Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Early influences on enlistment
My grandmother's brother, who lived with us, the family farm was in through my grandmother and her brother, and he was in the second AIF. He was 2/2nd Battalion. And around ANZAC Day when I was really young, we would have all of Gundy's, who was my great uncle, all of his mates would turn up and they'd be around for a couple of weeks, and a lot of memories with those old fellas.
And I become quite close to one of Gundy's very good mates and he was sort of like a mentor, second grandfather figure to me, because both my grandfathers passed before I could remember them fully. So they may have been sort of an influence, but also I'd left school in... finished end of 1977, and all of '78 I was a full-time hand, working on the farm with my father, and I just thought, "I need to get out and see a bit of the world." If this was going to be my life, I wanted to have a bit of an adventure before I became a full-time farmer.
Dust on your boots
I was certainly well aware of the Vietnam conflict. We had a fellow from my hometown who was killed in Vietnam and we were a very small country town, about 1500 people. So I think we were aware and ABC radio and black and white TV was our source of awareness.
So it was certainly well and truly in the press. But again, it goes back to that. I think until you actually get dust on your boots, you don't know. You can read, you can watch all the movies, you can talk to people, but until you actually get on the ground yourself, or you actually go through the experience, you can't do that to gain full understanding, and people react differently and it affects them differently.
I certainly know bravado, but it didn't stop me from enlisting, and I think we all want to test ourselves and we all want to challenge ourselves and certainly nearly 40 years in army did that for me, and I certainly wouldn't change a thing.
Initial training
Enlistment date effectively was 16th of January 1979, so first day in army. And I joined, took the oath in Sydney at the recruiting office there, and the first night in army was spent at HMAS Watson. So then down to Kapooka, to Wagga Wagga, and then in the middle of summer, three months of training down in the Wagga/Kapooka training area….You were just a general enlist and then after several weeks you were given some aptitude testing.
You know, sit in the classroom and answer those questions, run by the psyches, and then you were given a corps suitability rating, and then those that had choice put their hand up for a particular corps. But I will say that most of us didn't have a clue.
One or two in the platoon had some reserve service or some cadet service, but at the end of the day, we didn't really know. And you took a lot of the lead off your instructors. So you knew what corps they were and you knew their experience. Most of them, in fact, all of them were Vietnam veterans. And you got to, if you had the choice, you'd make a choice or put it down as one, two, three. But it was really service need, and it was what army needed on the day is where you went, basically. I
was selected for Royal Australian Armoured Corps, and my initial employment training was conducted at Puckapunyal at what was then known as Armoured Centre. And we then just joined a queue, waiting for an opportunity to jump on your initial employment course. There were two streams in those days, there was a tank stream or there was a cavalry stream, which was basically mostly APC. And someone flipped a coin for you and you either went heavy or you went light, and I went to the APC stream.
The Sinai Desert: First deployment
My first deployment occurred in 2004 and it was to the Multinational Force, an observer peacekeeping operation in the Sinai Desert, a part of Egypt, between Egypt and Israel, and it's a monitoring force there of the 1979 Camp David Accord, not a UN mission, but 20-odd nations agreed to provide a peace monitoring force between the Arabs and the Israelis, basically. And it was a six and a half, seven-month rotation for me… So , 20, 25 ADF members.
During my time they were all army. The CO of the contingent had a 12-month post and the rest cycle through on a three-month split rotation. So your six months was your nominal time for deployment, but they'd split it half so that you had continuity on the ground…I was the Australian service contingent RSM, as well as the force training warrant officer. So dual hat.
National role was regimental sergeant major, mission role was the force training warrant officer… I spent a lot of time on the international border, or the IBL, International Border Line, mainly where the northern part of the Sinai butts up to what was then Gaza, as in the border. It has since changed. The circumstances there had changed. But in the northern part of that International Border Line, quite hostile, and certainly I saw plenty of kinetic activity, so tanks, aircraft strikes, helicopter strikes.
