Transcript
We'd do everything from go and check on the schools to patrol down to the border. Halfway through my time there I was to be the headquarters. So we centralized in a place called Marko in an old police station. So we slept and worked out of the police station which was abandoned and we'd stay there and then centralized all our patrolling from there and coordinate it.
Halfway through the six-month deployment, I went and was the acting troop sergeant for our reconnaissance cell, which was about seven armoured vehicles. And then we positioned, I moved down to the actual junction Point Bravo, which we opened and closed each day with the Indonesian military across the creek, which was about knee high, and we'd go down daily and then walk in the middle of the creek.
I'd shake hands and we'd say, "Right, how many coming through today?" And they'd say, "1100 with cattle, small trucks, children, the lot". And then we'd have our armoured vehicles at the creek line. They'd come through and we'd sort of vet and keep an eye on who they are. So just so that the militia weren't melting in with the civilian population, we did see some come through and we stopped them, funnily enough, black T-shirts and carried machetes and that, no arms.
But we would sort of make a point to isolate them because we could tell, they would shake hands with the Indonesian military on one side of the creek and everyone stayed away from them. So we knew straight away that we would sort of, you know, pay more attention to them and search them and just say, "Look, you can come back, but you can't do what you were going to do or what you think you're going to do" because we had patrols everywhere throughout East Timor …
Upon returning, now they would constantly come across and do mini raids and still be a bit of annoyance. But because we saturated with such a massive battle group, at the end it was very hard for them to move around to do any actions because we did have patrols in towns and villages and constantly moving around, which interfered with what they wanted to do potentially on behalf of certain other organizations that we sort of, you know, put a stop and curtailed what they thought they could do.
