Glen Innes Vietnam Veteran's Day service: Lessons learnt by those who have fought | Comment

On 18 August 1966, the battle of Long Tan erupted, and the 1st Australian Task Force found themselves in the thick of the fighting. The battle's anniversary was marked each year as 'Long Tan Day' until 1987 when Bob Hawke announced that the day would become known as 'Vietnam Veterans Day'.

Like the war, the day set aside to remember Vietnam is far less prominent than those associated with the World Wars. Yet, this is not to say that Vietnam was any less significant to those who fought.

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Today, as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, our world lives through yet another major international conflict.

Indeed, throughout human history, tension and war seems to be the sad norm, and peace the exception. In such a time, it is worth reminding ourselves of the lessons learnt by those who have fought.

One person, who thought deeply and wrote eloquently of his service, was Oxford scholar and author of such Classics as "The Chronicles of Narnia" is C. S Lewis. As a young man, Lewis had served in WWI. Still eligible for conscription as WWII broke out, Lewis offered the following reflection in a lecture, later published as "The Weight of Glory."

"My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service, to be plain, includes the threat of every temporal evil; pain and death, which is what we fear from sickness; isolation from those we love, which is what we fear from exile; toil under arbitrary masters, which is what we fear from slavery: hunger, thirst, and exposure which is what we fear from poverty. I'm not a pacifist. If it's got to be it's got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish, and I think death would be much better than to live through another war."

From these words, we can see that Lewis believed that some evils are destructive enough that they must be resisted, even to the point of armed conflict. Elsewhere, Lewis made clear that he saw Hitler's Nazi regime as such an evil.

Lewis also paints the most vivid of pictures of just how personally destructive war had been for him, both in that moment and for the remainder of his life. Perhaps this is why Lewis's reflections on war move to a warning against believing that either warring against evil or striving to avoid war at all costs are the ultimate solutions to the ills of this world.

"If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul, we are disillusioned. But if we thought ... the life of learning was in its own small way one of the appointed approaches to the divine reality and the divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still."

Having served, Lewis knew that human efforts could not create the utopia for which we so long and for which we are created. He knew that the noblest efforts of soldiers in even the most necessary conflicts could not secure it. He knew that the skilled diplomacy that might avert outright conflict did not deliver perfect and permanent peace.

Indeed, as a committed Anglican Christian, Lewis would have regularly been reminded to look to God as the only one who could truly defeat evil and deliver peace, when each day he would pray along with the old Prayer Book, "Give peace in our time, O Lord: Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God." In this world of tension, strife and war, we do well to make this prayer our own.