Meditations on war

By David Delaney

When I was prime soldiering age – late teens, early 20s – I never gave a moment’s thought to being a soldier. Nothing attracted me to the idea of being at war. It never even occurred to me. I had plans, ambitions, things to do. War, to me, was an alien concept. A crime against humanity.

Both my grandfathers died before I was born. Both fought in wars.

Finding out about their lives, I became obsessed with trying to understand what made them go to war. A sense of duty, defending your country and the things you hold dear, I understand those things, but they don’t fully explain to me why my grandfathers were so keen on war. Which, according to my mother, her father most certainly was. I know less about my father’s father, but I believe he was similar …

O brother where art thou?

By The Ginger

Those of you who read my previous post on this matter may have picked up on a line about my brother’s death earlier this year.

He was 19 years old and killed in a car crash in January, and since then my family and I have spent a lot of time wondering how exactly you adapt to something so fundamentally life-changing.

My own tactic has been to downplay it, joke about it, act tough, because a lot of the time I don’t feel anything – there’s a sense of loss, sure, but it’s distant enough that I can examine it fairly dispassionately (either that or I’m just kidding myself and I’ll be in therapy with rope burns around my neck in 10 years time) …

Funerals suck

By The Ginger

They can be emotional, solemn and, when the fans inside the church are broken, inconveniently hot. Some people find them comforting and uplifting. However, I can’t think of a single person who would rather attend a funeral than not have to.

Sadly, they’re also one of few certainties in this world (the old idiom included taxes as well, but Paul Hogan has pretty much up-ended that one), and for men, they present a boiling stew of unfamiliar emotion.

Unfamiliar, not because we haven’t felt it before, but because a lot of us shy away from it like Jarryd Hayne dodging a tackle, and so we never have to face up to what we feel. Funerals do not give you that option …