Politicians will always sanitise the prosaic horror of combat death – and the ugly human fallout on the families of veterans
arrives again with its hardy perennial of hyperbole about how a failed military operation on an obscure finger of the Ottoman Empire birthed the Australian nation, one soldier’s words particularly resonate.
“Try to avoid the utterly demeaning term ‘fallen’ when speaking of war dead – they did not trip over a stick or a garden hose, they were drowned, burned, shot, gassed and eviscerated to lie face down in mud or sand or at the bottom of the ocean,” he urged. If ever a discomfiting truth was spoken to power this is it. Politicians will always send young people to conflict – and in Australia’s case, into far too many imperial wars of others. And you can bet they’ll always adopt such language when they do so – and when they come to commemorate the young who die in the name of their politics – that aims to sanitise the prosaic horror of combat death.
It’s a language that served at the time to comfort the families of the almost 62,000 personnel who died overseas. Although it probably did little to ameliorate the anguish of those close to the 150,000 who were physically wounded and perhaps 100,000 more who were also psychologically damaged.Yes the repatriated veterans suffered.
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