Coming Home

by Max Bolt

  Our community.

  Try again.

  The Government.

  Now that’s better. Governments make decisions and are therefore accountable. Let’s explore this via some Q&A with our ruling Prime Minister. Turnbull? Or is it Abbott? No Rudd? Gillard? Pauline Hanson? Clive Palmer maybe? It is difficult to keep up with who is running the country. But it does not matter, let’s pretend for ease it is John Howard, eyebrows and all, in charge.

  First and only question.

  The war, is it right or wrong?

  Which war?

  How many wars are we fighting? THE war.

  On terror?

  If you call it that, yes.

  What was the question again?

  The war on terror, in Afghanistan, is it right or wrong?

  It’s a terrifying place the Middle East. It is overrun by terror groups. These terror organizations are training and releasing new terrorists. Spreading terror and hatred over the Internet. Recruiting impressionable young men and women (this diversity correction added as an afterthought) and turning them into terrorists. Promoting terror and hatred. Inspiring terror all over the globe.

  (Notice the political skill in the answer – terror-fying the public with every sentence.)

  Yes, but is the war right or wrong?

  These people kill innocent people. They have sparked a massive refugee crisis. They can influence others. They are destabilising to world security. They–

  Right or wrong?

  They can–

  Right or wrong?

  (Deep sigh) well it’s right – isn’t it?

  Enough said.

  Alright, so that was a little one-sided, a little Leigh Sales-esq. So let’s look at things differently. Often it is easier to challenge the present with a review of the past. Let’s start with the not so distant past; the Iraq war. And by this we mean Iraq war number 2. A war inspired by George W Junior’s desire to mop up George W Senior’s unfinished business.

  Iraq invasion number 2 was a war premised on removing Saddam Hussein’s access to weapons of mass destruction. WMDs. Remember those. No? Well it doesn’t matter because there weren’t any. UN security forces spent the best part of a decade searching for them and came up with nada. But the nimble political machine saw this coming and quickly adjusted the basis for going to war to the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.

  So let’s continue the Q&A with Little John H, who enthusiastically joined our longtime buddies the US and the UK in the Coalition of The Willing (remember that one?)

  Question: Did the UN or any security force ever find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?

  Now. You see. Saddam was a very bad man. What kind of man tests chemical weapons on his own citizens? What kind of man supports the ethnic cleansing of sectorial minorities? What kind of leader tortures and kills his own people? Yes, Saddam was a very bad man.

  Now about those WMDs?

  But did I tell you Saddam was a very bad man. Part of the axis of evil. (Remember that one. The supposed unholy trinity of all countries bad; Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.) Those countries are inherently destabilizing to world peace.

  But the WMDs?

  Oh all right (pained eye roll and all), our intelligence was legitimate, but like all things, it is impossible to have perfect information. We make decisions based on the information we have. And what’s it matter, Saddam is, was rather, a very bad man. The world is better without him.

  End Q&A. After all it is just the political washing machine on overdrive.

  But is Iraq really better off without Saddam Hussein? Ask the innocent Iraqi people and see what they say. The Iraq war created the vacuum for terror groups to flourish. Like weeds twisting through the shattered remains of a fallen castle, those groups were able to grow in the secular aftermath of Iraq wars 1 and 2. And the military involvement of the West in their own backyard was the perfect call to arms for the disenfranchised youth. Let’s face it, today’s terrorist recruits weren’t even born when George W Senior was strutting his stuff in the Middle East, but they know the stories; their fathers and grandfathers have told them what really happened.

  But there cannot be a discussion of the Middle East conflicts without the oil angle. Forget WMDs and Saddam and that Axis of Evil thingy, there’s billions of barrels of oil buried under the Iraq desert. Iraq invasions 1 and 2; the Great World Oil Wars? The greed angle? But the US got rid of Saddam and still couldn’t get their hands on the oil. You see you can have a billion barrels of oil buried under the sand but if you can’t maintain security long enough to pump it out, what’s it matter? Never mind, the US developed a shale oil revolution in their own backyard. More oil than they know what to do with. Just pump it out of Texas and North Dakota and New Mexico and stick it to the Saudi’s and their OPEC oil pricing cartel.

