Far Horizons - Chapter One
Here's the first chapter of my new book. Enjoy!
Midnight.
The bottom of the Pacific Ocean. My knees sunk into the murky silt of its floor.
Absolute darkness. I held my hand in front of my mask but couldn’t see a thing.
“Your fingers are your eyes now,” Chief Timms barked at us on the first night of the diving course when a fellow recruit asked for a torch. Then he’d issued the punishment: his slow, torturous version of one hundred push-ups, his tattooed biceps rippling as he glared at us with contempt, moving through his with ease. The first push-up took ten minutes.
And the recruit was now long gone, a marked man from that first hint of weakness. We’d all learned not to ask questions because questions equalled punishments, and we didn’t need any more of those.
I was bone tired. Bitterly cold. My fingers were always the first part of my body to go numb. They barely felt like they were part of me during these long, cold weeks. I kneaded them together in a futile attempt at warmth; the thick calluses on my palms (from the countless push-ups and chin-ups) scraped roughly against each other.
An icy stab of ocean crept in through the thin, rubber neck seal of my black wetsuit, chilling my spine. My mind drifted, and I tried my latest distraction technique of tricking myself into believing that I wasn’t ten metres underwater in the dark of night: that, instead, I was curled up in a warm bed in the family home I’d left the year before. But that night it didn’t work. The water was too cold. I shivered uncontrollably, and my teeth made a rubbery squeak on the scuba mouthpiece that would bring me a short injection of air and an unwelcome chaser of salt water with each breath. My heavy diving cylinder dug into my ribs; after adjusting it, I reached into my wetsuit sleeve, pulled out a dull yellow glowstick and, using the tiny cloud of light it emitted, checked my air gauge. I had another forty minutes left on this dive, a search with our hands along the piers of an old timber wharf to clear it of explosives. Forty freezing minutes. The only good news was that tonight the bombs weren’t real, just training devices. So rather than being blown up, the only threat was that if we couldn’t find them all on this sweep, we’d be punished by being kept in the water for another few hours and made to repeat the test.
It was the final night of my navy diving course. I’d been selected from the seventy officers on basic training as a possible candidate for Special Forces, and this was the first step.
One of my best mates, Luke, or “Apples”, so nicknamed because he came from the apple-growing state of Tasmania, had also been shortlisted, but he’d been deployed up close to Indonesia to help stem the illegal immigrants arriving by boat. The course started three weeks ago, with sixteen candidates, including my other mate, Kel, a six-foot lifeguard, surfer and all-round waterman who grew up on the East Coast beaches. My nickname was “Spud”, a play on my surname, Tait, which sounds like the second syllable in potato. The three of us had bonded quickly in basic training and had been inseparable ever since. We were the fittest in our class, fiercely competitive and always determined to be the best: to show we had the right stuff. And the best way to do that was to become clearance divers, who then went operational in a real war. Most nights, on officers’ course, we would sneak out of our rooms after lights out and creep down to the ocean through the bush like special operatives, for hours of push-ups, running, swimming and breath holds where we would run along the ocean floor in the pitch black with heavy boulders cradled in our arms to hold us down. Apples was resentful that he’d been deployed north and that Kel and I would be taking the first diver selection step before him. But we all knew, like only young men can, that we’d be friends for life.
The three-week course was simple. Learn how to scuba dive, prove you were tough enough to go to the next stage and don’t get injured. Of the original sixteen, eight were now gone. A mix of blown eardrums, strained backs, destroyed knees and, for some guys, it was all just too hard. Too cold. Too painful. Some had been bullied off course as the instructors successfully manipulated us to do their dirty work for them and we turned, like a mob, on the weakest. When one recruit had lagged on a run, they made us carry him five humiliating miles back to base. He quit within the hour. At the end of the day, it hadn’t mattered what excuse any of the quitters had. The word next to their name was the same: FAIL. According to Chief Timms, no matter how hurt you were or how hard things got, it was always your choice. You could grit your teeth, put up with everything they threw at you and take another step towards becoming a qualified Special Forces operative. Or you could fail.
