Steve Brain - Rwanda veteran

Duntroon

I'd always wanted to be in the Army since a younger lad. My father, who'd been in the Army, both regular and reserves for a while, said, "If you're going to join the Army you may as well become an officer." He was a sergeant himself and he said the officers have better food and get more pay. He encouraged me to apply to the Royal Military College, Duntroon. And then about 1985 he said they're building this new futuristic academy and I think that'll be the best institution if you want to have a crack at that.

I applied for that and I was fortunate enough to win a scholarship to the Defence Force Academy. I was due to start there in 1988 when that summer holidays, after school, I was in a car accident and I smashed my collarbone into 12 pieces. Unfortunately, of course the Army couldn't take someone broken, so I got pushed away and I went and studied at Newcastle Uni and did journalism for a year. But in that time I re-approached Defence Force recruiting and they welcomed me back with open arms and said, "Look, we were just waiting for you to reapply to make sure you were still interested" and offered me my scholarship back.

I started at the Academy in January of 1989. Duntroon's a year or 18 months if you're direct entry into there, but at that age I was 18 so they prefer that you've got a bit of life experience. Mostly if you go directly to Duntroon you had either been through uni or you've done some sort of job first. I went through the Defence Course Academy and did a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, which was three years long, and then went over to Duntroon for the final year of purely Army training.

Operational Deployable Force

Well, we were called the Operational Deployable Force, the ODF, and Third Brigade rotated it's battalions between One and 2/4 of who was online and ready to go to a contingency type operation. Now, 1 RAR had been to Somalia about 18 months to two years prior, and so when Rwanda came about and it was going to be some infantry guys going over as the protection force, it was named that it was going to be from 2/4. And the commanding officer of the contingent, Colonel Pat McIntosh, was the then CO of 2/4.

As it turned out, we took a lot of individuals from the battalion, but the protection company, the rifle company of infantry was based on Alpha Company, which I was in, and we were told that the other three companies all had overseas jaunts that year to America, Hawaii and New Zealand and Alpha Company was the only one not going overseas. We were told that's why we got the deployment. I think it might have had a little bit more to do with the fact that Alpha Company was the champion company the year before I got there. And also, our OC, Mick Day, was pretty tight with the CO and I think that relationship had already been built to help create the opportunity for us to pick up that first rotation.

Pre-deployment training

It all happened very quickly. We'd been told that if the government decided we were going to go, that 2/4 was the unit sending the infantry and we'd been told that we'd be the ones within the battalion. But we still had to prepare and train as normal. We were away on a brigade exercise called Swift Eagle and we were allowed to go and do our own training and preparation. We really weren't sure what that was going to be, and like we still do today, we prepared for the last battle.

We took lessons learned from Somalia and we were working out food distribution points and how we could best do that. When we all gathered around one night around a transistor radio up at High Range Training Area, and the government announced that they were going to send forces to Rwanda and we knew that was going to be us. What followed was about a rapid two weeks of concentration. There was something like 43 or 48, some amazing amount of units represented in the 300 odd people that deployed. They all had to be concentrated into one area up in Townsville before we all took off to Africa.

Rwanda briefing

It turns out it's a very small country, about the size of Tasmania geographically. It's one degree south of the equator and very high altitude. It's probably, half again, higher than Kosciuszko, right up in the central highlands of Africa. And the north-western area was traditionally called the Congo, and that's where the Gorillas in the Mist came from, up in that high altitude jungle forest. I didn't personally know much about it at all.

We were very quickly briefed in on what had happened with the warring factions and the government forces leaving and the rebels taking over. But it was such a quagmire of who was who and we were told about the Hutus and the Tutsis and it seemed quite legitimate, theoretically, on paper, but it was only when you get into country you saw decades of inbreeding and to us it was hard to tell who were the Hutus and who were the Tutsis and then what allegiances people had. We were briefed as best we could and we got some preparation cards, we got some language training. French was the colonial language, but Kinyarwanda was the local language. Of course they tried to dredge up as many, quickly as possible, some French speaking linguists within the Army to be part of our contingent. But that two weeks was a bit of a whirlwind in preparation.

Diego Garcia

We went on an American C-5 Galaxy and my God, this was the biggest plane I'd ever seen. They could only about a quarter fuel, or something like that, the plane to land on the runway at RAAF Base Garbutt. Just because it wasn't long enough for them to take off. I saw a plane the day before we left and the wings were just so wide it was almost like they were flapping. But my whole platoon, we went on the 22nd of August on this C-5 Galaxy, with a lot of cargo underneath.

