Transcript
We were debriefed in country, the army sent, because it was a majority army run contingent, the army sent two psychologists into country and we were interviewed a couple of times and it's not till you start being interviewed by the psychologist, nothing's changed until they ask you questions as we are today and I took up smoking again, I hadn't smoked for years.
The RSM said to us, "Why are you the smoking, it'll kill you?" And we say, "Well there's people out there who want to kill us too." Cigarettes were 20 cents a packet. You know, cigarettes were cheap. At night time we used to drink, sometimes we got, especially on a Saturday night where we had a Sunday off for work, because we had one day off a week, nice to have the Sunday off.
You have a few drinks and, you know, have a good night and our drinking levels went up, our sleeping habits changed and it wasn't till we got debriefed by the psychologist in country that you realized' that, "Hang on, I haven't smoked for X amount of years and I'm smoking now. I didn't drink beer for a long time, now I'm drinking a heap of beer every night".
Sleep was hit and miss. So it wasn't till then you realise that life had changed. And we did a couple of debriefings over a few days prior to leaving country. But once we got back to Australia, we just went on leave over the Christmas break and back to work as normal in the New Year.
