Raring to go
So I was an army brat, so I moved around a lot as a child. But we were, at that stage, sort of stable in Melbourne. I was doing secondary schooling in Melbourne, and I went basically straight out of high school into the army. I got a scholarship to go to Duntroon in year 11, so my fate was sealed, provided I got the requisite marks and the like. So I was very much focused on getting through HSC and then getting to Duntroon and on into the army.
Well, he'd (father) left school quite young and gone up to Papua New Guinea and in the constabulary up there. His best friend was a kiap in the patrol. So we'd sort of grown up on tales of high adventure up in PNG and the like, and then he was a Vietnam veteran later on, so I'd been in and around him and his mates and hearing their experiences in Vietnam and watched how that had sort of played out with them over the years as well. And my grandfather had been in the army as well. So I was always deeply sort of immersed in army culture and history and I was raring to go.
The long years of peace
When I went to RMC, I was very keen to go to the infantry, had always had my heart set on that. When I graduated, fortunately I went to the infantry. I had asked specifically to go up to Townsville, which was then the rapid deployment brigade or the ready deployment force, I think we were called back then. And I was then very focused on serving in those units up there. I served in 1RAR for a number of rotations. I also sought to be on the brigade headquarters up there to stay in the brigade because that was the brigade that was going to have the best opportunity to go anywhere if anything happened.
And of course they were what we sort of know as the long years of peace in that sort of post-Vietnam era, where there weren't very many operations at all. I left the battalion after my first stint there as a lieutenant and went down to being an instructor at the school of infantry. And it was in that time that 1RAR went to Somalia. So of course I was desperately trying to get back to the battalion and was devastated when the battalion went off to Somalia and I thought that that might be the one and only chance that I would ever have to go on a deployment. So I then returned up there onto the brigade headquarters. And I ended up in Rwanda off the brigade headquarters.
A place never heard of
I suppose, for people who make a decision to join an organisation like the army, I think many of us are driven in part by the personal challenge. Many of us driven by the history of those that have gone on operations before. There's always a mystique about testing yourself in those types of conditions, whether you can live up to the legacy of those that have gone before. I mean, there's all of that. And for me, there's a great sort of sense of adventure about these sorts of things as well.
I have to say, almost 40 years down the other end, sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for, because sometimes you get far more than you bargained for, and Rwanda was certainly a case of that. But yeah, I know people who serve for sometimes 20 years in the years between Vietnam and when all the operation started and didn't go anywhere and they still feel very doleful about that. But then there's so many of us that have been on so many operations since ...
When I missed on going to Somalia, in my mind, I was conveying to my veteran father, that my career was over and it had all been wasted and I'd never get another chance. And he said to me, he said, "When I was your age, I thought the same thing. And I ended up in a place that I'd never, ever heard of." And I thought for a minute, and I thought, "Vietnam?" He said, "When I was your age in 1967, I had never heard of Vietnam." And so I pondered on that for a second and I said, "Oh, that's a ridiculous story. The world's a much smaller place now. There's no places like that anymore." And six months later I was in Rwanda and I had never heard of Rwanda before.
A cycle of excitement and disappointment
So, interestingly on the brigade headquarters, there was an exercise in Canada, a Five Eyes exercise, Northern Lights. So we were over in Canada doing this brigade. Our brigade headquarters was set up as one of the three or four brigades, I think under a divisional headquarters doing a command post exercise. And the genocide was starting to unfold in Rwanda. And we, of course, in those days, you used to listen to the news all the time about where the opportunity might come for the next sort of mission. And the Canadians announced that they were going, and we were at that stage, very sort of envious of them. And of course we were a higher readiness, rapid deployment sort of organisation too.
So I remember saying to the Canadians, as we finished up the exercise and headed back to Australia, that we might just see them in Rwanda at some stage. I got back to Australia and back onto the brigade headquarters. And then a couple of weeks later, it did start to unfurl that Australia was considering sending a contingent. There's always rumours, there's always changes of plan. And so there was a swirl of things going on, but slowly but surely, it looked like we were definitely going to send a contribution. The contribution would be built around a medical contribution that would have a security element and those sorts of things.
