The Opaque Honour of Champions

Resonances of Herecles in Ben Roberts-Smith

Tuesday 6th June 2023

I want to start off by saying that none of what is to follow is in any way condoning the behaviour of an Australian soldier in Afghanistan. Those actions are terrifying, disturbing and horrific. I am though interested in trying to understand how it happened.  

I watch the towering Ben Roberts-Smith emerge from the court room in an impeccably tailored suit, pressed to perfection like a military coat, hair similarly immaculate. It’s like the Australian defence force meets a style designer from a commercial television station. He is Australia’s most decorated soldier, a warrior with extraordinary strength and courage, receiving the highest honour in the land, returning shining from the glow of battle, with monuments and full-wall displays erected in his honour. He is the image of a half deity, towering above the mortals, and whose actions made the world safe. Like Hercules though he lives in a double existence. Both civilian and soldier, capable of both incredible love, friendship and affection, as well as being a formidable, terrifying enemy to those who cross him.

Hercules though is faced with another reality on return home. The war doesn’t stay on the battlefield, it follows you home. You have been changed by the experience and while you were gone the place you were fighting for has changed too. He is meant to return to wreaths and to high paid job at a commercial television network. Like a retired tennis player, he’ll be trotted out every so often to commentate an event. Except what we now realise is it’s not that simple. We see that his former virtuosity wasn’t in tennis or golf, it was in war, in wielding a rifle like a racquet, strategizing, killing, attacking and defending, except the stakes were actual life and death.

The truth of the war is revealed: the dirty, messy business of it - The crime of it. Hercules fought a dirty drawn-out war that annihilated an entire people. How could this honourable soldier act so despicably?

In the confusion of events could we possibly have a clear sense of right and wrong? To act within the equally confusingly named ‘rules of war’? These rules of war must be so opaque in practical terms. How do you stay just, ethical, rational and honourable in that place? It’s easy to say how we’d do it, like when we watch the Australian Open tennis from above, being able to see the whole court, seeing exactly where the opportunities are from above.

It’s the hatred you must have to kill a civilian that unnerves me. Was it like a spectrum of experience where he had to really go to a place in his mind in order to do it? Or was it only a small step away from the day-to-day reality of being a soldier in war? It wasn’t that difficult, just like another killing, just a slightly different type.

 It is absolutely a war crime, if the allegations are found to be true but again I wonder how clean cut it is.

 Returning to a civilised world, the status quo that you fought for, only to have that country turn on you must be extremely strange and heartbreaking. I wonder what kinds of deep trauma is felt by Heracles, by Robert-Smith, that he cannot speak of it, only be haunted by the things he has done, to the point of madness, manifesting itself in violence, manipulation and adultery.

We feel so much betrayal and the taint is so much worse when it takes the best. For us, the audience, he is now disgraced, tarnished and fallen. How could this image of the perfect warrior be so distorted? How could we have been so wrong to pin the Victoria Cross on him? How wrong have we been? Should we now be sceptical of our mythology? Should we call into question the Anzac mythology and the group of gallant and courageous mates that keenly strived for good in a global conflict? Is there taint in that story too?

When I see Robert Smith on the courthouse steps I’m watching an ancient Greek text played out on television. But what we are watching isn’t new, the notion of the soldier returning home to ‘civil’ society isn’t a new idea, just a new circumstance.

I am not condoning just seeking to understand how the men and women we send in to fight for a nation can end up executing civilians. Australia is righteous and honourable, and these actions are anything but. There must be something else at play. There must be another sense of reality here and a deep trauma we can’t see, shared only with those who have experienced it. We can only follow on in the media coverage listening to binary modes of good and bad, right and wrong. In our art, our symbols and stories we can have a conversation about this. We can try to understand the double existence and the opacity in honour and champions.