He conquered his lunch and marched to the elevator. His departure halved the number of officers in the dining room. With its stiff-backed chairs and its conveyor toaster, its white tablecloths and its royal portraits, it looked like the restaurant of a hotel that might have been considered upmarket in a provincial New Zealand town in 1982. It looked civilian but the armed forces were in the details – purple napkins for ordinary officers, red napkins on one table set aside for top brass.
The officers’ tower block was built in 1982. It may well be the weirdest building in all of New Zealand and is probably the masterpiece of an architect whose work I saw throughout my travels. You could never mistake his buildings as the work of anyone else. They were a particular New Zealand aesthetic – grim, deranged, bitter.
His material was concrete, a lot of concrete, great big slabs of it, thick and bare, unpainted and grey and easily stained, sometimes stippled, always insane. The buildings looked like pavements built upright. Two of the best examples were the district council offices in Greymouth and a lookout with stairs and turrets smelling of urine on State Highway Three near Palmerston North. The biggest and most creative structure, his masterpiece, was the tower at Waiōuru. Its seven levels were designed like steps; it looked less as though it were leaning back than staggering backwards.
It also looked haunted. ‘Funny you should say that,’ said Second Lieutenant Gwyn Macpherson. He was the other 50 percent of the officers at lunch that day. He talked about the ghostliness of the mess, and of the entire camp, especially at night – the silence, the dark, the wind in the gum trees. There was talk, too, at the Oasis of ghosts and spirits who popped in for a visit. A woman who had been killed in a car accident many years ago was sometimes seen driving the Desert Road. Someone said they saw – through fog, near dawn – soldiers dressed in First World War uniforms marching in line towards the army museum. Waiōuru remained afraid at all times: the gates to the army camp advertised that the security alert level was black. It has stayed that colour since 9/11.
It was a town of ghosts, but also of the brilliantly alive. Macpherson, a handsome blue-eyed blonde, 28, described himself thus: ‘I’m six foot four and I look like a Viking.’ This was only the first part of a sentence. It continued, ‘But there’s a young recruit here, she’s like four foot nothing, and she can do what I can do.’ He was proud of the recruits. They probably worshipped him but he was without vanity, and very easy company. He talked about the house he had bought in Hīmatangi. ‘It’s got a 10 by 12 shed! I couldn’t turn it down.’ What was the house like? ‘Oh, it’s all right. But the shed’s great.’ In his spare time he sews. He bought an industrial sewing machine, set it up in the shed, and runs up camouflage webbing for army packs. ‘Something always needs improving,’ he said.
He grew up in Kaitāia, skinny and long-haired, ‘wayward’, a surfer. ‘The army lit a flame under me.’ He joined at eighteen.
When he was born, his father was sixty-two. He had been a sergeant with the 27th Machine Gun Battalion in Crete when the island fell to the Germans on May 20, 1941. ‘He had nightmares to the day he died. He had twin brothers, and they were killed within 24 hours of each other, one in Crete and the other flying in the RAF. His mother blamed him for not bringing his brother back home from Crete.’
The Germans landed by parachute. For a long time they made easy targets, shot as they drifted in the sky. ‘A shot paratrooper landed at my father’s feet. My father always said he looked exactly like his twin brothers. That might have had something to do with his nightmares.’
Every desert has its rose. Where did it grow in Waiōuru? I went out into the Rangipō Desert with Lieutenant Macpherson in an army jeep that bucked like a ship in a storm. The ground was hard and bumpy; there was a lot of ice and clots of snow, and a lot of bits and pieces of shrapnel. It all looked the same, nameless, but the army had names. Macpherson took out the map he kept in his jacket and said, ‘Over there is The Wall. That’s the Sea of Boulders. And we call this one Ghost Bush.’
More ghosts; but the desert moved with life, in the shape of recruits in the ninth week of their standard thirteen-week basic training. As their platoon commander, the lieutenant talked about how satisfying it was to see them develop into soldiers. They were out in Zone One, as the army called the desert, wrapped up tight in their uniforms. The day’s exercises included target practice with their Steyr rifles. Also, they had dug holes in the tightly packed desert earth. What with? ‘An entrenching tool,’ said Nick Josephson, eighteen. What? ‘A shovel.’ Steve Devantier, nineteen, from Te Atatu in Auckland, said they were about to charge over a hill and fill up a hole. Why? He said, ‘So it isn’t there anymore.’
They were boys with pinched faces and a Waiōuru tan – white as ice. They slept under coarse grey blankets. They mopped floors, cleaned toilets, got haircuts. Reveille was 0545 hours, lights out at 2215. The louvre window in their room was kept open day and night. They could not ever sit down on their bed. ‘It encourages idleness,’ said Lieutenant Macpherson. A whiteboard in one of the barracks was headlined SAYINGS FOR THE DAY. That day the saying was FIFTY. What did that mean? A staff sergeant said, ‘That’s how many times they’ve fucked
