I have fond memories of those training days. Brent knew I was applying for the military and as a PE teacher was trying to help me out, but I was doing it on my own, hurting, faltering, telling myself to push on harder. I knew that in the army I’d get yelled at and tormented, but physical fitness was something I could control. At work, I treated the cable-pulling as a form of incidental exercise. We competed to be the quickest at ripping the Parramatta ropes through the pits. I thought if the military wouldn’t take me then I’d go to the US Marines, and if they wouldn’t take me I’d go to the French Foreign Legion. There were no limits to how far I’d go.
An appointment was made for me to front up to the army office in Sydney, and I went down to stay with Ross and Val for a week. The army letter had said to show up with your gear in anticipation of not going home. When the day came, I had a bag packed and said to Ross and Val, ‘See you later.’ If I got through the tests, I’d be on my way to Kapooka, the basic training camp near Wagga Wagga, by nightfall.
The office was on Oxford Street. I was sat down and given some straightforward tests. The interviewer said, ‘Your application says you want to go into the infantry. Tell me what it’s about.’
I regurgitated what I’d read on the army website. I would learn shooting, bush and infantry skills, be in a team environment, learn how to dig in, perform section activities. I expected to get yelled at and do physical training. He said, ‘Okay, no worries.’ If applicants hadn’t done any research, they got sent back to find out more. The army didn’t want them going in blind. Then, as an afterthought, he added, ‘And you’re going to do drill as well.’
I didn’t really know what drill was, apart from what I’d seen in movies. I didn’t like the look of it, and have never liked it since. I guess it’s worthwhile, in a punishing kind of way. But perfecting open-order marching wasn’t why I joined up.
They sent me down to HMAS Kuttabul at Garden Island, and put me through a basic physical: push-ups, sit-ups, swim, beep test. As soon as you’d reached their standard – thirty push-ups, or 7.5 on the beep test – they stopped you. From there, I was sworn in on the Queen’s oath and put on a bus. We sat and waited for a few more recruits, and when they’d filled two buses we were off. I was in the army.
*
The bus drove through the night, about seven hours from Sydney to Wagga. I knew that everyone on the bus was nervous, but it was interesting to see how differently people expressed it. Some were boisterous, high-fiving and cracking jokes. Others were subdued. There were guys with headphones, going inside themselves. There’s a basic human nature to how people behave in a group, which I’ve seen repeated all the way through from Kapooka to Afghanistan, and most of us are the same all the way through. For myself, I was apprehensive but excited. I wanted to get it done, get started on this adventure I’d been thinking about for so long. This was step number one. Outwardly, I was what’s known as a ‘grey man’, the one who gets on with it, stays under the radar, doesn’t speak much. Big ears, big eyes, small mouth. ‘Going grey’ wasn’t a deliberate pose: it’s my nature.
When we pulled into the barracks at Kapooka, military police (MPs) stepped onto the bus and started yelling and screaming at us. They lined us up and told us to put our belongings into bags, which they took away. I was at the rear of the line, and they assigned us numbers: I was in Bravo Company, 11 Platoon, 1 Section. That was it. The MPs shouted, ‘Remember that number to tell the corporal at the desk.’
I went to the desk and said, ‘Donaldson, Bravo Company, 11 Platoon, 1 Section, sir!’
He nearly exploded. ‘It’s corporal! Everything you say, it’s corporal!’
I squeaked, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’M NOT SIR! I’M CORPORAL!’
‘Yes, si– yes, corporal.’
I toddled off, nervous but not scared. I wasn’t fazed; I didn’t feel my temper was challenged by having my head ripped off. I was happy to do what they said, because it was taking me one step closer to what I wanted to be part of.
