Off to the Gate for a special treat: a pious anti-war monologue from the prize-winning American George Brant. Curtain up. And within seconds all my preachy prejudices have fallen apart. The speaker is a female pilot in a jump suit sealed within a see-through cage. Slaying men is her vocation. Interesting!
The story moves with amazing deftness and clarity. She flies missions over Iraq. Loves it. The speed, the jeopardy, the power, the solitude. ‘The blue’ is her term for her intoxicating and deadly haven in the skies. Home on leave, she hits the bars. A one-night stand. She likes the guy. Back in Iraq, she’s pregnant. Skypes him. He weeps with joy. She’s honourably discharged. Back home, they marry. A daughter arrives. She’s settled and fulfilled. But she longs to return to ‘the blue’. Go for it, says hubbie.
Rejoining the air force she finds that her beloved F16s are no longer ‘top shit’. She retrains and gets a job piloting heavily armed drones that survey the Afghan border. ‘The chair force,’ she carps. She works on an air-conditioned base, doing 12-hour shifts, holding a joystick and watching screens that show nothing but sculpted putty. ‘The grey’. She misses the stratosphere, the shared risk, the camaraderie. But when she identifies a group of ‘military age males’ preparing a roadside bomb she feels a rush of the old excitement. Her knuckles whiten around the joystick. A voice in her ear confirms that the targets are ‘guilty’. She fires. Boom. They perish. She watches shorn limbs flying across the scrubland, 10,000 miles away. Guilt, remorse and doubt crowd in on her.
She returns home, having killed, eager to unburden herself to her husband.
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