In the afternoon there is the heat and the call. A stream of sweat drips down my lower back as I lean against the airside comms station.

‘I’ll hold,’ she says.

The screams of jet engines are deafening. I cover the receiver with one hand and look behind me. A line of jets wait for takeoff. The heat of their exhausts distort the air, like looking into a carnival mirror. I watch one lunge down the runway, wings dirty. The air is thick. The sun burns. It’s too hot to breathe, so I pant instead. Suffocation as a season.

‘Hey!’

I look to see Tommy, the liaison officer to our island, waving. His English is excellent, tinged with that American-school-in-Asia accent. He might look like a pretty boy but Tommy is a hot shot. He used to fly only a couple of times a week, just out to our island for weekly briefings and the odd sortie with his squadron. But now he flies most days. It was Tommy’s sense of humour that made us friends. Like when he got 30 patches made up of a sun bear punching Winnie the Pooh and we all wore them to the three-star’s briefing. That’s how Tommy became an honorary Aussie.

From across the airfield, Tommy gives me a mock two-finger salute that had become our signature greeting, then bumps his fist against his chest.

‘We got you man!’ I yell out across the tarmac, bumping my chest in return. He grins back before jogging over to his jet.

‘Godspeed 6676,’ I murmur.

With one hand still covering the receiver, I scan the news on my phone, shaking my head at what I read. BBC had it as a ‘joint exercise’. Reuters as a ‘demonstration and démarche’. It was utter bullshit. We knew it. They knew it. Tommy knew it. But it would allow everyone to claim surprise after the fact, to excuse a delayed response, or to not respond at all. I stow my phone back in my pocket in disgust.

Then the jets are up and scream no more.

‘Go ahead,’ I say into the receiver at last.

A voice crackles in my ear. ‘No treaty conditions. No forward deployment. No air support. No boots on the ground. Train and advise only.’

‘Wilco Ma’am. No matter what?’ I say, my pulse thumping in my head.

‘No matter what,’ comes the reply. I bite my lip. An army of protestations want to march from my mouth. A click and then the deadline beeps. The soundtrack to inevitability. I cradle the receiver and light a cigarette. Taking a drag, I pull out the book I always carry when I’m away. Flicking to a random page, I read; the first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

 ‘Babe – don’t be like that,’ she pleads.

This morning there is more heat and another call.

‘Yeah, well paint colours aren’t really a priority right now,’ I snap before hanging up. I’ll regret it later but I’ve been balancing on a knife edge for weeks. Frayed nerves and frustration is all I have left to give.

I take a drag of my cigarette and watch the commotion around me. I am in an ant’s nest. Everything is moving. The dark sky runs towards the airfield with a grim promise. The ants zigzag across the asphalt, racing between buildings, hangars and aircraft. Tree branches and chain link fences protest against gusts of hot wind. Forklifts race out of warehouses like worker ants, hunched over under their loads. The last Herc lies on the apron. Our Queen, about to be carried away on the wings of surrender with her subjects swarming around her. This nest is forsaken. We built it upon a promise and now it would be suitably empty.

Hey! Sir,’ a soldier says behind me. ‘The OPSO is looking for ya.’

I turn around, squinting through the roasting sun. ‘Righto. I’ll go in then.’

‘They think it’s all going to happen this week,’ she adds anxiously.

I flick my cigarette into the ashtray and shrug. ‘Then welcome to hell I guess.’

Entering the Ops Room is like opening an oven. The heat of poor ventilation, faulty air-con and agitation hits me in the face.

‘We’ve been trying to find you,’ the OPSO says, looking up. He wore the harassed look of all OPSOs. A normally attractive face mired by fatigue and stress. Pasty skin from hours spent hunched over a screen. A touch of aggression on his face, worn like armour against the relentless abuse. A slight paunch spills out from his otherwise wiry frame, testifying to the countless Red Bulls and Mars Bars that sustain his breed.

‘You’re going to want to see this,’ he says, handing me a tablet.

I grab the tablet and check the live map.

‘Shit,’ I say. A small island once circled in blue trackers lies dying in red. The OPSO peers over my shoulder.

‘So, the southern and western sectors are new. Should be enough to invoke the treaty,’ he says.

‘Nope. Won’t happen,’ I say sharply, zooming in on the west. Clusters of blue dots blink at me hopefully. I click to load the cam footage, tapping the screen impatiently.

‘What do ya mean no?’ he asks in disbelief. ‘It takes a minute to load. Just wait a sec.’