Usually the basic training at Kapooka took twelve to thirteen weeks, but the army was trialling a new method of recruit training, which saw us in and out in half the time. We were housed in a long barracks of four-bed rooms, with a divider between the two sets of bunks in each room. The system marked you out by what tabs you wore on your epaulettes. For the first week, as a ‘jubie’, you had no tabs and were treated like a piece of shit. You couldn’t even go to the toilet when you wanted, and every morning you had to be lined up outside your room at six o’clock, having been shouted at to get out of bed, with your bedsheet over your shoulder. Everything you did, you had to be like an automaton, accepting authority, marching everywhere as a group.
In the second and third weeks you had red tabs, and then you moved on to blue tabs. Gradually the insulting, pointless part of it was relaxed. Under blue tabs, you didn’t have to march to and from the mess, and could walk in pairs. By then you were too close to the end to be overly bothered by it. For the last week you got gold tabs, which meant they took you into the bush for a bivouac, you did a navex, or navigation exercise, and were taught some basic soldiering skills.
Every Sunday we had to go to church, but one of the privileges of being on gold tabs was that you didn’t have to. I thought this was two hours I could have to myself. I’d write a letter to Margaret and Ken, Kenny and Julie, or Ross and Val. I rang Brent once. It felt good to be able to tell them I was enjoying it and not copping out. And I really was enjoying it, no doubt to their general astonishment. I didn’t make any close friends there, more friendship through necessity, but I think I was convivial generally and don’t remember being a prick or ostracising anyone. I was always there to help people out if they were struggling, and wasn’t part of a clique. For me it was just a mission to get to the next step.
Kapooka was a training institute, not a place for culling. The instructors weren’t dickheads for the sake of being dickheads (that came later, at Singleton). At Kapooka we had a really good one, an ex-infantry soldier called Rollingston, nickname Lurch. We joked about his inability to do PT, or personal training, with us. He popped a magic purple pill every day, Naproxen, because his back was fucked and his legs were fucked. He’d been in Somalia, and I felt like I could learn from him. I asked if Somalia had been anything like Black Hawk Down. It makes me cringe to remember, but I was green. When I go to Kapooka now and the recruits ask questions like that about Afghanistan, I wonder, Was I ever that young? Did I ever come across that way? They look so impressionable and naïve, like a bunch of scared sheep. Surely I never looked like that? But I’m sure I did.
Overall, I found it less challenging and more friendly than I’d expected. The sense of camaraderie was already there: you could leave your belongings out, because even in this first stage of the army it was understood that thieving from your mates was a bigger crime than murder. I liked the trust and teamwork they were trying to build. The PT, the shooting, the navigation and soldiering exercises were fun. The drill wasn’t, but I could get through that. There was a weird exercise one night, when they darkened the hallway and locked us in our rooms. A corporal came and grabbed us, one at a time.
‘Righto.’ The corporal came to our door and looked at me. ‘You ready for this?’
‘Yeah. What’s going on?’ I could hear muffled shouting from somewhere down the hall.
‘You’ll see.’
He took me to a door, pushed me through and slammed it shut behind me. Inside it was pitch-black with a bunch of strobes going off, flashing all around me. There was a rifle on the floor and voices were shouting, ‘Go! Pick up that weapon! Load! Action! Instant! Unload! Get on your guts! Get on your knees!’
To be honest, I think they’d just found a couple of free hours they wanted to fill in. But I thought, This is how I thought it would be the whole time. Instead, that was an exception.
Although the army couldn’t afford to disco
urage new recruits too much, a few weeks at Kapooka caused some attrition. One guy in my room flaked out when he was driven nuts by the basic petty stuff. With making our beds, they required the army standard of having one bayonet-length folded back every single morning. They’d make you rip your bed apart and remake it in three minutes. Or they’d make you take something out of your locker and iron it pronto. These were all games to annoy you and test you, but also to teach you how to work quickly under pressure. This one bloke decided he couldn’t do it any more. But unfortunately for flake-outs, it takes time to get their paperwork done and withdraw them from the system. They can’t stay in the platoon, because they’ll be infectious and bring everyone down, so those who flaked out were segregated into a kind of limbo. At mess times they were sat down on the other side of a partition. This guy was still in there when we left, waiting for his papers.
