by John Curtis
The system was working, but there was massive scope for things to go wrong. For a start, the people who were carrying on my work were operating outside Thai law, as I had done. I later found out, from a Thai cop who volunteered to help us in Thailand, that we should have taken each rescued girl to the local police station. That sounded good, but I was still operating under the expats' general assumption that all Thai police were corrupt and that any girl we presented to them might find herself being dragged back to the brothel if the owners were paying protection money to the cops. IJM had operated under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the police, but all my successes in rescuing kids had been done on my own, with no official top cover. I realised that the volunteers still in Thailand were likewise exposed. It was becoming ever clearer to me that, first, the work needed to continue, and second, it needed to be done with more structure and some formal processes in place.
I wanted to go back to Thailand, but Emma was getting used to having her dad around. ‘I don't want you to go away again, Daddy,’ she said to me. She was a smart kid and I wondered if she'd overheard Anna and me talking about my hopes for the future.
‘Honey, I'm going to stick around now,’ I told her.
A few months later the job with the Queensland state government came through and I went to work for them. For the first time in years I was earning a reasonable wage and had cash left over in my pocket after each pay. My life was getting back on track and although I wanted to keep up the work in Thailand, even if from afar, I wasn't sure how to balance my new job with everything that still needed doing on the child rescue front.
A female friend invited me to come along with her to check out a personal development course called Landmark. As an introductory offer we were able to attend the final session of one of the Landmark courses, where people give presentations about the projects that they have undertaken as part of the course. One guy had raised $30,000 in six weeks to build a special playground for disabled kids, while a woman stood up and talked about an orphanage she'd built in Kathmandu. I thought, ‘Wow, this is the sort of stuff I need to be doing.’
I've always been someone who stays in the background, just getting on with whatever needs to be done without drawing attention to myself. There's a term for it in the army – the grey man. The grey man doesn't seek glory or medals or praise, and nor does he volunteer for things unnecessarily. He keeps a low profile in the team or unit and just gets on with his job. That was me. I wasn't a shirker, but I didn't want to stand out either. The people giving the presentations, however, had to go out into the big wide world and enlist support for the worthy causes they'd chosen to represent.
At the end of the presentations we got the hard sell to sign up for the Landmark Forum course, and I thought that if this was what people got out of it – the skills and the motivation to make their visions come true – then I would go for it.
The course that I'd seen the tail end of was actually the third step in the Landmark program, and was called the Self-expression and Leadership Program (SELP). I signed up and did the basic course in Brisbane; it helped me not only to focus on the future, but also to clear up some lingering resentments between me and Anna. I called her one day from the course and said, ‘You know, you and I have a beautiful daughter and I just want to let go of all the past between us. I hope you forgive me for any outstanding stuff.’ She said yes, she did.
Later I travelled to Sydney for the second advanced course, then Brisbane for the final SELP course. The American guy who presented the advanced course was not the most likeable guy, but he had incredible vision and commitment. During one of his talks he mentioned that he spent a lot of time away from home presenting, and that this required the support of his family, especially his two daughters. He admitted he'd missed some crucial stages in their growing up, but that they still had a very strong relationship.
During a break I went up to him and told him there were some things I wanted to do with my life, but I was held back by a fear of hurting Emma by going away again. ‘How did you explain what you do to your daughters? How did you get them to accept it?’ I asked him.
He smiled. ‘It's simple. I sat them down and I involved them. I said to them, “Look, I can stay here with you, get a normal job, and you'll have your dad around all the time, and that will be fine. But I have a passion to help people become more than what they are, and I want to fulfil that passion.” I said to my girls that when I left to travel for work they could sit around and moan and complain about it, or they could say, “Hey, my dad is following his heart and look at the difference he's making.”’
I asked him how his girls had turned out, as they were grown women now. He told me that one was a UN negotiator working on the peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis and the other was helping poor people in Africa. They'd clearly turned out to be smart, independent women – and, like their dad, not afraid to travel. It all sounded too easy, and I wondered whether that line of reasoning would make sense to a seven-year-old.
The next time I saw Emma I did exactly as the presenter on the course had suggested. I told Emma that while I had rescued the five girls like I'd promised, there were still many more children in danger in Thailand. ‘Part of me just wants to stay here and watch you grow up,’ I said to her. She looked into my eyes and held my gaze. ‘I could stay here with you until you grow up and I could wait until then to go back and finish my work, but in the meantime a lot of kids would get hurt. I want to go back and keep rescuing kids.’
I waited for her reaction. She just continued to look at me – it was probably no more than ten seconds but it dragged like hours. Finally she said, ‘Dad, I will miss you, but you go save those kids.’ I gave her the biggest hug, and had tears in my eyes. It still chokes me up when I think about those words coming from my daughter.
