THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 27

After the Bands Stopped Playing

The first song in this group that truly caught me was Compulsory Hero.¹ I had bought the album by 1927 because I liked the band and the music, not because I was deliberately collecting songs about war or preparing myself for a later examination of what nations do to the people who serve them. The song arrived as part of the album and then separated itself from the surrounding tracks, carrying a word I had previously regarded as unquestionably honourable and placing another, far less comfortable word beside it. A hero might be admired, celebrated and remembered, but what did heroism mean when it had been made compulsory?

I heard Redgum’s I Was Only 19² on the radio not long afterwards. I cannot now remember the exact distance between those two encounters, and memory may have placed them closer together because they eventually became inseparable in my thinking. What I remember is that Compulsory Hero had already opened the door before John Schumann’s song walked through it. The first made me question the machinery that creates a hero, while the second forced me to look at the young man still living inside the title.

The strongest image in I Was Only 19 was the Channel Seven helicopter. It was an ordinary television image, the sort that could pass through most lounge rooms without disturbing anything beyond the conversation, yet it could return a veteran to a jungle everybody else believed he had left behind. The helicopter was not attacking him, and the newsreader probably moved on to another story within minutes, but his body did not require the permission of reason before responding. The war had ended on the calendar and continued inside the man.

Perhaps the two songs stayed with me because military service was never entirely remote from my own family. So many of my relatives became serving personnel that the uniform could not remain merely a symbol appearing in photographs, news reports or Anzac Day ceremonies. These were people I knew, people whose childhoods remained visible beneath the discipline and confidence of the adult standing before me. Their decision to serve filled me with admiration, but pride carried another emotion beside it that was not nearly as comfortable to display.

I worried about them coming home in pieces. That phrase immediately suggests the visible damage of war: a missing limb, a scarred face, a wheelchair or an injury that makes the cost impossible for the rest of us to ignore. Yet the songs taught me that a person may come home in pieces while appearing to be physically whole. The aircraft can land, the family can embrace the person who steps from it, and everybody can believe the danger has been left somewhere overseas, while fragments of that danger have already travelled home inside the returning body.

Admiration and fear therefore occupied the same space whenever I thought about the members of my family who served. I admired their willingness to accept discipline, responsibility and the possibility that they might be required to move towards the very danger from which everybody else was being evacuated. I also wondered what would be asked of them, who would make the decision and what part of them might be left behind even if they physically returned. The proud photograph in uniform could never guarantee that the same person would come back unchanged.

That fear did not mean I believed joining the services was an act of foolishness or that every person who enlisted had surrendered control of a life. Service could offer purpose, belonging, valuable training, lasting friendships and the opportunity to contribute to something larger than individual comfort. The members of my family who chose it deserved admiration for what they were willing to undertake, not the condescension of being treated as though they could not understand the risks. My concern was directed less at their choice than at the possibility that the country benefiting from it might eventually decide the obligation had expired.

There is something easy about admiring serving personnel while the uniform is pressed and the person wearing it stands where the photographer has placed them. It is more difficult to retain the same admiration when the returned person cannot sleep, tolerate crowds, sustain a relationship or explain why the sound of a helicopter on television has altered the emotional temperature of the room. The public version of military service is filled with courage, discipline, medals and ceremony. The private aftermath may contain anger, isolation, addiction, homelessness and families learning how to live with an injury nobody can see.

The age in I Was Only 19 would not allow me to keep the soldier at a comfortable distance. At nineteen, my own life was opening, although I had little idea where it would lead or whether the intelligence inside me would become an asset, an inconvenience or something I would continually be asked to suppress. My battles were not fought with rifles, mines or helicopters, and pretending otherwise would diminish the experiences of those who served. The difference was that I was permitted to continue becoming myself, while another young Australian could have the remainder of his life altered by decisions made before he was old enough to know what the remainder might contain.

The members of my family who entered the services also began with futures still under construction. Behind each uniform remained the child known by parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, even when the adult wearing it had become more capable than those family memories allowed. Service might shape them, strengthen them and provide experiences of which they would remain proud for the rest of their lives. It might also place something inside them that the rest of us would never fully understand, no matter how sincerely we tried.

