What a monumental waste of life and resources was that war. The only war story from my grandfathers lips, was the pain of losing his brother on the same front under the same circumstances.

Then came another five years in WW11, for him and his son.

I thank him to this day for his intervention in stopping me from attending a similarly waste of resources and men, Vietnam. Only after I completed my voluntary military training: I remember the shock of his words: Over my dead body you'll be going to Vietnam. I didn't.

I didn't finish my Vietnam Nasho training and my father said he'd face the murder charge and tried to shoot me for not going. Australians volunteer when needed. The Viet ballot for my call-up was 25% of 20 year-old men. For a Liberal government there would be at least 50% men who agreed with the war . So about 12% were forced to go by the 50% who refused to volunteer. Democracy..Anzacs..

A great, heartfelt, article by Brian Murphy.

My Grandfather fought at Gallipoli and then in WWII.

My father in Vietnam.

Of my father I wrote, for his funeral, this year:

Delivered as part of the Family Eulogy at Dad’s Funeral Duntroon Chapel Canberra, July 12, 2018.

"After talking to Dad for many years I’ve written a short poem that imagines:

WHAT DAD MAY SAY TODAY

When tomorrow starts without me
Just like yesterday
On this cold Winter afternoon
I have some things to say.

In 1970
I expected Vietnam would kill me
My end coming by a mine or RPG
Blowing up my APC.

But I lived 48 more years
Till 85 years old
Two diseases promised life till 2020
Then my heart gave out early.

I know I wasn’t perfect
Many things I regret
I had my faults
But please forgive me yet.

Life needs more forgiving
That’s the way we learn
It bonds us all together
For the better life we yearn

If I could relive yesterday
Even for a while
I’d crack a joke
And make you laugh
And even make you smile.

So when tomorrow starts without me
Don’t think we’re far apart
For every time you think of me
I’m right here in your heart."

see http://gentleseas.blogspot.com/2018/07/why-submarine-matters-quiet-since-june.html

More on World War One and wars generally at "Some Anzac Day Songs" at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8819

Dear plantagenet,

What beautiful tributes.

Brought tears to my eyes.

Thanks Foxy

Pete

On the 11h day of the 11th month, two days hence, One will remember them and contemplate the absolute absurdity or war! And the countless waste of lives.
Alan B.

Dear Alan,

I agree. But we're not honouring war - but our
veterans. And I'm sure that you'll agree they
deserve to be honoured.

Thumbs up to all of that Plantagenet...

Thanks diver

Pete

Absolutely agree with that Foxy. And Pete.

Even so, nobody wins in any war. Countless lives were wasted or ruined in WW11, to stop a madman from taking the world by force of arms and continuing the slaughter of an entire race.

I honour the brave men that fought in that war, which cost me 13 of my blood relatives. 12 during the conflict, the last run over by a double-decker bus two weeks after his return when he walked in front of a bus.

Vietnam was not popular on so many fronts. First, because politicians decided they knew more than their generals. Second because they equated Buddhism with communism and treated them as if they were one and the same. Foisted a corrupt minority government on the Vietnamese. And in so doing, forced neighbouring Buddhist nations, Cambodia and Laos offside with the allies and onside with the communist "liberators".

Finally after the Tiet offensive. which exhausted Charlie. there should have been a counter-offensive all the way to Hanoi. Instead, the yanks turned tail and ran deserting their alleged allies.

But only after they wasted more young GI lives than they spent during the entire length (theirs) of the WW11 campaign. And where raw barely trained troops were used as bait to flush out Charlie.

So forgive me for seeing warfare as a wasteful absurdity as we watch history repeat itself. The next war (and there will be one) will be fought by machines where the civilians will be the prime targets.

And for what? Scarce water and arable land? And only because, willfully blind politicians refuse to accept or adopt the widespread rollout of the very thing that could put endless reliable energy in every hand and with it, endless reliable water that alone will reverse desertification, return the deserts to the granaries and forests they once were and allow as many as 50 million droughts displaced refugees to return to their places of birth.

