of a jolt, given that we’d just had a week off. The fact that we were on a not quite real version of the Wall felt strange: I was nervous, while also knowing that deep down there wasn’t much reason to be nervous, not really, since this wasn’t like really being a Defender and so if I failed to do my job I wasn’t going to, you know, die. Also the scenery here was much more interesting, basically because there was some, as opposed to none at all except concreteskywaterwind. Here there was also river, a section of Wall curling round a far bend of river, even trees! Just visible on a clear day beyond the far section of Wall was a low range of green hills. By moonlight on that first night the landscape looked like an exotic work of composition, something a person had put together to show what you could do with blacks and whites and whatever those other moonlit colours are, not greys, but not normal colours and not black/whites either. Dawn is when you can tell a white thread from a black thread, it says in the Quran. But there are still shadow-colour differences before dawn, when there’s moonlight. Also, it wasn’t as cold as our section of Wall. I don’t know if we were lucky with the weather or if it was something to do with there being less wind in this direction, or some other trick of microclimate. For whatever reason, it was several degrees milder. Add it all together and it was much less hard. Which made it tempting not to be as vigilant as we were supposed to be.

‘This is the life,’ someone said over the communicator, that first night. I laughed, then after I had, wondered why it was funny. Eventually I realised: because the idea that standing for twelve hours in the dark and bitter cold with an automatic weapon, waiting for someone to attack you, with certain death the price of failure, marks you in such a way that standing for twelve hours in the dark and slightly less cold waiting for someone to pretend to attack you, by comparison, feels like fun.

The first attack came that night, at four in the morning. It was good tactics on the part of the other squad – a bright moonlit night like this would normally be the last you’d choose for an assault. Also, we thought they’d take at least a day to look at the maps, work out the topography, make a plan. What they did, more simply and more effectively, was to cheat. They didn’t approach the Wall over the estuary: they just were suddenly there, pouring over it at well-spaced intervals, silently, like ghosts. I had about five seconds of warning – in the form of weapons fire from a kilometre away, where the middle end of our section was overrun. I looked over, just had time to think, Oh shit, and a strange kind of electric shock, not a thought but a physical sensation, like the one you get when you’re watching a horror film and something terrible starts to happen – you feel it in your back, your spine, your belly, but it’s a sensation rather than an idea.

But it’s true what Defenders say. The expression we use is that ‘your training kicks in’. You find you have these new instincts baked into you. I clicked the safety off my A/R and looked back to my own section to scan. About a hundred metres away I saw two of them half over the Wall: one of them had made it but the other had got stuck and the first man was reaching down to pull his partner over. I lit them up, short bursts, the way I’d been trained. The first man looked over to me, then finished pulling his partner over the Wall, then turned to me with his hands in the air. I’d got them both. While I was congratulating myself on that, though, I heard a cracking sound from behind me and the red light on my chest started flashing. Again, training kicked in. I dived to the ground and rolled right towards the concrete bench at my post. Another two attackers had climbed the Wall in the other direction and were coming towards me. With part of my brain I realised that if this was going on all along our section of Wall, it must mean we were in the middle of a full-company attack, and we were outnumbered two to one: their whole company was attacking our half-company squad. With the rest of my brain I was trying to steady myself enough to aim. I got a long burst off, longer than we were supposed to fire in one go. If you shoot too many rounds at once, the muzzle of your gun travels, and you veer off the target.

I was – partly by luck and partly by training – in a good position with decent cover, mostly hidden by the bench, while both the attackers were out in the open. They should have split up and rushed me. Maybe they froze, maybe they thought they’d got me when they came up on me from behind. Mistake. After I got off a long clip one of them raised his hands to put his gun down. The other, whose red light was blinking, jumped up and began running towards me, jinking from side to side. He was about forty metres away and closing rapidly. I was out of ammo and had to change the magazine, and was grateful for the time Sarge had caught me and bollocked me about taping them together the right way, because I had the new clip in before the attacker got to me and was raising the gun to shoot when the light on my chest went red just as I heard shots from behind me. I couldn’t believe it – but no doubt that’s what it’s like, in a real fight. When you get shot your first thought is that you can’t believe it. Ooh I’ve been shot. Ooh so this is what it’s like to be shot. Ooh this is what it’s like to be dying, dying, dead …