And then as that started to take shape, I was an ops captain on the brigade headquarters at that stage, there was word that there'd be representation of the brigade headquarters. Then I was warned that I would be going from the brigade headquarters to join the force. And then I was told that was no longer the case. And then I was told that I was going again, and then I was told it, wasn't going again. That's also a feature of many of these operations as well. So some of us who were in that game for a long-time joke that if you hadn't been sort of put on the manifest and taken off the manifest, a couple of times, the operation didn't really count because that cycle of great excitement and disappoint was always very much a part of the rapid deployment units. And sometimes you were warned and got quite close to going on things, and then they were cancelled altogether.
So that certainly happened to me in later years when I was the online ready company commander. We were worn to go to Cambodia, and we're in the final stages of preparation to go and help evacuate people out of Cambodia, and then suddenly we weren't going. And there's been other operations like that along the way. But yeah, so, and then ultimately I was on the manifest and I was going, and then I went and joined the force that was being assembled and brought together in Townsville that comprised the headquarter elements of the second and fourth battalion at that time, the rifle company, parts of the administrative company, the disparate medical elements that were brought together as part of the field , the cavalry element with armoured personnel carriers. And then we had a very intense sort of short preparation, and then we were gone. And I was also wanting to be on the advanced party, which is what ultimately I ended up on.
An unusual conglomeration
It's multiple army units and there were joint people in there as well. So there were Navy and Air Force medical specialists in particular that were there. So yeah, quite an unusual conglomeration. The infantry battalion headquarters was sort of a dominant feature of it, but really it was just a clumping together of many, many disparate sort of elements. It was very much a blending, and me, I was familiar with some of the command elements of the battalion headquarters because the battalion headquarters would interact with the brigade headquarters very regularly.
But I was suddenly then supplanted into the battalion headquarters, as were other elements, such as intelligence elements and signals elements, and all sorts of things that weren't normally a part of the battalion headquarters. And then that battalion headquarters became sort of the force or the group headquarters. So it was coming together at the same time as the medical units were trying to come together and cohere as well.
So no, it was very much a coming together on the hop. And then of course the advanced party were... while the others still had more time to prepare, we were gone and we're in country sort of getting set up and experiencing the early days of the mission while they were still preparing and coming on in. So, the battalion ops side. Simon Gould was the head of the advanced party. I was taken as one of the sub headquarters groups to help him with the commander control of it.
There was a bunch of medical folks, both doctors, pharmacists, others. There were some specialist elements, tradies, and things that could help us get set up. And then there was an infantry platoon that was there to provide the protection, and there were others in there as well. But that was sort of a mixed, a little mini version of the main body that was to come to allow us to get into theatre. There had been a reconnaissance that had gone in prior, but we were really going in to then just figure out exactly where we were going to put everything and how it was going to work and get things set up for the main body's arrival.
Arrival and horrendous scenes
So we went over on a, in those days, it was very exciting. It was a US... from memory, I think it was some sort of national guard, huge aircraft. I think it was a Galaxy, A C5 Galaxy, one of these enormous cargo aircraft. And so we filed up into this thing that had this enormous cavern inside it. It was being filled with military equipment, and then we filed up into a sort of passenger area right up in the top of the plane. I'd never sort of been on one of these planes before. They were quite... we sort of seen them and sort of marvelled it in books and things, so that was all very exciting.
And then we stopped in Diego Garcia on the way, and that was of course fascinating, but there was nothing there. We got out and ran around and got back on the plane and then sort of headed on. But then when we landed in Rwanda, it was night-time. It was an airfield where there was visible signs of mortar bombs having gone off on the tarmac and the like. There was activity going on, we came off the plane, the gear was being marshalled off the plane.
I remember there were, I think, cameras and lights sort of looking at us as we came off the plane. So it was all a bit sort of a mix of excitement and disorientation. And then we were moved very quickly to an area where we got ammunition issued and all of that, so that got us very focused very quickly. And then we moved into the airport terminal and in the airport terminal, there was... And we had to be held there for some hours. And I think we were being held perhaps to be moved on to the area where we were going to be in camp, the former army barracks and the former...
Well, in fact, no. We were going to the former at this stage. We were going straight into the , but we then explored the airport for a couple of hours that night. And it was a scene of already of devastation and looting and ransacking. And there was pictures of the former leader that had been defaced and there were safes that had been broken open. It was complete sort of chaos, and again, all very exciting at the time.
