Caught in the cross fire of futility and cant

Mike Carlton :

THE scene is now all too familiar. There is the coffin draped in the Australian flag and topped by a slouch hat and medals, borne from the aircraft by solemn young men in khaki.

A chaplain in vestments and a lone piper walk before it, past the saluting colonels and captains. Somewhere in the background there are grandparents struggling to hold it together for the sake of a grieving widow and her stricken, bewildered children.

The rest of us watch this on television for our one minute, 45 seconds of couch compassion and then get on with the really important news: the Roosters have sacked their coach, a celebrity chef has lost a Good Food Guide hat, and halfwits have trolled a TV star on Twitter.

When are we going to cry out that enough is enough? When are we going to rise up to demand that not one more husband, father, brother, mate, should die in this bloody, treacherous and futile war in Afghanistan?

When will we, the Australian people, shout with one voice that the war is lost and it’s time to bring our soldiers home, not in 2014 but now. I have seen too much of this in my lifetime. In World War II we fought for a noble cause, the defeat of German Nazism, Italian Fascism and Japanese militarism.

Since then, from Korea to Afghanistan via Vietnam and Iraq, we have become enmeshed in failed conflicts fomented in folly and ignorance, and buttressed by the lies and deceit of politicians, generals and, yes, the media.

Korea, the so-called forgotten war, was to stop the march of godless communism.

It ended with 340 Australian dead, although not in a permanent peace but an armistice in which great armies still confront each other.

Vietnam, you will remember, was justified by the domino theory, which held that if South Vietnam fell the rest of south-east Asia would topple to communism as well, all the way to Indonesia. Better to stop them there than here, was the cry.

We lost 521 men killed for that lie.

In Iraq, it was to wipe out al-Qaeda and to seize Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. It would be a “cakewalk”; the US Marines would be garlanded with flowers in the streets of Baghdad, “greeted like liberators”, we were told. Australia’s chief contribution to that war was to pump $221.7 million into Saddam’s bank account for “transportation costs” in the still-unpunished Australian Wheat Board scandal.

Afghanistan was to go after al-Qaeda yet again. When Osama bin Laden was caught not there but, magically, a stone’s throw down the road from the Pakistan Military Academy, the war somehow morphed into a fight against the Taliban, a murderous bunch of Islamic fanatics to be sure, but of no conceivable security threat to Australia. So far it’s 38 Australians killed and counting – dying not for their country, as our mealy-mouthed leaders would have us believe, but in defence of the venal and thuggish Karzai regime.

The cant and the hypocrisy keep coming. We are there to get the job done, to see the mission through. But we learn nothing from history. When we eventually quit Afghanistan, as the British did in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th, the place will revert to what it always was , a violent wasteland of warlords growing opium poppies. What fools we are.

IT’S not only the dead. It’s the wounded, too, the hundreds if not thousands of men who carry the physical and mental scars of battle for life.

At Christmas 1966 I was an ABC war correspondent in Vietnam, tape-recording greetings from our Diggers to be broadcast to their families on their hometown radio stations.

There was one bloke lying in an American military hospital outside Saigon. Drips and drains trailed from the bed covers tented over him and he was groggy from the painkillers, but he was glad to hear an Australian accent among all the Yanks and he managed to mumble a cheerful greeting to mum and dad and his little sister somewhere in the Riverina. Don’t you worry, getting better, be home soon.

When I left his room I asked a nurse what had happened to him. “His balls were blown off by a landmine,” she said. “But he doesn’t know it yet.”

I saw worse in that war. Corpses fried by napalm; a village well in Cambodia filled with a reeking stew of human remains; dying soldiers crying out for their mothers, as dying soldiers do. But I am haunted today by the memory of that young man because he was my own age, just 20, and I have wondered ever since what happened to him. Perhaps he made it OK. Perhaps he committed suicide like so many of his fellow Vietnam vets. I do not know.

We treat our wounded veterans differently these days. They and their families are better cared for. But the terrible toll accumulates still, hidden from our sight and our minds. In a couple of weeks, one of our former commanders in Afghanistan, retired Major-General John Cantwell, will publish a book of his memoirs, Exit Wounds.

I’ve seen an advance copy. Read it and weep.