As a Gen Xer, I'm sometimes disappointed at how little some of my generation appreciate just what was done by these men and women.
My grandfather served in the Navy (Both Australian & on service to the RAN in the UK) during the war and until the 70's, saw service in the Mediterranean, and more significantly, on the Arctic convoys in the final years of the war.
On his 90th birthday last year he finally started to speak about what happened in those years (he never did previously, even when my mum and her brothers asked about it). Now we are happy to know he will be on tv in a documentary and has spoken on record for over an hour about everything that he saw.
My grandmother was a WRAN and my great-grandfather served in France in WW1. Knowing this only makes me appreciate all the more what went on and for the first time I'm attending the dawn service. I'm only ashamed I haven't gone sooner. A visit to the AWM in Canberra is a must.
If you can't go in person,
Australian War Memorial
I appreciate the sentiment of an RSL-sponsered ad on the radio tonight, where a young man says the thing that shocks him the most is not that those marching are old, but that at the time they went to war, they were his age, and if one of his mates was one of the people lost to war, he would expect people of his generation to give a moment's silence and respect.
Lest We Forget.