War

Throughout history millions have urged us to ‘make love, not war’ and an important voice has just joined this choir.

On Tuesday, Australia’s former Army Chief, Peter Leahy, suggested that the defence budget should be cut and redirected towards its diplomacy and aid programs – and no, he wasn’t wearing flares or dreads.

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An evocative photograph taken last week underscored that old utterance about a picture being worth a thousand words, and prompted at the same time some perennial questions about war in general, and about the particular war being waged at present in Afghanistan.

The AP photograph showed a small boy in the Afghan province of Helmand, standing on top of a small mound, his left hand reached out to clasp the right hand of a uniformed and heavily-equipped US marine.

Just what the two of them might have said to one another was not recorded in the caption, nor in the report below, which detailed a call from the UK Minister for International Defence and Security, Baroness Ann Taylor, for Australia to commit more troops to the NATO effort against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

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On 28th July 2009, I flew out of Sydney bound for Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It was to be the start of a fascinating trip into the Afghan war zone.

I embedded with the American 10th Mountain Division in Logar province, in the East part of the country. I was then shipped out to “The Tip of The Spear” as they called it, to the district of Kherwar.

The unit I joined was part of the Coalition’s blocking force against Taliban forces who are trying to use the area as an alternative entry point to the Wardack province and into Kabul.

Continue reading "Heart of darkness: inside the Afghan war zone" »

I read with glee this week the news that the Rudd government is reviewing the role of women in the Defence Force.

For some reason this always gets me riled.

Call me a bra-burning feminist with hairy under-arms and a Subaru if you like, but it appears to me that men don’t want women in the military because they are scared of themselves.

Continue reading "ADF: give us girls a go" »

An old newspaper can work like a telescope into the past, the details sharp but the whole picture a little shaky and blurred, and the newspaper on my wall is like that. It’s the front of the Melbourne Argus for Sunday, September the third, 1939, and it contains only one story, told in a series of blaring headlines.

BRITAIN AT WAR
DECLARED AT 8.20 P.M.
‘OUR CONSCIENCE CLEAR’ – MR CHAMBERLAIN
LONDON, TO-NIGHT
A DECLARATION THAT A STATE OF WAR EXISTED BETWEEN BRITAIN AND GERMANY WAS MADE BY THE PRIME MINISTER, MR CHAMBERLAIN, TO THE NATION FROM NO. 10 DOWNING STREET TO-NIGHT.

Continue reading "70 years on, how Australia too was at war" »

Until last week, I thought the silliest casualty of modern warfare was the word “bomb”, which in many news reports had become known by the acronym IED, or improvised explosive device.

IED might be a handy term for military strategists needing to distinguish between a mortar fired from a well-equipped conventional unit of soldiers and a bucket full of fertiliser and nails left by an anonymous freelancer in a car on a crowded street in Baghdad, but to the media, any explosive device whose detonation imperils those in the immediate vicinity should, provided it’s not Barry Hall after giving away a couple of 50s, be simply referred to as what it is: a bomb.

To do otherwise simply buries the true horror of the incident under a comforting layer of jargon.

Continue reading "ABC drops the F-bomb" »