Transcript
There was a very small contingent of Navy folks. There was probably about six or seven of us at the time. We were given a, you know, in the Navy, it was slightly different. When you go on a deployment, everybody goes and we just get told shortly before we're leaving, where, you know, the main places that we were going to. This massive document, in my eyes, came.
It was a pre-embarkation instruction. Be here, do this, do that, do this, you know, this is where you pick up your, your uniforms and various other bits and pieces. And I got that in the internal mail. One day I was told to report to reinforcement holding company at Randwick, which was only down the road from where I lived, I lived at Maroubra. So I could actually almost see it from my house.
And, yeah, we just spent our initial period of time there. I think it was a couple of weeks, just getting to know everybody, bit of team building, getting a bit of situational awareness of what the country was like what was happening out there and also our rules of engagement, that type of thing, when we were there, meeting up with the Air Force contingent, and also the army contingent folks doing a bit of PT, which was a bit unusual for us in the Navy, you know, so, and just a bit more team building and familiarisation with where we were heading and we did that for a couple of weeks. And then we were just waiting for our, you know, dates to then be sent off to the airport basically and, you know, get over there into Somalia.
