My grandfather was one of Australia’s choco (chocolate) soldiers. Volunteers with minim training sent to Papua New Guinea to delay the Japanese army while the Australian regulars completed preparations.
My grandfather died in 2015, having never spoken a word about what he saw. He started medication before 1950 and never spoke to a therapist or anyone else who wasn’t there with him. Everything we know is from someone else.
While my grandmother was pregnant with my dad’s sister, Pop had a flashback, tossed her out the window and carved up the living room with a Japanese NCO’s sword that he’d brought back. The sword stayed in the attic until his death. My dad was trying to arrange to return it to Japan when the pandemic broke out. At pops funeral, we were told by someone else who was there that pop’s childhood best mate was killed with that sword. Pop shot it’s owner, couldn’t save his friend and killer some people with it.
Pop was weirdly racial his entire life. He loved Asian food, but not sushi. He’d rant about Nanking if someone made ramen. He felt a life long affection for the traditional owners of PNG who he referred to as Fuzzy Wuzzies but was an unbearable cunt to Aboroginal and Torres Straight Islanders. He fucking hated the Irish and the Swiss. His side of the family is from Wales but he was third generation Australian. He was still so incredibly fucking invested in how someone’s nation of birth or cultural ancestry behaved during the war until the day he died.
He was psychologically abusive towards my father and grandmother, but not to my father’s siblings. He was a very popular man in town, but hated half his neighbours. He took all my spending money from my parents for a month visit because I left the toilet light on in his house twice and accused my wife of being a gold digger the first time he met her, because she was the one who was going to actually talk to contractors and agents so she was listening while dad and I decided what to do with a house we co owned. He scrounged his entire life to leave his 3 children a total of $60k and refused to believe the value of his home and undersold it by close to $100k when he went into nursing care. He lived his entire adult life in a home that was a wedding present from his in-laws and worked 50 years for the same company running a theatre and skate rink, before he moved into semi retirement as a morticians assistant and then started selling his home brew beer and home made spring rolls for something to do after that.
When he died, my grandmother didn’t know what kind of pizza she liked. She’s never been allowed to order for herself. Their entire marriage was a game of seeing who’d see the other one fucking dead. Nanna won. But she’d never in her entire life known the names of the pizza she liked. Just the one Pop ordered.
We know what his medals were for. It was a small town and the RSL blokes told us. Pop hated anyone talking about it. But the fucking number it did on his head never went away. His fear of everything outside of his home town was so prominent my entire life. He was so tremendously proud of having great great grandchildren when he died and so disappointed that 5 of his descendants had moved out of the economically depressed methed out shithole town he spent his entire life in.
My grandmother is in my experience the kindest woman in the world. But she spent 65 years needling the miserable bastard about one thing or another. Refusing to leave him. But also refusing to ever give him a moments peace or let him have the last word even if she agreed with him. Until her dementia advanced to the point that she can’t really talk any more, the only unkind words I ever heard her say to anyone other than my grandfather was to berate anyone who wore any shade of green in her presence for any reason. All because it brought the war back to her. They lived quite close to one of the largest military presences in Australia their entire lives.
People paid a price for surviving that war.