The speaker was a military doctor whose first deployment was to Rwanda as part of Australia's contribution to the UN peacekeeping operation, and then to what was then East Timor also as a peacekeeper, then to Afghanistan. She had had some unimaginable experiences and she gave us the smallest of glimpses into them. Even those glimpses were very difficult to witness. In Rwanda she had led a company of medics and their support people who found themselves in a displaced persons' camp where five thousand people were murdered while they watched, unable to intervene by the terms of the UN agreement and unable to fight the killers without bringing about their own deaths and therefore ending their ability to be of any use at all, all the while working to try to save as many lives as they could. She also spoke about deeply distressing episodes in her working life on the later deployments.
What she wanted to tell us was that she believed compassion was the most important capability for the work she and her colleagues did and that the giving of care to others is within everyone's reach, and this compassion can be exercised without regard to whether the resources one has available are enough to meet the need or whether one's actions will be enough to stop the suffering. In the instances she described there was no possibility of 'doing enough', and she said, frankly and with great emotion, that she had lived for twenty years with the pain and sadness of knowing that she hadn't done enough.
Listening to her speak, observing the powerful emotions affecting her voice and body, and being deeply affected myself both by the stories she told and the way she felt in telling them, I felt again and very intensely the bottomless respect and admiration I have often felt for returned soldiers when listening to them talk about their lives. Now today's speaker was by any measure obviously an exceptional human being and you could not really say the same of some of the veterans I've gotten to know over the past couple of years. But the talking about trauma that I have seen these people do, in every instance I can think of, has been framed by the speaker's concern for the welfare of the listener. They will say, should I tell you about what happened that day? or, I'm going to say something that might upset you, or, excuse my language, there's no pretty way to say this. It's a small thing sometimes and easily missed, but I'm certain it's always present.
You know, I would never have imagined in a million years that I would see anything to respect or appreciate in soldiery and the experiences of combatants or what they do to go on living when those experiences are over. And yet Persuasion has been such an important book in my life - the most important, I think - and it's all in there, all of it. I just didn't think it would have any application outside of that remote era. For some reason I don't myself understand I am reading yet another of Peter Stanley's books - I really won't read another one now until I've read some other military histories to leaven the unadulterated Peterstanleyism that now colours my thinking about Australian wartime experience - and this book, Quinn's Post, is grieving and revolting me and making me wonder all over again why we have this national obsession with the charnel pit of Gallipoli. War is the most hideous, awful thing there is and it always seemed obvious to me that it is a wicked crime against that fact to look for 'the good' in the middle of all the horror or to allow that anything of value can ever come of it. And I have had to revise that opinion, and I am revising it still.
2 comments:
My mother worked in the operating theatre, as a cleaner in preparing to do go into nurse training. She often saw "Weary" Dunlop and spoke to him, she said there was a look in his eyes that changed constantly. People couldn't understand why he didn't hate the Japanese after what he'd seen them do but the more she saw him work, the more she understood he'd taken himself to a level of compassion that stayed forever. From the age of 16 she was watching men die slowly from tuberculosis, no blood or bullets but it was still death and she hated that disease which is why she tried to understand "Weary"'s compassion.
I'm putting this badly but at 16 I was out dancing and having fun while she would be walking into a ward where she'd laughed with some young man the day before and there was his bed made up but empty ready for the next one. She has a small photograph of a group of men sitting on the hospital steps and my father is in the middle, she watched all of them die except my father.
Thank you JahTeh for a really beautiful comment. I did think of Weary while listening to this other person speak. It's more than them both being doctors, it's how they both drew on compassion and also on that really dispassionate almost cold thing doctors can do when they work on a person's body, and used these two drives to do things that defy imagining.
Kids like you were at sixteen are the very people for whom it's my job to bring this stuff to life. I don't know how far it is possible really. Dancing and having fun is extremely important too.
Post a Comment