Coming Home

by Max Bolt

  –better than average when you have John Howard in charge. Enter Big John, or Little John, as he were. It is 14 September 2001, and Little John stands on the lawns of parliament and declares war on terror. The day is warm, the sky clear and blue, as the then Prime Minister, in response to the Twin Tower terror attacks in the US, enacts Article IV of the ANZUS treaty, and commits his country to a war in the desert on the other side of the earth against an, as at that point, unidentified enemy.

  Eight months later, Mason lands in Afghanistan. Sand and rocks and mountains and–

  Terror.

  Terror in the hills, terror in the skies, terror in the streets of the mud brick towns. Terror in the eyes and minds of the local women and children. And confusion in the military.

  I know we are at war but just who are we fighting again?

  That is one of the challenges of declaring war on an enemy that has no acknowledged leader or legal identity. But the old-timers are clear.

  The Taliban, son. Those crazy bastards in the caves and hills. That’s who we’re fighting.

  Yeah, remember that dipshit Bin Laden?

  Bin Liner?

  Yeah him. He’s best mates with the Taliban. Been up in those caves getting high on opium with ‘em for decades.

  But what have the Taliban done to us?

  Not the point soldier. It’s what they might do to us. Now get your shit together and keep your head down.

  So Mason does what he has been trained to do. He kills the enemy, once he works out who the enemy really is. Because the enemy look the same as the local farmers and shepherds, except instead of a staff they’re carrying a Russian subsidized AK47 rifle.

  The Taliban, I know we’re fighting them, but who are they? Are they a race, an organization, or some religious sect?

  That’s enough with the Q&A soldier. Who gives a shit? This isn’t the time to interrogate the specifics of things.

  Because the reality is these Taliban, whoever they are, are loaded up with AK47, SAM, IED, shoulder mounted rocket launchers (strange where all those weapons come from), access to the Internet, and a local knowledge that makes them real dangerous. They live inside booby-trapped caves and move unseen through the mountains packing some serious firepower.

  Mason quickly gets past the consequences of firing a gun. This isn’t training, people actually die. He picks off some of the nebulous Taliban enemy. But it is not all one way traffic as the Taliban know about guns too and have a decent aim. And as the casualties mount up around Mason, he’s thinking none of this was in the glossy military recruitment brochures.

  The Taliban also know a thing or two about guerrilla style warfare. They bury death by IED in the sand and in roadside ambushes. So Mason travels through the desert in an allied convoy, living in constant fear that his vehicle might trip the hidden wire that blows his truck and everything in it to pieces.

  But Mason gets through the first month, and the next, and the next, living each day in a constant state of anxiety, as he sets about erasing the Taliban trail of terror. He cuts down the Shiite women and children that the Taliban have left hanging from trees. He buries the severed heads that have been pinned on stakes as a warning to those that might sympathise with the Western Infidels. He sees fellow soldiers blown up and burnt to death. He sees severed limbs and mental meltdowns. He sees all of this and realises that it could just as easily be him getting shot or cut up. Death, in this god forsaken desert, is completely random and indiscriminate.

  Mason cries when the Taliban ambush his convoy in a narrow ravine and rain bullets down on them. And he worries after he does some screwed up (outside the rules of engagement) things to the first Taliban he catches after that, prompting his senior officials to let him in on a secret.

  Rules? There are no rules. This is not a game. This is not sport. The rules you heard about back home were designed by men and women that have never had a bullet wizz past their head. So you don’t be crying over a Taliban that would kill you just as quick as you might kill him.

  Then there are the Taliban that Mason captures for interrogation; interesting word that in-terro-gation, amid the war on terror. Mason does not do the questioning but he knows what he is handing the prisoners over to. He has heard the stories and seen the aftermath. The ones that talk get off easy. The ones that think they won’t talk, always do. In-terro-gation is a very personalised activity, the trick is finding the right motivation. For some it’s dogs, for others it’s sleep deprivation or being stripped and beaten, and for the really stubborn there is always water boarding and electrocution. You just keep working through the toolbox until you find the right tool. Eventually everyone talks.

