Fighting Fit

Just finished my 15th – and final – army meal of the week: a packed lunch that included chicken and coleslaw on a buttered white baguette, an orange, and a Golden Delicious apple (for the record, more and better fruit than I've seen all week). The pack also included: an Elevenses oatmeal raisin cookie-bar hybrid, a Mars bar, a bag of garlic-flavoured crisps, and (bizarrely) a pack of Extra sugar-free peppermint gum.

I do like butter, but not on my sandwiches. Nor am I a coleslaw fan. And frankly, I find it hard not to be resentful when I'm forced to (over)spend my calorie budget on crap I wouldn't choose to eat – and that really isn't worth it.

But as I have all week, I ate as best I could and tried to let it go, beef pie, egg mayonnaise with butter, white bread, (white) potato (overload), pre-sweetened gruel-like porridge, canned fruit and all. I tried to be grateful for the occasional bright spots: the boiled vegetables that (occasionally) were served before they were doused in sauce, the honey-roasted parsnips and carrots (and were those actual flecks of fresh rosemary?) I looted from bottom of the mystery meat tray, the one day they didn't fry the fish. I never ate pudding. I got up before 6 am to run four of the five mornings, and managed between 45 and 50 minutes each time. I went down to the officers' mess for drinks three of the nights, but mine were non-alcoholic.

This morning as I was buttoning my trousers – which thanks to leftover Dorset pounds are about one big meal away from not fitting -- I felt a wave of relief and gratitude and yes, pride, that I didn't have to worry about whether I'd be able to squeeze into them. This assignment could have gone very differently, with mass overeating and exhaustion (of the too-full kind) and irritability (a side effect of bingeing), and the general inability to concentrate on anything but either getting more food or how horrible and sick I feel. It was nice not to feel embarrassed about whether someone had caught me sneaking extra food, and not to spend half of dinner thinking about how much pudding I could get away with.

This morning some of the other civilians I was working with bemoaned the end of a week of cooked breakfasts and puddings twice a day. I'm sure it won't surprise you that I don't feel the same way.

***

A couple of days ago, as I was deciding whether to write a news brief or nothing at all about a "routine" hour-long heavy exchange of gunfire that wounded two British soldiers, I stopped for a moment and nearly burst into tears.

Routine to be shot at for an hour? Obviously I know what soldiers do, but who puts themselves through this and why and how do they survive it? I asked this lovely Scottish guy I could barely understand (well, the regiment I was attached to was all Scottish, and I could barely understand any of them) what people are like when they get back to (relative) safety after battle.

"Some of them are fine and ready to go out again immediately," he said. "And some of them..." He shrugged and shook his head. I kept waiting for an answer, and he looked about to give me one. Then insurgents in vehicles to the north and east suddenly opened fire and we got back to the routine business of war, shootings, maimings, killings, and all.