The Reunion... Two Perspectives - Three Dimensions

Two Perspectives - Three Dimensions
For most of my life I’ve not been fond of the idea of reunions. It may sound strange that a person who became a teacher hated school, but that’s me – strange, as usual. Apart for my final year of school, which was in a special school in Sydney, far, far away from where I grew up, not only geographically, but in every other way as well, school is not a memory I cherish. I did go to one reunion at the boarding school I attended for five years. My flesh crept the whole time I was there. The social hierarchies were still in tact. Few seemed to have learned anything from their adult lives, and when one of my brothers, a bloke who’d spent his entire time in that school at the pinnacle of the hierarchy that mattered most – sport – made a critical remark about his experience, no one wanted to know, and the Brother who was present reverted to type and actually spoke to my brother as though he was being a naughty boy. In spite of my aversion to reunions, however, when one of the blokes from my Novitiate year – let’s call him Andrew – emailed me about a reunion of our group, I was actually very excited by the prospect.

I’d been primed for the positive reaction by something Andrew had done a little while before that. He phoned me one day, out of the blue, it seemed, to invite me to his parents’ house, a little way up the coast. Another bloke from the same group – let’s call him Tom – had given Andrew my phone number. I’d run into Tom in a school where I was assessing the work skills of one of the teachers’ aides. We’d spent several lunch breaks fondly remembering our days in the Juniorate and the Novitiate, and discussing what had happened in our lives since then. I thought no more about it after I finished the work I was doing at Tom’s school – until Andrew phoned me. I was jolted by the fact that one bloke I’d run into, more or less at random, had told another about me, and that he in turn got in touch with me to reconnect after all these years. I didn’t actually ask myself, but implicit in how I felt was the question, Why would they bother? I visited Andrew and was amazed at the path his life had taken. He’d gone from being a boy from Chullora to a senior position in the University of PNG. And from being, as we all were back then, a bright eyed idealist, to a bloke of practical compassion, quietly persisting with a sense of mission, in world in which ideals have become a joke. This made me rethink my conversations with Tom and his wife, and to realise that not everyone I’d gone to school with had been tooled by ‘the system’ to function as cogs in the machinery of capitalism. As I began to think of others from the same group and wonder what had become of them, along came this email, in early 2006, inviting me to find out. There was to be a reunion in October, which would have been forty years, almost to the day, after I left the Novitiate.

The reunion didn’t actually happen until January 2009, and when it did, far from it being a reminder of social hierarchies of the past, it was an experience of community. Yes, there were stories about the astounding heights in their professions to which many – most, actually – had attained. But never told as an exercise of one-up-man-ship; told, indeed, with such matter of fact humility and humour that I felt very confident about telling the group how little I had achieved in my life; that they were more interested in the fact that I was there with them than what I had done, or failed to do. We had all been monks. A few still were, but the experience had cast all of us in a mould that withstood the individualist imperative of the life to which most of us returned. No one was there to impress. All held one another in genuine esteem. It was an experience of salvation if I can put it that way. You know, the kind of experience about which one might say, If nothing good ever happens in the rest of my life, it will have been worth it to have had this experience.

Well, as it happens, I had not just one such experience on that journey but two. Because I share the life of not just one band of brothers but two. After being a monk, I was a soldier for two years, went on active service and endured the perplexing aftermath of our country’s catastrophic involvement in Vietnam.

For most of the thirty years that followed my return home I treated my experience in the army as a piece of furniture that can’t be got rid of, but must never be looked at or used. I had a couple of goes at doing the “veteran thing”. I went to Anzac Day in 1971, and then the Welcome Home parade in 1987, but found the whole thing very distasteful. Then in the year 2000 I received a phone call from a bloke – let’s call him John – whom I had not known in Vietnam, but had met briefly when we both returned to our jobs in the Commonwealth Bank and went on courses designed to ‘reintegrate’ us into Civi Street. Of the thirty or so ex-servicemen with whom I attended three such courses, he was the only one whose name and voice I would have remembered had he called me – which he did, thirty years later. He explained that he had seen me in Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, some months earlier, but as he was in a car in heavy traffic he could not call out, and that even if he could have, he was not sure that I would remember who he was. He spent the next several months tracking me down. I can’t begin to retell the lengths to which he went. I got dizzy just hearing about it. Eventually, he made contact with one of my brothers who gave him my phone number. From that phone call emerged one of the most significant relationships of my life.