So, we were down to eight men.
Well, seven men and one boy. I was only seventeen.
A sharp tug on the rope around my waist shook me back to my senses, secured with the bowline knot that we could tie, by then, with one hand behind our backs, underwater and in the dark.
We spoke through the rope, using a series of tugs and pulls to communicate, and it was our only connection to anyone beyond our cold, lonely part of the ocean. This message was a signal to stop, that a diver had found a mine and that we’d be here for a few minutes while we waited for orders from the surface. I peered into the black, looking for the dark smudge of another diver, but nothing was clear, so I wrapped my arms around my chest for warmth, closed my eyes and waited for a message. I thought about the friends I’d said goodbye to at high-school graduation the year before. None of them had joined the military with me, so their mothers had likely cooked them dinner tonight. They probably all enjoyed long, hot showers. In fact, very little about their day would have been anywhere near as challenging as what I’d willingly volunteered for, signing up to fight for my country. Lucky bastards. I knew it was probably best not to think about their lives, their easy university schedules and cruisy part-time jobs. My reality was that this was the seventh long dive of the day. I’d been in the ocean for ten hours already. My eyes stung with the salt water that had been leaking into the faulty mask that I had drawn the short straw on at five o’clock that morning. My knee was stiff and dull with the ache of a strain I picked up on the second week but kept running through; an injury that would remain with me for the rest of my life. My head was pounding with the agony of a wisdom tooth that had earlier decided to burst its way sideways through my gum.
But it was my ears that were the worst. They’d never really been great, beaten up by years of surfing and scuba diving as a teenager, but this was a new level of bad. When I descended underwater, my eardrums ached with a sharp stab I’d been grimacing through ever since black blood and mucus started leaking out of my nose a week earlier. I’d had to make a habit of apologising to the guys when I surfaced slower than them, and Kel had been surfacing alongside me so it didn’t look as bad, and I wouldn’t get failed. If Chief Timms found out how bad my ears were, he would have told me that I was “fucking weak” and sent me to the on-duty nurse. I’d be off diving course in a heartbeat. She would recommend that I get warm. Wrap a blanket around me, make me a cup of tea and recommend some bedrest. Every instinct screamed that this was a great idea.
However, there was a major downside. If I quit now, I’d be a laughing-stock. Both among the seventy classmates I’d just spent basic training with, convincing how tough I was, and worse, among the qualified divers who would laugh at me for a very short moment and then simply forget me. Since the British Navy of the 1800s, those holding the rank of midshipman have been labelled “snotties”, as they were said to be so sickly and scared at sea that they wiped their tears and snotty noses on their coat sleeves. Not me, though. I was determined to not be seen as a snotty. And I was not going to fail. I might have been the lightest recruit by twenty pounds, but I could run and swim faster than most of them. I would pass this course and hurdle over this first step on my way to being one of the toughest fighting men in the world. A Clearance Diver in the Royal Australian Navy.
A member of a formidable fighting unit that can hold its own with the US Navy SEALs and the British SAS. Things had started well. Four weeks earlier, on my first day at dive school, I had finished third out of thirty men in a two-mile swim, where we lay on our backs and kicked through the water with long fins on our feet. The sinewy, grey-haired lieutenant commander of the diving school had given me a wink of approval as I climbed out of the water, barking, “You might just have what it takes, Mid”, and slapping me hard on the back, rattling my boyish frame to the core. I’d thrust my chest out proudly when I walked away from him. He was right, and I’d been doing all I could since to keep showing them all that I did have the right stuff. But after a few punishments designed to “weed out the snotties”, I’d also learned that the best way to survive was to be a grey man and not draw too much attention to myself.
Finish every run in the middle of the pack. Complete each dive well, but do not excel; otherwise, there was a long way to fall if you started screwing up. So far, I’d withstood the sleep deprivation, the endless runs and the swims back and forth across the bay. I’d been told that I was a fucking disgrace, that I was pathetic and that there was no chance I’d pass. I’d been pissed on by the instructors, held underwater until I almost drowned and pushed off a boat going so fast it felt like I was hitting concrete when I met the water. It wasn’t just me being targeted.
