The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  Next was an interview with a hard-looking RSM (regimental sergeant major).

  ‘What do you do?’ he said. ‘What are you?’

  ‘I’m just the scout in my section in the battalion, a rifleman.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’re just a scout, just a rifleman? You’re the lifeblood of the infantry.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I meant I haven’t done all the support company courses the other guys here have done.’

  He cooled down a little. ‘Righto, but remember, you’re never just anything.’

  It was good, actually. He was telling me I was on a level playing field, no matter how inexperienced I was. Whatever we’d done or hadn’t done, we were all starting from the same point.

  There were other interviews. When they asked me why I wanted to join the Regiment, I said, ‘I want something more for my soldiering, I’ve read a lot about the SAS. I want to go there to improve myself and my soldiering.’

  ‘Okay. What if we took you in, and one of the blokes you’re working with is gay?’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with that. If that’s the way it is that’s the way it is. I might not snuggle up with him at night, but I don’t care as long as he does his job.’

  ‘What do you think about women in the infantry?’

  ‘I don’t know if women have a place in the infantry, but if that’s the way it’s going, that’s the way it’s going. I can’t do much about it.’

  ‘What do you think about women in Special Forces?’

  ‘I’m not in Special Forces so I don’t know. I can see there might be a benefit somewhere down the line.’

  The questions seemed odd, but they didn’t care about my opinions. The point was to make sure I wasn’t a nut job who got emotional about certain issues.

  After the barrier test, they sat us in a room where we waited anxiously for the result.

  I was called in to see an officer. ‘Private Donaldson, we think you’re suited to go and try SAS selection. Is that what you’re happy doing?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘All right, sign here. Here’s your joining instruction. Go back to your unit. Get in touch with our orderly staff. We’ll see you when it starts.’

  I turned to leave.

  ‘Private Donaldson?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-four, sir.’

  ‘You’re a bit older than other guys who come through here.’

  I didn’t say anything. Nor did he.

  My legs were torn up with chafing from the march and the navex, and I had a lot of gauze bandaging on my thighs.

  He said, ‘Make sure you look after those legs. It’ll hurt when you rip that stuff off.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  *

  When I got back to Townsville, I had three months to train for the SAS selection course. Since 1968 when it started, selection has knocked out two out of every three candidates, often more. I dedicated myself to sticking to the program down to the last detail. It helped that my platoon commander, Lieutenant Cocksedge, was supportive. I’d say, ‘I have a pack march to do for selection,’ and I’d get up at two o’clock in the morning to do it. He counted that as my PT for that morning and ticked my name off the roll. Not every platoon commander let you do that, so I was lucky.

  The Croc experience kept motivating me. I didn’t join up and put in all this effort to go back to doing that year after year, and didn’t want to do this training three or four times. I wanted to do it once and get it right and get in. I still had doubts about whether the SAS would consider me after the short time I’d been in the army, but I knuckled down anyway. I saw myself as average at PT and an average soldier, so I would have to perform to my absolute limit to even get a look-in.

  Weeks two to five of my program overlapped with the Christmas break. I owned a Toyota HiLux, and asked Brent if I could drive down and stay with him and Kate for my holiday. They lived at Corlette, near Anna Bay in Port Stephens, and were fine with me coming down.

  On the way, I stopped at the Gold Coast to stay with a girl I’d known a couple of years earlier. I’d driven down from Townsville in one go and got up early, went for a surf and did some training. I explained what I was doing, and she said I was nuts. When everyone else was winding down for summer, I put my army pack and cams in the HiLux, drove out to the Gold Coast hinterland, and found a mountain to hump up and down. The requirement was that you carry a 28-kilogram pack, eight kilos of webbing, and a 4.1-kilogram Steyr rifle. I made my pack 33 kilos, my webbing 10 kilos, and had a metal bar made up that weighed seven or eight kilos. My theory was, if I can do the march in the required time carrying extra in training, I shouldn’t have any dramas on the day. I don’t know if that makes sense scientifically, but it did in my head.

  When I got to Brent’s place, I found sand dunes to train in at Stockton and a firebreak trail alongside a powerline. I marched in the sand dunes in all my gear. In the firebreak I measured out a one-kilometre interval by parking the HiLux at one end, and did my interval sprints.

  I did it on my own the whole time. Once Brent said he might come with me, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m getting up at 4 am to do this walk.’ He reconsidered. Kate was a swimmer and water polo player, and she said she’d come do some laps with me at the local pool. When we got there, I got into my cams and boots, jumped into the pool, and swam fully kitted up. People were staring, wondering what this bloke was doing, and I thrived on that too.

