Battle lines: Australian stories of war

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While our bookshelves heave with military mythology, where are the Australian novels examining our participation in modern conflicts, including our longest war? New “All wars are…

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”— Viet Thanh Nguyen

One of us had to go to the wedding, and Sam was in Afghanistan – convenient bloody excuse. He was working as a political adviser with the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan, living in a shipping container on the base at Tarin Kowt. I was wearing a dress I hated in a big, white tent.

But I was the brave one – everybody told me. So alone, so publicly alone. Drinking budget champagne and making the smallest of talk. In the years Sam was deployed, I became fluent in wife-pity. I knew all its sly forms, from simpering to vampiric. The wedding added a bridal flourish.

At the reception dinner, one of the strangers at my table leant over and explained that he’d just read an article – online somewhere, but, like, totally reputable – about how the field hospitals in Afghanistan were full of guys who’d stepped on homemade IEDs and blown their nuts off.

Was that something I was worried about? “How would you feel if your fella came back with an empty fruit basket? Or without his banana?”

I chewed my chicken-or-fish. The table waited, watched. Before I could speak, the guy next to me chimed in. “I mean, it’s kind of perfect, though, isn’t it? These dudes fucked a country, now they can’t fuck their wives.”

I’d love to give my past self the perfect retort, but I was spared by the speeches – a toast to absent friends. I charged my glass.

I suspect there were real questions lurking beneath all that fruit-basket bullshit, questions about what we give to a war – bodies, certainties, justifications – and what we mutilate in the process. About what happens to the people who go, and the people who wait for them. About how fear changes the shape of a marriage. But nobody knows how to ask those questions, so they ask about ballistics and ballsacks. Or the warzone logistics of phone sex. Whether you plan to make a baby on decompression leave just in case.

I’ve been asked many ugly…

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