The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  ‘Don't worry, Mum,’ I said. ‘There's only ten of them, and Danny's pretty tough.’

  I wasn't as confident as I sounded. Danny was a fighter, but I could see out the window that the odds did in fact look pretty grim and the gang closing in on my brother looked serious. I walked to my room and dropped my school bag, thinking, for fuck's sake, I hate this place.

  By this stage I had developed a keen interest in the martial arts. Even before seeing my first Bruce Lee movie my favourite TV shows were The Samurai, and Phantom Agents, about a bunch of modern-day ninjas. Then, after seeing Bruce in action, I joined a martial arts school to give me an excuse to get out of the house. I was drawn to the discipline and physical activity of the school, a world away from my home with its wild kids, drugs and stolen goods. Hanging from the wall of my bedroom was a wooden sword that I used in some of my martial arts training lessons. Although it wasn't made of steel, it was quite capable of inflicting serious injury. Now I took it down and walked outside and down the steps, towards where Danny was getting ready to make what might have been his last stand.

  I held the sword in my right hand, resting the wooden blade on my shoulder. Slowly, without making eye contact, I walked around the outside of the circle of menacing boys. I did my best to look serene, wise and in control, like some Jedi master. The thugs didn't know what to make of me and in my peripheral vision I could see some of them turning away from Danny to watch this weird guy with the sword.

  Continuing to ignore them, I moved about ten metres away from the circle and sat down in the lotus position on the grass, laying the sword down in front of me. I placed my hands on my thighs, palms up, and began to meditate. Through my not-quite-closed eyes I could see all their faces turned towards me.

  Luckily for me, and Danny, it just so happened that when I had walked past them earlier to go upstairs into the house Danny had said, ‘You dudes better fucking watch out, that's my brother and he's a killer. He's a black belt in karate and he's fucking crazy!’ Danny was talking nonsense, as I was studying kung-fu at the time and wasn't a black belt in anything, but his desperate bluff was working to our advantage. The leader of the pack looked from Danny to me, then back to him. ‘Well . . . yeah . . . you just better watch it next time – or else,’ the gang leader threatened, somewhat lamely. They walked off, leaving a very relieved Danny and his kooky older brother sitting meditating before his sword on the unmown lawn.

  Poor Danny was slow to learn from his many close calls. He slipped down the dangerous path from weed to heroin and eventually got arrested for a robbery he'd committed to feed his habit. He ended up doing two years in Long Bay Prison. It always amazes me, though, the power of humans to change their lives around. Danny spent another twenty years screwing up but eventually he kicked the heroin and straightened himself out. I like him now and he comes up for Christmas each year. My wonderful mother held it together through all the dramas and did her best, but it was an uphill battle.

  I remember the first time I camped out by myself, at fifteen; I felt a sense of accomplishment I can still recall today. Spending time in the bush gave me a great appreciation of the natural environment. I loved the beauty of the trees and scrub, and the honeyed tones of the afternoon light on the sandstone cliffs. Looking at the smoke from the steelworks drifting above the port in the distance, I came to understand how important it was to protect our remaining natural assets. Even at fifteen, growing up in a safe, stable democracy, I knew that the prosperity and order and industriousness I could see stretched out on the coastal plain below was a façade that hid darker intents.

  I knew that even though the pollution fogging the clear coastal air above the mill and the factories created prosperity, that wealth came at a cost. Possibly as a result of my experience with the martial arts, I was also developing an interest in the military. I had it in the back of my mind that I'd like to form an environmental group that operated along the lines of a commando unit, taking direct action to protect the land and water, and prosecuting those who would damage the environment. Indeed, my first interest in southeast Asia was sparked by some articles I'd read about the nomadic Penan people, who lived in Sarawak, Malaysia. I was concerned about the greed of Malaysian loggers, and the resultant destruction of native timbers and wildlife.

  In spite of these interests, and even though I was a good kid, during these years I felt lost and suicidal as there seemed to be no place in the world for me. I didn't feel a lot of love in my family – certainly I didn't feel that I was loved – and I didn't know what my purpose was in life.

