Bad Medicine

by Terry Ledgard

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Terry Ledgard is no stranger to mischief and adventure. Having survived childhood in outback Australia, he joined the Army and rose through the ranks to become an SAS medic in Afghanistan. As he endured explosive action, blood-curdling trauma and gut-wrenching humanitarian aid missions, he found the modern-day soldier’s larrikin spirit was the perfect prescription for intense combat conditions.

  Armed with a new-found perspective on life, Terry returned to the Real World, but soon realised it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. His life became a slow-motion train wreck as he faced a gritty battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. But in a stroke of ironic fortune, he realised that the Army had taught him everything he needed to overcome the affliction, and that his most important weapon was a sense of humour.

  Evocative, moving and outrageous in its humour and honesty, Bad Medicine is an exhilarating account of life as an SAS medic in the world’s most intense warzone.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1  Idiot Infancy

  2  Baby Medic

  3  The Boredom Begins

  4  Man-Child

  5  The ’Ghan

  6  Prior Preparation Doesn’t Prevent Piss-Poor Performance

  7  Humanitarian Aid

  8  Getting Frosty

  9  Fat Kid

  10 Got Some

  11 The Cadbury Kid

  12 The Longest Day

  13 It’s A Celebration, Bitches

  14 Don’t Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs . . .

  15 Domestic Bliss

  16 Fuck My Life

  17 The Boredom Returns

  18 Flat Walker

  19 She Gone Proper Bugger Up

  Epilogue

  Military Abbreviations

  For my mum, Heather, who suffered an

  undeserved, brutal and life-changing stroke

  three months before this book was published.

  Keep kicking arse and taking names with

  your rehab, Old Girl.

  PROLOGUE

  Like all good stories, this one begins before my dreary generation, with my late Great-great Uncle Jim Ledgard. Jim was a typical country Australian lad – a tough as nails, bareknuckle-brawling, larger-than-life personality, with the demeanour of a gentle giant.

  Jim spent two years as a stretcher-bearer on the front line of the Somme during the First World War, including months in primitive military hospitals recuperating from shrapnel wounds and mustard-gas poisoning as a result of apocalyptic artillery barrages. Then, he took an entire German section prisoner using one solitary grenade to subdue and disarm his captives.

  Later, upon returning to his home town of Coober Pedy in South Australia, Jim stumbled into a disused mineshaft and fell forty feet onto a pile of rubbish lodged halfway down the hole. Jim survived for three days in that hellhole by sucking on barbed wire to stave off dehydration and eating flies for sustenance. He flagged the attention of rescuers by banging on a forty-four-gallon drum. Aside from a few bumps and bruises, Jim was miraculously unhurt by the ordeal and survived into his seventies – eventually succumbing to such a trivial ailment as heart disease: an unbefitting end to a brave and colourful life.

  To this day, the ‘Jim Ledgard litmus test’ is the moral filter through which all my life decisions are scrutinised. But they always fall short of the mark.

  Why?

  Because Jim Ledgard was the hardest-hitting motherfucker who ever lived, and I am a functioning Man-child.

  1

  IDIOT INFANCY

  My birth served as fair warning that I’d be nothing but a troublesome little brat. I arrived into this world in December 1983, weighing seven pounds and who-gives-a-shit-how-many ounces. Poor old Mumsy needed a blood transfusion to replace the precious fluids I’d siphoned during her natal nightmare. But with Australia’s strict fourth trimester anti-abortion laws, my folks didn’t have a choice but to put up with me from that point onwards.

  Growing up as an inquisitive, mischievous and highly imaginative Coober Pedy kid, I had what I can only describe as the perfect childhood. Coober Pedy is a unique town to say the least; there’s nowhere else in the world like it. Situated in the middle of the bum-fuck nowhere South Australian desert, the opal-mining community boasts a surreal other-worldly terrain that features in movies such as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Pitch Black. The sunrise there is unbelievable – fading night melts into an electric blue in the brief moments before the fluorescent orange sun peeks over the sawtooth silhouette of abandoned mineshafts on the horizon.

