Ben Bracken: Origins (Ben Bracken Books 1 - 5) (13 page)

I won’t go into detail about every day. I will regale what is important, but I can’t dwell too hard here. I sat and cared for my best friend as best I could for 6 days, routinely cleaning and feeding him with what we had. What comes next will not be easy to read, and I picture it being as hard to digest as it is for me to write. As my pen hovers the page, I feel a phantom standing over me - a wrought twisted demon, bent by fury, that has had me at it’s mercy every day since.

When we realized we weren’t being pursued, I filled the air with quiet one-sided conversation. I told him not to talk. I talked for both of us. But by day 4, his pain really betrayed itself. He had been so stoic, so strong, staring a certain death in the face, but never admitting that it might get the better of him. He burst into a thick sob, that echoed off the bowl walls, and eventually got lost in the mulch. He told me he loved you. It was simple - the purity of it is as solid now as it was then. He loves you - now, then, forever. All time. He was yours. As he faced his death, it was you he was thinking about. People travel a lifetime not feeling that, and I am one of them. I now know that that sense of utter devotion and belonging that can only mean love is definite - love is REAL. My tears are hitting the page as I write this. I could only imagine feeling, just for a second, someone loving me the way he loved you. If you ever wonder how he felt about you, in the dark embrasures of your mind where concern festers, and time has blunted the truth of your love together, you now know. You were everything to him. And you were with him to the bitter end.

And then I get to your children. And I don’t think I can write anymore. I watched him say his goodbye’s to you all. Nothing I can write will justify what he said about the love he showed me for his family, but let me tell you, it was given away in the harsh painful sobbing in that dark sewer in Afghanistan. His anguish at never seeing you again, his torture at never telling you one more time he loved you - the hopelessness of knowing he would never be there to support you again, or to guide his children through the minefield of growing up... I have seen what it means to love, and it was simultaneously tragic and beautiful - the ultimate opera.

Which makes the next part all the harder to admit. The authorities know, and I would imagine you do too. There is a big DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED stamp next to my name for a reason, and that’s the same reason I don’t have a single medal to speak of.

On the evening of day 4, his sobbing subsided. Then he asked me to kill him. He told me the burning was too great inside, the ache in all parts of him too hard to bare anymore. Our fate looked sealed, with our rations wilting. I expected the sewer flow to abate at some point, to enable me to reconnoiter, but it never did. Forward progress was fantasy. He asked me time and again through the 5th day. I remained steadfast. He refused to beg, but he had a trump card. I had told him, during one of our many conversations on Bastion, I would do the exact same thing, and that I would expect any true friend to listen to my wishes. He had me trapped by my own reasoning and stubbornness, and he knew it. I could’t argue with that. He told me that to kill him would be the greatest gift, to free him of the pain he was gripped by, to send him home to the heavens where he could watch over you and the kids. He said he had given everything for England, and there was nothing more to give. It was mission accomplished.

He begged all of day 5. There’s nothing really knew to tell here, save for that it was perhaps the worst day of my life.

Eventually he went quiet at the start of the 6th day, and didn’t speak again. His eyes were shut, and his breathing shallow. His energy reserves spent. After a breakfast of 1 inch of molded strawberry protein bar, I ended his life. It was instantaneous. I won’t add anything else, but I did it with as much care and love as I possibly could, which sounds just ludicrous. But it’s true.

I was overcome. I was furious, devastated, confused, happy. All sorts of emotions that left me in a state of extreme emotional anxiety and delayed post traumatic stress, or so my discharge psychologists tell me. I stood, then hurled myself into the churning water of the bowl. I took nothing with me, rather let fate decide what should happen to this murderer. I remember the familiar tepid foul deluge, and falling into it. And I remember nothing else.

The next memory I have is a hospital bed back on Bastion. Confusion. Hate for myself. Hate for being alive, realizing that in survival, I would be forced to live with what I did. I was mocked by a higher power, forced to endure a punishment that to me, was worse than death. I had been prepared to meet my maker, but my maker wasn’t ready for me - more than that he was intent on punishing me. And I would probably have done the same, if I was forced to decide the fate of someone who had done what I did.

