Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the one thing that applies to all the campaigns Australians have been involved in over the last one hundred years. Unfortunately, it not only harms those directly affected, it harms those they love and reverberates through the generations and the community in general, like ripples on a pond.

My father every night, relived his actions as a Sapper during the siege of Tobruk. He would cry and scream in his sleep. Awake he had violent, drunken rages that resulted in abuse and brutality being heaped on my mother, my sisters and me.

From age eleven to fourteen I attempted to protect my family against this man who towered over me. A man who, in his distressed state, believed I was a Nazi that he needed to strike down. When he would attack my mother, I often knocked him unconscious with blows to his head using beer bottles, half house bricks and lumps of wood. Finally in 1950, my mum fled with my sisters from Sydney to Melbourne to avoid the possibility of me killing my own father.

Eight years later, I actually joined the Army, to learn from my own experience how and why my dad ended up the way he did. He died before I could tell him I was beginning to understand what war had done to him and why we had become a dysfunctional family. I never laid eyes on him or talked to him after we fled to Melbourne.

I tell you this story, to illustrate that these are the sorts of experiences that large numbers of ex-service men and women and their wives, husbands and loved ones have all suffered and continue to suffer today. Day by day these families experience sleep disturbance including nightmares, emotional detachment, 'flashbacks', mood swings, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, alcohol and other drug abuse.

Please reflect on the enormous price, physical and mental, that veterans and their families have paid, one way or another, directly or indirectly, down through the generations to defend our country so that we, here and now, can live in peace

Dear Lorrie,
I sympathise with you about your personal suffering due to your father's war experience.
I note you state that all past Defence force personal over the past hundred years have fought and died, to achieve peace for us who are living today.
When is the peace going to happen?, we have troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Solomon Islands, and East Timor, we are up to our necks in debt to the USA, buying their weapons of mass destruction.
The so called "ANZAC" experience, is an emotional and political tool used and abused today by our current political leaders today to whip up nationalism and patriotism, using young Australians as fodder, for the military ambitions of Howard and Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan, for now, there may be more to follow.
Australians have placated and served Britain and the USA, in fighting their wars, currently the Howard government is placating and serving the USA under the banner of "war on terror". I am betting that Howard is crossing everything in hoping there will be no deaths of our troops before the election.
Australians are no more special than any other human on the planet, killing and maiming in combat, effects all humans, and their loved ones the same, regardless of what flag they are flying at the time.
Have you ever heard Howard mention the word "Peace", i have not, it would be very nice if he did, it would give peace loving people some hope for the future of their children and their children.

We have soldiers coming home with Trauma,I have seen the conflict it causes with in families.But the Anzac's fought for freedom they gave all.My Father and Brothers have been in wars.They didn't come home with The trauma todays soldiers do.I think with todays Troops the problem is How do they know the ordinary person in the street cares about them.We can not write letters to our troops serving away.There is a blanket on the news So we hear no news about todays troops in the war zones.Why? I have e-mailed various Ministers of this Government asking for information on how I can write letters to deployed troops.Needless to say I have not heard anything.Does Howard want us to forget our deployed troops.
WE have not heard of any deaths of our troops.But whats to say they have been kept secret.it is not logical to say we have lost no troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.America have lost hundreds of troops they work side by side.So how come no Australians have been hurt, It's about time this Government stopped treating us like mushrooms.We the general public are abit more logical then to believe American troops have lost their lives and Australia none? So if we have lost none why can we not communicate with our troops.I write to deployed American and Canadian troops because I can not get names and addresses of Australian troops?Why what is the big secret?? I think if our own troops could get letters from fellow countrypeople it would improve the phyche of our troops.I have written to American troops and have had a few replies that I have not expected.But by what they say.A letter from a comlete stranger makes all the difference to them.We should be able to write letters of support to our own troops.I write to troops that have no family and have never recieved a letter.It must happen with our troops also.There must be some who have no family and no one writes to them,So imagine the morale boost these troops would get,recieving mail from a complete a stranger.Our troops need our support.

