The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Grasso, his taskforce regimental sergeant major, touches him on the shoulder and holds up his open palm, fingers outstretched. Five minutes to go. Phelan nods.

  Never ask your men to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.

  But it’s a tough manifesto to live out from behind a desk. Tougher still for an officer who’s risen to a rank as high as this without having seen active combat himself. Not that it’s his fault. He’d stand in the face of enemy fire if he had to, he knows he would. He’d prepared himself for it, longed for it, greedily sought it when he was younger, but it never came – barely a shot fired in East Timor, and the postings in Iraq and Somalia only staff officer roles.

  The history of his tribe is replete with armchair officers, he knows this too well and fears ending his career like that. To truly lead, to test himself, to stand with his men in battle, that is something to aspire to. If anything, he’s found it harder to suppress his curiosity for action, to staunch his hunger for respect, to quell his envy when he sees soldiers return from enemy contact changed. But he makes do. He learns to plan an operation. Gets good at it. He’s read Monash compare generalship to conducting an orchestra, and pictured himself with a baton in hand. He’s sent warriors out on patrol. Again and again. Success after success. It gets almost too easy. That is, until they stop coming back.

  It wasn’t like this for Phelan’s predecessor. Or for the commander before that. Their commands were spotless. But Phelan – there’s no avoiding it – he’s got dead soldiers on his watch.

  The shock of the first, an earthquake of consequence, its tremors rippling still. Then a second, a third, a new reality entering the consciousness of the fighting force. Though his response – surely – couldn’t be faulted. There is what his position demands, and there is everything else he’s done. The visits and the letters and the reports. Standing beside their bodies in the camp morgue. Some days, his duties and his conscience stretching him closer to exhaustion than he’s ever been, he doubts himself. His judgement. He’s demanded review after review in an attempt to find a point – a decision perhaps – where he could have made a different choice. He’s tried to uncover some resourcing failure he could blame. Or a training inadequacy. A hundred times he’s replayed in his weary mind what he’s heard, what he’s seen. How can he possibly sleep knowing he has men who won’t, ever again? How could he not begin to fear each coming day and whatever news it will bring?

  Even the near misses offer no relief, make him queasy: a soldier who’d stepped on a pressure plate that didn’t go off, or caught a leg in a trip wire, or had it explode only for the shrapnel to be buried too low to get fragged. Some nights he’s been so sick with the consequences of the operations he’s approved, he half-wishes it was someone other than him making the decisions.

  Then the thought takes seed: go and see exactly what it is you’re sending them out into. Stand with them, experience it. It’ll be good for them to see you that far out in the field. And, Brigadier Phelan, it will also allow you to look yourself in the mirror, perhaps even to sleep. To know yourself as someone who would only ask his men to do something he is prepared to do himself.

  He wonders now, flying over terrain he has only studied on a map, if he has created a reason where one didn’t exist, concoted some vague logistical imperative to join a patrol out of the most isolated up-valley base. Not exactly defying the Chief, but close. For months he has pored over wall charts of the Uruzgan badlands. Each of their bases is a blot of friendly ink on a map that, in truth, is still being filled in. Our force is here to turn the badlands good, that’s the strategic objective. Each blot is supposed to spread as the friendly territory expands, and eventually one will join with the other. And then what will we have? he overhears his RSM muttering to himself before answering his own question: a fucking wildlife corridor.

  The operation is security for a meeting with local elders about building a ford over a river, one they can still use in summer when the snow melts and the water rises. The meeting is nothing grand – just a handful of locals, not big enough to qualify as a shura, and certainly no need for a brigadier. But he’s going to show solidarity with his soldiers on the front line, that’s what he’s been practising telling them.

