The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  ‘Now the RMO is going to inspect you.’

  The regimental medical officer came around and looked us up and down and checked us out. With one RMO and 140 candidates, it took quite a while. We weren’t allowed to talk. For some, this was already planting doubts in their minds.

  The RMO stopped at me and said, ‘You’ve got flat feet?’

  ‘Yes, I use orthotics.’

  ‘Do you think that’s going to be a problem?’

  I was panicking. You can’t take me off, after everything I’ve done, just because I’ve got flat feet. It had never been questioned before. It wasn’t like the old days when flat feet could disqualify you from military service.

  I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said, and walked off as if here was one they could already cross off the list. I took a deep breath: at least they weren’t going to send me home already. Push that out of your mind. There’s a job to do here.

  We put our cams back on and humped off after a guy with a red lamp on his head. It was now dark and we were sliding on the honky nuts – big brown gumnuts – and pea gravel. They marched us around in the bush for a while, and then lined us up in rows from A to Z in front of rectangular sheets used as camouflage and shelter, known as hootchies. The officers were first, then the rest of us. We had to sort ourselves into pairs.

  There were stories about how they woke you up on your first night after half an hour’s sleep. But we didn’t get to lie down until two o’clock in the morning, and although we were waiting for it, no wake-up call came.

  I’ll never forget the bullhorn that hit us at 6 am, though. We ate breakfast and they had us standing in marching order. Somebody might not have stacked his breakfast dish the right way – there was always some little thing – and the DS said, ‘Drop your packs and webbing, assume the push-up position.’ We did about fifty push-ups in slow time, then had to follow the DS as he ran down a road. I was trying to do my best, and noticed some candidates already struggling. I drew strength from that. You don’t feel any compassion. Each one who drops out is one competitor less.

  After that pack march was a 3.2-kilometre run with webbing and rifle, around a course with eight or ten stands where you had to stop and do a task. There was how to use a radio and use point of origin, how to tie knots, how to use a rope pulley system, and how to take apart a .50-calibre machine gun. These were all unfamiliar to me, and part of me was thinking a couple more years of experience might have helped. But on the other hand, some of the candidates might have done some of these things under different systems. So at least I had a clear head going into it, learning something new rather than unlearning old habits as well.

  At the end, we had to sit down for a test in that language we’d learnt on the bus. It wasn’t a big deal, just another box for them to tick or cross. We were still very much in the easy stage.

  That night, half an hour after lights out, the bullhorn blew and we were up for a two-and-a-half-hour smash PT session – boxing, kicking, heaving metal bars.

  The DS walked around and looked us in the eye and bollocked us. ‘Go on mate, there’s a truck over there, go on over, go back to your battalion and be a big man in the battalion, off you go.’

  They’ve changed it now. They find candidates feed off that abuse, and it gives them an advantage. It had been that way for me at Singleton, where I strove to defy my sergeant. Nowadays, the unit has changed SAS selection to a principle of silence: no talking. And that freaks guys out, especially in the military, where they’re used to getting feedback.

  I’d done a lot of work with bars, but this PTI was inhumanly strong. He was doing one-armed raises with a 10-kilogram bar, counting them out to fifty. We were all struggling to keep up.

  ‘Look, that’s seventy, can you keep up?’ He just wouldn’t stop.

  Other DS walked around saying, ‘It’s not hard, just lift your arm up. Why are you having so much difficulty, candidate? Just lift your arm up.’

  Some were dropping off. This was in the middle of the night, after half an hour’s sleep and a hard day’s work. I was counting how many the PTI was doing. He got up to 120, 130 reps. Then he said, ‘Rest!’ and he was holding his bar out horizontally.

  ‘HOLD IT OUT STRAIGHT! . . . Right! Change arms!’

  And he was off with the other arm. It went on forever. I was convinced, and still am, that the bar he was using was hollowed-out and weighed about a kilo. It probably wasn’t, but the thought helps me sleep.

  After those two and a half hours, we were allowed to stagger off to bed.

