>He was handsome and sophisticated, that older brother of mine.
He was 20 but wore his slouch hat with the ease of a veteran. He was home briefly in Melbourne's north before heading off to jungle training in Queensland. The familiar jeans had been traded for khakis, and he crossed his legs and leaned casually against the Ford Falcon posing for what are now grainy and washed-out colour photos. He reached for his cigarettes with the air of someone who understood the world and his place in it.
It was a lottery. Numbers in a barrel that sent young men-boys to fight a foreign war. Foreign place, language, culture. Did he know why? Twenty years old and off to fight a war in a tropical jungle. From Pascoe Vale to Vung Tau. From war service weatherboard home to army tent. From home to battalion. What did he think?
My parents — his parents — knew about wars, but I didn't and my siblings didn't and now my children and their children don't.
I was 13 when he went to Vietnam. There was a kind of perverse status to be derived from having a brother called up for national service, and for him to head north of the equator was a further plus. That set this family apart from all those who had older brothers who were not called up and who continued to be plumbers and bank tellers and university students.
We drew a tacit distinction between those who battled, and those who serviced the battle. My brother was an army storeman and that put him in the latter category, and in our minds that absolved both him and us of guilt by association and enabled us to make light of his term of duty.
What did he see? What did he know? What did he understand? What did he rationalise? What did he manage to forget over his subsequent 34 years?
We'll never know because he never said.
He never said, but I knew that sending a 20-year-old to war was not good for him, or me, or his country. When I participated in a Moratorium March in Melbourne it remained my secret rather than betray our young boy-man and all the others. I knew that my brother's life and the lives of all the other brothers were worth more than forced service in a war they didn't want or understand.
My brother came back. He worked, he