  With a blend of Croatian, country-ass white Australian and transient Aboriginal cultures all mixed in together, the place has this quaint, eccentric, oddball character about it. Floaters, drifters and tourists who only intended to pass through the town find themselves addicted to the opal game – every gambling addict’s dream job – and end up staying for forty years. Back in the day, it was also a notorious hide-out for Melbourne underworld hitmen while the heat from their latest job died down. As local rumour holds, the Victorian Police preferred the hitmen to hide out in Coober Pedy if there wasn’t enough evidence to put them away; it was easier to investigate dirty deeds done in the desert than maniacal murders in Melbourne’s metropolis.

  My opal-miner father, Willie, was of average height and build, and always sported dusty, tattered denim jeans with the obligatory flannelette shirt and terry-towelling hat when he’d come home each night after an arduous day’s work underground. He had an impossibly straight side-part in his thick, dark hair, which was immaculately combed and permanently glued in place with half a tub of Brylcreem. He also suffered from a condition known as the Ledgard Bum Chin: a genetic disorder whereby an arse-shaped feature dominated the lower region of his face. This condition is hereditary and makes the simple act of shaving a real bitch and a half; you’ve got to spread the cheeks with one hand and rotate the razor on its side to get into the deep arse-crack on your face.

  Dad was incredibly quiet and shy around new people, but was a MacGyver-esque genius if you put him within a five-mile radius of a broken car with just a paperclip and a ball of lint in his hands. He also dealt with the family’s disciplinary duties, which would often see him chasing me around the front yard screaming like a madman with a belt waving wildly above his head.

  My schoolteacher mother, Heather, had a thick Jheri-curl afro that ruled the upper regions of her scone with an iron fist, while a pair of gigantic glasses dominated her face below. Her glasses were so thick that she was considered a bushfire risk when the blistering Coober Pedy sun refracted through the lenses, causing dry grass and leaf litter to smoulder. Mum was one of those old-school hard-ass teachers who loved working with kids but wouldn’t hesitate to smite unruly behaviour with a shower of fire and brimstone if the situation called for it. She was an unbelievably generous and selfless person, though. She would tend to us children all night whenever we were sick, and donated all her spare time to local charities and community fundraisers.

  I love my mum and dad but I’m not really sure how they met. If I’m honest, I don’t want to know. I can’t afford the therapy bills.

  My brother, Bazz, was three years my elder and had one of those blonde rat’s tail hairdos – you know: all business in the front, bogan at the back. He was absolutely giddy for all things computers and spent hours on end frantically jerking away on the joystick of his beloved Commodore 64, tongue sticking out at weird angles to make sure the on-screen computer character moved in just the right way. Bazz also suffered from severe childhood epilepsy, which has got to be the biggest cosmic ‘fuck you’ to an avid gamer. I lost count how many times the flickering computer screen triggered one of his nasty epile
ptic fits during our formative years.

  My family, like so many others in Coober Pedy, lived in an underground dwelling known as a dugout, which gave us some respite from the heat in summer. I felt like a comic-book hero every time I burst through the front door of the Bat Cave, ready to thwart the evil clutches of boredom and get up to some childhood mischief. Big Bro and I relished every opportunity to explore the sprawling expanse of abandoned mineshafts that dotted the sun-scorched alien landscape beyond the front porch. Fond memories abound of catching angry reptiles, scrambling up steep sandstone escarpments and defying dehydration in stifling fifty-degree heat. My childhood overflowed with fun and adventure.

  But the dugout was also fertile ground for childhood nightmares to leap from my overactive imagination. My biggest fear was running the gauntlet to our detached outside dunny at night. So often in the wee hours of the morning, I’d stand there under the dim glow of the porch light in my tiny Thomas the Tank Engine PJs, staring into the endless darkness of night, where all manner of goblins, ghouls and golems silently stalked, itching for their chance to get me. Prompted by the growing urgency of my imminent number-onesie, I’d fight the fear and plan my move. Then, when my daring reached Roger Ramjet proportions (or pee was spreading across the front of my PJs – whichever came first), I’d be off, moving like a banshee from hell, skidding to a halt at the safety of the dunny door, before rocking the world’s quickest piss and sprinting back inside. My tiny little feet pitter-pattered across the ground as I ran. I’d never look back.