Years before either song reached me, Horatius had supplied a far grander picture of service.³ He stood at the bridge facing fearful odds, asking who would stand on either side while Rome was saved behind him. The boy learning those words admired their rhythm, certainty and magnificent simplicity. There was a bridge, an approaching enemy and a brave man who understood exactly what duty required of him.

I still admire Horatius, just as I admire the serving members of my family. I would not want age to turn every act of bravery into evidence of gullibility or every willingness to sacrifice into proof that authority has manipulated another victim. There are real dangers, vulnerable people who must be protected and moments when somebody must move forward rather than wait for somebody else to accept the risk. The uniform is not merely an instrument of government policy; it is also worn by individuals capable of courage, loyalty, judgment and extraordinary care for the people beside them.

The older man, however, asks questions the schoolboy never thought to ask. Who selected the bridge, who identified the enemy, who decided that the fearful odds must be faced, and why did those making the decisions so rarely stand in the narrow path themselves? More importantly, what happened to Horatius if he survived? The poem preserved him at the moment of courage, while Compulsory Hero and I Was Only 19 forced me to imagine the person who eventually came home.

That is where my rage begins, although it is not directed at the people who serve. It grows from the ease with which nations can praise sacrifice before it occurs, count casualties while it is occurring and become administratively confused when survivors require care for the remainder of their lives. We can find the money to send people into danger, the language to describe their courage and the band to accompany their departure. The question is whether we possess the courage to remain beside them when the band has stopped, the uniform has been put away and the person who came home is no longer assembled in quite the same way as the person who left.

Horatius was part of the making of my voice because he gave me language for courage before life taught me to examine authority. The words invited me to imagine that facing fearful odds was inherently noble, as though the odds had simply appeared through natural causes and the hero’s only decision was whether to meet them. The poem did not require the boy reciting it to inspect the machinery behind the battle, nor did the boy volunteer to do so. He was too busy admiring the man at the bridge and wondering whether, when his own moment came, he would possess the courage to ask who would stand on his right hand and who would stand on his left. It took many more years to understand that leadership must involve more than finding young people willing to stand where older people have told them history requires a body.

Thomas Love Peacock had already left a more suspicious rhythm in my head. His warriors could dress appetite as strategy, steal the fatter sheep and shout about death and glory while enjoying the proceeds of conquest.³ It was funny when I first met it because the logic was so cheerfully transparent, yet the joke became less comfortable once I realised how often nations use more sophisticated language to perform the same trick. Resources become national interests, intervention becomes duty, ambition becomes security, and the people who question the enterprise are accused of failing to support those sent to carry it out. Death or glory is a magnificent slogan provided somebody else supplies the death and the glory can later be divided among the speechmakers.

The rage begins there, but it cannot be allowed to remain simple. It would be easy for me to sit at a safe distance, declare all war meaningless and congratulate myself on reaching a moral clarity unavailable to the people who lived through the decisions. History does not always offer leaders a clean choice between peace and slaughter, and there have been enemies who could not be persuaded to become reasonable through the provision of a well-constructed discussion paper. I do not believe every person who authorised military action was a monster, just as I do not believe every soldier who obeyed was merely a victim without agency. My anger is not produced by pretending every decision was obvious; it comes from the repeated discovery that uncertainty at the beginning is so often converted into certainty during the speeches and then rediscovered only when the damaged return home.

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda removes the clean edges from the heroic picture.⁴ Its young Australian leaves with the music, the flags and the public excitement that can transform a departure into a national performance, then returns as part of a human cargo the audience does not quite know how to receive. The band can play for the men marching towards war because the beat gives everybody something to follow. It has far greater difficulty explaining what happens when those same men return without limbs, without sight, without peace of mind or without the version of themselves that first boarded the ship.

Eric Bogle understood the terrible distance between the outward journey and the return. The young man who leaves is absorbed into the legend of Gallipoli, while the older man is gradually left alone with the consequences as the parade grows smaller and the spectators lose their connection with what is passing before them. The nation remembers the event more successfully than it remembers the people, because an event can be polished, scheduled and placed on a calendar. A person continues to need things after the ceremony has ended, and those needs are untidy, expensive and unlikely to fit between the march and the football.