We didn't encounter anything particularly grizzly and gruesome at that stage, but that was what the anticipation was. So we explored for a couple of hours. And then in the morning we were moved on to the hospital and I can remember driving. We were put onto this dilapidated old, beaten-up bus and we drove through the city. And again, the city, the streets had been largely cleaned up of human remains and those sorts of things. But there weren't a lot of people around and it was very, very hot. We'd watch the sort of spectacular sunrise from the airport. Yeah, hot, few people, signs of sort of carnage rolling through these streets over these hills. It's a very spectacular sort of town, Kigali.
And then we got to the hospital and then once we were into the hospital, we found our rooms. But once we were in the hospital, then straight away, we were starting to encounter all sorts of horrendous things that had been left as a result of the massacre the way the genocide had sort of rolled out through the city. So we came into a hospital. I think it was the Mary Celeste, the ship that they found that, tables were still set. It was like this, there were desks with paperwork where you could see they were halfway through a sentence and had dropped the pen, or people had clearly been in the course of their business and had to leave very quickly.
And then as we started to explore the hospital, we started to come across clearly places where people had been sort of corralled and then massacred. There were rooms where bloodied handprints all over the walls. And there were beds where people had obviously been sort of taken to in their beds. The patients, it seemed, even though the bodies were gone, the blood and gore was still around. But the toilet bowls, clearly the patients had been left to their own devices for a very long time because all of the toilet bowls in the hospital were filled to the top and had set hard with refuse, so there was no plumbing. And as we, over the weeks ahead, started to clean up the hospital to get it ready for our medicos to come and set it up and run it as a hospital, there was gruesome tasks like having to literally chip through all of the solid human faeces and stuff, trying to somehow avoid the smell of that with gas mask, which was pointless. But it was a bit of a psychological effect along the line.
So we were getting that, and progressively the plumbers were one by one getting toilets operating so that we could actually sort of use them. But we were living in amongst this for days and I think we were getting concoctions of meythlated spirits and iodine that we were just scrubbing everything with to try and get this place back to an operating hospital and that sort of stuff.
So that the first days and weeks were very, very confronting, very you know disturbing as well. There were a whole range of things that happened in those early days.
Headquarters at Butare
The French had conducted an operation, Operation Turquoise, down in the southwest of the country where they had, they had sealed off a portion of the country. At the time, they said as a humanitarian gesture, now we'd never really understood what the politics of that was, whether they had economic interests or they had some more nefarious sort of interest, what their role in the genocide had been at that stage. It was sort of very unclear. But the result of that was there was a portion of the country that had been sealed off.
And these large camps such as Kibeho had formed down in that area. But the French were about to pull out, and there was to be a handover of the French sort of boundaries with the UN. And there was a headquarters that was being established or had been established down in the south and a town called Butare to help with that transition. They were looking to man it, and they wanted a representative from the medical support force. So I was then selected to go down and join this headquarters.
So during the course of the advanced party, I was sent off as an individual down to the south as a representative of the medical support force. And I joined , what was like a small brigade headquarters that was notionally led by a Ghanaian Brigadier, a one-star, but in effect was being run by the Canadian brigade major that was down there with a bunch of Canadian staff. So I fell in on that headquarters, with the dual role of being an ops captain in the headquarters itself, but also providing medical support force advice. I had a bit of trouble convincing people that I wasn't a doctor. The Ghanaian Brigadier in particular, was convinced that I was a doctor and kept coming and describing his many ailments to him. And I eventually just gave up and started prescribing him sort of placebos, various.
72-hour leave
Because we're on the advanced party, we were among the first people to get access to, we had two 72 hour leave periods. We didn't have a chance to take... I'm just trying to think now… leave. The first leave that we took was a 72 hour leave pass to Nairobi. And I went with a couple of fellows on the advanced party. And we flew out on a UN Russian aircraft, got to Nairobi and then had this sort of very condensed period of time that we made the most of in Nairobi. We jumped on the night train down to Mombasa and then sort of turned around and headed straight back to the Nairobi.
The 72 hours was gone. But the second one that we went on, we then went on safari out to the Amboseli National Park. So it doesn't sound like a long time, but you can do a lot in 72 hours when you're coming out of place like Rwanda into, in some ways, an equally exciting sort of environment as well. So in those days, Kenya was... it was a relatively safe place to visit. Many of the people who went on leave there did get into sort of trouble with muggers and things in places like Nairobi. But we had a fantastic time in our two 72 hours leaves.