One of our posts in the north was accidentally engaged by the Israelis, so quite a lot happened. And we would go down to the border line to investigate violations of the treaty. So a little bit happening, but back in the bases there was not a lot. That picked up post my time where the terrorists certainly blew up a mail van at one stage, which scared or gave some excitement to the Canadians who were operating the mail van.
But it did escalate. We actually had a bomb detonate at the Taba Hilton, which is down the southern end of the peninsula, which the force had quite a number of people staying in there at the time and there were quite a number of injuries as a result of that explosion. So, lot's happening. It certainly wasn't a Pacific Island retreat. Things were happening all the time.
Visiting Tarin Kowt and Kandahar
If you're in the Combat Outpost or the Forward Operating Bases, it was quite austere, the conditions, and we spent a bit of time downrange there at many different patrol bases and areas that we had control over… It could be as short as a day or two days or a couple of weeks.
It just varied on what the purpose of the visit was. Particularly during times of casualties, et cetera, they were normally shorter duration in-out type of activities, but it was a few hours, four-odd hours in a Hercules and two and a half hours in a C-17 just to get into Tarin Kowt.
So you'd use that time and use the resources wisely, but a lot of time spent downrange engaging, visiting, and then the commander had his other international engagement responsibilities as well. So we spent quite a bit of time downrange…I spent almost all of my time either in Tarin Kowt, or what the troops would name TK, or up in Kandahar at the main base in Kandahar, and a lot of office calls with the, you know, our partner nations, visiting their commanders and their senior enlisted staff as well, as well as visiting our own troops.
Lots of engagement just talking to Australian Defence Force personnel on their experiences, the challenges, giving them updates, providing information, changes to the missions, et cetera. So, no typical day, but a lot of time in meetings, a lot of time in helicopters flying around, dropping in, visiting people at their outposts and their bases.
Troop morale
Rarely come across a negative individual or a negative comment. Two groups, there were those that stayed inside the wire and then there were the combat forces that were outside. Now, of course, the combat service support also ventured out of the wire, but really very austere out in the outposts, not so austere and a lot more services and support available in the main bases.
And that doesn't mean it was all beer and skittles either because the troops that were working inside the main bases had long shifts in the operation centres or doing their role. So I don't think it was an easy day for anyone, just different threat levels faced by different groups, and certainly up in Kabul, which we visited a bit as well, there was a constant threat of improvised explosive devices or rocket attacks.
So, it was really just engagement, liaison, but I'd say on average the troop morale was always high. They always loved the work, loved being busy, but challenging in different ways.
Condition of infrastructure
We had quite a large number of embeds in Kabul as well, but it varied. It just depended on the cycle of the operations as to where people were. So there was a node that was at KAIA North Kabul International Airforce Base, sorry, International Airport, pardon me. But yeah, it just varied.
Mostly embeds up there, and then Kandahar was the same, a lot of embeds, as in embedded personnel, into various headquarters. Whereas Tarin Kowt was more operational, supporting the operations outside the wire. When we first flew over, it was, well, when I first went into Kabul, it was very little electricity, very little infrastructure was up and running, and as opposed to my last trip in there in 2019, it was lit up like Kings Cross in Sydney. I
t was a lot different, much better lines of communication. So bitumen, blacktop roads leading out of the capital. The first trip in, the road infrastructure was just terrible. But over time, life returned to whatever normal is and infrastructure was certainly improved significantly. I think at the time it was the busiest single runway airport in the world. You'd take off either in helicopter or fixed wing aircraft and just the hardware that was on display, so all the large unmanned aerial vehicles, the predators, reapers.
But even more interesting was the coming in on the approaches because you had layers of air traffic, all different types of aircraft, and quite busy for the air traffic controllers. I imagine they would've been earning their money there, but just a massive infrastructure. Kandahar the same, just 40-odd thousand people cluttered around the airport, and that's your foreign military forces and contractors. So quite a lot of hardware.
Level of threat and ground truth
In Kandahar, the sirens would go off. One of the buildings where we were housed in in one of the camps there, it received a full-on rocket strike in sort of the top area, the accommodation where the VIPs would visit. So the risk was always there. TK, yes. So Tarin Kowt, under attack. Not often, maybe once or twice, but you'd sort of either come in after or before an attack.
