Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Upbringing and desire to join the Army
In 1967, I was seventeen. I was born in 1950. So 1967, Dad was a local copper in Wellington, New South Wales and Long Tan had happened in '66 and I was the last lot before the high school certificate, that lot. So, I think that had just come in. So I was in fifth year. And I just wanted to get out, basically.
I wanted to join the Army, get away, see a bit of adventure. So I left school early. I didn't do year 12. What did they call it? The sixth year. So I left, but that was at the end of the school year, '66. I wasn't 17 until April in '67. So Dad said, he was a bit of a hard bastard, a hard bloke, he said, "If you want to stay at home, you got to pay rent."
This was in a police house. So I said, "Okay." So I went down the street and got a job at a merchant thing in Wellington for three months. And then I was begging mum to let me travel to Sydney to join up. So I actually joined the Army. I got my call-up papers on the 17th of May 1967 and, yeah, never went back to Wellington, apart from about 10 years ago.
In those days, it was a gorgeous little town. It's in a beautiful little valley. It's a beautiful little place. And it hasn't got the problems some people might have heard. It's got a few problems these days with some of the generations there and also drugs. But in the day, back in the sixties, it was just beautiful. We used to play football at Dubbo and Mudgee and Orange, Bathurst. And it was just a really nice, good town for a kid to grow up in. Nice school. It was great. It was a public school, Wellington High School. It was lovely, just a really nice town.
A disappointing first posting
Dad was pretty hard. He was a 42-year New South Wales police guy. Grew up during the depression. He was really hard. So when a lot of my mates would be out hitting the cricket ball around and doing this, I'd be chopping wood, mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, polishing his car, lighting the fire, helping mum in the kitchen. So, I didn't have a lot of free time.
They were good parents, lovely. Mum, particularly. But Dad was hard, and I just wanted to get out. And my sister, she'd already left to go to Teachers College at Wollongong. So it was a hard environment to live. Loving, yes. But just hard. Out of bed, six o'clock, he'd come in and kick you out of bed, "Get wood for the fire and do this. Help Mum in the kitchen." And this was all before school. And I'd be chopping wood and bloody doing things eight o'clock, 10 o'clock at night, before I did my homework.
So I just wanted to go. And the Army. My uncle was in the Second World War, so the Army was it. That's where I wanted to go. As a 17-year-old kid, you don't think. I don't think males grow brains until they're in their mid-20s. But I just wanted to go. And I wanted to do something Army, one of the combat corps, infantry, armour, artillery. So I joined at 17 in York Street, Sydney. Went to Eastern Command Personnel Depot at Watson's Bay. And that draft, about 40 of us I think, caught a rickety old bus all the way down to Wagga, Kapooka, middle of winter, May.
And I remember going into this massive food hall at Kapooka. And I think we got there at two o'clock in the morning and Scott McKenzie's 'San Francisco' was playing. I thought, "Oh, wow. Welcome." And anyway, we were straight into it. But I found, because I was in the school cadets, I was sergeant in charge of the rifle team, all that sort of stuff, I loved the Army stuff. And because of dad's upbringing, discipline, getting up early wasn't a problem.
So I think I almost breezed through recruit training. But then came, and it was a contradiction in terms, corps selection. And I wanted infantry, armour, artillery. So what do they put me in? Ordinance. I got none of those. And so square peg, round hole. I was put into ordinance. So finished that, very disappointed. Marched out, took the train up to Sydney. I was posted. My first posting was 2BOD at Moorebank and I became a forklift driver. So if you picture it, Vietnam was in full swing. This is '67 just before Tet.
It was all kicking off and here I am driving a forklift in a big warehouse in charge of ... Civvies were in charge. You'd spot the one or two soldiers around the place. I was a very unhappy boy, very unhappy clam. And meanwhile, Dad had been posted all over the place, and he ended up ... He lived in Eastwood, then he was inspector in charge of Hornsby Police Station. So, not a happy gent. And I got into a bit of trouble because I actually wanted to get kicked out. I thought, "I'll try the Navy, maybe," not thinking that if you got disciplined out of the Army, you're not going to get in the Navy.
A lucky break
I got into a little bit of trouble. Ended up at MCE at Holsworthy for a seven-day stint for racing a forklift, crashed through a wall. And then we were doing Vic Barracks Guard in Victoria Barracks in Sydney. We do the Cenotaph and I did about seven of those. And while I was there on one guard, I collapsed on the front gate of Vic Barracks and I had glandular fever and hepatitis.
So while I was in hospital recovering at Tumil Hospital, Ingleburn, I was recovering from that. And the old sergeant in charge of the ambulances, he came up to me one day and he said, "Mate, I know you're in the shit back there. Yeah, you're in a bit of poo. I've looked at your file." And he said, "We just lost one of our guys to Vietnam." He said, "How would you like to drive? I can get you temporarily posted to Tumil Hospital, ambulance." So did that for a while and loved that.
Joining the S.A.S.
A very good friend that I joined with in the Army, and he was at Kapooka with me. He wanted infantry, infantry, infantry and he got RAEME and he was in the warehouse next to me at RAEME workshops. So he was a year older than me. So you had to be 19 to go to Vietnam, which I didn't think about. So he put in, when the SAS selection committee came round, he put in for it and he got it. And he went to Vietnam in 3 Squadron in 1968, 69.
So he said, "Mate, when it comes around again and you're old enough," I was still a kid. "Put in for it, and I'll give you your first beret." So anyway, duly came around again and I was just short of my 19th birthday and put in. For some reason, they selected me. Must have been hard up for applicants or something, I don't know. And so then I went over to Perth. And I always remember my last shift at Moorebank, walking out in my overalls. I used to wear overalls. I was in the army, I wear overalls and I drove a bloody forklift, not a truck.