Respite and recreation
Some missions you are very intense, seven days a week. Years later in Afghanistan, I was on a routine in a coalition headquarters of seven days a week. But on Sunday you started two hours later. And that was the only rest cycle you would get, so very intense. Rwanda, the days were full, but the evenings, short of finishing reports and things like that.
There was an officer's mess in Kigali, there was a Sergeant mess in Kigali and there was a soldier's mess in Kigali. They would only open to serve alcohol, maybe sort of two nights a week, a Friday, Saturday night type thing. But on the other nights, you could go there and there were videotapes in those days available, and you could watch video tapes or play board games or chess and those sorts of things. So we would do that, or we would go and sit on the veranda outside people's rooms and tell stories and sing songs and do that sort of stuff. It was pretty rudimentary, but we also were able to do both organised PT inside the barracks.
And in the early days of the mission too, there were other activities such as runs that were organised through the city. So you could go and do a longer, I think was a five kilometre or a 10-kilometre run that we did occasionally. Also through the course of the mission, I organised a rugby game with the British parachute field ambulance that we trained up for a couple of weeks. And went and got the engineers to clear and oval, make sure there were no mines and other munitions on there. And then we staged the rugby game. So there was some good activities in amongst all of the other stuff as well. We share a national day with India and we were sharing the barracks in Kigali with an Indian unit for many, many months. And so we had a combined national day with them where we did cultural events and played a game of cricket as well. And those sorts of things. So there was the ability to get some respite.
The operations cell
So when I was in Kigali with the main force, I was an ops captain. So we would typically get up in the morning and do probably organized PT, some physical training exercise. There were a number of days a week we would also do weapons training and things, just to make sure we remain competent on the weapons. That would also involve taking all your ammunition, out of your magazines, to ease the springs in the magazines and things.
So we were learning to live in and around weapons for prolonged periods of time. Then I would spend the day in the op cell, a small room, couple of sergeants and myself monitoring the radios hearing what was going on with the various deployed outposts and the like writing reports. We also were responsible for issuing the orders for any groups that were going outside of the compound or outside of Kigali on tasks, various. I mean, there was all sorts of tasks that happen through the course of the deployment.
We would send teams out to respond to some sort of incident or crises. We were sending detachments out to set up temporary medical facilities in remote parts of the country. We helped with vaccinations, we even helped with the distribution of the new currency at one stage. So there were always teams moving in and out. And we in the op cell we're responsible for preparing them, making sure they had the orders, making sure that they knew exactly what to do.
If things happened and things would... there'd be traffic crashes would happen or people would come across traffic crashes. We had the ambulance detachment that we had were attached to us. So often we would have to dispatch ambulances out to pick up casualties. There'd be lunch through the course of the day, in the afternoon, more of the same. And then usually in the evening there would be a daily situation report that would have to be sent back to Australia. So we would compile that together for the CO.
On quiet days, sometimes if we had an opportunity, we would go down to the surgery and jump into the surgery with the surgeons and either watch what they're up to or help out just for something different. And that was also a new opportunity for us to see things that we would normally have seen and to see. There were wounds coming through, not just from machete style wounds, but there were still landmines and hand grenades and things going off and people were getting shot. So we were getting to experience battle type wounds and battle medicine as well at the same time. So that was, it was an interesting distraction as well.
A new currency
There was a unique aspect about the mission that the government that was in place was the army in exile out of Uganda that had swept into the country at the time of the genocide. And the then General Kagame had appointed himself as sort of interim president pending an election. But we were there supporting an interim government that hadn't been elected. But a lot of the bureaucracy was nascent, and a lot of the talent base that was needed to set up so much important bureaucracy, such as courts and treasuries, it just didn't exist.
Many of those sort of highly specialized people had been sort of killed off during the genocide, quite deliberately. Academics through universities had been killed off quite deliberately, so it was a mixed bag. So that was a little later in the mission. And the thing that was driving the new currency was that many of the opponents of the government, or many of the genocide perpetrators, even the army that had now gone into exile largely into neighbouring countries and the things, had taken or amassed former Rwanda currency.
