The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  Not long after I sent the letter I received a call from a great mate, Greg Ferguson, who was still serving in the commandos. Greg had worked with me for a few years as an assistant, teaching on a survival course I'd run for unemployed young people. He was the best assistant I ever had and one of the most loyal people I've ever met.

  Greg also had a good sense of humour. He was once called on to assist with a public relations photo shoot to promote the commandos. For the pictures, they used two Zodiac inflatable boats on Sydney Harbour, with our guys all kitted out in their gear and camouflage paint smeared on their faces. The organisers of the photo shoot selected all the best-looking people and put them in the lead boat. Afterwards, Greg said to me, ‘Mate, they put me in the ugly boat!’ From that point on, the ‘ugly boat’ became our term for being an untouchable or getting the least preferred treatment, in the army or life.

  I was sitting at my flat in Brisbane when the phone rang. A voice said, ‘Mate, what . . . have . . . you . . . done?’ It was Greg.

  ‘Hi mate, what do you mean?’ I replied.

  ‘The shit has hit the fan down here,’ Greg said in a hushed tone. ‘They're running around answering faxes from the Department of Defence, Department of Foreign Affairs, and regimental headquarters. Seems you wrote some letter to the Minister of Defence and now they want to know who you are, where you are, and what kind of training you've had.’

  I laughed. ‘Greg, you've got to be joking.’

  ‘No, mate. It's serious. You've got them worried. They have a file on you from DFAT with all these letters you've written in the past.’

  I thought it was crazy. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had a file on me? I had written plenty of letters to politicians – most of them to Gareth Evans, because he annoyed me the most – but I had never made any threats, just expressed my displeasure at the way the government handled foreign policy and how it seemed to have been hijacked by the Indonesian elite. Now the letters seemed to be coming back to bite me.

  ‘What do you think it's all about?’ I asked Greg.

  ‘My best guess is that they think you're a loose cannon and you're going to try and do something that will embarrass us, like assassinate the Indonesian President.’

  ‘That's crazy.’

  Greg said he would keep me updated and hung up. About a week later he rang back to say that the furore had all settled down after Steve, a friend of mine who was also the regimental sergeant major of the commandos, told them I wasn't a loose cannon and there was nothing to worry about. I still like the fact that for a week a bunch of bureaucrats were tearing their hair out over me.

  I got my small dose of revenge on DFAT when another Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, visited the commando regiment while I was still in the unit. The government had been seriously considering kicking East Timorese refugees out of Australia and getting Portugal to take responsibility for them. I had gone as far as setting up my own place as a safe house for the refugees if that were to occur. I asked if I could take the photos of the minister's visit, as the intelligence cell had a decent camera. The fact that I had no idea about cameras didn't bother me. On the day Downer arrived he was treated to a demonstration of our skills. Guys rappelled from the roof inside the main hangar building and Downer was shown our gear and transport. He was suitably impressed.

  There was a huge external flash fitted to the camera and I took every opportunity I could to take photos of Mr Downer. After a while he began to wince every time I took a photo, because the flash was so bright. He became visibly annoyed. I saw this as a small but enjoyable blow against the oppression of East Timor. What's more, not a single photo turned out. I had a great evening.

  While I was at university I met a woman called Anna; we were introduced by some mutual friends.

  Anna worked in real estate and was a kind and gentle woman. After going out for a while we moved in together. If I am honest with myself, I think I was just biding my time with Anna – not because I thought I might meet someone better, but more because I was engrossed in my studies and still just drifting through life. There were moments when I felt a strong bond to her and thought the relationship might progress further, and others when I felt constrained and hemmed in.

