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by contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence
ON THIS REMEMBRANCE DAY, LET US LAY A WREATH OF TRUTH
UPON THE MEMORY OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
“If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
~ Lt. John McCrea
Contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence provides Independent Australia’s Remembrance Day tribute to Australia’s fallen – or forgotten – heroes.
On this Remembrance Day, Independent Australia is in the seventh month of a supportive campaign for increased pensions and death benefits for past and serving defence force personnel, widows and heirs.
It will surprise many Australians to know that as far as such things are concerned, for decades successive Australian Governments have treated our armed forces with contempt.
The abject hypocrisy of the Prime Minister and other politicians, solemnly lowering their voices – as well as the Australian flag – as they mourn, yet another, killing or act of treachery in Afghanistan, makes some of our Diggers sick with disgust.
In the 140 days of the campaign, I cannot recall a single day without a comment being left on the Diggers versus Gillard story. Those comments are nudging 1,000 and have become a meeting and conversation cyber-room — as well as a public media space for Diggers, family members and supporters.
It has become an important historical document of retiree activism with our own Poet Laureate, Brigadier (Ret’d) George Mansford AO.
Tribute must be paid to our courageous Managing Editor David Donovan. From the onset he backed my story and this campaign for social justice and equity that I shamelessly support.
The campaign has been fuelled by the Diggers (Land, Sea and Air Forces) themselves. They have demolished the nonsensically vapid excuses made by the Gillard Government and the wobbly political scaffolding that props it up.
The Government continues to promulgate lies in feeble excuses for paying Diggers and widows paltry pensions.
Never was this more evident than in June when the Labor Party’s malevolence towards battling Diggers resulted in it killing off the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Amendment Bill.
The casting ‘No’ vote was actually sealed with a crimson kiss of betrayal by none other than she who had portrayed herself as ‘the Digger’s friend’ — Senator Kate Lundy, the Tokyo Rose of the Labor Party, in this instance. Maybe that should read the Tokyo Bottlebrush.
In the course of thousands of networking emails trafficking between us in the campaign, the meaning and the meaninglessness of war has become palpable. Tens of thousands of our defence force retirees are doing it tough and are infected with serious physical and mental ill-health issues and an ageing process aided and abetted by the injuries of war and their own country’s neglect and indifference.
They are constantly humiliated and forced to justify their existence and injuries. How dare this Government and bureaucrats subject our elderly to such abuse.
They are made to feel as if they are bludgers, weaning on the public purse. Our defence force personnel have been used and abused. They have been trashed by our governments.
Their life journeys are a litany of horror stories, among them instances of inept recordkeeping, false records and records being completely wiped, AWOL or deliberately misplaced.
War has differing impact on different people. On Remembrance Day we should do well to remember the burgeoning toll of civilians as well as military forces.
Our earth has been ruthlessly fertilised with the blood and bones of the war dead of both killer and the killed.
For some the war never ends. How could it. War is for Life. We human beings become emotionally ringbarked by our life and death experiences. Some of us live with them better than others.
In our democracy, those of us who would rather get our hands dirty tending garden beds than mass graves, remain mostly agreeable to paying other human beings to defend us and do any killing on our behalf.
And in our name, but at times against our will, our governments despatch these human beings to wars that are sometimes contrived and unwinnable, for reasons of financial expediency and political fellatio.
The spectre of the War in Vietnam hovers like a mist of Agent Orange over Afghanistan. There are similarities in more ways than one on both sides of the 15th Parallel North.
I marched against the war in Vietnam. I did not march against our soldiers. I marched against the Government(s).
Some of us were guilty of treating the returned soldiers despicably. So many of them were just kids.
I feel that for the most part, those scars have healed to the extent that whilst the majority of Australians didn’t want to go to war in Iraq and certainly want Australia to extricate from the hopeless war in Afghanistan, we are mindful and respectful not to take it out on our returned soldiers. We’ve grown up. We pick our battles with the bullies not the bullied.
