Shitfight
By Alie Benge. Originally published in Landfall.
The grenades aren’t shaped like pineapples, as I’d thought they would be, but more like cans of Coke. My hands shake as I select one out of the tin box; it could be a cake tin, or a box of chocolates. The bombs are in ordered rows. The pins are more complicated than in the movies. You could never pull them out with your teeth. (This information is met with collective disappointment, akin to when we learned that shooting from the hip was not an approved firing position.) You pull the pin as far as it will go and then twist your wrist slightly further than is comfortable. Resist the compulsion to brace the grenade against your stomach to help you twist.
A grenade is three pieces. Pin, bomb, and lever. It’s not the pin that activates the bomb. The pin releases the lever. The separation of the lever activates the bomb. I stand with a grenade in one hand and the pin in the other. There’s a corporal next to me whose job it is to drag me around the trench wall and jump on me if I happen to drop the grenade and throw the pin. I stare at my hands and remember a time in school when I unwrapped my sandwich, threw the bread in the bin and raised the paper to my mouth.
I throw the grenade, and watch the lever fly away. The corporal and I duck below the trench. Sound pounds over us, now a solid thing. I could reach up and run my hands through this sound. When the living and synesthetic sound dies back, there’s a soft pattering of falling earth and shrapnel. The corporal lifts his head over the trench, swearing and holding his hand on his heart.
‘Try throwing a little further this time.’
In the recruitment interview they ask if you could ever kill someone. The correct answer is, ‘If they were a threat to Commonwealth people or property, then yes. Of course I could.’ A boy in the year above me at school had trained for months to get into the army. When he was asked this question, he said no and was told he didn’t need to wait around for the physical. For me, it was easy to say the words, words being all they were. I was only signing up for the gap-year programme. I wouldn’t be in the army long enough to have to decide. This was a temporary solution until I worked out what I really wanted to do. I wouldn’t fall for the propaganda, I knew how these things worked, I’d read Wilfred Owen.
The bugle plays at 6am. We rip both sheets off our beds and stand in the hallway with the sheets over our shoulders. We yell our numbers in turn. One of the first things to get used to is hearing my own voice so loudly. The yelling bursts the capillaries in our noses and they bleed, off and on, for the first week. After the bugle and the ripping and the yelling we are given fifteen minutes to dress and make our beds, ruler in hand, measuring the part of the sheet that folds over the duvet, the placement of the pillow from the head of the bed and the extra rug that is folded on the end.
As we get further through training the fifteen minutes is reduced to eleven and then nine. The movement and the measuring and the obeying lead to a suspension of thought that leaves no room for anxiety or indecision. Thought is replaced by a narrow consciousness that zooms in on the pulling of laces through boots and the synchronised lifting of mattresses. We’re being trained not to think. The point of these three months is to break us down and build us up again as soldiers. They don’t want someone on the battlefield who will pause or question orders. They want soldiers who will obey. This suspension of thought is useful when I realise the showers don’t have doors.
The platoon that lives above us is instructed to take all the furniture from their rooms, carry it down the stairs, and reassemble the rooms on the parade ground. They’re given ten minutes but they take eleven. They’re told to carry the furniture back to their rooms and start again. Each time they fail, the time limit is reduced. They repeat the exercise until a recruit drops his end of the bed on the stairs, curls his arms around his knees and rocks against the stairwell, saying, ‘There’s not enough time, there’s not enough time.’ His suitcase is returned to him and the other recruits help him pack it. A different recruit goes missing in the night and is found marching down the highway in his pyjamas.
I get infringed twice in one week. The first for not starching my slouch hat well enough; the second for leaving a piece of paper on my desk. When rust is found on my bayonet the infringement is upgraded to a charge. I want to explain that it wasn’t my bayonet, that all the bayonets in the armoury were redistributed at random before the inspection. But I’m standing on a white line being yelled at, forbidden to make eye contact. There’s no designated time for explanation, and no point if there were. So I get up at 5am and march around the parade ground wearing a pack carefully measured to be one third of my weight. Corporal Steele, the only person I’ve ever truly hated, follows behind.
‘You’re a retard, aren’t you, Recruit Benge?’
‘Yes, Corporal.’
‘What are you, Recruit?’
‘A retard, Corporal.’
There’s comfort in knowing he also had to get up at 5. Bombardier asks me why I’m such a shitfight (noun: Someone who is bad at everything they do; everything they touch turns to shit). The name sticks. It attaches itself to me and I hear it when I fall through the netting on the obstacle course, when I realise I haven’t seen my rifle since the last time we stopped for a break, when I panic about running through an underground drain half full of water. ‘Shitfight’ is staccato. It’s sung like a nursery rhyme, and whispered under a breath as I pass. My own name falls away and ‘Shitfight’ takes its place.
