When this started happening, it was a struggle for those of us who were doing it easier to know what to do. At training it had been all about helping each other out, and your team’s only as fast as your slowest member. So another of the fitter ones, Monty, and I decided to go back to pick the stragglers up. One of them said, ‘Fuck off, leave me alone!’
‘Come on mate, you’ll be right.’
A PT instructor (PTI) came back and told him to hurry up. To us he said, ‘Fuck off back to the front of the group.’
This set the tone. You were there to strive ahead for yourself, and be at the head of the pack. Good, fit soldiers earnt respect within the wider group. Those who struggled at PT or soldiering were denied that respect. I wanted to be as good as I could be, but there was also a catch. You didn’t want to stand out as being too good, with the attitude to match. I reasserted my ‘grey man’ approach: just get on with any task without any carry-on, do my best but keep my head down and my mouth shut.
*
We started at Townsville at the end of 2002, and the regulars were soon going on holidays. As newcomers, we only had a week’s compulsory stand-down, so I rang Brent and said I’d stay in Townsville over the break. You got one free trip a year to your next of kin, and I said I’d save it up for when I’d accrued more leave.
I loved trying to surprise Brent, however, by turning up when he was least expecting it. Sometimes it backfired on me. A couple of years earlier, I’d gone to his place at Bar Beach and he hadn’t been there. Thinking he’d be home soon, I bought some sushi and longnecks and sat on his step. It got dark, started to rain, and I’d been trying to break in when an old bloke, a neighbour, challenged me with an umbrella. This was when I had the dreadies and half a beard, so I must have looked pretty suss. I ended up out in the rain all night when Brent didn’t come home. I didn’t even have a mobile, because I didn’t like people being able to contact me. I was free. And then I joined the army.
Anyway, after getting some Christmas leave, I rocked up at Brent and Kate’s house by surprise and again they weren’t there. But I tracked them down at a party, and had a bit of fun seeing Brent’s face. We were even closer as brothers since I’d joined the army. Outside that world, he could seem like my only constant.
But his world was changing – he and Kate were about to start a family – and so was mine. I let battalion life envelop me. As we got more senior we could move into better rooms, little efficiency apartments where communities of blokes formed. You had a bit more freedom and more of a social life once you moved there. Every weekend we went into Townsville, where each battalion had its own pub. It’s a garrison town, but weirdly I never came across anyone from 2RAR there.
We weren’t getting paid much, about $500 a week, much less than I’d been getting before I joined the army, but there was nothing to spend it on, so you saved what you earnt. As in Singleton, the younger lads blew their cash. At midnight on Wednesday night, your pay appeared in your bank account. So these guys would go out, wait till twelve o’clock ticked over, withdraw the maximum and hit the casino. Come Friday morning, they’d be hitting you up for a loan.
Our early hopes that we’d be off to Iraq didn’t materialise. We heard that three of the four companies would be sent to East Timor, and I got excited about that. But my company, Bravo, had just been to Malaysia for some training before I joined, so we were the ones to miss out. That was disappointing enough, but the hierarchy was selective in who it actually left behind. Our best section commanders and 2ICs were cut away to go to East Timor, and we were left with the weaker soldiers from other companies and us rookies. It felt pretty shithouse, to be honest. The war in Iraq had started and we were stuck in Townsville, at the bottom of the 1RAR barrel.
I turned every setback into fuel for my ultimate goal, which I never lost sight of. I was reading lots of books about Special Forces. I did a field medic’s course so I could be the first responder to look after someone in the ‘golden hour’ before they get a proper medic. Those courses didn’t come around very often and were hard to get into. I also tried out for a PTI course, anything to expand my skills.
I didn’t mention my plan to others. I didn’t want to be laughed at. People might want to tear you down if you say you’re going to the Regiment. So I sat back and watched and waited. Discreetly, I kept asking questions about the Regiment. Nearly everyone told me that you had to wait four years before they would even look at you, or do a support company course like Recon or DFSW first. The multitude of theories added to the mystique. I looked at that information and the people telling me and thought, Well, these guys are not in SASR, never have been and never tried out, so how would they know? I decided to do the exact opposite of what they said, and go for the most direct route possible.