Anyway, I walked out, and all the civvies lined up and said, "Yeah, farewell." They said, "You won't even make it on the train trip to Perth. We'll see you back here in a week." And I said, "Right. I will never, ever come back to this place again. I will never see you people again." I never did. They put down the challenge, and I took it up.
The Cadre course
in those days during Vietnam, they put selection committees around. They travelled all around Australia to all the different units. And then they had a little panel and I don't know where it was held, I think it would've been held at Inf Centre at Ingleburn or something in those days. So I just went up and did the interview. But they asked you lots of various questions. And again, I don't know why they picked me because there wasn't many. But they saw something in me, I guess, and they saw the desire to get out of where I was, because I was going to get into a bit of trouble.
I starting to pinch guns and everything, bits of ammo and guns. I was going to assemble me own armoury. So I went over to Perth. And when I started, there was 74 of us on the, we used to call it Cadre, now it's selection. 74 on the Cadre. When we finished, six or eight weeks later, there was four of us. Four out of selection. People had just disappeared during the night. Never knew why.
And I found it very difficult because a lot of the guys on the Cadre were from battalions, artillery, armour, sigs. And my weapon-handling skills were pretty crap. Navigation was crap. Fitness wasn't all that good. I was nine stone, wringing wet. And I'd do the runs, 20-mile runs and my boots would be full of blood and I'd have blisters bursting everywhere. And I'd just throw up, get on with it. And I think that, and a really weird sense of humour, got me through.
Return to Australia
I came back on a Yank R&R flight on a Pan Am flight. And there was about 10 Aussies. Anyway, we left Tan Son Nhat, Saigon, and we drank the plane dry of all their booze before Singapore. Then we all had bottles of bourbon, big litre bottles of beer, we drank all that. It was almost out of Coke. So I think they replenished the Coke in Singapore. And then we were halfway across Australia in the middle of the night and one of the Aussies said, "We're out of booze."
And one of the Aussies said, "This Chanel No. 5, it's got alcohol base in it." And we all had Chanel number five for our wife, girl, sweetheart, mums, and Mikimoto pearls, right? So we started, we got these hostesses down, these Yanks, couldn't believe it. And the other Yank soldiers were going, "Who are these guys?"
And we are drinking, putting Chanel No. 5 in a glass, fill up with Coke, drink it. Burping everywhere. You have the beautiful fragrance of Chanel No. 5. And then we were flicking Mikimoto pearls all around the aircraft. Ping. Take the thing off. Boom. So my last scene as we staggered off the plane at Sydney at three o'clock in the morning, was these Yank air hostesses on their knees picking up these Mikimoto pearls. Unbelievable.
Lack of debriefing on return
I just got off patrol two days before. I still had cam cream in the ears … Mum and Dad didn't recognize me. I was nine stone, very sick, yellow, malaria, dysentery. And anyway, I went home. Normal thing. Couldn't stand it. So I went early back to Perth, caught the train back early, just didn't fit in. People were talking about football and this, and I'd just come from a war they paid lip service to.
So went back. The Nashos, however, they were literally demobbed, I don't know, I think they might have gone to ECPD if they lived in Sydney, ECPD, Watson's Bay. Literally the next morning they would've got up, done their pay, da da da, da. "See you." Because I've talked to a few Nashos since. We had about 50 per cent of our squadron was national servicemen, which was unusual. But they were really good. And their transition back to Australia was absolute zero, no debriefing, no medicals. You did a medical in Nui Dat before we left. Nothing. It was just pathetic.
Anyway, so I was still in the army. So I went back and I thought I'd be on in the barracks on my own. Anyway, ones and twos, they all started coming back. Same experience, couldn't fit in. Nobody was interested, blah blah, blah. "Oh, you were in Vietnam?” Moving on. “Who won the football?" “Really?” And so we were there, then I did quite a few courses. I was in for another, that was '71. I got out May '73. Six years. But we didn't have any formal debriefs, we didn't have any psyche, nothing. We didn't have anything. There was nothing. It was straight back into it.
I think the first week that I was actually off leave and working, I was on a demolition course over at Rottnest Island. Like nothing. Nobody talked about it. You know, that was just the way it was. And I don't think it was much different from any other reg. And I'm sure if you talk to Nashos, their return, I think Mitch might be a Nasho, might have been a Nasho. Terrible. No formal debriefs or anything. Nothing. No decompression, nothing.
Decision to leave the Army
I got out in '73 because Labor, Geoff Whitlam disbanded, they wanted to cut down special forces. So 2 Squadron was disbanded. I was offered a Halo course in San Diego with the Seals. I wanted to get married. I'd met this girl when I was in ordinance in Sydney and, stupidly, I got married and got out of the army. So I thought, "Geez, what am I going to do now?"
So Dad was in the police and I thought, "Well, I don't think I'll end up being a bank Johnny. I think sitting behind a counter is going to be a bit rough after that." I was living adrenaline all the time. Fast car, an MGB and bloody, on the booze all the time. And so I thought the police force. So while I was still in the regiment, I applied for the ACT Police. So I joined the ACT Police. Came over to Sydney and did the interview for the ACT Police in Sydney at Phillip Stroke.
And I remember I was in full uniform battle dress with wings and metals and everything. And this old guy pulled up at a next to me at a pedestrian crossing. And he looked across at me and he saw the SAS wings, which is quite distinct. And he said, "You in SAS?" And all it had on our shoulder face was Special Air Service Regiment, not Australia. And he said, "Are you from England?" And I said, "No mate, we're Australia."
