As Anzac Day arrives again with its hardy perennial of hyperbole about how a failed military operation on an obscure finger of the Ottoman Empire birthed the Australian nation, one soldier’s words particularly resonate.
They belong to Vietnam veteran Jim Robertson. Before the 2014 centenary of Anzac – a jamboree on which Australia spent at least $550m – he wrote to federal politicians about the tone he hoped the commemorations might take.
“Try to avoid the utterly demeaning term ‘fallen’ when speaking of war dead – they did not trip over a stick or a garden hose, they were drowned, burned, shot, gassed and eviscerated to lie face down in mud or sand or at the bottom of the ocean,” he urged.
“War is humankind’s most horrific activity and it must be portrayed as such for that is how veterans see it. It should not be made to appear otherwise by false sensitivity or photos of politicians trying to look dutifully serious.”
If ever a discomfiting truth was spoken to power this is it. Politicians will always send young people to conflict – and in Australia’s case, into far too many imperial wars of others. And you can bet they’ll always adopt such language when they do so – and when they come to commemorate the young who die in the name of their politics – that aims to sanitise the prosaic horror of combat death.
And so, on days like Anzac Day they’ll summon the “spirit” of the “fallen”, the “glorious dead” and their “sacrifice”, the living evoking war dead in a language imbued with ecclesiastics. Fitting, some might think, for the secular religion that Anzac has become.
It’s a language that served at the time to comfort the families of the almost 62,000 personnel who died overseas. Although it probably did little to ameliorate the anguish of those close to the 150,000 who were physically wounded and perhaps 100,000 more who were also psychologically damaged.
Yes the repatriated veterans suffered. But so did their families as they dealt with the domestic violence, the alcoholism, the morphine addiction, the inability of veterans to settle, the fear in the eyes of the children and, not least, the countless suicides.
Today, amid all of the sugar-coating words, amid all of the light and sound of the football codes riding on Anzac, this is what we should be solemnly reflecting upon.
And yet from the get-go, with the help of a politically influential RSL and compliant newspapers, Australia told itself stories of the country’s achievements in war – the victories, the white-hatted bravery, the gallant deaths – but rarely ventured behind the closed doors to parse the ugly human fallout. Too much has not changed.
A country that culturally prides itself on selective war stories (the invasion at Gallipoli but never the more significant one on these shores) for its foundation narrative, on stories of loyally following allied major powers into unwinnable wars (think Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq) too often on the flimsiest of – or false – pretexts, is morally obliged to examine the human cost, past and present.
There’s a slow correction under way. The royal commission into defence and veteran suicide is airing experiences of those whose service contributed to their self-destruction away from battle. Meanwhile, the nation reckons with the brutal moral complexities of the battlefield as more alleged crimes of Australian soldiers come to light.
Today, ignore politicians and sports-casters and their hyperbole. Don’t get lost in their words when considering war’s evil. And especially beware politicians invoking Anzac to justify further adventurism, military purchases and strategic decisions like Aukus.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
