Waikato Times letter of the week

Number three in a series. This is from the 30 June issue (not online yet). As always, one wonders what the full, unedited version was like:

Secret silence
The hands-on information our television news service is giving us of what foreign brainwashing is doing to Iranians is a far cry from the secret silence of what our military has been doing in Afghanistan since 2001.

Some years ago we learned we are a nation at war by news that three years previously a New Zealand soldier had charged into a hail of tracer bullets, grabbed up a badly wounded soldier and carried him to safety somewhere.

This casualty was the first, and to this day the only casualty, sustained in combat since our heroic soldiers served and saved their country from the peasants of Vietnam.

The recognition of Willie Apiata’s heroism not only awakened our nation to an ever present peril of invasion it also strengthens our resolve to accept a devouring tax and debilitating health needs. (Abridged)

BOB KNIGHT
Hamilton