  Mason lives and breathes all of this. He lives every second of his three years on the front line thinking it will be his last. A million images and actions hardwired into his brain. The things he does. The things he sees being done. The things he thinks might be being done. Humans being inhumane with each other. The inhumane being human with each other. And after a short time that way of living becomes normal. He becomes what the people who trained him intended him to become. A killing machine with a gun.

  And at the end of it all he is one of the lucky ones who comes home. He swaps the desert for the trees and morals of suburbia. And once he is home those same people that turned Mason into that hunting, mistrusting, killing machine, expect him to erase everything he learnt and saw. Because that kind of behaviour has no place in Australia’s cultured society. In short, it is just not cricket.

  But you cannot erase what has been hardwired. It becomes part of you.

  And that part of Mason surfaces now as he stumbles bleeding toward the Kingswood medical centre.

  *

  Mason has never been off his medication this long and it shows. He is shaking and sweating. He is muttering to himself about his injury and how he’s going to get his job back. He ducks from his reflection in the store windows as reincarnations of his time in the Middle East return. He believes the enemy are hiding behind the buildings and parked cars. Armed Taliban lurking in the shadows. A blast of hot wind stirs the litter in the gutter like dust and spinifex in the Afghan desert. He takes cover inside the medical centre.

  The air conditioned oasis snaps Mason back to reality. The empty white waiting room is a temple to the wonders of modern medicine. Posters of people with perfect faces on the walls. Celebrities endorsing cosmetic procedures. Charts of the human body with dotted lines and call out boxes highlighting everyday imperfections; Don’t let your body get you down; get down with your body. There was a time, Mason recalls, when a doctor’s waiting room contained the obligatory skeletal mannequin and spruiked warnings about cholesterol and heart disease and smoking. The photoshopped, made perfect faces Mason sees now, are alien to him.

  The receptionist looks up. Her face is flawlessly flawed.

  “Can I help you?”

  Mason holds up his tie wrapped hand.

  “I cut myself. It needs stitching.”

  She gasps but her frozen expression holds firm.

  “What happened?”

  “Cut it shaving.”

  “The hospital is nearby,” she offers, completely missing the joke, “I can call ahead for you.”

  Mason glances at the pamphlets on the counter. A complete inventory of body altering treatments: Botox, jaw line redefinition, eye lift, neck lift, brow lift, grin lift, butt lift, breast augmentation, umbilicoplasty (what?), gynecomastia (huh?); a complete list of things to lift and fill and scrape and smooth, including the twin sealed sections; labiaplasty and phalloplasty – and the perfect self-esteem hooks to get you in – have you ever wanted the perfect smile – want your twenty-something face back – want to look and feel yourself again (now that is stretching things).

  “Is the doctor in?”

  “He is out at lunch.”

  Her expression holds like concrete but her eyes give away the lie. Mason makes for the closed office with the doctor’s nameplate beside it.

  �
��Excuse me. You can’t go…”

  Mason barges in and finds a man in a white coat with his feet up on a desk reading the paper.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. But I need some stitching.”

  Mason presents his hand like a trophy. The would-be doctor is shocked.

  “We don’t do that here.”

  Mason sits down in the patient’s seat.

  “A medical centre that doesn’t do stitching?”

  The doctor senses Mason’s unhinged behavior. He’s heard about ice and crack and all that. Like they say in the movies – he could have a live one on his hands. The receptionist stumbles in.

  “Is everything alri…”

  “Yes My Sweet,” the doctor soothes, “everything is fine. You can return to the front desk.”

  “Uh uh,” Mason interjects, “you stick around My Sweet. Just sit down there on the desk. Can’t have you calling the police now, can we?”