*
As compensation for not going to East Timor, we got a trip to Hawaii to train with the US Marines. Having read about them, I was amped up. And going to Hawaii, as a surfer, was a buzz.
The departure was routine army frustration. The army has this notorious fudge with time. The commanding officer (CO) tells the officer commanding (OC), ‘You’ve got to be ready at 8 am.’ The OC then tells the 2IC, ‘We need to be there at 7.45 am.’ The 2IC tells the platoon commanders to be there at 7.30. And so on down the line, every person in the chain of command taking his fifteen minutes, and before you know it you, the soldiers, are there at 5.30 am with all your gear on the parade ground. No one else is there. The platoon commander rocks up half an hour later, and it’s hours before the OC turns up, all ready to go, wondering why everyone looks pissed off.
Anyway, we got onto the Hercs and flew to the Marshall Islands. I was excited, watching the white rings around each island, wondering where the surf was. I still do that now. Even going into Pakistan on the way to Afghanistan, there’s a part of the shoreline we always fly over, and I see this perfect point break. You could have it to yourself, guaranteed.
After a one-night stopover, we went up to Kaneohe Bay, on the eastern side of Oahu. It being summer, the famous beaches on the North Shore, like Pipeline and Waimea, were a lake. I didn’t care. I was excited to train with the Marines, so I ended up being surprised by how unfit they were. Their patriotism, however, is unparalleled. We did some fast rope training and flogged them in a run. They did things very differently, to say the least. They ran as a platoon while chanting and singing together. We just ran.
We did the obstacle course, and unknowingly were doing it back-to-front. This Marine captain showed up, had a bit of a chuckle at what idiots we were, and said to our platoon commander, ‘You want a competition? Get your best five against our best five through the obstacle course.’
Our captain was pretty cocky and chose five blokes. I wasn’t one of them. He said, ‘How about we do it with webbing on?’
The American said, ‘Webbing? No, we don’t do that.’
‘Okay, mate, we’ll do it with webbing and you do it cleanskin.’
We all cheered madly on the sidelines, and our five had finished in the time only three of theirs had. Our commander was chuffed, and as we wandered off we could hear the Yanks getting screamed at. ‘These goddamn Aussies have beaten you on your own fucken obstacle course!’
When we had some time off, I hired a huge mal as the waves were fat and paddled out to one of the breaks at Waikiki. There was this one blond guy chasing everything. I could hear him talking in a Canadian twang. I said, ‘G’day mate.’
He was giving me a funny kind of look.
‘Where are you from?’ I said.
‘Canada. Are you from Australia?’
I said yeah, and we were sitting there looking at each other.
‘Mark?’
‘Drew!’
It was my snowboarding mate, who we’d introduced to surfing in northern California. We leapt off our boards and grabbed each other in a headlock. The chances of running into each other were infini
tesimal. I’d hired that board for an hour, and chosen that break out of six or seven different places to paddle to. I was blown away.
Drew was on a surfing odyssey, leaving behind his snowboarding, at which he’d been on track to becoming a professional. But ever since that day we’d taken him into the ocean, he’d been hooked, and here he was.
We caught up later and got drunk together. He was amazed that I was in the army, but he wasn’t one to question or judge. He just said, ‘Hope you’re having fun.’ He was going to university to study philosophy. I still wonder at the chances of our bumping into each other like that, and think of what different directions our lives have taken.
*
The longer I was at the battalion, the more my determination firmed up to go for the SAS. I was continuing my obsessive reading about Special Forces, and moved with one of my best mates at the battalion, Nate Hall, into a house in Townsville. He was dead keen on being a sniper, and was a better soldier than me overall. It helped me lift my standards to spend time with a bloke who wasn’t going to sink into mediocrity. Recently, after years of me pestering and hounding him to come across to the SAS, Nate finally gave it a shot and got accepted. I was happy for him because I knew he was always keen on doing it.
