Liz Cosson - The biggest deployment since Vietnam

Transcript

At land headquarters I had a mix of a military and civilians and I have seen incredible people who have just wanted to work to make sure they that they were keeping those soldiers safe. They knew the importance of this deployment of our force into East Timor they knew that, and they were prepared to work incredible hours and go above and beyond to do that work, and there were two civilian males, I'll never forget. They just worked and worked to do that. And so never underestimate the role of our civilians in our workforce, the public service.

You know, some people think the public service are not putting in; they are. And then I had the soldiers and I had the NCOs, who were also doing that. And as a team, it was such a team that just wanted to get this right because we knew we were making history with East Timor, the commander would stand up in the ops briefs every Monday, and he'd say, "This is the biggest deployment that we have seen since Vietnam. What do we need to do? Let's get the plans right. Let's know what we're doing".

Because the forces were preparing, you know, the battalions were preparing and our largest logistics teams were preparing. But we were the rear and we were making sure that supply chain was going to get to them.