But the way that Vietnam Veterans continue to be treated by our Government(s) is repugnant and a violation of their human rights. They are being punished for serving their country. Why? Is it because the Government just can’t cope with any public expunging relating to the filthy reputation of the Vietnam War and their even filthier mistreatment of our returned soldiers?
Is this why successive Governments are in denial about some of the uglier aspects of the Vietnam
War and the impact it had on our men?
When the Greek Aeschylus wrote yonks ago that in war, truth is the first casualty, he hit onto something. We get that.
It’s not just about lies being told by ‘the other side’. It’s about being lied to by ‘our own side’.
Few things cause greater anger and disgust amongst Diggers than someone fabricating their war history, their medals or war exploits. Ask Don Tate. Not that he did any of that.
Nonetheless, he was accused of being a liar. Of making up atrocities committed by Australian troops that he witnessed. The unit that he said he was in didn’t exist, according to official records.
What a wanker. What a trouble-maker. Trying to besmirch the reputation of his mates. So not on. Sullying Australia’s reputation. He was subjected to hate and ridicule. Spurned and shunned. A lesser outcast among outcasts.
As if Australians would tie the corpses of captured VietCong to the back of an Army vehicle and drag them along the ground until their heads fell off. So what if one of them was a female doctor.
She was the enemy. All’s fair in love and whore. Let sleeping VietCong dogs lie. The Red Mist and all of that.
When you read Don Tate’s finely crafted first person memento mori of his experience in Vietnam and what happened to him upon his return to this country, you will realise that his real enemy was his Government and its civil servants.
It will open your eyes to the blistering truth that both corruption and collusion exist side by side in Governments, the public service and institutions and what’s more, is passed down through the decades, masquerading as the eternal flame we light to celebrate our war dead.
Not only was Don Tate the man who never was. The men he served with were also men who never were. Moreover, their unit never was.
Don Tate held on to his truth. His war. His version of events. For years, gathering evidence, badgering Canberra and the Central Army Record Office and finding witnesses and supporters.
His fight for Justice, transparency and public accountability deserves recognition. In pursuing his own fight, he has also secured victory for those unable to do so — and those who are long dead. At least their families will know that Don and his mates were telling the truth.
Our Government did break faith with those who died. But those who died did not sleep and called out to Don Tate during the years. And he did heed their call.
Independent Australia will be proudly featuring Don Tate’s epic and memorable essay about his experiences this weekend as our flagship Remembrance tribute — when we lay a wreath of truth upon the memory of both the living and the dead.
4 Comments
Another great article, Tess, raising so many hugely important isues. The complex relationship between war, politics, national defence, national values, and the human interface personified by our people in uniform, is worthy of much deeper consideration than it often receives.
The wars of the last 110 years have not only defined our country’s history, but shaped many of our family histories. My Irish-Australian Grandad was an original Anzac, landing on the beach at Gallipoli and being wounded on the Western Front, then leaving his two brothers behind in the soil of Flanders and northern France. I think he appreciated the ambiguity of that war – partly an imperialist adventure, partly a war of defence against German aggression – and occasionally he would express somewhat republican sentiments about the British Empire for which he had fought, and the English aristocrats at its rotten core.
My father served in New Guinea and Borneo in the War Against Fascism, the greatest war of all time, arguably the most just war we have ever fought. But again there are huge elements of ambiguity, of racism and fascism in the way our country fought the war, and in its legacy. When we came to the Vietnam War, I declined to follow the family tradition, and almost ended up in jail for it.
I’m proud of my grandfather and my father, I’m proud of my refusal to fight in Vietnam, and I’m proud of my friends and relatives who fought there with honour, in what I still believe to be an unworthy cause. I’m very proud of my countrymen fighting now in Afghanistan, in what is essentially a War Against Fascism, just as much as World War Two, and I refuse to join with the 70% who simplistically oppose that war and equate it with Vietnam or Iraq. But at the end of the day it’s a war fought in someone else’s country, and I’m forced to confront the possibility that abandoning the women of that country, and all those Afghans who want to live in freedom, to the tender mercies of a brutal totalitarian ideology, may turn out to be the lesser of two evils.
