Bad Medicine

by Terry Ledgard

  Apparently, the short-staffed Medical Corps couldn’t afford to lose another medic, even if it was to the Special Forces, who were similarly strapped for numbers. The UM course was incredibly difficult to secure a spot on, with only two places per year awarded to army medics, but it would prevent me pursuing my plan of becoming an SAS operator, at least in the short term. What should I do?

  My fear of failure got the best of me. I royally screwed this decision up. In reality, my upper-body strength was more than enough to make the cut. Even though my ankle was battered and bruised, even if it had been in a plaster cast, I still could have gutted out the SF barrier test – and qualified for selection. But I settled for second best.

  Every medic in this great army wanted the UM course, so I chose the easy way out – fully knowing that I didn’t really want or deserve to be on the course. My self-doubt had crippled my confidence, and I completely undervalued the nine months of training I’d put in. It’s one thing to mess up something that you’re superficially invested in, but another thing entirely to fail at something that you’ve put everything into. This decision still haunts me.

  As my time with 16AD was drawing to a close, there were still more adventures in store. My first overseas exploit, Bersama Lima, was balls-to-the-wall fun. Bersama Lima is an annual international air-defence training exercise held in Kuantan, Malaysia. After a few weeks of September tropical heat and arduous trench-digging labour, my buds and I found ourselves running amok in a Malaysian nightclub.

  Innovative architecture, bright colour schemes, cheap beers and a packed house assaulted the senses and proved the perfect environment for Australian diggers to unwind from the intense exercise conditions. The club’s band was singing the words of popular English songs without understanding their meaning. We repeatedly requested their flawless rendition of ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries. Head-banging and rocking the fuck out to the addictive bass reverberating through the floor, we tarnished the very essence of that song as the band belted out the chorus through the microphone.

  Without warning, my mate Willy jumped up on stage and commandeered the mic from the unsuspecting band. Willy was revered for his unwavering work ethic and was notorious for being the loosest unit to ever don an army uniform. Shirtless, shitfaced and bare-assed, Willy proceeded to offend the sensibilities of every punter in the club, wrestling for control of the mic with the club’s yakuza-looking owner, who looked like he wanted to give Willy a deadly one-inch punch to the throat. Thankfully, the yakuza club boss didn’t assassinate us, instead opting to give us a prestigious VIP room – not because we were important but because he thought we could be neatly tucked away in the nether regions of the club while still spending coin on beers without offending the regulars.

  Getting a VIP room sounded cooler than it was. There were no girls, there was no music and the joint felt like a prison cell. So we unleashed ourselves back into the general club. But we soon got the sense that an international incident was imminent, so my buddies and I bugged out of the club post-haste.

  On the way back home, we found an old Morris Minor parked on a neighbouring street. Being such a tiny vehicle, and in our current state of inebriation, we couldn’t pass up this perfect prank. Four of us picked up the tiny Morry and rotated it ninety degrees. It couldn’t move forwards, backwards, left or right out of that position – it would have to execute a tedious thousand-point turn. Checkmate.

  Fleeing the scene of the prank, we made our way back to our hotel rooms at night’s end. Luckily, the whole contingent got in safely without so much as an STD or gunshot wound. Minor miracles.

  I woke up a few hours later and stumbled into the bathroom, only to find my roommate stark naked and wrapped around the toilet like a boa constrictor. I gave him a swift kick in the butt to try to wake him up, but he was firmly in the grips of a drunken stupor and couldn’t be stirred. I threw a blanket over him and had a quick piss into a pot plant on the balcony before passing out until lunchtime the next day.

  That was the first free night in Kuantan, but we had several more. Two groups of soldiers left our hotel the next day, headed towards the beach district. Once we were seated in the second taxi, our driver accelerated like a bat out of hell, weaving his way across roads, footpaths and children’s playgrounds. This inspired Willy to present our crazy driver with a fictitious proposal. ‘Hey, ram that other taxi with our mates in it and I’ll give you 200 ring-stingers,’ he joked. Ring-stingers was our name for the ringgit, the Malaysian currency. ‘Run them off the road!’ Willy urged.