  Two hours later, they woke us again. We had to run up and down a road, doing lunges, holding a fast rope off the ground, putting it down when they told us, dragging it through the bush, walking on it, doing push-ups on it, holding the squat position with it held above our head. Every minute the DS were mocking us. ‘Why are you having so much trouble?’

  At the start of the course, they’d given us a slip of paper we had to carry. It said, ‘I [name] voluntarily remove myself from this selection course.’ If you handed that over, that was it. No second chances, no coming back in a couple of years, you’ve had your chance, you’re done.

  Already this night, there were candidates stepping up to hand in their slips. In front of everyone, the DS made a big point of turning around and being incredibly nice to the bloke who was dropping out.

  ‘Okay, have a rest, get a drink of water, take a seat.’ The DS started treating them like normal people. ‘Sure, mate, go and sit in the truck. There’s a stretcher for you. We’ll take you up and give you some hot food.’ It was obviously a mind game to provoke the rest of us, and some of the guys got pissed off, taking it as an insult that the flakers would be treated like kings while we were getting kicked like dogs.

  Attrition was high in the first seven days. Some mornings, you’d wake up and see a bed-roll and pack missing. Just gone, flaked out. The DS came and reorganised us without a comment. We never knew if the absentees had handed in their slip, or been removed, or got sick or injured. They just vanished.

  The first phase to see how we worked in isolation came in the way of a solo 36-hour navigation exercise, or ‘navex’. At each checkpoint, you were grilled. Out of nowhere, a DS jumped out and got you to do all ten knots from the earlier knot test. I struggled with the .50-calibre weapon when it had a stoppage. A round came out and the DS asked me to see if it was hard struck or soft struck. If it was hard struck, showing the mechanism had worked, there was something wrong with the round and you replaced it. If it was soft struck, there was something wrong with the firing pin and you had to take the whole thing apart. I struggled a bit. The DS was shouting, ‘Mate, did you even listen in the lessons? You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?’

  After running a leg of the navex, with the general fatigue piled on top, it was hard to think clearly. At one checkpoint, the PTI told me to hit one punching bag fifty times, hit another one fifty times, run around a tree, and in twenty minutes do as many laps as I could. At another stand there was a video you had to watch and then answer questions on. A really fit bloke from the battalion was there. I was shocked to see him filling out his slip. The DS was working on the video player, and I whispered, ‘Oi, Foogsy, what are you doing?’

  ‘Mate, I’m done.’

  ‘Come on, keep going, put it in your pocket, he’s not looking.’

  ‘Nah, mate, I can’t do it.’

  I was in shock as I watched this special police video from South Africa and did the questions. I thought, Fuck, this is hard but it’s not so difficult I want to get that bit of paper out and give up. I kept telling myself to get through the day and not think ahead. But it’s a lot easier said than done. Foogsy used to paddle from Townsville to Magnetic Island and back, for fun, seven kilometres each way. I wouldn’t have been able to do that. But here, he’d hit his limit.

  That offi
cer I’d tested with in Townsville, I saw him broken. ‘My back’s fucked,’ he said. ‘My foot’s fucked, I’m not doing very well.’ I said, ‘Okay, good luck,’ and kept moving. He handed in his slip.

  We had a full day of patrol skills, where we were tested on our ability to work as a team. At one checkpoint, we had to stand in a grid and answer questions, and if any of us got one wrong the whole section had to do thirty push-ups and start again with a new leader. It demanded a complicated mixture of knowledge and spatial memory, and by the end we’d done a lot of push-ups. I could see the guys who were getting it wrong, but they weren’t necessarily marked down as much as those who, knowing the right answers, were saying ‘You fucken dickhead’ to the one making mistakes.

