One of the most significant moments in Australian military history unfolded without fanfare on a tarmac at Sydney airport, when Ben Roberts-Smith was calmly escorted off a plane and into a waiting police car.
The country's most-decorated living soldier and the most famous of his generation, Roberts-Smith was on Tuesday charged with five counts of the war crime of murder.
It follows a high-profile civil defamation case, which three years ago found that the former Special Air Service (SAS) corporal and Victoria Cross recipient had unlawfully killed several unarmed Afghan detainees.
Roberts-Smith, who left the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in 2013, denies all wrongdoing and says the allegations are "egregious" and driven by spiteful and jealous peers.
His case – now set to be tested to a higher, criminal standard – has become the face of Australia's reckoning over the country's alleged conduct in Afghanistan, which has cast a pall over its much-mythologised military legacy.