We flew into Perth, where they refuelled. The international airport there. We were even allowed to go into the duty free, which we all quite chuffed about. No grog, of course, but I remember buying a shortwave radio and a pair of binoculars. Very quickly we were on our way and about the middle of the night, about three AM, we stopped in again at the American base at an island called Diego Garcia, which is an air base in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

We were there for about an hour and a half and they gave us a bit of a feed and then we were back on the plane to head into Rwanda. I recall what struck me about Diego Garcia is we were just about to re-board and take off when an American Air Force Lieutenant Colonel came over and said, "Who's in charge here?" And I was the senior rank on the contingent. And he said, "Look, the guys that flew in yesterday, they nicked a couple of our number plates. On their way back in six months, can you tell them to return them, please." I had to assure this much senior officer to me that we'll find his number plates. I don't think they were ever returned.

Eyes wide open

We landed in Kigali probably about mid-afternoon. I remember getting off, we didn't have our weapons. Now, the RPA, they were all over the city. This was now their territory. They were right into the airport and the airport was a massive logistics hub. The Americans were pumping in supplies, lots of different countries and U.N. planes coming and going.

And the RPA, what looked like Mad Max mobiles, these technical vehicles, utes, just various weapons, and I was so glad to see some Aussie soldiers there waiting for us. And they were our protection to the compound. But the airport had been all shot up. It was partly rubble, part holes punched in concrete because of rockets and stuff. You definitely knew you landed in that war zone and it was game on, eyes wide open, I think.

Kigali

It was a proper city, as you could imagine, but it was very hilly. It was quite undulating. It was probably 5K from the airport to our accommodation. But I would only be guessing at the population before the war, but it was quite desolate when we first got there. There was no civilian population really living there. It was just the RPA, some aid agencies, and U.N. headquarters.

On the outskirts, once you left the city then into the jungle, it was just like high altitude tropical jungle. There was lots of banana trees, tall grasses, that sort of thing. But one thing that did strike me, there was a lot of eucalypts out in the bush and I don't know why. I've read somewhere that Australia donated a lot of seeds years before, but that did remind us of home a little bit. You'd be driving out in the back of nowhere and just see a lot of gum trees and that sort of things.

Compound accommodation

The compound we were in was part of a larger Army barracks, and the part we were in used to be what was their officer cadet school. Further round them was their training establishment. And the RPA landed or took over that base. Our base was right next to the RPA, now this conquering army. And then there was the hospital. And that was the hospital where our medics were getting a ward up and running for the U.N. And it was about a 500-metre walk from our accommodation. The RPA, they put in two checkpoints between us and the hospital just so that we had to go through their checkpoints every time we wanted to get to and fro.

The accommodation was multi-storied. For the senior NCO and officers, it was a single room each, just a small room. And for the ORs, they were put in larger rooms with bunks. Now, there was no doors. There was a slat where the mattress would go, but we didn't have mattresses, so we just put a stretcher on the slats. And there was a shower in each, but with no running water. That's where you'd just douse yourself with a bucket. I was pretty happy, probably about a month later, when markets first started returning.

I went and bought myself a second bucket so I could have one to douse myself and one to wash off. You'd put black plastic bag around the bucket and put your bucket in the sun all day just to try and warm it up a little bit for when you had to wash at night. It took the edge off the water. It made it a little bit warmer. There was three rifle platoon commanders and it was decided that because one of us was always going to be out on task, that'd we'd only get two rooms for the three of us.

We could never really set it up as your little spot sort of thing because one of us was always coming and going. And of one of the two, someone had been executed in that room, so there was a big blood stain on the wooden desk and we scrubbed it, we bleached it, we tried to do everything, but we couldn't get that stain out. It was always a constant reminder of what had occurred before we got there.

A changed mission

The commanding officer was heading over with the advanced party and he was there at the press conference with the Prime Minister. And Pat McIntosh, the commanding officer, has talked about that years later, that in a heartbeat, everything we'd planned for, just changed. Well, for us, that meant the protection that we had to provide spread us a little bit thinner on the ground because now we were tasked to go out just into remote villages and provide almost like a very short-term aid post. And we'd have to rope off or put barbed wire out just to provide a bit of physical distance and get the locals from that village that wanted to come and see the medics. Now, again, we're in Central Africa. Often it was looked at the Western world, white medicine.

