The Home Front

The Never-Ending War within our Veterans

By Patrick Lindsay

Published by Affirm Press
RRP $34.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781922806444

The statistics are sobering: forty-one Australian soldiers died in action over twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan. In that time more than 1400 veterans took their own lives.

Veterans today are chronically over-represented when it comes to PTSD, depression, homelessness and suicide.

In this book, author Patrick Lindsay, who already has an impressive list of military history titles to his credit, looks at the wide-ranging damage caused by training Australians to be fighting machines and then inadequately supporting them as they re-enter their communities.

He also looks at the issue of corruption on an industrial scale in Afghanistan, in both the government and in its military and ponders the serious flow-on effects to those in the coalition who fought on its behalf during the war, only to see both collapse at lightning speed with the withdrawal of coalition forces.

The inevitable question would surely arise: what was it all for?

Reading through this book, I think a better title might have been ‘Damaged’, because that’s how warfighters emerge from conflict – physically, mentally and spiritually damaged. Yet many used waivers to override the recommended 12 months of ‘dwell time’ between deployments to return to the conflict.

The Home Front is in equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Will there ever be a way to successfully manage the trauma for those who engage in war at the behest of governments far removed from the grim reality of it?

Probably not, but there is vast room for improvement. Changing the culture of an unsympathetic bureaucracy might help. Lindsay has laid it all out here.

VERDICT: Insightful and disturbing.