ANZAC Day has always been a special day for me.
It brings memories flooding back - not of conflict, thanks to the generations before me I've never had to go to war - but of people and places.
It conjures up vivid images of primary school and listening to heroic tales of the likes of Simpson and his donkey broadcast over a school intercom from a scratchy radio.
I fondly recall my grandfather. As a kid I cut his firewood on Saturday mornings, ran down the street to put his bets on at the TAB and brought back his Craven A cork-tip cigarettes - they'd kill a brown dog and probably killed him.
He always said he volunteered to train as a pilot in 1914, but at 88.9kgs was 18kgs over the weight limit for the wood, wire and canvas aircraft of the day, so joined the infantry instead.
He ended up in the trenches at Gallipoli in 1915, was shot through the elbow and evacuated to Lemnos.
He saw out the war as a stretcher bearer on the Somme and was mentioned twice in dispatches - out of the frying pan into the fire!
He rarely spoke about his war, he just acted a bit differently in the week before Anzac Day - spent some time at the RSL, drank a bit much, but always attended the dawn service.
Anzac Day brings back memories of my own father.
A naive country truck driver, he took the government's wartime mobilisation propaganda to heart, walked into a recruitment office in 1940 simply to inquire and came out an enlisted man.
He was a headquarters staff sergeant in Cairo.
He always downplayed his role by saying he earned his service medals for sticking to his pen in times of strife and never spoke about his experiences, but the Middle East was the first Allied victory and a turning point of World War II and he did his bit.
Anzac Day brings back memories of school cadet camp at Puckapunyul Army base in central Victoria in the mid 1960s and the first time we saw nashos - national servicemen conscripted by a ballot of 20th birthday dates - enduring basic training.
Podgy, pale, recently civilians sweating up Scrub Hill with a backpack and SLR, being turned into trim, tough, fighting men by regular Army officers who barked at them like car yard guard dogs.
I recall the trepidation of the conscription ballot after my 20th birthday and the relief when my number didn't come up - I was two years into a prized four-year cadetship with a daily city newspaper. I didn't want to spend two years in the Army only to return to my cadetship when other cadets, who had started with me, were finishing theirs.
I remember people who were called up and went to Vietnam.
For some, a tour of duty made them stronger, more decisive and more determined.
For one however, I remember it was disaster.
He couldn't settle back into his old job as a bank teller, he drank too much and slowly drifted away from former mates, like me, who didn't then understand what he had been through or had seen.