  The Chinook arrives as planned at exactly 0630 hours. What takes Phelan forty minutes by air was a three-day ordeal by Bushmaster convoy for the men who established the base here. As the helicopter’s dust storm abates, Phelan follows his RSM and his warrant officer, Hartley, out of the chopper. Behind him comes a lieutenant from army media and another two soldiers, then finally the crew. His back is stiff as he bends beneath the blades, straightening fully only when he’s beyond the reach of the rotors’ gusts and he stops to grasp Lieutenant Anthony Gruen’s hand on the perimeter, the two men yelling greetings to each other above the engine-roar.

  Lieutenant Gruen is tall and lean, his dark hair clipped to a fresh stubble. He is barely older than most of his men. He gives Phelan a tour of the base, a simple wooden building, set in the centre of a small compound protected by HESCO-reinforced walls. As they match strides inside the perimeter wall, Lieutenant Gruen briefs him on the insurgency this far up-valley, only breaking his narrative to introduce the brigadier to his men – soldiers who take their earbuds out to greet him, or lay down their Bibles and weights to salute. Phelan looks them in the eye and repeats their names back to them. The base’s Afghan interpreter salutes him too.

  ‘Thank you,’ Phelan hears himself saying to the terp.

  ‘He’s solid,’ Gruen says as they move away, leading Phelan towards a break in the wall. ‘Good and solid.’

  Lieutenant Gruen points to the nearest village. Phelan looks over the HESCO down at the village and sees only desert and mudbrick and maize fields. There is no electricity, no steel, no cement. The water runs in open irrigation channels off the river, and the base is close enough to smell the smoke from their morning fires to know they burn their shit. There are fat-tailed sheep and barefoot shepherd boys, mules and water carriers.

  ‘You’d do well to find a single thing out there that couldn’t have been lifted straight from the Old Testament,’ Phelan muses.

  ‘Or the Koran,’ Gruen replies crisply.

  Phelan looks at the lieutenant. Was he correcting him? He turns back towards the village. ‘Are they friendly?’ he asks.

  ‘Pot shots in the first week or two,’ Gruen says, leading the brigadier away from the wall, ‘quieter now.’

  Gruen ducks his head as he passes through the doorway of the base’s building, its flat roof laid not with harvested grain like the compounds in the village below, but sandbags. Phelan follows him inside, his entourage trailing short paces behind.

  ‘Brew, Sir?’

  ‘If you’re having one, Tony,’ Phelan replies.

  Gruen hesitates just long enough to make Phelan doubt himself. ‘We weren’t going to, Sir.’

  ‘I certainly don’t need one,’ Phelan responds quickly.

  ‘We’ll start the patrol briefing then, Sir.’

  Route selection is everything, but in a narrow valley the options are limited: across the dasht, along the road that runs through the villages, through the fields, or some combination. Yesterday’s patrol started out along the footpad beside the village wall, so today Gruen picks a route that begins in the harvested field this side of the village.

  Once they’re all kitted up a cocky young corporal, Starc, walks down the line of soldiers, checking their gear, making sure everyone’s wearing dog tags – the brigadier and his warrant officer too.

  It’s obvious Lieutenant Gruen is proud of his boys and the way they’ve held up for the forty days they’ve been together inside this tiny base. Phelan imagines these soldiers putting themselves on the line, getting their arses shot at, having kids spit at them in the street, the hard work of winning hearts or minds up here. Forty days without shaving, without showering, sleeping on st
retchers cheek by jowl. By now Gruen must know these men better than his own family. He’d know who’ve got wives, girlfriends, kids, who’s taping glossy photos to rough posts beside their stretcher for everyone to share. Music, footy team, dick size. You train with blokes, you bed down with blokes, you fight with them, you get to know them. Who’s running from what, who’s hiding, how many of them are looking for their fathers.

  Mothers don’t like to hear it, wives even less, but there’s no better way of getting to know someone than to fight with them. And here Lieutenant Gruen and his men are, exhausted beyond the point of sound decision-making, but still turning up patrol after patrol, perhaps for no other reason than their mates are there with them.

  ‘Sir,’ Starc says, pointing to Phelan’s badges of rank, ‘unless you need ’em, it’s better to leave ’em. You don’t want to bring anything that might give you away. And if anything goes wrong you don’t want—’ He catches himself.