Everyone had come and quite often they'd be giving just vitamin C placebos just to make sure that everybody got something. But of course things like scabies and that sort of thing was rife, head lice. The medics were trying to do their best. They'd pull a few teeth, set a broken arm, that sort of thing. But whilst that was going on, we were just making sure that things were safe and secure in that environment. But you do have to remember, there was no enemy direct for us. We were a U.N. force in there providing protection for other U.N. troops, namely the Australians.

The RPA had been at war with the government forces and they were now the conquerors. And they came in and behaved like a conquering army, full of bluster. They tried to poke our buttons a few times, but we had to have drummed into us, and we made sure our soldiers knew, they weren't our enemy. And in fact, if we reacted to a prodding inappropriately, then they had force of up to 50,000 at the end of that war and we were a mere couple of hundred. A, the odds against us in a fight of that magnitude were slim, and then we were there at the government of Rwanda's behest.

They had to approve for the U.N. to be in there. At any moment, if they turned around and said, "No, you've disrespected us," they could have kicked us out. The Australians get kicked out, that's a mission failure, and indeed the whole U.N. doesn't have the medical support they need to operate, so the whole U.N. mission could fall over. There was that sort of ramifications we had to be quite mindful of.

Children of war

We felt relatively safe, but as time went on, that got better. When we first got there tensions were very high, and it was only about two weeks after the entire war, genocide. The army then had become quite popular, or the RPA, so they were actively recruiting, getting more people in. And they were taking about nine days to train a solider, give them a weapon. And that's what really concerned us more, is the lack of training, lack of understanding, lack of intellect in dealing with weapons that a relatively untrained person might have.

That hadn't been through the war and now might have felt like they needed to make their mark. There were, as is often the case in some of these countries, children of war. You might be stopped at a checkpoint and a kid of 10 years old has got an AK-47 and he's pointing it at you telling you to stop or you're not allowed through. And you'd show him the official paperwork and he didn't care. He wanted to search your vehicle to see what he could nick, because all the civilian vehicles come through, that's what he'd do. He'd take his water or a bit of food. And we'd said, "No, you're not doing that."

And so that had that little bit of tension and we'd just try to calm him and just get someone of note or authority to come and talk to us. That was always a worry type thing, but like I said, as time went on then, civilians slowly started coming back into the capital of Kigali and things returned a little bit to, I guess, a bit more normal. Markets opened, a few shops then got opened. Mind you, they were opened by people who'd just come back, would walk into a shop and say, "This is now mine." They didn't know what they had or know how to run a business, and it was the same with some of the houses. Civilians would return and find that conquering army or RPA officer was now living there and it was like, well, "I'm either going to kill you or you kill me or one of us leaves". In those first days, there were still bodies in the street, but as things cleaned up, we certainly felt that little bit safer.

Downtime

For me personally it became a bit of exercise, a bit of PT, and I think for most of the folks they actively pursued some fitness. With that, someone threw up a basketball ring so you could shoot some hoops. I think there was a ping pong table. We still had three messes. We had an OR's, a senior NCO's and an officer's mess. It was probably one of the last times that we were allowed drink on operations. The bar was open on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night just for a couple hours after dinner so you could unwind and go and have a cold beer.

Probably six weeks to a couple of months in we got some TVs delivered and some people started getting some VHS movies sent over. And I remember the first movie I watched over in country was The Odd Angry Shot, which is the classic Australian film. Almost a little bit ironic, I guess, from where we were. That was probably our downtime.

Hats off to the cooks

We were on combat rations, ration packs for a fair while. My memory serves me right it was probably four to five weeks, as we got the kitchen up and running and they were trying to establish a supply line for fresh food, which is quite difficult. The cooks then got us onto 10-man ration packs, where they were able to turn hard rations into something edible. They were fantastic. We started getting some vegetables in, that sort of thing.

Eventually we got a little bit of meat, which I think was mostly water buffalo was the cheapest they got in. And even a bakery. It took a fair while, as people came back into the city, we hired or we got a hold of a bakery and they went and checked all the workers for tuberculosis and those sort of things, and then we employed them and they cooked bread just for us. That was a luxury when we had that first taste of fresh bread.

A good friend of my family's, Doc Holiday, he had been in the Army with my dad and he worked in catering for Qantas. He sent me over a couple of trays of those little individual vegemite squares. I'd grab a couple of vegemite squares and take it up to a meal and you'd put it on your bread and thought you were the king. I take my hat off to those cooks, and often the military cooks get a hard time, but they did phenomenal.