I have no objection to remembrance. I do not sneer at Anzac Day, the dawn service or the people who stand in silence because somebody from their family never returned, or returned in a form the family struggled to recognise. The sneer would be another form of comfortable superiority, no better than the politician using the occasion as a backdrop while speaking of sacrifice in a voice professionally trained to sound solemn. What troubles me is our ability to become deeply moved for several minutes each year and then consider the obligation discharged. We remember the fallen because their need of us has ended, while the living veteran may continue asking for housing, treatment, understanding or simply a way to survive the afternoon.

The song’s most confronting image is not death but visibility. The damaged men return in front of the crowd, and the crowd cannot avoid seeing what its enthusiasm helped send away. There is a difference between reading a casualty figure and watching a person whose body has become the account in which a national decision was recorded. As an accountant, I understand the temptation to reduce the untidy world to totals, categories and provisions, yet I also know that every number must have arisen from something that happened. A body count is not the cost of war; it is merely the easiest portion of the cost to count.

The dead are tragically straightforward for governments. Their service can be acknowledged, their names engraved and their families presented with carefully chosen words that are sincere even when the machinery producing them has become routine. The seriously wounded complicate the story because they continue to live, and their continuing life exposes the difference between ceremonial gratitude and practical responsibility. The person who cannot sleep, hold a relationship together, find work, tolerate noise or explain the fury that arrived without warning is not an interruption to the heroic story. He or she is the remainder left when the story has been subtracted from the experience.

I Was Only 19 shifted the Vietnam veteran from the edge of the national argument and placed him back at its human centre. The song did not require the listener to approve of the war, endorse every decision made within it or become nostalgic for a time when conscription supplied young men to national policy. It asked something more difficult, which was to distinguish the morality of the war from the humanity of those sent to fight it. John Schumann built the song from the experience of people close enough to correct him, and perhaps that is why it does not sound like somebody borrowing pain for dramatic effect. It enters through detail, but the detail opens into the question Australia had avoided: what did we imagine would happen to these men when we brought them home?

The Channel Seven helicopter answers part of that question. The war has crossed the ocean, entered the lounge room and taken possession of an ordinary news image that has nothing to do with Vietnam until one particular nervous system says otherwise. The man beside the veteran may see a helicopter, while the veteran’s body recognises danger before the conscious mind can explain that he is home. That is cause and effect operating below the level at which a government department prefers to conduct its business. The form asks when the injury occurred, but the honest answer may be that it is occurring again now, in front of the television, years after everybody else stopped counting.

I know something about the body retaining knowledge the mind would rather dismiss. Depression does not always arrive waving identification, and the Black Dog has never shown much respect for the administrative convenience of linking every reaction to one readily documented cause. A sound, a failure, a foolish decision by somebody who will never understand the weight of it, or the slow accumulation of being unheard can travel through the system until the response seems disproportionate to everyone except the person experiencing it. Again, I am not comparing that with combat trauma, because comparisons of suffering too often become competitions nobody wins. I am recognising the mechanism by which yesterday refuses to remain where the calendar placed it.

The young soldier in the song was nineteen, but the man answering the doctor’s questions is older. That distinction carries much of the song’s power because it reveals that the war did not finish when his service did. He has aged around it, perhaps built relationships, found employment and learned the outward behaviours required to convince other people that he returned successfully. The wound has aged too, adapting itself to new rooms and waiting inside experiences nobody else would connect with a jungle patrol. The battle is over in the official history, yet the body has not received the official advice.

Compulsory Hero takes the word we use so freely and turns it until the coercion becomes visible.⁵ The young man may be compelled to serve, but he can also become compelled to accept the role assigned to him afterwards. A hero is supposed to be brave, grateful, modest and undamaged enough not to interfere with the national satisfaction created by calling him one. He may speak of sacrifice, provided he does not describe it so honestly that the rest of us become uncomfortable. He may require help, provided the help is inexpensive, temporary and accompanied by sufficient documentation.

