Damien Timms - Rwanda veteran

A family connection

I grew up inner city St. Kilda, still barrack for them unfortunately. But I was just studying, but I always had this idea nagging to just join the Australia Defence Force. And to be honest, it wasn't sort of a popular thing back in '89 when I joined. Not many people actually wanted to go to the Defence Force but that's all I wanted to do since I was a little kid. In particular my grandfather, he was Navy. I don't hold that against him., me being army. I sort of looked up to him and I think I did sort of listen to the stories, the Anzacs and everything like that, and it just sort of stuck with me.

The other choice I wanted was a fireman. However, to be very outside of all that, I was actually studying art, I was just born with the ability to paint, draw, and all those sort of things. I won a few awards and everyone sort of wanted me to follow that desire and go through that. But I certainly realised studying that I was like, "No one actually is famous or rich until they're actually passed away or they've done something crazy like cut their ear off."

A lack of knowledge about Rwanda

This probably shows how far we've come in the way that we get information. There's no such thing as social media. Really anything that was recorded basically had to take, it was on a VHS or a BETA tape and was sent by standard mail before you got anything. So to be honest, Rwanda was, no one actually really knew what it was, even the first contingent that went. Even though I was in the second contingent, the first contingent come from 2 RAR as well, and most of those people had gone through initial training and all that together at the school of Infantry and we all trained together.

But we were sort of privy to the information that they had. But it wasn't that much. Even our initial training sort of centred around the veterans that had come from Somalia. So we're doing sort of training that was almost through the streets of Mogadishu and things like that.

An eye-opening experience

I definitely remember the whole trip because it was eye opening. I mean I had been overseas before. In fact, my company had been together for a long time, which was quite good. It didn't sort of move apart like things sort of happen now. We'd posted at New Zealand and all that. But when we deployed over there it was like we'd never been anywhere before because it was just such an eye opener.

They had a plane from a company called Tower Air. And I think that company actually got banned from actually landing in Australia because the safety standards were so below par. When we got into the aircraft, internal parts would actually fall off and all that, because basically to get us over to Africa, which is on the far side of the planet, they went and booked the cheapest flight they could. And looking at it now, we didn't have the Air Force that we do today which has its own capability to get us there.

A dark sense of humour

But when we got over there, I just remember one of my good friends that I'd gone through training with. And to relate to some of the movies that talk about the thousand-yard stare, these people I could see were just fatigued, mentally fatigued more than anything. And they just appeared like a shell of what they were. They had this sort of dark sense of humour about them. I mean some of the things were quite funny. They certainly greeted us, and stories that you hear about Australian troops all the way through history.

They had a whole collection of books. We didn't realise until months later what they had done, which was they ripped out the last pages out of every single book. So as you read through them for the few months, you go, ugh, and it had something like, love from Alpha Company at the back of it. So every book was like that. They had taken the time to go through hundreds of books and rip the last pages out. And they had big giant signs and that saying welcome to Rwanda and had the amount of days there. And 'Smoke those Embassy Blues', which are like the cigarettes that are local, and quite harsh. I mean all cigarettes are obviously we know today are quite bad for you. But I think these ones were even worse. But they had big signs like that.

A macabre story

So the way where the mess hall was, the kitchen was inside of the building, but it had a window that opened to the outside. So you had to grab your plates, go to where this window was and you were standing outside and they would serve it up. There was the bay Marie there and then you would walk down the way a little bit, go up some stairs and you'd be in the mess hall. That was just because the way it was organised to get everyone fed, because the building wasn't actually made to be a mess.

So in our initial meal, I just remember the Alpha Company guys watching us get food and were standing there. My first meal, as I was walking along outside going to the stairs, I felt like I got hit by this wet mop. What was that? What it was, was these big giant birds like ravens, hawks and all that. They would just sit up there and they were aggressive and just grabbed the food off your plate and just take off. They just stood there watching us and sort of laughing, sort of baptism of fire so to speak.

But there is a bit of a macabre story why some of these birds were there. Because there'd been so many people massacred and killed, there was just this overabundance of the population of these large birds that had grown because they're eating all the dead bodies.

Every now and then on patrol you would have some body part just drop out of the sky or something like that because they'd been carrying it. You'd never imagine something like that in your wildest dreams. But the food actually, so the caterers, every operation I've been on to be honest, the caterers have been number one. They know it's a good morale thing to keep the food up. But I'm pretty sure they got a commendation or something like that, but everyone was quite familiar with the cooks. And always, Australia in its support, always seems to put so much money towards the way that we eat.

