Mark Ormrod (1)
MARKING THE VERY EDGE of survival, the point where the competition between life and death is at its most fierce, stands Mark Ormrod. And he stands there on two metal feet, the metal hand at the end of a metal arm on his good strong hip, the first British triple amputee to survive the conflict.2 The human being who embodies the very concept of unexpected survival. He should have died – gone into the undiscovered country and not come back, except he did. And he marked the way behind him so that others might return.3 He is still marking the way back every day of his life, not least by having written one of the best memoirs of casualty I have read, Man Down. Mark was blown up on Christmas Eve 2007 by an IED. He had gone as part of the original British task force, deployed at Forward Operating Base Robinson (known as FOB ROB) on the banks of the Helmand River. The explosions that were then starting to smash out across Helmand could have been from what have become known as the legacy minefields – left over from the ten-year Soviet occupation of the country.4 Or it might have been one of those built bespoke, its echo evidence of the cheap, durable and effective offensive weapons of choice. By 2009 they would saturate the landscape. Fields full of them, laid into the irrigation culverts that had been used for centuries, and then just enough dry soil kicked over the diggings for disguise. In one two-mile stretch of road, fifty-three separate devices were found, placed at no risk to the bomber, but every step perilous for those who came after.5 Within a year of Mark’s wounding, 80 per cent of those brought into the hospital at Bastion were IED casualties, and a new three-letter acronym replaced GSW (gunshot wound) and RPG frag (rocket-propelled grenade fragment) on the patient notes and noticeboards.
Medics were learning, and everyone who went out from the operating and patrol bases was learning, how to look for IEDs. There could be a small, random pile of stones at a roadside, enough to make a patrolman break into a cold sweat of fear, or badly hidden command wires for a trigger, or simply an absence of local people around, avoiding a slew of newly laid devices.6 But not always. IEDs might have been laid days or years before. Heavy rain could wash rocks away and cover everything with baked-on layers of sludge, no signs of disturbance, just like those under the ground that Mark trod on as he led a four-man patrol fire-team to observation positions on a low hillside. Looking back, he reckoned he might have walked over the very spot several times that day, but that one time his body weight plus his heavy kit sank just the right depth into the ground to make contact between the sole of his boot and the pressure-plate detonator, triggering at least a kilo of bomb. The explosion was huge, carving an 8- by 15-foot crater out of the hillside and exposing multiple other devices – at least five, and every single one live – all around him.
Mark’s body was hurled into the air, the blast wave underneath him destroying his rucksack, water sack and rear body armour plate. Shrapnel got through to tear and burn his back, and everything else was wrenched apart, including his rifle and a tempered steel mortar tube for launching grenades. He had enough time and somehow memory to register a column of black smoke to his left before hitting the ground. Smoke, dust, sand, stone, gravel and a crystal-blue sky above him.7
But no pain. As he came back down, Mark felt intense pins and needles in his legs, but otherwise the worst thing was that his helmet had been knocked to the back of his head and the chin strap had got wedged up under his nose so it was difficult to breathe. It must have been a mortar or a rocket that hit him, he thought, and he should pull himself together because anyone in the area would have seen the explosion and known there was a fight to be had or men to finish off. So he tried to turn around and get into a firing position, which was when he found he couldn’t move as he should have been able to.
He pulled up the top half of his body to look down to find out why and saw what was left of his legs, rags, bits hanging out everywhere, loose flesh that had once been calf muscles coated in sand, ripped to pieces. There’s a medical word for the kind of amputation caused by blast injury: avulsive. Avulsive means that the tearing and the destruction of flesh go on higher up the limb than the point at which the bone is smashed away. This is because the weapon’s hard material, such as shrapnel or casing fragments, takes the hard bone, but its blast energy goes further. The sheer, invisible wave of force tears off the soft tissue flesh and everything it carries: muscles, veins, arteries. Propping himself up to a lean on the side of the crater, he heard a small voice in a rational part of his brain saying he should have been bleeding to death, but he wasn’t. Later a medic told him that they thought the blast had been so strong that the torn blood vessels of his legs had contracted in shock, temporarily dampening his blood pressure so that the deadly cascade had been stopped in its tracks.
