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Working as a field medic wasn't so bad, he conceded late one night. The hours were long and the work difficult in more ways than one, but he was fed and sheltered and they paid him enough to keep himself drunk during his off hours to numb his mind. He had all the practice of a veteran surgeon by now despite his young age, and when he returned home, he could have any job in any hospital he wanted. He even got his own private quarters. He would've felt greedy asking for more than that-- and the beautiful nameless woman from off-base bouncing on his lap and suckling at the prominent muscles of his neck was just another perk.
His days started far too early, and ended far too late, and he spent a great deal of his time with his hands dripping with the blood of others. His time was largely spent in triage, sprinting about and handling the most serious cases first, leaving the stable patients to wait it out for hours in agony until he could see to them. He didn't even need to leave the medical tent most days, because the injured just kept pouring in, sometimes arriving in groups, in mobs, in seas, after a bad shelling or a mortar.
He'd learned to drown out the sobbing, the groaning, the screaming, so he could function through his days without feeling like joining them in their cries. He measured his days in sutures and staples, abscesses and amputations, wondering somewhere in the tiniest corner of his mind if his work was doing any good at all. For every soldier he was able to put back together again and return to battle, there were five, ten, a dozen others who wouldn't go back to the front lines, and a good half that who would never go anywhere else but back home in a pine box.
Those last were the ones that always felt the worst-- those that burrowed into his mind and stoppered up his throat and burned at his eyes, late at night, hunched over the typewriter, tapping out a message for the families left at home with eyes that couldn't even see straight, and no words that would help anyone anymore. He felt guilty, he felt responsible, and he felt that maybe if he was able to do his job better, they would still be alive. They could have at least died an honourable death on the battlefield if not a peaceful death in their own homes, at their own proper time, rather than the slow agony of nights spent howling impotently while sepsis claimed a limb or poisoned blood, or a bleed he'd missed in his haste to attend to his other patients slowly drained them from within. If he had enough morphine, he might have at least been able to give them some relief from the slow death, but he wasn't even sure he would have enough syringes for tomorrow's onslaught, never mind any other day, or any mercy in his medical tent.
It cut straight through him to see one of his patients clench a fist in his coat far tighter than he would believe they could, and stare into his eyes and beg, plead with every breath, just above a whisper, please, please Doc, help me, please. It kills him every time a patient starts to cry, softly, beg him for life, or for death, or for something, anything, to make this end. They would try to bargain with him, or blame him, pursue him out of the room with shouts and cries and curses, or simply stare at him with shaking hands balled in his coat, making a small request of “Tell my wife I love her.” That would keep him up for hours, alternating between shaking with hopeless rage or torrential tears or aching grief. He would finally complete the death certificate and notice, struggling the whole time to retain his composure, and then tear a small corner off a sheet of paper and scribble a note on it, tuck it inside the envelope and hope the final message would make it home to its intended recipient, hope that the people who went through the mail would have heart and allow this small respite to pass. In all the failures of all kinds in his line of work, this was the last way he could think of to try and make amends for all that he couldn't do to save these lives, for all the reasons he wasn't able to send these loved ones home alive and well.
These things tore at him even now, even so far away through a thick haze of alcohol and lust, and he briefly thought of home as the pretty young thing ran her fingers along his sides and moaned long and low. These thoughts were killing it for him-- he flipped her onto her back, getting aggressive in his frustration and grief. Still, he couldn't escape it, the licking doubt at the corners of his mind that reminded him that his work here was futile, that still more people would die every endless day until the undefinable 'they' decided they had profited enough off misery to sate their greed and ended this war. Still he would not have enough bandages or morphine or antibiotics to help everybody, still he would write detached methodical letters to families at home and still he would include small scraps with sympathies scrawled on them and still he knew someone was reading this outgoing mail and removing his small token of humanity and his plea for forgiveness from each one, simply because it was best if the families at home didn't know.
He missed home, now while bedding this pretty stranger more than ever. His mind, in its inebriatede haze, compared her faked ecstasy to making love to his fiancee back at home. He missed her like nothing else, and was plagued by ghosts, seeing her where she would never, could never, be in this hellish wasteland. She was the one small motivator that helped him pull through each day, even though he knew it was very likely she hadn't waited for him, either, given the explosive spat just before he deployed. She threw his ring in his face at some point, but afterwards he found it where it had rolled under the couch and left it on the coffee table downstairs with a note not too dissimilar to those he tried to send to the grieving families, a corner stolen from a piece of something bigger, with his sharp, sloppy writing reminding her that he would always love her. If he was lucky, then maybe there was still something at home for him to return to. If not, it still wouldn't matter because he would still be far away from all this and close to her, the girl that made his heart beat a little faster. He would feel alive for the first time in what felt like forever, and perhaps for once rather than living among death and despair, he could take a stab at living life and maybe even giving life.
He closed his eyes and imagined the stranger in his bed was her and mouthed her name as he came, engulfed by the sweetest light for a perfect singular moment. It quickly faded back into the restless night in this same godforsaken tent, the stale air heavy with the fading heat from the previous day and the prostitute's perfume as she took his money and left his bed. He knew that tomorrow he would wake to raid sirens and screams and explosions on the battlefront and face a tent full of the dead and dying, but for now, it was enough to see him through.
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