So this was an opportunity to zero the balance and make sure only those people who were legitimate in the eyes of the government had the new currency. And there was real suspicion about the new currency, even amongst some legitimate population. So we were down in the camps trying to convince some people that they really needed to exchange the currency and they wouldn't be convinced. So there was a period where they had an opportunity to switch to the new currency and then overnight the old currency was suddenly worthless. So it was a fascinating... one of these subplots that was running inside a country like that, that is in complete breakdown.
Relations with locals and the Rwandan Patriotic Army
I spent many months also down in the south in Butare in the tactical headquarters. I also later in the mission led little teams that went down to help with the repatriation of the camps, where we had a group of medics and some other specialists and some infantry protection, and we would go and visit the camps and then help process people and the like. So on day-to-day in Kigali, you would have incidental contact with the locals, either them coming to the front gate of the barracks, whether it was kids begging for food, or other sort of just having a bit of fun.
As you moved around town, you would encounter the RPA, which was generally less friendly than with the locals. We also had locals coming into the hospital as casualties. We were also responding to some incidents in around the grounds of the hospital and nearby. So we were interacting with the locals all the time. When I went down to Butare, then we had Rwandan sort of local employed people who were acting as cooks and cleaners inside the buildings and that sort of stuff, but then we're going to the camps. And when you're in the camps, you were completely surrounded by a sea of local humanity, so yeah, but very mixed populations.
Our relationships with the Rwandan patriotic army, the new army were always a bit tense. There were elements inside the camps who had clearly previously been in some of these militias, like the Interahamwe. Very standoffish. And then you had people that we would help in the normal course of their duties who were very appreciative, but often there was very limited English skills, and very limited translator capabilities on our behalf. So you were often just interacting through gestures and goodwill. And then there were the kids, and the kids were always fantastic. And I mean, places like Kibeho and the other camps would have a great time playing around with the kids and sort of playing jokes on them and giving them biscuits and having them play jokes on us and that sort of stuff. So that was always a really enjoyable part of the mission.
Poor psychological preparation
We came into the mission, this my first mission. It was many of our first experiences, both in an operational environment and with the UN. I think we came in with some preconceived notions and assumptions that were found to be not correct. I mean, we assumed that the UN would be a coherent, well-functioning entity, which it wasn't. It was very disparate, different national groups inside the UN and there's a very more sort of less rigorous approach to the way orders are given and the way things are carried out and followed through. And so it took us a while to sort of get used to which bits of the UN were more effective than others and all of that.
We also assume that as an assistance mission, we were coming into to help not only a government, but a people who would be enthusiastic about that. Now, of course the general population were largely enthusiastic, but the Rwandan Patriotic Army were not enthusiastic. I think we were seen as an inhibitor for them setting up their new regime, carrying out whatever payback that they saw was just in terms of people that they were sort of progressively sort of hunting out as they asserted themselves as the new masters of Rwanda, or in their minds, probably the returning masters of Rwanda.
So instead of having free access around the countryside, and instead of being either tasked or sought for support from the RPA, it became a very standoffish relationship, a very suspicious relationship, and frankly became just very difficult in that our movement around the country was regularly inhibited by the RPA. We'd been trained to build roadblocks and things with great vast resources. A Rwandan needs milk crate, a piece of string and an AK 47. And that piece of string across the road backed up by an AK 47 will stop a large UN convoy for as long as you want it to. And if you can't negotiate your way past the guy holding up the piece of string the chances are you're not going to get any help from UN headquarters to alleviate the situation.
So there was a lot of these frustrating sort of situations that we were encountering that at times were resolved quite benignly and quite quickly, but at other times ended up in quite tense, sort of standoffs that took sort of many hours to resolve. So as we worked our way through the mission we became less and less enamoured of the RPA. And by the time we left, I think many of us were very, not only sort of suspicious of them, but were quite sort of bitter about the way that part of the mission had played out. And I know the next rotation came thinking that we had somehow contributed to the ill will.
But I think that was probably naive and came to pass when the Kibeho massacre happened you know at the hands of the RPA. So yeah, it was a thing you know that unfolded and dawned on us slowly that it wasn't the way we had assumed it would be. And it took a while for us to really get a sense of what it was.
