The late Peter Smark was one of Australia’s most admired and respected journalists. He still is. Webdiarist Judi Folster of Duffy in Canberra reread a Peter Smark piece in the Sydney Morning Herald after John Howard announced we were at war with Iraq:

I have before me a cutting from page 1 of the SMH dated 7/12/90 written by the late Peter Smark entitled ‘Death and Vomit: let’s not get sentimental about war’.

I have kept this piece of paper because to me it is the most exquisite piece of antiwar writing I have ever read -I also cut out the letters to the editor two days later – they summed up my feelings about that war so well and today as I listened to John Howard in Parliament Peter Smark’s words rang in my ears- and I quote:

“I hear the iron of certainty and resolve enter a politician’s voice and I know the young will die”, and, “You can hear the fools again now talk of a ‘quick, clean war’ in the Persian Gulf, or of a ‘swift surgical strike’. God preserve the young from the follies of middle-aged males. “

Death and vomit: the real meaning of war

by Peter Smark

We came to the hamlet near My Tho through fields green as limes. On the banks of the paddy-fields, palm trees nodded amiably. Under a fierce, noonday sun, three little girls chirped like crickets and giggled behind their hands at the heavy, awkward foreigners blundering into their world.

Tossed like garbage on the clay were the bodies. I remember the number and will never forget, 82. The battle had been the previous day and the flies were already at work. I expected the blood, the grey horror of exposed entrails, the stench. But I hadn’t prepared myself for the flies. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about the flies. Or the rats.

And so, at the age of 24, I discovered what war means. I was lucky it was so late, I suppose. My father’s generation and my grandfather’s had learned the chilling truth in their teens. And they had to carry guns.

As I sweated and vomited that day in 1961, a maelstrom of unconnected thoughts churned through my mind and I can remember them now. I recalled the play-acting of infantry training at Puckapunyal and how the instructors had had to cook the books to make them show I could shoot straight.

In fact, I made the Korea-hardened trainers despair. But, years later, as I watched a cocky little jackanapes of a Vietnamese captain prance through his victory display and a wooden-faced American adviser jerk his strings, I thanked my God he had never sent me for a real soldier and I thank Him again now.

But fate has locked much war into my life and there are dog days when the tide of memories floods. They come when, somewhere, I hear the iron of certainty and resolve enter a politician’s voice and I know the young will die. I remember the flies and the rats. I heard that certainty and resolve in the voices of Bob Hawke and George Bush this week.

History will judge if they are right to feel so certain and so resolute, to be so dismissive of the long haul of blockade and sanctions. I don’t here argue for or against. I merely record some memories to remind myself and others what it is we do when we send young men off to war.

I remember the Plaine des Jarres in Laos and my friend the young Meo lieutenant lying without a leg and about to die from the mortar shell which tore his jeep apart. The morphine was in and his eyes were open and I swear he smiled a farewell to the reporters who had shared a bottle of whisky with him on the last night of his life.

And I remember Homer Bigart of The New York Times, friend and mentor, cynic and wit, gripping my arm until the bruises swelled blue, and chanting “Christ, Christ, Christ” as a machine-gun tore away a supporting section on one of our pleasant days in the Vietnamese countryside.

Homer, who shredded US ambassadors for practice and regarded four-star generals as breakfast, was angry and weeping not from fear for himself but because of the waste and futility of it all.

There are times for tears. Times like the night when General Sir Thomas Daly paced the streets of suburban Manuka in Canberra and cared not a jot that the prudent burghers and bureaucrats could see and hear the Chief of Staff of the Australian army weeping openly. An explosives blunder by friendly forces had killed or maimed most of a truckload of Australian troops in Vietnam, and Tom grieved for them as a father should.

War is much about mishaps and mistakes as generations of Australians from past conflicts can attest. You can hear the fools again now talk of a “quick, clean war” in the Persian Gulf, or of a “swift, surgical strike.” God preserve the young from the follies of middle-aged males.

Follies and malice, feuds and hatreds. I remember Belfast in 1968 when the B Specials swept through the Catholic areas and shot down people in an orgy of officially condoned mayhem.

That was a night for weeping, for to this day the people, all people, are paying the price for this as for so much else. They’ll talk up a storm for you, the middle-aged males, about the just cause and they’ll let the young die to fuel their self-righteousness.

I remember the siege of Seria in Borneo in the early 60s during the Brunei Rebellion. And how a British nurse, one of the hostages held by rebels in a Shell Oil installation, was sent out by her armed captors to carry a message to the encircling British forces, then turned and went back into captivity, not knowing if it was to her death.

I remember we looked at one another, we vultures and reptiles of the press, and didn’t have words enough because we knew we were watching courage and character greater than we could ever summon.

The Queen’s Own Highlanders, tough Scots all, were in awe of her and when they stormed the refinery and freed her, they cheered her like the Queen. Sometimes, war can summon up nobility.

But the memories which press out most urgently are ghastly. Of the tray of a truck in Zimbabwe piled high with dead while soldiers played cards in the shade below. Or the results of a landmine in Ovamboland, a street riot in Singapore, blood and waste, always waste.

And always the politicians and the functionaries, the sanctimoniousness, the fraud. Do you remember how those around Margaret Thatcher hid away the maimed from the Falklands so the victory parade in London would not be marred by the reality of what had happened down in the South Atlantic?

All but a handful of the press were kept from that, of course. And from the US high jinks in Grenada. Vietnam has taught our masters much in information management; whether it has taught them much about the horrors of war remains to be seen.

Australian reporters who have seen much of war are sprinkled still through the media: Peter Cole-Adams, Bruce Wilson, Peter George, Ben Hills, Alan Ramsey, a dozen more. In every one of them, the sound of Bob Hawke’s words will have set the memories stirring this week. Not just what he said, but how he said it.

The ships are moving closer in, we are told, because the UN wants that. Our cause is said to be just, no less than the stamping out of a risk to the stability of the world economy, the international backing for it unprecedented.

Perhaps it is so. But we should be in no doubt about the danger to those who now fly our flag. It was when the Falklands War was over that we learned fully how ghastly a weapon is the Exocet missile, learned how ships had become infernos. Our ships will be serving in the area where two Iraqi Exocets hit a US warship late in the Iran-Iraq war; that ship barely stayed afloat.

Perhaps caution will stir in Saddam Hussein and we will be saved the horror and our young men the terror of war. If it does not, and an Iraq toughened by a decade of fighting decides to resist, the possibility of crippling damage to oilfields could produce the very destabilisation of the world economy which the present undertaking is supposed to prevent.

But for now the cry is “Havoc” and the dogs of war are straining at their leashes. Younger reporters than I will cover this war, and I pray God will keep them and those they accompany safe and bring them home whole. And I pray, too, that their memories will not be of carnage wrought because middle-aged males could not contain their impatience.

If that marks me as “soft” or “wet”, let it be so for I’ve seen enough of hard men and the marks they leave behind.