He said, "Oh." He was in Second World War, Royal Marine commando. Didn't realise Australians had SAS. And anyway, did the thing and obviously passed and then joined the police in June '73, 2 days after I got married. Got married at Granville, stayed overnight at the Collector Pub. Bride and I drove down the MGB. And then I took the oath on Monday morning. Quick transition, no honeymoon.
Joining the ACT Police
Dad, because he was in New South Wales, you might remember there was a Springbok tour in 1971/2 in Canberra, all around Australia, but before apartheid. But there was a lot of demos here. And New South Wales police were brought down to help pad out the local plods. And he knew the inspector in charge of recruiting here, unbelievably.
He was ex New South Wales police. And he said, "Oh, the young fella's in the Army thinking might get out, join the police." So he said, "I can tell you about New South Wales. Tell me about the ACT." Well, the ACT police had better salaries in those days. More equipment, better equipment. New South Wales police was on the bones of its bum, quite frankly. And you don't get travel there because I went to four or five different schools.
And the bonus was that if we have kids, Canberra, that's it because in those days it was the ACT, not AFP. And I said, "Oh, okay." So I wrote away to him, got the thing. Yeah, did the interview, came back, "Yeah, we'll have you." So I came over, and in my course of about 30, there was about seven ex-Vietnam veterans. Yeah. So, rest is history. Joined that in '73, got out in '98, went back to Timor in '99.
Career in the ACT police and AFP
My Dad applied to go to Cyprus in New South Wales police in 1965 or something. And I remember he and mum having a bit of a discussion, brackets, in the kitchen about she didn't want him to go. And she won. He didn't go. Anyway, up until 76, the Commonwealth Police sent troops, police to Cyprus. Then it went over to the states. So the state police forces had it and the AFP had it. ACT police went over. And then we morphed into the AFP in '79.
And then I was on the first AFP contingent in 1980. So half our contingent was Commonwealth Police and ACT Police and we were the first AFP contingent in 1980 and I just applied for that. I was on the bikes, then I was on motorbikes. I did 13, 14 years on motorbikes, pursuit cars, all that. Rescue squad, I went to Darwin in '74, Cyclone Tracey. I just wanted to go. Marriage wasn't going really well. So she, I think, willingly let me go, gladly let me go. And in those days, the tour was about 18 months.
That was later cut down to 12 months since six months and then back to 12 months. So I went over there, 18 months, came back in 1981, end of it. Got divorced, went back to traffic, couple of guys got sent home for some reason. They asked me to go back again. So I went back and I did three years full up in Cyprus. Loved it.
Witness security, VIP protection and Interpol
I did wit sec, witness security. That was pretty exciting. Travelled all over Australia with some very interesting criminals. Did five years there. Then got promoted sergeant in the AFP and then transferred over to VIP protection. I did five years there and I was in charge of the Turkish protection team for a while. Then the first Gulf War in '91, I was hived off that and given to Bob Hawke. With him for about six months. Loved it.
That's another story … And then while I was there, there was a vacancy came up on the Governor General's team, which was deemed to be the creme de la creme of jobs in VIP protection, close personal protection because you travelled on your own with the P. And the risk factor with the Governor General is a lot less than the PM or anybody. So anyway, my name was put forward to do the replacement.
So I went in and then worked out at government house with Bill Hayden, Bill and Dallas and I was with him. We flew up to Ipswich on the day that he was finished in the job and the clock went tick, tick. He was no longer the Governor General and Zelman... Ah, no, William Dean took over So I was with him for two years and then somebody in personnel decided that. “Don Barnby's had a bloody good career. He's had a lot of fun.
So I think, we'll”, there's that word again. See? “I think we'll redevelop this guy and on, he needs to sit behind a desk for a while to calm down”. So I ceased, in my mind, being a policeman, I was offered the fourth or fifth floor in headquarters here in Canberra. So I just said "Eenie, meenie, miney, yeah, I'll take the fourth." And I think it was Interpol. So I handed in my gun. I used to take police cars home and police bikes, travel. No more uniform. I packed my little lunch, I caught the bus to work.
I became a public servant. And all the guys in the office, they all knew me. And I walked in and they'd always say, "And how are we this morning, Barney?" And I'd say, "Just peachy." They'd get me a coffee, sit me down, "It's all right, calm down." I did two years there. I was told to do two years and I did two years. But I travelled thousands of miles a day on the computer talking to Paris, bloody New York and Washington and all over the place. But it just killed me. I was like a caged tiger. And while I was there, Bougainville kicked off.
Cyprus: Patrolling the buffer zone
Our role was to patrol the buffer zone, which went from east to west of the island. And when I was there in 1980, '81, and came back '82, went back '83, '84, the Danes were in the west of the island. Then the next ones were the Brits, then the Canadians were in Nicosia, they were on the buffer zone, Nicosia. Then the Swedes were down near Larnaca. And then the Austrians were over near Famagusta. So our job is, and we were based at a place called Kokkinotrimithia, just outside Nicosia.
Our base, our job was to patrol the buffer zone. Checking on, well, going out and investigating any incursions by either Greeks or to. They weren't allowed in the buffer zone, but they did because the buffer zone cut through farming land. And as usual, they wanted to plough as much as they could. So they'd make incursions into the buffer zone. So we'd go out and, yeah, naughty. Yeah, we'd take them, the Greeks, to the local police station, Turks, there too.
And we'd tell the local coppers, "This guy has started to plough a hundred metres in the buffer zone and he can't do that." So they'd blah, blah, blah. And then we'd take him back on his tractor and say, "Have a good day." And off we go. We also did a lot of liaison with all the different contingents. And that usually involved a lot of booze because particularly the Danes with the gameldanssche and the Brits with the booze, beer. And anyway, we investigated any incidents that happened within the buffer zone.
