Transcript
I spent three years in 1RAR and then one of the normal jobs of a new captain is to be the adjutant of an Army Reserve battalion. And so I went from one area to Perth to the 11th/28th battalion, or the royal Western Australian regiment and was there and Karrakatta barracks in Perth in 1999 and that's of course when the deployment to Timor all started with Interfet. I was anxious that I thought I'd missed the show there and then I got a call in late 1999 to say the next battalion that was on the rotation was 6RAR, "Would you like to be posted to 6RAR, as the Pioneer platoon commander?" and I thought that was fantastic because at that stage, I was going to be a third year captain doing a lieutenant’s job. I said "Yeah, I definitely want to go".
And so I moved back to, I moved to Brisbane for the pre deployment training for 6RAR’s tour but then we had the realization, the CEO at the time was Lieutenant-Colonel Mick Moon and he had decided that our area of operations in East Timor was in four different company areas and all of the specialist platoons in support company would send one of their sections to each one of those companies. And so as the platoon commanders we all looked around because we knew that someone was going to stay in Australia to keep the home fires burning basically, and we all knew that one of us was on the chop for that.
And then fortunately, I got asked to reinforce the intelligence cell and so I did that for the majority of the time, in East Timor other than a few months when we reconvened the battalion reserve and we used pioneer platoon to do that in order to chase up a number of militia activity and to have a reserve that we could plug into various areas that were that the CO was concerned about.
And so I did that for a number of months with a small platoon of pioneers and pioneers are a group of soldiers who have minor engineering skills and they're often sort of a bit of a ragtag bunch of fascinating characters and, and that was the case for my pioneer platoon in 6th RAR in 2000. It was a great team … they're all infantry soldiers, and they've got additional skills.