An extraordinary mission
Look, it was an extraordinary mission. And for reasons around the way the mission was formed at a point in time, it was when we hadn't done a lot of these joint sort of missions where troops had been munged together. The Australian honours and awards system was just going through a complete revision. The mission lived in a weird space between chapter six and chapter seven of the UN charter. So it didn't sort of fit the war-like or non-war like definitions. And because the unit didn't have a natural parent unit, because there was a full field hospital and a much smaller infantry sort of grouping, the unit was never sort of recognised in the way that it might've been at the time. And 25 years later, both rotations have been recognised through a meritorious unit citation.
And I think there were certainly things that happened through all of this mission at a medical level, at a responding to crisis level, at a showing extreme sort of bravery in the harrowing circumstances at Kibeho that warrant that. So in amongst all of that, there are many, many amazing characters. I think for me, there's a person who is still a great friend of mine. Michelle Barrett was a young female doctor who had been in the army for I think... Seventeen weeks sticks in my mind or something like that. And I think within either 24 hours or on the sort of second day we're in Rwanda, was helping cut someone's leg off in rudimentary conditions.
The surgeons that came through that were operating at rates that hadn't been seen since Vietnam conducting all manner of surgeries on adults, on young children. I witnessed surgeries on young children, who had been on women's backs who'd stepped on landmines and these sorts of things. Also doing surgery on clearly very unpleasant people who probably had been perpetrators of all manner of crimes and things as well, so that adds another dimension to surgery.
I saw infantry corporals and their sections show enormous restraints in sort of Mexican style standoffs. There were many, many people on this thing that did sort of great things all the way through it, but that's why the ADF such a fabulous organisation to be a part of. And you see versions of that on all of these missions in some way. But this one for me was just... There was just such a unique set of circumstances that... It wasn't only my first mission, but it was the most intense in terms of the personal feelings that it invoked, and the sense of team that we got from going through that together.
A formative experience
The mission probably did three things for me. It delivered some immensely strong friendships that we still enjoy. The group of people that I've had as a close circle from Rwanda that I didn't know before we went to Rwanda in particularly in and around the advanced party. That's been a lifelong gift and we still stay in very close contact and see each other at least a couple of times a year, if we can. And that encompasses people from the medical side of the mission and in the infantry, but other parts of the mission as well. So that's a great gift, and that's a thing that service and operational service can deliver. And I think Rwanda's been a great example of that.
For me, it was a very formative experience as well, because I learnt things about human nature and civil society and just how precarious, just how fragile society can be and just how quickly it can turn and how darkly it can turn if it's allowed to. And there's definitely the worst of human nature on display in Rwanda, both through the genocide. And then in later events like Kibeho. So that's allowed me to form perspectives on the world and views on life and reflect on value systems in a way that I think has been personally very useful.
But the final thing it gave me is it taught me a lot about our craft as military leaders. And I took things from Rwanda through other missions that have been really important. I learnt the absolute importance of the role of young officers in managing soldiers in either extreme boredom or confronting horror or situations of great fear and uncertainty. And that young officers are selected for different attributes to soldiers. And it's those sorts the character attributes and the judgment attributes that come into play, even from very junior officers are really important. And that the discipline that the military invokes is absolutely essential. And there are times when that sort of split-second adherence to orders is absolutely important.
So I came away from Rwanda with a crystal-clear sense of that, which has been very useful. Having trained as an infantryman for attacking hills and defending hills and all this sort of stuff, that's not what we did in Rwanda. Although there were aspects of physical security that came to play out through the mission at various times, but there were other things in there about dealing with human remains and dealing with very psychologically traumatic incidents that have also been very useful to me as a commander. And we had to deal with human remains without any appropriate training, without any appropriate equipment, without any appropriate sort of briefing or debriefing on a number of occasions. And that has damaged a lot of people. And then frankly left me with a self-diagnosed hypersensitivity to the smell of human death and all these sorts of things. But I've been able to manage it over the years, but others haven't.
But it's allowed me on other missions where suddenly it's been seen as a convenience for soldiers to go and clean up things like this. I've absolutely refused, unless the appropriate training and equipment is provided, or some suitably trained and equipped force has come to do it. Now, sometimes that's frustrated soldiers who thinking that's all part of a experience set that they should have protected them from it. And I'm very proud that I've stopped damage being done that they couldn't foresee, because unfortunately that wasn't the case in Rwanda. So there's been other, other lessons like that in leadership sense that, that mission at that time in my career, I think has, has greatly helped to this day.
