As the centenary of the first world war approaches, our children will hear an awful lot of stories about glorious Australian battlefield victories, dignified defeats, superhuman courage and sacrifice.

But they will learn a whole lot less about a more pervasive, ugly, disturbing truth: that mostly war just kills people horribly, without dignity, and scars for life too many of those who survive it.

That is why we should thank singer-songwriter John Schumann for turning his classic anti-war song I Was Only Nineteen, into an illustrated children’s book. Another generation of young Australians will read the book, hopefully seek out the 1983 song that Schumann performed with Redgum, and perhaps contemplate the deeper resonances of war.

As a 19-year-old in 1983, I wasn’t much into Redgum’s brand of folk-rock. But nonetheless, the song spoke to me and many of my friends. At university in the early 1980s, we had little to protest about. Education was free and we didn’t have to face the question of whether to go to war, let alone of our government sending us unwillingly.

The Anzackery – or disproportionate nation-defining emphasis on Anzac – that grips Australia today, was only just emerging. So, meshing as it did with our childhood recall of grainy black and white TV footage of Australian troops in Vietnam, I Was Only Nineteen introduced us as young adults to the story of what war does – and for a long time had done – to Australia’s young people.

It was a jarring reminder of our luck – and a historical awakening.

Yes, we learned the story of Frankie who went from drinking tinnies in the Grand Hotel in Vung Tau to lying screaming in the jungle and waiting for the morphine. And Schumann, who mined the experiences of his brother-in-law Mick Storen while writing the song, became an early awareness-raiser about veterans afflicted with post-traumatic stress – a pervasive condition among veterans that the military hierarchy has still not nearly come to terms with.

But Schumann’s lyrics astutely questioned our wartime history as it relates to the serving soldier (James Brown elaborates on this in his excellent recent book Anzac’s Long Shadow).

So here was Schumann in 1983, presciently challenging the Anzac myth that was about to emerge, thanks to our politicians – not least former prime minister Bob Hawke – as the central cultural narrative of Australian nationhood.

“And the Anzac legends didn’t mention mud and blood and tears,” Schumann wrote. “And stories that my father told me never seemed quite real.”

Indeed.

Today, the narrator in Schumann’s book is a grandfather who is telling his grandson about his Vietnam experience, while dealing with the lingering health and emotional legacies of service. Illustrated by children’s book artist Craig Smith, it candidly depicts the soldiers’ battlefield experiences, including the moment when “Frankie kicked a mine” on the day of the first moon landing: 20 July 1969.

“I can only hope that this particular iteration of the song for kids helps future generations from making the same mistakes as past generations,” Schumann said.

“If one kid is moved by this book, and as an adult, perhaps as a politician or someone in a position to make a decision, decides against involving us in a conflict we have no part of, then the book will have done its job.”

Bipartisan politics shields Anzac commemoration from too many dissenting voices – from those who question too vociferously whether the $150m of taxpayer money to be spent over the next five years will be used to properly tell the stories of the battlefield’s real legacy.

It’s like challenging the orthodoxy of a powerful religion, really. And Anzac is, undeniably, heavily cloaked these days in the language of divinity, with its constant references to the “spirit”, the “fallen” and always the “sacrifice”.

Soldiers fight for all sorts of reasons. Because they are sent to do so. Because they believe in causes. But always because politicians tell them to go and do so. The diaries of the original Australian and New Zealander Anzacs are full of contemptuous references to the politicians and the heads (the officers and generals) who decide their fates.

But what shines through repeatedly is that whatever their reasons for going in the first place, from Gallipoli and Palestine to Vietnam and Afghanistan, they ultimately end up fighting mostly for their fellow soldiers – their mates.

If there’s a “spirit” it’s probably that. Though it is hardly unique to the Anzac.

The fallen? Well they are the dead. And “sacrifice”? With all of its implications of men willingly offering themselves up on the battlefield for their nation, and of the women and children back home suffering stoically in their absence, it seems like a trivialisation of the true and devastating social impact of conflict – especially the first world war – on Australia.

I’ll be buying John Schumann’s book for my kids.