Amputations

Baghdad, Iraq.

Hot and sickly in that hospital room, as the surgeon used a saw to cut a man's leg off at the calf. There was no foot, just a raw stump with some pure white bone. That was from a previous amputation that hadn't gone far enough. More of the leg had to go.

The body on the chopping block was Nepalese, one of the army of private security contractors working this city. Unlike the American mercenaries, or those from South Africa, Britian etc, these men from Nepal are well mannered, polite and efficient. They don't behave like mad-dog killers or thrill seekers, and they're not war profiteers. They are workers, doing a job, earning a modest living and trying to avoid trouble.

He had been standing outside the fortress US embassy in the Green Zone when a truck ran over his foot. The crush wound turned poisonous and the only way of stopping it spread was to start sawing.

He was twitching with the pain as the doctors tied off his thigh with a tourniquet. He didn't cry but, beneath an oxygen mask, he choked and coughed and called for his ancestors to give him strength, before passing out under the anaesthetic.

His story: from a poor village in Nepal's mountains, he paid some mafia type to get him to Kuwait, and into a job as a guard in Iraq earning $1,200 a month. Loans were taken out, family debts incurred. The move was an investment, one that has now failed. Money will have to be repaid to people who always collect. If he cannot get a prosthetic leg, he will not work again and, almost certainly, if that happens, no one will help him.

He lay in bed before the second part of the amputation with that bleak future staring at him. He said, flatly and matter-of-factly: "I might as well be dead".