  So enough of the critique of Iraq wars 1 and 2, now on to Afghanistan.

  Let’s begin with Bin Laden. Remember him?

  World enemy number one. Instigator of the Twin Tower attacks. He was allegedly hanging out with the Taliban in the hill caves of Afghanistan. Well, the US got him ten years later. Not in Afghanistan but Pakistan. Those Stan’s can be real confusing. And he turned out to be a frail old man who liked young women and porn. They caught him with his pants down, literally.

  But chasing Bin Laden introduced the world to the Taliban. Another bad bunch. Harbourers of terrorists. Ethnic cleansers. Inciters of evil. So seeing as we’re over there why don’t we mop up that bad mob also?

  But why does all this matter?

  Because our men and women are risking their lives fighting for the cause that the government mandated. And when they come home to a country that barely remembers the war they started, it kind of messes with their minds. And when they come back a little messed up and worse for wear, shouldn’t we try and help them. Shouldn’t the instigators of the war on terror, and all the implicit supporters, which is, like it or not, every Australian citizen, seek to help these men and women? Forget about the The Bachelor or The Biggest Loser or The Real Housewives of such and such for a moment and consider the sacrifice these soldiers have made.

  So back to the original question.

  Who is to blame for Mason’s undoing?

  All of us – maybe?

  *

  Fitch is in his office thinking. That unexplainable sixth sense is screaming at him that things are about to get real messy. That his brother is out there, off his medication and spinning out of control. But finding him? Where does he start? His desk phone interrupts his thoughts.

  “So which one of those whores are you sleeping with today?”

  Fitch presses the phone tight to his ear. The station does not need to hear this.

  “You think I don’t know what you do? Come home late. Sleeping with those little bitches. You think I don’t know!”

  This was the same frail woman Fitch left sleeping at home this morning. The same woman that called earlier to wish him a happy birthday and to hurry home. The expired woman coiling now and striking like a cobra. It was the disease talking. This was not the woman he married.

  The doctors had given her three years, ten years ago. An imprecise prognosis from an imprecise profession. But the MS is slowly destroying her motor neuron function. Her movements have become difficult and her thoughts, at times like this, deluded.

  “You like me being trapped in here don’t you? So you got time to flit around town. So you can sleep with those whores at work. I swear if I see any of those little bitches I will kill them.”

  Fitch has heard it all before but it still hurts. Not the words but what they signal about his wife’s condition. Subconsciously he glances beyond his office window at the rest of the station. He is ashamed that this is his wife. That this is his life.

  “I reckon I should just end it all now. Just get your gun and shoot myself. Is that what you want? So you can be with those little bitches?”

  Fitch used to pray that she would get better. But it was a desper
ate impractical hope from a usually practical man. She would not get better. Modern medicine dictated a slow decline. So Fitch endured it. Not for the present or the future, but for the memories of the past.

  “You don’t think I would do it? Just get your gun and shoot myself. Leave a letter blaming you. So your…”

  Fitch gently hangs up. When he returns tonight she will not remember the call anyway.

  “Surprise!”

  A group barges into Fitch’s office with hats, streamers, squawking party blowers, and a cake with a single candle on it.

  “You know you’re getting old when we can’t find enough candles to match your age.”

  “Captain Fitch with his fifty year itch.”

  “Happy birthday to you. Happy…”

  Fitch smiles and endures the singing and candle blowing and kisses of his work colleagues.

  “Speech! Speech!”

  There was no escaping things.

  “I was hoping for this annoying milestone to go unnoticed,” Fitch says, “wishful thinking in a department full of detectives. Thanks for reminding me I’m one year older. Now get back to work.”

  “Aw. Captain of the Fun Police.”

  “Party pooper!”

  “Who’s been watching Grumpy Old Men?”

