Read 19 With a Bullet for Free Online Page B

problems again.
    By the end of the first week, my feet were one open wound. I had lost all the skin on my toes right down to the flesh. I pulled a couple of my toenails out like old rotten teeth, showing them to the guys in the bungalow and tossing them in the trash. I rose half an hour earlier than everybody else, when it was still pitch dark, and dressed my feet, wrapping each toe in gauze and Band-Aids, with a thin bandage around my heel. I smeared thick Vaseline on the inside of my hard boots, all the way down to the toe. After that it would take five minutes to push each foot into the cold, hard boot. By the time I’d done that, it was time, and I would shuffle to the bungalow door and down the tar road to the parade ground looking as if I was skiing down a black tar slope. I found that by sliding my feet and not lifting them I could get through the first hour of PT, until the intense pain was replaced by a comfortably numb, deep ache.
    I was determined to carry on. I had screwed up once at the preliminary tests at Engineers, and if it wasn’t for the Engineers’ lieutenant who had plucked me from failure and pushed me into line I would not be here. I wasn’t going screw up again. I was going to get my wings if I had to lose all my fucking toes for them. I gritted my teeth and pressed on.
    “C’mon ... do it! This is what it takes ... don’t stop now!” I found that one of the tricks to ease the pain was to keep moving. I wouldn’t stop moving during the short smoke breaks between PT classes, and would shuffle around or walk on the spot as if doing a rain-dance while I quickly smoked a cigarette. Every day the instructors would encourage us to report sick or sit out for a while if we couldn’t carry on, and then laugh as they wrote those who did so off the course. I knew that if I made one word of complaint about my feet I would be off the course and RTU’d
    “Just think to the next second ... no further.”
    Every morning at 05:00 roll call, under the big paradeground floodlights, there were always a couple of guys missing who just couldn’t get out of bed to carry on. Already our class had shrunk from 50-odd men to less than twenty. Every full day of PT ended with a 15-kilometre run and every night I pulled out another toenail and tossed it in the trash.
    My feet had became a conversation piece in the bungalow at night, with guys crowding around to see the injury and wondering how much longer I could hack it.
    “Your feet are pretty fucked up, mate,” said John Delaney, a cocky, John Travolta lookalike from the south of Jo’burg, who would later become a good friend.
    “We’ve still got a week to go and they say that it’s going to be even tougher— you’d better get some painkillers or something, or you wont make it with those feet,” he said matter-of-factly.
    “Yeah, if I sick-report for pain pills even once I’m off anyway, so I might as well carry on.”
    John nodded in support.
    “It’s only five more days. If I drop off I’ll regret it for years,” I said with false bravado.
    “Well, I have to tell you …” said a blond-haired troop a couple of beds down from me, “when I see you get up early in the morning and bandage your feet it helps me go on, because if you can carry on with those feet, then I can also push on.”
    Another troop laughed from across the bungalow and agreed with him.
    One afternoon we were split into eight-man teams and each team was assigned one of the steel 200-kilogram vehicle parachute pallets that stood in a pile next to the hangar. We were told to carry it for 21 kilometres without the big pallet touching the ground. We thought they must surely be joking, because we could barely pick the thing up and carry it past the camp gates without wincing in pain, never mind carry it for 21 kilometres. It wasn’t a joke. The pallets were not only very heavy— so much so, in fact, that six men could just about shuffle with one on their shoulders—but they weren’t