Help! I have lost my blue tie

We were uniformed reminders of something of which the veterans did not want to be reminded

It is a strange sensation to have lived a lifetime in which, successively, Australia has fought against the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Vietnamese, and is now fighting against who we are not sure — it is difficult to know who the enemy is, but it seems very much like a rerun of the crusades. Only the Japanese have ever posed a direct threat of invasion; yet the bones of Australians lie across the world.