Dave Lassam - American service personnel

Transcript

All the American servicemen that I've ever met and had to work with are great guys. You get some loonies as you do in any defence force but culturally, they were fine, there wasn't any open hostility like your sometimes fear there might be between, say, Hispanics, and African Americans.

But they're all there on a mission, they knew they were there for the good, the good fight. Some of the surprising things I must admit that was happening was that if they were coming into country, to then step over the line into Iraq, or Afghanistan, they'd carry their weapons with them everywhere.

Whereas medics, unarmed, and there were young women with machine guns strapped to their pack going to breakfast in the morning and it because they had to learn to live with the weapon, become a part of it, and what they weren't given ammo. They were just given the weapons to do. But that was a bit of an eye opener in some of these bases.

But that's what were there for, once you realised and you remember that you're actually in a war zone, you get with it, but it was quite unnerving to start with, if you're not used to it because we didn't have anything either, we Australian guys, we had nothing, whereas the guys who are Australians who were at the base working did, whereas we didn't.