I didn't give a rat's about trying to "get Kony"; I never forwarded to my friends the email that promised if I did, some kid in Alaska would get a miracle earlobe transplant. And hell would've frozen over before I did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Memes and me? Nup.

That's about to change, thanks to my ol' mate Huck and the video he posted of himself on Facebook last week. "WTF? That's weird," I thought.

Huck is the polar opposite of the "Hey, check me out" type. He's more your social media caveman, so it was ... odd.

Intrigued I watched his vid. It was Huck doing 22 push-ups on a rocky outcrop in bushland overlooking a sleepy northern arm of Sydney Harbour near where we grew up.

Huck prefaced his clip by saying he'd been nominated by a mate on Facebook (yes, a meme) to take part in a campaign to raise awareness for PTSD, particularly the effect it has among our service personnel.

Originating in the US, it requires you to post a video each day of your 22 push-ups for 22 days straight and nominate a friend every day to take up the challenge, too.

(Believing that was a bit OTT, Huck decided to nominate five in total.) The goal is a combined 22 million push-ups.

And while my media-shy mate vowed to do the 22 x 22  bit, he'd only post a handful of video updates - in which he'd share something he'd found out by researching PTSD.

Push-ups. Push. Ups. When was the last time I did a push-up? was all I could think. It was three freakin' years ago!

(Fun fact: I've put on 12kgs since I moved to the South Coast and become a mumsband).

Quick as a flash I posted a message: "Nominate me H--k! I've grown fat as f--k!"

With the press of a button, I'd made the PTSD meme all about me. I'd been looking for an excuse to get fit again and here it was.

Only it wasn't. I started reading about Huck's growing knowledge of PTSD.

Around the world, war ravages minds as well as bone and blood vessels and I was shocked to learn that Australia lost three war veterans to PTSD last week alone. In the US it's around 20 a day.

Heaven knows how many civilian lives it crushes in places like Syria and Iraq. And Wollongong. Nowra. No uniform is necessarily required.

On Sunday, I got the meme summons from Huck. "You're up bro!"

To motivate my lardy butt I tried to think of all the people I knew who'd fought in wars and may have been affected by PTSD when it suddenly occurred  to me that throughout my entire, plushy life I have never personally known a single soul who has been to war. Not one.

No Papa from WWII; no dad or uncle from Korea or Vietnam; no mates in East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else where hell spills onto the earth.

This has astonished me. I have blithely absorbed images of blood and fire from the comfort of my couch for 30-odd years and never personally known anyone who'd been in a war. And then I've changed channels.

But while I've never personally known a soldier, over the years I've had the privilege of  interviewing veterans from every major conflict Australia has been involved with over the past 100 years.

In the early 1990s I spent time at a nursing home in Albury with a kindly old man who'd been but a boy  when a shell exploded beside him in some stinking trench in France.

He shook my hand with his left hand extended upside-down: a life-long necessity from having most of his right hand sliced off by the shrapnel. 

The Diggers of earlier generations spoke of "shellshock" but the younger vets I've spoken to - including the soldier I interviewed only recently who'd killed people in Afghanistan - have all been comfortable and honest with the clinical term: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I phoned up Huck the other day: "I don't know anyone who ever went to war. Do you?"

He did. His mate, a sniper, saw action in Timor and Iraq. When he flew home, PTSD came with him.

"It was heavy," Huck said, describing a series of ugly and depressing incidents that unfolded after his buddy's return to the Lucky Country.

But of course you can live your entire life in a peaceful land and still acquire PTSD.

And I do know some who have suffered after being exposed to horrors in our front-line emergency services.

I became friends with a country cop 10 years ago after a mutual mate of ours brought him along on our annual schoolmates surfing trip.

I'll call him "Robbo" here and my first impression was: sullen, grumpy and aloof, mumbling from behind a thick beard.

"What's with this guy?" I thought. By the end of the week, our mutual mate had clued us all in: "He's doing it tough. PTSD."

Different uniform - same problem.

As an outpost cop, Robbo had seen and done too much: he had to observe the autopsy of a child; hold the hands of dying people through mangled car doors; he'd beheld the silent, macabre aftermath of an eight-day-old suburban murder-suicide.

He was back on the surf trip the following year. We went in the ocean. He'd shaved. He even laughed.

The year after that, he'd left the police force and was working in a sugar mill and loving life. He's gotten proper help for PTSD. It's a killer for sure, but it can definitely be successfully treated.

A couple of years ago Robbo told me the only reason he's still alive is that every time he got to the brink of suicide, he was too pissed to pull it off. I'll see his smiling mug again on next winter's surfari.

Hopefully I'll be fit as f--k having done some push-ups but I'll definitely be more mindful of the millions of traumatised people around the world who aren't as lucky as I've been.

Lest I Forget.