The brakes were off, but I knew I couldn't keep overseeing the rescue work all on my own. While I had been alone in Thailand, rescuing those first five kids had not been a solo effort. I'd found my calling in Asia, but I couldn't have got there without the hard work and sacrifice of other people who'd played a part. Corporal Fletcher from the army had worked her arse off to get me the back pay that was owed to me; Anna had agreed to me going, taking sole care of our daughter for those first months and then allowing me to extend my stay; Rita and Allan from Kids Ark had given me a chance and shown me the importance of prevention as well as cure; and Jumna and his network of Lahu friends had given up their own time to set up the safe house and transport systems I'd needed to get Kem out of the country. Now, I knew, I needed more people to help me ratchet things up a notch. But where would I begin to find them?
My social life had been in the doldrums, so I'd started going onto an internet dating site. I met a nice Asian girl called Grace whom I dated for a while. She was involved in Rotary and she invited me along to one of her branch's meetings to hear a talk by an Australian woman, Gemma Sisia, who had set up the School of St Jude in Tanzania. I was fascinated by Gemma's talk. As well as setting up a school from nothing, she had taken a radical approach to alleviating poverty in Africa: her school accepted the brightest kids from the poorest families, but just one child from each family. The theory was that the gifted child would prosper and, in accordance with African culture, pass on the benefits of their education once they left school and found a good job. They would be contributing wealth back to their families and villages. I was also very impressed with the way Gemma had marshalled support in Australia and conducted a very successful fundraising campaign to pay for her good work. I spoke to Gemma after the talk and found out that she spent a lot of time talking at Rotary clubs. She was incredibly inspirational and afterwards I thought, ‘Hell, if she can do that, then so can I!’
I contacted my local Rotary club and told them a little about the work I'd been doing in Thailand. It felt a bit odd, talking about what had been a very personal quest, and having to explain it to complete strangers back in the safety of Australia. Very f
ew people in Australia knew anything about what I'd been doing; even my friend James, who'd helped me find the job, didn't really know about the rescue work I'd done.
The guy I spoke to sounded interested and booked me in to give a talk at the club, which met at the Brisbane Planetarium. I put together a PowerPoint presentation about the problem of trafficking and child prostitution in Thailand – at least as much as I'd been able to learn about it – and about the rescues I'd been involved in, including a bit about each of the girls and their backgrounds.
On the day, I showed up, met a few people, was introduced, and got up to give my talk. I started up my presentation and I thought it was going quite well, until I got to the point where I described telling Emma I was leaving her to go and rescue five children. Since returning, I hadn't really had time to process all that I'd done – and all that I'd failed to do – in Thailand; nor had I thought about what could have happened to me if I'd stayed on the self-destructive path I'd set myself back then. A tide of emotions surged up inside me, gathering momentum like a wave approaching the shore. My lip started to quiver and I felt my eyes watering. Damn, I thought, here I was, an ex-commando, about to start bawling my eyes out in front of a bunch of businesspeople.
There was a table of guys at the back of the function room who'd been pretty boisterous before the talk and I'd seen a couple of them exchanging comments as I'd started my talk. I was later able to confirm that they were the self-appointed bad boys of the group. Now, though, they were silent. In fact, the whole room was watching me.
It took me about thirty seconds to get my emotions back in check. During this time there was absolute silence in the room. I managed to get myself under control and finish the talk. At the end of the presentation many of the members, including some of the bad boys from down the back, came up to me and asked for more information or told me they wanted to get involved. I hadn't intended to turn on the waterworks to tug on their heartstrings, but it seemed I'd hit the mark. In fact, the bad boys' table had a quick whip-around on the spot and raised $400 in cash, which they presented me with.
Before I'd left Thailand my friend Sila, from the Lahu hill tribe, had identified ten kids who came from the poorest families in his village. Sila said these were the children he feared for most, because if their parents could not afford to send them to school there was a real chance they could be trafficked. At the time I gave Sila the last $2000 of my army pay to set up a fund for these kids, but I knew the money wouldn't last long. Now I told the Rotary guys that the cash they had just raised would go towards keeping those at-risk kids in school.
A week later I got a call from Russell Hawksford, one of the Rotary club members. ‘We'd like to take you out for breakfast this week if you're free.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
A few days later I met Russell and another guy from the club, Geoff McGlashan, at a café in the Brisbane suburb of Milton. Russell's about twelve years older than me, and he's a fit, successful business consultant with an air of no-nonsense authority about him. He's also a bit of an adventurer – he'd worked in Papua New Guinea for six years and served in the Citizen Military Force (the precursor to today's Army Reserve) as an NCO in the Pacific Island Regiment in PNG and competed in ocean yacht racing. I didn't know it then, but Russell would prove to be the most pivotal person in the formation of The Grey Man.
For his part, Geoff was a crew captain on surf boats for the Surf Life Savers; he would later set up fundraising branches of The Grey Man across Australia.
‘Look,’ Russell said to me, getting straight down to business, ‘we don't do this with everyone who comes to speak at the club, or everyone who needs money, but we were so moved by what you're doing that we'd like to help.’