Rotations

Looking at the place, Rwanda, there was no typical day. But you went on a rotation. I'm pretty sure it was like four different rotations. So the first being one would sort of be your rest rotation or would be, there was a main base which used to be the Kigali Rwandan officers academy, their equivalency of Duntroon but obviously quite small and not as grand so to speak. That had been all sort of bombed out and you had to provide security to that place because there was still a threat within the city of Kigali, the main city of Rwanda.

The next one was what we were really over there for, which was hospital duty. And that hospital duty was to guard the hospital, which was about 400 metres up. So you had front gate security and everything like that there. And the next one was providing patrols out to outer areas. So we'd be in vehicles and we'd go out to camps where displaced people would be. And that would be one rotation. And then I think the last one was actual rest and you stayed at the main camp. So there's sort of a reserves so to speak. So you had those four main tasks. But daily we'd just do that. Security was our thing.

Downtime

A lot of us would just go to the makeshift gym that they had. That seems to be a normal thing with a lot to pass the time, because you don't have all the bells and whistles of things today where you can just get on there and you've got thousands of movies on your hard drive or anything like that. So we didn't have any of that. We actually had to get tapes in or get mail in or something like that. Or do things like just sit around and talk with people, play a board game or something like that.

But a lot of time we'd be working. But I remember we watched quite a few movies or so. The other thing was we actually went out on patrol and we spoke with the kids that were around the area quite a bit. That's probably one of the hard questions you've asked me because I can't really remember that much downtime. I haven't really contemplated it that much.

Local interactions

We didn't have any real interaction with the Interahamwe, which were the main offenders, the first ones who had been pushed into the camps and over the border. But our main thing was, interaction was the children. A lot of them were orphans. One person, a lady called Madam Carr who is actually quite famous if you go back to things like the movie Gorillas in the Mist. She actually is one of the close friends of Diane Fossey, the lady who did that. And she used to go stay with her. So we'd go out to her. She ran her own orphanage.

Non-government organisation so we had a lot of dealings with them, like Doctors Without Borders and a myriad of other sort of organisations, AusAID, I think they may have changed their name now and a few others that were there. Other armies, so the British, the Canadians. Because it was a Canadian led mission, they were quite prominent and around. So they were quite close to us. And of course some of the victims or patients that you would have coming in when you're at the hospital.

You'd be a stretch bearer because there was still a lot of acts of violence, mines, people would get blown up with mines, et cetera. So you'd hear a blast and you'd go, “Yep, I'm going to go down to the emergency area" and a family would bring them in. You have to bring them in, so that was our, excuse me, our interaction with all the other sort of groups.

A mine incident

So we didn't do any mine clearing but I just remember I was playing soccer with some of the kids and the kids actually just were running to get this ball and I just noticed no one else was around me. And all the kids were like because I didn't speak Kinyarwandan. The kids, they actually started to learn Australian. In fact, probably the worst Australian. They were learning Australian Army English. It's got a few profanities in it. But they stopped and they all just basically were saying to me like “Boom”, that I was standing in a mine field.

And I just remember I walked back the way I came and I just kept cracking on with it. They said there'd been mines in that area. The other one that we had encountered was some British engineers. They were clearing down near a bridge and they cleared it all. They got rid of some mines. And they went down the next day and one of them got blown up. Someone had put a mine there. They were watching them and they basically deliberately blew up one of the UK soldiers. He was missing his legs and that sort of thing.

Rules of Engagement

So you had several cards. I think it was a light blue card just like the United Nations one, and they I may have some of my different deployments mixed up, but I definitely know there was a light blue card and I thought another one was pink for this. Then other operations has orange, silver, et cetera. But this one, yeah, the colors I just remember very more pastels than anything else. I think it was a pink and a light blue colour. And I'll make a point later about how far we've come from this point. Yeah, our equipment was quite below par.

Australia had sort of bled itself away from post-Vietnam and just like a lot of the equipment had sort of become antiquated and there was just a trickle of stuff. So what we went over there with, to compare with later what we have now is so different. What we learned was, we shouldn't go under some of the rules that we have through the UN where they basically said you can only defend yourself. We had two magazines of ammunition.

Because some people asked the question, "How come you didn't protect all the people that were getting murdered?" It was 10000 RPA, and it was three sections of us. So sometimes it's better to be in the peripheral as the observer than be one of the people getting counted. Because we had also checked our own history, 28 Belgium paratroopers had been murdered right in front of the Canadian UN person, Romeo Dallaire, months beforehand. So we knew what these people were capable of and the blood lust that they get. And sometimes it's like, hey, we just need to be like a porcupine, protect each other, and if we can protect some of the people that we can, because you can't save everyone.

