Remember This.

I've always liked the section in the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine called 'two of us'. Today though, I not only liked it but thought it worthy of reproducing some sections of it here, as it does such a good job of explaining why I feel sick to my stomach when I see someone like John Howard holding his hand over his heart on occasions such as Remembrance Day.

two of us

interviews by Paul Maley

Louise Merrington, 21, is a student at the University of Melbourne and a freelance writer. Ken Sillcock,95, is her grandfather. During World War II, he served as an army stretcher-bearer, then as a wireless operator flying bombing raids over Europe; his brother Ron went missing in action in the Caribbean. Ken is collating his wartime correspondence for a book.

Louise: [...] His younger brother was killed in the war. I can see that even after so many years he's still quite sad about it. The thing that really struck me was when he said 'I just don't understand why Ron could only live to 30 and why I've got over three times that'. It made me want to cry.

I know people have a tendency to idealise the past and I guess things like that force you to step back and say, 'Hang on, it's not all as rosy as you think it is'. He said to me the nickname they had for themselves in the army was 'six-bob-a-day-murderers'. He says murder is illegal except when the government's paying you to do it.

[...] We're both against the Iraq war. He's very strongly against it because he's been through it all, whereas I can see that, while we shouldn't have gone in the first place, if we were to pull out now it would probably end in anarchy. Well, more anarchy.

[...] I feel a terrible irony when all the politicians come out on Anzac Day or Remembrance Day and lay their wreaths and make their nice speeches and say, 'Lest we forget', and then they go and send our young men and women off to get killed again. I find that incredibly frustrating because it's like, well, if you just stopped for long enough and actually came and listened to the stories of these people, you might have a different view.

Ken: [...] Louise spent six months in China before starting her uni course. In one of her emails she commented that living as a minority in a foreign culture makes one very tolerant. That's the way young people should see the world. It's so much better to send them abroad to meet young people of other countries in a friendly way instead of going to fight them.

The whole business of war is wrong. Every generation has been conned by their elders that it's their duty to go. In World War I it was frightful. Women used to hnd out white feathers to anyone who hadn't enlisted and accuse them of cowardice, which was a rotten thing to do.

I was against war right at the beginning, but I felt, well, it will feel a bit crook if, at the end of [WWII], all those people have givn thteir lives and I haven't done a damn thing to help, so I enlisted. But at the time I thought, I'm in the business of saving lives as a stretcher-bearer -not killing people. I didn't want to be firing rifles at other people, but of course when I came to Bomber Command we killed so many thousands. We didn't see who we were killling, that was the only difference.

Lest we forget, indeed. We still have old guys like Ken Sillcock alive at the moment, who are trying their best to pass on to us the lessons they took away from their painful experience of war. But we're not even listening, and soon, there'll be nothing to remember.