This year's commemoration of Gallipoli and its antecedents and consequences have been given wide currency because of its centenary significance. Exposed to all the many narratives of Gallipoli, I finally begin to think I get it.
At the time, the young New Zealanders went to war eagerly, out of loyalty to empire and a thirst for adventure - much as others in other times and countries have done.
Here, they came from the various hamlets and pockets of habitations and the early beginnings of cities in a land that had seen European settlement for only a few decades. The relative isolation of those young people meant that their initial sense of belonging was local - to the town or the village - and that, at first, others like them but from an area beyond mountain or river were comparative strangers.
Added to that was the ethnic divide. Maori and Pakeha shared as much suspicion as togetherness.
Much of that was changed by the war. The primary loyalty in battle becomes for one's comrades. It was out of that melding together in the face of common danger that the basic substrate of national identity could be formed.
The horrors of the nine months of the recurrent nightmare of trench warfare soon made trivial the differences that the soldiers had brought with them on arrival.
They fought for no more abstract principle than the lives of comrades. Those who returned slowly understood that the meaning of their sacrifice could only be realised through their national identity. Kiwis and Aussies had endured enough to make them family.
That understanding led me to wear a poppy - not as social obligation but to join in that identity in spirit.
I saw Anzac Day as a time for remembrance of the losses of loved ones - and of innocence. For the first time I attended the dawn service, not as a bystander but as a participant.
When Nick Olney, Ohakea base commander, spoke, he spoke to me. He made it clear this was not a celebration but a commemoration of loss. Not an exultation of war but a time of reflection to help contemplate the ways to peace.
Gallipoli, like Vietnam and Iraq, can teach us the sad truth that war should never be undertaken impulsively and that its price is paid not only by the dead but by the survivors - those wounded in body and spirit. It's a price that endures. For Gallipoli, the price continues to be paid though a century has passed.
My entry to this year's commemoration strengthens my opposition to the impulses that lead men like Tony Abbott and John Key, men who have never faced the horrors of war in uniform, to send others into harm's way with appeals to jingoism, to fear, and to bar-room masculinity. When will they ever learn the lessons?
Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
