Falling for the old lie
T is sobering to consider that 41 Australian soldiers were killed serving in Afghanistan.
It is teetering beyond belief to find out more than 1200 Australian defence personnel took their own lives during that 20-year period, a vast majority after they had returned home from service.
Yes, 30 times more Aussie defence personnel killed themselves than were blown up by extremists in suicide vests, or shredded by car bombs, or shot dead by al-Qaeda, the Taliban or any other terrorist in Afghanistan.
Statistics suggest they were far less likely to die in the thick of bloody battle in the infamous war-torn ruination of cities such as Kabul or Kandahar, than at home in Australia among the suburban lawns, footy and Hills hoists of Hobart, Wagga Wagga, Glebe, Melbourne or Subiaco.
It is a bitter paradox for families who wait months and years in varied states of anxiety for sons, daughters, wives, husbands, mums and dads to return from tours of duty in foreign war zones, only to lose them on the front doorstep of where the home fires were still very much burning.
Five months ago, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a royal commission into defence and veteran suicides to examine what at the time was thought to be 400 or so suicides since 2001. The figure was so large, many families were affected. There was a sense of urgency to find out what was going on.
But new statistics from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare this week reveal the problem is astronomically worse in overall numbers — 1273 defence personnel took their lives between 2001 and 2019.
Most fear the death toll has continued without waning for the past two years, and that the total number of deaths from 2001 to now is hundreds more. What? How? Why?
The truth is the motivations for many suicides remain a lifelong mystery, with friends and family left behind to piece together fragments of the final days, going over and over all that was said, every step taken, in order to find a clue to explain the inexplicable.
Those who live with the frayed edges and shards of a loved one’s memories often settle on a simple rationale to explain the tragedy, but never really shake a deeper sense of puzzlement that is the result of having more questions than answers.
Hopefully, the royal commission will provide some answers, and finally address this long taboo subject.
RITISH war poet Wilfred Owen wrote of the hell of war when he was sent to France to fight on the front line in World War I.
His words describe in gruesome detail the horror of trench warfare that had little to do with gallantry, valour or even triumph.
WWI was the first industrial war of the 20th century with killing machines capable of slaughtering tens of thousands a day — 20 million were killed, 21 million injured from 1914 to 1918. The bloodshed was unprecedented, but the real nightmare lay in wait for those who survived the mud and trench foot, poison gas, artillery, shrapnel, grenades and mates blasted to bits.
As Owen writes:
Bent double like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
Owen was killed on the Western Front, his pen silenced just the week before armistice in 1918.
Australia mobilised 345,000 soldiers to fight in WWI from a mere population of 4.5 million, and about 62,000 Diggers died. Many Tasmanians died on the Western Front, including Longford-born and raised Keith Heritage, who had previously served with distinction in German New Guinea and Gallipoli.
Captain Heritage was killed by shrapnel in 1916 at Pozieres. It was a bloodbath. He was one of 6800 Australians killed in just seven weeks.
Tasmanians stood tall on the Western Front — 11 of the 14 Victoria Crosses granted to Tasmanians were for acts of bravery on that relentless theatre.
Tasmanians have a sense of pride and honour at the price paid by their relatives in WWI and all other wars because we like to think they fought for the freedom we enjoy today.
I share a sense of pride that my Italian grandfather fought alongside the Allies on the Alpine Front at the border of Austria and Italy in WWI. Our ancestors’ deeds are honoured, revered and memorialised.
But Owen found little worth revering on the front line and simply wrote about what he saw, including when a soldier failed to get his gas mask on in time:
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Owen’s concluding lines about the old Lie are expressed in Latin, and translate: “It is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland.”
My grandfather said not a word of the war from the day he was discharged from the army in 1920, aged 23, until the day he died in Melbourne, at 93. Many Tasmanians say their returned warriors were similarly mute. I reckon their silence says almost as much as Owen’s mighty pen. War is hell.
IGHTING in Afghanistan was vastly different to the trench warfare of the Western Front. In the neatly linear conflicts of WWI, the enemy was easily distinguished as the bloke with the German accent tossing grenades from the trench directly opposed to you.
In Afghanistan, your killer could be among the Afghan recruits you were training in the art of modern warfare, or riding with an improvised explosive device in the truck he is parking next to you.
Mind you, an arm ripped off by shrapnel in 1915 hurts much the same as one torn off by a pedestrian in a suicide vest. We have known about post-traumatic stress syndrome since before WWI, when soldiers returned from battle with what was known as shell shock.
The ordinary human psyche struggles with having to kill and having to endure the killing of others. The human psyche is deeply horrified at the carnage of war.
Even armoured with a well-drilled hate of the enemy, indoctrinated in the justness of the cause, and expertly trained in war, the best of soldiers can still break. Hollywood may tell us that as a species we’re natural born killers, but it’s fantasy. Those among us who kill without remorse are psychopaths who suffer a pathological condition.
Ordinary folk like you and I have entrenched empathy and an aversion to killing one another. Human nature is capable of knowing, even loving, our enemy. It’s a marvellous capacity stymied only by layer upon layer of cultural pressure, and by myths and legends that revere the fallen soldier.
HE royal commission will identify ways to reduce the pain for those who return from tours of duty, help in their transition, and assist families who have lost loved ones. Support services will improve.
But the decision to go to war, to arm our nation with nuclear-powered submarines, to militarise our region and procure killing machines will not be investigated. These decisions will, as always, be made in secret by our government and sold to us as “jobs”.
We, the people, are merely fodder for war. The royal commission we desperately need is a probe into the rising prevalence in our society of Owen’s old Lie that it is “sweet and fitting to die for the homeland”.
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