In Harm's Way

"And there's another country": Stoicism and sacrifice, the virtues that permitted a nation of barely one million citizens to bear the loss of 18,000 of its children in the First World War, are no longer much valued in the hyper-sentimentalised mass culture of the 21st Century.

THREE YOUNG SERVICEMEN die when a RNZAF Iroquois helicopter crashes into the hills above Pukerua Bay on ANZAC Day, 2010.

The bare facts: Who? What? Where? When?

We’ll wait a little longer, I suspect, for the How? And the Why?

And behind the bare facts – as always – are the torn and floating webs of family and friendship. Stories that could fill volumes. A private grief that never wholly departs. That aching sense of absence, that bitter taste upon the tongue, every time April 25th rolls ‘round.

For the families, friends and comrades left behind, ANZAC Day will never be the same.

There was so much we could have learned from this accident. An opportunity to follow the vivid threads of history back to the events that gave birth to the whole tradition of ANZAC Day commemoration. Tragically, however, we allowed this chance to link the raw emotions of the present with the thoughts and feelings of the past to slip through our fingers.

Instead of displaying the stoicism that a soldier’s death demands, we have been encouraged to wallow in the worst kind of public sentimentality. Our heartstrings have been worn to breaking-point by the news media’s relentless bows. Our capacity for sober reflection overwhelmed by the insistent journalistic clamour for everyone – from the Prime Minister on down – to emote, emote, emote!

We are told that our armed services are "like a family" – whose members have been "stricken" by the ANZAC Day crash. When interviewed shortly after the accident, Lieutenant-General Jerry Mateparae, Chief of the NZ Defence Force, seemed close to tears. The Prime Minister instantly cut short his planned visits to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East in order to be present at the funeral.

What does this tell us about New Zealand’s soldiers and citizens in the 21st Century? What does it say about our resilience? Our willingness to sacrifice? Our capacity to endure loss?

If this past week’s outpouring of grief at the accidental deaths of three servicemen is indicative of New Zealanders’ collective grasp of the brutal realities of military service, then we’re all in very big trouble.

Every nation, for its own safety and security, must regularly and ruthlessly send a percentage of its young men and women into harm’s way: harm from which not all of them will emerge unscathed; harm which an unavoidable and irreducible number will not survive at all.

A defence force that cannot take casualties simply isn’t worthy of the name. And a nation which is no longer able to stoically endure its losses has laid itself open to every kind of enemy assault.

This is not a popular line of argument in 2010. In an age of rampant individualism, the virtues of stoicism and sacrifice are scorned. The idea of "laying down one’s life for one’s friends" only makes sense on Facebook.

But just pause for a moment, and try to imagine the New Zealand which, in the days, weeks and months that followed the landing at ANZAC Cove, was flooded by a never-ending stream of fatal telegrams.

Imagine a nation of just over a million citizens, asked to absorb the loss not of three – but of three thousand – of its children. Imagine the families which, day after day, were torn asunder: the sons, brothers, husbands and sweethearts for whom there could be no funerals, no front pages. Imagine the enormous – the almost superhuman – effort required to hold up one’s head; to dry one’s eyes; to place one foot stubbornly in front of the other. To carry on.

Imagine a grief so vast, so unrelenting, that it escaped altogether the power of ordinary speech. Imagine its dreadful weight as each year’s ANZAC Day services drew near.

We look at the great memorials to the fallen, and we sense in the cold marble, in the endless lists of names, something awful. There’s a terrible void where life and talent should’ve flourished; the abiding absence of a whole generation which, with a stoical endurance that simply outdistances contemporary imagination, traded their present for our future.

Perhaps it’s this, the sense of being part of their country’s unending story, that makes even remotely bearable the sacrifices of military families.

And yet, as those three young airmen are borne to their final resting-place, I ask myself:

Could 21st Century New Zealand survive another Gallipoli?

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 30 April 2010.