By Josh Gardner, who hopes the trenches have wi-fi
A DARK cloud is rolling across Europe. We may not see it lit af again in our lifetimes.
And I’m told it’s not long before my country will need me, a listless member of the socials generation welded to his phone skilled at delivering murderously funny memes, to fight Russia.
I’m surprisingly okay at being packed off to Ukraine with a rifle. It’s a while since my last citybreak and season two of Severance isn’t gripping me. Plus it’s reassuring to know there are still jobs AI hasn’t made obsolete. You can’t deploy ChatGPT into the meat grinder!
History’s a book to me therefore closed, but All Quiet on the Western Front and 1917 paint a mixed picture of war. Though they didn’t have the moral courage to show the Nazis and Hitler so they’re barely accurate.
Close-up footage of missile strikes would be capital-C content for my Insta, and I aim to become a moustachioed influencer like that dude who wrote poems about gas. He didn’t monetise his stanzas with sponsored ads like I will.
Anyway, the frontline today is an internet-connected facility in Colchester where soldiers in gaming chairs control drones on nine-screen monitor rigs while sipping energy drinks, the stories of who will inspire younger generations.
When I confidently told my dad any war will be over by Christmas anyway, he seemed skeptical. Even when I amended it to ‘actually October, when GTA6 is released’.
‘History’s repeating itself, son,’ he said. ‘The war will drag on for years. Data rationing for even longer. You’ll become a tiny name on a massive memorial, and Military Wives will have a shit number one about you.’
He said my only hope was to object to fighting on moral grounds. I stopped him there. It was obvious that I had to become a woke objector, a role I’d been preparing for my entire life. I can find anything racist, colonialist or transphobic.
That’s me saved then. I’ll sit out this one in the munitions factory complaining that single-use bullets aren’t sustainable. They’d better have vape breaks.
