My darkest memory from Vietnam is of a young Australian soldier lying wounded in an American hospital near Saigon.

It was Christmas 1966. I was taping messages from our diggers to be broadcast back home on ABC radio. This bloke - my own age, in his early 20s - was groggy from sedation but he managed a few cheerful words for Mum and Dad in country Victoria. Don't you worry, be home soon, love to all.

Out of his earshot, I asked a nurse what had happened to him.

"His balls were blown off by a landmine," she said. "But he doesn't know it yet."

I saw much worse in that war. I got shot at myself a couple of times. People died in front of you. There was a well in a Cambodian village filled with a reeking stew of corpses; a baby's hand and wrist floated on top.

But the thought of that mutilated boy haunts me to this day above all the other images, and it comes back with awful clarity when I hear of kids from a new generation killed or wounded in our latest war.

We have learnt nothing and forgotten a great deal. Surely, when history weighs our place in Afghanistan, it will come to the same conclusion as it did with Vietnam: that we squandered young men's lives in a futile, unwinnable fight with an enemy who posed no threat to us.

So much of the language is identical. Oh yes, we're making progress, staying the course, resolved to see it through, blah blah. Julia Gillard seems to think everything should be in pretty good shape by, say, 2014.

Yet only this week, Henry Kissinger - a man who knows more than most about unwinnable wars - wrote in The Washington Post that: "The stated goal of creating a government and domestic security structure to which responsibility for the defence of Afghanistan can be turned over is widely recognised as unreachable by 2014."

And a report to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also this week, found that the billions of dollars poured into civil works there had done little more than distort local culture and the economy, with scant evidence of any sustainable improvement. In other words, when the West eventually goes, Afghanistan will revert to what it has always been: a mess of primitive rival fiefdoms mired in tribal violence and corruption.

After the death of our latest soldier, Sapper Rowan Robinson, 23, Gillard trotted out the same old banalities.

"One of the things that amazes me when I do speak to families who have lost a loved one ... is often they say to me that we best honour the sacrifice that they've made, and their loved ones have made, by staying the journey and seeing the mission through," she said on Tuesday.

Well, of course they bloody say that. It is all they have left. The alternative, to think that their boy fell in a lost cause, is too horrifying to contemplate.

So we continue with this insane calculus, somehow sanctifying the memory of those who have died by having more men die. Time to go.

THE most sickening aspect of the opposition's hypocrisy on refugees is the pretence that the Howard government's policies were a model of decency and humanity.

Christopher ''Poodles'' Pyne was yapping away in that vein on the ABC's Q & A on Monday. Unstoppably. Nothing would shut him up. Why, all the Coalition has ever wanted is to prevent these wretched folk paying money to people smugglers and risking their lives on the dangerous sea journey in rotten Indonesian fishing boats.

In fact, Howard's Tories ran a system of callous cruelty and, at times, outright brutality. This was the mob, remember, that sooled the SAS on to the Tampa refugees in 2001. The immigration department habitually locked up people it didn't like the look of, many of them mentally troubled, such as the Australian residents Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon. Children behind the razor wire mutilated themselves or went mad. Howard's "we will decide" call was a blatant piece of election dog-whistling to latent racism and bigotry.

The infamous Pacific Solution that Pyne and his mates keep blathering about was worst of all. Some examples:

An Iraqi named Mohammed Faisal spent five years banged away on Nauru until he was packed off to a psychiatric hospital in Brisbane. He was eventually admitted as a legitimate refugee.

Phil Glendenning, the director of the Edmund Rice Centre, a Catholic action group, reminded me that the Howard government sent 400 fearful Afghans back home from Nauru. He has evidence that about 20 of them were murdered when they got there.

One of them, Mohammed Hussain, a member of the persecuted Hazara tribe, was kidnapped and tossed down a well, and a hand grenade was thrown in after him. In another episode, 42 "unaccompanied minors" - children - were also returned to Afghanistan. Glendenning does not know what became of them.

Yes, the Labor government has made an appalling botch of its refugee policies. But it has nothing to learn from the other lot.

Everyone wants compensation these days. For anything. Slip on a wet floor at the supermarket and there's at least seven figures in it. Electricity bills going up? We all need compensation for the hit to our back pockets. Feelings hurt because someone cracked a dirty joke at work? Yep, there's a buck in that too if you find the right lawyer.

The latest demand for a rain of other people's cash comes from the beef industry, after the suspension of live cattle exports to Indonesia. The cow cockies are howling that an industry worth $300 million a year has been stopped in its tracks and they'll all be ruined. Said Hanrahan.

A thoughtful person might ask why the beef industry allowed the atrocities at Indonesian abattoirs to go on for so long. One suspects there was much shrugging of shoulders and turning of blind eyes while the money rolled in.

Indeed, Meat Australia, or whatever it calls itself these days, has virtually admitted as much. Are we really to believe that the farmers themselves had no previous idea of the horrors revealed in that Four Corners program?

Gimme a break.

Little adds up with this insane calculus

Mike Carlton