  A sense of dread always followed me back to bed. One of the demons had picked up my scent and followed me inside; I was certain of it. Seeking refuge, I’d hide under the blanky. Not my own blanky – don’t be crazy, there was a fucking demon after me, dude. No, I’d hide under my Big Bro’s blanky. Under the awesomeness of Big Bro’s protection, once again safe, I was free to drift back into a psychedelic, cartoon-filled juvenile slumber.

  After my first few years’ introduction into the dark world of Coober Pedy school life, it was time for my family to uproot and move on. I had a little teary as I said goodbye to my friends for the last time, feeling like a displaced refugee and worrying about making new friends in a new school. Pops had decided that the opal wealth in Coober Pedy had run dry, so in 1990 the Ledgards made the long pilgrimage to the opal-mining town of Lightning Ridge, located in (what I thought was) the Newest region of South Wales. I hadn’t quite grasped the fundamentals of geography yet.

  Lightning Ridge is, in fact, not an ironic name, like you’d call a tall chick Shorty or a ginger ninja Bluey. No, no, the town is situated on a ridge-like formation and experiences a disproportionate amount of electrical activity during thunderstorms. Very apt name – golf clap to the early explorers.

  The Ridge is also a unique place to grow up, albeit a little classier than Coober Pedy. Well, the crime was more up-market anyway. In Coober Pedy, you might have worried about being bashed for your money or groceries as you left the supermarket. In Lightning Ridge, ratting was by far the most popular criminal activity.

  RATTING

  Unlike ratting in the sense of dobbing or tattle-taling, the word ratting in an opal-mining context refers to the illegal practice of mining somebody else’s patch when the rightful leaseholders are at home asleep or getting shitfaced at the pub.

  Employing sophisticated hardware such as night-vision goggles and semi-automatic weapons, Ratters are notorious for plundering their unsuspecting victims’ mines with reckless abandon. If discovered in the act, Ratters retaliate with violent shootouts or by blowing up their victims’ houses with pipe bombs, to discourage them from ratting on the Ratters.

  Aside from the occasional late-night boom that could be heard from across town, the ratting didn’t affect my neighbourhood. I thought the danger was very exciting – it gave me plenty of grown-up stories to tell at school the next day. For the first eighteen months of integrating into the new Lightning Ridge dynamic, my family and I lived in a very distinctive neighbourhood: a caravan park. And we lived in a caravan. Wow, as I’m writing this I’m only just realising that I’m trailer trash, which explains so much! My therapist would have a field day with this little gem of a repressed memory, but I digress.

  Despite a brief interlude during the transition between interstate public-education systems, I made plenty of friends – it’s just so easy when you’re seven years old. As a bonus, my schooling didn’t appear to suffer one iota. Submitting every piece of mundane schoolwork on time and to the required specification consumed my very being, and I soon found myself brown-nosing trying my little heart out to gain every, highly important and prestigious accomplishment that the Lightning Ridge Area School had to offer. Talent camp; sports captain; school prefect; school captain: I did it all.

  SCHOOL

  Originally designed to equip minors with the necessary knowledge and skills to be a functioning member of society, schooling was transformed in the wake of the industrial and commercial revolution of the early 1900s. In the early twenty-first century, the purpose of school is to groom victims for a life of corporate servitude in the Real World while simultaneously crushing creativity and spirit under the guise of education, so that being an obedient little worker drone seems like the only reasonable choice in life.

  Schools are administered by ghastly, reptile-skinned goblins known as teachers who feast on the very youth of their students and bathe in the tears of young children.

  Although I was a timid try-hard on the surface, in a few rare and uncharacteristic moments my true rebellious nature managed to shine through. During one eventful lunchbreak, while the teachers were gathered in the head office (no doubt plotting their next afternoon of water-boarding torture), a buddy and I channelled our inner freedom-fighter spirit and broke into a classroom. Once inside, phase two of our mission began, and we strategically placed thumbtacks on the teacher’s chair – my mum’s chair. Total fucking anarchy.

