ANZAC Day might be just a holiday, perhaps for some its about getting up early for dawn service, then heading home to spend it with their families.
As a child, and particularly, a teenager, I dreaded ANZAC Day. All that day meant to me was my ex-serviceman father leaving early in the morning, and returning home later in the day absolutely smashed off his face, and sleeping it off in the garage. As a child it was weird...as a teenager it was humiliating.
Of course, Dad coming home from the RSA drunk was nothing new, and was simply part of our lives growing up. I constantly worried about what other families and my friends would think of me.
In Dad's later years, as I became more aware, I started to understand the toll war had taken on him. Dad served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps for twenty years, and saw active service in Malaya, Borneo, and, perhaps most significantly, Vietnam.
My self-centred humiliation about my father's behaviour on ANZAC Day, or any other day of the week where alcoholism ruled the roost, changed to contempt for governments who send young men to ill conceived wars to have them return battered and scarred, with wounds we cannot see.
As Dad grew older, I came to accept he was unwell, but putting up a jolly good fight to live life to the fullest in his post-Army life.
By the time he passed away in February 2010, we had made our peace, and I am satisfied that he left this world knowing his family loved him. On his final night, I remember feeling all the bitterness for how he had made me feel over so many years simply fall away.
On 25 April 2010 I attended my first ANZAC Day Dawn Service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum - the same place my father marched every year since the late 1970s.
I find ANZAC Day as the rest of the country sees it very difficult to understand . Rhetoric about the 'dawn of our nationhood' or how young men 'fought for our freedom' sounds hollow in a country where children are living in poverty, suffering third world diseases, public assets are about to be sold, workers are being starved into servitude to multi-millionaire employers, and huge tracts of land can be sold to the highest foreign bidder.
I am sure the young men who went to their all too early graves in 1915 - and in subsequent wars - believed they were saving us. I know my Dad did, even if the facts about the war he served in tell a different story.
So, ANZAC Day becomes my father's memorial. I do not hear Reveille and think of our 'nationhood.' I hear it and think of my father polishing up the copper coffee urn he would take to the RSA. I don't feel stirrings of patriotism when I hear 'Advance Australia Fair,' but remember his insistence on saying 'daance' rather than 'darnce' even when everything else he said sounded like a Kiwi.
I think its important to remember our lost soldiers, but perhaps I don't think of them in the same way as everyone else - I think of them more as pawns in the greater global scandal that is war, rather than heroes, conquering or otherwise.
The war made my father a shattered pawn. That despite all the damage war did, for the most part, he gave us a happy childhood, and that is what makes him a hero to me.
