Transcript
To be honest, it was mad. The U.S. literally unloaded us, and as we got off, they're going, "Watch out, there's mortars in the tarmac there. There's mines out there." So the ground guider's parked here and said, "Right, wait for the sun. You can't go anywhere until the sun comes up because of movement." We heard some rifle fire going off in the distance. The airport terminal had been shot to buggery, holes and everything all through it. So it was just like you just landed in a war zone. So it's ironic, 18 hours earlier we ate McDonald's at Townsville, and then we landed. And then this was going on.
Ironically too, once the sun come up, the U.S. had virtually gone. They just literally packed up and left. There were bugger all U.S. there. They cleared out. And I think that was because of Somalia. They didn't want a repeat of what happened with the Black Hawk incident, et cetera. They literally left. That was another ironic thing. We had some ammunition, we got some. One of the first things I saw when the sun came up, and I was looking at the airport, was a little kid carrying a water jerry on his head with his mother and stepping over bodies out the front of the airport. And he sort of waved to us which... that was a bit surreal.
Another strange thing was, in the front of the airport, was a freshly dug fair bit of dirt. And it turns out it was a mass grave. And someone's watch was going off under the dirt, like "beep, beep." And I just said, "Wow, you don't see any of that." So my driver was relatively new in the army, he'd only been in six months. And he was, in those days, lucky to get a deployment because they generally sent senior people on the deployment but he got the luck of the draw to come.
He was actually pretty upset and I didn't know what would occur, and I said to him, "Look, have you shot someone? What's going on?" And he said, "I miss my girlfriend." And I said, "Look, we've more things to worry about right now with all this going on than that and we'll talk about it later." But that was another point that sort of... And this all happened literally as the sun's coming up. So you can imagine it was a bit different from Townsville McDonald's.
