A recent spike in the statistics has seen the number of suicides by Australia’s Afghanistan veterans pass 500. This is an appalling toll which raises many deep questions for us all.
I have a photograph which shows me busking surrounded by young Labradors. The dogs are trained in a local corrective institution as companion dogs for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. This is a meaningful program for prison inmates and the familiarisation tours are an excellent way to remind the community of an otherwise hidden cost of the way Australia projects itself internationally. This enjoyable but sobering group photograph is the closest contact I have had with our campaign in Afghanistan even though the commitment is supposedly undertaken on my behalf.
The then Defence Minister put the government’s case for commitment in terms that seemed reasonable. He said that Australia needed to be there because that is where the Bali terrorists had been trained and equipped. The bombings of Bali nightclubs killed some 80 Australians directly and maimed and traumatised many more. While those figures are horrible, they put the 500 suicides into stark perspective.
It is one thing to sit in Australia and debate the aims of the Afghanistan commitment. As the true stories behind previous military adventures emerge, we find continually that governments embellish the facts and twist the truth to suit their own agendas. They lie about requests for assistance from host countries and from great and powerful allies. The reason they do this is plain enough: because we accept the Anzac myth so unquestioningly, governments believe they can play this card at any time by sending troops overseas. It then becomes unpatriotic to question foreign policy because it might sow doubts in the minds of our brave troops. This is a nasty, cynical, and deadly use of propaganda by desperate politicians.
It is not likely that an outsider can adequately understand the current military paradigm, so there is no point in attempting to criticise the way that personnel are treated. Perhaps soldiers and others are not well prepared for their roles in Afghanistan. It is also possible that the debriefing they receive on their return is inadequate. But focussing solely on such issues lets the politicians off the hook. There can be no adequate preparation for war other than to tell soldiers they are being sent out to kill and there can be no adequate debriefing following that experience. It would be more honest to present them with the suicide statistics at recruitment.
This is where the Anzac myth defies reality. The legend emphasises sacrifice, courage, and mateship. It implies nobility, awareness, and choice. Pulling the trigger or pushing the button on a weapon involves none of these admirable qualities. Perhaps the awareness strikes home rather too deeply and too late. Promises about a land fit for heroes ring hollow when people realise they are not heroes at all and that they should not expect the community to treat them as such.
There is little merit in debating the pros and cons of Australia’s commitment to strategic terms while we are blinded by the Anzac myth. At the very least we need to acknowledge that when we commit troops to wars or even urge allies on as we did in the case of Iraq, we are sending them to kill and by implication, to kill on our behalf.
Talk of ‘just wars’ and of ‘defence’ is meaningless to the man or woman in the front line. It is better that they be told the truth and that truth must include the political realities: the government is most likely exploiting you for its own purposes, there is doubt about what your mission can achieve and if the Australian people seem to support you, this is only passively, partially and in principle, not actively, unanimously or on a well-informed basis.
Australia sometimes needs to arm itself. It is difficult to criticise the generation that fought for survival in the wars of 1939 to 1945. Occasionally Australia must contribute to United Nations peacekeeping efforts such as the one in East Timor. For most of the time, however, the use of the military and spending on defence are mired in the desire for political power.
The Bali bombings occurred a generation ago. It will still be true in a century’s time that the terrorists were trained in Afghanistan. An entire generation of Australians has been affected negatively by this war, just as a generation was traumatised by the commitment to the Vietnam War. These impacts will continue until we stop glorying in the myth that we Australians do war in some clean fashion and then only when we are forced by aggressors to take up arms. In the meantime, we need to acknowledge the needs of veterans and to repatriate and rehabilitate with care and compassion. If we want anyone to blame it should not be the victims of the lies but those who told the lies and we who allow them to get away with it.
Dr Tony Smith is a former political science academic with interests in elections, parliament and political ethics.
Comments
6 responses to “The essence of war is to kill”
As stated by Dwight Eisenhauer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-jvHynP9Y) The military-industrial complex constitutes a power in its own right, regardless of the existence or absence of political justification.
In our time preparations for a next war constitutes global suicide.
I am with your sentiments precisely, Tony Smith – and looking forward to the day we round up those politicians and shock jock media voices who told the lies and sent our young people to die or be maimed (body/spirit) and those who came home to take their own lives!
Round them up – and lock THEM away! For crimes against humanity – in those far off lands and to our own sons and daughters right here!
Yes Tony. Definitely.
My closest interaction with the war was my interaction with soldiers preparing for war operations at Shoalwater Bay. I prayed with them and I was arrested and hauled away. Then I interacted with them again in 2011. I blockaded an invading US batallion in the dead of night under white phosporus skies. The next morning we blockaded them again at the intersection near Samuel Hill.
We are just ordinary people looking for opportunities for physical intervention.
My husband stuck a mattock in an Euro attack helicopter putting it out of action for several months- It was designed to cover SAS killers with machine gun strafing.
My friends Greg Rolles and Tim Webb interacted at Swan Island when they were stripped, hooded, bagged and threatened.
Ciaron O’Reilly stopped a US navy plane with a hammer and blood, that was stopping in Ireland for refueling.
We are just ordinary people and we had these interactions for which we were locked up, charged and had to provide money to the State as punishment.
If 2% of the people who read and write on this blog had joined us WITH YOUR BODIES we may have had more success. If you had written about our stories and sent us supportive notes, we may have done more. We have spend our lives opposing war – mostly to sneeThe sars from the educated middle classes.
It is not enough to write about how you oppose war, or you are against it, or you disapprove.
It is simply not enough. No matter how truthfully you speak.
We have to move our bodies, in our wheelchairs – or whatever devices move us around as we age – and do different things. Act in new ways. Words don’t do it anymore.
the same with climate change… you have to take action. With your bodies. In new places.
I’d like to see all the aged intellegencia that contribute to this intelligent, and truthful blog, chained together on their wheelchairs, holding the tomes you have written, chained together at Electro Optic Systems, or Boeing or Raytheon or BAE . . We know enough. Your words are truthful; but without embodied power they are not enough. You must take action.
Thank you Tony. I think that ordinary people should be encouraged to see all these costs of war, remembering that suffering by Australian service personnel is generally a fraction of the suffering of people in whose lives we intervene.
Useful to keep in mind that care for veterans in the United States is far worse than Australia, in part driving memes of the alt.right. I have for some time expressed the view that a major consequence of modern war is the importation of the horrors one goes nobly abroad to conquer. I have also written recently here about pharmacotic war. There is as much need to chop this off wholesale in an addicted nation as to detox prescription opioids in the sick veteran or other. Something I have just been through. Addressing just bits, considering people too tender to be confronted will not solve the problem.
Having added those thoughts, please accept by praise for a powerful and valuable paper.
Well said, Tony. Will add it to our little collection: http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/stephens-david-getting-beyond-our-heroes-a-war-memorial-angle-on-possible-war-crimes/