Page 5048 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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I would also like to underscore the Vietnam vets’ work at Page, but there is one part of their work that people forget. They are not just about being a club house. The thing that scares them the most is the rate of suicide amongst their colleagues who still bear the internal scars of that conflict. They still bear the scars of being spat on when they came back. These people are doing something actively about it by giving peer support. When I talked earlier on about giants, these are the people I was talking about.
I have been in the Army twice. I got to be a corporal twice, and we will not go into those details because there are some interesting stories about that. But when I went into the national service, I was not conscripted. As I have said jokingly before, I could not even win the national service lottery. I volunteered to serve for two years, because I believed in the government of the day. I believed that it was incumbent upon us young people to try to put ourselves between an enemy and the people of this country. Did I get that conflict wrong! I got that conflict wrong so badly that I bore the scars of it and the antipathy and the abuse almost bordering on hatred. I bore that for many, many years.
As an Air Force kid, I used to sit and watch Anzac Day parades all of my life, but not after I got out of the Army. I could not face it, and I could not face it for nearly 30 years. I could not face Remembrance Day for 30 years. I still have difficulty today. That is because people blamed our soldiers for discharging their duty instead of blaming the politicians that sent them into the theatre in the first place and should not have done it. We need to be able to recognise these people so that they can banish their demons, so we can help them with their guilt.
Something happened to me which I want to share with you, which does not help. I got a couple of medals. I do not have anything anywhere near as appropriate as Mr Hanson does, but I got a couple. I very rarely bring them out. I think they have been out of the cupboard only twice or three times max in my life. I wore some miniatures once to a particular formal function in the Great Hall at Parliament House, and a chap came up to me who had nothing but a suit on and said, “Which weeties packet did you get them out of?” That did not help, I can tell you. I did not feel like bringing them out of the cupboard again for a long, long time. I thought, “How ignorant are you, sunshine?” But I did not say it, I just copped it. I have to tell you, colleagues, that I am not known for my patience and I am not known for taking it, but I did.
We need to be very careful about how we deal with these sorts of things. Out of my platoon of 44, the reunion is down to 35. A couple of people have died of cancer, but a couple of people we left behind. They went to Vietnam and did not come back. When we look into the faces of their families, you just weep. You look into the faces of their kids, and all they have got, instead of a father, is some medals and a discharge certificate. Well, we need to be a little bit better than that.
Members will know the old adage that if we do not recall or learn from the past then we have got no future. We need to learn from the past. We need to make sure that we do not do to the troops in the Middle East when they come back what we did to the troops in Vietnam. Whether we agree with the conflict or not—I would suggest that
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