As time passed, they told me what had happened. A fisherman had find me stuck against a grid at a river outlet, unconscious, pressed against the grating - 3 miles from the helicopter crash site. I was mangled from head to toe, but somehow carried the murmur of life. Which was enough for the fisherman to use me as a bargaining chip with my commanding officers. He originally wanted some munitions, but my superiors thought the munitions too valuable. They eventually bartered him down to some fast food from Bastion, which ironically wasn’t all that far away. Literally, I was as valuable to my superiors as a Big Mac. If McDonald’s need a hot new marketing hook, there you go. ‘Big Mac - worth swapping a half dead soldier for’...

I lay in that bed for an awful 3 weeks, as a battle waged in and around me. Physically, I was strengthening, slowly but surely, but in contrast, my spirits were darkening. A gloom was setting in, and I near welcomed it. Hate became welcomed, and I gradually entrenched myself in a the dank mental tomb of depression. Since that very day, I have never once come out. I was gripped by a series of pretty nasty surface infections, but nothing too serious on the inside. Malnourishment was the main problem, and dehydration. The feverish side effects of both of these became the bricks and mortar for my depression. They constructed the walls in which I dwell in madness.

I eventually regained enough strength to answer all the questions I knew were coming, and at this point, a sub-plot began to emerge. I betrayed myself by giving in to the labels they wanted to assign me. What difference it would have made is anyone’s guess, but... I told them I killed him. I confessed. I said I had to. They asked what alternatives I had, because, surely, given my survival, there was a way out. I didn’t want to go through the long story of our hell on that ledge, fighting off every mental demon that may ever face you. They were right. There was a chance we both could have survived, if we both took our chances and dived into the cauldron. But neither of us did. And when they asked me this, I didn’t fight it. I agreed that there was a chance. Such is my guilt, I agreed that there was a chance that things could have been different. I hung my head in shame, like a scolded dog. They may have guessed the truth but they didn’t show it. They treated me like I was a man who had been given an opportunity, in an extreme setting, to take another man’s life.

This is not a far-fetched scenario. Combat warps a man. The stress of war is just as bad. You are trained and trained, to the point of monotony, to kill. It becomes your be all and end all. There is nothing else but to kill. And in this mindset the act of killing is just as dangerous as not killing at all. To a less strong mind, killing can become a drug, the release of ending life an opiate beyond compare. The ultimate thrill in a setting where it is encouraged, and part of your job. Conversely, if you have not killed, but you have been expertly trained to kill, every moment up to that first kill is sparked with the crackle of intense anticipation. You know a kill is coming, you know that that most guttural and primitive of sensations will be activated, sooner or later. But what if it is never fulfilled? What then? I have heard of soldiers who go to great lengths to get that first kill out of the way, and to fulfill all that training. We are talking about an environment entirely preoccupied with the taking of life. The impact of this has many permutations, and releases many personalities. I mentioned earlier camp being like a huge psych ward - and thus we go full circle.

I was court marshaled. They painted me as a man who, in albeit an extreme circumstance, had killed a fellow soldier when alternatives to survival were at hand. I was never accused of being an all-out murderer, but they stopped just short. Thanks to my service, they decided not to take it further than simply stripping me of my medals and dishonorably discharging me. Word was out that I had killed Steven, but somehow survived myself. That was enough for people to judge me. I sealed my decent into infamy by never setting anyone right. I was so awash with guilt, confusion. Steven had begged me to kill him. Just begged me. Just like I would have done if the roles were reversed.

I was shipped back to England, the previous 9 years of my life wiped from the slate. I came back with no record, no history, no nothing. I didn’t have a place, a purpose or a home - especially after my parents took umbrage with my decision in the sewer. I hoped that they would see my rationale, at least understand my position and why I did what I did. But no such luck. I was home for an extremely uncomfortable 2 days, and, even though they never kicked me out, I took the initiative and left. Their son had gone from hero to zero in the blink of an eye, and their own pride took a massive hit in the balls. I think they were scared of the questions and the ensuing scrutiny, so I left. Neither party has contacted the other since that day. I was left with the money I had earned through my years of service, which had been steadily dripped into my home account from overseas. I had no dependents, and no plans for the money, so it was all still there. We are not talking about a great amount of cash, but enough to keep me afloat as I work out what to do next.