There is something particularly cruel about demanding heroism from a person who was given so little choice. Conscription did not ask every Australian family to carry an equal portion of the risk, nor did it convert the political enthusiasm of older men into an equal chance of being shot. A birthday could become part of military selection, allowing chance to reach into one household while passing another by. The compulsory part continued beyond enlistment because the returned man was expected to resume civilian life among people who had argued about the war without experiencing it. We handed him a heroic title partly because it saved us from asking what else we owed.

I have used the word hero myself, often sincerely and sometimes carelessly. It is a convenient word when somebody has done something beyond what I imagine I could do, but it can also conceal the person beneath the act. Calling somebody a hero may be the beginning of gratitude, or it may be the point at which we stop listening because the label appears to have completed the conversation. Marilyn became a candle, the veteran becomes a hero, and both can disappear beneath the image supposedly created to honour them. The person remains more complicated than the word, which is precisely why the word is so attractive.

The heroic language also protects those who made the decision. If every death is automatically a noble sacrifice, questioning the purpose for which it was required can be presented as an insult to the dead. The argument closes itself neatly: the cause must have been worthy because brave people died for it, and their deaths must not be questioned because doing so would diminish the cause. I cannot accept that circular reasoning, not because I lack respect for those who served but because respect requires us to examine whether their trust was deserved. The dead do not need us to pretend every decision was wise; the living need us to ensure that courage is not treated as a resource governments may draw upon without full accounting.

Khe Sanh begins where many war stories prefer to finish.⁶ The soldier has returned, yet home is no longer the place it was because he is no longer the person who left it. He moves through countries, relationships and attempts at ordinary life with the restlessness of somebody for whom arrival has become impossible. The song does not present homecoming as the restoration of a previous setting, because there is no switch that returns the nervous system to its factory condition. The man may be standing in Australia while remaining psychologically in transit.

That idea reaches beyond war, which may be one reason the song has remained so firmly within Australian life. Many of us know the experience of reaching the place we had been trying to reach and discovering that the expected relief did not arrive with us. Retirement can do it, business success can do it, a return to a childhood town can do it, and the achievement of enough can do it when the person who spent decades pursuing it no longer knows how to stop. We arrive carrying every version of ourselves that made the journey, including the ones we thought the destination would allow us to leave behind. For the veteran, however, that dislocation has been sharpened by experiences most of us are fortunate enough never to encounter.

The character in Khe Sanh is not easily converted into a commemorative figure. He is unsettled, sexually detached, geographically restless and unable to resume the life that national mythology assumes was waiting for him. He does not return to a grateful community, receive the required embrace and proceed into a meaningful career while quietly polishing his medals on appropriate occasions. He becomes inconvenient, which may be the most truthful thing about him. Trauma rarely organises itself into a story that reassures the audience.

We speak of reintegration as though a person were a component removed from civilian life and later inserted back into the same vacant space. The word sounds practical, measurable and reassuringly achievable, but the home has changed, the family has changed and the returning person has changed in ways no orientation program can reverse. A partner may have spent years carrying responsibilities alone and then be expected to step aside for somebody who no longer knows how to stand within the household. Children may meet a parent shaped by vigilance, silence or anger, while the veteran may discover that the skills that kept people alive overseas are interpreted as problems at home. The war moves into the family without appearing on any deployment order.

When the War Is Over asks the question contained in its title and then quietly refuses the easy answer.⁷ The fighting may stop, the troops may withdraw and the government may announce that the mission has concluded, but those are institutional endings rather than human ones. The individual must somehow begin again while carrying experiences that cannot be placed in storage. Starting again sounds hopeful until we recognise that the person is not starting from the place where the interruption began.

That song is not as explicitly tied to one conflict as the others, and perhaps that allows it to enter the chapter from a slightly different direction. War can also become the name we give to any prolonged period of survival in which ordinary life is postponed until the crisis passes. We tell ourselves that when the war is over we will rest, repair the relationships, become more present, write the book or discover who we were before necessity took command. Then the crisis finishes and the person built to survive it does not automatically disappear. Peace can be disorienting when struggle has supplied the structure.

