I Need to Get Back to the War
When you find an enemy worth fighting, too much inactivity becomes unbearable
Two weeks ago I stood on the shores of the Coral Sea and was brought to mind of my grandfathers and the many thousands of others who served beyond the horizon in the Solomons and New Guinea during the Second World War. There’s something about the tropics and the weight of that history; that vast, sweltering theatre of war both so beautiful and so deadly. It was quietly poignant standing in its warm waters 80 years later and feeling that enduring ancestral connection so many of us have with this part of the world.
It was the tail end of my Christmas/New Year’s vacation in Far North Queensland, and I’d managed to go the whole eight days without getting into the sea. This was not for lack of motivation – I love swimming in the ocean – but in this part of Australia the waters are dangerous, literally infested with sharks and crocodiles.
We were about to leave Port Douglas and drive back to Cairns, and I had fifteen minutes before checkout, so I trudged down to the beach and crossed the sand to the water’s edge. I had been resolved since early in the trip to set foot in the Coral Sea at least once, and of the notion the previous evening to go down to Four Mile Beach for a late-night swim. But an impressive monsoon came blustering through the small town, drenching everything – including us, on our way home from dinner.
I went swimming in the resort pool instead as the rain thrummed down, turning the surface of the artificial lagoon into bubble wrap, then went back in and had a few too many gin & tonics and watched Police Academy. Truth be known, it may not have been the rain that kept me from the beach that night, it could have been the sharks (at the time I didn’t know there was a net).
The shark net clearly demarcated the safe zone – an eyesore on such a beautiful coastline, but necessary. And as I stood knee-deep in the water snapping some shots of the beach for posterity I looked out to the steamy horizon and wondered at the secrets this, the world’s second largest sea, concealed beneath its calm surface. How many destroyers, troop transports, supply ships, and subs? And how many bones, Australian, Japanese, American and the rest? And how many of these had drifted to the bottom severed from the superstructure that had previously held them? blasted off by manmade projectiles… or sliced clean away by the razor teeth of the killer fish that this great net now protected me and the rest of the tourists from.
We had to get the rental car back by 12:30, and we had to check out of the resort. So I splashed about in the Coral Sea for another minute, thinking my solemn thoughts, then trudged back up the beach and walked the five minutes back to the hotel feeling gloomy at the prospect of a hungover hour’s drive around difficult winding roads.
That night I sat up late in the apartment in Cairns and drank more gin. The missus went to bed, reminding me that we had to leave for the airport the next day by 10am. I was glad to be alone in our air-conditioned retreat – I had a bit more drinking to do, and some more ancestry to channel.
I stepped out on the balcony for a smoke and was accosted by the heat and humidity which for a southerner like me still hits hard even after a week in the tropics. I wondered how my grandfathers had coped with it out there, across the Coral Sea. Had they acclimatized eventually? Or did it grind them down daily like it does to me when I’m this far north? The smoking is a symptom of tropical exasperation for me – ironically the breathlessness I feel in humid climates drives me to the cigarette. Must knock this on the head as soon as I get home, I thought, and I wondered if my grandads, who were both smokers, had picked up the habit while in the Pacific.
I went back into the cool apartment and put on an episode of The Pacific. I’d been planning this for some hours and had been waiting for the missus to go to bed because she’s not really into the war stuff. Something about my little splash around in the Coral Sea that morning had ignited my old burning fascination with the war, my family’s part in it, and that momentous historical upheaval, the aftershocks of which still resound today.
The episode I was up to was Part 4 – Gloucester/Pavavu/Banika in which US Marine PFC Robert Leckie is taken off the frontline and sent to the hospital for a nasty case of enuresis. While there he speaks to a psychiatrist and in one of their discussions he tells the doctor that he wants to get back to his unit before they ship off without him.
Leckie wanted to get back to the war.
I was by this time well-lubricated and given to identifying grand romantic parallels with my own life and I scribbled some notes, of the mind to develop them into an article.
This is that article, and the parallel I drew on that sultry night in the Far North, was this:
For those of us who have found a cause to fight for, and an enemy worth vanquishing, too long spent on R&R can get to us.
I wanted to get back to the war.
Now, let me be clear. I am not comparing myself to the servicemen who endured the horrors of the Pacific Theatre, or any other military conflict. These men loom almost godlike for me, not least my grandfathers, both of whom served in the Pacific – my mum’s father as an infantryman, and my dad’s father as an army surgeon. My mum’s stepdad, who was actually closer to me when I was growing up than my maternal grandfather, also served – but he was an RAF Spitfire pilot in the Mediterranean. Like I said, I’m not comparing myself to these guys – hell, shark nets and air conditioning? They’d probably have laughed at me.
But the nature of war has changed. And while hot wars are of course still fought all around the world, the great war of our generation is an informational and psychological one. And this is a war I have been engaged in fighting for the past few years.
Among the notes I jotted that night were these:
Regardless of the macro political realities of WW2, our grandparents fought for their countries (when countries were still countries)
My war is not theirs - but it is
As I lie here on the edge of this sea over which they fought for control, my fight remains as real as theirs was. The nature of it has changed, but, like them I ultimately get no rest. This week’s boozy sojourn has been but a standard R&R, and come next week, the war must go on.
I guess my thesis here is that ultimately, the fight against the Great Reset and all its permutations is the struggle for national sovereignty, essentially the same thing my grandfathers were fighting for, or at least what they believed they were fighting for.
I have in recent times become skeptical about the so-called Good War. The more one learns about the international banking interests that lurk behind its origins, the more one begins to draw dingy parallels with our current paradigm.
But regardless of the machinations of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, it remains a reasonable proposition that to have lost the way of life our grandparents enjoyed in places like Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in favour of Nazi or Imperial Japanese rule would have been tragic and ignominious. So I must continue to believe that for all the questions which surround WWII and its genesis, it was ultimately a noble struggle.
80 years on, the freedom-loving peoples of the world once again face down the specter of authoritarianism. It’s not Hitler with panzers and stukas this time, it’s Klaus Schwab with carbon credits and digital IDs. It’s not Josef Mengele with his diabolical medical experiments, it’s the forced ‘vaccination’ of the entire planet with a dodgy novel gene therapy which has now injured and killed millions of people.
I have written before about the volunteer work I do for Jab Injuries Australia. As I resumed that work this week, I was rudely reminded why it is that I fight this war, and why I needed to get back to it.
I am not ashamed to say that the stories I edit each day often move me to tears. And with every account I proofread – each one linked to a real person with a real Instagram profile – I am hardened in my conviction that these so-called vaccines, and the gargantuan PR hustle that swirls around them, is the single greatest act of evil ever to be perpetrated against our species.
Not least amongst all of this is the deafening silence of the corporate media and all the other venerated institutions of ‘Our Democracy’. Shame on us. We have utterly betrayed the legacy of those brave men who sweated and rotted and bleed for us in places like Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester.
We have fallen.
We have failed.
We have lost our way, and now it is time to fight.
And so, while, as I type this at quarter to eleven on a Tuesday night, wishing that I was still on holiday, soaking up my R&R and my gin & tonic, I know that were I indeed back there on the shores of Coral Sea, prostrate and idle, the ascendant faction of my being would be having the same conversation that Private Leckie was having with the doctor.
I’d be telling him, “This isn’t the right place for me. Nothing against all of you, but I want to get back to my guys before they get sent on without me.”
I’d be telling him – I need to get back to the war.