Our weeks had hardly begun before he was taking away our Friday nights. One of the more pointless set tasks was to pull up the hems of our trousers for inspection, to show if we’d rolled our socks over our boots in the correct manner. He exploded at someone: ‘Right, that’s Friday night gone for the lot of you!’
The aim was to bring us together, make us accountable to each other, so we could say to any miscreant, ‘Mate, get your shit straight because you’re fucking the rest of us over.’ But this sergeant was so over the top, there was no incentive to improve. Some weeks, by the time we’d got to Monday afternoon, he’d already stripped us of Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday. One week, we really busted our guts and made it to Thursday without having lost our weekend. We were doing an exercise out in the field, and the sergeant lost his shit over some rubbish he’d found uncollected. He got the three garbage bags we’d filled up, ripped them up and chucked the trash everywhere, going off his head, screaming and carrying on. ‘You leave rubbish at a camp, you kill your mates, you kill your platoon!’
We just stood there thinking, Please don’t take our Friday night, not when we’ve made it this far.
After he cooled down, he said, ‘Right, you’ve got thirty seconds to pick up all this rubbish, and if you don’t, that’s your Friday night gone!’
We were desperate. Everyone was scrambling around, trying to pick up the rubbish he’d strewn about.
‘Thirty seconds, that’s it!’
We formed up and were looking around, thinking, Okay, we’ve done it.
Then this one little plastic wrapper blew out of a guy’s hand. In slow motion, flipping and rocking back and forth like a feather, it twirled in the air, taking forever, right in front of us, before it landed on the dirt.
‘Right, don’t you dare fucken touch that! That’s Friday night done! Dump all the rubbish on the ground!’ He went bananas, kicking it at us, through us, picking it up and chucking it at us. I was right at my limit. If this prick throws it at me, I’m going to go him. Everyone was the same.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now you’ve got twenty seconds to pick it all up!’
It was spread around everywhere. We did it, thinking we might win back our Friday night, but he didn’t care.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Saturday and Sunday – gone.’
Each Friday we’d sit there grimly watching other platoons tear off into Newcastle for the weekend. We learnt to hate that bloke. I just wanted to go to my brother’s place and hang out with him and Kate, or my mate Dom. After six weeks at Kapooka and four weeks at Singleton, I was craving a weekend off.
On the weekends, the corporals and sergeant were home with their families and left a duty corporal who’d tell us what to do. We had to sit in our rooms for hours. On the hour, every hour, all through the weekend, we’d have to lump our gear to the duty room, take it apart and repack it as per standard operating procedure. First hour, we had to be in field order. That meant our combat webbing and packs plus 35 kilos of gear standing in perfect rank and file waiting for an inspection. By the start of the next hour we had to be back there with our plastic army storage trunk, our field order laid out on the ground with our pack and webbing, all to be unclipped. Every pouch, belt, clip and buckle laid out on the grass. If anyone had anything missing, they’d put it on a list for the sergeant on Monday. The next hour you’d have to be there standing in field order, all put together again, for the same procedure. This would continue from eight o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night. We’d just do that all weekend, pulling our stuff apart and putting it back together.
What a fucken waste of time, I was thinking. This was the first test of my resolve. I was starting to question what this was all about. Brent had told me the surf was pumping at Newcastle. It was hell. There was a rec room to watch TV, but the rest of the time there was nothing. We weren’t allowed to go to the gym by ourselves, so we’d go and do push-ups and chin-ups out the back of our lines. We’d make our own circuits. We had no internet. I didn’t have a mobile phone. All there was, was army.
When, in about the fifth or sixth week, we finally got to go out on the weekend, everyone went nuts, overcompensating. At least I had somewhere to stay and family to hang out with. Some of the trainees were seventeen years old with nowhere to stay, had saved up some money and were full of pent-up frustration. Friday nights were massive bitch sessions about the platoon sergeant, and the next thing some of the guys were back at Singleton, having taken their money and blown it all in a few hours of drinking and gambling.