I have lived too much of my life waiting for the war to be over. There was always another client problem, another responsibility, another threat to the business or another person who needed the shoulder I had trained myself to provide. I could imagine a point beyond the immediate pressure when I would become fully available to Robyn, the family, the writing and perhaps even myself, although the exact location of that point kept moving with admirable consistency. Retirement was supposed to declare the armistice, yet nobody informed the part of me that remained on patrol. The comparison with military service ends well before the suffering involved, but the question remains recognisable: what happens when the identity built for the emergency survives the emergency?

That may be why my anger at the treatment of veterans contains more than political opinion. I recognise the national version of a habit I have practised personally, which is to value people most while they are useful and assume gratitude can replace care when their usefulness changes form. Governments praise service while it contributes to national purpose, businesses praise loyalty while it contributes to profit, and families may praise reliability while somebody continues carrying what nobody else wishes to lift. The moment the strong person needs sustained help, the admiration can acquire conditions. We love the hammer while it is driving nails, then appear surprised when the hand holding it begins to shake.

The evidence that former service personnel still present to homelessness services, including some sleeping rough, should be morally unbearable in a country capable of finding money for warfare. It does not mean every homeless veteran was placed on the street by military service, and honesty requires that the causes include family violence, mental illness, addiction, financial stress and other vulnerabilities that may exist in complex combinations. Yet complexity is not an excuse for inaction; it is the reason simplistic systems fail. A country that accepted the benefit of service cannot retreat behind the difficulty of proving which portion of a damaged life belongs on which departmental ledger.

The rage sharpens when the response becomes a maze. We are capable of creating forms, thresholds, evidentiary requirements, reviews and appeals that satisfy the administrative need to prevent an undeserving person receiving too much, while an obviously suffering person receives too little. I spent a professional lifetime around systems and know why controls exist, because goodwill without accountability can become another invitation to exploitation. I also know a system can become so preoccupied with protecting itself from the wrong claimant that it no longer fulfils the reason it was created. Efficiency measured by claims rejected may look excellent until somebody counts the people sleeping outside.

I am not suggesting there are no services, no dedicated workers and no governments attempting improvement. That would dismiss the people who spend their working lives helping veterans navigate the very system I am criticising, often with a compassion larger than the policy framework surrounding them. The problem is not that nobody cares; it is that caring is repeatedly required to fight the machinery through which care is delivered. We have built systems in which a good person must bend a rule, find an exception or make one more telephone call to produce the humane outcome that should have been the system’s ordinary purpose.

My indignation does not stop with veterans because the pattern does not stop there. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remain imprisoned at rates so grotesquely disproportionate that the figures should interrupt any easy claim that Australia provides equal justice merely because the legislation uses the same words for everyone. This is not the same story as veteran homelessness, and I will not collapse two histories into one rhetorical device simply because both make me angry. They meet at the point where governments become highly capable of controlling damaged people and far less capable of addressing the conditions that made the damage predictable.

The contradiction becomes even harder to ignore when Indigenous military service enters the picture. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men volunteered for wars on behalf of a nation that restricted their rights, sometimes restricted their ability to enlist and often returned them to the discrimination that service had briefly appeared to suspend. They could be considered Australian enough to risk death beside other Australians, yet not Australian enough to enjoy the same freedom when they came home. The uniform created an equality the country itself refused to maintain. When the band stopped playing, the old rules resumed.

There is a straight line of cause and effect there too, although governments prefer lines that disappear when a new administration takes office. Dispossession, removal, restricted movement, disrupted families, unequal schooling, poverty, policing and imprisonment are frequently discussed as separate policy areas, allowing each department to measure its own activity without accepting responsibility for the shape produced by the whole. The analytical Jeff understands the need to distinguish causes and resist claims that every individual outcome can be explained by history alone. The human Jeff looks at the overwhelming pattern and asks how much evidence is required before refusal to connect the causes becomes a form of dishonesty.

The comparison with war is not that Indigenous communities are merely another group of veterans requiring better post-conflict services. The deeper discomfort is that the conflict was conducted here, beneath the language of settlement, progress and national development, and its aftermath was never confined to the past. We celebrate Australians travelling overseas to defend country while remaining hesitant to look directly at what was done to the people whose country this already was. We understand inherited honour more readily than inherited consequence. The medals travel through families with pride, while disadvantage is expected to explain itself afresh in every generation.

