I am just starting to realise a startling aspect of getting older: the past can really sneak up behind you and whack you right between the ears.
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Some of the things you think you know and have known for decades sometimes turn out to be wrong, twisted or just plain obnoxious.
It happened again this week.
I didn’t go to Vietnam.
My marble would have been drawn out in the conscription ballot drawn one month after Australia withdrew from South East Asia.
Don’t get me wrong. I would’ve gone. Not happily perhaps, but I would have gone because it was what Australian men did – and I was the first male Gregson in four generations not to go overseas and fight someone, so it was something of a noble family tradition.
My brother went to Vietnam. My Dad – a non-combatant army nurse spent time in Changi and the Japanese coal mines. His father went to Gallipoli.
And there is a story that one of his previous generations went to South Africa in the Boer War.
This meant there was a weight of family history and I was sort of hard-wired to the idea that it is right and honourable to use military means to bring despots, rogue regimes and similar ne’er-do-wells to heel.
Something clicked this week.
It was Barak Obama in Laos. He was talking about what the US had done in Laos during the Vietnam war.
A quick executive summary is that while the United States, Australia, New Zealand and other allied nations were trying to stop North Vietnam from romping all over democratic South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese were using the parallel nation of Laos as a sort of secret military ring road.
We never declared war on Laos. Neither did the United States.
But one of Barak Obama’s final acts as US President has been to go to Laos, apologise for what happened and offer many millions to help clean up unexploded bombs all over the country.
Here’s the fact that floored me: - according to the BBC, the US flew 580,344 bombing missions over Laos, dropping 260 million bombs.
An average of eight bombs were dropped every minute of the nine years of war.
Most devices dropped were anti-personnel cluster bombs.
An estimated 30 per cent of these munitions did not detonate.
It is estimated that about 288 million cluster munitions and about 75 million unexploded bombs were left across Laos after the war ended. (Surely a massive failure of US quality control?)
Now remind me – who won?
It was the first clear example of what’s now known as asymmetrical war in which a mighty, high tech force fails to come to grips with a less technical, numerically inferior, but more agile and motivated force.
British MP Tony Benn used to argue that all war was a failure of diplomacy.
He did not, however, explain how you could ever develop diplomacy with out-of-control lunatics such as ISIS, Syria’s Assad, Al Qaeda, or any of the other faces of modern evil in today’s world.
Or will we one day wake up and read statistics such as those now coming from Laos and once again ask: Remind me again – what was that all about?
The weight of family history would probably answer that you can only do what seems right at the time.
WAYNE GREGSON