Flake-outs were put into the Digger James Platoon, named after the highly regarded officer who lost his left leg and his right foot in a mine strike while serving as an infantry platoon commander in Korea, where he was also awarded the Military Cross (MC). He subsequently resigned, studied medicine at Sydney University and rejoined the army medical corps, rising to the rank of major general as the head of Army Health Services. My view is that the naming of ‘Digger James Platoon’ at Kapooka sends the message that people can overcome injuries and continue on to achieve great things.
I never saw anyone who flaked out get taken back in. Sometimes people had a more acceptable excuse than just being unable to meet the standards. In our shooting phase, there was an Indonesian-Australian with a soft manner, who the instructors had been riding a bit. He wanted to be a medic and help people. When we got to the shooting, he said, ‘I’m not here to kill people.’ They said, ‘Mate, understood, but you need to do this.’ He said because of his religion he couldn’t do it, and dropped out.
We had three girls in our platoon, and luckily none of them dropped out for the wrong reasons. It could be tricky in the mornings, when everyone had to line up in the hall in their identical blue pyjamas, trying to drape their sheets in such a way as to cover their morning hard-ons. But there wasn’t much you could do about it with the corporal yelling at you and someone over his shoulder pulling a face. I copped that once from a British guy who’d been in the army before and was coming back in. He was always taking the piss, doing everything they asked but also giving plenty of good-humoured advice. One day they picked me to be the one they yelled at. I was there in the hall, trying to say, ‘Yes, corporal’, while my so-called mate was behind the corporal, swaying from side to side to make me laugh. Keeping a straight face under pressure is another essential military skill.
Between dinner and lights out, which was ten o’clock, we’d have whatever free time we could fit in after doing homework, navigation theory or ironing. Teamwork became important. I’ve never been any good at ironing my clothes or shining my boots or having the brass the right way. I tried but didn’t have a knack for it. Some of the trainees could belt out an ironed shirt in seconds. I’d say, ‘Can you do mine, and I’ll do something for you?’ He might need help doing a navigation theory test, or improving his push-ups, so we could barter our skills with each other.
During that free time, we’d talk to each other about why we were there. About 80 per cent were there for a job, and the other 20 per cent knew exactly where they were headed. One guy wanted to drive tanks and blow shit up. Another, who’d moved from America, wanted to be an engineer: he wanted to be up front to find and defuse bombs. I chatted with people who, like me, were headed for infantry, but I didn’t put it about that I wanted to be in the SAS; that would have been presumptuous. But it sort of seeped out. A couple of times Rollingston pulled me aside, out bush or at the range, and said, ‘Hey, are you thinking of going into the Regiment?’ I said, ‘Corporal, all I want to do is make the infantry first and then think about that.’ He said, ‘Mate, you won’t have a problem.’ The worst thing for me would have been to believe him, so I deflected the compliment as best I could.
There were a couple of encounters with SAS visitors at Kapooka, and my antennae were on high alert. One of them came along to a PT session and said to us, ‘Let’s see how many push-ups you recruits can do in two minutes.’ I thought, This is what I’ve been training for. I think I got to eighty and was the only one still going after two minutes. He said, ‘Not too bad. We’ll have to keep an eye on you.’ I didn’t say anything and just hid my blushes, thinking, That’s pretty good if an SAS guy said that to me. I’d better not fuck up now. Inspired, I did the beep test and almost beat the company commander. I was nowhere near as good as the instructors, but I was doing well enough to be able to apply myself to the things I wasn’t good at.
The SAS aura went beyond push-ups and beep tests. On an overnight exercise, where we’d hump – walk with a heavy pack – and navigate during the day, get put into an imaginary contact with the enemy, do some shooting and go on to a bivouac, we were walking along and I heard people whispering, ‘There’s the SAS bloke.’ He came up from nowhere in his cams, all rigged up to go hunting with a bow and arrow. He had a chat, bagged us out and ran off into the bush. We were blinking back our amazement at how fit this guy was, like we’d just met Superman. The reality was probably that he’d got out of a car 100 metres behind – but he sure made an impression!
