I’ve written before about Harry Parker‘s Anatomy of a soldier – an extraordinary novel(for multiple reasons) that reconstructs the journey of a British soldier who steps on an IED in Afghanistan through the evacuation chain to Camp Bastion and on to Selly Oak in Birmingham (see also ‘Object Lessons’, DOWNLOADS tab).  I’ve also sketched out an ‘anatomy of another soldier‘, describing in similar terms the precarious journey of a soldier wounded on the Western Front in the First World War back to Blighty.  It’s part of my project on medical care and casualty evacuation from war zones – the Western Front, the Western Desert, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

Much of my archival work (on the First and Second World Wars) has been done at the Imperial War Museum and the Wellcome Library in London, and now the IWM has provided a series of short but sharp insights into the journey of a wounded soldier from Afghanistan back to Britain.

It’s not the experiment that Harry conducts – which isn’t to disparage either of them, and in fact Harry did a reading from ‘Anatomy’ at the IWM – but works through the IWM’s signature mix of objects, documentary and interview.  It includes an interview with Corporal Harry Reid, recalling his experience of being wounded;

‘… a vague recollection of spinning round in the air, not sure if I did or not…  I lay on my back, looked down, I couldn’t see my legs at that stage, a big dust cloud all around, so I couldn’t really see anything, and I couldn’t hear anything…  I weren’t in any pain at that particular time, I just felt like shock and numbness, as if I’d walked into a door…

I looked across to this left hand, thinking right, I need to get a first aid kit out here, because your training kicks in straight away, in your right-hand pouch you’ve got your tourniquets, your first field-dressing, and your morphine…  I knew something violently had just happened… I looked across and this finger was hanging off … so I kept hold of that and I thought I’m not losing that as well…  I looked across at my right arm and it were twisted up around my back so then I shouted for a medic … but obviously I shouted but I couldn’t hear myself shouting, which was quite strange…

He crawled back towards me, risking his own life … and he gave me some morphine and started putting tourniquets on.  He put  a tourniquet on my arm, pulled it obviously really tight to stop the blood flow but I felt it pinch my skin … that felt painful, I couldn’t really feel anything else, so I told him not very politely to calm down a bit because it was pinching my skin…

Then I remember being in and out of consciousness..’

That last sentence is crucial; it turns out that one of the most traumatic after-effects of blast injuries is the inability to remember what happened between the initial shock and recovering consciousness in hospital.  Many of those wounded in the First and Second World Wars recalled only too well what they suffered during their evacuation, but later modern war is accompanied by powerful narcotics that combine analgesics with amnesia.    Here is Emily Mayhew in A Heavy Burden:

As ITUs [Intensive Therapy Unit] became more advanced, so did a condition known as ITU-PTSD –the stress induced, post-traumatically, by not knowing what has happened to the patient during the hours and days that are missing from their memory.

How much worse … would this be for the soldier who fell in the desert, was swooped away by MERT {Medical Emergency Response Team], saved and nursed at Bastion, flown half a continent away and then woken, not with their unit around them dusty and shouting, but their family, strained and weeping.

Recovering those lost hours, days and even weeks is a central part of my own work (see also ‘The Geographies of Sixty Minutes’ here).

So it’s good that the web page for Journey of a Wounded Soldier also features a triptych of images from the brilliant work of David Cotterell showing evacuation from Bastion to Britain (above), and interview clips addressing treatment and rehabilitation at Birmingham.