  They linger a while longer before obediently filing out and Fitch, feeling every one of his fifty years, goes to check if the tapes from the 7-Eleven holdup have arrived.

  “Just in,” the woman in surveillance says, “the armed robbery that wasn’t, enjoy Chief. And oh yeah, happy birthday.”

  Fitch takes the tapes and settles into the solitude of the dark monitor room to watch.

  *

  “So why are we here?”

  Mason remembers it as the most common question from the soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. Those soldiers questioning why they were sticking their necks out, literally, to preserve peace in a melting pot of ethnic infighting where there seemed no answer or end to the violence. Some soldiers had their own solution.

  Screw it, do us all a favour, and just nuke the Middle East.

  But, no, Mason has seen two sides to the region. He saw the bad but he also saw the good. He saw good and just people surviving amid the violence and hatred. He saw industrious people tending fields and stores and factories. Amid the brutality Mason saw good families trying to carve out a good life. Parents trying to secure the best they could for their children. He saw children fresh eyed and innocent. Mason saw these children and he saw hope. He pointed this out to one of his superiors after a nighttime raid on a supposed Taliban sympathiser’s family home.

  Irrelevant, soldier. There’s good and bad everywhere. If you don’t get rid of the bad they infect the good. And the good over here, they’re not really that good, they’re just not that bad. And if you accidently get rid of a few of the good while trying to get rid of the bad, that’s ok. Nuke the Middle East I say, would save us all a lot of trouble.

  But Mason knows the nuclear angle is flawed logic even beyond the moral pitfalls of destroying an entire region of the globe. You might achieve an instantaneous fix, but once the nuclear fallout clears, the scourge of terrorism will merely take seed in another part of the world. Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia. Home Grown (nice wholesome label that) terrorists in the US, Australia, Canada, Scandinavia. Terrorism has no boundaries. Cut off the head and another appears in its place.

  Terrorism is not based in religion or nationalism.

  Scouring the desert though, for a rarely seen enemy, left Mason a lot of time to think. The war, its premise and its objective, made no sense to him. Fighting to rid the world of terrorism. Really? Trying to defeat terrorism with terrorism. Mason concludes that the fight is necessary, there is no place for terrorism and cruelty in any of its forms, but the painting of an entire region as the antagonists is unfair. And he asks himself the same questions when he returns home. In search of answers he visits an extensive list of websites of supposed Middle Eastern terror groups and their supporters, but cannot discern any reliable message behind the propaganda of hatred and violence. He falls back on his own real life observations. He compares the people he encounters at home to the good people he saw on the ground in Afghanistan. The self-obsessed people grown fat physically and spiritually on the excess of their own good fortune versus the industrious farmers and shepherds and shopowners dodging death in the desert and towns.

  Different rules for different fools.

  Except one group has the power to declare war on the other, without so much as taking their eyes off the latest episode of The Bachelor.

  Mason is so immersed in his thoughts that he barely realises he has walked outside the town centre. Bush on his right and an old car wrecking yard on his left. He can hear the police cars in the distance, responding to the 7-Eleven robbery that wasn’t. He crosses the road and enters the trees.

  The shade offers some respite against the heat. But the silence and shadows unsettle him. They drag him back to Afghanistan. His medication starved mind confuses the trees for the mud buildings of a desert town. Eerie silence. The threat of death lurking in every shadow.

  He pulls the gun from his pocket and checks the chamber, loaded, Dumb and Dumber weren’t pretending. He tests the gun’s weight and grip, sighting down the barrel, one eye closed, one eye open. He likes the feel of the gun. Surrounded by hidden Taliban, it makes him feel safe.

  He takes aim and fires. Birds squawk and skitter as the trailing boom echoes through the bush. He smiles. That felt good. He sights again, bracing with both hands this time. A brutal thunder clap as bark splinters off a tree. But the Taliban are still closing in.