Those rules had really sort of hamstrung us. Our equipment and just the way it was. I think holistically in the big picture, if you look at what happened with Somalia, in particular the Black Hawk Down incident, America didn't want to get involved in anything like Rwanda and that. And not many people had a real flavour to sort of do anything. They probably thought this was going to be just a Cambodia that sort of happened or Sinai and all these other sort of UN missions. However, this one went horribly wrong for the world so to speak. We just happened to be in the middle of it.

Kibeho

Kibeho, so my role again was provide security to the medical team. So we had a medical team go down there and it was all on the intelligence information that the RPA may have some vengeful acts for the Interahamwe, who had committed all this genocide. And they were going down there and they were saying that they were training camps for the Interahamwe to rise up again. Historically Rwanda has had one demographic being the Tutsis, and the Hutu.

They will rise up and they will train over the border. And they'll come over and fight them and so on and so on. It's just been like that for centuries so to speak. But this time obviously with the war they'd killed two million people in around two weeks or so, so they'd really had gone full on. I digressed from your question, but from an intel and needing to understand the history of things, it seemed like it was going to be another tit for tat sort of thing.

So they went down there. We were close to the area because we were doing sort of other outer patrols, because we were vehicle mounted. And then we basically got called up to go support them because a massacre had started there, basically vengeance acts against the people. When we initially got there, the Australians had started a triage station and were also there with the Zambians who actually had an outpost there. All the people were fleeing from the shooting. A lot of them had been killed so they moved, tried to get into where the UN soldiers were to protect them. A lot of them obviously didn't make it and the RPA would not ... It was like they had their blinkers on for the UN troops. Yeah they're there, but they're basically observers. They're not going to do anything. This is our country, let's get our vengeance so to speak.

So, we're there. We provided security. We looked after the triage station. And this went on for quite a few days. I personally got re-rolled into walking around with the United Nations Provost Marshal for that. So, he was a military police officer, and he was basically investigating what was here. The first thing was he was walking around with the old pace counter and he was checking how many bodies he could sort of see. After a count, because they had these long toilets and they we just dumping bodies in there or into the river. 

He had to start saying, “I think there's a hundred in there, there's another hundred there.” It got to around 13000 or so. I think when you look at the official records it's way less than it was. But I just know from my own sort of, what I witnessed, there was a lot. You just look out across the terrain, and you see it littered with bodies from mothers with their children strapped to them and all that sort of thing. They'd both been murdered or die of starvation because their parents had been killed.

Infection and disease

There was at the hospital, just infection and disease was always there, the dead heart of Africa was rife. So AIDS, we're talking the '90s when it was the biggest threat to the world because people didn't know what it was. You would actually go into the AIDS ward and you would see three people in one bed, skinny and they're basically on palliative care. We were doing one of the outer patrols and I just remember you'd get these updates or reports over the radio and the message was, 'There's a suspect case of Ebola at a village just over the border'. I reckon after hearing that in about two seconds, I seen the fastest U-turn in history.

The vehicles were like, "Hey we're not going up near there. Let's just get out of here." Even cholera in the camps, that was basically a water borne disease, once you get it basically people are gone from that. I got two bouts of malaria over there. But in saying that, I didn't know I had malaria at all until I went to East Timor and got Dengue fever. When they did blood test they said, "Hey, you've actually got these two bits of malaria." I think there's five in the world. I've got three of them. But to be honest it hasn't affected me yet. Knock on wood. But Dengue fever is something else.

Medicine and vaccinations

So one thing, we had a lot of vaccinations, which is I'd say Australia does all throughout its history has learned from the lessons learned being jungle fighters in Vietnam, Malaysia and World War II, that you need to have preventative medicine against these sort of combat elements. Being on a trip that was predominantly doctors and everything like that, they were very quite aware of it themselves. In fact, we had to take Doxycycline I think for six, seven months like that, which people complain about because sometimes people wouldn't eat when they had it. They say it gives people weird dreams and all that sort of thing.

I don't know if that's an urban, or I'll rephrase that, an Army myth. But we had to take quite a few, quinine and all that sort of stuff. There was another interesting thing with water. There was a big lake there you couldn't go into. It looked great, apart from the hippos and that in some of the other areas that would kill you at night-time if you went into them, because of the wildlife there as well, especially big gorillas but in the lake they had some bug or something like that so if you got into it and it got into your system, you basically will die. So yeah, a lot of places were just not nice. Australia is a harsh place but Africa can be just as harsh.

