by John Curtis
I almost hadn't added Misao to my list. She was Japanese and I thought she looked quite cute, but she'd written very little about herself on her profile. She said she loved living in Brisbane, and liked going to the coast, to Surfers Paradise, and boogie boarding. As I filtered out the other possibles I kept going back to Misao's picture and her few words. ‘Nope,’ I'd say to myself, then move on to another listing. I went back probably six or more times before I finally sent her an electronic ‘kiss’ to show her I was interested. She agreed to meet me and she was date number seven on my list of fifteen (although I hadn't arranged to meet them in any order of priority).
We arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Brisbane. It was just after Christmas and I know it sounds corny, but as soon as I met her I knew there was something special about her. Misao had the greatest spirit – there's no other way I can describe it – of all the girls I'd met so far on my high-speed-dating campaign.
We chatted for what seemed like ages and when I checked my watch I saw that the relatively short time I'd allocated to her was nearly up. ‘I'm sorry, I have to go.’
‘But you've bought me a coffee and I want to talk to you some more. Stay, and I'll buy you a coffee,’ she said.
I felt terrible, but I told her I had to leave.
‘Where do you have to go in such a hurry?’ she asked.
‘I have to take my mother shopping.’ As soon as I said the words, I knew the lie sounded incredibly lame. She'd either think I wasn't interested in her or that I was a mummy's boy. The truth was, I had to go and meet girl number eight at New Farm and if I didn't move I'd be late. I'd arranged to meet the fifteen in alternate coffee shops so there would be no overlap. ‘I'm so sorry.’
I'd borrowed my friend Janette's Toyota RAV4 because my old car was such a bomb I thought it might break down between dates. When I got in the car I called another friend, Vicky, on my mobile phone.
‘How's the dating going?’ she asked.
‘I think I'm going to marry this one.’
‘You're joking!’ she said.
‘Of course I am,’ I said, but the more I thought about Misao, while I drove to the next appointment, I knew she was the one.
I was still flat out with The Grey Man work but I called Misao soon after our coffee date and said that while I would like to see her again, it couldn't be for another two weeks. I suggested we go to a Latin dance class – something a bit different.
Misao agreed to go, but I got the feeling that she thought I wasn't really all that interested in her, or that I was playing hard to get. We emailed a few times in the intervening two weeks, but I was so busy that my messages to her were rarely more than two or three lines. She told me that her past boyfriends had all been besotted with her and had sent her voluminous emails, which she loved. It drove her crazy that I was giving out so little information, but that's who I was, and I wasn't about to change.
The dancing class, when it finally came around, was great fun and we went out for coffee afterwards, where I learned more about her. Misao was a student and Japanese language teacher who'd come to Australia because, even from an early age, she'd felt stifled in Asia and wanted to breathe again
We got on really well, but we sometimes had some communication breakdowns. I told her she was ‘damn cute’ for months before she told me she wanted me to stop calling her that. She thought I was saying ‘dumb cute’. On one date I told her a funny story about something to do with a woman I'd once been out with who lived on the Gold Coast. Clearly she didn't get the joke (I can't remember what it was, so it couldn't have been that funny), and she didn't laugh. The next day I received a text message from Misao which read: I hope you enjoyed your time with your lady friend on the Gold Coast. It took me a while to work out what she meant, but then I realised she must have thought I'd said I was still going out with the woman on the Gold Coast. I called Misao's number but she refused to answer. I knew she'd be home so I drove around. When I got to her place I knocked on the door. ‘Misao, are you in there?’
‘Go away. Go back to your other woman.’
‘There is no other woman. Are you crazy?’
Eventually I was able to explain to her how she'd got it wrong, and she calmed down. We had a few more dramas like that. Some naïve people might think that Japanese women are somehow more subservient or placid than western women, but that's bullshit. They're high maintenance.
We drove up into the mountains for a date and Misao said she wanted to discuss something serious with me. I was a bit nervous, as I really liked her and thought things were going well. We went for a walk in the bush and sat down for a rest. Misao turned to me with a serious look on her face. ‘John . . .’
‘Yes?’ I wondered what was coming next.
‘All of my boyfriends have had a nice car. I don't know how to tell you this, but your car is rubbish.’
My car had a shattered rear window and for a while I'd had some plastic taped across the hole. Even after I got the glass replaced I hadn't bothered to scrape off the duct tape that I'd used to hold the temporary window in place. This was just as well because I was out driving one night when the cops pulled me over for not having a working taillight. I explained I was having some electrical problems and a fuse had blown. The male cop looked at the car and asked if it was registered. It must have looked bad. I showed him the registration sticker. He looked at the duct tape and asked whether I had broken the rear window recently. I said yes. Luckily the duct tape covered up the rust that was eating away the metal around the window. I chatted to the female cop and told her that my girlfriend wanted me to get a new car. ‘You should listen to her,’ she replied. Misao loved that story and wanted to call the policewoman to thank her. When we started looking for a house, Misao would make me park my car around the corner from whatever property we were visiting so she wouldn't be embarrassed in front of the real estate agent, and in case the vendors thought we were time-wasters with no money.
