Transcript
In East Timor, Dili was a strict, heavy patrol program, so we were working seven days. Then when we busted out of Dili, we went down to Maliana in centre sou- west. That was still seven days a week, and just patrolling. Constantly out, you're just out looking for trouble and not finding it.
Then when we moved over to the coast again and went up into the Highlands, again, a lot of looking and no finding. It became very evident to the squadron commander and myself that we had to deescalate our mindset from war-fighting to more of a peacekeeping concept. When you're operating an armoured vehicle for war, you're operating the vehicle on the edge, you're putting the vehicle into positions so you can get fire.
We needed to ramp that down a bit when you're just driving around and get everyone calm. We could see that we needed to start to calm things down a little bit in ourselves and deescalate this a little bit to get more of a peacekeeping... Waving, we instituted a wave policy, all commanders would wave. One of our troops... You'd tell when you'd been in an area with one, because the troops are dispersed, so from the headquarters, they're out doing the patrols.
Then the boss and I would head out and follow them up. You could spot where two troop had been. The two-troop troop Sergeant had come up with this thing of winding his hand up and then coming up with the thumbs up and the kids used to run out and... You knew, "Oh, well, two troop's been here."