A rabid baboon

There was this baboon, baboons are quite aggressive, and it would hang around the hospital. And they thought it had rabies. And they tried to relocate it. So they put Valium in an orange and they gave it to it. This thing would go to attack people and had actually bitten people. The precaution was you had to get the, I think it's around seven injections, painful injections you got to get for rabies to prevent. Because one you get it, that's it as well. So there's a combination of the disease and the nasty animal. Baboons are a really aggressive animal. And you'd be walking through the hospital and this thing would be in the middle of the hallway or something and want to attack you.

I think what triggered it, one day someone saw it and went to throw a biscuit at it, like they were trying to be nice to it. And it hit it in the head and it just actually kicked off and started racing around and everything like that. So someone defended themselves and they hit it with a cricket bat. Every good Australian carries a cricket bat somewhere. All it did was stun it and make it angry, because this thing is basically 10 times stronger than a human.

Racing around and people went and hid and nothing happened. When it ate this orange too, it actually enraged it and made it get angrier. It didn't even affect it. It did the opposite. But then one day it come out. These people were sitting on guard duty in a gun pit and they were looking out and it came over the top of this roof and started attacking them under there. Cricket bat come out again and they hit it. Then they put it in a bag and thought "Oh I've killed it". They went and got someone and brought them over to get this thing, to get it relocated or just get it hidden because they were worried we've killed this animal. And then they looked in the bag and it was just sitting there enraged again and it kicked off again. So they kept hitting it with a cricket bat and it wouldn't go away. Eventually they disposed of it, I suppose is the nice way of putting it. But that was just one wild animal.

Gorillas in the mist

I remember I went up to see the mountain gorillas. If you're in a place like that, it's quite rare to see these animals, and you don't realise how big they are. I was certainly interested because when you first get in the country, they had a stuffed one in the lobby. We'd also heard that they not just had murdered people but they were going out and just killing the gorillas just for the sake of it. You get up there and they tell you not to stare at them because monkeys, if you look at their eyes they get challenged. Just to look down and be obedient and never run. Never run they say.

Walking up there it's like the guides were with us and there were a few other doctors and nurses. And I had alpha male syndrome “I'll lead from the front”. In reality that was the scariest thing because you can see these things. The silver back, one finger is about the size of four of mine and they're just snapping bamboo and chewing on it. And as we're walking closer he started beating his chest. It's like, "Whoa, here we go. It's going to kick off". And then it runs to challenge at me and I just looked at him like this. I was shaking as well but I remember just standing there and looking. Then it took off and did a few grunts. You're nothing. I've stamped my authority. I looked around. The people that were behind me originally, they'd all run and I was just standing there by myself.

Phoning home

Like I said before about, we didn't have social media and we didn't have the communications that we do today and that was evident. We'd have to get the local news sent to us, the Australian news. We even did, and this is back to the Kibeho massacre, we did an Anzac Day video, we were just doing a service around the flagpole and all that. We had to pre-tape it before Anzac Day to send home to say, "Hey this is what the troops are doing in Rwanda". But the reality was the Kibeho massacre had happened and we weren't doing that, even though they aired that later on.

My family did get to see that. But it would cost us about 50 US on a Telecom, not Telstra card. And you would use a sat phone or whatever and plug it in and call. You had to basically pay to call home. And 50 US back in '95, '96 was a lot of money, a lot to be honest. Yeah, you would sort of chew it up. I remember the cards had a picture on the front of it of a Somalia vet and he's holding the hand of a little Somali child on the front of it. They made that for our trip. It sort of shows the ignorance they had of Africa. In fact, I knew the person who was in the picture of the silhouette of him.

End of the trip

Looking at the end of the trip, it was interesting in itself because we had to clean the vehicles and we had APCs in country. They've actually been brought back and they sit in a museum now or something, the actual APCs, down at Pucka. They didn't have any way because it's a land locked country. They had to get them outside the country and then onto a ship somewhere and then so on. So when we're leaving and we were the last ones there, there was a handful of us that had to escort their carriers on the back of trucks to be loaded onto other trucks and then moved onto some other country where they'd be able to ship back to Australia.

We had to wear actually civilian clothing and drive and follow them and drive these civilian cars back and then get to the airport. Everyone else was waiting there. It felt like you're some covert operation. But it was just so that every time we drove around the Presidential Guard or something like that, they would harass the Australian or UN troops. So here we were basically driving around with weapons in these civilian cars and going from there to the airport to get on a plane to go.

But personally I didn't feel this form of elation or a form of "Hey the mission is only half done". I say in retrospect, because I did have that feeling when I left Afghanistan that "Hey, mission half done." But I did definitely feel some elation like I'm out of this place.