Kabul, there were certainly some very serious breaches in the outer perimeter, not while we were there, but at various times the insurgents had taken out the first wall and then entered the base and then left to the troops to tidy it up. So it was something that that constant threat was always there.
And certainly out on patrol with our forces down in Uruzgan Province, we certainly engaged in kinetic activity on patrols and stuff, but not direct firefights, if I could say that. But we weren't supposed to be doing that, the general and the RSM Force… it's ground truth, and if you knew my boss at the time, he was very hands-on, and there were probably many who thought that that wasn't the smartest thing to do, but that was just his style.
That was his leadership and we certainly stayed out on the patrol bases and went out with the troops, be it vehicle mounted patrols, either helicopter or actual dismounted patrols…And I'd have to say, I mean, we were sort of almost like voyeurs going out, but it was really just to get a sense for the community, the environment, and just to, I suppose, have the opportunity to engage and talk with the troops and just experience a little bit of what they were experiencing.
An IED incident
We had an incident on one patrol out of a patrol base called Musisi where our patrol had changed direction and the people in the village attempted to relocate an explosive device. Unfortunately for them they detonated it while they were moving it, and that was only 100-odd so metres in front of our patrol.
That didn't end well for the people trying to relocate the device and we actually watched their funeral in the afternoon. So that sort of thing gets your attention. When one of those things detonates pretty close by you certainly focus on your training and making sure that everything's okay. But fortunately the young patrol commander did a great job and all that was managed appropriately and no casualties on our patrol side of the house.
The Middle East and Afghanistan
So in 2009, I'd finished up as the regimental sergeant major of the 1st Brigade, and for the first five months of 2010, I was sent to the war college to do the single service component of the Australian Command and Staff College Course. Whilst I was undertaking that training out at the staff college, I was given a posting order to go into the Middle East as the regimental sergeant major of Joint Task Force 633, which I was quite pleased about, but my time at the staff college was cut a couple of weeks short to undergo that deployment.
So a late May deployment, a couple of weeks in-country training and then took over my role in June and then right through to the end of the year and rolled out very early in the New Year back to Australia to take up a posting in Headquarters Forces Command Army in Sydney at Victoria Barracks in Paddington.
So in 2010, I went in the middle of the year. The posting to Forces Command was the following year, but seven months in the Middle East area of operations … working directly to Major General John Cantwell. He was the Joint Task Force commander… But we spent a lot of time flying into and out of Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, Bahrain, basically all over the Middle East area that our commander had responsibility for. We spent two separate trips at sea on Her Majesty Australian ships, both Parramatta and Melbourne. So I got to spend a bit of time in the Gulf, bobbing around there with the sailors that were deployed.
Digger culture
I just think the Australian culture is quite different to the American culture, and so I say, what you do in barracks you do on exercise, you do on operations. So you really don't change. The personality of the people don't change, just the level of training increases as you go through those steps. But I think the Aussies are pretty laconic, pretty laid back and quite accepting, and engage differently with the local community to what I think the Americans do, but that doesn't make it any better or any worse.
It's just that I think the diggers are quite happy to have a joke and a laugh, whereas maybe the Americans are not so... take the same approach. But it doesn't mean it's right or it's wrong, it's just different. And I think the digger can make friendships much quicker, I think, would be fair to say, but you take the Dutch or the British, each nation has its own culture and its own approach. But yeah, the Aussie digger are very friendly and quite open to engage, whereas not everybody, I would say, would be.
A little bit of excitement
I think it's the same for everybody. There's a bit of excitement, there's the unknown, but you're flying into a secure base mostly, and of course on the fringes, those landings and take-offs, I think it's more exciting taking off in a C-17 when it tips on one wing and scoots away. But I think there's definitely threat levels and the air crew operate the aircraft according to those threat levels, are still pretty exciting.
I don't think there was too many times where I was really worried about any outcome about not getting on the ground or not getting off the ground. But again, it was always exciting, always a bit of adrenaline coming in and going out. Helicopter different out in the outpost because you're mostly over area that's not necessarily controlled by you coming into those bases, but I always enjoyed that little bit of excitement, whether it be a bounce on landing or just going out and catching up with the troops.