‘Thanks, that'd be great,’ I said, although I had no idea about what that help would imply or what should happen next. We chatted for quite a while and Russell and Geoff said they wanted to take on the rescue work as a project for the club, as well as getting involved personally.
As I now had a real job, I'd been able to buy somewhere to live, and the next time we met was in my new unit. As well as Russell and Geoff, five of my friends had come along, as I'd found out from the Office of Fair Trading that we needed eight people to set up a charitable organisation. In fact, there were a host of rules about what we had to do. We had an election of sorts in which I put myself forward as president, as I seemed to be the logical choice, and although he was really the co-founder, Russell became the secretary of our newly formed organisation, which had no name at this stage. Ron Boston, one of my friends from Landmark, volunteered for the unenviable job of treasurer. Suddenly we were in business.
We have deliberately kept the membership at that low number. This way, Russell, Geoff and I can make executive decisions quickly, and not become bogged down in red tape. If we require support, we can quickly ring everyone and get a consensus.
As part of our application for registration as a charity, we had to write a charter that outlined what we did. I kept it simple, saying our objective was to rescue and protect children. Couching it in such general terms turned out to be a mistake.
A few weeks after lodging the application I received a letter from the Office of Fair Trading saying they had a problem with our charter. It seemed they thought we were going to be rescuing – or kidnapping – Australian children. I called the office and spoke to an officious bureaucrat. When I gave him my name, he said, ‘Oh, yes . . . you people.’
I explained to him that we had no interest in kidnapping Australian children, at home or abroad, and that our work would be focused in south-east Asia. This placated him and he agreed to proceed with the registration, on the grounds that we also notified the Australian Federal Police and Office of Child Protection.
I did all that and we got our application approved, but before we could finalise it we had a real drama trying to think of what to call ourselves. We discussed names like ‘Shadow’ and also looked at Thai names, but even though there were only eight of us it was hard to agree on something. Finally, I remembered that old army term The Grey Man and realised that was us: we were in the background, not looking for recognition; we worked undercover; and we just wanted to do our job.
We were caught up for a while with the bullshit of having meetings and getting organised. As more people started to learn about us we had more and more people volunteering to help. Some of them were good people, who are with us to this day, but others were nutters. We had a very well-off guy who wanted to bring in processes and organise everything, and I wasn't sure he was a good fit. We had another man, not dissimilar to Jacques the Legionnaire, who seriously proposed we set up a ‘Star Chamber’ where we would collect information on paedophiles and then track down and assassinate them. The organiser was allowed to drift away and we said goodbye to the would-be hit man as well, which was a shame in a way as he was highly motivated and a ‘doer’, and we've subsequently found that people like that are scarce in the community.
A few people I knew from the commandos drifted in and out of the organisation. A big supporter of ours was Corporal Vanessa Machin. Females couldn't qualify for the green beret when I was in the unit, but if ever there was a woman who could have served on the frontline with Special Forces it was Vanessa. We'd first met many years back, but we hadn't got off to a good start and I was quite intimidated by her for a while. Not long after I'd transferred to 1st Commando Company intelligence cell back in 1990 I drew an M16 assault rifle out of the armoury to practise with. I'd never actually trained on the M16 but as I was in the intelligence cell and no one paid much attention to me I thought I'd have a go with the American-made rifle. After the practice session I handed it in to the armoury, where Vanessa was working. As I was walking out of the vault-like room I heard a voice scream: ‘Who left the bolt in this weapon?’ I looked back and saw the fierce-faced non-commissioned officer was holding up my M16. ‘Ummm . . . that would be me, corp.’ I didn't even know it had a bolt that had to be removed.
/> Vanessa gave me a verbal thrashing and I remember thinking I'd give her a wide berth from then on. Later, I went on an army driver's course and she was on the course as well. She was hilarious and we became good friends and have stayed so ever since. She's given us a lot of moral support and acted as a useful contact between The Grey Man and the military. Her former boyfriend Murray Frean, another commando, also became a good friend and supporter. Vanessa later married a US Marine Corps master sergeant named Bill, and moved to Hawaii. While I wished her every happiness, her move was The Grey Man's loss.
Our first priority as an organisation was to raise some money. The rescues themselves don't usually cost us a lot of money, as volunteers pay for their own airfares and expenses, but we do need money for the preventative programs that we set up in the hill tribe villages. In 2008, our first year of operation as The Grey Man, we held our first fundraiser, at a Thai restaurant in Brisbane. Most of the people who attended were friends of mine or Russell's, but in time our support base began to grow, by word of mouth and through Russell and me talking at more and more Rotary clubs. At that first dinner we charged a bit on top of the meal, plus we auctioned off some craftwork and other items donated by local businesses, including a box seat at the Gabba in Brisbane for six people. We raised $3000, and while that probably doesn't sound like a lot compared to what other charities raise, it was more than enough to keep ten poor kids at school and out of the hands of traffickers for a year.