Transcript
Ironically, one good thing out of my Rwanda deployment, it woke up the army about pre-deployment briefings, you know, what to expect. It was quite good and I learned a lot of lessons too, myself, and the biggest lesson, I suppose I learnt was support and advice to the families like this. Again, we'd had Somalia, we'd had Rwanda, and then we had this. Now the big deployment of East Timor.
So it was like, they said, "Look, we need to get the families in, we need to explain to them from little things, mowing lawns, to mum and dad are not there so the families need to be briefed a lot more. We had a psych team come in and do a pre deployment brief, you know, what to expect and family expectations and that which was quite good.
Unfortunately, the gentleman that dealt with me, and the idea was they dealt with us before we went over and then when we returned, the same person followed up, and unfortunately my guy committed suicide in the time that I was away overseas, the psych guy. So I spoke to a younger, another psych when I got back, but yeah, it was unfortunate for the poor chap, but at least we've learned lessons from Rwanda and to some extent Somalia to the point where we started, the military start to bring those things in.
So that was one good thing, if anything … so brief before we left and the families as well, so we start to get them involved and warn them about what it's going to be like or we know they're going away and potentially could be in harm's way and they might come home, just to fully prepare them. And the families tight knitted, bonded together and, you know, they had functions with the kids and that just, you know, so they could keep sort of a, you know, a family bonding military extension … a debrief when we got back, this sort of stuff didn't happen in Rwanda and certainly Somalia was the same.
So it's like lessons learned. The military finally said, "Look, we've got to look after this". And it's gotten even better, to be honest, since then from the other deployments I've done. As soon as we landed we had four days off to relax and then straight to work and then start debriefs. The team came in and debriefed my squadron.
