Anzac's Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession

Other books in the Redbacks series:

Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia

Andrew Leigh

Why We Argue about Climate Change

Eric Knight

Dog Days: Australia after the Boom

Ross Garnaut

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Copyright © James Brown 2014

James Brown asserts the right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photo­copying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Brown, James, author.

Anzac’s long shadow : the cost of our national obsession / James Brown.

9781863956390 (paperback)

9781922231352 (ebook)

Australia. Army. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – Influence. Australian Defence Force – Management. Memorialization – Australia. World War, 1914-1918 – Campaigns – Turkey – Gallipoli Peninsula –Influence. Soldiers – Care – Australia. Veterans – Care – Australia. Australia – History – 1914-1918 – Influence.

355.60994

Contents

Prologue: On Parade

Introduction: Outside the Hall of Memory

Chapter 1: Selling Remembrance

Chapter 2: An Afghan Complex

Chapter 3: No Metric but Death

Chapter 4: The Widening Chasm

Chapter 5: War is a Profession

Chapter 6: Legend and Reality

Chapter 7: Caring for Veterans

Chapter 8: Anzac Day

Chapter 9: A Distant Shore

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

To the men and women of the future Australian Defence Force.

And to Daisy, whose love makes everything possible.

Myths are tonic to a nation’s heart. Once abused, however, they are poisonous. – Norman Mailer

PROLOGUE: ON PARADE

These are not people you see face to face very often, hipster artists and soldiers, but here they are – in the one room, gazing at Ben Quilty’s depictions of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. The room is packed full of the curious and the thirsty. I ask an acquaintance from the art world whether this is a normal opening-night crowd. ‘At least three times as big as I’ve seen here before,’ he replies.

I recognise a few faces. Soldiers and officers I’ve served with. Some whose work I know only by reputation. Public servants who’ve worked in Afghanistan, public figures, too. Telling the military from the maestros is best done by looking down. Even when out of uniform, the fighting folk are identifiable by their fastidious shoes. Some officers wear their most corporate suits, secretly relishing the opportunity to dress like the rest of society’s professionals. One soldier dresses according to the unwritten manual that specifies a dark suit must be worn with a black shirt and garish tie – as at a mafia wedding, or mid-western US prom night. A nonchalant few are in uniform. A row of medals occasionally clinks across a breast. Each of the military faces looks excited. This is unfamiliar territory for them, and they’re the stars of the show.

In some ways, Ben Quilty resembles special forces soldiers I’ve known – slim, bristly and focused. It is clear why he was accepted by these professional warriors and allowed to tell their story. His selection as an official artist for the Australian War Memorial was an unusual move for such a conservative institution, but Quilty’s own choice to paint soldiers at war makes a lot of sense – his oeuvre depicts plenty of young men making risky decisions. In the military, a sense of professional duty can help stifle recognition that going to a combat zone is not a wise course of action. Yet Quilty made a cold and clear decision to journey to Afghanistan to paint men and women at war – no easy choice.  

Up close, Quilty’s paintings are strong yet discombobulated shards of paint. They make no sense. In the thronging crowd no one can quite get the perspective they need to admire what he has done. So too in war, perspective is elusive. Most Australian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have such a limited view. A valley here, a village there. Death or worse is close at hand – in your face and at your feet. A moment’s inattention can be your, and your mates’, last. The close-up intensity of survival removes the luxury of perspective, the step back to make sense of so much chaos and noise.

In the gallery downstairs, there is more of that elusive perspective. A long, meandering timeline of the Afghan War is strung around the bare white walls, scrawled in plain black texta. I trace time around the room and realise I’ve forgotten just how long this war has been raging. We’ve been in Afghanistan longer than the Russians. A child born on the eve of the 2001 American invasion might enter high school this year. In front of me I recognise a warrior I know, whose finely tailored suit tapers to conceal two prosthetic legs. 

The late critic Robert Hughes once wrote that the purpose of art is to close the gap ‘between you and everything that is not you’. To make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness. 

The gap between our soldiers and the society they serve is a chasm. This year an Anzac festival begins, a commemorative program so extravagant that it would make sultans swoon and pharaohs envious. But commemorating soldiers is not the same as connecting with them. 

Anzac has become our longest eulogy, our secular sacred rite, our national story. A day when our myth-making paints glory and honour so thickly on those in the military that it almost suffocates them. The historian Mark McKenna wrote, ‘In little over 50 years, we have so dramatically transformed our conception of what happened at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 that the men who clawed their way up those steep hills would not recognise themselves in the images we have created of them.’ If the original Anzacs cannot find themselves in Anzac Day, then what hope have our returning Afghan veterans?

