There is a process in some professions known as the Chain of Custody. This is the documented transfer of a thing from one person to the next. In art history, it often refers to the ownership of an artefact, in the police force, to criminal evidence, and in the Army, to the repatriation of bodies of those who have been killed in war. I think of it as taking something of great value and never letting it out of your sight.
Military stories are also passed along from one person to the next. This has happened as long as there have been wars and as long as there have been armies. They are passed as historical accounts, songs, maps, yarns, photographs, and epic poems. They are told by combatants, by official record keepers, by observers and victims, and these are memories. This is how people remember. On Remembrance Day, we pass these stories from one person to another.
War Poems as Remembrance
A few years ago, I wrote a song cycle of War Poems. I chose 11 poems that spanned the Boer War to Afghanistan, written by people who fought in these wars. Not observers, but participants. Six of them are still living, three are Australian, one is my mate.Â
The diversity of experiences in these poems is telling. A British poet known only as ‘DL’ describes the ‘beautiful toys’ and ‘cherry blossoms’ in multiple launch rocket fire in Iraq. Chris Hunter, a NZ Vietnam Veteran is haunted that we so easily ‘forget about the people’. Nigel ‘Bernie’ Bruen, who somehow survived the Falkland’s War as a bomb disposal technician, describes carefully stepping around the landing ship, the ‘Sir Tristram’, strafed at Fitzroy Cove, hearing ‘the beat of his heart’ and ‘silently searching’ for unexploded bombs. Claire Hughes, a contemporary British soldier tells of her ‘paper skin burnt and scalded by fingerprints.’ Sidney Keyes in Europe in the 1940s said he is ‘the man who looked for peace and found [his] own eyes barbed’. Kevin Powers an American veteran of the Iraq War says he loves his wife ‘like not killing or 10 minutes of sleep’. That’s how much he loves her – like 10 (precious) minutes of sleep. Charlotte Mew in May of 1915 says, ‘Surely the Spring will come again like a Divine Surprise’, and C.T. Mealing, a Queensland soldier in the Boer War, feels the sting of betrayal of his love at home ‘once you promised to be true’, he says. ‘And my heart is broken for all its faith was placed in you.’ And that is perhaps the oldest war story of them all.
These poems tell of beauty, guilt, fear, pain, shame, love, hope, and anger. Despite the different feelings, they are common experiences, shared by the people who wrote them. And in presenting them in 2026, I felt as though I held the hand of every writer across every battlefield all the way back to Private Christopher Thornton Mealing of the 5th Queensland Imperial Bushmen, who wrote his poem under the stars on the beach in Cape Town in 1901. This was an unbroken chain of custody of military stories over 125 years.Â
War Stories as Remembrance
Perhaps we pass stories down the line from person to person to make sure that the stories are living stories. That they are as relevant today as when they occurred. But some war stories are parables. Parables are short stories used to teach a lesson. They contain familiar characters and settings and are specific in nature, but their point is to be generalised. But why put a narrative distance between the real event and the telling of it? Vietnam veteran, Tim O’Brien, author of ‘The Things They Carried’, says of military stories:
…if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
What he means is: sometimes a thing is impossible for people to understand. So you tell them impossible things in order to convey the same feeling. Parables and exaggerations both act as bridges to understand the complexity or significance of something.Â
Here’s a war story. Some soldiers are lying in ambush in the jungle. One of them gets bitten by a snake. The message is sent that it is a viper. Soon it becomes apparent that it is ‘a nest of vipers’. Somehow this is relayed as ‘a nest of snipers’, and a General orders an attack on the position. Now this either happened to Felipe Buencamino III in the Philippines in 1942, to Private. N.A.S. Manutange in Sri Lanka in 1983, to me in East Timor in 2008 or to members of the 82ndAirborne Division in Peru earlier this year. I won’t tell you which because you get the point.
Here’s another story. Some men are sitting on the beach waiting to go home after the war is over. They are eating bread that they themselves made that morning. They have divided up the rations of their wounded friend between them, and they are passing round a small statue taken as a souvenir discussing whether it will bring them good or bad luck. This either happened to members of the 14th Infantry Battalion on North Beach, Gallipoli in 1915, to the Papua New Guinea Defence Force at Kieta in Bougainville in 2001, or a small group of Mycenaeans in Troy in 1184 BC. I won’t tell you which. Sometimes memories require a bit of distance before we start using them as lessons.
Remember or forget?
Memories are things of great value, and memories of triumph, loss and the very ordinary – add to our community fabric. As the custodians of stories – as links in the chain of custody, you are all responsible for the stories you tell. Tell them well.
I will finish with the last verse of the poem ‘Improvised Explosive Device’ by American Iraq War veteran, Kevin Powers:
If this poem had wires coming out of it,
You wouldn’t read it.
If these words were made of metal
They could kill us all. But these
Are only words. Go on,
They are safe to fold and put into your pocket.
Even better, they are safe
To be forgotten.
About the Author
Cate Carter is co-director of the Military Organisation and Culture Studies research group and founding member of the ADF Creative Arts Association and the Defence Research Student Community. Holding a PhD in Military Sociology from Deakin University, Cate is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Adelaide University. She currently works at the Australian Army Research Centre and is a composer in her spare time.
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Image: Captain Walter Ormond Stevenson writes in his dugout at Gallipoli, 1915. Australian War Memorial, P02282.013. Public domain.