I can feel the anger rising into the territory where it might become too easy. Government becomes “they,” history becomes a charge sheet, and I place myself among the enlightened observers who would naturally have acted better had anyone been sensible enough to put me in charge. That is the temptation within moral certainty, the same temptation examined when I looked at the losing side of history and discovered that being correct about the cause does not relieve me of the duty to see the people. I have benefited from the country as it was built, from its systems, opportunities and assumptions, even while fighting parts of those systems throughout my working life. My indignation must therefore include the uncomfortable admission that I am not standing outside the structure with clean hands.

I have also used heroic language when it suited me. I have admired the person who kept going, praised endurance and built much of my own identity around being the one who remained at the bridge after more sensible people had gone home. There was nobility in some of that, but there was also vanity, stubbornness and a reluctance to admit that usefulness had become a hiding place. I cannot criticise nations for manufacturing heroes without examining the ways I manufactured one inside myself. The difference in scale is enormous, but the emotional transaction is familiar: suffering becomes easier to tolerate when it can be renamed courage.

The songs in this chapter will not allow courage to remain untouched, but neither do they destroy it. The young men march, fight, protect one another, endure fear and sometimes perform acts that deserve every ounce of respect we can give them. What changes is the location of the moral question. Instead of asking only whether the soldier was brave, the songs ask whether the nation was worthy of his bravery and whether it remained beside him once his service ceased to be useful. Heroism belongs to the person; justification belongs to those who gave the order.

That distinction matters because opposition to war was once too easily turned against the people sent to conduct it. Vietnam veterans could return to a country still fighting with itself about the conflict, and the returning men became visible representatives of decisions they had not made. The anger that should have travelled upward was sometimes directed sideways or downward at those most accessible. We have become better at saying that supporting veterans does not require uncritical support for every war, but saying it is easier than building policy around it. The real test comes long after the welcome-home parade, when support requires money, patience and the acceptance that some wounds will not submit to a timetable.

The same distinction should protect us from another mistake. Respecting the veteran must not become a tool for silencing questions about new conflicts, inflated threats or political leaders attracted to the posture of decisiveness. The person most entitled to demand serious scrutiny before troops are deployed may be the person who already knows what deployment can cost. To question the war before it begins is not to betray those who may be sent; it may be the most practical form of loyalty available. A nation should not wait until the songs are written to discover that the speeches left something out.

Songs perform a task official histories often cannot. A history records the battle, the units, the dates, the decisions and the outcome, while a song can follow one damaged person home and sit beside him when a helicopter appears on television. It can enter the silence between a husband and wife, the restlessness that makes a settled life impossible, or the bitterness of an old man watching younger people inherit the ceremony without understanding the cost. Music does not replace evidence, and emotion can distort history as easily as rhetoric can. Yet without the emotional account, the evidence risks becoming another way of ensuring nobody has to feel what the figures mean.

These five songs do not present one consistent political argument. They came from different writers, different periods and different musical forms, and one of them may be heard as much as a relationship song as a song about literal war. Together, however, they create an Australian conversation about the point where public conflict becomes private aftermath. The folk song, the protest narrative, the polished pop lament and the pub-rock anthem approach from different directions, then meet after the parade. The band has stopped, the microphones have been packed away, and somebody is still awake.

The boy who admired Horatius would once have placed the moment of truth at the bridge. Would he stand, would he run, and would somebody answer when he asked for help on either side? The older man now understands that the bridge is only the beginning of the moral story. Somebody must remain when the defenders return, help them live with what the bridge required and resist the national urge to convert their suffering into a comfortable legend. Courage is not only standing against the advancing army; it may be sitting beside a damaged person years later when there is no audience and no music to tell us how to feel.

I still hear grandeur in facing fearful odds, and I do not wish to become so cynical that sacrifice means nothing beyond evidence of political failure. There are people who stepped forward because their mates were beside them, because civilians were in danger, because duty mattered or because the alternatives available in that moment were worse. Their motives cannot be reduced to the failures of those above them. But neither can their courage be used to launder the decisions that placed them there. Honour must be strong enough to survive examination, or it is merely another band playing loudly while the troops march away.