Without question only gormless visionless, self-serving politicians stand between us and a world at peace at last!
Alan B.

Dear Alan,

I don't think that anyone will disagree with your
take on how destructive war is. My parents lost
their country, most of their family, their worldly
goods, their social position, everything - during
WWII when they fled from the Soviet Regime.

I also fear that our world can become so
obsessed with the problems of hatred and aggression,
that it will allow peace and love to be regarded
as soft and weak. Yet our survival depends on their
dominance.

A time to remember and think of those that did not return.
My Uncle, George Butcher, died at the Battle of Polygon Wood near Ypes
in Belgium. He has no known grave.
I had the honor to visit the Menin Gate and see his name on the wall there.
The Local Fire Brigade every evening at 6pm since 1922 and hold a
ceremony and play the last post. A very moving occasion.

Of course I never knew him being born many years later as my mother
was George Butcher's little sister. She often spoke of him.
My father was in an adjacent battle field at the same time and was
wounded there. He was lying on the ground when two German soldiers
came by, picked him up and carried him into the Australian lines.

While grieving them we need to also grieve for the families they never had.
They are not often counted in the cost of war.

Yes, Foxy. Can't imagine what that could have been like. It's so indescribably awful what some humans can do o others, for some perceived difference. Today there seems to be, new minority scapegoats for the alt-right and the extreme left.

Be it a Muslim minority here or impoverished Latinos elsewhere. One has seen pictorial of men women and children line up against a mass grave and machined gunned into it. All allegedly done in the name of alleged patriotism. And today even as I pen these lines there are several megalomaniacs with a stockpile of the worlds most powerful weapons and only prevented from using them by the spectre of mutual destruction.

Star wars as envisaged by Ragen ended the concept of mutual destruction and now Trump seems to want to revitalise that to end the mutual destruction roadblock.

And he wants an arms race that can only provoke and increase tension.

We live in dangerous times on a world gone mad and where as one looks around, one sees a situation too often repeated where the inmates have taken over and are now running the asylum.

We and the world need to end its captive market reliance on fossil fuels. And become where possible, islands of sanity in a world gone mad and rushing headlong toward annihilation?

My Celtic forbears also lost their lands, lives, liberties and heritage during both the highland clearances and the annexation of large swathes of Ireland.

My maternal great grandmum survived into her nineties and told us of the advent of the black and tans, where the English emptied their prisons and put murders, rapist and outright villains in uniform and just let them loose on the Irish to loot plunder and rape at will.

We also fled the atrocity and horror even though two of my great great granduncles fought alongside the English as victoria cross winners. Its these brave and inherently decent men we should honour, not the calloused and indifferent mongrels that threw them into harm's way!
Alan.

Dear Alan,

Thank You for sharing.

You write with such power and integrity.

We need new way of thinking to cope with the
nuclear age. I wrote on another discussion that
it is here that writers, with their concern for the
human condition and their special skills with language,
can enable us to imagine the horrific reality of
nuclear arms and nerve us to build an alternative
future.

Maurice Strandgard writes:

"Somewhere there must be a place
Called Little Peace
Where men with little humanity
Do not have the power
To make great decisions.
Where little fears do not lessen
The so small span
Of our lives,
Where
For once
We can know peace.
Just a little.
To know the taste of it."

There can never be peace so long as there are people who expect others to carry them through life in more comfort than those who support.

Exactly Individual, none more so than those tax avoiding leaners who have others, their brains and bent sweat-soaked backs, earn all their income for them. As they lord it over one and all, thinking themselves how massively wonderful they are for earning all that, bulging at the seams, vaults of money.

For example, a six times bankrupt D Trump who left a trail of broken lives, broken dreams, and broken family enterprises in his wake as he "EARNED" his billions.

