Submitted by Paul Daley on
Politicians will always sanitise the prosaic horror of combat death – and the ugly human fallout on the families of veterans
As Anzac Day 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.
They belong to Vietnam veteran Jim Robertson. Before the 2014 centenary of Anzac – a jamboree on which Australia spent at least $550m – he wrote to federal politicians about the tone he hoped the commemorations might take.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
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