Then from somewhere suddenly, in both his leg stumps, pain. Pain, out of nowhere, and now more pain, swiftly, in his right arm. It must also be injured, pay attention, said his brain; look at it, see what’s happening. His arm moved somehow, and he saw above his face his hand, the palm cleaved in two, the skin flayed up to the elbow, the two large bones of his lower arm completely exposed. Left arm by comparison not so bad: just a large piece of shrapnel wedged in his palm, and fingers still recognisable as fingers and still moving, so he could reach across and unclip the strap of his helmet and throw it away from him, so at least he could breathe. Later he thought that he shouldn’t have done that because of the other IEDs dotted around him in the crater that his helmet could have set off. But he wasn’t thinking that. In his head, time, doing its thing on a wounded human, telescoping back and forth: present – pain, debris; future – daughter, girlfriend. Thoughts racing between what would be his life, flashing images of the waste, pain, debris, death, and all his own fault, stupid, rage at himself, anger tearing out of him.
Everyone out on patrol with him had also been knocked off their feet by the blast, and he could see them all scrambling to get upright, covered in the dirt of the explosion, all suddenly made the same dusty grey, faces and uniforms, and all of them turning to look at him. A particularly close friend made it to his side first, not shouting but using his command voice to quieten Mark, talking over him increasingly loudly and firmly because the injured man was begging him to shoot him, rather than leave him in this state. And then sense started to return as Mark recognised the sounds of the unit gathering itself, preparing to withdraw and take their casualties with them. He tried to take part, calling them together, to focus. A second member of the team had been injured and dragged clear, somehow not triggering any further explosions. Mark wasn’t draggable, so, as the others prepared to clear a way for his rescue, one got on the radio and called in the casualty, immediate attention required, send the helicopter to their base. Send it now.
And as the messages were sent, everyone was shouting at Mark from where they stood, not moving for fear of triggering more explosions, but the barrage of voices was constant, keeping him awake, conscious, focused on their situation. Mark responded, picking out the sound of a young, panicking marine close by who looked as though he was losing control. Mark put all the energy he could into his voice. They had to clear a path to him, to get him ready for evacuation by stretcher when the helicopter got there. They had to do their mine clearance drills, second nature by now; be careful, but hurry up. Take out their probes or bayonets and push them into the ground in front of them, marking clear ground with white stakes and marker tape. Finding a way through. Don’t look at him if it helps them to focus. Remember their training. Do it now. Come and get him.
But it was so slow. The air was cold and clean, the dust from the explosion had settled, and Mark noted that there were no flies to swipe away from his wounds. But he was hot now, and the pain and the pins and needles had merged into one and the temptation to drift away from it all was overwhelming, but still they shouted and crept towards him. After ten minutes the team medic got through. Just in time. Mark’s stumps had started to ooze blood, and soon his body would lose control of its circulation. Shock setting in. Deadly cascade resuming, death back on the clock. The medic put tourniquets on each limb remnant and dressings on whatever injuries he could see. He jabbed a needle into Mark’s remaining intact arm and squeezed the plastic bag to force the contents into the vein: resuscitation fluids and analgesia, life and time.
Then a canvas stretcher, two of the unit picking him up to put him on it and the pain back, pure and extreme. Mark roared out. His right foot was still attached to his leg by a thick muscle, somehow not torn in two by the blast, and it had been left behind as they gathered him up because they thought it had been blown clean off, but it hadn’t and now it was dragging behind them in the dirt, all the nerves in the muscle screaming back at the brain. So Mark reached over the side of the stretcher for his own foot and found it with his one good hand, and grabbed it himself while they still bumped along, and cradled it on his stomach, with the muscle stretched and scraped and caked in dust flapping across him, and he kept hugging the boot, clenching his eyes closed, trying to drift somewhere else. A vehicle came forward, and they loaded him up, but there was no paved road, and so they sped and bumped through the ruts. They kept shouting at him to keep him with them, awake all the way to base; even when the vehicle missed a gear and slammed forward, one of the soldiers instinctively grabbing Mark’s exposed femur, pinning him in place by his own leg bone. Nothing for this pain in the CMT’s Bergan, nothing anywhere.
Then stop, unload, Mark still holding his foot, carry him forward. Inside the base the helicopter appeared over the perimeter wall, coming in low and fast, swivelling round to land as the bay door opened close to the bearer party. Loading, hand signals in the noise mêlée over his head, confusion, but a handover. By now Mark was failing, drifting to black; the very last thing he remembered was sensing the wind from the helicopter’s rotor blades and the smell and heat of the turbine exhaust and burned jet fuel, as they carried him into the darkness of the interior.