  After about two years with Anna I reached the conclusion that I needed to move on. It wasn't just about my inability to commit to her, it was also that I wanted to do something more – something meaningful – with my life. It wasn't her fault, as she was great. On my return from overseas I'd made contact with Greenpeace. Ever since my days camping in the bush as a kid I'd felt a strong affinity for the environment and a desire to protect it; perhaps due to the other, more martial side of my life, I was drawn to the idea of direct action, such as that used by environmental groups in Germany, who were abseiling down smokestacks to put up banners decrying pollution. In 1995, just before moving to Brisbane, I'd gone along to a meeting in Sydney where the local Greenpeace people were discussing a plan to put up a banner on the Sydney Opera House to publicise the organisation's Save Our Seas campaign. I volunteered to conduct a reconnaissance of the Opera House to look at how we'd go about hoisting the banners. I took photos and made notes of when the regular security patrols were mounted and I was even able to climb up the building's main ‘sail’ at night, illegally and undetected.

  The plan was that the rest of the direct action group would join me on site at the completion of my recce, but when I got down from my climb no one was there. I called them and was told that they were having a meeting but they would turn up soon. Fair enough, I thought. I walked around the building again and checked the night patrols. At about 10 pm I called my contact again.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ummm . . . we got a bit hungry so we've ordered pizza. We won't be long.’

  ‘For fuck's sake,’ I said under my breath. ‘Okay.’

  An hour later when I called back a third time I was told that the committee members were feeling tired after their pizza and had all gone home to bed. That was the end of me and Greenpeace. It turned out I was far from the only person who had been frustrated by Greenpeace's preference for talk over action, and the number of airheads that such organisations attract. I'd previously read a book called Sea Shepherd: My Fight for Whales and Seals by Paul Watson, the rebel Greenpeace member who had broken away and set up the Sea Shepherd organisation that was busy sticking it to Norwegian and Japanese whalers on the open seas. While I was with Anna I read another of Watson's books, Ocean Warrior: My Battle to End the Illegal Slaughter on the High Seas.

  I was incredibly impressed by this guy – his commitment, his passion, and his fearlessness in the face of danger. After reading Ocean Warrior I pulled my commando green beret out of storage and posted it to him. I had worked so hard to earn the beret and it still meant a lot to me, but I sent it to Paul as a gesture of thanks for what he was doing to protect the environment, and in recognition of his courage. Paul wrote back to me saying that he would sit the beret in front of him on the bridge of his anti-whaling vessel the Sea Shepherd, and he also confirmed there would be a place for me on board if I ever wanted to join their organisation.

  I was over the moon. Finally I felt like I had found what it was that I was supposed to be doing in life – the reason I'd been put on this earth. I had a love of the environment and a desire to protect it; I'd done my best to help Greenpeace; and the army had given me a good number of skills that I could offer to Paul and his crew in the dangerous business of boarding ships at sea and getting in the way of the whalers. I'd operated small boats in open waters, could defend myself if it came to that, and I had a fondness for high-adrenaline pursuits. This had me written all over it. I was still at university at the time and decided to complete the study year, but Paul and I continued to correspond in the meantime.

  In 1997 Paul was imprisoned in the Netherlands at the instigation of the Norwegian Government after disrupting whaling activities, and it was while he was still in gaol that I wrote
another letter to him, to discuss in more detail the possibility of joining him at sea. As it turned out, the volume of mail Watson received was apparently a contributing factor in his early release in the same year. The Dutch authorities were embarrassed by the letters and calls of protest they were also receiving.

  I wrote to Paul again and told him I would be delighted to take him up on his offer, and said I would join him later that year. I decided to tell Anna that it was time for me to pursue my dreams for my life and that I would be leaving to join the Sea Shepherd organisation. I told her and two weeks later she said the two words that brought my world to a standstill.

  ‘I'm pregnant.’

  It's funny how time and age can change your perspective on the pivotal moments in your life. When Anna told me she was going to have our baby, I thought my life was over. Now, of course, I feel very differently about what happened, and not just because of how much I came to love my daughter. If we hadn't found ourselves in that situation I might never have ended up starting The Grey Man. At the time, though, I was angry and felt trapped.

