What Did You Do in the War?

My first war, I travelled from newborn to six years old. Ration books and food shortages (yes, even in Australia) were a fact I never questioned. I lived among many more neighbouring women than men; in a house with my mother, my nana, my aunty, my girl cousin. 

My dad would arrive like a whirlwind: briefly, large and loud. For two nights I’d be kicked out of sharing Mummy's bed, then he’d be gone again. (With a crippled leg from a childhood accident, he couldn’t go to the war with most of the absent men. He was in a camp in central Australia with others not-quite-fit, training to protect us here if our country ever got invaded.)

no war here –

but fathers who came back (if)

as strangers

During the Korean War I was in my mid-teens, surviving my parents’ divorce, uprooted from my childhood home, acquiring an abusive stepmother, moving to Melbourne and going to uni, starting to date. I barely noticed the war. (I learned a version of it later, watching M*A*S*H.)

MASH taught me

American army life 

not Korea

Our longest war lasted from when I was still single and childless to my sons being in primary school. I marched in protests, I wrote letters to newspapers and politicians. Our Prime Minister reintroduced conscription shortly before announcing that Australia would join its ally, the USA, in Vietnam. Our next Prime Minister declaimed, ‘All the way with LBJ’. At the motorcade when LBJ visited Sydney, anti-war protestors lay down in the road. The State Premier yelled, ‘Run over the bastards!’

A TV newsflash too sudden to turn off: the My Lai massacre. ‘It isn’t true!’ declared my shocked six-year-old. ‘Australians would never do that!’ I had to tell him, ‘I’m afraid they did.’

At a huge rally in Melbourne, a spitting young man heckled marchers: ‘My mate died over there!’ 

‘Then why are you not marching with us?’ an elderly man demanded.

Over 80

I no longer march.

There are still wars.