  Phelan guesses what it was the corporal thought better about saying – he wouldn’t want to give the Taliban something they can use for propaganda. Because while Phelan’s pack is lighter and he’s got no antenna that might identify him as a commander, he’s otherwise dressed as one of them: camos, body armour, webbing, helmet with its Australian flag sewn into the left-hand side, dark ballistic glasses, field dressings, hydration. Phelan strips the badges off his uniform, and hands them to his RSM, who’s staying at base.

  Beside him a sapper with a harelip is mucking around, flicking his unsuspecting comrades’ testicles through their trousers with the back of his middle finger.

  ‘Sapper?’ Phelan addresses him, reading his name on the uniform, Beckett.

  The soldier stands to attention, fearing an admonition, but Phelan gestures to his helmet cam which is already running.

  ‘You need to tape down the lights better,’ Phelan advises, pointing to the little green and red LED charge lights on the side of the camera. ‘They could give you away in the dark,’ he adds, pleased he has something constructive to contribute, even though he’d picked it up from a review of a special forces operation that had gone wrong rather than first-hand experience. ‘Put more gaffer over the lights, Sapper, that will do it.’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ snaps the soldier.

  Before they go, Lieutenant Gruen breaks the patrol into two sections and has them practise formations inside the compound, the order he wants from them on the outside. Phelan feels the adrenalin rush. This is what it’s all about, what it’s always been about. He feels his surging strength, feels his fifty years as an accumulated vitality, sucks in the air. He has his place in the column, warriors before him, warriors behind.

  Phelan watches the men who aren’t on patrol take up positions on the perimeter wall, covering the line of soldiers about to leave the base. The gate swings open ahead of him. Phelan loads his rifle before following Starc towards the compound entrance. The soldiers in front of him pat the bony head of the base’s pet goat before striking out through the gate, and Phelan does the same, something talismanic in the gesture.

  They head down the scree in single file, the sappers out front, taking the path across the rocks to the edge of the green zone below. Beckett is lead scout, with Phelan positioned in the centre of the patrol, his warrant officer immediately behind him. Phelan’s got cover front and rear. Gruen follows with the radio on his back, watching his boys gracefully scanning their arcs, and listening, for now, to the comforting sound of boot-crunch around him, while high above, out of view, the drone, Tiger Shark, is circling, feeding information down to him.

  At the edge of the green zone, irrigation channels and low mud walls separate the crops. Phelan watches as two giant bales of golden maize stalks bob slowly across the fallow earth in front of him, the women carrying them obscured by their loads, the late-harvest grain swaying like lions’ manes. The patrol breaks into two columns and crosses the stubble towards the village.

  When they reach the first mudbrick wall of the first compound, Phelan’s section makes its way down an alley that leads to the main road bisecting the village. He and his warrant officer, Hartley, work as a pair, covering each other as they move down the alley. You’re never more alive, Phelan thinks, never more a part of the universe than at moments like this, never more at home.

  The main street is swarming, even though it’s not market day. The high mudbrick walls on either side of the street collect and funnel the men and the children. The walls are pasted thick with election posters. Phelan hasn’t met President Karzai, not yet. A mule-man drives a dozen beasts down the road towards them, casually striking his beasts with his switch, puffs of dust coming off their flanks with each blow. Two men and a young boy squat in the doorway of a store, framed by brightly painted yellow wooden beams, grey shawls wrapped around each pair of shoulders. Their crooked toes protrude from their plastic sandals.

  ‘Salaam alaikum,’ Phelan greets them.

  ‘Walaikum salam,’ the men reluctantly reply.

  From the shade of a tree near the marketplace ahead, a group of mat-haired children look up from their play. Phelan waves at them but they are impassive. He reaches into a pouch in his body armour for some sweets and drops to one knee. The kids come forward and take the wrapped lollies from his giant gloved hand. Not curiously like sparrows, but greedily like butcher birds. As they’re finishing Phelan becomes aware of Gruen watching him. When he turns he catches an unguarded expression on the Lieutenant’s face. Though fleeting, Phelan recognises it. Disdain.