  I said to Anna, ‘It's your body, and I don't want you to have an abortion if you don't want one. I'll stick by you if you want to go through with it, but I want you to know that I'm pretty pissed off.’

  Anna decided to keep the baby and things settled down for a while. I wrote to Paul Watson and told him I couldn't join him on the Sea Shepherd as I now had a child to support. I was very happy when our daughter, Emma, was born in 1999 and I have loved her since the day she came into this world. I tried to keep up appearances, and as Emma started to grow up I took her out into the bush and even began to teach her some basic survival skills. She loved learning about and tasting wild foods, and always wanted to help me while I was making traps and spears. I tried to be a good father but day by day I was sinking into a deep, dark well of depression.

  I stuck out my degree course to the finish, and then did honours as well. I think my motivation and results were a testament to my mature age, and the fact that I had basically no social life to speak of. However, when I earned my degree I felt the same as I had after receiving my green beret – I'd enjoyed the process of getting there, but the ‘award’ was a bit of an anticlimax.

  I tried to get out of my rut by going back into the Army Reserve. At the age of forty-two I joined up again. Due to my professional and survival background, I was taken on as a scientific officer in a medical unit. I only had to do a two-week officer-training course, and I then graduated as possibly the army's oldest lieutenant. I was posted to an environmental health unit whose job was to check out areas where the Australian Army was about to be deployed. We would assess the potential risks to our troops from an environmental viewpoint, which included danger from wild animals and poisonous plants as well as chemical, radiological and biological threats.

  I enjoyed the officer training course, which was easy compared to commando training, but the unit's work wasn't particularly interesting or challenging. I'd read that one of the Australian TV channels was planning to produce a reality show with a survival aspect to it so I contacted the TV station and volunteered my services. I met with them and they said they wanted someone who could give the contestants on the show some basic survival training and also build the challenges and obstacles the contestants would have to overcome.

  ‘Sure, I can do all that,’ I said, full of false bravado. I'd actually had no experience at all building obstacle courses, but I had some rough ideas from my time with the army and was able to work with a really switched-on set designer who turned my basic concepts into reality. The work served as a temporary distraction from my depressing life.

  In spite of my love for Emma, my relationship with Anna had not improved. In between stints working on the TV show, I got some temporary full-time work with the army and went to live on the Enoggera base in Brisbane during the week, which enabled us to have a kind of trial separation. I continued going home on the weekends, and sometimes Anna would bring Emma to the base to visit me, but it wasn't a good situation.

  I went to the Northern Territory with my unit and we did an environmental assessment of the site of a big exercise. It was quite interesting, but during that trip my wonderful grandmother died. I went off by myself and cried. She was the best. Anything that was noble in me had come from her and my mother. When I got back to Enoggera I started to become disenchanted with the army again. I was running foul of petty bureaucracy – for example, when I tried to improve the standard of marksmanship of some of the soldiers under my command I was told I wasn't authorised to let them undertake advanced shooting practices on the computer-generated indoor firing range. There were no real bullets involved, but petty rules and regulations were stopping me from letting my soldiers learn to shoot better. My life seemed crazy and frustrated at every turn. Once more I turned my back on the army.

  I started thinking about what else I could do to sate this desire of mine to give something back – to do something of value with my life. I spent three months training with a Buddhist monk and martial arts master on the Gold Coast, while I searched for answers, and while I did learn some things from the Sensei, I ended up leaving his group.

  I did stay with Anna for a little while, but very soon we knew it wasn't going to work. Some friends offered me a room in their house and I moved out. Emma would often come and stay with me; she was still too young to understand that her parents had separated for good, and she seemed to be happy spending time with both of us. Anna and I had split amicably, so Emma had at least been spared the trauma of seeing us fighting.

