I've Never Served.

And I think about it every year.

Photo by Bart Ros on Unsplash

Every Anzac Day, someone I’m drinking with asks me.

Usually it’s at the two-up ring, because that’s when the small talk turns into the actual conversation. The march is done, the coffee’s gone cold, the coins are tumbling in the air. And someone, catching me being a bit more earnest than usual about the whole thing, will ask — “So, is it your grandfather? Uncle? Did they fight in the Pacific? North Africa?”

No.

My family’s service record is a different kind. My lot was on the receiving end. Great-grandparents fighting off Ottoman oppression in the hills. Grandparents watching German soldiers roll into their village and burn it down. The war my people fought wasn’t one they signed up for at a recruiting office. It was one that walked into their street.

We came here in the late eighties. I was four the first time, six when we stayed. Whatever claim I have on Anzac Day, it isn’t bloodline.

And yet — I show up.

I go to the dawn service. I watch the march end-to-end. I stand quietly while the old blokes with zimmer frames shuffle past and the younger ones behind them. I play two-up. I win a bit, I lose a bit. I drink at the RSL and pubs.
I do it every year, and I will do it every year until I can’t.

People assume I’m doing it for a relative. When I tell them I’m not, they look at me a little confused. Sometimes I can see them trying to figure out why I’m so religious about it.

It’s because I haven’t served.

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This is a thing I actually struggle with, and I don’t want to pretend I’ve got it figured out.

I know I won’t ever serve. I’m in my forties, I run a business, I have responsibilities that aren’t compatible with enlistment. That train has left. In truth, even when I was younger and it was still possible, I never seriously considered it. Not because I thought it was beneath me, or because I was anti-military. I just didn’t. I travelled and did career pivots and the kind of extended self-curation that everyone in my cohort was trying out, and the younger generation have turned into a self-help art form.

And there’s a small, quiet thing that has sat with me for a long time, which is that I think I should have. Not in a guilty, self-flagellating way. In a civic way. The way you think about voting, or jury duty, or any of the other minor contributions you make to a society you happen to live in. I think if you are able — able-bodied, without major commitments, in the narrow window where it’s possible — you should at least seriously consider it. Not because service is glorious. Not because it’ll make you a better person. But because it’s the cleanest possible signal that you are willing to pay forward what others paid for you.

I know this is a deeply unfashionable thing to say.

We live in a time where service has been recast as merely one of many valid personal choices, alongside gap years, travel, study, start-ups, and the general eat-pray-love journey of modern adult becoming. Gap years are valuable. I had my own of sorts. It shaped me, as those things do.

But I do think there’s been a slow drift in which we’ve lost the sense that some things you do because you owe them — not because they’re enriching, not because they’re Instagrammable, not because they’ll look good on a CV. You do them because somebody, some time, did something harder than you’ll ever have to do, so that you could be standing where you are, having the argument about whether to do it at all.

The people who served didn’t do it because it was convenient. They didn’t do it because they were particularly brave, or particularly noble, or particularly anything. Most of them were just people — young, uncertain, often terrified — who decided that a debt was owed, and that someone needed to show up and pay it. Some of them paid it with the rest of their lives.

And every year, on a day in April, we show up and say thank you.

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When I go to the dawn service and I stand there in the cold before the bugle plays, I am not entirely sure whether I’m doing it out of respect, or out of guilt.

Respect is the clean version. Respect is: I honour what you did. I recognise the cost. I pass your memory forward by showing up.

That’s the version I’d like to think is happening.

Guilt is the uglier version. Guilt is: I will never do what you did. I have benefited from what you did. The least I can do is stand here once a year and acknowledge that I’ve taken the freedom and declined to pay the ticket.

That version, too, is probably true.

What I haven’t been able to work out, after years of the same quiet internal debate in the same spot, is whether it matters which one it is.

I used to tell myself it was mostly respect, with a little guilt underneath. I’d like that to be the accounting. But I don’t think I can honestly claim that. Some years it’s more respect. Some years it’s more guilt. And I think that guilt is part of why I go. Not the best part. Not the part I’m proud of. But part.

Is that okay? I genuinely don’t know. Maybe the whole point of Anzac Day, for someone like me, is that the guilt and the respect aren’t separable. Maybe the guilt is a kind of respect — the version that acknowledges you haven’t earned what they earned, and never will.

Or maybe I’m dressing up guilt as respect because that’s more comfortable.

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Whatever’s underneath it — whether it’s the respect I’d like it to be, or the guilt I avoid fully acknowledging — the thing I actually do, every year, is the same. I show up. I stand in the cold. I think about people I’ve never met, whose names I’ll never know, who did the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to do, so that I could have the luxury of not doing it.

I think about them specifically. Not generically. I pick one, usually. A name read out somewhere. A photograph in the paper. A bloke on the march with all the ribbons. I try to imagine what it was actually like. Not the cinematic version. The real version. The boredom, the fear, the shit food, the friendships, the mates who didn’t come back, the mates who did come back and wished they hadn’t. I don’t know how well I do. Probably not very.

But I try.

And then I play two-up, and I lose some money, and I drink a beer, and I tell whoever asked me about my grandfather that no, we didn’t serve. It’s just that somebody has to show up.

Maybe that’s not enough. Maybe showing up is the smallest available contribution, and I should be doing more. Another thing to feel guilty about.

I haven’t worked out what more would mean for someone who is never going to serve, who runs a small advisory firm in Sydney, who immigrated here from a family that was doing its own quiet fighting on a different continent a generation before I was born.

So for now, I show up.

And next year, I’ll show up again.

And I’ll stand there, unsure whether it’s respect or guilt, knowing that the people whose memory I’m there to honour wouldn’t have cared which one it was — as long as someone stood still for a moment, and remembered.

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Lest we forget.

Damian.