My son Hamish May enlisted in the Australian Army today.
I have a mixture of fear and pride. But I have heard it said that a parent’s job is not to wrap their child in cotton wool and hide them from the world. It is to push them out into the horrors of it so they can become an adult. I believe that.
‘Hard times makes hard men, hard men make easy times, easy times make soft men and soft men make hard times’. Avoiding hard things makes us mediocre and weak.
He went this morning to swear allegiance to the King. To swear to protect the weak. And interestingly, to protect Australia’s economic interests.
That is right. Every soldier who puts on that uniform swears to fight, and if necessary to die, to protect your freedoms and your ability to make an honest buck. That is not a metaphor. It is literally in the oath. The structure of a free society rests on the willingness of young men and women to carry that weight so the rest of us do not have to.
I wanted to mark the day by telling a story I tell my staff and my kids when they complain about having a hard day.
Long Tan
If you do not know the Battle of Long Tan, look it up. It sits alongside Thermopylae in the catalogue of moments where a small group of soldiers faced something that should have been unsurvivable and somehow came through the other side.
In August 1966, roughly one hundred and eight Australian soldiers from D Company, 6RAR, made contact with an estimated two thousand five hundred Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops in a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam. What followed was hours of close combat in driving rain, with ammunition running out, casualties mounting, and reinforcements fighting to reach them through the dark. Eighteen Australians were killed. Twenty-four were wounded. The enemy lost hundreds.
The men who fought that battle were not volunteers in the traditional sense. Most were conscripts. Drafted at eighteen or nineteen years old under the national service ballot. Paid a pittance. Handed a rifle and sent to the other side of the world to fight a war that the country was deeply divided about. They did not choose it. They were handed it.
The Beer I Offered
When I marched out of Kapooka I had the honour of meeting several surviving members of Long Tan. I spoke to each of them privately and quietly offered to buy them a beer for their service.
To a man, every single one of them said the same thing.
I do not need thanks. I was just doing my duty.
Not one of them wanted recognition. Not one of them felt they had done something worthy of special acknowledgement. They had watched their mates die in the mud of a rubber plantation on the other side of the world, half the night not knowing if they were going to make it to morning, and their response to being thanked for it was a quiet deflection and a shrug.
I have thought about that moment many times in the years since.
What This Has to Do With Your Hard Day
When a staff member grumbles about how hard the work is, I tell them about Long Tan.
Not to shame them. Not to minimise what they are going through. But to offer some perspective on what hard actually looks like when you stand it next to the real thing.
Those men at Long Tan did not ask for a merit badge. They did not post about their resilience. They did not need acknowledgement that the day had been difficult. They just did what the moment required of them and moved on.
Making fifty cold calls does not deserve a participation trophy. Losing a deal does not warrant a week of recovery. A difficult client conversation is not a trauma. These are just the conditions of the work. The daily friction that comes with being in the arena rather than watching from the outside.
I am not saying the work is not hard. Sales is genuinely one of the most psychologically demanding professions available, as I have written about at length elsewhere. The rejection is real. The pressure is real. The mental load is real.
But there is a difference between acknowledging that something is hard and expecting recognition for doing it anyway. The Long Tan veterans understood that distinction completely. They had done the hardest thing imaginable and their position was simply that it needed to be done so they did it.
That is the standard worth aiming for. Not the performance of resilience. The quiet, unremarkable practice of it.
The Debt We Carry
We say in the army, you go do your duty, you do the hard work you have to do, later people will call it bravery.
The men at Long Tan did not feel brave. They felt obligated. The situation required something of them and they delivered it. The bravery was assigned afterwards by people who were not there.
These were not career soldiers chasing glory. They were teenagers pulled out of their lives by a ballot, paid about fifty dollars for the day, sent to the other side of the world to watch their mates die in the rain, and when they came home Australia spat on them. Literally in some cases. The anti-war movement met them at the airports. The country they had bled for did not want to acknowledge what had been done in its name.
People like to joke about government workers. And honestly most of the jokes land. But soldiers are the exception that makes the rule look worse. They work harder than almost anyone in any sector, in conditions that would end most careers in a week, for pay that would not cover rent in any capital city in Australia. They do not do it for the money. They never did. They do it because someone has to and they decided that someone was them.
And still, when I offered to buy them a beer thirty years later, they said they did not need thanks. They were just doing their duty.
Hamish is walking into that line today. I am proud of him and I am frightened for him and both of those things are true at the same time.
The next time you feel like moaning you had a hard day, maybe shut your fucking mouth.