Butare markets

We'd quite regularly go and have a look at the markets. It was actually, for us, it was a good way to judge the tension in the town. Not so much Kigali, the big city, but if you were out and, for us, for about five months of our rotation we had a permanent presence down in the south in a university town called Butare. And there was a U.N. outpost down there as well. Going to the markets there, you got a bit of a feel for if it was popular and people were smiling you would garner that things are okay. But you could just sense when things were a bit more tense or something was happening and that got the spidey senses prickled."

Horrible sights

Some of the sights... and we were young men. I'd turned 25 when I was over there. And most of my soldiers were younger than that… now , every person that went out, whether it be a medic, it might have been an intelligence officer, it might have been someone going to check the local water, they had to have their protection party with them. And mostly we'd operate in four to five man protection groups. And so the lake, Kivu, was just littered with bodies.

There was a story of the adjutant who was a transport fellow, I can't remember his name. They stopped the vehicle on the side of the road and just went to take some photos and he trod on something squishy and he looked down and he's put his foot in the chest of a cadaver. These sort of sights. And if not sights, smells. That decaying body smell. We didn't have a psych deployed with us or anything like that. We did have the unit padre, Ron Peacock, a lovely fellow. He would be tasked to try and counsel anybody if they'd seen something terrible and encourage them to talk through it and that sort of thing, and offer his services.

We tried, in that way. As a commander, if I saw someone a little bit on edge, you might get one of his buddies to stand by him or just make sure that he was never left alone or that sort of thing. But it was quite regular. I think for me the most horrific thing I saw is our intel guys were tasked by U.N. headquarters to go to a church that they'd heard had some dead bodies. And so I went along with the protection task and it's hard to describe. To this day, I regret going and wish I hadn't have gone, but at that time you're young and brazen and I'm going to see what I'm going to see. You can't stop me type of thing.

Well, there was over 300 bodies in this church with their luggage. They were fleeing home and they'd obviously sought refuge in the house of God, which I don't know whether it was a RPG or RPA, IGF, sorry, who had done it, but someone had killed them. Now, there was probably about another 50 lined up outside and as a soldier, what concerned me was that these people had just accepted their fate. Now, the soldiers, to save money on bullets, ended up using machetes to kill these people.

And I'm thinking if you're going to die, if you're just waiting in line to die, at least fight back or run, don't just stand there and wait for your turn. And that really got my goat. And the skin on the faces was decayed enough and opened everyone's jaws, so it looked like they were all screaming. At that point, I went for a bit of a walk around the church and again, I came across what was Sunday school. And in there was maybe about 20 bodies of children all under 10, under eight years of age. And they all had just been slaughtered and left there. And it was the only time I was a little bit reckless.

I also had a military license so I was driving one of the vehicles and we drove back along dirt roads. I was, I'll admit, probably a little bit fast and I went through an RPA checkpoint. And their checkpoints were quite literally a couple of milk crates with a bit of string. But they had a rifle if you didn't stop. And we would do the right thing and stop, as I referred to earlier. But this time I was just a mixture of terrified, angry, trying to work out my emotion, and we just drove on through, ran through it. And I thought if they shoot at us, they shoot at us. And they didn't and we kept going home. One of my NCOs afterwards grabbed me and said, "Are you okay, boss? What the hell was that all about?" Had a nip of scotch that night just to try and calm the nerves.

Rules of engagement

There was none when we first got into country and that was what was kind of weird. All the deployments I've done since, there's been something established. But we had what was called a yellow and red card that we trained with. The yellow being a bit more subdued, the red a little bit more ready. We went over on what they called yellow card. That was for the rules for opening fire, that you had to be under threat before you opened fire.

We had that probably for a few days and it was actually the Australian legal officer, Ozzie Osborne, who rewrote the rules of engagement for our contingent, and they ended up being adopted by the whole U.N. And he gave quite a few lessons to a lot of the African battalions and that sort of stuff so that everyone was on the same sheet of music with these rules of engagement. I've still got a copy laminated. We were mostly at load, and it described the laws that you were allowed to open fire under. And that was if either you or someone you were charged to protect was under threat of life.

And we were trained to go through an escalation. Cocking your weapon, ordering someone to stop, that sort of thing, before you would open fire. And if a particular circumstance you were going on a task that they felt, the ops guys felt was possibly more hostile, you were ordered to go to a high degree of weapon readiness for that task. But just having a read of those orders, this morning, I had a bit of a chuckle. It said things like, "You are to avoid, at all costs, coming between warring factions. If you find yourself between warring factions, you are not to take a side" this sort of thing. It said, "You are not to engage in automatic fire unless you are being ambushed or attacked by a group." I just remember thinking in my training, "Well, how do I judge what a group is that's attacking me rather than a couple of individuals?" But thankfully we never had to open fire like that.

