"I think it's hard-wired into most Australians that when we think about war, we think about boats turning up on a shore... we think about charging up a hill to kill an enemy", Australian veteran James Brown notes. Yet the legacy of the unsuccessful takeover of Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 seems to overshadow more recent conflicts, and few Australians would know exactly what troops have been doing in Afghanistan in the past 14 years. "If you were to put the Afghan battlefield and the Anzac battlefield side by side, you couldn't really get two more different situations", explains Brown. Here, soldiers talk about why they joined the army and went into combat zones, and what they took from their time at war. Candid reflections reveal a complex puzzle of similarities and differences in technology, medical treatment on the battlefield, and attitudes to war. As one Anzac veteran says: "I was 100% keen like all were in those days. There was more patriotism in those days than there is now". The challenges facing modern soldiers differ but some aspects of the soldier experience never vary, and the belief in the power of luck remains strong.