2-45（在线收听）

45.

I stopped sleeping.

I simply stopped. I was so disappointed, so profoundly dejected, that I just stayed up nightafter night, pacing, thinking. Wishing I had a TV.

But I was living on a military base now, in a cell-like room.

Then, mornings, on zero sleep, I’d try to fly an Apache.

Recipe for disaster.

I tried herbal remedies. They helped, a bit, I was able to get an hour or two of sleep, but theyleft me feeling brain-dead most mornings.

Then the Army informed me I’d be hitting the road—a series of maneuvers and exercises.

Maybe just the thing, I thought. Snap me out of it.

Or it might be the last straw.

First they sent me to America. The southwest. I spent a week or so hovering over a bleak placecalled Gila Bend. Conditions were said to be similar to Afghanistan. I became more fluid with theApache, more lethal with its missiles. More at home in the dust. I blew up a lot of cacti. I wish Icould say it wasn’t fun.

Next I went to Cornwall. A desolate place called Bodmin Moor.

January 2012.

From blazing hot to bitter cold. The moors are always cold in January, but I arrived just as afierce winter storm was blowing in.

I was billeted with twenty other soldiers. We spent the first few days trying to acclimatize. Werose at five a.m., got the blood flowing with a run and a vomit, then bundled into classrooms andlearned about the latest methods that bad actors had devised for snatching people. Many of thesemethods would be put to use against us over the next few days, as we tried to navigate a longmarch across the frigid moor. The exercise was called Escape and Evasion, and it was one of thelast hurdles for flight crews and pilots before deployment.

Trucks took us to an isolated spot, where we did some field lessons, learned some survivaltechniques. We caught a chicken, killed it, plucked it, ate it. Then it started to rain. We wereinstantly soaked. And exhausted. Our superiors looked amused.

They grabbed me, and two others, loaded us onto a truck, drove us to a place even moreremote.

Out.

We squinted at the terrain, the skies. Really? Here?

Colder, heavier rain started to come down. The instructors shouted that we should imagine ourhelicopter had just crash-landed behind enemy lines, and our only hope of survival was to go byfoot from one end of the moor to the other, a distance of ten miles. We’d been given a metanarrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic toMuslims.

Our mission: Evade the enemy, escape the forbidding terrain.

Go.

The truck roared away.

Wet, cold, we looked around, looked at each other. Well, this sucks.

We had a map, a compass, and each man had a bivvy bag, essentially a body- lengthwaterproof sock, to sleep in. No food was allowed.

Which way?

This way?

OK.

Bodmin was desolate, allegedly uninhabited, but here and there in the distance we sawfarmhouses. Lighted windows, smoke curling from brick chimneys. How we longed to knock on adoor. In the good old days people would help out the soldiers on exercise, but now things weredifferent. Locals had been scolded many times by the Army; they knew not to open their doors tostrangers with bivvy bags.

One of the two men on my team was my mate Phil. I liked Phil, but I started to feel somethinglike unbounded love for the other man, because he told us he’d visited Bodmin Moor as a summerwalker and he knew where we were. More, he knew how to get us out.

He led, we followed like children, through the dark and into the next day.

At dawn we found a wood of fir trees. The temperature approached freezing, the rain fell evenharder. We said to hell with our solitary bivvy bags, and curled up together, spooned actually,each trying to get into the middle, where it was warmer. Because I knew him, spooning Phil feltless awkward, and at the same time much more. But the same went for spooning the third man.

Sorry, that your hand? After a few hours of something vaguely approximating sleep we peeledourselves apart and began the long march again.

The exercise required that we stop at several checkpoints. At each one we had to complete atask. We managed to hit every checkpoint, perform every task, and at the last checkpoint, a kind ofsafe house, we were told the exercise was over.

It was the middle of the night. Pitch-black. The directing staff appeared and announced: Welldone, guys! You made it.

I nearly passed out on my feet.

They loaded us onto a truck, told us we were headed back to the base. Suddenly a group ofmen in camo jackets and black balaclavas appeared. My first thought was Lord Mountbatten beingambushed by the IRA—I don’t know why. Entirely different circumstance, but maybe somevestigial memory of terrorism, deep in my DNA.

There were explosions, gunshots, guys storming the truck and screaming at us to look down atthe ground. They wrapped blacked-out ski goggles over our eyes, zip-tied our hands, dragged usoff.

We were pushed into what sounded like an underground bunker system. Damp, wet walls.

Echoey. We were taken from room to room. The bags over our heads were ripped off, then putback on. In some rooms we were treated well, in others we were treated like dirt. Emotions wentup and down. One minute we’d be offered a glass of water, the next we’d be shoved to our kneesand told to keep our hands above our heads. Thirty minutes. An hour. From one stress position toanother.

We hadn’t really slept in seventy-two hours.

Much of what they did to us was illegal under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which wasthe goal.

At some point I was blindfolded, moved into a room, where I could sense that I wasn’t alone. Ihad a feeling it was Phil in there with me, but maybe it was the other guy. Or a guy from one ofthe other teams. I didn’t dare ask.

Now we could hear faint voices somewhere above or below, inside the building. Then astrange noise, like running water.

They were trying to confuse, disorient us.

I was terrifyingly cold. I’d never been so cold. Far worse than the North Pole. With the coldcame numbness, drowsiness. I snapped to attention when the door burst open and our captorsbarged in. They took off our blindfolds. I was right, Phil was there. Also the other guy. We wereordered to strip. They pointed at our bodies, our flaccid cocks. They went on and on about howsmall. I wanted to say: You don’t know the half of what’s wrong with this appendage.

They interrogated us. We gave them nothing.

They took us into separate rooms, interrogated us some more.

I was told to kneel. Two men walked in, screamed at me.

They left.

Atonal music was piped in. A violin being scraped by an angry two-year-old.

What is that?

A voice answered: Silence!

I became convinced that the music wasn’t a recording, but an actual child, perhaps also beingheld prisoner. What in heaven’s name was that kid doing to that violin? More—what were theydoing to that kid?

The men returned. Now they had Phil. They’d gone through his social media, studied him, andthey began saying things about his family, his girlfriend, which scared him. It was astonishing howmuch they knew. How can perfect strangers know so much?

I smiled: Welcome to the party, pal.

I wasn’t taking this seriously enough. One of the men grabbed me, shoved me against a wall.

He wore a black balaclava. He pressed his forearm into my neck, spitting every word from hismouth. He pressed my shoulders against the concrete. He ordered me to stand three feet from thewall, arms above my head, all ten fingertips against the wall.

Stress position.

Two minutes.

Ten minutes.

My shoulders started to seize.

I couldn’t breathe.

A woman entered. She was wearing a shemagh over her face. She went on and on aboutsomething, I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep up.

Then I realized. Mummy. She was talking about my mother.

Your mother was pregnant when she died, eh? With your sibling? A Muslim baby!

I fought to turn my head, to look at her. I said nothing but I screamed at her with my eyes. Youdoing this for my benefit now—or yours? Is this the exercise? Or you getting a cheap thrill?

She stormed out. One of the captors spat in my face.

We heard the sound of gunshots.

And a helicopter.

We were dragged into a different room and someone called out, OK, that’s it. End exercise!

There was a debrief, during which one of the instructors offered a half-arsed apology about thestuff to do with my mother.

Hard for us to find something about you that you’d be shocked we knew.

I didn’t answer.

We felt you needed to be tested.

I didn’t answer.

But that took it a bit too far.

Fair enough.

Later I learned that two other soldiers in the exercise had gone mad.