One of our investigations was a British nurse was raped by some Turk soldiers. A Greek was yelling obscenities to a Turk soldier in Nicosia - buffer zone was a street wide, most of the areas, in that area - and yelling obscenities. So this Turk shot him. That was a murder. Other ones were starting a fire in the buffer zone to clear land, which they weren't allowed to do. Mine incidents, somebody had fired a mine on the edge of their thing. So we'd go out and then we'd call the army, they patrolled the buffer zone.
But the Brits had a scout car squadron, little ferret scout car and their roving commission was from the west of the island where the Danes were all the way down to Famagusta as ours was. But we used to butt up on sector five or sector four where the Swedish police were. The other contingent of police there was Swedish police. So the Aussie police and Swedish police and we'd go down and then they say, "Oh," we'd ask them, "Have you guys done a patrol through to Famagusta or Varosha recently?" "No, no. Haven't been down there." So we'd go down there because a good swimming place, beautiful old Roman ruins under the sea and, oh, just gorgeous. So we go down there, do a patrol there, and then come all the way back.
And our base was generally at KT, Kokkinotrimithia but we also had a little section down at Ledra Palace Hotel right inside Nicosia with the Canadian army, they were at a big, totally wrecked hotel, but that was their base. So the ones that were down there usually did the patrols within Nicosia, doing what you had to do, all the way down to Famagusta. And then the ones at Kokkino, KT, we did from sector two, all the way back up to the Danes, right up the top.
Yeah, beautiful scenery going through Turkish enclaves and all this sort of stuff, Maronite enclaves. I mean the scenery was beautiful. Back in the eighties it was very un-touristy. Now the little tracks that we used to drive on are now three lane highways, four lane highways. The little fishing village called Pathos down south along the east coast, a little fishing village with a little lighthouse and a Maronite castle or something. It was beautiful. Now it's apparently high-rise hotels. It had beautiful rock cut tombs and mosaics and the Greeks just bulldozed a lot of this stuff. Unbelievable.
A pleasant life in Cyprus
When we first got there, we got there on the 23rd of April 1980, two days before Anzac Day. So we had a two-week changeover with the Commonwealth Police that had previously been there and one of the questions we asked was, "Where's a good restaurant? What's the food like here?" It was really funny flying into, I'd never been to the Middle East, but I'd been to Europe at that stage and flying into Larnaca from Athens, middle of summer, or hot, everything was dry. I felt at home. I had this deja vu, I'd been here before.
I was a crusader's saddle or something but I didn't feel out of place. I knew how it was all going to work. Other guys had never been anywhere like that and they were going, "Wow, there's ruins everywhere and this and that." And the way of life, siga siga, slowly, slowly … And I took all that for, didn't phase me at all, because I can be a bit impatient with fools or people that don't know what they're doing. But the Greek way of life and the Turkish way of life, very slow, but I fitted in straight away.
And we asked some of the guys in the ComPo, "Where's a good restaurant?" So we went there and we went there normal time, seven o'clock, right? So we all rock up for a meso and nobody in the restaurant. Oh yeah. They're having us on, right? Having us on. No, no, no. People start coming to the restaurant at 10 o'clock at night. We'd eaten, gone, and then they came in. So that was our first lesson in siesta. Everything shuts down from 12:30. You can't do any business in Cyprus after 12:30, 1:00 o'clock until about 3:00, 3:30, particularly in summer. Everything shuts down. It was that way of life.
The social life was incredibly social. The Australians at KT, Kokkinotrimithia, we were just over from the British base at St. David's camp. We had the best bar in the UN in the Cyprus. The beer was cold. We had Carlsburg, Keo or Efes, Turkish beer. The beer was cold but we also froze, chilled the glasses, right, because you'd go to the Poms and you had drinks. I was a brevet rank inspector on my first 18 months and then they changed it slightly and I went back as a senior sergeant. And the actual force commander, the Canadian force commander, he said, "Barney," he said... He was there on my first one as the force commander, and he was still there. He said, "Hit a hurdle, mate?" And I said, "No." I said, "They've just changed the brevet."
He knew that we weren't inspectors. I was only a senior Connie on my first one, and I was still a senior connie. So it was just brevet ranks. Because you had to have that rank to deal with the sip pole of the Greeks and the Turks. They respected rank. It was very sociable. So we had cocktail, all the contingents, it's just like the DFAT round of drinks in Canberra, all the embassies go to everybody else to celebrate whatever day. And they all used to love coming to ours but we had a very hectic social schedule and we were taught as part of the protocols, and I ended up buddying up with a British officer.
And they're very good at that M and M-ing, mix and mingling. You talk to each group. If they're at your venue, you have to entertain them. So I became very good at. And I don't like that. I'm out of my depth there. I used to work behind the bar or do the barbecue so I didn't have to talk to people all the time because they talk rubbish all the time. So I'd talk over one group, five minutes. The Brits, they had it down to a tee because their officer commanding would be watching all the young subbies entertaining the guests when it was over at St. David's camp.
So they'd almost time them. "Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Move on. "No, nice to meet you." And off they'd go. So I started that routine. And it was very sociable to Swedes and the Danes and whatever off they'd go. So I started that routine. And it was very sociable to Swedes and the Danes and whatever, and the Danish Dan Con, it was always a drink fest. I love the Danes because they're very similar to Australians. They love life, they love drinking, and they just merry people.