I was getting desperate to move on from the battalion. Life was filled with pointless exercises. As a digger, of course, you don’t understand the massive moving parts of the machine you’re in, but to fill in your time, they’d devise mindless tasks such as digging in rocks on a hill for three days. Guys got pissed off, and rightly so, as they weren’t advancing their skills.
The final straw for me was Operation Croc, a big multi-unit exercise. We were to load up onto HMAS Kanimbla, sail down to Rockhampton and fight some make-believe enemy. It at least had some potential for real war-fighting stuff, which made the ultimate let-down all the harder.
Our trip down on the Kanimbla took twelve days, and my old rebellious spirit started to rise up again. I had some run-ins with officers. Navy are a different breed; they take things very seriously as far as rank goes. We were calling them ‘mate’, and they’d burr up. If you call an army officer ‘mate’, at worst he might say quietly, ‘That’s “sir” to you.’ But in the navy it was a screaming fit. ‘you’ll come here, stand at attention, call me sir, show the proper respect!’ That’s how they treated each other all the time. It was back to being a recruit.
They had a letter code – ship state Zulu, Yankee, or whatever – meaning what doors and hatches had to be shut. They were very strict on it, but nobody had explained any of this to us. A door had Z on it, but we didn’t know we were meant to shut it, and when I got pulled up by a naval officer I said, ‘Mate, nobody told us.’
‘Don’t you “mate” me, I’m an officer of the Royal Australian Navy!’
And so on. I’d keep saying, ‘Okay, mate, don’t worry.’ Eventually a senior officer had to come in and calm him down. We weren’t being mongrels on purpose. It was just a clash of cultures.
But I was getting restless to the point of desperation. According to the scenario, our ship got ‘sunk’, but that meant we had to do an enormous loop of 150 nautical miles, taking three or four days, before returning to the same spot. There’s always someone at the bottom level being fucked around in the army, and on Operation Croc that was turning out to be us. We got outside the heads and the ship was getting bashed around by the seas. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with motion sickness, and was green and throwing up, hating it, thinking, Fuck this, this is bullshit!
Once we got onto land, we were moved around on a map by some CO in his little tent – just like all military history! We ended up tromping all night to an ambush position. After we were fucked around a bit more, I said to the secco, or section commander, ‘Why are we here? What are we ambushing?’
‘Dunno, mate. This is a fucken joke.’
The higher-ups’ theory was that we didn’t need the overall picture of the campaign, we only needed to know our objective for the moment. My secco said, ‘Welcome to these exercises. This is our part.’ We had no sense of purpose, no ownership of the plan. The boys were generally very professional in their soldiering, but had lost all interest in Operation Croc.
The final straw was when we were told we’d be assaulting a target by helicopter. We thought, Finally we’re going to do something. But at the last moment the decision was changed. Instead of sending the assault forces in, they were sending the headquarters: the OC, the 2IC, all their staff. We were in uproar. It didn’t make sense! Why did they have to be on the ground first? Wasn’t the idea for us to secure the ground, and then they’d come in to expand the operations?
It turned out that the HQ people got their helicopter ride, but were rendered ‘battle-ineffective’. We could all see through it. We were never going to go. We were stuck for another three days on the airfield, digging pits to defend it. Even our secco was muttering, ‘Get fucked, yous can fuck off.’
I got back to Townsville feeling disillusioned. I still had a high expectation of what the battalion could do, but they were getting let down by the hierarchy. I’d joined up to jump out of helicopters and go bush and attack targets, but the scenarios were just a matter of ticking boxes that someone had come up with, and Operation Croc was the biggest crock of them all.
Personally I needed more, and Croc gave me that last push. During Croc, we’d crossed paths with some army commandos, who showed us the weapons and technology they had. It was so much more advanced than the gear we used in the infantry, and their being there was almost like a recruitment drive. They had an SAS Regiment man with his sandy beret, and I had a chat to him. He gave us a spiel about Special Forces: ‘I’ll put it to you like this. If you want to do some Special Forces shit, join the Commandos. If you want to do Special Forces shit properly, come to the SAS.’ It was quite funny, because all the commandos were calling him a wanker, but I was impressed and used it as more fuel. The farce that Operation Croc was turning into wasn’t pushing me to get out of the army; it was pushing me to get out of the infantry and into the SAS.