Afghan ingenuity
I think you can watch all the pictures and all the movies and you can read all about it, the topography and the demographics and the population, all the rest, but it's not until you get dust on your boots that you really get a full appreciation for it. And the conditions as well, extremely hot to extremely cold.
I come in at the beginning of the fighting season and went out in the depth of their winter, so you got to see all levels of extreme. But yeah, one thing to read about it or to be briefed on it, but another thing to actually get out on the ground and experience it…And the starkness.
So looking out in the Dasht, or the desert, and the mountains and the clear definition on a really sharp, clear day, and look back to the Rud, or where the river is, and the green is just absolutely amazing. And it stops and starts like a line on a piece of paper. So it's not sort of peters out and then becomes desert, et cetera, it's as defined as that.
So wherever you can get water to dirt, you can grow stuff, and they're quite good in agricultural space, but they're amazing aquifers to me. We'd be out in the middle of a little valley or gully, stomping along, and you come across a roaring channel of water, and you could see the rivers below you, and it might be at one kilometre or two kilometres away from you.
You just go, "How did this water get here?" Simply, they would pipe it off, tap it off from a couple of kilometres upstream, and then just follow the contours of the land and you come to this valley and it's beautiful and green and this crop's growing. Yet you know you're nowhere near a water source and they've used the lay of the land and their knowledge of how to channel water and how to move water around. Phenomenal. And coming from a dairy farm, I was fascinated.
And we had flood irrigation, as well as irrigation systems, but nothing of the complexity that these fellas, the farmers were dealing with. And of course, it's so easy for someone upstream just to cut your water off, so you'd imagine that there would be quite a few blues over control of water. But that was one thing, and you talk about what things really stood out.
It was just their amazing ability to move water around so that they could then farm and crop. Just amazing. No technology. So the village might have a tractor or someone would have a tractor, and certainly amazing patchwork. Those that had electricity don't go and run your occ health and safety or work health and safety pen over the cabling, et cetera.
Certainly in the cities, it's just a mass of wires. But amazing communicators. I mean, they communicate across a province with a handheld radio and a little bit of antenna. They just really were brilliant at that communication, but very basic, very rudimentary. As I said, one tractor per village or something like that, and yet they manage to get by.
Force Headquarters
Force headquarters was the conduit from out of country back to the headquarters back here to Australia, and it was really just an assisting role because the elements downrange had all the treatment, casualty, et cetera, responsibility and reporting of incidents, and comms were very good. So you got very quick notification of an incident or a death or an injury, and then there'd be a comms blackout, but then people would go forward very quickly to help and assist with any recovery, either of remains or casualties.
Myself and the commander flew into Landstuhl in Germany twice to visit troops had been quite severely injured in combat operations, and the first time was with the helicopter crash with the 2nd Commando Regiment guys, and then another time for a young fella who was quite badly bashed up by an improvised explosive device.
But really, there's a set procedures and protocols for allowing those downrange to deal with and treat the incident and make sure that's stabilized, and then the headquarters' main position was offering support and to communicate back to Australia updates and sit reps. The other role that we had was just making sure that any of those killed, their remains were respectfully handled and then returned to Australia at an appropriate time.
A reflection on Afghanistan
I'm disappointed for the Afghani people, but look, at the end of the day, it's their country. They get a vote and they've chosen that they're on the path they're on at the moment. Now, whether that's all willingly or not, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, that's where they are.
I think the service for those that served in Afghanistan during the 20-odd years, everyone should be proud of their service. They gave an opportunity to a people who didn't have the same opportunity. I think the mission was achieved very early on, and that was to pull down Al-Qaeda. But at the end of the day, ultimately it comes back to the people of Afghanistan, or any nation really.
Our troops, men and women of all services and government agencies, departments, volunteers, non-government entities, should be quite proud of what they did, their contribution, and I think in time that anger and pain may go away for many, and just reflect that you did your bit at the time and you did your country proud.