Phoning home and mail

Telstra provided us two payphones for the 300 odd people. There was always a line to use those. And for 20 bucks you could buy an STD card. $20 would get you about a five-minute phone call home. The married guys with families and kids would probably use that a little bit more. I called home to either my girlfriend or mum or dad probably once a week with those phone cards. Mail was quite good so we'd regularly write.

It was fantastic receiving mail or parcels from home with some Chicken Crimpy or some Tim Tams or something. And of course, just a letter from home from friends or family was always fantastic. You'd rip it open and read it really quickly and then you'd read it a second time and savour it, then leave it out for maybe a day or two and just reread it on odd occasions.

Helping an orphanage

I made sure I wrote back to everybody that sent me a letter. One of my favourite ones was there was a school-teacher in Dubbo, never met her, never knew her. She'd heard that we'd been adopting some orphanages. And you'd talk about recreation. One of our favourite recreation past times was to go to an orphanage and just play with the children. And they were so many, so many. My favourite one was an orphanage called Concern and it was run by an Irish lady named Maddy. I don't know her surname, it was just Maddy.

And she had about 600 children because their parents had been slaughtered and most of them had either been hacked with a machete or just left to fend for themselves. We'd go along with some soccer balls and volleyballs and just play. Just getting our play, chasings or whatever it might be. And you'd really see the soft side of these big, tough soldiers when they just get to play with the kids. Anyway, but this schoolteacher at Dubbo had heard about this so she went on a campaign to send us muesli bars. We got a couple of boxes of these muesli bars that we'd take to the orphanages and hand them out to the kids. Inside was just a letter.

This anonymous to me lady, I wrote back to her a thank you and explained we'd given then to these kids and that sort of stuff. She ended up reading this letter over the Dubbo local radio and then I started receiving more letters from people around that area. It was quite that connection to home, which was fantastic. I wrote back thanks and that sort of thing for what they did. But these kids just loved it. Could only imagine the rations they were on because it was all the aid agencies providing food. Just a couple of muesli bars with a bit of yogurt or a choc chip or something like that.

Mayan Gumbo

There was this one lad. What was his name? Mayan Gumbo, I think his name was. M-A-Y-A-N Gumbo, Mayan Gumbo. He took a shine to me and whenever I went over, I'd sit under a tree and he'd come and sit in my lap. He was about four years old and he'd play with my watch. And I'd set the alarm for him so that it'd go off after he'd been playing with it for a few minutes type thing.

But he had this big bandage around his head as he was recovering from machete wounds. The wounds in his head formed like a W with another V. And I ended up, I asked Maddy "What are these scars and why are they shaped like that?" And she said, "That's a machete attack". The adult with the machete has just swiped forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand three times of each and he was just left for dead. I often wondered what became of him, but his smile would just light up your heart. They were in good hands.

Pride in service

I was very proud after my training to become an officer. I just never thought somehow... We had this great peace after Vietnam. We had some smaller things like Cambodia and Namibia, and then Somalia where 1RAR, our battalion group went, but it never seemed on the radar that something else was going to happen. When it did, those couple of weeks before I left, I could see my friends were torn.

There was a bit of professional jealousy, and yet they were proud that I was going and this sort of thing. And then when we came back, we were almost shunned to a degree by some of our peers. I never picked up a specialist platoon, like mortars or recon, one of those. And I was told, "You've had your go. You went to Rwanda." And fair enough, I guess. And it wasn't until several years later when East Timor started that greater armies started to get their opportunities on deployment and I was quite grateful for that. Because for a while, Somalia, Rwanda, we're the only ones who'd been somewhere.

And you didn't want to be a braggart, but you wanted to be proud of your service. And I was, and to this day, quite proud that we went. Helped form, I guess, the young man that I was. The friendships that we created there, even last year at the 25-year reunion when we were awarded the Meritorious Unit Citation, we had a bit of a party with a big collective group of friends that we'd all deployed together 25 years ago. And here we were with our partners now and all a bit older, bit greyer, but still able to share a laugh and a smile with some of the stories. That was very much an Australian thing, I think, just that mateship that helps you. Never regretted going, but there's been some tough times post. But I think that's the case with anything you do in life really.