captain_spalding said:

When i was very much younger, i visited the Bomana War Cemetery near Port Moresby.

Of course, as i’d grown up, i’d heard all about WW2, and the fighting in New Guinea, Kokoda, all that.

It was while walking between the rows of graves that something hit me hard. A lot of the blokes buried there were my age (as i was then), or even younger.

We were really just ‘older kids’, me and them both. Honestly, i doubt i had the adult skills necessary to organise a chook raffle (and i knew it), and possibly a lot of those bos were the same.

Yet, they’d been packed off to a hot, humid, undeveloped, naturally very hostile place, and told to defend it against an absolute horde of people who wanted only to kill them, and to defend it by killing those people.

And, those poor buggers had been killed. They’d died brutally violent, horrible and painful deaths, in a place they never wanted to be in, far away from all the people they loved and were loved by.

In front of me, buried in that foreign place, was where they ended up.

People would say that they ‘gave their lives’. They did. But, it was there that i understood that it wasn’t the lives they had that they gave . It was the lives they’d never have. They’d never see home again, or those people they loved. They’d never have careers, or hobbies, or sports. They’d never go to the beach again, or go camping, or fishing. They’d never enjoy their twenties or thirties. They’d never fall in love, maybe marry, have children, grandchildren, watch their families grow and prosper. They’d never have a future. That was their real sacrifice.

I’d like to take Donald Trump Jr. to Bomana, and rub his nose in the dirt there.

I never saw that cemetery when I was based in Moresby but I got a small sense of it when I was doing evacuation flights out of Tokua, about 15 km from the erupting volcano at Rabaul. I knew there were extensive caves the Japanese had dug or extended on the other side of that mountain. The eruption had pumped out enough ash & rock that the entrance was completely covered up, and all the bodies & gear still in there would be there forever. They’d never been known or remembered from then on.