People ask me why I’m here, in this space where I so obviously don’t fit. I tell them I thought I knew what I’d wanted after school: an internship, a desk that I could put framed photos on, a career in advertising. But it wasn’t what I’d expected. I want basic training to be over, but not like I’d wanted those months to be over. My future had stretched out before me, the same day, the same bus ride, the same nine hours. I struggled for breath in the never-endingness of it all. Here, at least I don’t wake up sad, count down the hours from 8am, and cry behind my sunglasses on the ride home. Perhaps that’s what keeps me here while people who aren’t shitfights have breakdowns in stairwells. Perhaps they had a second option, something to return to. But I can shut out the insults and dull their edges in a way that I could never dull monotony. I may be a shitfight, but at least I’m not bored.
I can’t remember what I’d imagined the army would be like. Whatever I dreamed about beforehand was quickly excised by the bright, dusty, out-of breath reality. It was my friend Sophie who first dreamed up the plan. We would enlist in the gap-year programme together, get good Myspace photos, save our money, and go travelling when it was all over. It was these prizes that kept me going as I performed the nightly jog around the block that was my training. I was dreamy, with no thought of war or politics, and I needed the hope of something different. Then Sophie didn’t get in and I had to do it by myself.
Bombardier gives us this: ‘You’re on a mission in Iraq. You and three others. It’s crucial that you aren’t seen. On the last day of your mission, a young girl wanders into your camp. She starts to cry and run for home. What do you do?’ We say, ‘Bug out.’ We say, ‘Abandon the mission.’ When he shakes his head, we say, ‘Restrain her somehow until we’re done and then let her go.’ These are not allowed. Bombardier waits, but no one will say it. We’re given a talk about hesitation.
I’m surprised by how much talking there is. I learn to yawn with my mouth closed and rest one eye at a time. We’re given talks about honour and tradition. About sacred duties and administering justice. During the latter I dodge my eyes away from pictures of children in an Iraqi town, their skin bubbled away. The results of chemical weapons. They tell us about landmines, how they’re designed not to kill but to maim. The lesson is on the Ottawa Treaty, which outlawed their use. On a PowerPoint slide is a list of non-signatories: the nations that ignored the treaty and continued to plant mines like seeds to bloom under children and farmers. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Other lessons are on the Anzacs, the Rats of Tobruk, the Victoria Cross. The talks could be divided into ‘Who is your enemy?’ and ‘Who are you?’ The will to win is praised. A lack of aggression is shamed. We watch videos of tanks in formation driving down a road, soldiers running, all in slow motion with cinematic music.
In school I’d craved an opportunity for radicalisation. In primary, my friend and I would change our names to sound like hippies. One week I would only answer to Sunshine Daydream, the next Mountain Flower. We would play suffragists without any understanding of the concepts of voting or violence, having not yet identified oppression.
The radicalisation was an objective desire. It had no subject or direction. An end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Something about the stories I’m told during training get in my blood. They touch the part of myself that wants to fight for something, to belong to a community and be part of their movement. Besides, there is shame in not believing their ideology, and I’ve had enough of being shamed. Soon I’m running my hands over my scalp as my hair floats to the ground. I’m standing on parade on Anzac Day. A swell of pride and a forgetfulness. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Lest we remember.
The lines on the targets are arranged in a disruptive pattern. Enough black against yellow to suggest a human form, but not so many lines that it’s obviously a person. The hope is that in another context, another time, we’ll see only this suggestion of a person through our cross-hairs.
There’s a recruit named Cameron who, for some reason, we call Dick. His interest in death is awkward. His questions about it reveal something in himself that we’re uncomfortable being near. He asks Bombardier if he’s ever killed anybody. Bombardier sneers at him and says, ‘There’s something not right with you, Dick.’ But as he walks away he says, ‘I don’t know. You drop a bomb from a plane. It explodes. What do you think?’ I wonder what Bombardier sees on those strange nights when you wake in a half-dream state and things come back to you, larger than they are in the daylight. Does he see a door open in a plane and a flash of light and fire?
During basic training I can’t imagine ever being out of here. How was it that once I could get in my car and drive somewhere? How did I govern my own time? The day we graduate there’s a feeling in the air, like on the last day of school when we’d stack the chairs in towers and talk about holidays. As I get on the bus to leave, Corporal Steele yells over the crowd that he’s going to call my next posting so they know to expect a shitfight.
The bus takes me to a holding platoon in Melbourne where I’ll sort out everything I need for corps-specific training. The first job I’m given is to write my will. After that, I’m led to my new bedroom and I’m alone for the first time in three months. When my door closes I feel like the only oxygen is on the other side. I fold socks under the door so it won’t close fully. I go to the shops to buy my dad a birthday present but I can’t remember how to decide.