On the last day, I was sitting at the mess with the American, and an unusual-looking older bloke sat next to us. He didn’t have slides or a name tag, and his gear wasn’t ironed. He had scuffed-up black boots, not the standard brown ones. He slapped down the sand-coloured beret with the winged dagger on it. We might as well have been getting a visit from God.
‘How you going, fellas?’
‘Yeah, pretty good.’
He looked at me. ‘I hear you’ve done not too bad on this course?’
‘Yeah, good.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Infantry.’
‘You ever thought of coming to the Regiment?’
I said ‘Yeah’ and tried to change the subject. I was in awe of this bloke and didn’t want to make a goose of myself. Things got silent as he ate his breakfast. Finally I said, ‘So what are you doing here, sir?’
He just gave me this look. I thought, Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have asked that question. I’ve got to know him since I joined the Regiment, and I’ve asked him about it. While he can’t remember the episode, he says he was probably just shooting us a look to show how hard he was.
At our March Out Parade, he was sitting in the crowd in his beret, his polys (the ceremonial dress), and the red sash showing he was a warrant officer. I kept thinking, Why is this guy here? I stopped myself short of thinking, He must be here for me. Maybe I did, just a little. It was hard not to be deluded that they had someone from the Regiment to check us out for possibles. But even if it wasn’t real, I was getting encouragement at Kapooka. They weren’t out to cut you down or belittle you. Every instructor I came across was willing to give me tips or suggest someone else who could help. Towards the end of the course, they said, ‘We’ve got a special treat for you today,’ and sat us in an amphitheatre to watch Black Hawk Down. I sat next to Rollingston. He was talking to me about Somalia. My chest puffed a bit; I felt I’d earnt a little of his respect.
Brent offered to come down for the March Out, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. It was only six weeks, only the first step. ‘Maybe if I get through the next part,’ I said.
The next part was a whole different world: infantry training at Singleton. By the end of that, I would appreciate seeing some familiar faces.
ELEVEN
The Kapooka graduates were sent out to all corners: Sydney, Melbourne, Puckapunyal, Townsville. I was put on a huge coach to Singleton with four others. There was plenty of room to spread ourselves out.
Immediately on our arrival, it felt more like the real army than Kapooka. NCOs
were yelling and carrying on, trying to organise us and several dozen other new recruits. The barracks were named after battles in Australian history: mine was named after Samichon River in the Korean War. I was getting a bit nervous, but still excited and positive. I was in IET or initial employment training, learning to be an infantry soldier. We did our paperwork, went over some weapons drills and were shown the camp layout, taking instruction from an old corporal whose voice was so hoarse and crusty he would eventually need a throat operation.
‘You guys think you’re good enough to get in the infantry?’ he rasped. ‘Right, we’re going to do some push-ups.’ Then he’d get right in your face and shout, ‘Down!’
I thought, No way is he going to beat me. He dropped into a push-up position and held it just off the ground. ‘You reckon you can hold it longer than me?’ the Corporal croaked.
I did my best, glaring at him while my face was breaking out in a sweat and my arms and legs were turning to mush. I was trying to feed off him. It was tough, and soon people were dropping out of the infantry left right and centre. I revved myself up by saying to myself, This is what I came here for. In a funny way, being a rebellious person by temperament was something I could turn to my advantage, getting through by sheer bloody-minded defiance.
Our biggest tormentor was our platoon sergeant, who I had for twelve weeks. He had no reason to be a dickhead. He just wanted to be, or so it seemed. He came right out of the classic military-style negative-reinforcement textbook. The regulations gave us free time from Friday night until Sunday night, but the platoon sergeant could take it away from us on his own say-so. Early in week one, he said, ‘That’s your Friday night gone straight away. The corporals told me you weren’t here in time.’ No one had done anything wrong. We hadn’t been late. We were really fucked off. But this was only the beginning of it.
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