The mother
Venus Poa stops talking when the tears come. And when they don’t stop, she disappears inside to take a moment.
It’s this time of year, approaching the anniversary of the death of her son Corporal Douglas Hughes, that the hurt which never goes away forces a confrontation.
The Herald visited Poa at her home in the Mangakahia Valley at Pakotai in Northland to ask if the cost was worth it.
It’s no sort of question to ask a mother, and little wonder the tears came.
But this is the reality of our time in Afghanistan. With war comes death. The names of the eight who were lost can be as distant as Afghanistan until you’re sitting with the woman who brought one of them into this world.
She is so proud of Hughes, who served in Afghanistan in 2008 and deployed again in 2011. He was a te reo, French and Spanish speaker who become fluent in Afghanistan’s Dari tongue.
The ability to communicate as an equal with locals would have made him a valuable asset on patrol, a value evident in the training courses the NZ Army sent him on at the United States’ main base at Bagram.
There’s a certificate for “detainee interviews and field questioning”. Another was for a course in “tactical site exploitation” — the US-coined phrase for “collecting information, material and persons from a designated location” and extracting needed information.
On what was achieved in Bamiyan, Poa is unsure. She knows her son contributed to the “mission” but doesn’t have great clarity on what that “mission” was.
“I wish he had never gone over,” she says. “The first tour, I used to worry all the time with him being in a war zone. And then he came home.
“I sort of felt at ease with the second time, thinking, he’ll be coming back.”
And then he didn’t. His death was later ruled self-inflicted although his family have many unanswered questions.
The deployment after Hughes’ was the 20th and five people were killed. There were questions over how our small military was able to stretch itself across a 10-year mission.
After that tragic tour, New Zealand carried out one more sixmonth deployment then pulled its troops out.
“Why wait for so many lives to be taken and then pull them out,” asks Poa.