  It would have been the perfect crime if not for the goody-two-shoes witness (who I would have been seriously pissed at for tattle-taling if I hadn’t had the hugest crush on her, which I didn’t do anything about because it was a well-known fact that girls had cooties). With the lunchbreak over and my mum inching tantalisingly close to the impending pain, Goody-Two-Shoes spilt the beans and, just like that, our plot was foiled. Even worse, the poor, defenceless freedom-fighters were then unceremoniously fingered in the court of the classroom, in front of everyone. I don’t know what was worse: the spittle flying from Mum’s lips as she chewed the bejesus out of my buddy or her snarling words to me, ‘I’ll deal with you at home.’ Ouch Town, population: me.

  When I was finally released from Intensive Care, I was happy to learn that the Ledgards had upgraded from the caravan park and moved into the prestigious, snobby teachers’ housing accommodation on the other side of town – an above-ground, brick and mortar, air-conditioned domicile. What a fantastically foreign contrast to the humble caravan! This was my first house that wasn’t made entirely of dirt or built on a foundation of wheels.

  My glee was soon replaced with what I suppose I can call morbid humanitarian empathy for the broken Aboriginal family in the housing-trust home next door. Over the next few years, one member or another of the neighbouring family: broke into our house; stole my entire basketball-card collection; tried to stab me with a kitchen knife; repeatedly bounced a puppy against a wall to see if it had nine lives; caved a kitten’s skull in with the pointy edge of a claw hammer; and burnt down an abused-women’s refuge. I wish I was kidding, and I haven’t even mentioned the worst incidents. It was totally fucked up.

  Despite all evidence that my new neighbours were the Australian equivalent of the Manson Family, in my juvenile naivety I still managed to enjoy some rip-roaring good times with the aspiring sociopaths next door. When school was out, we’d kick it around the motorbike tracks, cook marshmallows on makeshift campfires and generally run amok. On one occasion, bat-shit insane from boredom, we fashioned
a bent spear from a nearby acacia tree and chased this poor kangaroo through the main street of Lightning Ridge. What a sight! An ebony and ivory band of barefoot, wild-eyed, shirtless heathens screaming at the top of our lungs as we attempted to mob the anxious marsupial in the foyer of the local clothing store. No emasculation in admitting that Skippy escaped without harm.

  In the summer of 1996, the Matriarch of the Ledgard Adminis­tration decreed that the pursuit of wealth in Lightning Ridge was no longer tenable. So, with dreams of opal rock stardom and riches evaporating quicker than a fresh piss on a hot Lightning Ridge day, Dad relented. And we found ourselves yet again relocating. We made the long journey to a seafront town in South Australia, namely Whyalla, to pursue Mum’s career on the infinitely more preferable giving end (as opposed to receiving end) of the public-education system.

  Just quietly, the gloss of the New South Wales education system from yesteryear was wearing thin for me. Angling for gold stars, and education in itself, stopped being the point of my schooldays. Instead, I was preoccupied with all things cool and the developing chests of my female classmates. In my adolescent rebellion, nothing but Nike and Adidas could ever disgrace my greasy teenage skin. I’d even discovered a way to circumvent the family’s strict ‘housework for the dole’ scheme. Dressed in Kobe Bryant kicks, designer shorts and expensive, brand-name tees, I’d plead for more flashy new clothes that I just had to have for super-important sporting events. And it worked every time; the suckers always caved.

  Over the next few years, despite having a larger circle of about fifteen best friends, I gravitated towards a core four-man group of buddies. Scrubba was the token loveable dumb-ass who couldn’t even speak English, or any other language for that matter, and just mumbled incoherently. Bodz was a short-ass, smart-ass Filipino who regularly incited small-scale riots with his razor-sharp wit. Wayno was the male model of the gang – girls went wild at the sheer thought of his mojo, but he never really mastered the whole self-confidence thing, which merely amplified his appeal to the fairer sex. I was the enigma of the cohort. I could spout some poignant Oscar Wilde quote in one moment and in the next I could be charging head-first into a street sign, just to see whether it would budge or I would bleed. I could transition from philosopher to full retard in 0.2 seconds flat, but usually preferred the retard end of the spectrum.