The above map shows the increasing gains that have been made by crocodiles in the war between IS and Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria. Clark was posted just outside of Mosul.
Family, friends and neighbours alike have celebrated the return of local drone operator Doyle Clark from some place probably close to the conflict Iraq and Syria.
Clark says “it wasn’t harrowing.”
“I just have this image stuck in my head…. it’s men from my regiment, with their limbs blown off, losing blood… so much blood… it’s all imagined, of course, because we just had joysticks in a bunker under neutral territory sixty kilometres away in Mosul.”
Clark’s family is relieved that the decorated member of the armed forces is home. His wife, Larissa, told reporters that all the time her husband was at war, while she was confident of the intentions and capacity of the regiment, she “could never shake the feeling that something might go violently wrong for anyone other than her husdband who was not piloting a remote, terrible weapon from an hilariously euphemistic distance from the fighting.”
“In my head I drafted and redrafted one or two ways that I might have to tell my children that their father was never coming home because something unpredictable and terrible had happened on his flight there, or coming back. Once he was there, though, things were pretty chill.”
“It was such a comfort to see him at the arrivals lounge. I had no idea whether he was going to make it through all 20 hours of his flight.”
Clark says his time some distance from the front line is an important experience from which he learned a great deal, saying “it is utterly possible to detach yourself from the awful reality of the conflict. If I was every horrifically enacting the bloody, imperialist will of an aggressor state, it certainly never felt like it.”