P.S. Can’t wait to see Don Tate’s essay.
Dear ROSS GARRAD, thank you for your kind words and for sharing your family’s poignant story with us.
You are so honest in your writing and the hydra-headed complexities of wars,cause and effect.
Whilst reading this, I was struck by how many wars are woven into your own family’s journey and
as you write, wars fought in ‘ someone else’s country. ‘ Your family represents so many others, it is true. But the way you have scooped the wars together in these few paragraphs makes we
realise how close we are to the past.
This is an important piece in the jigsaw of Australia’s history.
P.S. I have read Don Tate’s essay. It is a stunning read – and check out ‘ The War Within ‘ video at the top of this article. Don is so eloquent.
Remember, when people like Don and you share your stories, you are telling OUR stories; stories of the people. Not stories doctored with political expediency or spin.
Onya Ross!
Truth, it seems, is probably the number one thing we as humans feel uncomfortable with because it confronts us with the dark side of our nature.
On Remembrance Day we remember the fallen. Do we reflect on why the war to end all wars didn’t?
Theologians and philosophers have mulled over the doctrine of the just war (not that I have read anything more than a Wikipedia article on it). But if there is a ‘just war’, is there a ‘just peace’, and if we don’t know what a ‘just peace’ is can we ever hope to live without war? And before we begin to try and answer that question perhaps we should ask what is peace? If we send in the UN Peace Keeping Force to keep the warring parties apart do we have peace, or simply the absence of hostilities – at least outwardly?
You mentioned Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. I was 16 when I joined the RAAF in 1967, too young to philosophise over the rightness or wrongness of Vietnam. Today I still ask ‘Why was it wrong?’ We face the same idealogical enemy as we faced in Korea – and look at North Korea today. It was the ideology of Stalin who I believe killed more of his own people than Hitler. And I read recently that many of those ‘boat people’ – at the time ones Frazer showed such amazing leadership when he opened the doors to them – were Catholics who faced persecution and loss of religious freedom under communism, as have adherents of all faiths under that ism.
I followed with some interest the response of some in the Peace Movement to the invasion of Iraq and the fanfare some made of their action in standing in front of American tanks. I wondered where they had been when Hussein rolled his tanks out against the Kurds in his efforts of ethnic cleansing.
And can we ever have peace while the Taliban enforce their fundamentalist form of religion on their people – one that denies women any basic rights and brings conformity through a reign of terror?
Its one thing to argue there are better ways but it is another to demonstrate that those ways work. I support aid efforts that aim to educate people and lift them out of poverty. I doubt if the Taliban and their ilk would willingly accept offers from credible aid agencies. And, unfortunately western aid seems to come with ugly connotations – open up your markets to free market exploitation. Anyone who reads a little of the history of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th early 19th century can see real parallels to what is happening in the developing world today as indigenous peoples are exploited and abused. Capitalism without restraint is simply another form of warfare with the same ugly consequences – and no, communism is not the answer because it has been exposed as a cruel hoax.
Your article mentioned Don and his quest for truth – one that others didn’t want told. But do I want to face the truth that my lifestyle is propped up by a system that allows millions in Africa at this very moment to face starvation and almost certain death? How should I live when I know that if I have change in my pocket I am in the top 10 to 20% of the wealthiest people in the world.
I can only conclude that I am the cause of all the problems of the world and until I can work out how to be at peace with myself, knowing that I share this planet with others who have as much right to it as myself, then the legacy I leave my grandchildren is one of conflict and not peace.
Dear KEN MARSH, I have just read your challenging and thoughtful comment. I share so many of your thoughts, my head is reeling. I reckon others must be contemplating what you’ve said, and thinking similar things.
I reckon your grandchildren are extremely lucky Darlings. Their Grandad is a deep thinker unafraid of participating in public discourse and encouraging others to think. That will be
the legacy you bequeath them Ken.