Serious Swedes
The Swedes, lovely people but they took everything very seriously. Quick instance, we were sent, a bloke and I, was sent out to an incident that was happening in the buffer zone in the Swedish sector. This farmer was ploughing too far out of the buffer zone. So the Swedes had sent a platoon, 40 men, armed. They had weapons, we didn't, armed, to stop this farmer ploughing and what they were doing,
Joe and I pulled up in the Land Rover and we just watched and we go, "What are they doing?" They were running behind, in marching order, running behind the tractor, yelling out for him to stop in Greek. And we said, "Okay, well." So we waited until they came around the big circle, and we went around and we stopped them and he just kept ploughing. And we said to the young Swedish officer, "We'll handle it."
So we went up, parked right in front of his tractor in the Land Rover. Joe took the key out and I got him out of the seat. Explained to him, showed him the book in Greek, "You're not allowed to do it", we said, "Just get in. Your tractor will be fine." Put him in the Land Rover, took him down to the local Cypriot police, they read the Riot Act to him, took him back, put him on his tractor and he never did it again.
Low threat level in Cyprus
Threat level indicator out of five, it'd be a level one. Most of the time, while I was there, I can't remember whether it was first or second tour, there was a Turkish coup in Turkey. So the Turks got a bit edgy and brought some tanks over to Cyprus. So then the Greeks got a bit nervous and they brought tanks over. So there was a bit of a Mexican standoff for a while. That was a bit touchy. But the threat level towards UN personnel on Cyprus, UNFICYP, I would say one.
Occasionally it would blip up to two. And then back down. It was always, unless something untoward happened, which can always do it. But generally, it was a fairly manageable situation all the time. There was little incidents, there'd be little blips, little like when the Turk shot the Greek. There was all, yeah, everybody act up a bit. But never anything to start a full-scale conflagration again. So yeah, pretty low.
Effects of the division in Cyprus
Before the Turkish invasion in '74, Turks and Greeks used to live in the same village, parts of Nicosia, whatever. They were hand in glove. And to quote a story to illustrate that, we used to spend a lot of time in the Turkish areas because they were just fun. And you go up to Kyrenia. But I remember going across to a Turkish tailor to get, he'd measure us up for a suit or clothes. And he would then give you the name of his Greek friend on the Greek side to go and make it.
He'd get the material, cut it, and then the Greek would make it. And while I was doing that once, he, because he knew we worked both sides of the buffer zone all the time in the middle and he gave me a letter from his wife to the wife of the Greek tailor. He said, "We haven't seen each other since '74, but they still keep in touch. So, would you mind?" And if you want to be really pedantic, it was wrong of me to do that. But I said, "Yeah." So I put the letter in there, I didn't tell anybody about it at the time and then next, when I went to the Greek tailor, I said, "Oh, this is from Ishmail or something." "Oh, thank you."
So she wrote a letter and then somebody else took it back across. So, those little relationships carried on. Generally, the populace of both sides were accepting. There was atrocities that has to be said. There was atrocities and there was mass graves and bodies found and all that sort of stuff. But that mainly happened up in Enosis and all that, the separation of Greece and Turkey. Right up until the Turkish invasion in '74. And then there was a lot of stuff happening around that period.
But when I went there in 1980, it was fairly benign. There was still the standoff, they couldn't travel, the border wasn't opened. We used to do south and north wind patrols, we used to call them. And there was Maronites villages and enclaves, and particularly in the North. Greek Maronites that still live there. So we'd load up a British convoy of food trucks and we'd go through the Turkish checkpoint, which we used to go through every day, basically, we did.
But once a month, we'd go up with about a convoy of about four big trucks full of flour, eggs, veggies, rice, all that sort of stuff. And we'd go up into the mountains of Northern Cyprus and we'd do a humanitarian patrol, give them all this stuff. And then we'd take letters from them to their Maronite friends that lived in another little enclave down near Limassol on the Greek side. So then we'd just do these south and north WinPatrols. But generally, the situation was fairly ... This is me looking at it, having been in a few interesting situations elsewhere in the world. It was fairly benign.
A witch and a gorilla
There was never any danger of, say, while we are doing the buffer zone on patrol with our white Land Rover, a big red rat kangaroo on each side, UN flag flying, you didn't think you were going to get whacked by a sniper. But occasionally, we played pranks on the Turkish Greek checkpoint. I used to love going through the Greek checkpoint and say, "Good morning," in Turkish. And they'd go, "What? Oh, bloody Australian." And then the same in the Turks, I'd speak Greek to them. And I remember one day, names will go unmentioned. But you know, those masks you put on.
The bloke that was next to me put on the gorilla mask, the rubber mask. And I put on the old witch's nose, with the big nose with the wart on it. And we had our blue berets on and we were going through and we went, "Yasso, kalimera " all this. And they went, "What?" And they looked at these two UN one with the big nose and a gorilla face. So they just thought we were mad and we got on really well with both sides whereas the military component of the UN didn't mingle as much as we did. They were confined sides. Whereas the military component of the UN didn't mingle as much as we did.
They were confined mainly to their region of the buffer zone. Whereas our work, we used to go to Kyrenia to have meetings with the Turkish police commander up there on stuff that affected their side of the buffer zone. And then we'd do the same on the Greek side. So we mingled a lot more than the UN military guys did. They saw a little bit of Cyprus. We saw all of Cyprus.
Everywhere, every bit of it. So, ours was a fairly well roving commission, which was great. And they loved the Australians because I think Melbourne has the third-biggest Greek population in the world, Thessaloniki, Athens and whatever. So yeah, we got on and the Turks loved us. They saw my ribbons and they said, "Oh, army. Ah, Gallipoli, Gallipoli." We'd talk like that, have a couple of beers and whatever, so.