  The woman tip toes in on her high heels and sits uncomfortably on the corner of the desk. She is petrified but her face won’t budge. The doctor stands but Mason pulls the knife from his brief case and the doctor sits back down, patting the air with his hands.

  “Now sir. Please calm down.”

  “Look. I’ve had a bad day,” Mason says, “it’s a hundred degrees out there and I’ve got to get into town. This is a medical centre right? You are a doctor?”

  The doctor nods.

  “You know how to stitch someone up, yeah?”

  The doctor shakes his head.

  “What?” Mason says, “you bulk bill all these bullshit procedures. You charge the Australian taxpayer for turning people into Barbie and Ken, but you won’t do a wee bit of stitching?”

  “Not wounds like that,” the doctor replies.

  “Alright,” Mason says, “I guess I got to show you how then. I need a needle and thread.”

  The doctor stands.

  “Uh uh. Not you,” Mason says, “her.”

  “In the cabinet down the hall My Sweet,” the doctor instructs.

  “And don’t be thinking of calling the police,” Mason calls after her, “I’m just gonna stitch meself up and then you two can get on with whatever it is you get up to in this place.”

  Mason looks around the room while he waits. More photos of pristine faces and bodies. A picture of a beautiful girl made ugly by a swathe of dotted lines and arrows crisscrossing her face.

  “So tell me,” Mason asks, “just what do you do in this place?”

  “We improve people’s self-esteem.”

  “Really,” Mason says, “you ever set a fracture?”

  The doctor shakes his head.

  “Removed an appendix?”

  No.

  “Cleared an ear infection?”

  Negative.

  “Frozen off a wart?”

  “Taken a temperature?”

  “Prescribed antibiotics.”

  “Diagnosed Tonsillitis?”

  Nope, nada, uh uh.

  “People come in here lacking self-confidence,” the doctor counters, “and they leave…”

  “With a face that won’t budge if you hit it with a sledgehammer,” Mason interjects.

  The receptionist returns and places a plastic container on the doctor’s desk. The doctor gets out of his seat but Mason waves him back.

  “Sit down. You ain’t qualified for this, allow me.”

  *

  The wound is deeper than Mason expected, but the shock of every wound is relative to those seen before. Cue Afghanistan and roadside IEDs and soldiers; delimbed, cut and burnt.

  Mason falls back on his military training. It wasn’t all tanks and skirmish in the Australian Outback. Self-administered first aid is critical in conflict situations. He sifts through the medical items.

  “First you disinfect,” Mason narrates as he splashes the wound with iodine liquid, “then you thread the needle.”

  “A local antiseptic?” the doctor offers.

  Mason ignores him and places his arm on the doctor’s desk.

  “Come on, gather round.”

  The doctor and receptionist move in reluctantly as Mason begins stitching. The needle pierces and stretches the skin, and the thread pulls it tight.

  “You know I got sacked today after ten years with the same company. Then my car breaks down and I get rolled by a bunch of kids on the train. But hey, I got a plan. I’m getting me job back. Yeah, on me way to town to get me job back. Ain’t no one going to stop me.”

  The receptionist starts to sway.

  “Hang in there My Sweet. Nearly done,” Mason says.

  She starts crying. Her tears running like rain down a glass window.

  “There,” Mason concludes, displaying his sewn up hand, “a little crooked but not bad under the circumstances. Scissors?”

  The woman cuts the thread before promptly fainting.

  “Too much for her.”

  Mason picks up his knife and twirls it in his uninjured hand.

  “Now I’m going to leave and you, doctor, are not going to call the police,” Mason says.

  Mason passes a woman in the reception area on his way out.

  “Look,” Mason says presenting his bandaged hand, “bloke’s a miracle worker. Good as new.”

  The heat hits him like a molten wave as he steps outside. He returns to the train station and gets on the first city bound train.

  “Getting me job back,” he mutters.

  *

  The call comes through on Fitch’s personal mobile, the number reserved for his wife and several others. The voice is female and upset.

