'My Name Is A Number: Book 2'

We had collected all the dog tags and weapons, keeping the cartridges but destroying the firing pins on the guns since they were, for the most part, antiques.

The rest of the guns were piled on a fire, the fuel for which was the cabin and the bodies of the dead—including our comrade. They all burn.

Once it was alight and sending up a column of sooty smoke as a signal to anyone who might be watching, we set off west down the last of the Mount Kenya slopes towards the Nanyuki-Nairobi road where we may hope to pick up passing traffic going between the fortified townships of Nanyuki and Nyeri.

We had walked for several miles, keeping about fifty metres apart, through grassland. Not high to us but high enough to hide a warthog.

“Trooper!”

An anguished whisper hoarsely called from the grass to my right.

Immediately I dropped to lie prone, facing the direction of the voice. I remained quiet, waiting for the other person to speak again.

“Dear God! Trooper. I’m Sergeant 369, APC Commander.”

“Where’s your APC?” I whispered back.

“Destroyed. RPG. Don’t go west. They will get you at Naro Moru. They have a nest there,” the Sergeant said, his voice harsh, full of pain.

“Where are you from, Sergeant?”

“Leeuwarden,” he responded after a moment.

“Say something in Dutch,” I told him.

“Ik ben verlamd,” he gasped.

‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘He’s paralysed’. I said, “I will come to you. Make any hostile move and you die.”

The voice snorted with derision, “Now, soon, later? What difference?”

I crawled towards the sound of his harsh breathing for almost ten metres.

He was on his back, his eyes dark with fatigue and pain.

My Corporal whispered to me, “No helicopters available. We have to carry him out,” she put away the burst transmission radio.

“I was thrown out of the APC and hit a rock, or something. I have crawled here, fought off a couple of animals with my knife. One of them ran away with my knife sticking in it. Water? Do you have water?”

I handed him my canteen, "We should try to get you back to Nanyuki," I told him.

“What use is a man who has no use in his legs to the military,” he snorted again.

“Maybe a desk job? Maybe manning the fifties on an APC?”

He looked at me with pity as if he couldn’t believe I really meant it.

He took a couple of swallows of water; a look of bliss flowed over his face as if I had given him the world to play with. The look stayed there as my bullet passed through his brain.

Lifting his wallet and tags I heard the Corporal say, “Let’s go. Everyone from here to Nakuru will have heard that shot.”

We left his body for the animals. Everything got to eat.

 ****

This is a section that was removed from ‘My Name Is A Number: Book2”.

My purpose in including it was that the ‘heroine’ was concerned at not finding the dog tags for a Sergeant that she had come to like. He was an APC Commander but he, and the APC, had gone missing.

When they raided a village they found a number of dog tags but not his so she was worried that he might still be alive and suffering somewhere.

Finding this individual gave her hope that he may yet be alive but the section was considered irrelevant to the story and was cut out. The part where she shot a baby was left in as evidence of justification for unpalatable actions in the event of armed conflict.

When authors write something they need to justify what they are writing. I could, very easily, have filled this story with gratuitous violence in the hope of appealing to a certain market but that was not the thrust of the story.

The objective was to describe how people manage to survive; where they find the courage to go on; how they can do terrible things and justify it to themselves so that they can keep going.

This Sergeant knew that she, the Trooper, would kill him. She had to do it—there was no choice. It was enough that she had given him water before he died. An act of kindness in what is, otherwise, an emotionless state.

For her part she knew that he was going to die. He would not remember the water once he was dead so on some level it was as pointless as having a conversation with someone you are about to kill, unless it is to obtain information.

Irrational kindness. Something that she would never have done for an enemy.

Did her Corporal call for a helicopter? Unlikely. They would know that there would be nothing in range. No helicopter would be there before they had to leave to save themselves from the ‘New Mau-Mau’ mobs. It was just another comfort for the Sergeant to make him think they had tried everything on his behalf.

So, you see, there is a lot in this brief section that is unsaid. There was a warning from the Sergeant about what they might expect on the road back to Nanyuki. This would have provided a link for the next part of the story that was also removed because now the link was unimportant.

When we write we tell people what happened but we don’t fill in every detail. The reader has an imagination and is well able to formulate ideas and images for themselves. Just putting in a framework for them, the reader, to ‘colour in’ is often sufficient.

Now I wait to hear what has been excised from Book 3!!