I proposed to Misao on the top floor of the Q1 building on the Gold Coast, and to my great joy she said yes, although she added that when we eventually got married I was banned from driving the car to the wedding in case it broke down and I didn't make it to the ceremony. One day a few weeks later we went to the shops and I parked my groaning, smoking, rusting old beast. We got out and had only moved a short way from it when a woman walked past. Misao overheard the woman say, ‘What a dirty car.’
‘She can't say that,’ Misao said to me.
I shrugged. ‘Who cares?’
Misao's face started to redden. ‘I'm going to tell her.’
‘Tell her what?’
‘I'm going to tell her she's wrong.’
‘Forget it.’ The car was a running joke between us and I couldn't work out why Misao was suddenly getting so riled up over someone pointing out the truth – that my car was a piece of junk.
‘John, this woman doesn't know you. She doesn't know that you drive that car because you spend all your money on going to Thailand to help the people there. All she sees is the car. When I first met you, I thought: there is something wrong with this strange man and his strange car, but now I know. People should not judge you by what you drive. I am proud that you use your money to help other people.’
I was so proud of her right then, and I realised how lucky I was to have met her.
I was a shy kid. As an adult, I could deliver an intelligence briefing on a military exercise, or address a crowd of people if I had to, as I'd done with Rotary clubs, but I still shied away from the limelight. If I had a vision of how The Grey Man would be perceived publicly it would be someone whispering to someone, after we'd ended an operation, ‘Who was that masked man?’, à la the Lone Ranger. Okay, I know it's a romantic image, but I'd never sought public recognition for the work I'd been doing. Also, as I've mentioned, The Grey Man had made the deliberate decision to shun publicity in Thailand because we didn't need it, and because it might compromise the identities of our operatives who worked undercover.
/> The reality, however, was that we had a full-time employee on the ground who needed to be paid, so we needed to improve our fund-raising capacity. The emails and other administration tasks were never-ending, so I really wanted to find someone who could help us on that front as well. To justify having our man on the ground, we also wanted to expand our operations. Funnily enough, operations don't cost nearly as much as the development and preventative work we do in the villages. All our volunteers – me included – pay our own airfares and expenses. However, we did find ourselves having to give money to the Thai police to assist with their logistics.
We also needed to widen the gene pool of our operational volunteers. I was still getting a steady stream of volunteers from the military via the Special Forces grapevine. Most of these tended to be from the 1st Commando Company in Sydney, where I'd served. Just as in my days, the commando profile tended to range from criminal to cop, and everything in between.
My experience with former or serving military volunteers had been pretty hit and miss. Occasionally we'd get someone who turned out to be all right, but a lot of the guys who contacted us were adventurers who wanted to cross into Burma and seek out traffickers, or to kick in doors with all guns blazing. I was seriously worried that some of these guys might create an international incident if we let them loose on Thailand. The other problem with some former Special Forces people, surprisingly, was their unreliability. They liked the idea of being involved in an operation, but in reality very few of them had either the skills or the patience to be effective undercover operatives. They tended to be men of action, who had no tolerance for the continual frustrations of trying to find underage kids in a sea of vice.
I'd also been contacted by a couple of policemen, including some ex and serving Federal Police. I wondered, briefly, if the interest from the Feds was us being checked out as an organisation, but mostly I took these expressions of interest as genuine. Indeed, it seemed to me that police could be better suited to the sort of work we were doing. So much of the job, as I'd learned from first-hand experience, involved following leads that might result in nothing, or spending long boring hours in bars or on surveillance. There was no kicking in of doors, no gunplay, and rarely a happy ending with a big brave westerner walking out of a brothel with a grateful Asian girl in his arms.
Thanks to our minor public profile through Rotary and the fundraisers there had been a couple of small stories about The Grey Man in newspapers in Australia. One of these must have caught the attention of ABC Radio in Brisbane, because one day in January 2008 I received a call from Pam O'Brien, a producer of The Conversation Hour presented by Richard Fidler. She said Richard wanted to interview me. I told her I'd think about it and get back to her.
I'd heard about Richard Fidler's program and knew that he was widely respected as an interviewer, so I was fairly sure he would do a straight job and not seek to overly sensationalise what we were doing. I thought going on his program might help us to attract some suitable volunteers and bring more people to our fundraising, so I got back to the producer and agreed to have a chat. A week before the interview I met with Pam and explained to her, in some detail, what we'd been doing as an organisation, and how I'd become involved in it. Richard would understand who we were and what we were on about before the interview began, and this was different from other interviews I've done since. I was mindful, however, of protecting my identity, so for the interview I continued using a pseudonym I'd created in Thailand – John Curtis. John is similar to my real first name, and the surname comes from my childhood hero-worship of the actor Tony Curtis. My favourite movie was The Black Shield of Falworth, a Tony Curtis classic. I used a pseudonym because I was worried that if people in Thailand found out my real identity someone might come looking for me one day. I wasn't concerned about my safety, but I had real fears of someone targeting my daughter.