  ‘Aah, I’m not so sure, sir,’ the driver replied. ‘I don’t think that will cover the damage. Make it 500 and you got a deal.’

  We all pissed ourselves laughing.

  ‘Do not, I repeat, do not ram that taxi!’ Willy replied, worried that the joke was getting real.

  Luckily, no ramming occurred that day. That night was probably a different story.

  After a drunken beach-paradise afternoon, we group of ten degenerates found ourselves outside the seediest Malay nightclub in existence. The dingy joint literally had a stream of sewage flowing past the front doorstep. The more depraved minority in our gang made a beeline for the dimly lit back rooms, for what I’m sure was a highly ethical and wholesome brand of fun. The rest of us stood around a greasy bar table trying not to make eye contact with the other punters in the club. That strategy didn’t quite work. After a few moments, this poor, lone Malay girl with a freakishly deformed forehead covered with zits was standing uncomfortably close to the group (when I say zits – hers were not a normal brand of acne; it was swamp-ass!). Before long, we’d decided to leave this dive and move on to greener pastures, but there was a serious roadblock in our way. The papa-san of the club was blocking the exit and insisting that we pay for one of his girl’s time.

  ‘What girl?’ we argued. ‘We haven’t done a damn thing, barely even had one bloody beer!’

  Papa-San was referring to Swamp-Ass; she was his prostitute, his possession. He was adamant that we owed him some sort of financial reimbursement for her time standing next to us! I don’t know whether we were just tight-asses and didn’t want to pay, or we thought the notion of owning another human being made the papa-san more despicable than the Devil, but we all wanted to commit grievous bodily harm. Cooler heads prevailed. Taking a punt on the hope that the Malay Mafia weren’t just around the corner, one of the lads suggested that the papa-san might enjoy the act of auto-fornication, and we barged past him without a drama. To this day, I don’t know who won that confrontation. The papa-san is lucky to still have all his teeth, but I also noticed that a handful of patrons in the bar were strapped. In hindsight, we were lucky to still be breathing.

  The Bersama Lima training exercise went down without a hitch; international relations between Australia and Malaysia remained intact, so the exercise was a success.

  A few weeks later, I was back in the Land of Oz and attending our 2005 end-of-year celebrations. The night started out innocently enough with a few beers at an Adelaide comedy show, but it quickly went south once the tequila came out.

  One shot, two shots, three shots, four.

  The responsible married adults went home after that. The rest of us decided to run a pub crawl up and down Adelaide’s nightlife district of Hindley Street, which always ends well. We were at the fifth club we’d hit that night, dancing like a bunch of drunken monkeys and watching music videos on the club’s massive stage projector when tequila made another appearance.

  One shot, two shots, thre . . .

  My head felt like a toxic waste dump.

  I looked around the room, trying to get my bearings. Thank God, I was in my own bed. It was the morning after our big cele­bratory bender and I couldn’t remember a fucking thing from the night before. My arm was killing me; it felt like it was on fire. I peeled back my sheets and stared down in horror. It was bandaged from shoulder to forearm, with blotches of blood seeping through the gauze and sticking to my sheets. Fuzzy memories
slowly started to return.

  Surely I didn’t, did I?

  NELLY

  Nelly is a famous African-American rapper from St Louis, who catapulted onto the world stage with breakout hits such as ‘E.I.’ and ‘Ride wit Me’ circa 2000. Nelly is the coolest motherfucker on the planet, with an array of jailhouse tattoos adorning his body.

  While Nelly wears these tattoos with style and swag, Australian white boys should never, ever try to jock his style.

  My memory black spots started to fill with fragmented snippets of watching a Nelly music video on the club’s big screen, followed by a hysterical fake argument over Nelly’s awesomeness and a drunken dare that I couldn’t pull off the coolness of his tattoos.

