Justin Langer: Demonising of Ben Roberts-Smith insults Australian veterans, tarnishes national discourse

The rocks from ANZAC Cove are still sitting on my desk. They have been there for six years now. Beside them, a spent bullet casing I picked up from the heavily vegetated hills of ANZAC Cove. Singularly, they are nothing remarkable, small, weathered, silent objects. But every time I look at them, I think about how close any of us are to wearing a uniform and being asked to do what young Australians have been asked to do in far-away places for more than a century. The only difference is the timing of when and where we were born. That humbling perspective has come into sharp focus twice in my life. The first was on the Western Front, walking the fields of France and Belgium with the Australian cricket team. Never have I felt so mortified by the experiences of young men who lost their lives in the freezing cold mud of the battlefields. The second, 18 months later, was at Gallipoli, where a pre-dawn boat ride across the Dardanelles stunned me as we stared at the cliffs where the young Anzacs had been told to storm all those years before. Climbing those hills. Touching the dirt at The Nek. Standing at Lone Pine with a hip flask of whisky, with mates of roughly the same age as the men who had jumped from those misdirected boats on April 25, 1915, was distracting. On both occasions, there was no gun fire, smoke, fear, loss, or grief to deal with and yet, it was within these two experiences that my patriotism stopped being an abstract concept. At ANZAC Cove one evening I did something I had never done before. I bought a bag of tobacco and a packet of papers from a local shop, sat on the sand, rolled a cigarette and watched the sun go down. I am not a smoker. But at that moment, sitting where young Australians had sat more than a hundred years earlier, writing letters home, trying to find a quiet moment before another dawn, it felt like the right thing to do. A small, personal tribute, I guess. What still sits with me from both trips is how much respect came from the other side. In Belgian villages, Australian flags hang in classrooms and pubs. The cemeteries are tended as though every headstone belonged to a local family. At the Menin Gate in Ypres, every night at 8pm, since 1928, apart from the years of German occupation, a simple ceremony honours nearly 90,000 Commonwealth soldiers who have no known grave. The night we were there I was moved not only by the cruelty of war but also by the respect for those who fight in them. In Turkey, there is Atatürk’s line, carved in stone at ANZAC Cove, telling the mothers of Johnnies and Mehmets alike to wipe away their tears because their sons now rest side by side. That the founder of modern Turkey wrote those words about men sent to kill his own soldiers remains one of the most powerful acts of grace I have ever encountered. It is also, quietly, a standard, a standard for how a country may carry itself around the business of war and memory. I have been thinking about all of that a great deal in the last fortnight, as I have watched the Ben Roberts-Smith saga return to the front page. As has been so well publicised, even here in India, the April 7 arrest of Roberts-Smith and charges of five counts of war crimes was like a scene from a movie. A very poor scene at that. As we know, this is not the first chapter in this story. Three years ago, our Victoria Cross hero lost a defamation case against Nine Newspapers, with a judge finding on the civil standard, ‘the balance of probabilities’, that allegations of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians were substantially true. A criminal court, applying the much higher standard of beyond reasonable doubt, will now decide what comes next. What I have found difficult to watch is the speed with which our country has retreated to its own trenches. On one side, he receives a wave of support from those who believe BRS is a martyr being persecuted by the woke establishment. These supporters — who haven’t forgotten what Australian soldiers do for their country — see him as a hero. On the other, there are commentators treating the arrest as a long-overdue reckoning. Somewhere between those two positions sits the harder work of a reasonable person, who is trying to make sense of it all. Over the last week I have been sent Sam Bamford’s ‘2 Worlds Collide’ podcast with Special Forces Operator Scott Jones. These were directed to me from three different friends who thought I would be interested. The clarity of these two, young Australian veterans was interesting and raw. The first thing I learned was that Afghanistan was not a conventional war. It was a counterinsurgency in a country where the enemy did not wear a uniform, where explosives were strapped to children, where partnered Afghan soldiers sometimes turned their weapons on Australians they had patrolled beside that same morning. Special Forces operators worked under rules of engagement written by senior officers and sanctioned by elected politicians. Those rules, on certain approved missions, permitted the targeting of pre-approved individuals regardless of whether they were armed at the moment of contact. That is not an excuse for anything, but rather, it is the context. Without context, any moral calculation we try to make is incomplete. While context is not the same as absolution, it is always important to understand. Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied armies that liberated Europe and later served two terms as US President, put it as well as anyone ever has. In his Chance for Peace speech of 1953, he said: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” Context. It is worth keeping that line close at hand when we talk about men like Roberts-Smith, because honouring the soldier and being honest about the war are not opposites. The people who have actually fought in a war are almost always the least romantic about what war is really like. What I keep coming back to is how narrow the current conversation has become. Almost every question is being asked about a small number of men at the very sharpest end of the spear. Very few are being asked about the chain above them. Who set the targeting parameters? Who approved the missions? Who drafted the rules of engagement? Who knew and who did not want to know? When an AFL side underperforms, we sack the coach. When a corporate culture fails, we ask about leadership. Yet when the subject is military conduct, we appear willing, to treat the soldiers, who face unspeakable pressure, as lone actors. That is not accountability. That is scapegoating dressed as accountability. Walking in someone’s shoes is the phrase people reach for at moments like this, but it is easy to mishandle. It does not mean defending everything a person does. It means doing the work to understand the terrain they crossed before we judge the turns they took. The young men whose graves I walked past in France, and whose names are carved into the Menin Gate, did not go to war for their country so that we could become a society that decides guilt or innocence by which side of politics happens to suit us that week. They went so that we could be a country in which the rule of law is applied evenly, to heroes and to villains, with patience and with dignity. What we owe them, and every soldier who has followed them, is not sentimental hero-worship, and it is not cheap judgment, but rather the patience and understanding to see the whole picture at once. The rocks from ANZAC Cove that are still on my desk are a constant reminder. Lest we forget, certainly. But also, lest we rush to judge. Our veterans deserve better.