  Lieutenant Gruen orders the section to turn down another alley so they can link with the rest of the unit at the other end of the village. Phelan wipes sweat from his forehead, his hand momentarily passing across his eyes, when a bottle is thrown over a compound wall and lands just behind him, hissing. He dives before he’s even seen it, like it’s a grenade, and when it doesn’t go off immediately, he goanna-scrambles forward as fast as he can while the thing’s still spitting, not yet knowing it’s only a chloroform bomb and in the scheme of explosive devices out here, harmless enough. When he turns a corner out of the alley, panicked and still coiled, there’s a little girl running too, but towards him, straight into the barrel of his gun.

  And somehow, someway, somewhy, Phelan doesn’t shoot. He feels her forehead nudge the muzzle, actual skin against actual metal, and still he doesn’t shoot. She screams. Phelan looks at her, this little creature dissolving into terror, and understands the pressure of his finger against the trigger. She’s screaming and his finger’s tight and he’s looking at her, the little girl’s scream filling up the entire world.

  Lieutenant Gruen has nearly reached them when Phelan kneels and takes off his glasses, his helmet. Lays his rifle down beside him, smiles, or thinks he does. Phelan pats the girl’s shoulder like an uncle might, three or four times, lightly, then produces what’s left of his sweets. The girl is no longer screaming when her mother runs forward, and grasps her arm and pulls her away, knocking the lollies from Phelan’s outstretched palm onto the dusty road.

  Gruen picks up Phelan’s weapon and silently hands it to him.

  No Quiet Corner

  Kira repositions the pedestal fan. Its newly angled breeze touches Phelan as it moves mechanically back and forth, slowly passing across his body, cooling his skin in its steady sweep, ruffling the folds of his shirt. As he follows the blur of the fan’s blades, he detects a barely audible clicking sound, and thinks that if the fan was set at a slower speed the sound would be louder, would be an irritant, thinks how often you have to go hard at something or else be exposed by it. He feels a sharp pain and winces. Kira pulls back.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, settling back into his body.

  Kira reaches for new tissues from the box on her work station, turning away from Phelan momentarily. He notices for the first time the patch of sweat forming on the back of her singlet. When she turns to resume her work, he
looks beyond her to the wall mirror and its fresh image of this woman, Kira, bending over him. He is transfixed by her sweat-mark, and watches as it spreads across her dark back.

  The soldiers push on in the rising heat, village after harvesting village, their packs growing heavier with the sun overhead.

  ‘That was close back there, Boss,’ Hartley says to Phelan when they stop to slug water.

  ‘We were lucky, son,’ Phelan replies, a term he probably wouldn’t use if he and his wife had children of their own, but truer than he’d like that the army is a family of sorts, that he’d be adrift without it. Phelan’s manner appears perfectly matter-of-fact as he speaks – though his heart rate has still not come down – as if he’s already reviewing the incident from a report on his desk. As if the heat and the pack-weight are nothing, and if others need to stop for a drink the weakness is theirs.

  Phelan’s not for wilting. He doesn’t know a fifty year old fitter than him, and, as he now tells himself, he’s more determined than any of the youngsters here. He’s got a career to prove it, even one like his with his string of regimental and staff appointments, exchange postings where he could orchestrate them, his Chief Instructor roles, a term at the Royal College of Defence Studies in the UK, and then his ‘strategy and preparedness’ appointments on his return. What’s his rank if not evidence of his determination to succeed? Some of these privates, he reflects, are just training for their first exam, cramming desperately. They might be ready – no army trains its soldiers better, equips them better, and, most controversial of all among the coalition forces over here, pays them better – but what’s a year or two when set beside a lifetime of discipline and competition. The knowledge that might otherwise gnaw at him – that some of these young privates have seen the action that has eluded him – has been washed away by the adrenalin of the patrol.