Being out after all that time in Kapooka and Singleton, I had the strangest sensation. We had to wear jeans and a collared shirt in public because we were still representing the army. Wearing civilian clothes felt as bizarre to me now as wearing cams for the first time. Even though there were women at Singleton, we rarely saw them. Our days were heavily structured and the women were not doing the infantry training we were. I said to Brent, ‘I feel really weird. I’m in unfamiliar clothes, I’m seeing females walking in the street. My idea of normal has been changed.’
He said, ‘Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do to you?’
‘I guess so. I’d feel much more normal if I was in a pair of cams.’
For the three months we were there, the barracks at Singleton started to feel more normal than Newcastle. I enjoyed going out in the bush and doing section attacks. There was one crucial week when, if you were going to fail, you would. It was the section contact phase. If you weren’t looking through your sights when you were shooting, if you weren’t in the right position to fire, you received a warning called a safety breach. The second warning was a standards breach. If one of the instructors walking behind you saw you doing an improper drill, he’d write it down and say, ‘You’ve fucked that.’ The punishment was to go back to repeat it with a platoon that might be two or three weeks behind you in the training. My view was, I’m not doing this twice, so I made sure I got it right.
Singleton was a big step up from Kapooka in their attitude to culling people. They weren’t going out of their way to get rid of you, but to their credit, they still had a standard you had to reach. The instructors prided themselves on being hard. The two main ones, corporals Meehan and Barrett, held a lot of the PT record performances and used us, their sections, to compete against each other, whether it was on the obstacle course, the bayonet assault course or overall.
I had my first experience of the mindset of violence we’d need. Ultimately, your ability to kill someone might be the difference between your own life and death, and is one of the tests of whether you can be a combat soldier. Back in Kapooka, we’d had bayonet training – the routine of ‘Left parry, right parry, butt stroke, smash, slash, in, out, on guard’. We did it with bayonets fixed to Steyr rifles, using them on a rubber car tyre attached to a metal rod. The rod was on a spring system that would bounce back up, like those clowns you can punch down but come at you again. A corporal at Kapooka did it so vigorously that on his first slash he snapped the blade out of his Steyr. It was quite eye-opening when you saw how aggressively he attacked something that was a stand-in for a human being.
At Singleton, as we lined up with our bayonets, the instructors paced up and down in front of us.
‘What are you gunna do?’ they shouted.
We had to scream: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’
That’s what they were teaching us. There’s a technique to using bayonets, but ultimately it’s an act of violence. They didn’t overdo it, but it was my first glimpse of what would be a long indoctrination. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but I wasn’t scared by the idea. My attitude was, Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Even now, when I certainly have crossed that bridge, I think it’s one of those experiences that no matter how much training you’ve done, you never know how you’ll handle it until you’re confronted by the real thing. Although I also feel that bein
g real with yourself – accepting what you may have to do in this job and being at peace with it – will set you up for dealing with those feelings when it happens.
Meanwhile, in section attacks we had to throw grenades and assault a pit. We put two shots into the enemy and yelled out, ‘One dead enemy!’ or ‘One enemy KIA!’
Given what I’d been through, I suppose I have to wonder whether I had a different view of life, not only because of what had happened to Mum, but through Dad being a Vietnam vet, loving his hunting so much, and his work killing live animals. Was it somehow programmed into me that I found it easier than the next person to take a life?
I don’t think so. I could equally argue that what happened to Mum left me valuing life more, not less. When I was doing that first training in how to kill, I didn’t find that it unleashed pent-up reserves of violence from inside me. I didn’t go into an uncontrolled frenzy when I charged with a bayonet or put shots into an enemy. In fact, they were looking for that kind of crazy-eyed behaviour, and weeded those people out. I was quite calm and controlled. The whole exercise was about unpeeling our natures. Some of the trainees really didn’t want to be a part of that. Some took it too far. Those of us who could handle it, and went through the course, were in the middle ground.
