IT WAS pushing 50 years ago – June 1967, in fact – when a gaggle of army recruits was lined up at Kapooka to be told they were to march to the quartermaster’s store to exchange their jungle greens for khakis.
The reason for this uniform change was that, instead of being shipped off to Vietnam, we were going to the Middle East to help the Israelis, who were in the process of whipping the pants off the Arab nations in the Six Day War.
It all turned out to be a heavy-handed hoax perpetrated by a bored sergeant but, in the news-free zone of a recruit battalion, we swallowed it.
Not only did we swallow it, we accepted it as probably more logical than the prospect of service in Vietnam, although just why the battle-hardened Israelis might have needed our help was never explained. But why was the notion of shipping out to the Middle East to fight with Israel so plausible?
It might have been because our fathers and grandfathers had served there in two world wars and come back full of admiration and affection for the Jewish settlers of Palestine, and a commensurate contempt for the Arabs of the region.
There was a cultural affinity with the Jewish Israelis that we could not find to share with the Arabs.
And I guess there was an element of collective Western guilt over how we had turned our backs on Jewish refugees in the late 1930s and condemned so many to the Holocaust.
Read the full article by Terry Sweetman at The Courier Mail.