The Channel Seven helicopter remains the image that brings all of this home to me. It demonstrates how little control we possess over the consequences released by our decisions and how casually one person’s ordinary world can collide with another person’s private war. The television producer did not intend harm, the helicopter pilot may never have known the veteran existed, and the viewer beside him may not have understood why the room suddenly changed. Cause and effect can travel through people who never meet, which is why responsibility cannot end with intention.

The same is true of national policy. A decision made in a secure room travels outward through soldiers, families, communities and generations, gathering consequences no briefing paper can completely predict. Another decision about housing, health, policing, bail, compensation or support may then either interrupt that chain or add another link to it. Governments cannot promise that nobody will ever be damaged, because leadership sometimes involves choices among dangers rather than between danger and safety. They can, however, be judged by whether they remain when the damage becomes inconvenient.

After the bands stop playing, we discover what the gratitude was worth. If the veteran is left to fight another department, another night without sleep or another day without secure shelter, the music was not honour but accompaniment. If Indigenous service can be celebrated while Indigenous imprisonment continues at an obscene rate, commemoration has been separated from conscience. If we speak of heroes while refusing to look at the systems that manufacture need, the word has become a substitute for action.

Perhaps this is Horatius viewed from the other end of life. The bridge still matters, and the willingness to stand there remains one of the finest things a human being can offer another. What has changed is my understanding of who must stand beside whom after the immediate danger has passed. The nation that asks for courage must possess some of its own when the bills arrive, the bodies return and the history no longer fits neatly inside the speech.

The radio in my head will continue to play these songs because none of them permits the war to finish where governments prefer to place the ending. The band may fade, the parade may turn the corner and the crowd may begin thinking about the rest of the day, but the consequences continue walking among us in bodies, families, prisons, streets and silences. I no longer hear only the grandeur of the man holding the bridge, although that part of me has not disappeared. I hear the question that should have been asked before he stepped forward and must continue to be asked long after he comes home: once we have required everything of him, what exactly do we intend to give in return?

Notes

1. I Was Only 19 (A Walk in the Light Green) was written by John Schumann and recorded by Redgum. It was released in March 1983 and appeared on Redgum’s live album Caught in the Act; Schumann based the song principally upon the Vietnam service experiences of his brother-in-law, Mick Storen, and other veterans.
2. “Horatius” is one of the narrative poems in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, first published in 1842. It retells the Roman legend of Horatius Cocles defending the bridge across the Tiber while it was destroyed behind him.
3. “The War-Song of Dinas Vawr” was written by Thomas Love Peacock and appeared in his 1829 novel The Misfortunes of Elphin. Its comic warriors dress plunder, appetite and violence in the language of battle and glory.
4. And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda was written by Eric Bogle in 1971. The song was recorded by Bogle and many later performers; it follows an Australian soldier from enlistment and Gallipoli through disablement, return and old age.
5. Compulsory Hero was written by Garry Frost and recorded by the Australian band 1927. It appeared on the band’s 1988 debut album, …ish, and was issued as a single in 1989.
6. Khe Sanh was written by Don Walker and recorded by Cold Chisel. Released in 1978 on the band’s self-titled debut album, it portrays the dislocation and restlessness of an Australian Vietnam veteran unable to resume an ordinary life.
7. When the War Is Over was written by Cold Chisel drummer Steve Prestwich and recorded by the band for its 1982 album Circus Animals. Although its language can be heard beyond literal warfare, the version remembered here carries the uncertainty of trying to rebuild after chaos.
8. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that specialist homelessness services assisted approximately 1,500 people identifying as current or former Australian Defence Force members during 2024–25. Of those presenting to services, about 370 were sleeping rough, while mental health issues, family violence and problematic alcohol or drug use were among the significant overlapping vulnerabilities recorded.
9. At 30 June 2025, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprised 37 per cent of Australia’s adult prisoner population, with an age-standardised imprisonment rate of 2,500 per 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults. The figures demonstrate severe continuing overrepresentation rather than implying that every individual imprisonment has a single historical cause.
10. Indigenous Australians served in Australian forces despite formal enlistment restrictions and extensive discrimination. Many First World War veterans returned to restrictions and unequal treatment little changed from those they had faced before serving.