As the end of the IET approached, I got excited about marching out. One day towards the end, we were all pulled into the platoon sergeant’s area. He passed around a newspaper that reported a bombing in a Bali nightclub that had killed at least eighty Australians and injured many more. Holy hell. It cemented in me the purpose of being there. It had happened in the United States and now it was at our doorstep, affecting our country and the people who live in it. More than ever, my personal drive to excel in the army was being woven together with a bigger cause.
The final phase involved ten days of living and digging in fighting pits to establish a defensive position, climaxing with shooting, a pack march, a stretcher carry, an overnight exercise where we were up all night doing defensive work, then a big stores carry, and finally a bayonet assault course with the instructors shooting blank ammunition and throwing smoke at us. A few made it right up to that last day but were told to do the last couple of weeks again.
After a pretty difficult three months, I was ecstatic to be an infantryman at last. On the last night they said, ‘Righto, this is your turn, you can take the piss out of us.’
I knew what I was going to do. Here’s my chance. I put a big stack of beer cans in the middle of the circle and started going off my head like the platoon sergeant had that day in the bush, kicking them everywhere. I kicked one straight at him and the beer went all over him. I stopped. He took it well, I’ll give him that, but I thought at that moment, maybe I’d pushed it too far.
Although he was a prick, he had a job to do and I have to give him credit for being pretty effective and maintaining standards. And there was probably a decent bloke underneath it all. One day at Singleton, another trainee and I had been staying back to help him prepare for a live fire exercise with Claymore mines. He was ex-Reconnaissance, and was doing them up in a Recon way rather than the standard infantry procedure. As we worked together, he was handing out tips and passing on information about guys in the SAS Regiment he knew. We hadn’t seen this side of him. It was good to break down that barrier. When he wasn’t playing his role of hard-arse platoon sergeant, he was actually a decent fellow. Three years later, when I was in the Regiment, I ran into him, just by coincidence, in a mess hall in a camp in Iraq. I sat next to him and said, ‘How’re you going?’
He kept eating his food. After a while he said, ‘So you made it, eh?’
His demeanour had changed a bit. At Singleton he’d been on a pedestal. But there in Iraq, among everyone else, he just seemed normal. I’d changed too. I thought he looked almost happy to see me with the Regiment. A little bit proud, perhaps.
I invited Auntie Margaret and Uncle Ken to the Marching Out ceremony. Photos were taken, and I had short hair, a number-one buzz cut, a far cry from when I’d dropped in to their place in earlier years. It made me happy to win some awards in front of them: best shot, best PT, most outstanding soldier. It was nice for them to see that I’d earnt some respect in that environment, and was going to stick at it.
When we were standing around, it was announced which Royal Australian Regiment we’d be going to. 3RAR was parachutes, and initially I’d wanted to go there. Paras had high standards and worked hard and went everywhere. The parachute culture prided itself on its ability to take hard knocks. They had the mentality that comes with being skilled soldiers who are trained to drop in behind enemy lines and fight their way out.
There was appeal in other regiments too. 4RAR was Commandos. 5RAR had amalgamated with 7RAR to become 5/7RAR, the mechanised battalion, working with the armoured personnel carriers, or APCs. Their culture was known among the other regiments as ‘Ramps down, pants down’, because they got fucked on (so to speak) while moving alongside the APCs. 1RAR and 2RAR were air mobile, which meant they went in and out by helicopter, in theory anyway. In practice, there was a helicopter shortage.
But the overriding rule is that whichever regiment you’re in, you think it’s the best. The corporals at Singleton and my section commander at Kapooka had all been in 1RAR, and they’d convinced me to put that down as my choice. They told us that 1RAR was always the battalion that would go somewhere first. That gives it prestige, builds a spirit in the corps and gives the guys something to hang on to. I thought they sounded like the most professional soldiers.