  I unravelled my bandage. Sure enough, I had a ridiculous, longitudinal, squiggly jailhouse tatt running down the length of my arm, just like Nelly. I burst out laughing, tears streaming down my face, moments before I rushed off to the toilet to vomit. Spare money from the following years’ pay went to covering the squiggly lines with an even more intricate and elaborate tattoo sleeve job. The comedy value was totally worth it.

  My days at 16AD were coming to an end, and while I can only reflect on that period with fondness, the time to step up had come. In the early summer months of 2006, I headed west to the SAS barracks in Swanbourne, Perth. Even though I was only joining the unit as a black hat, my excitement was hard to hide. I was about to have some adventures, some real fucking adventures.

  4

  MAN-CHILD

  The first thing I noticed was that the overbearing discipline in the regular army was more relaxed at the SAS. At my previous units, superiors would line up a platoon of soldiers and make them pull out their field gear, ticking off each item on a checklist once they’d eyeballed each soldier’s piece of kit; as if they were children who couldn’t be trusted to account for their gear without parental supervision. The superiors would do this not because they were going out field, but because they had nothing better to do. At the SAS, though, you looked after your own kit. If you forgot something, then you’d just look pretty fucking stupid and have to make do without. Long hair, beards, wearing board shorts and singlets, and not saluting officers when they walked past all astounded me. The regular army was heavy on draconian disciplinary practices, but the SAS left it up to the individual to focus on the war winners. It was all about self-discipline, and it worked. The Regiment embodied the best parts of army life without suffering through all the bullshit. This was definitely where I wanted to be.

  All the lads looked older than they rightfully should; even the youngest faces were etched with maturity. The ageing effect of war is a well-documented phenomenon, and most SAS soldiers had seen more wars than the History Channel – the youngest Justin Bieber–looking motherfuckers seemed like Keith Richards after they’d come home from active duty.

  On my second night at the Regiment, this blonde-haired, albino, baby-faced dude sat next to me at dinner. He was also a medic, and his name was Daryl. We got to talking, and Daryl revealed that he was heading out for a night on the piss with some other medics and invited me to come along for the ride. Not long after, a black Subaru WRX arrived on the scene, driving like a hurricane out of hell. The car’s tyres screeched to a halt, its tachometer red-lining as the driver revved like a Summernats hooligan in the car park. These were the other medics we’d been expecting, so we both jumped in the back seat and buckled up for dear life. The driver, Simon – who was the most laid-back boss you could ever ask for – explained that he was the Medical Troop sergeant as he dodged his way through the congested West Coast Highway traffic, honking his horn at any poor motorist who refused to exceed the speed limit by at least fifty kilometres per hour. The passenger, Brad, was also a medic, an instantly likeable dude who was egging on Simon’s hard-core driving by taunting any sluggish delay in the WRX’s performance. Little did we know it at the time, but Brad and I would share some epic adventures in the years that followed. This was my introduction to the SAS medical troop – a bunch of adventurous, fun loving, easy-going and highly trained legends. The tight-knit medical troop motto was: Bad Medicine.

  Within the first few weeks at the Regiment, I’d joined the black-hat induction program, which included a training stint out bush and in a confined building environment. We were taught some basic skills that all black hats needed if they were to survive in this high-tempo atmosphere. During one scenario inside a massive training building, I was tipped off that one of the lead trainers, who was playing the role of a foreign militia general fighting for our team, was a double-agent for the bad guys who were trying to storm our building from outside. With this new intel, I double-tapped the general with a calculated and controlled volley of blank rounds when he came around a corner aggressively brandishing his weapon. But, his militia force was instructed to remain loyal to their fallen general, and actually helped the bad guys take our building from the inside out. Harsh as it may have been, it was ultimately a realistic lesson in the complexity of modern warfare.

  What do you do when killing the bad guy isn’t the right thing to do? These training exercises really illuminated the shortcomings of the conventional ‘good guy/bad guy’ way of thinking in a warlike situation. I was starting to understand the intricacies and complications of war; this exercise highlighted so many grey areas for me.

