About forty years on from the appalling and relentless shit our Vietnam veterans had to endure then and afterwards for most of the rest of their adult lives, our brilliant defence establishment, which like most major organisations nowadays makes out like it cares deeply about the people it chews up when it really couldn’t give a fishy fuck about any of them, is doing it again to the current military generation. Which is the children and grandchildren of the generation of poor bastards Australia exploited, ruined, and ignored the last time we were in a serious conflict, in Vietnam. Although we’ve done the same to others since, such as those in Rwanda and East Timor.
At least we’re distressingly and disgustingly consistent in treating abysmally the people who serve our nation in the worst circumstances imaginable and then ensuring that they are treated, by our standards, in the worst circumstances imaginable when they get home.
The average criminal who supports his or her drug habit by granny bashing has vastly more services available to try to rehabilitate him or her self as about a 95% shithouse chance of improving, never mind rehabilitating, him or her self (and I won’t bother with the fucking drug lords here, who are a much bigger problem but who’d be a lot less of a problem if we unleashed serious military forces against them) while service people who have actually done something for the nation’s benefit, as judged by national policy whose flesh and blood instruments they were, get fuck all services. Unless, as sometimes unfortunately happens, they fall into the criminal system because their hugely grateful fucking nation didn’t give them the support they needed to try to help them to re-integrate into the society whose interests they served and which callously spat them out as damaged people when they had served those interests.
The biggest enemy our service people have is their own service; the civilian administration above it; and the fucking government which sends them off to places in ‘the national interest’ and then gives them less consideration and support than some fucking illegal immigrant cunt whose criminal contacts donate enough to the government’s political campaign funds to keep worthless and damaging cunts like that in the country http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/court-arrests-to-lead-to-murder-plot-charges-20090325-9aim.html Meanwhile the poor bastards who risk their lives and have their lives, and the lives of their families, damaged or destroyed in various ways in the honourable service of the nation get fuck all from governments which pervert immigration laws to allow criminal cunts to reside here so they can be protected by service people to whom the same government gives no protection, concern or care.
The endless battle
Nick McKenzie
March 28, 2009HE COULD almost taste the asphalt and dirt as he slid on his stomach through the bomb site. One wrong move and Tony Gilchrist would be blown to bits. Just hours before, a colleague had suffered that fate, triggering an improvised explosive device that tore his body apart. Gilchrist’s colleague was lucky because he was still breathing; four US soldiers had been killed when the first device had exploded.
Now Gilchrist was looking for bomb No. 3, breathing slowly, sweating and inching forward, fingertips raking the dirt. His thoughts often turned to his family in Australia. They, like the public, knew little of his team’s work in Baghdad, the carnage and risks faced by the soldiers who would serve more missions than perhaps any other Australians in Iraq. Nor would the public learn much when Gilchrist finally got home. In fact, no one would be waiting for him at Sydney Airport. That would be the second time the Australian Defence Force would fail him; he had already tried once to seek help in Iraq but been disappointed. His need for support was confirmed on his first night back home, when he woke up drenched in sweat, vomiting and reliving the horror of bomb scene after bomb scene — a total of 102 scenes of fire, death and danger.
Gilchrist felt alone, but he is one of many serving and former Australian soldiers suffering an intense psychological reaction to the trauma of war. Up to 10 per cent of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will have long-term mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Australian Centre for Post-Traumatic Mental Health.
Last year, the Government acknowledged fears that the mental health system for soldiers and veterans was failing, and commissioned two confidential inquiries. The findings are still secret, but with the conflict in Afghanistan raging and the prospect of Australia being asked by the US to send more troops, expectations are high. Already, many soldiers and veterans tell of their struggle to find help.
Now, Tony Gilchrist is one of them. But, lying face-down in the Baghdad dirt in mid-2005, he thought nothing of his future or the unrelenting images that would haunt him. Searching for clues to the bomb’s location, he held his breath and slid forward, waiting for something to go wrong.
For Joe Day, one image stands above the rest. It is of a small Iraqi girl at a roadblock, wearing a white dress dotted with pink flowers, as if she is going to a party. But in her cheek is a chunk of shrapnel, surrounded by bruising. “The rest of her face and some of her hair is burnt, and part of her dress melted to her body. I looked in the girl’s eyes, these pretty little brown eyes, but the pupils were just still,” Day recalls. He broke the rules that day. He ignored orders and let the girl and her family past the roadblock. It is one of several decisions that sustain him as he relives the Iraq war back in Australia, searching for redemption. Day says he is “75 per cent” redeemed and the rest may come only “after I’m gone”.
The Australian Army warrant officer was posted with US forces commanding a Marine platoon on two historic occasions: the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2004 battle of Fallujah. Before Iraq, the laconic Bendigo-born career soldier had served since 1985 in a mostly peacetime army. It was only in the 1990s that the operational tempo lifted, leaving a defence and veterans’ support system unused to troops who have killed in war. On day 11 of the Iraq war, Day found nothing prepares a soldier for the reality of killing. He gave the order to fire at a car hurtling towards a checkpoint. When the machine-guns stopped, a uniformed Iraqi soldier sat dying alongside his badly injured comrades.
“You can see straight into their eyes, and you see the fear in their eyes, and they’re just lying there and they’re — with their eyes — they’re begging you to let them live,” says Day. “In the end, I think all they were trying to do was get home, that’s all they were trying to do. And we’d shot them up.” Day speaks slowly, every sentence considered. “Your mood changes after that point. You’re unclean from then on.”
Later, Day was accused over the alleged murder of unarmed men during what he describes as a bloody firefight on a riverbank. “It was watching people being mutilated right in front of your eyes. I thought I was a goner … I’m going to be hanging out to dry (over the accusation) because it’s easier to massacre a foreigner (an Australian soldier in the US) than it is one of their own.”
As pressure grew, Day was partly sustained by a US defence mental health support system that he believes is more proactive than Australia’s. Up to an estimated 20 per cent of US soldiers who serve in Iraq have post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition whose sufferers may experience flashbacks, emotional numbness and hyper-vigilance. The initial comfort Day found with the help of his platoon’s psychiatrist ended when the psychiatrist was killed, but for Day, rock-bottom would come later, when he returned to Australia.
The director of the Australian Centre for Post-Traumatic Mental Health, Professor Mark Creamer, says problems with the support services are due largely to severe underfunding. “This makes it less likely that those with mental health problems will be recognised or that they will have an appropriate place to go if they put their hand up and ask for help.”
Day was later cleared over the riverbank killing, when video footage backed his claim the men he had shot were armed. But the incident highlighted the soldier’s dilemma in Iraq and Afghanistan — the difficulty of knowing friend from foe, insurgent from civilian. The uncertainty leaves soldiers feeling constantly under threat and facing the question of when to fire. After taking a civilian life, no matter what the circumstances, how do you live with it?
Private Ben Millmann coped by avoiding questions.
“The first question anyone asks you is, ‘Did you shoot anybody?’ I’d lie and say ‘no’ because I’d rather people think I didn’t shoot anyone than think that I shot a woman and child.”
Millmann can’t forget the aftermath of the shooting near the Australian embassy in Baghdad in February 2005 — the “bucket of blood” covering the occupants of the car that had failed to heed warnings to stop from Millmann’s patrol, the screams of “Why? Why? Why?”
The realisation that he had shot a woman in the face, blinding her and her young son. The 20-year old “instantly felt like shit”, and then increasingly ostracised.