  He ducks and pivots, then rolls, and slithers on his stomach, gets back up on one knee sighting with the gun. Taliban insurgents are coming out of the trees and shadows. Come and get some of this. He makes pow pow pow sounds. He rolls again and crawls into the undergrowth. Mason’s eyes are furtive, peering through the thin spaces in the scrub. Watching, waiting…

  A noise startles him and he spins, swinging the gun around.

  Kill or be killed.

  A jogger stumbles off balance, too stunned to hide. Following perfect crime show etiquette, he raises both hands without being asked.

  Mason’s eyes are shifting and crazy. His finger takes up the tension of the trigger. A drop of sweat stings his eye, he blinks, and for a single, soul redeeming moment, he sees the innocent jogger for what he really is.

  Mason slowly lowers the gun. The jogger sprints away.

  Mason is shaking as he returns the gun to his brief case and exits the bush.

  “Get me job back,” he mutters as he heads for the train station.

  But he wants company and decides on a brief detour.

  *

  Revenge. A dish best served cold but never on an empty stomach.

  The gang have regrouped in a grilled chicken shop. The smell of cooked chicken and gravy fills the air. Fat drips from the twisting rotisserie. Bloodied and bruised, the Bad Boys of Western Sydney are still bristling with adrenalin from the morning’s fight on the train.

  Fight – if you call it that? More a one way arse kicking from an undercover UFC maniac. The old bastard had done them over, or–

  “Took us by surprise,” Ring Leader says, “I cut him. I…”

  He delivers a Braveheart-esq. motivational speech, stalking back and forth in front of the booth seats where his cronies are sitting. But his bloodied bottom lip messes with his put on homie talk. His disses and pisses sound like wisses and fwisses. And except for the bit about the cut hand, it is all imaginary bullshit. But the others get on board with it.

  “Yeah his eyes were rolling back in his head.”

  “He be shittin' in his wittin'.”

  “We’d be whoopin' his butt.”

  The shop owner watches perplexed from behind the counter. Their talk is a foreign dialect. It is inspired by some bad reruns of COPS – not the lame Australian spin-off but the original badarse
US version where you got cops and gangsters doing bad things to each other – bad boys bad boys – what ya gonna do…

  Well here’s what they’re gonna do.

  “We should go mess him up gee.”

  “Kick his bitchy arse back to bitchyville.”

  “Go dis that old MF.”

  But how? The MF is gone.

  “Hey,” one of them cuts in, “I lost me mobil-ee in the mel-ee.”

  Ring Leader’s eyes narrow.

  “You got Go Fetch app yeah?”

  The owner of the lost mobile nods.

  “Password,” Ringleader snaps.

  Ringleader taps his mate’s phone number into his own mobile and the app he purchased for $3 that allows him to locate a lost mobile anywhere in the world, springs to life. They gather around eager to see. And what they see is a Google Maps map and a small blinking red dot.

  “It seems,” Ringleader says, “that your mobile would be walking.”

  Satellite tracking technology in the hands of the masses.

  “Let’s go mess this MF up,” Ringleader says, “and this time,” he pauses to reveal a black hand gun in the oversized pockets of his oversized pants, “we do it properly.”

  They march out in their padded jackets to face the extreme heat, and the shop owner shakes his head in wonder.

  *

  Fitch sits alone in the dark room, his face very close to the wall mounted monitor. The specialised equipment offers some serious functionality; full HD, infrared, pixilation dilation, face recognition, super slow mo, super def enhancement – it makes close ups and freeze frames seem truly primitive. So intrusive is the focus of this thing that you can almost delve inside a criminal’s individual cells, and seen the neutrons and protons doing their electron thing. And currently the technology is going to work on the grainy CCTV footage from the recent 7-Eleven holdup.

  Fitch sees the store attendant straightening the impulse shelves as a customer briefly passes in front of the camera, his face cast in shadow. Then the would-be thieves burst into the place. Their faces are covered with balaclavas, one with a gun, the power forward taking charge at the counter, the other with a machete, on point guard. A man, maybe the customer from earlier, is forced to lie on the ground.