But at present, I can’t do anything next. You see, I’m banged up in prison, on a murder charge that I can’t shake. Some would say it’s justice. I’m inclined to agree with them. I’ve made some poor choices in my life, and I keep making them. But I’m in a spiral that won’t relent, and I chase violence for a purpose I am yet to comprehend. I had become nothing more than a brutal problem solver, not by design but by accident. And I got a taste for it, and it put me behind bars.

There is a paradox at work. I don’t recognize anything anymore. This place is not the same to me. I don’t see England as my own. I don’t even see it as England. England is an ideal and nothing more. I can’t believe I gave up everything to protect this morass I don’t even recognize anymore. But I will never give up on what England means to me. I can sense a fight in me. I can feel my rebellion boiling. If I get the chance I will do what I can to keep my England safe - even though my England hates me and wants to bury me as deep as it can dig. And I do it with the memory of Steven as my mascot.

If I ever do anything worthwhile with my life, I do it in the spirit of Steven’s memory. The courage he showed, I will too. The spirit he exhibited, I’ll do the same. The unrelenting good... I can’t give that. I’m not ‘good’. The ‘good’ I had died with him. But I will work for the cause of ‘good’, and hope that that will be good enough.

Kayla, I leave you to your own conclusions. What I wanted to do was set the record straight so that you know what really happened, and so that I know you found out just how much Steven loved you. I need you to know that. I can’t carry it around anymore without you knowing it.

I also want you to know I am sorry. I did what I did out of love and respect. Don’t you dare forgive me. I won’t ever forgive myself either.

All the best in life, and know that once upon a time, you were loved very much.

Ben”

3

Dag’s eyes lift from the page, and drift out onto the prison. It looks just the same as it did moments before. Yet, inside there is a man festering and bubbling over, a man so in need of help yet too hurt to ever accept it. Dag feels for him, and acknowledges again the similarities he felt with him when he first met Ben on that peculiar and demonic night in North Wales, when Dag had saved Ben’s life from an indoctrinated spiritual congregation.

Dag always thought there were dark events that led Ben to where he finds himself, and in a sense, he was right - only he was not expecting the story to be quite so sad, and painful, and perhaps, for it to resonate so forcefully with Dag. He too had had difficult decisions to make in combat, but nothing like the choices Ben faced. It is deeply sobering, and before Dag knows what has happened, he has been sitting in his car for 15 minutes in silence, just thinking.

He folds the letter, and put it back in the envelope. The seal is ripped, but he knows he can just get a new envelope and copy the address from the old envelope and the new one. More bothering to him, was whether he should send it at all.

This Kayla, wherever she may be, may have put these demons to bed a long time ago. She may have moved on, she may have a new life. She may know the circumstances of her husbands death in far more gruesome detail than Ben has been able to divulge. She may be happy. Or as happy as can be expected.

Is it right to give this letter to her? Would it bring up things that just shouldn’t be brought up? If the letter doesn’t make it, Ben would never know the difference. He openly guarantees he won’t contact her, so it’s not like he’ll ever see Kayla to confirm it’s receipt. Ben’s darkness is so complete, his mindset so carefully arranged in such absolute terms, that Dag is unsure whether anyone else should be burdened by it’s weight.

Dag sits there, clogged by indecision. He feels as if he might sit there forever, just staring at the prison walls, digesting what he has read and hoping that the passage of time will allow it to help him make a decision. But he can’t bring himself to move. He just sits there holding the letter.

It is dark before he turns on the car engine, his decision made. He just hopes it is the right one - and in truth, he knows he will never know the answer to that. He drives off, leaving the sprawling urban prison behind him, and the tortured soul it conceals firmly encased inside, toiling and troubled, waiting for a chance at something resembling redemption.