Transcript
For me, it was pretty surreal as a 23-year-old. My first dead bodies and anything was that airport, and then on for the rest of the trip. I don't know. It's left me with a lot of dark black humour. I don't have much empathy or sympathy for things. Get quite angry. So to me everything's black and white. And I'd have to admit, I did change after that job. I've since deployed to East Timor, and in effect, Iraq 2007 and 2008. So, I think for me, and I do a lot of presentations on Rwanda about difficult deployments.
For me, it was one. Certainly changed me a lot as a person. But I was a career soldier and I'd stayed in for another 24 years plus after that, so 32 years in the army. I only just recently discharged last year, but I do reserve work now. So, me, it's about educating the next lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen, or officers, and I do a lot of talks at ADFA and RMC about: ‘be prepared for the unexpected’. I hope no one ever does a deployment ever again. And I'm pretty sure Australian Government wouldn't sign up for that sort of stuff. They didn't know what was going on, we just contributed to something we didn't know we were going to do.
