On 11 November 1918 at 11 am the guns of the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of continuous warfare. This year marks the 89th anniversary of the armistice, when Australians remember those who fought and died for our country in war and armed conflicts.
Adele Horin says;
Australia is unique in its enthusiasm to fight war on distant shores. The explanation is simple. Successive governments have used troop deployment to curry favour with first Britain, then the United States
It’s strange how those who sit at home and slander hundreds of thousands of their countrymen have this warped view of history.
My family have put in appearances in all conflicts since the Boer War. My Grandfather went there under age to be discovered after some time and returned to Australia. I still have photo of him wearing the Queens South African medal riband. His cousins, my great uncles, served in WW1 and two stayed over there while grandfather trained the troops at Blackboy Camp in West Australia.
My father and all of his brother and cousins served in WW2 and a host of my cousins served in all the post-WW2 conflicts and yet I’ve never ever heard any of them question the reasons we fought. Us young bucks did our best to slow down communism; our fathers the Nazis and the Japs and our grandfathers, the Germans.
It certainly would never have occurred to any of them in WW2 that the reason we were fighting in the Pacific was to curry favour with the Yanks. Some of the family were in Europe and any thought of currying favour with the Brits would’ve been overshadowed iin their desperate struggle to quell the fires of Hitler.
The only rationalization I can make from Adele’s piece is that she is currying favour with her peers -those who would denigrate our service and weep tears for the enemy.
Poor show
Lest we forget
I borrowed the graphic from the
Australia War Memorial Visit the site and pay homage to the sacrifice of the servicemen who have played their part in the Nations history.
I searched for “Horin” – didn’t get any hits.
UPDATE: I got this email from fellow blogger Wallace Craig from Midland Texas.
All Veterans should be so blessed as to live in a place like Midland.
For the past 7 years Rusk Elementary has had Remembering Veterans as their school project. I get letters of thanks from the kids at all major holidays every year. Today was their big Veterans Day Event. A 1.5 hour show put on by the kids. Probably 1000 people crammed our big CAF hangar, with probably 400+ veterans. At the end of the show all Vets stand and the kids bring a “present” of thanks to each……this year the plaque below. After each Vet has his gift, the kids, 100’s, line up on two sides in a long row and all the Vets pass through, the kids cheering the entire time and shaking hands. There was a Vietnam Marine in front of me and a guy who spent 2 years as a POW in Stalag-Luft 15 behind me…..there wasn’t a dry eye among us. Every Vet then gets a sack lunch made by the kids to eat with the kids. An incredible amount of time and work…
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Kev
Recognition of veterans has improved where I live in the last decade. I’m routinely invited to schools on Anzac Day, and the reception is usually respectful and genuine.
Incidentally, whilst I don’t support Adele Horin’s comments as you quoted her, she is well-known for her work, having been given the Edna Ryan Award (Media/Communication) in 2006, so if she is currying favour with her peers, she has been successful. She writes mainly on family and women’s issues for the SMH.
Then she needs to stick to her forte. There are many ways to address the trauma that war brings families but denigrating the serviceman isn’t one I’d support.
Just to be clear on my opinion – every left wing and/or Adele type comment on war, even if it is aimed at the Government, insults veterans by questioning their motives and by default, suggesting they were too dumb to understand that which Adele sees clearly.
Kev
I respect your opinion on comments on war, but I don’t personally feel insulted as a general rule. It depends to a large extent on the context of the comment.
I think this issue has a particular resonance for Vietnam Veterans, because of the reception we got on RTA – or at least those of us who served post 1969, when the public view of the war began to change.
I remember being told by a colleague when I started teaching disabled kids in 1971 that ” I’d gone from creating spastics to teaching them”. This I found completely offensive at the time, mainly because to me it implied that we were so poorly disciplined that we killed/maimed children. Her comment, of course, wasn’t directed at our discipline, but at the basis of the intervention. The fine distinction didn’t matter to me at the time.
