Restricted Remembrance
It seems that almost every year I am asked to give my opinion on Anzac Day as the son of a Vietnam veteran . Each year as Anzac Day begins to poke its head into the national consciousness, I try to make some sense out of the competing emotions that I feel. On the one hand I do feel enormous pride in my father, love him dearly and understand the terrible decision he was forced to make ( he was a conscript). On the other I am passionately opposed to war having seen first hand its debilitating effects. And I also have seen how damaging and violent so-called movements for peace have been against soldiers, forgetting that they themselves are victims of conflict.
I suppose what I feel most during Anzac Day is a sense of frustration. A sense that for all 'lest me forgot' that we have developed national amnesia when it comes to the topic of war and of the sacrifices veterans made. As one commentator wrote in the SMH today, for all our statements at ANZAC day that this will never happen again, that we will never send people to experience the horrors of war- it has and it will continue to happen again.
Also in our restricted remembrance, we at ANZAC day forgot when visit war memorials, attend dawn services, when we see unknown tombs and monuments, epitaphs that recognise those who gave their lives in wars- these lists, these empty stats, only tell a fraction of the cost of war. They mask the reality of those wounded, those who were so Permentantly scarred from their war injuries, that they were unable to return to work, to normal society. It masks the psychological pain war inflicts on its participants; the numbers of Veterans of all wars suffer PTSD, with its debilitating effects of recurrent nightmares or daytime flashbacks, in which they endlessly relieve the traumatic experiences. Their psychological crying and cutting.
It also masks the generational cost of war. When the decision is made to send a soldier to war, even if he or she survives, the pressures and emotional heartache for their families is just beginning. Trauma, without adequate treatment has not end point, but like like a sick game of psychological tag, is passed from generation to generation. And of course it masks the other victims of war- civilians killed and maimed, children orphaned, the victims of wartime rape and sex servitude.
While some sort rememberance is essential perhaps in order to fully understand war, to begin to mean it when we say 'never again'- that we need to acknowledge and recognise this true cost of war.