ANZAC Day 2015 was a wonderful memorial to the courage and idealism of thousands of young people who offered, and too often gave, their lives for us over the last hundred years.
On Tuesday I spoke briefly to our students about my memories of ANZAC Day when I was growing up in the 1960s. At that stage of our history I (and all other 18 year old kiwi boys) was subject to a ballot for conscription.
Viet Nam was the world's first televised war and was a very politically sensitive subject. There were still a lot of veterans from World War 1 and 2 - and they were naturally angry that the loss of their mates was political fodder. So ANZAC Day became a divisive day, and for quarter of a century too many people forgot that the day is not about politics: it is about sacrifice and love.
It may have been my lack of maturity - or maybe our immaturity as a nation - but there seems to have been a lot of glorification of the wars. We were still demonising our former enemies - we were still glorifying effective killing.
At the end of last week there was none of that - it was about the tragedy of war. We were choked by individual stories, stories of sacrifice, mateship, courage, and the values our young men and women died to protect. All of us were moved by stories of young Turkish men, our former enemies, with their own individual stories, stories of sacrifice, mateship, courage, and the values so similar to ours.
The message was the message we have always heard from the veterans themselves: we must never, ever, forget. We must never, ever do that again!
ANZAC Day has become again a day to pray for each of the people who went to war back then and now, to give thanks for their sacrifice, and to pluck up the courage and determination to do all we can to work for peace in the future.
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