ANZAC Day thoughts
As a product of the second world war I spent my childhood buried in air warfare comics and it was my dream to be a fighter pilot one day. One step up from my Dad who was an RAAF pilot who trained to fly bombers in England but never flew on an actual bombing mission he said. It was in England that he met my mother, married her and brought me to Australia in the safety of her womb. I was made in England you could say.
I served eight years in the RNZAF as a communications operator during the Vietnam War years and would have done practically anything to be able to go and serve in Vietnam but there were no RNZAF forces deployed to that theatre. I learned many years later that had I remained in Australia my birth date would have seen me drafted for national service and in all likelihood have been sent to Vietnam, perhaps to die there.
My most scared moment as a father myself was when my son, who had enlisted in the Army, rang me to say excitedly that he was being posted to Cambodia as part of the peace keeping forces sent from Australia to monitor free democratic elections after a decade of war in and around the country. My first and only thought was of him coming home in a body bag and my heart broke. He attempted to allay my concerns by saying that it was alright as he was the machine gunner in the platoon to which I retorted "And who do you think they will take out first?!!!".
What is ANZAC Day, my non-Australian non-New Zealand readers may be asking? ANZAC was an acronym for a grouping of Australian and New Zealand Army Copy personnel brought together by our colonial masters, England, to take part in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. The day these forces landed on the Gallipoli beaches was April 25, 1915 and this day is commemorated with great reverence to honour all fallen service men and women every year as ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. I have provided a link below to an excellent coverage of it in Wikipedia.
My first memory of an Anzac Day was attending the ceremony at the local cenotaph in Maldon which had a honour guard of four soldiers at each corner of the garden around the memorial. My under 10 self solemnly went and stood at attention in front of each soldier in turn then saluted each one. On reflection this must have made it a little difficult for the soldiers involved to maintain their solemn, respectful stance.
To this day ANZAC Day brings me to tears at some point and more so the older I get and the more I have learnt to appreciate the value of human  But now the tears soon turn to anger at the madness of people and politicians who engage in wars which invariably have to be fought, with lives lost, by those with no effective input into the decision.
References:
Read all about the origins of ANZAC by clicking here:
The picture is my own snapped outside the entrance to Blacktown Hospital in Western Sydney, Australia
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