Duncan Garner: 26 years ago I went to Gallipoli – what happened there changed me forever

As a political journalist, when the prime minister travels, you go too. Countries, capitals, conferences, cities. Washington DC, New York, Turkey, Singapore, Stewart Island, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, Samoa, Tonga, Niue, Fiji, France, Belgium, Nigeria, London, Japan, Russia, Bahrain, Dubai, Oman, Mexico, Chile, Malta, Brazil, China, Brunei… you get the point.

It’s always exciting, often exhausting, sometimes surreal and usually eye-opening. The White House, 10 Downing St, Tony Blair, George Bush, Barack Obama, Robert Mugabe and his henchmen.

I was lucky to work in an era when media organisations spent the money to put journalists on the ground.

The trip that has stayed with me most is Gallipoli in 2000, commemorating 85 years since the campaign.

It was one of my first major overseas assignments as a political journalist for TVNZ’s One News. Helen Clark was prime minister, and attending the dawn service at Gallipoli was still relatively rare for a New Zealand PM. She was keen to build and affirm our national identity, and in many ways she helped turn Gallipoli into a modern pilgrimage. John Key would later continue that tradition.

Clark had also discovered a relative, Frank Clark, had died at Hill 60. That detail mattered politically. It was symbolic, and it connected Clark to our most significant battle.

The journey took days. We flew in stages, across Australia and through Asia, before finally arriving in a bustling, humid Istanbul. The next morning we were on buses heading for the Dardanelles. Clark travelled in the official motorcade. The media and staff followed behind. It was a long, slow five-hour drive, and in hindsight I’m glad social media didn’t exist then.

We smuggled a few local beers on to the bus. We sang, shouted, made up all sorts of games. Listener columnist Steve Braunias was great company. He sees and hears things most people miss. We were self-appointed stirrers. The PM would have frowned on our behaviour, but hopefully the passage of time, 26 long years, gives me immunity from judgement or prosecution.

There anticipation built the closer we got. Turkish families were making the same journey, walking roads, climbing hills, gathering at cemeteries. Some had waited a lifetime to return to these places. Others were visiting for the first time.

What struck me was their openness. Their generosity. This is Turkish soil, of course, but they know what happened here. They know the hills are a vast graveyard. They know New Zealand and Australian blood is in this ground. And still, there was warmth. Handshakes. Smiles. A quiet acknowledgement: this place belongs to more than one people.

Travelling with the New Zealand Defence Force added another layer to it all. You become part of something bigger. Young servicemen and women, many barely out of their teens, moving through a former battleground defined by people of the same age all those years earlier.

This is where the Anzac spirit is said to have been forged. It is also where New Zealand began to see itself less as an extension of Britain and more as its own nation.

We were fighting, and dying, as New Zealanders. Some 2779 Kiwis never made it home alive.

The day before the dawn service, I walked along Anzac Cove. It’s not unlike parts of Wellington’s south coast or Miramar Peninsula. I stood on the beach where the landings failed so catastrophically. I climbed through the ridges and trenches around Chunuk Bair, where New Zealand soldiers briefly held a crucial position at immense cost. The Aussies were just along from us; PM John Howard was hosting a BBQ for his forces.

The Commonwealth war graves are immaculate. Rows upon rows of white headstones. Names, ages, ranks, hometowns. Each one a life reduced to a few lines of stone. I remember being there, moving from one grave to the next, reading each inscription. I kept – and keep – thinking: “Was it worth it? What a sad waste of young lives.”

So many never made it more than a few dozen metres from the boats. Some died in the water; others as they stepped on to the shore. The terrain rose sharply in front of them. The Ottoman forces were entrenched above. It was an ambush in the most brutal sense. Some reports say the tide turned red as the lives of our young men ended before they’d barely begun.

I stood there and imagined it: the terror in those boats, the confusion, the noise, teenage boys shaking with fear in unfamiliar waters, the orders shouted and lost in the wind. Then the sudden violence. The chaos. The shock of it. The whistle of the bullets. The absolute brutality of being hit by a bullet and the finality of death and realisation that leaving is not an option.

They were so young. Eighteen. Nineteen. Some younger still, having lied about their age. Boys from Nelson, Auckland, Wellington, Hawke’s Bay – from a country of barely one million people at the time. For many, it was their first journey overseas. Their “big OE”, as we might say now.

That night in 2000, the peninsula filled with people. Tens of thousands gathered for the dawn service. We set up our gear, lugging 32kg of equipment isn’t fun but it was still a far easier task than what our troops had encountered all those years before. I tried to sleep in the open but I couldn’t. I lay in the tussock under a sky thick with stars, thinking about the names I had read that day. Wondering about their lives. Their families. The telegrams that must have arrived at homes across New Zealand. Or not.

At some point, you stop being a journalist and become a person, a human, processing it all.

Before dawn, we gathered in place for the service. A searchlight cut across the water. The beach came into view. This was the moment the first boats had come ashore in 1915. The Last Post reverberated around the natural amphitheatre. The national anthem followed. And then the distinctly orange sun rose over a landscape packed with silent people.

Tens of thousands sat in makeshift grandstands, many holding on to each other. Some cried, others looked bewildered, many just stared out to sea. This had meaning.

I had to go live for the evening bulletin soon after the dawn service. I felt exhausted, drained by the magnitude of it all but full of pride being here. As journalists, we are trained to observe, to report, to step back. But you don’t leave your humanity at home on a story like Gallipoli.

What happened here shaped us. It affected almost every family in the country. Very few communities were untouched by loss.

After the broadcast, I stayed on the peninsula for a few more hours, walking alone, trying to process what I had seen and felt.

Years later, I again went to Gallipoli. I also reported from Afghanistan during the war, and from Passchendaele – the site of New Zealand’s worst single-day loss of life in World War I. More than 840 men killed in just hours. Another 1900 wounded. Mud, chaos and human devastation on an unremarkable, sloping paddock in Belgium that now sits there as a monument to the hapless nature of war.

War comes with a heinous price.

Gallipoli changed me. It shocked me, educated me and made me grateful. I never saw Anzac Day the same way again.

Every year, I’m encouraged by the number of people who turn up to dawn services across the country. In a world that is more ruthless, where artificial intelligence threatens millions of jobs and will topple industries, where we appear to have fewer standards and values and where the device now controls so many brains, having Anzac Day is a chance to reflect on who we are, where we are heading and who we want to acknowledge.

Crucially, it parks politics, intergenerational wars, race wars; finger-pointing stops and we are all huddled together, remembering people, loved ones. Anzac Day promotes unity, and Gallipoli taught me how lucky we were to be born after the world wars. Anzac Day is to acknowledge those who weren’t so lucky.

Time heals, yes. But it does not always teach.

We are more than 110 years on from Gallipoli. The world has changed beyond recognition. And yet some things remain disturbingly familiar. War still exists. Still consumes young lives. You have to ask, again and again: why do we keep repeating this?

If there is a lesson, it is simple, but hard: remember them. And hope that the next century is better than the last.