Formation of the Australian Federal Police
There was Commonwealth Police, they were responsible for guarding government installations. They also had guys stationed in Australian High Commissions and Embassies overseas. They also did investigations under the Commonwealth Crimes Act. The ACT police was the local village police force for Canberra in Jervis Bay, like the New South Wales police. And in 1979 under Sir Colin Woods, British ex-commissioner of police over there, he came up with the concept of amalgamating the ACT police, the Commonwealth Police, and the Narcotics Bureau all together to form a federal police with jurisdiction in Australia, in all states of Australia, and also in the embassies.
So, the federal police these days has jurisdiction in Canberra, all around Australia and all its territories, and also at all their embassies and high commissions. We have a liaison officer, two liaison officers who then deal with crime, say in Athens. We have somebody in Athens or in Washington. Any crimes pertaining to Australian citizens or that might affect drug smuggling, organized crime, South America, all this, they're our conduit or liaison officers in those areas. And we converse with them daily.
And when I was in Interpol, I used to be talking to the AFP liaison officer in Washington all the time, or London. Yeah. So now, it's a worldwide police force. Probably not the FBI. FBI's got a bit of a different role, but yeah, so we have jurisdiction everywhere. But it was amalgamation of those three agencies ComPol, ACT, and Narcotics Bureau
Selected for Bougainville
A bloke came into me one day and he said, "Barney, you know it's Bougainville? Heard about that?" And I said, "Oh yeah." And he said, "We're sending some people over." He said, "It's a pretty rough mission, are you interested?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll go." So I was put on TMG. There was two of us, and the other guy's from Interpol, too. He went to Buka and I went to Savali and Tonu, south of the island near Buin. He had the best, really, dream run, because Buka was that island off the top of bay and they did sea patrols all around the place diving and eating fish every night.
And yeah, "Wow, this is fun." I was in the jungle swamps and mountains of Bougainville down near bloody Buin where a couple of Victoria Crosses were down there, I think Frank Partridge might have got his VC down there somewhere. It was a crapper. And I was with TMG, True Monitoring Group and that was with the Kiwis. And most of the guys in my little camp were Kiwi SAS. I didn't tell them, they had heard that I was ex SAS. So I became the father of all these young Kiwi SAS guys. And we used to do...
Our main mission was to explain the Wellington agreement, I think it was, the truce. And do patrols, literally patrols. Occasionally, they dropped us off in by chopper. But the Kiwis only had two Hueys. Their military defence budget was pretty low. The Land Rovers we had kept blowing up and falling apart because they were just 1970 models and they were just crap.
But we did some really long patrols up into the mountains, spreading the word, listening to villagers. I had a twofold role of getting, if they wanted to talk to me, any atrocities that had been at because, the BIG, the Bougainville Independent Group and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, Big Bra, they were kicking off all over the place and running right through some of these villages and committing atrocities.
But mainly the atrocities that I took down details of that I don't think were ever investigated, but were by the PNG army, when they were doing stuff there. They hated, they called them Redskins, the Bougainvillians, lovely, lovely people. They hated these Redskins, the PNGs because they're black, black, purple, black. And they're really quite intelligent. I remember I was up in a little village somewhere in the middle of nowhere and the village chief, we'd pile in like three days walking up these bloody mountains and we'd get in there totally dripping wet, been through swamps and rivers and everything.
But the chief had always come up to me because I had grey hair. And the Kiwi lieutenant that I was with in charge of it, he was a young kid, 25. So they just ignored him. They'd come up to me and they'd talk to me. So he got a bit pissed off about this but I explained to him why. They respect elders. I don't know why, but they do. And I remember walking into this one village and this guy came up to him, wearing a pair of stubbies and a St. Kilda footy jumper.
We'd learned a bit of Pisin language at DFAT before we left, which is useless, because I'd learn a bit of pigeon while I was in New Guinea in the Army and then I tried to learn Pisin, no good. Anyway, this guy started, I started asking him tentatively blah, blah, blah, while in Pisin and he says, "All right mate, I'll speak English." I said, "Oh, so where do you learn that?" He said, "I did an engineering degree at Monash Uni." Really? Seriously? Unbelievable. No, they were classic. They were really lovely people. Beautiful.
The AFP role in Bougainville
My mission was called the TMG, Truce Monitoring Group, under the Kiwis. They took it off initially. That morphed when I left into the PMG, Peace Monitoring Group. And that was under the auspice of the Australian Army. But within that organization, military wise, there was Fijians, Samoans, Vanuatuans. Yeah, a couple of other regional police and military people that worked over there under the umbrella of, well, when I was there, the Kiwis. Yeah, the Kiwis ran the show for I think the first 18 months.
The Wellington or the Dunedin Agreement. And yeah, it was all about the Panguna mine. The gold and copper mines and the PNGians … There was a lot of dispute about the copper mine, the Panguna mine, which was up in the mountains of Bougainville and the Bougainvillians wanted independence. They wanted to be independent from PNG, because PNG actually had jurisdiction over Bougainville and they had military and police there.
And as I said before, a lot of the atrocities that I was informed about were perpetrated by PNG Army or police against the Bougainvillians, because they didn't want Bougainville to secede from PNG. So our job, mainly, was under the auspices of the New Zealanders at that stage, was to talk about the peace process, trying to come and get people to the table to talk about it and they did have quite a few meetings, I think, in Dunedin, in New Zealand in those days, to talk about seceding from PNG.
I don't know what role the PNG military and police have in Bougainville these days but back in '98, there was a lot of them there and they were not liked by the Bougainvillians. There was a lot of atrocities. So our role was to go to villages and try and talk to them through interpreters, we had a couple of little guys to go run around with us because yeah, they'd chat.
