I once heard it said that in times of peace, the war like man makes war upon himself. I write these words on the eve of America’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan, I roll my wrist and note the date on my Rolex Deep Sea, Sea Dweller, it’s been some twenty long years after that fateful day in New York. How was I to know that on that day, as I sat in the Navy’s Recruit School barracks, how that single event would define the rest of my life. I’m not sure what the future holds for Afghanistan as the Taliban resume control of vast stretches of the country, but I can guess.
I sent an Afghan friend a message the other day, inquiring about his situation. I simply typed: R U O K into a secure messenger app. He typed back: “Hello Brother, Thank you very much for thinking about us at this difficult time, with the US leaving, we don’t know what is waiting for us. But everything forward looks disappointing and dangerous. Oh, and thank you for that watch”.
The simple fact is, that when you’re over ‘there’ all you want to do is come home, and when you’re home, all you want is to go back ‘there’. Back there where things made sense, where things were simple, black and white, crystal even, the bezel indices on my Panerai ticking away, the second hand seemingly retreating anti-clockwise. A place where your day had structure, where your goal was clear and your thoughts resolute. Where getting to the end of any day was an accomplishment in and of itself, grateful for every numeral increasing at the three o’clock position. Where you slept like a baby knowing that demons only come for you in the daylight hours, unlike the night terrors you will suffer in your civilian bed. Your self-hatred replaced by ‘theirs’. Back to the place where there were no bills to pay, no mail to read, no phone calls to return, just the mission, the objective, one all- consuming goal. The call to prayer that had been an aural burden (but a handy marker of hours past), would now be a welcome break from the mediocrity of shopping mall muzak.
To live back there, between two worlds is to purify one’s purpose, a minimalistic Spartan elegance that carries you forward in search of that elusive elixir, that ambrosia. It’s not free, this elixir, it never is, it comes at a cost, a price that must be paid. The possibility cessation of your time on earth. Someway, somehow, the piper is reimbursed, some say with thirty pieces of silver, some say two obulus for the boatman. The only watch you never want to receive is the gold one that accompanies your retirement. To turn a mission-oriented mind inwards is to do a great and terrible thing. Boredom is cancer in a military mind, idle OCD attention to detail can only bring pain when there are ‘no more worlds to conquer’.
RAN Clearance divers on operations.
I have read a lot of war novels and watched a lot of war movies, and I always felt the butterflies turn summersaults in my lowers when the hero says goodbye to his loved ones and sets out for the war, sullen, humble, and even a little scared. Even the great Achilles paused on the Ithaca sand and thought about whether he should sail into that cold night, to the far away shores of Troy, perhaps never to return but to live on in songs of glory that echo in eternity. It always struck me as odd, the singularity of that moment. That’s all it is, a moment, a single decision, after which an unstoppable momentum would carry him forward. The literal gravity of the conflict drawing him in like some doomed celestial star. I have been in countless departure lounges making that same decision, looking up at the oversize Omega on the duty-free boutique wall. I faced this flight time every two months for over ten years, over and over again, like the ignorant Sisyphus.
All Achilles ever wanted was for someone to remember his name. We all do to some degree or another, ego laden creatures that we are. We seek that which is unattainable. We desire immortality. Some have kids to fight death, others build businesses, still more slap their name on a building, but ultimately all those things die, they all turn to dust, return to that whence they came. Mother earth consumes it all. Her timekeeping creator making sure of it. There’s only one thing that out paces time, and that is story, legend, song. It’s only our story that remains above ground. It’s the only thing we leave behind. entropy barely lays a finger on that which can be retold, generation to generation, on and on into the annals of time immemorial.
Making an entrance. Infiltration operations.
It’s been some seven years since the publication of my book ‘UNDAUNTED’. I’m hoping with the printing of this Second International Edition it will find a wider audience. A lot has happened in those intervening years. After the breakdown of my marriage and my subsequent return to Australia, things really fell apart, and quickly. I was broke, strike that, broke would have been good, at least broke you’re at zero, I in fact was in the red. I had no car, no job, no relationship and nowhere to live, my Sunnto Spyder also having “mysteriously” disappeared (Bugger!) the result of having lived in a warzone and a marriage for way too long.
Eventually, I made contact with my old commercial diving mates and due mainly to my financial situation, decided to work for two separate commercial diving outfits to maximise my earnings. One operated all day and the other had a contract that ran at night. I worked 24/7 underwater in Sydney Harbour on all manner of dangerous tasks. Tasks that tend not to reward the sleep deprived. Maximum dive time accumulating on my Citizen Aqualand. To be honest it was fucking dodgy, I don’t recommend it, but I was desperate, and desperate people do stupid things, Like the sin of selling a watch to pay rent (insert Homer Simpson shudder here).
Anti-Piracy operations, somewhere at sea.
I then made some inquiries back in the security world, as I wasn’t finding civilian life that rewarding. Word on the street was that a few guys from the Iraq contract were now working in Kabul, Afghanistan. It had been a good long time since I’d worked there, but I’d always loved the rugged Mad Max like environment of Kipling’s Kafiristan, so I put out some feelers and managed to get the gig.
