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The anger, shame, drug abuse and suicides among soldiers suffering traumatic stress after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan could be greatly cut with treatment pioneered by Sydney researchers.
The coalition has lost 1960 troops since the war began in 2001. There are 2351 Australian personnel now serving in Afghanistan - 21 Australian soldiers have been killed there, 10 of them since June.
High-tech armour is allowing more servicemen and women to survive improvised explosive device blasts but the traumatic brain injury toll, sometimes associated with posttraumatic stress, is also rising.
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Gordon Traill thought he was ''immune'' to the bodies in the Iraq red zone, the jets overhead and mortars exploding. Wasn't that normal? He slept with his hand wrapped around the pistol grip of a 5.5mm Steyr rifle.
In his mid-40s, the warrant officer was the ''old man'' of the 5/7 RAR, part of the security detachment assigned to protect Australia's diplomatic mission in Iraq.
In 2004, outside the apartment block in which he was living, a bomb under a Volkswagen exploded moments after the Australian ambassador had been driven past. Shrapnel flew into the building. ''I'd never heard anything so loud in my life."
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Difficult man, John Kaldor. Charming, cultured and engaging, but demanding. The day before our interview, which has been booked for weeks, the former textiles king, who put Australia on the world’s contemporary art map, phones and leaves two messages in quick succession.
He wants to change the interview location, meeting time and duration. “You’ll only need half an hour to get my life story,” he insists in his quiet, clipped Hungarian accent when we speak and, what’s more, my questions are to be asked while he drives, to save time.
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J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High
Kenneth Slawenski
(UQP, $39.95)
Reviewed by Steve Dow
ON THE event of his death at age 91 on January 27 this year, Jerome David Salinger’s family released a statement in which they said the US author of the famous Caulfield siblings in The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass family of Franny and Zooey had himself remarked he “was in this world but not of it”.
So who was the fiercely private J.D. Salinger, who had not published any writing since 1965, sequestered in his isolated hermitage and outhouse bunker in New Hampshire but whose silence did nothing to dampen the ardour of fans and the intrusions of a hungry media?
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