The excellent work of DFAT staff in Bougainville
I worked with a girl most of the time from AusAID. She was brilliant because Bougainville is a matriarchal society and the women generally wouldn't talk to me when we'd talk about other stuff. The military guy, the lieutenant and me, we'd talk for hours, and they'd go through every sentence of this Dunedin or Wellington agreement. It would take hours. Miserable. And you'd be in a grass hut. It'd be either pouring rain or humid and everything. Stinky.
There would be guys sitting up the back with machetes, digging the puss out of their tropical ulcers in their legs and they look quite mean. Some of the guerilla movement, Big Bra, they were pretty fierce. So they'd be sitting off the back sometimes. You'd know they were there because the chief would point them out. They didn't cause any trouble, at least in my experience. But then I would get Leanne to get the women aside and I'd explain through the interpreter away from the PNG.
We're often accompanied by a PNG copper or military guy who wanted to listen in. But I'd explain through the interpreter to the chief, "Leanne's here to listen to the women if they've got anything they want to talk about. Leave this meeting and go off and chat." So she'd come to me with lots of notes and then that night I'd be writing up all this. So that was good. I also had in my team a girl from DFAT and a civilian from ADF Russell.
They were really good. And it was a really hard mission. I mean, very quickly, a quick story at Savali, which was a satellite station of Tonu, which was my main base. That was in a swamp in the lowlands. But up in the mountains there was another swamp, Savali. It was a little village and we had a little grass hut. The roof was riddled with bullet holes. Rained all the time. And we had one of the Land Rovers parked outside the hut and the next morning we went out and it had been sucked into the bog and it was up to the top of the doors and we couldn't dig it out.
And we got a chopper and we tried to get, and it was just stuck. We lost two on river crossings on the Puriata River. The conditions were really bad. We had an outside drop toilet, a hole in the ground, and you'd go out there with a machete or a golf club because there was rats everywhere, mean looking, big rats and cane toads. Because I had the runs while I was there, as I said, lost 12 kilos. And you'd be sitting, hunched over this little hole in the ground trying to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, and there'd be all these little pink eyes rats and bloody canes toads jumping out.
Oh my God. It was just disgusting. It was just terrible. And, yeah, I'd, bloody hell, been through Vietnam, so it was hard. But for these poor kids, the DFAT girls, they did really well. We did our training for Bougainville in Bamaga, Cape York and they didn't even know how to use a can opener to get the tins of rations open. And they didn't know how to pitch a hoochie. So we had to teach them all. I had to teach them all that stuff. But they did really well and I was so proud of them.
They were all given a medal when we got back at DFAT. I didn't get one because the police force didn't give us one but they all got their medal and I went there and I had a little speech. And there were tears coming down because they did really, really well in incredibly trying, and they didn't complain. It was just crap. We all got a bit sick and yeah, they did really well.
Church services
They were very religious, obviously. And every Sunday, they liked members of the TMG to go to the church service. Well, the church services went from one to four to six hours. That's a lot of sitting on bamboo slats, I'll tell you. But anyway, there was a reason why we all became very religious. At the end of the church service, the local village women would make a feast.
So there was fish and rice and all these native vegetables, the food, because we had New Zealand army rations, which are absolute crap. Chlorinated water with New Zealand Army instant coffee. Oh, not good. So wed' do that. But also during the church service, the young girls had formed a choir, the village choir. And they sang these beautiful songs. Their voices were so beautiful that I took an old tape recording in my day and taped it because they'd sing all these religious songs.
And then some of them, not all, some of them would then go into this, it was like a religious frenzy. They'd go into this stupor like you'd probably see in black magic things in the West Indies. And some of them would collapse on the floor and they'd just go all over the place. It was all part of the experience. But again, the main driver to go was this beautiful food afterwards because for the next six days you'd be eating rubbish. And that was Bougainville.
Illness and 'peck peck'
I got horribly sick. I lost a lot. I lost 12 kilos. I almost had blood coming out of every orifice, my eyes, ears. I had infection, back, front, whatever, because everything was polluted. And we had to, water resups was down at the local river. And all villages in all those countries used the river as had to, water resups was down at the local river. And all villages in all those countries used the river as the sewage, rubbish, all the rubbish, all the things.
So whenever we are having a bit of a scrub up in the river, one of us would be detailed to sit up in the bank and do 'peck peck' or 'puck puck'. And I always get them all mixed up. But 'peck peck' is human poo, and 'puck puck' is crocodile. So yeah, you'd sit up there, yell at "Puck puck. Peck peck." There'd be either a turd coming down or a crocodile swimming down. Unbelievable. So, I got infected. I got ear infections and we all got, oh, really sick.
A scary latent level of threat
Because of these nuts, these guerilla groups. If they got on the jungle juice, they used to make their own booze. They could be, we often had reports, you'd go to a village, there's shots and somebody was grabbed and taken because they kidnapped the young girls sometimes. So that was a bit more tenuous. I remember I met the head of the local guerilla group in our area one day and I was taken to visit him and while I was talking to him, I was just eyeballing this guy and he was high on jungle juice.
His eyes were literally rolling around his head. And he had that stare, they were bloodshot. His breath smelled. He had a big beard. He had a gun over his shoulder. And I was just having a bit of a chat through the interpreter. And I went away and I said to the young Kiwi lieutenant, I said, "Geez, mate. He was a really scary guy” because yeah, you could go overboard.
No personal violence towards me, but the latent level of threat you could switch on a heartbeat if you said the wrong thing. So I kept it pretty businesslike. And what's a wantok? Is it wantok? They have a funny thing. He thought we were going to give them presents because that's what we're supposed, we had to do but we didn't do it. So he was a bit angry. Anyway, that all went well. Yeah. We were unarmed.