  That training was pretty hard, especially in the summer heat, and it took a lot of mental work to push myself through it alone. Much as I loved my music, I didn’t let myself train with headphones. I remembered the SAS man’s contempt when that chook had asked if he could wear his MP3 player. I wouldn’t be allowed to listen to music on selection, so why would I do it in training? There was also a pleasure in hearing the real world around me. While snowboarding, I never liked having music on. The sound of clipping your boots into your board, the crunch of the snow, the smooth sound of your board sliding through the snow: my heart rate goes up even thinking about it. In the United States I’d go into the back country on my own and shut my eyes. It was so quiet it was beautiful. It was similar here, just me and nature, though the cicadas meant it was never silent.

  Brent and I had had some conversations about Mum and Dad. I’d asked him to tell me stories about Mum and Dad that he might have known and I didn’t. All of this stirred up a lot of thoughts and memories while I was out training.

  I remembered always trying to prove myself to Dad, whether it was taking on a bigger kid on the football field or in a muck-around fight or karate. I remember going to a karate competition as a fifteen-year-old and coming second in the state under-18s, fighting black belts, just on determination. I never feared a bigger guy bashing me. Even when I had a white belt I was like that. It was stuff I did because of my own personal stubbornness, but also a little to win Dad’s approval. It must also have been a quality I’d inherited from him. When he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, he had it very tough emotionally. His mum had men friends over, and she’d lock him in his bedroom. He’d yell out, and she’d come in and tell him to shut up. When he had the chance, he took off to the beach for whole days. He told us how, after a huge storm, he’d gone running through a wall of solid foam. We said how great it must have been and he snapped, ‘No, it was dangerous!’ He just hadn’t wanted to be at home. He didn’t feel safe. It was a tough way to grow up, and no wonder he left when he was fifteen. It shaped his whole life. And when it came to raising us, no matter how tough we thought he was, all he was doing was what any parent would do, which is give us a better time in our family life than he’d had in his.

  For Mum, it wasn’t all that different. When her mother had died and her sisters left, and her father remarried, all Mum had for company was a rabbit and a cat.
It had to have been lonely, but it built her character. She didn’t act tough, she was small and quiet, but she wouldn’t take any shit. If she wasn’t happy with what someone said, she’d put them in their place. As a mother, she instilled that determination in us. ‘Never think you can’t achieve something, never feel worthless,’ she said. She’d been made to feel worthless at home and thought she’d never become anything, and was adamant that we’d never have any self-doubts about what we wanted to do.

  I thought about the two of them a lot while I was out slogging in the heat. They’d just tried to give us a better life than they’d had. They never manipulated us children, which was what had happened to them in their homes. Thinking about that filled me with a lot of steel.

  During the training, I got bad chafing on my back from where the pack rubbed. I told myself it was going to get worse than this. Every time I wanted to skip training and have a rest, I’d say to myself, Nup, your mum’d be disappointed. I’d think about her last day. I don’t know what she went through, but I’d say to myself, This is nothing compared with what she went through that day.

  Sadness drove me further. One of the last times I saw her, she’d asked me to go on a short car trip with her somewhere out of Dorrigo. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, but I said no. She thought it might just be a nice time to spend with each other. Instead, I went and got drunk. Hindsight’s a beautiful thing, but I regretted a lot of small things like that. What I’d give for a car trip with her now.

  *

  Brent and Kate went for a holiday up north, and I lent them my HiLux. On my own at the house, I whittled life down to the essentials: training, cooking up big feeds, surfing, reading books and watching surfing movies. Sleep, eat, train, surf. It was gold.

  When they got back I headed to Townsville. On my way I stopped at Wooli and had a surf at Wilsons Point with Kelvin. It was fantastic to be back there – I really love that part of the New South Wales coast. Good uncrowded waves. He was still riding his mini-mal, and I was riding a 6"1'. We had a good chat. It was weird going back there, because it brought back that immediate aftermath of Mum’s disappearance, when Kelvin had helped me through a period of crisis. Now, though, I was much more self-confident and happy.

  We were sitting out the back of his house one afternoon. Kelvin was having a beer. I was drinking water.

  ‘So, you’re in the military,’ he said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What are you training for?’

  ‘The SAS.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When I heard you were joining the army I was pretty certain you were going for the SAS side of it.’

  That was funny. Kelvin was about the most out-there, non-military person I’d ever met. I said, ‘Of all people, how do you know about the SAS?’

  ‘I don’t know about them, but I know they exist.’

  I didn’t relent on the training while I was there. I got in the car and marked out the kilometre, and ran the intervals in the middle of the night, between Wooli and Minnie Water. It would’ve been pretty arresting for people to see this maniac in cams with a metal bar running in the night.

  Without consciously planning it, I was taking stock of my whole life. I could sense that something big was about to change for me, and driving up the coast I was reliving parts of my experience.

  Having touched base with Kelvin, I stopped in Toowoomba to see Vaughan and his parents, Dee and Phil. The parents of my friends had been so good to me in my darkest hours, and even now, Dee, a physiotherapist, had time to think about my wellbeing. She told me the runners I was using were wrong for me: I had flat feet, and she said my runners would bugger up my knees. I was spewing: I’d just spent $200 on them. But she was right, and typically willing to sort me out. When I think, nowadays, of ‘defending my country’, there are a lot of things that come to mind, but one is that great debt I owe to such people who helped look after me in Dorrigo.

