Rain And Pain

• Raimonn Lim, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2017

The air relayed the merciless cold throughout the night. The sky abruptly bled with the heavy droplets of rain and the ear piercing cracks of thunder. Rain was the last thing we wanted during the last pack march of selection. But the last thing we wanted was to drop out of the course. Not now. We’ve come so far for that to not happen.

Before I applied for selection, my platoon Sergeant during a deployment in East Timor, once said to me…
“Pain won’t kill you. Pain will never kill you. So either go home and live with the regret, or just simply suck it up and smile through the entire thing.”

One day of constant pain is enough to break a man’s body. Six weeks of pain is enough to break the spirit. Enough to shatter the bones on your back and to blister the skin on your feet to the point where red flesh is exposed to your socks. But so far the Sergeant’s word was true; I haven’t been killed yet.

The added weight of the rain water on my pack is giving me hell and I only have 10 kilometres to go but time is ticking. Behind me are the last handful of candidates that managed to survive the past six weeks of hell the directing staff (DS) gave us. The road is only illuminated by the yellow glow sticks that the directing staff installed on wooden posts, but their visibility is only so helpful because the shower of rain created a layer of water that shrouds the glow sticks to a small figment of light that’s visible from a metre away.

At this point, I’ve lost track of time and I’ve simply become a man that’s blindly running along a dirt road in Singleton in the middle of twilight. In the distance, I see a figure but I can’t tell what he or she looked like but the outline of a human was discernible because of the droplets of rain that bounced off the body. By the time I came within an arm length towards the figure, a light from a torch penetrated through the darkness and the figure said…

“Five more to go son.”

By the time I figured out that it was one of the DS, I near bloody pissed myself when he spoke. It took a while before my mind was getting hazy and I started to feel nothing in my feet. I ran as fast as I could with my gear and Steyr rifle in my hand. Then all of a sudden, I see a pair of bright lights shining down at me. The only difference is that they’re much brighter than the torches the DS were carrying and the pair of lights had a 50. Cal machine gun mounted on top of it.
By the time I reached the gate the DS said…

‘Well done. You’ve made it’
‘Sir. What do you mean?’
‘You’re the first one here. You’ve passed.’