  During my teens I was painfully shy and my self-esteem had taken such a beating from my father's negative programming that I didn't believe I could do anything. I remember one time when I was fifteen and my mother asked me to take a cup of tea to a visitor in our lounge room. As I carried the teacup and saucer in to the visitor, my hand was shaking so much that I spilled tea everywhere.

  Perhaps because of my chaotic family life, I was unmotivated at school and I did badly in my Higher School Certificate (HSC). I decided to give the leaving exam another shot, and went to a technical college for a year and re-sat my HSC. I did much better the second time around, and gained admission to the university of Wollongong, by which time I was nearly nineteen. I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in philosophy, with a view to perhaps joining the department of foreign affairs and being posted abroad as a diplomat.

  During my time at uni, I joined the Australian Army Reserve's 1st Commando Company, based at Georges Heights on Sydney's Middle Head. It seemed a natural extension of my interest in the bush, survival, martial arts, and the fun, adrenaline-charged things I'd been doing with Rangi.

  As far as the Army Reserve went, the commandos were the elite. They were the part-time component of the Army's Special Forces, whose main force was the Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment, based in Perth. Many of the commando instructors and permanent staff were current or former SAS men, some of whom had served in Vietnam.

  I was still living in Wollongong and it was about a two-hour drive for me to get to the commando depot. We would train for one night during the week and generally a weekend per month. On top of that you were expected to do full-time courses of two or more weeks' duration, and attend an annual two-week camp. I regularly found myself driving home at one in the morning and I remember a couple of times nearly wiping myself out on the road as I started to fall asleep at the wheel.

  Since my first solo camping trip at the age of fifteen I'd been fascinated with the idea of survival in the wild. My favourite book was an old American camping book that had lots of tips for living in the woods, and recipes for cooking on open fires with a minimum amount of gear. Around this time I met a guy by the name of Rangi Nikora, a former New Zealand SAS soldier. He shared my interest in survival and added to my own knowledge of how to live out in the bush with nothing. Rangi was a larger-than-life character who had served in Vietnam and had a real lust for life that translated into doing some crazy things. He had parachuted off the Pan Am building in New York decades before BASE jumping became popular. His attitude rubbed off on me and I found that I enjoyed pushing myself, trying to work out what my limits were. Rangi and I and a few other friends paddled kayaks out to Fort Denison in the middle of Sydney Harbour one night. We dodged the water police patrols, slid our kayaks up onto the rocks and climbed up over the walls of the old fort, which was built back in the nineteenth century as a deterrent to the Russian Navy. We weren't allowed to be there, and it was one person's birthday so we had a very quiet party in a corner of the fort. At one point we heard noises and crept along the stone-walled corridors until we came to the caretaker's flat. He was inside watching TV with the door open. My friends and I crept right into his living room and stood a metre behind the guy, watching the flickering screen, and then crept out again. It was silly stuff, but exciting at the same time, sneaking right up to him through the shadows without him knowing we were there.

  I had taken up advent
urous activities to develop my confidence and by the time I was eighteen I had flown gliders and powered aircraft, skydived, scuba-dived, hang-glided, skied and rock climbed. My first successful climb of an almost sheer rock wall was a real turning point. I hadn't thought it possible for me to make that climb, and all of a sudden I started to think that maybe I was a capable person after all.

  Rangi and I climbed the Harbour Bridge and walked over the arch long before it was legal to do so. As daring as I thought we were, when we made it to the top of the bridge we looked across to the other side and saw the glow of a cigarette: someone else was already up there. On another occasion we decided to abseil down a sheer cliff in the Rocks area of Sydney. When we got to the bottom there was a patrol car and a couple of cops waiting for us.

  ‘What do you think you're up to?’ one of the constables asked.

  ‘We're stuntmen and we're just rehearsing for a TV show we're working on, bro,’ Rangi said, cool as.

