Pinko

I was awoken in the middle of the night by an almighty crunch. Elephants were outside the tent ripping up and munching branches. Saliva flying and molars gnashing metres from my head. I couldn’t make out any bulk in the gloom, but elephants can be like that. Lumbering oafs one moment, merging silently into surroundings the next. In the morning fallen foliage was all around the tent.

I wasn’t wild about the evening. We have had some partner staff visiting from Reserve headquarters, who are generally simple to work with. At dinner there was four hours of chat about aviation fuel, ammunition and logistics. Some useful information absorbed about the practicalities of working here permanently.

I was termed a Pinko, which at first I thought was a reference to my sexuality, which had already received some ‘comical’ references and sniggers despite me never having mentioned it to anyone here. Instead I later learned Pinko is a ‘pejorative coined in 1925 in the United States to describe a person regarded as being sympathetic to communism. It has since come to be used to describe anyone perceived to have leftist or socialist sympathies.’ The date reference sounds about right for the era these characters believe they still live in, and if ‘leftist’ equals ‘progressive’, then I’m a proud Pinko.

Adult men who engage in the act of mocking others’ sexualities a) don’t realise the effect it has of further alienating the person who already feels different, and b) all tend to look the same; like hairy red balls of meat in khaki shirts, indecipherable from each other. Certainly their faces are usually indistinguishable from their necks and shoulders.

You may think I am mocking them equally, however one’s sexuality is a protected characteristic that is not a person’s choice. Developing a certain value system and stuffing it into a khaki shirt is an act of their choosing and I trend I have witnessed across space and time.