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In 2011 Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the Australian honours system. In a June 2023 civil defamation suit judgement, the Federal Court of Australia found that on the balance of probabilities Roberts-Smith had committed war crimes during his time in Afghanistan. Warren Brown uses Roberts-Smith’s Victoria Cross as a metaphor for the former soldier’s tarnished reputation.