And he has many many cigar-chomping, conyac swarfing mates, forever critical of others. but aging day by day as they inch inexorably toward their own final day of judgement and have to look love straight in the eye and total up all their deeds to find as much as one single genuine example where love personified, alone decided any of their, arranged by them, outcomes.

Me, I'd have them trot alongside a hay truck throwing square bales of green lucerne hay up for fourteen straight hours a day, to have them understand what a real man's work looks like.

To be fair. I'd match them up with a few sixty and seventy-year-olds well hardened to this real physical work and only ask they keep up.

And let's see how many of these self-congratulating ultra-privileged windbags and leaners survive more than one single day.

Imagine self-made millionaires, born the log cabins they hewed out of the wilderness, with their own bare hands, Gina or Clive actually lasting for more than a single hour?

Albeit, a couple of giant bellies would possibly continue to wobble for that long after they stopped?

Like the aforementioned, not one of them would have actually carried arms, been put in or served in harm's way, but rather used the power of privilege and influence to very-very adroitly avoid it? Let alone, volunteer?
Alan B.

There will never be peace as long as humanity holds onto certain faults, flaws and fantasies.
As long as there is greed and averace, there will be no piece.
As long as people 'dream' about peace, there will be no peace.
As long as people refuse to mature and exercise reason and common sense, there will be no peace.
It behooves us to stand by and do nothing when we can clearly see what others fail to see, that their beliefs are the reason there will be no peace.
As long as we refrain from disabusing others, with their naive beliefs or lies and fallacies, there will be no peace.
As long as we refrain from speaking truthfully, there will be no peace.
Let's face it, there is no magic pill that will suddenly change the EQ of human beings.
Again it is a fool, a dreamer, a fantasist who even dares to whisper such unrealities.
In life, there will always be spectrum's, or variables, as in good and bad, short and tall, and so on.
And so it is we can never end up with a perfect human, because the 'bar' is continually moving.
Take a dozen of the most pure and perfect men by todays standards, there will still be the one who is deemed to be the most pure and the rest are progressively less so as you move down the line.
And so it is with humanity.
I cannot wear fools, and it would appear that those who promote this panacea of life, are either unthinking fools or unrealistic dreamers.
Either way they are dangerous people, preaching false hope and dogma as if they are the authority on the topic they speak.
As long as human kind has ALL it's faculties it is born with, there will be no peace, and people saying or wishing it otherwise only anger and frustrate people like myself, because I can see what they are refusing to see.

Yes Altrave, the world is full of dreamers!

And they go back as far as the eye can see. Starting with blind fools who imagined they could harness the power of steam and move virtual tons of freight at speeds greater than forty miles an hour, even though the wise men like yourself no doubt, knew for sure and for certain, that it couldn't be done and that anything over forty miles per hour would automatically terminate the lives of all those who tried it.

Then even greater dreamers with even more in]mpossible dreams dreamed men could fly. Even though we, you and I, the very practical down to earth men we are, knew if a man were meant to fly? He'd have been born with wings.

then there were those outright looney tunes who thought they could put a man on the moon. Absolute insanity, it'll never ever happen and as much chance as building a massive world-leading economy with inclusive cooperative capitalism.

Yes I know, cooperative capitalism keeps your money in your own economy until completely exhausted and as it does so, makes every one dollar do the economic work of seven or more, thanks to the inherent flow on factors that obliges just that to happen.

It'd be an absolute tragedy, if we could drought proof this economy, and have to import guest labour because we had completely full employment and the best wage scales and conditions in the world. And like all of the other aforementioned, we the smart folks, know, none of that is possible!

Or that an overheating planet can actually ever end its reliance on coal.

Without coal?

What on earth would either Gina Or Clive have for breakfast? And with the generous donations of this industry how could the coalition win a seat, let alone, government?
Alan B.

