Transcript
Well, for me, our armoured vehicles, we've got to maintain them virtually all the time, so we were doing that. In the downtime of a day, we just chill. It wasn't smart phones, it wasn't as much technology. We had a pay phone where you had to... you could ring home and you had to work out the timezone to ring home. At the time I had a girlfriend back home so I'd try and call her whenever I could. It was a $20 U.S. phone card you'd put in.
It'd expire pretty quick as you'd imagine because it was satellite link, so it would zap up pretty quick. We had three pubs, boozers, sort of things. So soldiers club, senior NCO's club, and a officers mess. So we could have some beers on a Friday and Saturday night just to unwind. That'd become problematic if someone had more than the two cans, but we had a system where we'd put our ammunition down in the guardroom and you'd virtually go back, if you were sober enough the next day, you'd get your ammo back.
Which we generally were, but that was our way of unwinding. We had to share the compound initially with the Ghanaians and got a bit of a Ghanaian army band to play and stuff like that, so that was our down time. But alcohol on a deployment is not always a good thing as far as how people deal with things. So had an incident with a corporal, RAME Corporal who, we had to take his weapons off him because he was a little bit out of control.
