The scars of overseas deployments can’t be ignored

There’s often an air of shame that is associated with modern-day veterans’ service.

Maybe you attended an Anzac Day dawn service this morning.

Maybe you preferred the sleepin, opting for the comfort of bed rather than a brisk morning surrounded by strangers.

For those of you who did attend an Anzac Day service, thank you. My military family thanks you for your show of support. It means more than many of you will ever realise.

Acknowledgement is important and we feel it when we see others gather to respect those who have gone before and still answer the call today.

Regular column readers may get sick of me banging on about being a military partner, but I really do believe that our small community deserves some representation.

While at a service, you might have seen some solo parents trying to wrestle their kids to behave, be quiet, be respectful of the eerie morning calm that envelops Anzac dawn services.

Some of them are military partners, their other halves deployed overseas for sometimes up to a year at a time.

Give them a smile. You never know the battles anyone is facing and military partners often have years of exerting the ‘‘Everything’s OK, nothing to see here’’ persona.

For most people, this long amount of time away – willingly – from someone who they love is completely foreign. I once met someone who had been married 27 years and had never spent a single night apart.

That totally creeps me out, but anyway, my point is that everyone has a story and for many military partners, it can be a lonely and isolating one. This year’s Poppy Day appeal tagline that ‘‘Not all wounds bleed’’ is poignant among contemporary veterans and their families.

There’s a strange dichotomy between how we see the ‘‘olden day’’ wars and the more modernday ones.

It often feels like there is an accepted view that veterans of the past saw many horrors and when they came home, spoke nothing of it and suffered the consequences through undiagnosed conditions and behaviours linked with the trauma.

There is an agreement that this probably wasn’t the best thing both for their mental health and the follow-on effect of the generations that followed.

But when we look at modernday veterans, who have served in places such as East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and South Sudan, there’s often an air of shame that is associated with their service, most of it sourced from outsiders with no link to the military, but a ‘‘knowledge’’ to judge.

This shame is extremely dangerous.

It’s the type of emotion that sees veterans turn inwards, not seek help, ruminate unhelpfully and eventually suffer life-long downstream negative effects.

While there is a role to play with those closest to modern-day veterans, there is also often, and sometimes more importantly, a role for the wider community to play.

One of my most favourite academics, Brene Brown, studies shame and I absolutely love her quote: ‘‘If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.’’

Instead of criticising our Defence Force personnel at every turn, it is worth trying to see what a bit of empathy can do instead.

These are humans behind the headlines, some with parents, siblings, partners, and children. They sacrifice more than many of you may ever truly understand – whether it’s time away from their loved ones, missing anniversaries, birthdays, special events, funerals, or, in the very worst of situations, they sacrifice everything and don’t return home alive.

While thankfully these days it is rare for soldiers to return bloodied and battered from the front line, the injuries are definitely still there.

As the Defence Force’s chief medical officer Dr Paul Nealis said in media reports last week, the physical safety of those in the Defence Force may have improved, but the changing enemy tactics in the form of the shift to psychological attacks means injuries now take on a different form.

How we as communities deal with these injuries is up to us, but we need to acknowledge our community’s role in supporting anyone experiencing mental distress – not just military personnel.

Families are often the first line of support for veterans and others with mental distress, but they can only support that person when they know that they have loving and empathetic communities behind them, willing everyone along on their path to recovery.

There’s no time left to put our fingers in our ears and ‘‘la-la-la’’ our way out of this. Mental distress is real, it’s common, and it is absolutely able to be dealt with, but we shouldn’t expect anyone to have to do it on their own.