The instructors had been democratic and everyone had received roughly the same horrific treatment. But I was still here. For those last few hours of the diving course, I needed some divine help. Despite growing up in the Pentecostal Christian church, I hadn’t prayed for a while, and my adolescent faith had been quickly pushed aside by the harsh realities of life in the navy.
But I mustered up the small semblances that were left of my spirituality and brought my hands together to make a shivering double fist. In my mind I uttered a short prayer, asking for help to get through this last dive.
God acted quickly.
Boom!
A loud, muffled thump broke through the night ocean, like a baseball bat hitting a pillow, and a flash of too-bright white light pierced through the abyss. Then darkness re-enveloped all. I peered again into the black, small flashes of lightning sparking across my eyes from the gone-too-soon light. Nothing.
The only sound was of bubbles, keeping me alive for a breath before ascending with each exhale, thirty feet above to the real world. I took my regulator out of my mouth and listened. Silence.
But then there was a strong tug on the rope around my waist. Someone was passing a message through the line. Another tug.
Then three more. Five in total. Five tugs meant “emergency”, and we needed to surface immediately. That matched up with the bright white light and loud bang, meaning it wasn’t God, in fact, but a diver recall device, an underwater flare that meant something was wrong. They’d told us what emergencies this might signal: a shark, an enemy inbound or a dead diver.
I kicked hard to the surface and furrowed my brow to push through the sharp needles that stabbed into my sinuses as I returned to the real world – Sydney Harbour on a frigid and still September night. The navy base looked like most military installations do: dark, mysterious and ominous, but in the hills around it, the city’s mansions twinkled like jewels, modern castles that working-class kids like me could only dream of living in. My ears filled with water as usual, my whole head pulsing to recover from the agony I’d just pushed it through again.
Through my blocked ear canals, I made out the muffled yells of Chief Timms for us to “get out of the fucking water now!”. The water splashed effervescently as eight divers churned towards the ladder, Kel just ahead of me. With our fins in our teeth, we hauled our tired bodies and our heavy diving gear upwards; then we ran along the old timber wharf that had speared splinters into our hands during many rounds of push-up punishments. We ran past the cold shower we rinsed under each night, which felt warm to our chilled bodies. Past the timber beams, where we had quickly figured out how to execute twenty perfect overhand chin-ups so we could eat. Past the tables where they would serve our food and where they’d once encouraged us to eat triple rations, as “you may not be eating again for a while”, before putting us on the most intense run of the course, most of us throwing up everything we’d just tried to get down. Past “the Lizard”, a twenty-foot beam of slippery wood extending out over the water that we’d been forced to hang off by our fingertips for hours. “Fuck you, Mr Lizard,” I said under my breath, and Kel laughed. I didn’t know what we were running towards, but my guess was soft sand sprints in wetsuits or swimming laps of the harbour until sunrise. Or maybe Chief Timms had one final torturous tactic in mind to get a few more of us to quit on the last night.
But I was wrong. We ran into the sick bay. Inside was the on-duty nurse, rugged up in a thick navy-issue blue jacket, a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. She didn’t even look up at us; her eyes were fixed on the television. We crowded into the old room – built when the world was last at war in 1942 and barely changed since then – water from our wetsuits dripping into puddles on the chipped concrete floor.
The banner at the bottom of the screen was brutal in its simplicity: America Under Attack. A tall building had smoke pouring out of its upper floors. Then “Whoooafuckwhatthehellholyshit!” came out of us, a chorus of disbelief as we watched a plane fly into a second tower. Someone backed into me by accident, like the blast had hit them too. We stood silently, still shivering from the cold, and watched the TV, struggling to grasp what we were seeing. The first to speak was Chief Timms. “Shit, men,” he said, rubbing his scarred, shaved head with his big bear-paw of a hand. “We’re all about to go to war.”
And he was right. We would come armed, we would come angry and we would come to bring Iraq to its knees.