After a frenetic five years in Afghanistan, I felt it might be time to come home. I’d spent the better part of ten years away in war zones and my health and personality were starting to suffer. I’d been getting more and more migraines and combined with daily nausea and horrific memory loss it was starting to trouble me.
I would wake up at night in severe pain, the migraines were unbearable. My dreams were always the same, that guy in the truck, driving past me on that dirt road at the foot of an Afghanistan mountain pass, the look in his eyes as he drew a grubby finger across his throat and kept on driving down that dusty track. I thumbed my safety catch and wiped the sweat from my brow. I remember the insurgent saying “You Foreigners have the watches, but we have the time” Time to go home, time to go home.
Hugh's 2MEF coin, received from a operation in Afghanistan.
It’s moments like these that would shake my previously impervious resolve that we were there “nation building” the timeless adage that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ seemingly a joke levelled at us by farther time himself. My thoughts harkened back to a conversation I had with an Iraqi civilian a little over five years ago, he told me it was a good thing that the leader had been removed but that the resulting vacuum had been filled by evil. He told me his best friend and he had been warned by the insurgency to get out of their neighbourhood as they were perceived to be from a ‘lesser caste.’ He of course refused, along with his childhood friend. After the pressure abated days later, he returned to his home to find his friend lying dead on the doorstep with a dog’s head sewed to his shoulders in place of his own. I asked him why he stayed, why he fought on? He shrugged, looked right into my eyes and said, “This is my home.” Time will tell, I guess…
Afghanistan, undisclosed location.
I was always so sure of my motives in the so called ‘War on Terror’, but now they dance out of sight, ever just on the horizon of a setting sun. My hope that it would remain in the sky for more than twelve hours; thus avoiding the terror of night, dashed, with the simplicity of a sundial. If I knew these motives were gone for good, that would be better than the alternative. That they will stay forever out of my grasp, dooming me to wander aimlessly on, moving like the path of a shadow in the midday sun, hoping for their return.
Eventually, I would be diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy as it is known in America. Basically, it’s brain damage from the concussive effects of the overpressure caused by standing too close to all those explosive charges whilst operating as an MOE man in the military. It even takes an emotional toll that sneaks up on you.
It’s not the melancholy that makes this illness with its ever-present depression so unbearable, it’s the memory of once being happy. To think of the person I was before I joined the military made me incredible reflective, and for the first time in a long time I need to think about my future. To live with this most terrible of invisible enemies, is to grieve a death, the death of who I was. It’s so painful sometimes I almost wish I had never been happy, so I didn’t have those memories that now weigh so heavily on me. I was happy once, I fucking remember it. I needed to put some effort into finding my way home, practically and metaphorically.
Every soldier makes a journey to war, but also makes a journey from it.
Pain for those that live with it, every day, can corrode the container it is kept in. So, if one cannot escape, then best it be used for something. It crystallises, calcifies, cauterizes, not unlike the callused hand of a lumberjack the scar tissue builds up on your soul and it leaves you leathery and well worn, a pitcher’s mitt of expression. The kind of pain that drives nations forms caliphates, bonds pilgrims and seals the fate of comrades, time marching on. It’s a near certainty in our modern world that all those seek to avoid pain, we shield our children from it, we numb ourselves to it and the modern man is even hesitant to inflict it. Pain in our society is to be avoided at all costs, its prescribed out of our lives with a script, a pint, a shot, even the occasional snort, puff or plunge. Some pain I’ve discovered, some I’ve courted and some I’ve even sort out. Some I’ve inflicted, some I’ve absorbed, others I’ve deflected, distorted, demurred. I don’t live with pain, it’s not a guest, I wouldn’t even say it lives in me, rather I live inside it, cocooned within its cloister walls, contained in its redoubt. You want to truly experience the passing of time? Get a migraine, you will feel every second, just like the ‘time machine’ on your wrist.
Having existed in the murky world of conflict zone contracting for way too long. I know for certain that depending on your journey into the lion’s den, we all come out the other side a little different. Maybe it was time…
The author, working security.
I could hear her voice break ever so slightly over the static of the internet communications. I’m not sure if it made her questions more poignant than they would have sounded in person, but it certainly seemed so. “Do you want to die Hugh? Is that it? Would that make you happy? Would that satisfy your curiosity?”. I know it kind of seems like an obvious question to ask, given such a self-evident, self-destructive bent in my personality. But it took someone completely indifferent to my military exploits, someone unimpressed with the iron clad exterior that I had worked so hard, for so many years to construct. It took a girl with fresh eyes and an honest curiosity for my wellbeing to ask that question and for me to begin to answer it.
I walked off the plane from Dubai and strolled out into the eucalypt scented Australian night. Brooke was there, waiting for me. It dawned on me that no one had ever been waiting for me before, and she would never need to wait again, I was home, and right on time.
Hugh O'Brien