  There were tasks where you had to cooperate and innovate to move a wooden pew with weights and tractor tyres through an area, and negotiate a course down an airstrip with a telegraph pole that could only be moved by flipping it end on end. The DS made a specialty of picking up the slightest mistake and punishing you, and studying how this would reveal character traits. Some candidates would say, ‘I’ve got a blister,’ or ‘My knee’s hurting.’ Others would sit down and eat out of their ration pack while the heavy lifting was going on. I felt as if nothing went unnoticed. The stress of keeping up was doubled by this feeling of always being watched and assessed. It was relentless.

  The night we’d finished those patrol skills, they got us out of bed to do more PT. Then we went in a Unimog up to Lancelin, a sand-and-saltbush beach hinterland area further out of Perth, for a five-day navex on rations and water. Shut up in the Mog, we weren’t shown where we were going. We were let out at this crossroads and shown our first checkpoint on the map, and told to go there. Everyone sort of looked at the DS and thought, But we don’t know where we are. We had no GPS or anything. How could we get there if we didn’t know where here was?

  I stood there, loaded with five days’ rations and water, webbing, rifle, a sleeping bag, radio, spare batteries, medical and other equipment, and a checkpoint on a map. Eventually I figured how to do a resection using what features I could discern, which wasn’t a lot. It took me a while. I plotted it, and it was 12 kilometres away. And that was just the first leg.

  Lancelin was hellish to slog your way through, with deep sand and thick saltbush. We called one area Mordor, from Lord of the Rings – it was all black burnt-out banksia that seemed to have a mind of its own, poking you and springing back on you and pushing you away.

  The context of the navex was a race – we were up against each other individually – but we didn’t know where the end was. I couldn’t pace myself, because I didn’t know what the endpoint was. I just had to go my hardest, for five days, in a terrain with no landmarks and hard, resistant bush. We couldn’t talk to anyone, and if we were caught walking on a marked track, we would be removed from the course, no questions asked. If we got lost, we had to shoot some rounds in the air. We were only allowed to move between 7.30 am and 10.00 pm.

  Losing weight fast, I had to stop myself from going hell for leather and burning out. I’d walk for four hours and have a thirty- to fifty-minute break, during which I’d de-kit, chill out, have a feed, rest, and most importantly stop thinking about it all. I don’t know if that was tactically sound or not, but I did it in the middle of the scrub where no one would find me.

  It was a hard slog, but for the first time in my life I saw the Indian Ocean. My second leg was to a beach hut, and I was excited to see the surf peeling beyond it. I thought, If I get through, I’ll come back and surf here. I watched the sun set over the ocean, which I hadn’t seen since America and which is always a thrill for someone from the east coast. These little glimpses of beauty were what I used to get myself through all the torment.

  At the end of the third day, after a long slog through deep sand dunes, I arrived at a checkpoint down the end of the beach. The DS said tersely, ‘That’s enough for you, go and get some water.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s enough walking, have a drink.’ His voice had a finality to it that brought me crashing. I was thinking, Fuck, there must be a cut-off and I haven’t done enough k’s. I checked my sheet and added up what I’d done. I’d covered more than 100 kilometres. Surely that wasn’t too bad? I knew I’d gone twice as far as some candidates I’d seen battling along the way.

  Another bloke was sitting near the checkpoint.

  ‘What have we done wrong?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I think we’re done, mate. That’s it. We’ve been sat down to wait for the others to catch up.’

  The DS came up and said, ‘Rest up, get out of your gear, have a feed. If you want, have a swim.’

  It seemed bizarre, to think one moment I was being sent home, and the next I had finished the navex two days early. Half-expecting the DS to pull me up and tell me he’d only been tricking, I stripped off, ran into the ocean, and washed all the nasty red bush ticks and grime off me. It was regenerating, like growing a new skin. I enjoy the feeling the ocean can give you of being alive. I had some blisters as well, but not as bad as some of the guys were sporting when they came in over the next day. We were made to do more PT while we were waiting. Eventually, when about forty had turned up, the DS were yelling at us for losing some gear, and suddenly said, ‘Right, get on the trucks.’

  Julian had made it, and I said to him, ‘What’s happening? Aren’t they going to wait for everyone else?’

