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