I went back to the studio and met Richard just before the show started. We had a brief chat which confirmed that the time I'd spent with his researcher hadn't been wasted. Once we were on air I found myself relaxing, as it was clear Richard knew just the right questions to ask to elicit the details of my early life, my time in the army and how I'd ended up in Thailand and set up The Grey Man. I talked him through some of my experiences in Thailand and how they had turned my life around. It was all going really well, I thought.
‘How do you handle it, emotionally?’ Richard asked me.
It was a question I hadn't been expecting. I paused a few seconds – probably not a good thing to do on a radio program, but Richard let the silence hang there. I'd been fairly matter-of-fact up until that point, but I suddenly felt the emotions well up inside me and start to overcome me.
I swallowed and felt my throat constricting. The beginnings of tears pricked at my eyes. For God's sake, get over it, I told myself. It was like a repeat of my embarrassing performance at that first Rotary meeting. I hated showing that weakness, but when I think about it now, I realise I must have been bottling up a hell of a lot of stuff. I didn't – couldn't – let myself dwell on the emotional side of what had been happening to those kids, let alone the physical damage that had been done to them.
It has been almost seven years since I first went to Thailand and it still happens, even today. I gave a talk to a ladies' group at a church recently and got choked up again. I thought, why is this still happening to you? I think sometimes I hide from the enormity of it all – not of what I've done, but the scale of the problem and the knowledge that I could do this for the rest of my life and the evil would continue.
Richard broke the on-air silence. ‘What happens to these kids is such a hard thing to accept. Does it trouble you, John? Does it drive you?’
I took a breath to steady myself. ‘I try to maintain a certain amount of dissociation from it because, I think if I didn't I'd be . . .’ The emotions welled up inside me and I fought to keep them in check.
Richard jumped back in to save me. ‘You'd be upset all the time, probably . . .’
I stifled a sob and Richard steered the interview back onto safer ground and asked me about how my daughter felt about what I did.
At the time of the radio interview Misao and I were still getting to know each other, and I still hadn't told her anything at all about The Grey Man. I'd told her I was going to be on the radio, and I'd decided that that was how I would break the news to her about my other life. When she listened to it, she finally understood what was taking up so much of my time.
On that day Misao donated $1400 to the charity. I was so impressed with her, but I knew she was a student and I tried to give the money back. She said, ‘I'm not giving the money to you but to The Grey Man.’
I was so busy that we couldn't see each other very often, even though we were only five minutes away by car. She told me she'd taped the interview and used to play it at night until she fell asleep – she said she did this because she missed the sound of my voice.
Overall, the interview with Richard was painless, but the aftermath was overwhelming, in a good way. I probably received close to two hundred emails through our fledgling website as a result of being on The Conversation Hour. I spent the next two weeks answering and going back and forth with many of the correspondents. People were pledging money and sending donations, so I also had to write receipts and send thank-you notes. I was working full time as well and so I was getting very little sleep. I couldn't really complain, though – The Grey Man received $8000 in donations as a direct result of the exposure the ABC radio interview had given us.
We also had plenty of people wanting to volunteer to join the organisation, which was good, as well as a few people with interesting stories. One guy who contacted Russell told him that he had been sexually abused by a Catholic priest as a child, and that he was angry at the local bishop for not taking action in his case. The guy in question was interested in my military background and asked Russell if we would help him assassinate the bishop. He wanted to blow the clergyman up, and thought we cou
ld help him rig up the explosives. Russell had to politely decline. I thought about contacting the bishop, but on balance decided that he was probably safe for the time being as the guy had held his grudge for decades and still hadn't made good his threat. I hope the bishop appreciates this.
TEN
Back to Thailand, Hunting Paedophiles
A few months after the Richard Fidler radio interview, Claire Forster from the ABC TV documentary program Australian Story contacted me and said they were interested in doing a story on The Grey Man.
I was a bit iffy about it, because I was trying to put the lid back on our media coverage. The publicity was making us more visible and had added substantially to the organisation's funds, but it had also significantly added to my workload. I was busy for weeks after the Fidler interview, responding to queries on the internet until one or two in the morning each evening, and conducting follow-up interviews. Claire, however, can be a very persuasive person. Not long before she contacted me I'd seen an episode of the show about a Vietnam veteran known as Bomber who had set up an NGO to clear landmines in Cambodia. Claire said to me that after that documentary had gone to air those guys had received donations of about $30,000. It was an appealing scenario for a small charity, and The Grey Man could do a lot with that kind of money. We had a full-time employee (although luckily he was costing us a third of an average Australian wage), and a raft of community projects in need of ongoing funding in Thailand, plus I was interested in branching out into other countries, such as Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos, and Burma.