I finish my training in Melbourne and I’m sent to Townsville where the air is so hot it feels like hands around your throat. There are only two seasons here: the hot season and the wet season. They’re both hot, it’s just that one is also wet. A stranger tells me he once saw a bird die in mid-air and fall from the sky. I live in a building with artillery boys and I sleep with a crowbar next to my bed. An email goes around telling us to watch out for the crocodile that lives in the river by the gym. Townsville is a garrison town. It was ready to be deserted before the base was built, and now the town’s industry is geared towards catering to soldiers. The civilians here call us Army Jerks because we drink too much and start fights at The Strand on hot weekend nights. They don’t smile at us. It’s suggested we avoid public transport and travel in twos. Our shaved heads and strong arms give us away. I’m blasé about the warnings, over-confident, until something is slipped into my drink and I spend a night staring at taxis and telling people I have stars in my wrists. This is the fifth time I’ve changed cities this year and sometimes I look for landmarks to remind me where I am.
The eighth of March hovers in my mind as the day I enlisted and the day I can leave. Yet as March approaches I find I’m not ready to go. If I stay I could get a post in Brisbane, a deployment in June. A deployment means I could buy a house, or go to uni without a student loan. I have to decide.
There are hippies dancing and waving signs outside the base in Townsville. One shakes a sign at drivers that says, ‘Honk if you want peace.’ Another, ‘Refuse to serve in Afghanistan.’ I drive past on the way to Subway and think how almost a year ago I might have done something like that. The next month civilian protesters sneak into Talisman Sabre, a joint exercise between Australia and America. They try to take videos of our training but they’re caught by the fenceline. People are getting angrier and security is tightened on base. We talk in groups about how civilians have no idea what’s going on over there; how we’re training the Afghan National Army, equipping them to look after themselves, and then we’ll leave. We say war is the means by which peace is achieved. We bolster one another’s opinions and they flourish. The eighth of March arrives and slides past. I’m posted out to Brisbane. I prepare for a war I don’t understand and I wait as one after another, deployments are promised and then fall through.
In Brisbane I learn that if anyone was to invade Australia, it should be at 7pm when everyone on base is drunk. During one of these 7pms I meet Steve, a lance corporal in training. He likes me because I’m the only girl here and my hair is almost grown back. I like him because he has those muscles with the veins running along them, because he has a higher security clearance and tells me secrets, and because he’ll be gone soon. He’s off to Afghanistan as soon as his promotion comes through. He says cooks are safe over there. He’ll get put on sentry and patrols, but it’s a non-combat role. I tell Steve that a cook at training told me if insurgents get all the way to the kitchens, they’ve broken through every line of defence. The cook had said, ‘Wait till they flood in, wait as long as you can, and then blow up the gas tanks. Get right up close and you won’t feel a thing.’
Before Steve leaves, a cook from our battalion is killed. He was on sentry duty with a recruit of the Afghan National Army. The story gets through the cracks in security. Around base people pass the story back and forth. The recruit must have killed him because the shot was in his back, and because the recruit disappeared into the desert on the back of a waiting motorbike. I thought of those conversations in Townsville. How we’d believed one another about war bringing peace.
Men die in the Afghan spring, when insurgents come out from their winter hiding places. In the Book of Samuel it says, ‘In spring, at the time when kings go off to war.’ We call it the ‘killing season’. We lack the poetry of the prophets. It’s unnerving, how unchanged war is. Every killing season, smiling photos of dead soldiers appear in the papers. We get released from work to attend more talks to bolster us up again. We’re shown more pictures of the Taliban’s victims; more stories circulate, ‘Look what the bad man did. Look how they treat their women.’ We’re fed a hero fantasy.
But it’s a man in green who walks me home one night and tells a lie to our friends. He says I waited by the door, taking my time with my keys, and then invited him inside. Men in green send the texts that roll in like thunder: ‘Steve deserves better than an ugly slut like you.’ Steve doesn’t believe the lie and I wait for him to defend me. I wait and I wait. He laughs when our friend runs up behind me and pulls my skirt into the air. ‘Whore’ is written on my door with little stick figure diagrams drawn all around it. The diagrams, or I suppose they’re portraits, could be a disruptive pattern. The suggestion of a person. I stare at the sharpie marks against the blue paint and wonder, who is my enemy? Where does he live?
I drive to my parents’ house and start looking up universities. I end up reading about the Ottawa Treaty and find the United States on the list of non-signatories. I am out of love with this. I should already be gone.
I read in my field notebook the notes I’d written from the grenade course, ‘The F1 grenade has a kill radius of six metres. Casualty radius of fifteen metres. Contains 4000 ball bearings to maximise damage upon detonation.’ I can’t remember which lesson this is from, ‘Who is your enemy?’ or ‘Who are you?’
I don’t remember leaving. I remember starting university, and relearning how to buy groceries and be alone, but walking out of base that last time, handing in my resignation, doing final medicals, these memories are gone, in the same way that I wake in the morning with no memory of falling asleep. Three years later I find a box in my grandparents’ cupboard. It’s full of letters from my Nanna’s uncle, who died in the war. The last letter says, ‘Don’t worry about me. Something seems to tell me that I will come through all right and all will be well.’ He died on the ninth of September 1918, aged twenty-one. Dulce est, blah blah blah. War is like a card game that the elder teaches to the younger.
I heard that Steve came back from Afghanistan and started having panic attacks whenever he heard his name being called. He was diagnosed with an allergy to coffee.
