Transcript
My initial role prior to Rwanda was war fighting. We thought we were going to do one thing. We didn't. We did some minor form of, armoured vehicles are essentially protection for the contingent in Rwanda, from that and because it was such a unique deployment, we were sort of brought into the mix of, "Right, if this thing ever happened again, what would we do?" and learned a lot of lessons from that and it was the first armoured UN deployment ever by Rwanda small troop, so the sort of lessons learned about how do we integrate Australian armour into an operation like that with the basis of potentially future operations and then jump, fast forward to 1999 when East Timor was to be supported by Australians to establish itself as a new nation or a country, we then went in as the first push into East Timor.
So again, we were under the expectation, the potential, because we were deemed as INTERFET not UN, it became UN after the fact of INTERFET, which is what I was part of, virtually came in, stormed the beaches, like Normandy, landed and then moved out to the borders, and then internally the country started to build itself with the help of the military and then, finally, the UN with other nations coming in and supporting.
