What Doesn’t Come Home
On belonging after service - and the work of coming home. ANZAC day 2026.
Estimated reading time: 7 mins 27 secs
It’s usually something small that gives it away.
Standing in line for a coffee. Service station. Early morning. Fluorescent lights, the hum of fridges, the smell of burnt coffee. The kind of place where no one is really paying attention to anyone else.
A quick exchange. Someone trying to be polite.
“Thanks for your service.”
You nod. Take the coffee. Move on.
There’s nothing wrong with it. But there’s always a moment — brief, easy to miss — where something doesn’t quite line up. Where what’s being acknowledged doesn’t match what it actually feels like to have done the job.
Most of the time, it’s easier not to explain.
Especially on days when the language gets louder, and the distance between what’s said and what’s lived becomes harder to ignore.
I worked as a uniformed military psychologist within the Australian Army Psychology Corps — a part of the Army most people don’t realise exists — including multiple trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. I worked within the Special Forces community for over 8 years between 2004 and 2011.
That meant I wasn’t just there under the same conditions — heat, risk, that damned dust, distance from home — but also listening to military personnel’s stories afterwards, before they came home to Australia. Helping them make sense of what had just happened, or sometimes just holding the fact that it didn’t make sense at all.
Over time, that puts you in a particular position.
You don’t hear one version of service. You hear probably 1000’s. Different units. Different roles. Different personalities. But the same threads, returning again and again.
I wasn’t outside it either.
I missed the same things. Birthdays. Weddings — two of them I didn’t attend. Time with my kids that doesn’t come back. Phone calls that dropped out halfway through an argument, leaving both sides sitting with it unresolved for days.
You don’t hear that many versions of something without recognising it in yourself.
What stood out wasn’t the differences. It was the consistency.
Different people. Different deployments. But the same tensions, repeating.
A kind of split.
Between what was happening in front of them — what needed full attention just to stay safe and do the job — and what was happening back home at the same time.
People assume separation. That you leave one world and enter another.
That’s not how it works anymore.
You’re in a place where attention matters. Where the heat sits on you early in the day, where that fine dust gets into everything — your gear, your food, your mouth — and where small mistakes have consequences.
And at the same time, communication started to change.
Early on, we didn’t have our own phones — or at least couldn’t use them. If you wanted to speak to home, you went to the welfare hut. Lined up. Waited your turn for one of the shared phones.
Sometimes you’d wait, finally get through — and it would just ring out.
Later, video calls arrived. Usually through US-run welfare huts. You’d queue again, this time for a terminal. Limited time. Patchy connections. Always aware that other people were waiting behind you.
And because of the time difference, those calls rarely landed cleanly.
You were either calling into the middle of someone else’s day, or missing something on your end — a meal, a briefing, time with your own team.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
A call where your two-year-old refuses to come to the screen. Cries. Turns away. Your partner trying to manage it while you sit there, on a time limit, with people waiting behind you.
Then the connection drops.
And that’s it.
So even connection came with a trade-off.
You’d get a window into home life — just enough to stay attached — but not enough to be part of it.
It kept you connected. But it didn’t close the gap.
And at times, it made the distance harder to carry.
It shows up in ways that are easy to miss from the outside.
Watching your child blow out candles on a screen that freezes halfway through, then buffers.
Being told about something going wrong at home, knowing you’re going to hang up and step straight back into a situation where people are relying on you to stay focused.
Missing weddings. Missing first steps. Missing the ordinary moments that, in the end, are the ones that matter most.
And then there are moments that don’t wait.
A phone call that changes things. The kind you would normally drop everything for.
Except you can’t.
So you do what people learn to do.
You put it in your back pocket and carry on with what’s in front of you.
There isn’t another option.
You don’t process things in real time.
You move on to the next task, because that’s what keeps people safe. Whatever you just heard or felt gets pushed aside so it doesn’t interfere with what needs to happen next.
You get good at that.
Conversations become shorter. More controlled. You say what’s necessary and leave the rest unsaid. You learn to shut things down quickly — not deal with them, just move them out of the way.
It works, in that environment.
The problem is that it doesn’t switch off when you leave.
It shows up later. In places where it doesn’t fit.