Charlee wrote that the problem with our troops is "How do they know the ordinary person in the street cares about them". Never mind that, how do they know the government cares about them? Our "leaders" are good with their little speeches as we send the flower of the nation off to war but, when any return damaged, the government and their disgusting Dept. of Veterans' Affairs do all in their power to ignore the problem. Does Howard want us to forget our deployed troops? He can when it suits him. They're only cannon fodder for Uncle George Bush.
I know someone, badly damaged in the Gulf, who was hung out to dry for years before government recognition. I, myself, had to fight Dept. of Veterans' Affairs for four years, representing myself against their legally trained staff, to be recognised.
So, what hope for those now in Iraq?

maybe the answer is to recognize that signing up to be a professional soldier can get you killed or broken, is not well paid, and has nothing to do with defending the nation, everything to do with being a tool of some politician.

Sarah I not only hate the idea that our young men and women are being badly used. I want to know where Prime Ministers get the authority to go to war ?
Our Politicians are all too willing to send us off to fight other people’s wars in the naïve hope that they can gain great and powerful friends.
They cloak themselves in the glory of battle honours hard won but they are most unwilling to accept their long term responsibility for the returned crippled, disfigured, blind and insane.

Prime Minister John Howard, told cabinet we were off to war, no ‘ifs ’or ‘buts’. The question of who decides for Australia apparently is, by default, left in the hands of one man.

It is a foul, foul obscenity that cynical, manipulative old men can still today send boys into harm’s way to address the failures of leadership, policy, diplomacy and the incompetence of these same old men. Our newly imposed sedition laws forbid me from saying what I really think of this.

Sarah101 wrote Anzac spirit etc is a tool politicians use to whip up nationalism.

We made heroes of the men of Gallipoli. We have made much of the spirit that we say symbolises them. They didn’t develop that spirit at Gallipoli. On the contrary, they carried the ‘Spirit of Australia’ with them to the Anzac Cove because that is who they were and that is who we are.
History has demonstrated and Henry Lawson and Dorethea Mackellar wrote of how this country, with its vastness, furnace- breathed droughts, bush fires and floods, is character building to say the least.
The truth is we are too stubborn for our own good. We know that when we are faced with calamity we need and can rely on each other and we refuse to let any bugger get the best of us.

So let’s not idolise or mythologise these soldiers. They were from and of this place. They were descendants of migrants who came here
over the last 100,000 years from all corners of the earth. Pioneering men and women who carved out a nation from a land so harsh and desolate that only the stubborn and brave dared persevere despite the hindrance of flood, drought, war and governmental interference.

In 1903 we Australians created our national flag and used the Southern Cross to embody Dante’s four moral virtues of justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude, principles that Australians should live up to.

So, what happened in 1915 was that we realised who we are and what we’re made of. We discovered for ourselves the intrinsic goodness of our national character, qualities like decency, manliness, integrity and fairness with a whole lot of larrikin thrown in.

We sure do not get our moral values from our political masters.

Demos, I signed up with the Australian Defence Forces. If we had no defence forces, we would have been speaking Japanese since the 1940's or, if we had no defences more recently, Indonesian.
While I'm not so naive to think that defence forces will never be used to wage war, as long as other nations have them, we need them.
My only gripe was that the government desn't want to know the down side and tries to sweep the damaged defence members under the carpet.

to Sarah101... again...and Demos... military readiness is as simple as the schoolyard, ... its about survival.

It's about alliances and mutual obligations in those alliances for mutual support and again...survival.

Small countries like Australia, cannot survive without what is usually termed 'Great and powerful friends'.... for us it is the USA.

I identity with JSP in his statement about the downside, but I have served in the RAAF, where I went to Vietnam during the war.. have experienced beatings and torture by those in the previous intake, have been thumped mercilessly and dragged to the ablution block with blood streaming down by chest from a nearly broken nose, and none of this has left me with any sense of 'trauma' with the notable exception, that if I ever meet face to face the one bloke who tortured me again, I cannot guarantee that I won't 'deal' with him in a very unfriendly manner.

But I'd certainly ask him if his attitude has changed and how he now feels about that incident prior to anything else.

I saw people during my RAAF time, who would have fitted in perfectly at Auschwitz, they exist in all races. I think many of you live sheltered lives and /or are simply in denial about the realities of life.

During those turbulent and painful years in the RAAF, I learn't the meaning of 'Great and Powerful Friends' as one of the non Apprentices saw our plight and trained us in weightlifting and boxing. He also assured us that if we were ill treated, 'CALL ME'...Its nice to have powerful friends sometimes.

I think some (not all) PTSD comes from lack of true exposure to the philosophical and historical basis for defense. War is indeed hell, but sadly, every peace, including the one we now currently enjoy, is the result of... a war.