Alan, you've crossed over onto another track.
You speak of human 'physical' achievements, not their psychological ones which pertain directly to the question and attitudes regarding the points I was referring to; PEACE.
The things you mention are a direct result of academia and IQ.
The topic of peace is one of human interaction with other humans or EQ.
I know full well of the 'dreamers' you speak of, I am one such dreamer.
My life both domestically and professionally has been one of 'dreaming' up an idea, then taking it from the non-dimensional, and on through to the three dimensional.
In other words (my title is industrial designer) I think up an idea, then build it, then establish it's production.
I am one of a handful of people in Australia who have the ability to 'vertically integrate'.
So you see, where as your comments have value, they do not relate to me or as a response to my comments.
World peace bares no relation to world achievements.
One of the best examples I can give is the atomic bomb.
Those with IQ created it and those with EQ deployed it.
So to re-iterate, dreamers and fantasists who use emotion to deliver a message are dangerous people, and should not be allowed to speak.
When people are vying for office, they rally the public with emotion laced speech.
One such example was HITLER!

Yes Atrave another one, Winston Churchill or someone like Gandi or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandella, The list is long and includes guys like Erdogan, Netanyahu or even D Trump. The latter most popular when addressing a crowd of right-wing fundamentalists.

Having the power of persuasion is not particularly unique, but available to all to use and persuade others down paths that will lead us to the promised and predicted, one thousand years of peace.

And only possible if we stop fighting among ourselves for the crumbs of defeat. Be it defeat in conflict or economic well being.

Our finest moments as humans were when at war and putting others first. So also in the war on poverty and want that in truth can only ever improve all lives, yours, mine and all others, if done intelligently, without hurt or harm to any others or fouling the nest we call planet earth.

I mean real success in business is best achieved by delivering the very best service or good you are capable of and just allowing the profits to take care of themselves.

Moreover, the most efficient, most productive by a mile, business models were co-ops that almost alone as private enterprise, free market models, survived the great depression virtually intact. Always providing someone with IQ was at the helm and with skin in the outcome!

And for alleged virtical thinkers unable to put the other guy first, an impossible concept That is in eternal (ME-ME) conflict with their inner self? Alan B.

Everything around us started with a dream in some
form or another. Not all of them good of course.
However, I prefer to think of the dream chasers
who have done good and changed the trajectory of
our world for the better. People like Father Chris
Riley and his work for youth in Sydney. He founded
and developed "Youth Off the Streets (YOTS). Then
there's organisations like - Beyond Blue, Lifeline,
Vinnies, Salvation Army, to name just a few - they
all started with someone's dream. People like
Walt Disney who pioneered a new vision for animation
and entertainment. Richard Branson has started
some 4 gazillion companies. One of the most powerful
speeches in history starts with "I have a dream..."

Anyway - you get the picture.

Alan, I concur on some of your points.
I am a little confused with one passage.
Where you mention a thousand years of peace, I am only able to conjure up a prediction of instability, fighting and war for a thousand years, then peace would prevail, on Earth.
I know it sounds a little far fetched, but not sure where it came from.
Was it the bible?
Was it Nostradamus?
I don't know but, I can't find any reference to a thousand years of peace.

"Winston Churchill: 'If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour" - 1940.
Hitler believed that if he get rid of all the enemies and kill all the undesirables a Reich which is strong in it's territory and have an influence much outside the political boundaries will come which will exist for 1000 years.

His inspiration is the 1st Reich [The holy Roman Empire, 962–1806] which lasted almost 1000 years with a lot of influence even when the Empire itself is not that strong."

As Anglo-Saxons and Germans are...German , (like the Windsors) then peace was possible . Being Christian , peace was possible.

Alan B,
Yes those multi billionaires you refer to could do with some lard-wobbling exercise along a hay wagon so they could resemble the thousands of workers they employ.
Then we have those who deem it a "Right" to get above average wage for simply brandishing a BA or similar utterly useless qualification to an equally useless public service bureaucrat & get a position of uselessness paid for by the rest of us. And, they don't employ a single person.