So when we were told we were going to 1RAR, a couple of us were cheering away and jumping up and down, saying, ‘We’re going to Iraq!’ As it was happening, with Margaret and Ken being there, I had this flash from the past. In 1991, when the first Gulf War had started, we’d been on holiday at Tanilba Bay. On TV we saw the tanks and helicopters and Scuds, and the old man was fixated. Whenever it was on screen, he’d shut everyone up. Margaret and Ken were taking the piss, saying ‘It’s not Vietnam any more.’ He said, ‘Shh, it’s on, the world’s at war. They’re gunna start conscripting you, Brent, we’ll have to hide you up in the roof.’ Brent said, ‘Dad, I’m only fourteen!’ Dad said, ‘This’ll still be going on when you’re eighteen.’ When everyone else had gone to bed he’d stay up at night watching it.
Well, he was wrong, but he was also right. Australia was about to send troops back into Iraq, twelve years on. And it looked like I’d be going, not as a conscript, but voluntarily, just like him. I could see him there, in front of the TV set at Tanilba, as clearly as if it was yesterday.
TWELVE
I had a week off before travelling to Townsville, where 1RAR was based. While waiting to leave, we had to stay on barracks. Upon graduation, we’d exchanged our crossed-rifles badge, for School of Infantry, for the Skippy badge, a kangaroo with a wreath, which denotes that you’re a full-fledged infantryman. Although I was only a private, the badge brought some privileges: we could go out every night if we wanted, as long as we were back by curfew, and we could go to the mess at any time.
That feeling of being at the top of a tree only lasted until I got to Townsville. I’d never been that far north, and as I looked down at the brown expanse of Stuart Hill, I thought, What the fuck is this place?
At the base, it was a whole new atmosphere. A jaded duty corporal sent us to our lines without any welcome. As soon as we started walking through the dusty ground between the barracks a nasty yell came from somewhere: ‘Swing your fucken arms when you walk in this place!’
It was like a reset, first day at a new school. The next day they were marching us around, showing us the lines, which were multistorey barracks blocks, and told us which block belonged to each company. In a weary drone, the NCO announced each one: ‘Heavy weapons, direct fire support, recon, snipers, mortars, signallers, pioneers, extra support.’ There were soldiers who’d been there six, seven or eight years, and they had a hard-bit
ten, salt-of-the-earth look.
1RAR has a green puggaree, the band around the slouch hat. The green puggaree was first worn by 1RAR during the Malayan Emergency in 1959–60. The Australian Army was unable to supply 1RAR with new puggarees so a local tailor was commissioned by the unit to supply them made from the same soft green material as the British Forces green shirts. As a tradition they are still worn to this day. We still had plain khaki ones, so everyone knew who we were. Suddenly there was a shout of, ‘You fucken lids!’ and a volley of half-eaten apples and oranges were thrown at us. I was thinking, Jeez, this is different from the training establishments! It was free rein up there. I was excited, and it really did feel like a step up. You don’t want to fuck up here, I thought. This is where it’s all gunna happen.
The barracks were dingy and filled with asbestos. The rooms were dormitory-style, four beds in each, and our platoon of thirty occupied its own level in the block. Downstairs was an office area where the support companies hung out. Every morning we’d rock up to work in running shorts and a blue 1RAR T-shirt. We had to form up, march to company headquarters, and then do PT. It was pretty full-on in the summer heat. There was a run called Tank Hill, up to a water tower. Our secco, or section commander, was a huge, chunky fellow known as Rhino, from DFSW – Direct Fire Support Weapons – where they pride themselves on being big. I was surprised by how fit he was for his size.
This hard run soon sorted us out. In Singleton, an older soldier had said, ‘Whoever the first guy is who wants to come and talk to you, he’s usually the worst soldier and the biggest fuckwit.’ Soon after I arrived in Townsville, this one bloke was making a beeline for everyone to tell us how everything worked. He was the authority. Others were the first to gob off or try to be smart-arses. Within minutes, the senior men had them pinned. They’d pass it around to each other: ‘That guy’s a knob, he’s been here all of two minutes and he’s mouthing off already.’ And then, on the Tank Hill run, it was just as I’d been warned, the know-alls were the first to peter out.
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