  ‘Oh,’ said the cop. ‘Fair enough. Just make sure you tidy up when you're done.’

  We laughed about it afterwards, but my heart was still pounding as I imagined us being arrested. Rangi had done it all, and nothing seemed to worry him. Sadly, he was to die in his early fifties. After recovering from a heart attack he got a job on a movie as a stunt coordinator. He was told not to do anything strenuous so he was demonstrating a handstand on the edge of a building when he had his second heart attack and died. It was so Rangi.

  While part of me was drawn to army life, the ethos of the organisation was also at odds with another side of my personality. As well as my love of outdoor pursuits, in my quest to find some inner peace and work out what the hell I should be doing in life I'd also developed an interest in Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation. I was educated in a Catholic school and at one stage even considered becoming a priest; however, my mother says that when I was about twelve I came home from school one day vowing I would never have anything to do with the church again, although I can't remember what sparked this outburst. I suspect it was a philosophical issue rather than a repressed incident of abuse. I also hung out with the Hare Krishnas for a while, the Orange People (followers of the Rajneesh movement), the Spiritualists, Mahikari and a host of other spiritual paths, in an attempt to resolve the core issue of my life: what was my purpose here on earth.

  I suppose some people would say I was a bit of a hippy but at the same time that I was pursuing all these intangible aspects of life I was getting my hair cut short and being barked at on a parade ground by a tattooed warrant officer, who had in all likelihood killed a few people in his time.

  After about three months I started wondering if I was cut out for the commandos. I didn't really fit in, although I certainly wanted to. Commando training is intense, so there is a lot of bravado around and zero tolerance for people who don't give it their all. As a result there used to be a saying that getting out of the unit was easy – you either died, or you didn't show up for three activities in a row. I didn't fancy the former, so I just stopped turning up for a while. When I went back to the unit a month later, I was sure I would be kicked out. I was right, and while I was prepared for it, what I didn't expect was the feeling of shame I experienced when the sergeant who processed my discharge told me I had been classed as ‘ineffective’.

  There was nothing personal in the term, save for the sneer with which he delivered it; the word ‘ineffective’ is a military term for someone who has not fulfilled their commitment. All the same, it cut me like a knife, and I did take it personally. When I was growing up my father never missed an opportunity to belittle me and tell me that I would never amount to anything. I'd made my own choice to stop showing up for commando training, and I knew the consequences of my actions, but being labelled ineffective brought back all those memories from my childhood. After all the work I'd done on building up my self-esteem through increasing my physical confidence, being kicked out of the army set me back on my arse again.

  And in spite of all my attempts to find a purpose, my civilian life was becoming as directionless as my failed military career. I chopped and changed my university degree, switching from philosophy to geology and even mathematics, before I eventually gave up on it in 1979 and dropped out two years after enrolling. After that I fell in and out of a variety of jobs, never staying in full-time work for more than a year or so. I was a computer operator for a health fund for a while, then I worked in logistics for a photo and film company, and for about four years off and on I was a part-time marine surveyor, directing the loading of cargo ships at the port of Eden on the far south coast of New South Wales.

  My life was going nowhere and I still hadn't worked out what it was I should be doing, although my exploration of different philosophies gave me some hope that the answer would eventually come to me. I became involved in increasingly alternative things, ending up with a diploma in rebirthing and transpersonal psychodynamics. Ultimately, I found that in all these pathways there was generally something of value, but these alternative practices also attracted more than their fair share of navel-gazing airheads. I was looking for meaning in my life, but some people were happy enough just to tune out. At some point I decided the new age was not getting me to where I wanted to be, or making my life better.