  Back in Townsville, I maintained my focus. When my mates were getting on the piss, I’d offer to drive them in and out of town. At two o’clock in the morning I’d take off to Paluma or Bluewater and hump for six hours. I got home and slept until the early afternoon, then trained through the night. I wanted to play mental games by making myself tired and sleep-deprived, because I knew they’d exploit that in selection.

  In the last two weeks the training program tapered down – which I needed. There was a long pack march in there and I did it with Julian and two sniper mates to see where we were at. We went up this high mountain near Innisfail, and I remember noticing how much they were struggling. We spent the night. They had hammocks and I slept on the ground. For my smarts, I woke up with leeches all over me, even in my mouth.

  We linked up with some others to do a similar thing, including an officer. He had no shirt and was wearing headphones, and he was smashing the start of the walk, more or less bolting away from us. Maybe I hadn’t trained as hard as I should have? We stuck with the rough track, picking our way among rocks. Near night-time we caught that officer and he was spewing his guts up.

  I said, ‘Are you all right, mate?’

  ‘I’m all right, I’m all right, keep going.’

  At the end of the descent, when Julian and I got to the car park, we were wondering if we’d have to go back and find him. He eventually turned up, full of excuses. ‘I’ve hurt my ankle . . . I was sick.’ We sort of went, ‘Righto.’ It was good to see where I was at compared with others going for selection, but it was all about competing against myself, not them. When I’d been out in big surf or going down a 40-foot drop on a snowboard, I was on my own and there was no one to brag to later. It took me a while to understand that fully. Even in Afghanistan, I’d never rate myself as the best soldier, nowhere near it. There are numerous things I always do wrong. But it’s about doing it better next time. If you’re going backwards, there’s something wrong.

  On the eve of leaving for Perth, I rang Brent. He wished me luck and warned me to watch out for the mind games. He’d spoken to someone who’d done selection, and they’d told him about one huge walk where a truck waited for them at the end. Every time they got near the truck, it would pull away from them, to taunt them when they were totally fingered. ‘They fuck with your head,’ Brent said. ‘Anyway, try your hardest and show them what you’re made of.’

  It was one of the first times he’d acknowledged that he was proud of me. I’m sure he always was, but he hardly ever said it.

  FOURTEEN

  So this was it. On the Qantas flight over to Perth Airport, everyone seemed to be an expert on selection. I sat tight, not thinking about my chances, set on just trying my hardest and running my own race. My goal was to get selected, but I didn’t let myself dwell on that overall result. Instead, I just focused on getting through the first day. Then I’d deal with the second. If I could get through one day, I thought, I could get through twenty-one.

  There were 120 to 140 candidates starting the course. We were met at the airport in the late afternoon by a man whose T-shirt said ‘DILLIGAF’, as in ‘Do I look like I give a fuck?’ He barked out instructions and handed us three pieces of paper each. ‘Study them on the bus trip, don’t talk to anyone. You have to know them all on this course.’ One was the first two verses of ‘Advance Australia Fair’. The next was the words to ‘Lili Marlene’, the SAS Regiment’s song, about a prostitute out in front of a barracks. The third was a fake language they’d made up – words for mother, father, brother, yes, no, north, south, east, west. It was just a memory exercise, to see if you could pick things up and retain them.

  We weren’t driven to Campbell Barracks, the SAS headquarters in Perth’s seaside western suburbs, but straight out to one of their training facilities at Bindoon, an hour away in the bush. There was a big metal hangar and a sheltered area with an ATCO hut where the kitchen and barbecue were. We h
ad a feed and handed over our papers before being told to line up in the hangar in a big grid, each of us behind the armband with our candidate number. The opening spiel began, with instructions on what we needed. ‘If you do not have any of these items one of the DS [directing staff] will come and assist you.’

  Someone put his hand up. A DS went over and the next thing we heard was, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you bring this?’

  We were given a short ‘cover story’ on a piece of paper, and had five minutes to memorise it. We also had to write an essay about ourselves: your life, your military life and why you wanted to go into the SAS. There was also a six-page maths exam. It started easy, and then went into calculus and harder stuff. I was looking around, thinking, No way can I do this. One, I was shit at maths at school, and two, I didn’t have a calculator and couldn’t remember these theories. I was stressing out, thinking, If I fail this, I’m out. In the end I just did what I could, which wasn’t a lot.

  One of the first things they did was tell us to strip naked and put our stuff – phone, watch, all non-military stuff – in our echelon bags. These bags are heavy duty, olive, drab coloured canvas bags with a zip and two carry handles, similar to a duffle bag. So there we were, more than a hundred of us, standing in the nude.