Anzac Day has morphed into a sort of military Halloween. We have Disneyfied the terrors of war like so many ghosts and goblins. It has become a day when some dress up in whatever military costume might be handy. Where military re-enactors enjoy the same status as military veterans. The descendants of citizen soldiers swell the ranks of parades their grandfathers might have avoided, claiming their share of the glory and worship, swimming in a sea of nostalgia. Sort through all this and you’ll find the servicemen and women increasingly standing to one side. Those who have fought fiercest in Uruzgan’s narrow green valleys and on its vast brown hills forgo their uniforms more often than not. They don’t want honour that rides with hubris. Or glory bestowed by a society that fetishises war but doesn’t know the first damn thing about fighting it. A surfeit of honour can scar today’s returning soldiers as much as insults scarred our Vietnam veterans.

Months after he returned from Afghanistan, a senior army officer told me that his soldiers were coming back ashamed that they had not measured up to the heroic giants of Anzac. Unlike in the past, victory in our recent wars has been marked more often by an absence of violence than furious personal feats of it. Our Anzac narrative doesn’t yet have a place for quiet professional soldiers doing their job – for those whose families can’t understand what they actually did in Afghanistan, despite the number of war films they’ve watched and odes they’ve recited. 

Brendan Nelson, the newly minted czar of the Australian War Memorial, tells the gallery crowd he will race to have an Afghanistan exhibition installed. ‘Our returning veterans need to know they will have their story told now,’ he says. But our government is spending at least $30 million more on commemorating soldiers who fought in Europe long ago than the mental wounds of soldiers returning from Afghanistan today. And a policy that one general refers to as ‘contrived secrecy’ stops soldiers from telling their stories while still in uniform.

But on this night, the serving stand beside the sophisticated and the svelte of Sydney’s art world. And the svelte are growing restless. The speeches have gone on too long and their glasses need tending.

Looming above the now chattering crowd, a soldier’s afflicted face looks upwards from a canvas. In this warrior’s face Quilty has left just enough gentle mystery for us to fill with our own conceptions of war. His expression could register a successful mission, or despair at the death of a colleague. Another painting of a sprawling ‘Trooper M’ is just ambiguous enough to host a swirl of emotions – fear, courage, hope, horror – in equal measure. 

The artist didn’t create these emotions. He didn’t lead these men and women to choose a calling that visits violence on those who deserve it. But he has brought their experiences to life, and to light. 

On my way out, I pass a group in the courtyard chatting and smoking. Three hipsters and a short, darkly moustached warrant officer with gnarled skin. He wears medals and a regimental tie denoting his service in special forces. He’s telling his story to an interested audience. Dancing in his eyes is something I haven’t seen in such men before.

Pride.

INTRODUCTION: OUTSIDE THE HALL OF MEMORY

It’s an inauspicious way to step off this island continent and into war. Most weeks in the past twelve years, in a quiet corner of Sydney Airport, soldiers and officers of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) have farewelled solemn families and sad friends and headed for the Middle East Area of Operations. Plain-clothed military men and women have boarded countless unmarked planes since Australia first deployed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. No plaque marks the spot; no memorial registers its significance. The quiet reality for Australia’s modern warriors is that war begins at check-in.

I was once one of them. I’ve spent the better part of a decade preparing for, deploying to and returning from military operations in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and the Solomon Islands. Today, however, I’m checking in for Canberra.

In the two years since I’ve left the army, I’ve been stunned by how little people I otherwise respect know about soldiers, particularly since Australia has been fighting a war for more than a decade. I want answers about why there is such ignorance of the military in Australia. It’s something I truly don’t understand. Our most sacred national day is dedicated to remembering military service. Australians know so much about World War I and World War II. Military histories are best-sellers. Anzac is central to how we think of ourselves. But it’s as if I’ve been living on the moon while I’ve been in the military.

On a Sunday afternoon I join a group of old friends for their regular touch footy game. I explain where I’ve been since leaving university. I geolocate places like Puckapunyal and Tarin Kowt for them. ‘We have a full-time army?’ an up-and-coming investment banker asks me. ‘I thought we just had reserves.’

At an inner-city party, a well-known journalist is informed by the host that I served in Iraq and Afghanistan and joins me on the balcony. His opening gambit is particularly thoughtful: ‘Did you kill anyone over there?’ I mirror his sensitivity: ‘Just a few women and children, but they’re only worth half points.’ I explain I was a cavalry officer and he wants to discuss horses. I imagine this is what it would feel like to tell someone you’re a doctor and have them ask your preferred technique for applying leeches. I can’t be bothered correcting him, so I tell him I ride (I don’t) and play polo (I can’t). No doubt he leaves the conversation wondering how it is that this civilian-murdering, polo-playing army officer ended up at the party. I leave wondering how someone who can intelligently discuss almost any topic of public policy seems to have a seven-year-old’s understanding of the military.

Another person, on hearing I was in the army, wants to know what it was like sleeping in a dormitory with thirty people for eight years. Weary of the stupid questions, I