I’d seen a few blokes training for the Regiment. They’d gone off to Perth for the selection course but had missed out. There were all sorts of legends about how tough selection was, but I set about gathering real information. I was asked if I wanted to do a sniper course but said no.
The commander said, ‘What do you mean, no?’ I’d only been in the battalion for less than two years, and it was quite a compliment, at that time, to be noticed that early and invited to do the sniper course.
I told him I’d got the SAS paperwork off the computer. ‘I want to do this,’ I said, placing the forms in front of him on his desk.
To his credit, he said yes and signed off on it right away.
I was very determined not to do another of those pointless exercises. To this day, I can happily say that Croc was my last one.
THIRTEEN
I’d made a resolution not to eat any fast food for a year, and felt much healthier not to have that in my system. I got into the recommended training program and was panelled for the three-day Special Forces barrier test in Singleton. You had to do a certain amount of testing for them to decide if you were up to trying out for Commandos or SAS, or neither. The old way had been that the guys who were culled out of SAS selection were moved down to Commandos, but the skills required for each were quite different, so now they were trying to stream from the outset.
A couple of blokes I knew came to do the barrier test with me. Julian, a good soldier who I didn’t yet know very well, was a sniper from the battalion. There was another sniper nicknamed ‘Head’, because he had this massive head and ears, who had tried out a couple of times before but got injured. He was telling us everything about how it was going to be. It was another case of beware the loud one. I was thinking, Do what you should do. Don’t fall into the trap of doing what the others are doing.
The tests were challenging but not overwhelming. There were push-ups, sit-ups, swimming in cams, treading water for five minutes, a 3.2-kilometre run in boots and cams and carrying a rifle that you had to complete within sixteen minutes. They put you in a series of tight tunnels, pitch-black, full of mud and shit, and you had to crawl for a couple of hundred metres. We did some rappelling off towers to test how we were with heights. They showed us an action-instant-unload drill on a weapon we’d never seen. We had to watch it once, mimic it and get shown again, and the next day they tested us again to see how well we’d remembered it. We did a 15-kilometre pack march that we had to complete in two hours fifteen minutes, fully loaded with marching order, and then a navigation theory exercise.
Just before the practical navigation test, or navex, there was an interesting exchange that gave me an insight into the SAS way of doing things. We were all sitting down listening to an SAS man giving us the grids and our first checkpoints. One of the guys said, ‘Can I wear my MP3 player while I’m doing this exercise?’
‘What?! Are you for fucken real? Where are you from?’
He said he was a signaller, a ‘chook’, from 152 Squadron in Perth.
‘You’re from fucken Perth and you’re asking me if you can wear an MP3 player on a navigation exercise? You’ve got to be one of the dumbest cunts I’ve ever come across.’
This chook did get through. He turned out to be someone who genuinely liked listening to his music, but also liked to get a reaction out of people.
The navex was exciting, and more tense than the other tests, which were more physical than mental. This navex was one of the first times I had to navigate for myself in the bush when it really mattered. You did navexes in the infantry, but you were always near someone or you’d only do a leg, and the stakes weren’t high. This time, if you made a mistake, you had to quickly figure out where you’d gone wrong and fix it, or else you were out. Luckily for me, it had only been a year and a bit since I’d been on this same Singleton layout for infantry training, so I had the advantage of knowing where I was and could pace myself. What made it harder than usual was we weren’t told how long the course would be. At each checkpoint, there were people barking questions. ‘Where did you come from?’ ‘When did you leave?’ Then they gave you the next checkpoint. It was a lesson in keeping your thinking clear while you were under pressure. Each student went somewhere different, so you couldn’t just follow people. I made a few mistakes but ended up second and got all ten checkpoints.
The Crossroad Page 13