Mentally challenging

Rwanda was, as I said, it was just seen I think as just sort of this little side mission. It wasn't anything. People didn't realise some of the actual horrors there. If anything about Rwanda was sort of a mentally challenging, not physical. It's not like an operation in Timor where we're climbing hills, mountains, all that, or Afghanistan where you're out there and there's actually a real sort of danger from IEDs and all that. I'm not saying any of them are different. You can die on all these places, but that place was mentally challenging. So I think because it was mentally challenging people don't appreciate it as much.

In fact, when we got back we were sort of just given our medals away from the cameras. So we got off the plane and you know how at the airports they've got the area just before you go out to where your loved ones meet you and all that, a minister or something turned up. I don't remember who it was. It just sort of was "Here's your medal, here's your medal," and it was sort of 'Hey, on your way' type of thing.

I may sound like I'm exaggerating a bit but that's the way it felt. Later on it's very formal. Other medals that I've received from different operations it's like you can see the weight of Australia behind things. So much so, there's a lot of lessons we learned from Rwanda and the people who are still in the military apply from what they see as some of the failures to be a positive. So they've learnt from that so that our current troops will never go through that sort of poor process or systemic errors.

A lot of mental fatigue

Me personally, I think it's made me who I am today definitely. As in, appreciate things for what they are, because you see how some places can be very unlucky, unfortunate, all those negative sort of words. And then you can see how lucky Australia actually is. Which does dim my view sometimes when people are sort of whinging about how they've got it bad in Australia or something like that. I'll be tight lipped about it, but I sort of form the opinion like, "Hey, you actually don't realise how lucky we are."

I did have a bit of an outburst at my younger sister when I got back. She was whinging about something. It was just not even a thing. Because when you've got children walking up to you and they've got a machete stuck in their head and they're asking you for water, you go "Whoa, that child has problems". Then you watch other people whinging about that don't have the latest app or something like that or their WiFi is not working correctly, they are not actually real-life problems.

That's one aspect of it. I definitely would not ... so I'll probably rephrase the question. If was asked again to go and know what I was about to experience, I would still say yes. I definitely would go. Because I had this logical sense to go, "Hey, this is Africa, at its worst I get it" but I did get to go to Africa and see it for what it was because there was still good moments there. But it's still a lot of bad. The only thing that I do hate about that trip was the affect it had on a lot of my friends. There was a lot of mental fatigue or even further. And unfortunately there's quite a few people I know who aren't with us today. And some of that may be because of Rwanda. I don't know. But I'd definitely say at least a few have had the side effect of that.

Stuck in time

To wrap all this and I have mentioned a few times, we went from a level, and I won't just say Rwanda but Somalia, Cambodia and also Rwanda, those three trips, people deployed and they sort of got back and there was no real mechanisms. There were just a lot of your mates sort of thing and have a beer type thing. But as the years went by, you could sort of see some of it was a façade and people did have some issues. In particular, people I knew that deployed to Rwanda. You could see they were a different person.

Some of those people that I saw in Alpha Company when I first landed, you could see just a difference. And me personally, I'm the best backyard psychologist there is, but I could almost pick points that some of my friends had actually, their minds had stopped that day. They physically had kept moving in time, but their mind kept reverting back to a certain point in time. One of my friends, I remember we were standing on this rubbish in Kibeho. His child had just been born that day in Australia.

And one of us actually happened to be standing on a dead baby and we didn't know because it was under the rubbish. And somebody said, "Oh, look at that". He at that time had changed. And there was a few others like when you had to go, you're trying to save children and you're just basically retrieving bodies and people firing at you and all that. They will talk about those points, the sights, the sounds, the smell, so that their mind will always revert back to that point.

That's just me, like I said as a backyard psychologist, witnessing and experiencing your friends still moving with you in time physically, but their brains just keep going back to that point. They keep reliving it, because where I'll forget the sights and sounds and the smells and all that sort of thing, or you'll need something to jog your memory, they just keep over and over sort of stuck at that point.

Rising above it

As I said, there's a few positives. I saw some people, like there was a doctor there. She was a captain or a major who later became a colonel, Carol Vaughan Evans and she received a medal. And a few others that received great recognition for things that they did over there. Probably our medal count, actual unit commendations didn't come until 25 years later, which probably did settle the ship. It goes back to that point of where people didn't want to know about it when we first got back. And it's sort of that anguish of, we probably should've got more recognition. Because you then later look at other things that occurred and you think, well we just lived like that for six months.

Other units will get something for one event or one sort of incident. But I think everything was steadied by that unit commendation. And the people who really did rise above, especially the junior leaders that were there, they did really well. Some of them had only been out of the Royal Military College for a couple of months so to speak. The next second they're commanding infantry troops or medics around under stressful conditions all by themselves. And I just saw them rise above it.