A reaction that’s sharper than it needs to be. Sitting in a quiet room and still scanning without realising it. Struggling to settle, even when there’s nothing requiring your attention.
And then someone close to you says, “you’ve changed.”
And you know they’re right.
You just don’t have a clear way to explain what’s different.
You protect people by not telling them everything.
Not because it’s secret. Because it doesn’t translate.
But that protection has a cost.
Coming home doesn’t resolve that.
If anything, it makes it more obvious.
From the outside, it looks simple. You’re back. You’re safe. Life resumes.
But what you come back to isn’t the same as what you left.
Your partner has been carrying things alone for months. Decisions made without you. Routines built around your absence.
You step back in, but the system already works without you in the way it used to.
Even small things take adjustment.
Where things go. Who does what. How decisions get made.
None of it is wrong.
It’s just different.
And you’re different too.
So there’s a period where two versions of things meet.
The version that carried on without you.
And the version that comes back with you.
They don’t always fit together easily.
This is where the gap starts to show.
ANZAC Day. Public language. “Heroes.” “Thanks for your service.”
None of it is wrong.
But it doesn’t quite land.
Because it smooths over something that, in reality, isn’t smooth. It assumes a clear boundary — that what happened is finished, contained, and can be acknowledged from a distance.
But for most people who’ve served, it doesn’t stay in that space.
It carries into ordinary moments.
How you move through a crowd. What you notice without trying. The way you read situations that other people pass through without thinking about them.
Those things don’t stand out.
But they’re there.
There are other parts that don’t get spoken about at all.
The unevenness of risk. The sense that the rules you operate under don’t always match the reality you’re in. The awareness that decisions are being made far away from where they’re carried out.
You learn to work within that.
Not because it makes sense. Because it’s the system you’re in.
What matters is that people carry those things.
Quietly.
There’s another part to this that sits further back.
For most of history, war didn’t sit at the edges of society. It sat closer to the centre.
People left.
And when they came back, something had to be done with what they carried.
Not in a clinical sense. In a social one.
There were ways of acknowledging that what someone had been part of didn’t just disappear when they returned.
The details varied. The point didn’t.
The experience wasn’t left sitting with the individual alone.
That’s harder to find now.
What happens instead tends to be contained. Moved into systems that sit slightly apart from everyday life.
Which means that when people come back carrying something that doesn’t fit easily into normal conversation, there aren’t many places for it to go.
So it stays where it can.
With the individual.
And often within a small group of others who understand it without explanation.
What often gets missed in all of this is that the difficulty isn’t just about what happened while people were away.
It’s about what happens when they come back.
Because coming home isn’t just a change in location.
It’s a shift in relationship.
With family.
With place.
With yourself.
You can be back in your own house and still feel slightly out of place in it.
Not in a dramatic way. Just small things. Not quite knowing where to stand in conversations. Not quite fitting the rhythm that’s been established without you.
The person who left doesn’t return in the same form. And the place they return to hasn’t stayed still either.
So there’s a period where belonging can’t be assumed.
Where both sides are trying to reconnect without fully understanding what’s changed.
Where small missteps — on both sides — start to build.
For some, that settles over time.
For others, it doesn’t.
The strain carries forward. Into relationships. Into family life.
And from the outside, it can be hard to make sense of.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Why can’t they just move on?”
But that question misses the point.
Because belonging, after that kind of disruption, isn’t something one person rebuilds on their own.
Standing in line for a coffee. Same lights. Same hum. Same quick exchanges.
Nothing looks different.
Most of it sits underneath.
Not because it’s hidden.
Because there isn’t a place for it to land.
But for many, it doesn’t resolve quietly.
The gap doesn’t always close. The strain doesn’t always ease. And the cost of carrying it isn’t borne by the individual alone — it sits in families, in relationships, in the spaces where connection used to feel straightforward.
Belonging, after that kind of experience, isn’t something you return to.
And it isn’t something you rebuild alone.
On days like ANZAC Day, we acknowledge service.
Less often, we recognise what comes after it — and what it asks of all of us.
Until we do, much of it will remain where it has always sat.
Just out of view.
Great article Mark, resonated a lot with me. Definitely made me stop and reflect