It was perhaps easier for me, as I was a Nasho, and never believed that we were engaged in a just cause. I was cynical (or mature) enough at the time to weigh up the option of two years in the clink against two years in the Army, and settled for the latter.
This, of course, makes me a hypocrite in hindsight, and I wouldn’t be Robinson Crusoe. Nor does it lessen my respect for diggers (like you, I guess) who believed in the cause.
Any anger I retain is about a process which cynically picked about one in twenty young men and sent them off to war, whilst the others continued on their merry hedonistic way. I hope we never see this again.
Nor does the process of conscription demean the service of Nashos. Once I was in an Infantry battalion I was the best soldier I could be. My motive (to come back in one piece) may have been more selfish than that of my Reg mates who believed that we were defeating communism, but conduct in the field was indistinguishable.
It’s a difficult and complex topic, and still not well understood. Paul Ham’s book puts a lot of it in perspective.
There’s a very good quote in it by Harry Whiteside, who served both in SAS and Infantry –
” War takes a blender to standards and values….Men come back and spend the rest of their lives trying to find out who they are…”
We don’t all come out of the blender with the same views – and that’s OK.
I’m a failed poet. Here’s something I wrote after our second op back in 1970.
Please accept it as a tribute to all who served in infantry.
” Locstat
Each man eases
Pack down, webbing loose
And flares his rationed smoke.
Each man watches
Steel point bamboo stabs
And avoids all other eyes.
Radio hisses
Skipper checks the map
Flicks his compass open
Looks at the scrub
Stink of sweat and fear
Our shared reality
Move now!
The signal curses quickly down the line.
I heave my pack again.”
Any anger I retain is about a process which cynically picked about one in twenty young men and sent them off to war, whilst the others continued on their merry hedonistic way
Could it be because you were selected and others weren’t and if that was the case you have a point but the cold hard logistics says this; The Army, or the country, couldn’t afford every 20 year old to be enlisted nor did we need an army of 500,000 – thus someone has to make a decision as to how to select them.
It was done – you lost the lotto but you know you did gain something from the experience
For the best part of 30 years or more the distinction between Nashos and Regs was forgotten, obliterated in the comradeship of shared hard times. For years, nobody cared whether you were a Nasho or a Reg, least of all your comrades in arms.
Now the divisiveness of the bad old days is being revisited because of that useless piece of gilt, the “Anniversary Of National Service Medal”.
Unecessary, unwarranted and generally unwanted by those who served shoulder to shoulder with their Reg counterparts.
I served with many, many National Servicemen who have never counted their time in uniform as anything but a plus. Now it seems, the wearing of that “medal” is an opportunity to denigrate the military; ” I was forced to go, blah blah blah. . . .”
I’d like to kick the clown who came up with this “medal” idea right up the date. He/she has no idea of the trouble he/she caused within the veteran’s ranks, nor the leg up to the high moral ground afforded by those who wear it and their ability to cast doubts on the character and motivation of those professional soldiers who chose the military as their careers.
I liked the locstat thingo, is it a poem?
I was the radio operator for our platoon and when we stopped for a locstat, I didn’t get to sit down – I was trying to get comms with CHQ. I was not a trained sig, I came straight from the gun group to a pogo position in Pl HQ!
I rose to prominence very quickly in the Bn in the first couple of weeks at my being the Pl sig. I had not been able to get comms with CHQ for most of the day. Late in the afternoon I heard niner’s chopper (sorry for non military people this was the Bn commander, a Lt Col). So I changed frequency on the radio and called him up.
He told me to wait out (he may have been doing something really important for all I know), Then a few moments later, he called me back. I mentioned that I had comms problems with callsign 1, and could he relay our locstat. I sent it to him and for the next few minutes I could hear him relaying it to OA (Bn HQ)
This went around the Bn like wildfire, a Pl sig sending a locstat to niner!
Sorry 1735099 (a bloody Queenslander!) But you don’t often see the word locstat and suddenly I was back there…..
Supposed to be a sonnet – 14 lines – blank verse.
Well there you go 1735099, I know nuthin’… except … I is grunt… Grunt is good