An Ordinary Day Read Online Free PDF

in some field hospital. A medic was a soldier like all the others, except he also carried an extra fifty-kilogram pack on his back filled with medical gear. Medics were only sent where they were needed: where soldiers were being wounded. And soldiers weren’t being wounded at the base camps or in the back lines.
    A few months later, deep in the bush of southern Angola, with the extra weight of the medical bag, focusing on treating the wounded rather than firing his weapon, Durant was the most vulnerable member of the squad. During those months he had experienced a fear he had never felt since and never wanted to feel again. Even worse than dying, he feared having to kill.
    Durant was more exposed to death than any of the other soldiers. He touched the victims, felt their warm blood on his hands and heard their last, desperate prayers. For a medic, the war was too intimate. Apart from tending to his own comrades, he also had to declare the number of enemy deaths. This entailed checking the deceased combatant’s vital signs, something he had always done mechanically and with less emotional attachment than for his own comrades.
    This changed one day in late 1983 when the sadf launched its third major invasion into Angola called Operation Askari. This involved more than 10 000 troops and was ostensibly aimed at SWAPO bases in Angola, but it was also timed to support a push northwards against Angola’s MPLA government by drawing FAPLA troops to the south.
    Durant was deployed with a small team of reconnaissance-unit soldiers who had lost their medic in an earlier skirmish and needed a replacement. In true army style, Durant was ‘volunteered’. The unit received orders to push north about fifteen kilometres to an area which aerial reconnaissance had identified as hostile. Buccaneer jets had since bombed a house which they believed to be an MPLA barracks, and the unit was ordered to gather intelligence from the ruins and capture prisoners who may have survived. It took the men two hours to reach the area, and as the unit got within twenty metres of the still-smouldering house, gunshots rang out. The soldiers threw themselves to the ground. The unit quickly sheltered behind a broken-down wall in thick bush. The lieutenant ordered Durant to hold the position until the house had been cleared. The other eight men disappeared into the bush while Durant crouched down low and waited. He heard more gunshots and began moving along the crumbling wall to find better cover. Stumbling along, trying to keep his rifle pointed in the general direction of the gunfire, he reached a clump of thick bushes. As he moved around them, he fell over a heavy sack hidden in the bushes. He hit the ground awkwardly, dragged down by the weight of his pack, and lost hold of his rifle which landed a couple of metres away.
    The sack was the body of a man lying in the thicket, caked in mud and blood. His uniform was unfamiliar, and Durant knew that this was an enemy soldier. The fire fight continued in the distance, with the occasional staccato burst of gunfire, shouts and grenade blasts. Durant rolled over, released his medical pack and retrieved his rifle. He rolled the man over. The man’s face was a mask, almost completely obscured by caked mud mixed with dry blood and dirt, but he opened his eyes. Durant fell back in fear, letting the man roll back over again, face-down in the dirt. Perhaps he had imagined it. Was it just a postmortem reaction? Durant put two shaking fingers on the man’s neck to feel for his carotid pulse. It was faint, but unmistakably there.
    After scanning for enemy combatants, Durant pulled his medical bag closer. The blood on the man’s torso was coming from a wound in his thigh. The man’s hand was clamped tightly over the wound but it couldn’t staunch the bleeding. Durant lifted the man’s head and laid it sideways to enable him to breathe easier. After failing to prise the man’s hand off the wound, Durant applied a trauma