Poems Against War: A 'Journal' from Childhood and Teenage Years

War Games

1. Fort — Da!

The two ‘nature-loving’ boys set up fort

by laying branches across the apertures

between old wandoos — a clump

of trees on the middle of the paddock.

We — the ‘war boys’ — didn’t

expect it, trekking across open territory,

heading for the cover of the Top Bush:

the wandoos a safe place to munch

biscuits we’d packed before

leaving the farmhouse. It was

a strategic position because contours

and firebreaks took you right

past it — the paddock a killing

zone, all lines of sight and minefields,

thin green crop only up a month...

walk through there and there’d

be hell to pay. Looks are deceptive.

We’d let down our guard, coming

up to our ‘safe place’, but truth is

it’d long been a contested space:

the others liked to listen to the parrots

cavorting overhead. There’d once been

an echidna working termites in a hollowed

log. Large insects worked shadowy bark.

And so when we fell to the hail

of clods — boondies

mud peppered with gravel,

the upturnings of the plough

where wheat hadn’t set at the edges —

maybe we shouldn’t have been startled.

This was an aggressive environmentalism

we’d guessed might be possible, but

had rejected as being out of all

proportion. Brother to brother,

cousin to cousin, the hail

came from the peace-lovers,

while it was we, in our fatigues,

who yelled louder than the tractor

straining through boggy ground:

Not fair not fair! This is all wrong.

(ii)

A statement I am still

trying to work out

over forty years

later as I pass

another sign

pointing to the remnants

of an ancient Celtic hill fort,

so attractive to the invaders

long after.

                   And on Wheatlands farm,

it was alliances between Celt and Saxon

and Celt on restless, hyperventilating land.

Alliances against the ‘wild Aborigines’

who we knew must come with spears

and vengeance. Why wouldn’t they?

Ambush: Latin to French to English.

I don’t know the Noongar word.

What right do I have to the devices

of language, the codes

of resistance?

What right to remember

what I remember.

The era, childhood,

the legacies,

2.  Scale Models

Airfix. Miniature. To scale.

Bedroom festooned

with armour, bristling

with tanks and anti-tank

guns — terrain & camouflage.

Leopard tanks, Shermans,

Centurions. Catalogue.

Library. Firepower.

Amassing strength.

Deflecting shells.

Blitzkrieg a-political

masculine word choice.

I’d tried everything else

I could think of. I didn’t

believe in destiny

though I feared fate.

3. ‘I don’t want to play wars.’

Said my younger brother

as I flung Cape lilac berries

at his head. Me, kitted

out in constructor’s safety

helmet, home-made ‘rifle’,

backpack and ammo pouches.

I had fought many enemies

and triumphed but there

was no body count

outside my head.

I needed independent

verification of casualties:

at least one ‘severely wounded’

who might be treated: I carried

a genuine first aid kit.

This was the path to being a general.

My father had nothing to do with it,

being ‘Up North’ and having

done his time in Nashos —

‘character-building’,

served with Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer,

missed Korea and Vietnam

as the timeline unwound.

4. Movies

Primed in black & white, Saturday arvo

war movies on wet winter days — quagmire,

trenches, bogged down in Audie Murphy.

So obsessive, I spent the time spotting

inconsistencies in weaponry, uniforms,

ordnance — historical anomalies,

being in possession of the facts,

the truth, as I was.

                                  Don’t argue

with me — do your research, mate.

I saw the colour of the battlefield,

never the colour of the blood.

5. Purnell’s History of the Second World War

Purnell’s every Saturday morning for a year

ordered through the local newsagency.

And more. All going smoothly in the fields

of death, campaigns across the steppes,

Battle of the Coral Sea, Fortress Europe.

Then the Holocaust Issue. Then silence.

No wars for the week. No recreating

battlefields in bedrooms. No self-control

to make general staff material.

And I was too young to read Celan

and find a way through poetry.

I was too old to want to die

in the trenches.

6. War Games

Strategy games. Too old to kill each other in the backyard,

the mind wants more — campaigns, scenarios, turning

the tides of history. The SS Death’s Head Division

a black counter on the hexagon of country, terrain.

Attack strength, defence strength, capacity

for movement even when supplies

are in short supply on the front elsewhere.

Clinical as reading Wilfred Owen at school

and perfectly understanding the poetic effect

of horror. The slips between writing and reading,

taking orders and giving orders. Who said,

‘Different wars...’ or ‘Every war is different...’

No one, I hope, no one. Though I imagine

it’s likely, and I thought it back then.

7. Debate

Reading Clausewitz On War and Guderian’s Achtung! — Panzer

(the allies didn’t charge him after the war and he was valorised

as an acceptable incarnation of the elite soldier... something

for those who love war as a human quality — deep in their souls —

to cling to) and Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico

and Sun Tzu ur-text The Art of War, I was a full bottle

on why wars are: inevitable, necessary, desirable.

I am — point blank — too humiliated to recount

the details of my argument, and unwilling to hide

behind the smokescreen: ‘I was given that side

of the debate... the rules, the art-form, the discipline...’

qualities I have no belief in now, and probably not then.

And the Head Girl, taking the side for peace,

argued with as much passion against war

as I did for. A professional cool, a studied vehemence

was my guiding light.  And the war-loving boys

who made my life hell — physical and sexual

and psychological abuse — looking on

to see their future commander in action!

I could tell them that Master Sun said...

‘Exploit the enemy’s dispositions

     To attain victory’

But the spies among my own team

sold me out — a pathetic specimen

to lead the assault,

conduct their war.

     John Kinsella