Transcript
Straightaway there was somebody that spoke like us, met us and, you know, basically ushered us off the aircraft and got us all formed up and ready for the next part of the journey, which was the getting on the vehicle and transported through the streets and that's when a lot of it hits you, you can see that the place has been completely destroyed.
And the lawlessness and, you know, once you go outside that gate at the airport, you're basically in Dodge City, you know, it's like the Wild West, and those sorts of things, certainly for a navy person, were very confronting for me at the time. And not really knowing, you know, what I was getting myself into, but the fact that we're all there, you know, with people that have been there, and knew what to tell us what to do, you know, sort of calmed us down a bit.
And then off we went, drove, I think it was about, maybe not more than 10 Ks, maybe seven Ks up to where we were staying, which was the old US embassy compound. It had been completely destroyed and they were in the process of trying to sort of put it back together so that people could start functioning in there. And disembarking from the vehicle and meeting up with the rest of the contingent and being given a what they call an MRE, a meal ready to eat.
So, "Right, there's your lunch", you know, have that, and then just work out from there what jobs we were going to do. Swapping our weapons over because we had pistols. We were picking up our rifles, so we swapped over our weapons, and worked out where we were going to sleep for the night and, you know, did all that sort of thing. And then got a bit of an in-country sort of briefing so that we sort of had a bit of situational awareness of sort of what had been happening over the previous couple of weeks, catching up with a few folks that we hadn't seen for a while, because the advance party that we did some of our training with.
And then basically just settling into, you know, where we were staying, which was an old garage, which was commandeered, which was the Australia House, which was commandeered by the Australian contingent because it was a reasonably solid structure. And there was a, you know, a bunch of concern around mortar attack, and small arms fire and various other bits and pieces. So I think that's why they located themselves into this particular building.
