Last Night Another Soldier Read Free

dad. If not, burn them.’
    Flash shook his head as he bent down for the blueys. ‘The man’s dead. It’s not right.’
    ‘I know, but do you really want his wife reading letters from some other woman? They could just be from a sister, but we can’t take that chance, mate. It happened in Basra when a guy from A Company got hit by a sniper. His wife got all his personal kit, and in there was a pile of blueys from another woman. John’s familyhave enough problems as it is.’ Toki scanned our faces as if searching for clues. ‘That goes for all of us. Let’s get John’s stuff sterile. If we see anything dodgy, bin it.’ Flash quickly started sorting through the blueys while we got back to sorting out John’s kit.
    I kicked a pile of magazines with my boot.
    ‘What about these, Toki? FHM , Zoo …’
    ‘Cookhouse. Julie won’t want those. Anyone know if he has any porn on his laptop?’
    I started to pick up the magazines. ‘I know he was making a music video using all the film he’d been taking.’
    ‘I’ll check it out while you lot are on fatigues. Don’t want Julie seeing us chewing up Taliban either.’
    Red flecks appeared on Si’s cheeks joining his zits like some crazy dot-to-dot quiz. His eyes flashed between us. ‘He’s dead, and for what? For nothing, that’s what. Three days aggressive camping just to get a good kicking? We should have stayed and smashed ‘em up big time.’ He brought his fist down hard on the bed. ‘At least John would have died for something. Where are the pencil necks giving these orders? I didn’t see any of them out there last night.’
    He was right. No one from HQ ever came to our FOB. I started rolling up John’s sleepingbag. ‘Probably sitting in those air-conditioned Portakabins in Kandahar, never even been in the Green Zone. Why did they rip us out, Toki?’
    Toki was checking out the rest of the patrol pack, pulling out dirty socks and dark-green sweat-stained T-shirts. ‘D Company were getting hit big time last night. They needed all the Apaches and support up north. Once they’ve cleared and are holding their area, we’ll be going out on the ground again.’
    I put the pile of magazines on top of three bags of boiled sweets, which were all destined for the cookhouse. ‘Better had! Makes us look like right wimps.’
    Si wasn’t finished yet. ‘Why ain’t we got loads of helis and all the gear like the Yanks got?’
    Toki sighed, raising his legs and plonking his desert boots on John’s camp bed. ‘No money, I guess. Never is.’ We all nodded as we knew it was the truth.
    A calm female voice came over FOB’s loud speaker system. ‘Standby. Standby. Firing. End of message.’ Sure enough, the rattle and whoosh of two massive rockets kicked off into the sky. We called them 70km Snipers, because they could still reach their targets from that far away. At least this time it was our guys giving the Talis the good news.
    Toki shoved everything he’d been sorting through back into John’s patrol kit. There was nothing to be found. ‘D Company must still be getting a hammering,’ he said.
    Toki wasn’t wrong. D company were getting smashed up big time on the other side of the valley. It was taking all our helis to keep the Talis down. Another rocket kicked off, forcing Si to shout above it as he picked at a new zit on the side of his neck. ‘Hey, Briggsy, heard you did a touch of the old Kung Fu Panda with a Tali this morning, right before you head-jobbed him. Good one, mate.’
    ‘Yeah. Sort of.’ I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about it, so I stared into the bin liner I’d just put John’s iPod into, in the hope that we could just carry on packing the kit away.
    ‘And?’ Si wasn’t going to let it go that easily.
    ‘Mate, what happened? Cough up.’
    ‘Well …’ I revved myself up to tell the story as best I could.
    Si nodded with excitement as I explained what had happened. I tried to tell it as dramatically as I could, because I