‘The treaty is dead. We aren’t going in. Regardless.’ I say flatly, avoiding his eyes. Finally, the tablet springs to life. A cockpit. Now several of them, stacked. I see 6676 in the centre. Flying through a grey sandwich of water. Water falling from above and water waiting below. The cockpits come alive with a metropolis of bad omens. Deep breathing crackles through the speaker. A supersonic flash for an instant and then those mechanical screams. But this time instead of up, the jets go down. And then nothing. We got you man.  

He is walking now. I wish you could see it, the text message reads. It is a message filled with a love I can’t mirror. Staring at the phone, the winter air bleeds into my already frosty mood. Again, I ignore the message and lock my phone, walking back to my desk.

My eyes are fixed on the screen watching the feeds. A sortie of enemy bombers approach four clicks out. A winter storm is approaching and I am in the eye. Uneasy whispers and anxious glances swirl around me. Amidst the turbulence, I remain anchored. One click out. Then the bomber’s cargo silently falls like murderous rain, covering the city with their rage. When the rage subsides, silence and stillness descend. All that moves are coils of smoke and clouds of ash across a sparse winter landscape. When the feeds are static like this, the flickering screens are nauseating. At this point, I always leave.

I go outside for a walk. The first whiff of metal and ash stings as I step into the piercing cold. I leave the compound behind me, an uninviting mix of concrete, metal, barbed wire and disrepair. This time, I see only one familiar face outside the fence. She is next to the playground, on the steps of a disfigured apartment building. Her hunched frame resembles an ancient gargoyle at the entrance to a crypt. Her withered face looks up at me in recognition. I nod back, grateful to recognise a soul in this hellscape. For the first time she stops me. I rummage in my pockets for the M&Ms I usually keep for the kids, but she waves them away. With snarled, arthritic fingers, she imitates a plane and then points to me, questioning.

‘We – stay – here,’ I say, shaking my head emphatically, pointing to myself and then the ground.

She smiles a toothy grin and waves me off, smiling beatifically as she gazes skyward.

My frigid hand doom scrolls for a moment. BBC, ABC then Reuters. I keep searching for us. Page 3. ‘Heavy shelling’ I read. I only read the news when I’m away. I shouldn’t. It’s one thing to slow down to look at a car accident as you drive by. Another to park up and walk around the scene, taking in every angle while humanity lies in disarray around you. But I can’t tear myself away when I’m out here. The articles talk about a ‘global order’. Politics don’t interest me, but it smells like a prayer, not reality. All I see is more old and powerful guys smashing into each other and destroying things around them. Each pushing their own version of the truth, until it lies twisted on the ground like a mangled bumper. We just pick up the pieces on this highway to hell.

Leaning against the Hesco, I pull my shemagh around my face and grab the signal from my pocket. My eyes scan it again but skip over the familiar words. I peer out at my monochrome world. Cold white sky and snow. Dark black ash and cindered ruins. One or the other covers everything. The crates, pellets and tins catch my eye. Spilling out of the armoury and growing into shining towers on the loading dock. It was like a birthday party for lethality, with missiles for candles and drones for balloons. I pull out a zippo and light a cigarette. A throat clears behind me.

‘S-sir, it’s almost time,’ the Battle Watch Captain says, teeth chattering.

‘Coming,’ I say. Despite the gnawing cold, I delay. I reach into my breast pocket and retrieve the book. Opening the cover, I smile at the photograph pinned inside.

‘Happy birthday little man,’ I whisper.

When I walk into the TOC, the RSM catches my eye. I give him a slight nod before retreating to the back wall to wait.

‘Alright listen up everybody,’ he squawks, snapping to attention like a rigid peacock displaying his feathers at some sort of robotic zoo. ‘The boss has got an announcement to make,’ he continued, ‘Operators, keep one ear on headset and one eye on same time chat. Everyone else gathers around the planning table. With both ears and both eyes,’ he adds laughing at his own joke. Silence. Another shit joke from a shit bloke.

I look up to check the TOC feeds as I wait. I read the estimate: 60,000. Not good. A drone loiters over a military truck lumbering along a boggy road. A small bee bumbling back to its dying hive. The RSM steps toward me, taking up his perch to my right. A little too close.

‘Ready boss,’ he murmurs solemnly. You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this and you will find strength, I remind myself, hand feeling for the book in my pocket. I hated doing this. Each time my speech betrayed my spirit, the edges of who I am became blurry. You tried to protect home from it. To inoculate them from that part of yourself and inoculate yourself with their love. But it cost you. You became a scarecrow, knowing your presence protects those below you and those back at home, but you still had to stand in the blustering wind alone, even as it frayed parts of you away over time.