  He shook his head. ‘This is it.’

  Of the original 120 to 140 who’d started selection, about eighty had started the navex. Now we were down to forty. And the biggest challenges were still to come.

  *

  They took us to the public park in Lancelin, where we could shower up and have a barbecue. It was a very brief respite before we were bussed back to Bindoon for the third and final week.

  There was a slight easing of pressure after the navex, before the final onslaught on our minds and bodies. Over the next day we did roping exercises on big suspension ropes strung between towers ten storeys off the ground. The hardest part was a regain, which is flipping over the rope and pushing yourself with your legs and pulling with your arms. It wasn’t physically hard so much as a test of your fear ten storeys up.

  Fear was a big part of the last week. There was a tunnel system leading into the Embassy, which was a big mocked-up building the Regiment used for practising assaults. I went in and it was black, not a speck of light. I thought I was alone until I heard someone grunt in fright just ahead of me. I came to a ledge with a big drop into a pit. I jumped down into the pit and put my hands up. I could feel a body.

  ‘Fuck, sorry mate!’

  I thought it was that guy. There was a horrendous smell in there, and the sound of dripping water.

  ‘Mate, are you right, you need a hand?’

  He was still there. I thought, What is it? You right, mate? I put my hand up again and touched a paw – Fucken hell! I pulled my hand away, then groped around to work out what I’d been touching. It turned out there were a couple of dead kangaroos dripping with blood above us. We had to use them to get up and climb through the next hole. When I got to the top, I turned around to the kangaroo, grabbed his hand and shook it and said, ‘Cheers, Skip.’

  There were two more exercises. One was a six-kilometre circuit that we had to do fast, carrying a bloke with a weapon over our shoulder in a fireman’s carry. That night they followed it with another PT exercise, but our minds were on the big iceberg looming ahead: the notorious Lucky Dip.

  Legend speaks of Lucky Dip as pure hell. I might have felt pretty hardened after the first sixteen days, especially that navex at Lancelin, but I’m sorry to say, Lucky Dip fulfilled all expectations.

  Split into sections of twelve, we were dropped off a truck in what we were told was an area filled with enemy combatants. We rushed off into the bush, where the DS came and nominated a commander
and told each section what we were doing. They asked me to be 2IC, and I went around to make sure everyone had everything squared off ready to go. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but followed what we’d do in the battalion.

  It started pissing down. A man came and said in a funny accent that he needed help from us Australians to get his gear to the next camp. ‘Who’s in charge, who’s the 2IC, why aren’t you ready? I thought you Aussies were supposed to be hard and tough! Look at you, you aren’t laid out properly, your gear’s a shambles, you’re not ready to go, you don’t want to work.’

  His stores included wooden poles, signals gear and wooden ammunition boxes with rope handles. ‘You just follow us,’ he said, exasperated, ‘and we’ll take you there.’

  It turned out to be six hours of humping this stuff through the bush. The crates were filled with rocks, but their shapes were different, so the weight was unevenly distributed, and they were awkward as well as heavy, about 40 kilos each. If we stopped for a rest, I was told off for not having a section defence set up. The punishment was having to do push-ups in our webbing, keeping our rifles off the ground, a simple punishment session.

  We came to a road we had to cross without touching the ground. The only conveyance we had was some 44-gallon drums and painter’s planks. It was a punishing exercise, getting all those stores across, constructing some kind of bridge or mechanism with the drums and planks. We needed two blokes on security on each side, so manpower was limited. The DS were constantly telling us the scenario had changed and we had to do things differently. It started to break down people’s minds, the mental exertion and the frustration, being wet and cold, knowing it was getting dark soon, the goalposts always moving.

  At night a new DS came in, as fresh as we were tired and hungry. He took us off for an ambush. We had to walk really slowly in single file, as slowly as possible.

  ‘I’m going to stand over here in the bush,’ he said, ‘and if I hear a single noise, you’re gunna keep walking until I can’t hear anything.’