  In April 2006, I was providing medical coverage for the 2006 SAS selection course that I should have been participating in. The selection regime was merciless. Sleep deprivation, soul-crushing PT and basic lessons filled the day’s schedule. Mates that I’d been training with at 16AD prior to selection were beasted from asshole to breakfast on the course. I couldn’t help feeling that I should be there with them on the course, not supporting it.

  I was out in the middle of the training area by myself for a few days in a row. The SAS candidates needed to find my checkpoint as part of their navigation exercise. Once they reached my location, I presented them with a quick first-aid scenario to test their sleep-deprived thinking ability, gave them new coordinates and sent them on their way. I settled into my sleeping bag one night and awoke the next morning to the most disturbing sound I’d ever heard. There was a rustling noise coming from the bushes to my right. Jumping out of my sleeping bag, I went to investigate. There was nothing in the bushes. Then I heard the sound again, off to my right again but louder this time. I quickly turned towards the noise. Nothing, again.

  This is how the Predator movie starts.

  I was growing increasingly anxious. Just at that moment, Brad drove up to my checkpoint with breakfast. I heard the noise off in the bushes again, this time feeling a tickling sensation in the middle of my head. I’d turned a complete 360 degrees by now. Brad jumped out of his car, looking at me like I was fit for a straitjacket.

  ‘Sssh. Do you hear that?’ I asked.

  ‘Dude, are you okay?’ Brad replied. ‘I can’t hear anything, bud.’

  The noise was growing louder and I was spinning around like a maniacal merry-go-round. ‘What the fuck? I can feel something inside my head!’ I exclaimed, trying not to scream.

  We both soon realised what was happening. Brad grabbed an auriscope and looked into my right ear. A spider had crawled into my ear canal while I was asleep and taken up residence, aggressively raising its front pincers as Brad shoved the auriscope inside my head. ‘You’re not going to believe this, Tezz. There’s a fucking spider in your ear. Hold still. We’ll get it out soon,’ he assured me, digging into his kit for the appropriate tools.

  My calm exterior masked the underlying hysteria. The last thing I wanted was for this eight-legged beast to lay eggs inside my head. Brad produced a large syringe and plunged it deep into my ear, squirting water into the canal under intense pressure. I tipped my head to the side and watched in horror as the spider dropped to the floor and spread its legs.

  It was huge!

  I stepped on the bastard for retribution as it tried to scamper away. My pulse slowed as I thanked Bra
d profusely for his help, trying my best to forget exactly how many hundreds of eggs a female spider carries in a typical pregnancy.

  Despite hating myself for taking the easy way out of selection, I did gather some invaluable intelligence on the whole process for future reference: I knew navigation checkpoints off by heart; I knew that the instructors weren’t as heinous as they pretended to be – they were actually incredibly good dudes; and I’d witnessed the pitfall of selection prospects systematically talking themselves out of completing the course. It would start with ‘establishing an alibi’, verbalising a reason why they couldn’t make it, which led to them succumbing to their own bullshit when times were too tough.

  My mind was action-packed with self-doubt, so I knew that this demon would be something I’d have to battle with at some point.

  After a few months of providing medical support for SAS selection, counter-terrorism training and REO cycle training courses, I was posted to HMAS Penguin in Sydney for the UM course, as promised.

  Penguin is the most scenic and beautiful spot that a military person could ever find themselves posted to. Not only is it home to navy medical training courses, but it is also the home of the school of the elite navy clearance divers. In the morning, I’d wake up to the picturesque Balmoral bay panorama with glorious sandy (topless) beaches giving way to the deep-blue contrasts of the ocean, equalled in beauty only by the lush green mountains dominating the skyline. This place was heaven on earth.

  There were usually only five to seven spots per year on the navy-run UM course. Three typically went to navy medics, and two positions were reserved for army Special Forces medics, who needed the skills to cover the Special Forces diving capability and to learn more advanced trauma skills that would come in handy on overseas deployments. Our course had seven students and lasted for seven months; it was very intense, involving nearly a hundred theory and practical exams. On average, only sixty per cent of the students passed.