  By 2004 my life was bottoming out. I had started to study for my PhD in anthropology, but gave up. I'd had a string of part-time jobs while at uni, but now that I was out of the army I had no source of income. A friend of mine suggested I try the same type of antidepressants that she was on. I've never been one for taking drugs – legal or illegal – but I was feeling so sad I took her advice and went to a doctor. I was prescribed some tablets but they just turned me into a zombie – a sad zombie at that. About a month later I was reading a book on depression and it pointed out that depression was just deep unhappiness, so I figured I should be able to fix that myself. I threw the antidepressants out.

  I didn't feel motivated enough to look for a job. Although I had run survival courses in the past I'd had to let this work slip while I worked full-time at the army and now the thought of starting again was just too much. Depression sucks the life out of you.

  Then, in August, something happened that I can only describe as an epiphany. My daughter was staying with me at the time and I clearly remember leaning against the doorframe that led to her bedroom. Emma was asleep, curled up on the bed. She was five years old and just beautiful. I stood there and looked at her, watching her tiny chest rise and fall as she breathed.

  Suddenly, I heard a voice in my head. It was my voice but it came unbidden. The voice said: ‘There are children her age being abused in south-east Asia.’ That was all it said.

  My first thought was, ‘Whoa, where the hell did that come from?’ I'd been to Thailand once, on the way home from a trip to the US where I'd gone to train at the Tracker School but I hadn't seen or heard anything about underage sex workers during that brief visit. In fact, I was a pretty naïve traveller when I was in Asia. I had no interest in girly bars or hookers, and the closest I came to that scene was when I got out of the airport, stepped into a tuk tuk and asked the driver to take me somewhere I could change money. He took me to a place called the Happy Happy Turkish Massage Bar and when we went in I saw all these suddenly attentive girls spring up from their tables and drinks. This must be one of those bars, I thought. The whole thing was quite comical. The bartender offered me what even I knew was a bad rate for my foreign currency.

  ‘Umm, no thanks,’ I said to him. ‘I think I'll just go.’

  ‘No, stay,’ the man said. ‘You can have one of my girls as well, if you like.’

  ‘Err, no thanks. Really,’ I said. I
suddenly wanted to get out of the place, and had visions of being held up by a gangster with a gun or being taken out into a stinking back alley and beaten up. I was the only white guy in the place and there were no other customers, just these girls eyeing me up. ‘I think I should go.’

  The bartender just shrugged. ‘What hotel are you staying at?’

  ‘I haven't picked a place yet,’ I said. It was only a one-night stopover.

  The guy found a guest house for me, gave me his address and told me to contact him any time I came back to Thailand. Far from wanting to rob or shoot me, the owner of the Happy Happy Turkish Massage Bar turned out to be typical of most Thais I've since met – friendly, polite, and happy to go out of his way to help a stranger.

  So there was nothing in my limited experience of Asia that had opened my eyes to the problem of trafficking and child prostitution, and when the voice came to me that day I hadn't been thinking or reading about the issue. I had never heard voices before and even though I'd thought about helping disenfranchised people in Borneo, I'd never previously contemplated the evils of the people-smuggling and sex trades. This was a strange experience. I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, if I could do something about it I would,’ but I was forty-five years old, depressed and broke and there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

  The Army Reserve has a scheme whereby the civilian employers of part-time soldiers are paid the equivalent of the adult minimum wage while their employees are on full-time military service, by way of compensation. Self-employed people can claim the employer support payment (known as the ESP) as well, if their normal business suffers because of their military activities.

  Because I'd had to give up running survival courses while working full-time for the army, a year before I heard the voice in my head, I had applied for the ESP. Predictably, the paperwork had been lost in some bureaucratic abyss and I had never been paid. Some months later I had contacted Enoggera Barracks to follow up about my payment, and luckily I got in touch with a female corporal by the name of Fletcher whom I had known while I was an officer there. She assured me she would do her best to find out what had happened to my claim. I didn't have high hopes that this non-commissioned officer would be able to achieve anything, but to my amazement and her credit, one week after I heard the voice in my head, Corporal Fletcher rang me. ‘Sir, you're going to get $15,000!’