Jenna Price | Ben Roberts-Smith's story cannot be partly ignored or wholly cancelled

Australians adore their heroes and chisel-jawed Roberts-Smith lined up as one of the very best. And perhaps that's our problem. Instead of recognising that all of us are mixed bags, the good and the bad, cherries and pips, we want to believe that there are good guys. That can only ever lead to disappointment.

Justice Anthony Besanko ruled last week that media reports alleging the former special services soldier murdered unarmed civilians during his time in Afghanistan to be substantially true.

So should the AWM continue to lionise Roberts-Smith - or should it put a trigger warning on everything which bears his name, everything that refers to the former soldier and honour the Victoria Cross which the soldier won?

I am pretty confident the AWM will tell the whole story of Ben Roberts-Smith. They will tell the story of the heroic deeds which won the former SAS solider the highest military honour. They will also tell the story of his horrific misdeeds, including the murder of prisoners of war. That's the sensible thing to do - to avoid the wilful mischaracterisation of all that has happened in this case.

Here's more or less where folks are lining up this week.

Defenders: Ben Roberts-Smith did what soldiers do. We must always honour his work. Anything he did wrong was done in the fog of war.

Attackers: he's a criminal and should be abandoned to whatever fate awaits him.

I call Neil James, the executive director of the Australian Defence Association, expecting him to be in camp one.

He says both are uninformed arguments - but he also likes to remind me that what Roberts-Smith is accused of doing was not done in the heat of the moment. No fog-of-war argument to be used here.

However we feel about BRS, his Victoria Cross makes it impossible for the AWM to just leave Ben Roberts-Smith out of the exhibits altogether.

It's awarded to those who, "in the presence of the enemy, display the most conspicuous gallantry; a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice; or extreme devotion to duty". And it is hard to rescind them, there is very little precedent. Could we follow the same rules as we have for the Order of Australia? When recipients are convicted of crimes, they get knocked off the list.

Here's the thing - so far, Ben Roberts-Smith has not yet been convicted of a crime. ANU law professor Don Rothwell says there are different levels of proof between a civil trial (for example, defamation) and a criminal trial.

The first is about the balance of probabilities, the second must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. And a civil trial will not always lead to a criminal trial. Rothwell says it's quite uncommon in Australia.

If this case proceeds to a criminal trial, it will be groundbreaking for another reason - Australia has never had a war crimes trial of a former or serving member of the Australian Defence Force.

Yes, we've had war crimes tried in this country - but those committing them were not, at the time, Australian citizens. Their crimes were in the "service" of another country, not this one.

If a criminal prosecution of Roberts-Smith goes ahead, says Rothwell, it will be entirely novel for our criminal justice system and a test for our courts.

It's already a test of our judgement. According to some of my fellow Australians, it is perfectly OK to push civilians off cliffs. It is also, apparently, perfectly OK to do what my friend Naomi Barnes describes as a leggie. A leggie, in case you haven't figured it out, is where you take a prosthetic leg as a war trophy from one of your victims and drink out of it. Roberts-Smith cheered on soldiers who did precisely that, even posing with the prosthesis used as the novelty drinking vessel.

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How did we ever get to think this was OK? Historian Michelle Arrow, who campaigned for our other great cultural institutions to get the kind of funding the AWM did during the Morrison era, says we are caught up in the mythology of ANZAC, which exploded during the time of former prime minister John Howard.

The Australian War Memorial expanded. Our near religious attendance at dawn services grew. As we commemorated the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli, we spent somewhere between five and 19 times the average spend per death of other countries making those acknowledgements.

Macquarie University's Arrow says the Roberts-Smith case is being framed as if people at home don't really understand what war is like.

"But actually the people who first brought this to light were his fellow soldiers, [his actions] were not in keeping with the rules of war," says Arrow.

Surely, if we need heroes, it should be these whistleblowers. It must have been hard to reveal the wrongdoings of one of their own and to reject that brotherly code: "What happened at Whiskey 108 stays at Whiskey 108."

I fear what's happening with this case is that it is not just about war but about another culture war, about what we consider to be patriotic behaviour and what is not.

Yes, we should be grateful to those who protect our country - but we also must remember and honour what the rules of war are.

The case of Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us that we can't conveniently overlook the war dead of other countries, yet glorify our own.