The military guys were unarmed. Nothing, didn't have anything. And the chopper, as I said, the Kiwis had about two or three hueys and they were all back at Arawa, not where we were. And we were up in the mountain somewhere, so if we got in the poo, we had it used to go with a Kiwi sig and he could get comms to Arawa. So if we really got in the, yeah, deep doo doo, you'd have to radio through.
Blowing up Second World War munitions
We didn't have any flare-ups while we were there and the peace process went on. I think the PMG, one of their main roles was to de-arm the militias and the guerillas. So, we laid the groundwork explaining the peace process, and I think the PMG... So they disarmed, sorry, disarmed a lot of the guerilla groups that were there. So I would assume that, I think the mission was, it did what we had to do. Yeah, it was quite successful.
One side story. There was a lot of munitions around from the Second World War and we had identified this area with a lot of old aerial bombs and naval shells and everything and grenades, Japanese stuff. And so we got the organizers through Arawa and Kiwis and the bomb disposal team, they sent up to us with was a PNG army one and these guys were cowboys. Anyway, we loaded a lot of this stuff on, it was all rusted, in the back of a couple of old utes.
And then we had to go and we were going to blow it up at the sea, which was a fair way, about probably 20Ks. It took us about six hours to get, the roads were terrible … And they piled all this stuff, dug a bit of a hole in the beach. I took photos of this. Dug a big hole on the beach, piled all these bloody artillery shells and naval shells, aerial bombs, big stuff. And then they wired it all up, and we went down and we were going, "Jesus." and the Kiwi guys were with me and we all knew munitions.
This stuff's going to go bang. So they went back about 600 metres. No, we went back about a kilometre and a half up the beach and then we heard through the radio where we had radio comms. "Yeah, blowing it now. Fire in the hole." Well, half of it went unexploded. It was blown out to sea, back into the jungle.
There was grenades smoking still going into the... like, seriously? Yeah, that was interesting. Then I went, I said, "Oh, well now we're down near the coast." Because I never got to swim the whole time I was there. And I thought, "We go for a swim." So we all stripped off, just about to jump in. Then we looked offshore and there's these fins circling around about hundred metres off the beach. No. So, then we all got bitten by sandflies. So was a lot of fun.
A reflection on Vietnam
I am a firm believer that when you look at history, things that have happened in history, you look at those historical happenings in the context of the geopolitical or whatever situation then. You do not look at our involvement in Vietnam. You do not look at our involvement in Vietnam in the 21st century mentality.
At the time, the domino theory and all the rest of the stuff, there was a lot of, I've read a lot about the political machinations that were going on and to and fro and the Americans and all the rest of the stuff, the Australians. But I still think that we should have gone under the ANZUS agreement. I think that we did do the right thing at that stage. We all have, at least I have, and most people I speak to, have got regrets about the way we left.
It's exactly like the way we left East Timor. It was a lot of parallels there. We thought we were going to be there and see it to its conclusion but the war went off the pallet back in America, Australia, New Zealand, whatever. That was the reason we did it. We did very well in our area of Phuoc Tuy in Vietnam. The Yanks thought we did a good job. I think we should have been there and without being too flippant, I think it was the best training an army can have is to be operationally deployed.
There's nothing worse than an army that is not operationally deployed, because when they do have to go, they've got nothing, no corporate knowledge. No, I've always said, because I spent a bit time with the Israeli army over in the Middle East and Israel. And they're the most combat ready defence force in the Middle East, and possibly parts of the world.
Because they're flying operational missions. Their air force, their military is on standby all the time, and they really know what they're doing. So you need that operational awareness and currency because a peacetime army, it's doomed a failure, even if it does UN missions like East Timor and stuff like this because that's what you do. It's like being a brain surgeon and being scared of the sight of blood. Well, if you join the military and you don't want to go operational, what the hell are you doing in the military?
Join the public service or something. What the hell are you doing there? That's your job. So, I wanted to go. I actually, when they notified us that two squadron was being withdrawn and that was the last squadron in Vietnam, quite a few of us tried to put in for the training team to stay there, because we only did nine months. A tour was 12 months. I wanted to stay.
We were doing a great job. We were well-trained, professional. We knew what our bloody operational orders and bloody SAPs were. We were doing a good job. And that was our job, because when I came back to Australia, they disbanded 2 Squadron. We did between the SAS in that period between '71 and '79 when they adopted the C2, counterterrorism role, there was that period that I know a lot of guys were in the regiment during that period.
I got out. A lot of them stayed in. They did nothing. They were never going to be sent anywhere except on courses or training exercises and it was just ... We were trained to a peak of professional. We were good, we were bloody good. It's like a boxer training, or an athlete, training never to be used and never to run a race and you think, "What the hell? Why?" That's why I got out. I couldn't see a future just doing courses.
There was no purpose to the training. And it is hard training. We've lost more people on training exercises in the regiment than we have in combat. So that just shows you how realistic the training we do. Yeah. So, no, I wanted to go, I'm glad I did, and I have no regrets. And I think we did a good job. And the Vietnamese, I've been back many times since. They love the 'Uc Da Lois'. They love the Australians. Not so much the Americans.
I went back with an American Seal years ago, back in 2005. And every time he'd open his mouth, the Vietnamese would turn away. They were very polite, but they'd turn away. Whereas I'd talk, "Ah, Uc Dai Loi." "Yeah, yeah, where's the nearest toilet or train station?" They'd talk to me and he started to get... And I said, "Mate, well, America had a different role and they've got a bit of history here. Bad history." The Australians, we respected our enemies, we treated them well. We killed a lot, but they killed some, a lot of us, but we were professional soldiers. There's no war crimes coming out of the Australian side of it, none that has been proved. There's a few allegations around, but certainly none in SAS. We had none of that.