John, the veteran – that he shares my partner’s name is a little inconvenient, but I’m sure we’ll all get by and not confuse them – has an even more fraught relationship with his Vietnam experience than I. I can watch movies about it and do all manner of things that involve exposure to violence, real or contrived, without felt ill effect – such as visiting the Eureka Museum in Ballarat, where there is a very large reconstruction of a battle scene. But he has to guard his eyes to a degree that I would find utterly frustrating. Yet he, and his wife, are involved with helping other people in need to a degree that I find truly humbling. It was, in fact, to offer me assistance that he thought I might need that motivated his relentless search for my phone number. When he found out that, in my mind, at least, I was OK, he stayed in touch with me, sharing insights and concerns, and listening to my ponderings and pontificating with a genuine interest that I have not encountered in any other person – ever. Though he himself could not re-engage with his Vietnam experience, he helped me to do so, and to become proud of the fact that I am a veteran. Though he cannot abide the thought of attending RSL meetings, he encouraged me to find my way into understanding and appreciating on its own terms, what I had previously regarded as a self-serving and reactionary social institution. And though he is not a member of the Vietnam Veteran’s Association, he had a long involvement as a volunteer with the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service. It was his willingness to face other people’s demons that motivated me to become involved with other Vietnam veterans, and to join the association, where I found a level of fraternal – dare I say it – love, that is as life affirming as it is unexpected; especially in the light of the notorious tendency of Vietnam veterans, in particular, to fragment into warring factions. What I experience at VV meetings and functions is not community. It is something else just as powerful. We are not hail-fellows-well-met, but – Oh God, how I hate the way John Howard abused this word – mates. There is no status based on how close one came or didn’t come to having one’s head blown off. No one treats me as a second class veteran just because the only shot I fired was an accident for which I was charged and sent out of the operational area for the remainder of my tour. We were all mauled by the public, including the RSL, for a decade and a half after Australia withdrew form the war. That’s the bond that defines us, whether we are in an association or not. And the measure of that collective identity is the role the association is playing in the lives of people returning from current conflicts and peacekeeping operations, regardless of whether they join the association or not. We’ve changed our name from the VVAA to the Vietnam Veterans, Peacekeepers and Peacemakers Association of Australia.

John, the veteran, is pivotal to the resuscitation of my identity as a veteran. Nine years after that process began, I had the opportunity to spend quality time with him and his wife. John, my partner, was to be in an exhibition in Sydney that started a few days after the reunion, and his work had to be in there a week and a half before the exhibition. So I delivered the work and drove to Ballarat for a few days before the reunion, to stay with John the veteran and Pam, his wife. While I was there I saw at first hand the involvement of both of them with an extraordinary network of people. I met one bloke who John was helping apply for a disability pension – not a veteran but a civi. I did not meet the people they discussed, but it was clear that they were involved with people who were active in alternative lifestyle, not as an indulgence but as an effort to live at peace with the environment and their neighbours. I met people for whom John was the internet/computer trouble-shooter, and others who’d invited him to share their Lodge. Among all of the people I met there was a sense of community – no hierarchy; no status; no conspicuous individualism. Were I to put a name to their (informal) community it would be the Society of Friends. Not that they are Quakers – as far as I know – but that they live as though they are.

I heard recently that the bloke that John the Veteran was helping with his pension issues succeeded in his application. I heard also that a developer who will probably win in the long run was thwarted by a small group of people with whom John works for the preservation of a local park. The caring community will last a little longer – until those elected to represent the interests of people living in local communities betray them by over riding the court which ruled in the community’s favour. John goes to Melbourne every week to hand out pamphlets to people who make themselves feel better by abusing those who care about the integrity of the city and the surrounding countryside. John the Vietnam Veteran may spooked by his role in a stupid dirty little war. But he’s right there in the front line of those who are campaigning for the outbreak of peace on earth.

How lucky am I to have a foot in each of two communities? And to have returned to my roots in both communities at the same time! It is said that having two eyes enables us to see in 3D. Can you imagine the world that I see through two such lenses? I have seen the future, and it is … well, if I tell you, you know what I’ll have to do next…

Yes, that’s right – restrain you. But then again … you mightn’t believe me.