  It had been twelve years since I left the commandos and at the age of thirty I was still carrying the burden of being proclaimed ‘ineffective’ by the army. I started to think about giving the military another shot, to prove myself to myself (and who knows, maybe even my father), and to exorcise that ‘ineffective’ demon. At around this time I met a girl from the Army Reserve at a party. She persuaded me to re-enlist and also became my girlfriend. I was underweight, probably from being a vegetarian for fourteen years, but my new girlfriend was a nurse and she had a few words with the female army doctor who examined me and they let me through. I signed up for a recruiting unit based at Randwick in Sydney. They were nicknamed ‘the party unit’, because they didn't take army life as seriously as the commandos and, while they worked hard, they also spent a lot of time playing hard after hours. I did my two-week training course, which I enjoyed, but unlike the commandos this was no elite unit I had ended up in.

  I soon decided I wanted something more challenging, and thought that the military intelligence unit located up the road from Randwick Barracks might be more my speed. A lot of my work in the recruiting unit was administrative and I was getting the hang of the army's bureaucratic love of paperwork – so much so that I was able to organise my own transfer to the intelligence corps without anyone managing to block it. I had no faith in the chief clerk and figured if I'd gone through the chain of command it might never have happened (the last thing a recruiting unit wants is to lose people). I couldn't help thinking my self-administered transfer was a fitting way to move to the shadowy side of the army.

  I booked myself into the psychological aptitude test required for acceptance into the intelligence corps. The three-hour test was pretty intense, but I passed and was sent off to do an initial training course for the intelligence corps. We learned about surveillance, interpreting aerial photographs to identify potential enemy aircraft, tanks, ships and weaponry, and operating in a command post. I enjoyed the course and got on quite well with two other soldiers, Jim and Damien, who had come through from my old unit, 1st Commando Company, and were destined to serve in the commandos' intelligence cell.

  I particularly liked Jim, who was of Greek descent, and I convinced him to come along to one of the bush survival courses that I was running by this stage. I'd turned my interest in survival into a business and was running bushcraft courses for people who wanted to spend time in the outdoors, or just learn new skills for fun. As we walked through the bush I asked Jim what he had planned for his future; even though I was now in my early thirties I still hadn't figured out what I wanted to do with my own life, so I was always interested in other people's goals.

  ‘I'd like to go back to Greece one day with enough money
to buy a fishing boat or maybe a tourist boat,’ Jim said to me.

  ‘Sounds like an expensive plan,’ I said. ‘How much would that cost you?’

  ‘About three hundred thousand dollars.’

  ‘Are you going to be able to raise that much?’ I asked.

  ‘I'm pretty sure I can,’ Jim replied.

  Jim changed the subject and suggested I transfer across to the commandos. I thought about it and decided it was time for me to go back to the Special Forces unit and finish what I'd started as an eighteen-year-old. I went to Georges Heights one night and met the operations officer, a captain, who was Jim and Damien's boss. He told me that he would be happy to have me come across, but unfortunately there were only two slots in the cell and these had been filled by Jim and Damien. One of them would have to transfer or leave the army for me to get a gig there. I was disappointed, but about a week later I got a phone call from the same captain. ‘How'd you like to transfer to commandos and join us in the int cell?’ he asked me.

  I was surprised. ‘Sure, I'd love to.’

  ‘Good. Come in next Tuesday and we'll sort out the paperwork,’ the captain said.

  ‘Great. But what happened? How come you've got a vacancy now?’

  The captain paused for a second. ‘Jim's left.’

  Jim seemed like a really keen soldier, so I had to ask. ‘Why?’

  ‘Did you hear on the three o'clock news about the armed robbery at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney today?’ he replied.

  I told him I had. The police had foiled a raid on the hotel, but not before a shootout between the cops and the crims. The robbers had almost escaped with about three hundred thousand dollars.

  ‘Jim was one of the crooks. He's out of the unit, and you're in.’

  After Jim's arrest it emerged that he was also a part-time hit man who had killed several people, and that he and his brother had been importing heroin and steroids. Despite all that, I liked him. He became a Christian and eventually got out of gaol after turning evidence against a few heavy criminals, but as a result he opened the door one day and someone put three bullets into his chest. Jim was a bodybuilder and very fit and, amazingly, he survived the hit and then went into witness protection with his new wife and was never heard of again.