  “Fitch. He’s gone. I don’t know where he is. He’s…They sacked him this morning and he’s gone. I’m afraid he’ll…”

  Fitch massages his bald head. The heat was getting to everyone, even his usually straight-minded estranged sister-in-law. Fitch had been close enough to Linda, his younger brother’s estranged wife, but less so since the split. Fitch meets her hysteria with some clinical precision.

  “Linda. Slow down. Who? Where? And What?”

  “Mason,” she says, “he lost his job this morning. They fired him. And he’s just up and gone.”

  Fitch considers this crisis against the others on his list. Sure Fitch’s brother Mason has a history of violence; he brought the war back with him from Afghanistan, but therapy and medication had set him straight.

  “He left his pills behind, Fitch.”

  Fitch starts listening. On the pills Mason was odd but socially passable. Off the pills he was dangerous. Fitch knows this as he had personally advocated the treatment for Mason’s post-war traumatic depression.

  Fitch remembers Linda first telling him about the demons haunting her husband. The nightmares and the cold sweats. How Mason was struggling to adjust. Fitch brushed it off at first but things escalated. Mason became reclusive, antisocial and abusive. Linda covered the bruises and cuts with makeup and lies. But people only walk into the kitchen cupboard so often. And it culminated one night when Mason, drunk and strung out, brought himself to the police station.

  “Arrest me brother. Please.”

  Mason was crying. His eyes shifting and unstable. Fitch had a dim recollection of his ten year old pre-war younger brother crying over some trivial mishap growing up. The unhinged adult post-war Mason was foreign looking. Fitch called Linda. She told him about the violence and how the bastard had better not come near her again. There was enough evidence to have Mason charged and Mason was up for it too.

  “Go on brother. Lock me up and throw away the key.”

  Fitch did, for a night at least, in a holding cell. In the morning when Fitch returned, Mason was red eyed and unable to recall the previous night.

  “Do you know what you did last night?”

  Mason shrugged.

  “Bad stuff?”

  “Yes some very bad stuff. And you’re not going to do any more bad stuff. Not to your wife. Not to your son. Not to anyone.”

>   Mason stared at Fitch.

  “I don’t want to go back out there brother. I don’t like it out there.”

  The confession made Fitch pause. How could this former soldier who had faced death and fear daily, be reduced to this? And prison was not the answer. Fitch believed there had been a miscarriage of justice. Mason had fought to defend this country and Australia had abandoned him. And Fitch, having encouraged his younger brother to enter the military, felt personally responsible for Mason’s demise.

  “You are going to get yourself some help,” Fitch said.

  Mason shook his head.

  “I don’t need no shrink.”

  “Think about what you did last night and say that,” Fitch countered, “think about the example you’re setting for your son and say that.”

  “I never asked for any of this.”

  “But you got it, so you got to deal with it.”

  Fitch handed Mason a piece of paper with a number of a military psychologist on it.

  “I’ll check with him in a week’s time to make sure you have called him.”

  So instead of throwing the book at his brother, Fitch tossed him a hash brown and McMuffin, and a second chance.

  “Eat and then get out of here.”

  “He’s dangerous Fitch. He’s crazy.”

  Linda’s frantic voice drags Fitch back.

  “I’ll look into it,” Fitch says, “now stay home and call me if he calls.”

  Fitch hangs up and finds Nate.

  “Get up kid we got some work to do.”

  “Murder or armed robbery?”

  “Neither. Come on.”

  “Really? In this heat?”

  Chapter 4

  Now back to Mason’s reintegration to society.

  So Mason goes to war intact and comes back a little messed up. To be fair the Australian government invests in the welfare of their returned serviceman. We created the problem so we assist in fixing it. Well kind of. There is providing assistance and then there is taking responsibility. The first helps temporarily with your problem, the second helps permanently with our problem. The government sets aside millions in federal budgets; temporary housing, employment support, free medical and hospital cover. But then?