soldier's life - all for nothing

[Flash]

Join the army - if you are an idiot. My experience as a conscript-Vietnam veteran is enough to turn anybody off serving as a soldier in the Australian Army.

For most of my army service I didn't have a bed beyond whatever piece of wet and creature-infested ground I went to sleep on. In Vietnam I used my ammo pouches as pillows and at various times was near eaten alive by leeches, ants and other creepy crawlies, as well as suffering sleep deprivation from a lack of troops to carry out night guard duties. For months on end I was lucky if I got four hours' sleep a night. I went from 89 kilograms to 57 kilograms.

When my two years of national service finished, the lies of the government really became apparent. I was told that as a combat-experienced digger I had to agree to three years in the reserves-Citizens Military Force or five years in the Emergency Reserve. I thought I had done my two years but no, at any time in the next five years I would be the first to be sent back into war.

I was told by the government I'd get my job back with appropriate promotion. Well, my former employer told me I wasn't getting my job back and that was life.

I was now ex-army and unemployed; I had lost thousands of dollars in income over the two years and I was broke, had nowhere to live and could not get a job. I was back on the streets, without a job and without saleable skills. How do you translate skills in killing people to a civilian environment? Try approaching an employment agency when the last thing you did was kill people.

How do you survive as a former digger? Well, if you were from the Vietnam era you expunged it from your résumé and said you spent the missing two years in jail - that was a more acceptable explanation at the time.

Anyone who applies to be a soldier is an idiot; why, otherwise, would you fight wars that have no relevance to Australia.

And after you have fought the war you will get just what all the idiots before you got - nothing.

Glenn Barry (4RAR/NZ), Marsfield

[Flash]

admin said:

Join the army - if you are an idiot. My experience as a conscript-Vietnam veteran is enough to turn anybody off serving as a soldier in the Australian Army.

For most of my army service I didn't have a bed beyond whatever piece of wet and creature-infested ground I went to sleep on. In Vietnam I used my ammo pouches as pillows and at various times was near eaten alive by leeches, ants and other creepy crawlies, as well as suffering sleep deprivation from a lack of troops to carry out night guard duties. For months on end I was lucky if I got four hours' sleep a night. I went from 89 kilograms to 57 kilograms.

When my two years of national service finished, the lies of the government really became apparent. I was told that as a combat-experienced digger I had to agree to three years in the reserves-Citizens Military Force or five years in the Emergency Reserve. I thought I had done my two years but no, at any time in the next five years I would be the first to be sent back into war.

I was told by the government I'd get my job back with appropriate promotion. Well, my former employer told me I wasn't getting my job back and that was life.

I was now ex-army and unemployed; I had lost thousands of dollars in income over the two years and I was broke, had nowhere to live and could not get a job. I was back on the streets, without a job and without saleable skills. How do you translate skills in killing people to a civilian environment? Try approaching an employment agency when the last thing you did was kill people.

How do you survive as a former digger? Well, if you were from the Vietnam era you expunged it from your résumé and said you spent the missing two years in jail - that was a more acceptable explanation at the time.

Anyone who applies to be a soldier is an idiot; why, otherwise, would you fight wars that have no relevance to Australia.

And after you have fought the war you will get just what all the idiots before you got - nothing.

Glenn Barry (4RAR/NZ), Marsfield

Join the army! Please.

One of the big news stories in politics over the past week or so was the announcement that the government would expand the army by two infantry battalions. This is largely in response to our increasing peace-keeping commitments in the local region, rather than involvement in conflicts in the Middle East, where Australia has a somewhat token representation.

For a while it seemed like Australia was flirting with the American model of small tactical groups of highly trained special forces troops. Although that sounds great in theory, when you need lots of boots on the ground (as America does in Iraq, and Australia does in East Timor and the Solomon Islands), what you really need are grunts. Australia's involvements with its failing Pacific neighbours needs lots of grunts, and that's what this new policy is designed to generate.

I'm personally not a big fan of the military-industrial complex, but I'm all for a strong peace-keeping presence in our local region (provided it's done with the appropriate safeguards and the consent of the locals). In principle, I don't have an objection to the recruitment of more grunts to do this. I think that, if we're going to have a military, that's a much better use for it than fighting for America's oil supplies in the Middle East.

I have no idea, however, where the hell the government thinks the army is going to find these young men to train into professional killers.

The United States is having trouble meeting its recruitment targets for its troop commitments in the Middle East, and the US is really the best case scenario as far as recruitment goes. In the US, the armed forces really serve as a defacto welfare system. It gobbles up the poor, the minorities, and dispossessed, gives them some marketable skills (which frequently go beyond merely killing folk), and re-injects them back into society when they're a couple of years older, have a bit of money and some direction in their life.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not advocating sending all of the poor young Black men off to the army. But that's how it does work in practice, and it works reasonably well for a lot of them. The whole getting your arse blown off in some god-forsaken shithole bit is a significant down-side to the plan, but it's a compromise many of the candidates are willing to accept for the leg-up it may give them. And given that the US doesn't actually have a welfare safety net as such, there is a nearly inexhaustible supply of young men (and some young women) for whom the armed services seems like a good option.

And therein lies the problem. Whilst the Howard government is doing its darnedest to whittle away the Australian welfare safety net, it's still mostly there. If you're young and unskilled and poor and dispossessed in Australia, chances are your only options are starving to death or enlisting in the army. Sure, the Job Start allowance and Centrelink all sucks, and no one is actually doing the New Apprenticeships, but the options are there for the sufficiently motivated. And those options probably look a lot better than being given a Steyr and a pair of ill-fitting boots and being sent over to Iraq to kill Arabs. The combination of Australia's involvement with unpopular conflicts and the availability of other options means that finding these extra 2600 blokes to fill those two additional battalions is going to be something of a challenge. The last unpopular conflict we got ourself quagmired in required conscription to fill the ranks - what makes them think that this one will be any different.

Being an unrepentant lefty, I'm not going to argue for dismantling the welfare safety net for the sake of stocking up the army. But maybe we need to do a little bit of re-thinking of the role of Australia's military. The Canadian armed forces essentially sell themselves as a peacekeeping force for the UN. That's not strictly accurate these days, but its image does seem to be considerably different to other Western armed forces. Sure, they have the benefit of a close relationship with a country with a well-funded and well-stocked military, but guess what - so do we.

Let's face it - Australia does not need protecting from a foreign aggressor. The only country that has the capacity to attack us is Indonesia, and they have enough domestic problems tying up their armed forces (many of which were trained by Australians). And if they did attack, they'd have to cross about 2000 kilometres of desert before they actually got anywhere they could do any damage (they're welcome to Darwin, if they want it). Besides providing emotional support for the Americans (did anyone really think that a handful of ANZACs are going to save the tens of thousands of hapless American troops in Iraq?), Australia has no place participating in foreign invasions.

If the Australian military was re-imagined and repurposed as a dedicated peace-keeping force, or even if it has a handful of battalions designated as serving an exclusive peace-keeping function, I think it would have an easier time attracting recruits. The generals would never agree, of course, but they don't make policy any more than I do - they exist to carry out the instructions of the executive. Given that Defence is currently having significant problems even recruiting civilians to warm seats in Canberra, I don't think they're in a position to argue.

The ANZAC tradition is something that the Australian military holds dear (and something that the government loves capitalising on), but I actually think it's entirely consistent with a dedicated Australian peacekeeping force (after all, the original ANZACs believed that they were protecting Australia and the world from fascists). I think it'd also be a pretty easy sell, politically. Unfortunately it's inconsistent with the government's position of being willing deputy to George Bush's world policeman, so it'll probably never happen.