As the troops gather in front of me, I straighten up from my slouch against the wall. Another scarecrow moment. Clearing my throat, a sea of expectant faces drift toward me. ‘Effective immediately no further ground re-supply missions to the north will be approved,’ I say. They turn to look at one another in disbelief. ‘Additionally,’ I continue, ‘we will withdraw in 48 hours.’

‘But Sir, we are so close to…,’ a corporal starts to exclaim.

‘Stop! Listen,’ screeches the RSM.

As if on cue, the alarm starts to blare. I scan the feed. One returning from mission to the east. I watch the familiar apartment building from our eye in the sky. Playground in front. What’s left of the spirit in this place is all over it. Swinging, chasing and jumping with glee. I see a boy that looks like mine, catapulting off a slide in delight. Then, the rain falls again and covers everything in its rage. I find my fist gripping the book through my breast pocket. We – stay – here.

Her eyes try to pin me down as mine scurry away like unspeakable creatures caught in the light. I escape to the window. The red and yellow leaves dance in the gusting wind, catching the morning light. They beckon me away from my exposed perch on the couch.

‘Are you still reading the news?’ she repeats with a gentle smile.

I sigh, ‘Yeah.’

‘Why do you think this time you’re still reading it now you’re back?’ she asks.

My eyes return to the window and I feel like the scarecrow again. Raised up and alone in the field, with a harsh, penetrating wind tearing into me. But, the inoculations weren’t working like they used to. I couldn’t protect home from me any longer. I remember what my crusty old Platoon Sergeant used to say at basic training before weekend leave: Don’t add to the population, don’t subtract from the population. He didn’t necessarily mean birth and death, although he also did. There were a thousand ways to be born and to die in this life. I had been dying for so long, I didn’t know how to live anymore.

‘I...I feel responsible,’ I say, fumbling for the long buried.

‘For what? Many of the decisions weren’t yours to make,’ she says.

We got you man. We – stay – here. A tremor runs down my arm. It reaches my hand and plays at my fingertips like macabre fireworks. Unignited energy that could have protected a cold winter playground. Or prevented a wounded tropical island from bleeding out into extinction.

‘Preserve the empire,’ I say sarcastically.

‘The empire?’ she asks.

‘Pfft. Politics,’ I say, ‘It’s the duck pond problem. They don’t fucking know what’s under the duck, until they pick one and see the number underneath. We just get caught in the car accident between good intentions and reality,’

‘So you’re not angry with them?’ she asks.

‘When you’re back,’ I say, ‘you still don’t understand every decision. But you might come to understand some with time’, I say.

‘Like how doing your job well isn’t always going to feel good?’ she suggests.

‘It’s more than that. You realise everything is grey. Choices between good and evil are easy ones to make. But that’s not our world anymore. I’m not sure it ever was,’ I say.

‘So good and evil don’t exist?’ she asks.

‘They do’, I say, ‘But those aren’t the decisions that haunt us. What most of us face is a choice between two or three goods. Or evils. All competing against one another. We try to figure out the best of them from our place in the fog. Knowing all the while we will be judged from the clear skies of hindsight. The consequences stain,’ I blurt out, my hand grabbing the book beside me. She raises her eyebrows in surprise. Her gaze follows my hand, still resting on the book.

‘Which line comes to mind now?’ she asks.

‘Waste no time arguing about what being a good man should be. Be one,’ I say.

I spent a lot of time on that couch. Until I could handle it alone again. Be okay again. I still spend a lot of time thinking. About the uniform. About right and wrong. Love and pain. What it does to us. Perhaps in the same way the elements heat, cool and saturate the world, pain does the same to us. That’s why we say a heated argument. A searing loss. Burning rage. Feeling cold and empty. That we are drowning and can’t find our way out. We spend so much time pretending we have no pain, but like the elements, it can’t be denied forever. There are always signs. Like when you lose your temper and yell and scream at the one you love most. Or when people keep asking if you’re okay, but you sink down, drowning in impenetrable silence. And when you’re surrounded by joy and pretend that you feel something when inside there is nothing at all. Then you realise and before you know it your little planet is dying from the inside. The oceans rise, the temperature burns and then the cold removes all the colour in your world until the landscape is empty and barren. Then, and only then, the wind comes through your desolate little soul. Sometimes it too comes like pain, whipping through you and making you face who you’ve become cruelly. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it comes like change, gently curling itself around you and slowly disentangling you from yourself, saying, ‘Look! See! It’s time to fix what you’ve become.’