The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  *

  At eight o’clock the next morning, we had to clean some weapons. A few guys were getting called out for extra interviews. There was an officer who’d made it through selection, and after this interview, he came back to us, shattered. He looked like he’d been crying.

  ‘I’ve come to say goodbye, boys, I’m out of here tonight. I didn’t get through.’

  We were stunned. After he left, everyone was quiet. Someone said, ‘Ah, fucken hell.’ Even though we’d been told it might happen, it was a shock that after we’d got through selection, they were still telling candidates they hadn’t made it.

  A couple of others got pulled out. Then the DS called everyone remaining into an annexe and said, ‘Righto, welcome, you’ve all passed.’

  And that was it. No one-on-ones, no being called to the office, just a terse group announcement.

  Then: ‘Except for you, Private Palmer. Come and see us.’

  He just went, ‘Aw, get fucked.’

  They turned around and said, ‘Nah, only joking, mate.’

  Maybe the last part of the test was knowing when to laugh.

  FIFTEEN

  We had four days off, including a weekend. The Regiment did everything they could to deflate any sense of pride or satisfaction we might feel. One of the things they told us before we went out was, ‘Don’t go down to the pub telling everyone you’re in the SAS. You’ve done nothing. You’ve only done the first step. You’ve got another twelve to fourteen months of training ahead of you. All you’ve done is a course that tells us you might be suitable for extra training. Get that into your heads right now. This is where it starts. All you’ve done is walk in the front door.’

  Try as they might to take the wind out of our sails, when we hit Perth we had a good time. We still didn’t know each other well, but that’s the way the army is. We were on an understandable high; it was also weird being back in society, especially in a city I didn’t know, after three weeks in the bush. My head was spinning, and then I collapsed into sleep. Some of the guys racked out for fourteen or fifteen hours.

  At eight o’clock on Monday morning, we were thrown straight into a Special Forces weapons course, the first stage of the twelve-month Reinforcement Cycle, or ‘Reo’. My rank was now trooper, as it is for all enlisted men when they join the SAS, no matter what their rank was beforehand. Obviously for me, having been a private, this wasn’t much of a comedown! But to level everybody off like this is an important statement from the Regiment, that we’re all starting again from the bottom, no matter what we did before.

  Reo gave me that first-day-at-a-new-school feeling again. We had to do a lot of reading for each course, and then lock it away and try to make room for more information. The SF weapons course ran for two weeks, before a six-week patrol course. The core of how the SAS operates is the five-man team. The Regiment began as a long-range recon group, dropping in behind enemy lines, gathering intelligence and getting out without ever being seen. It used to hang its hat on reconnaissance. You had to learn how to walk through the bush quietly, using cover and shadows. Sometimes you go as little as 500–700 metres in a day, often stopping and standing still for long periods. It’s hard to walk like that all day, and takes a lot of patience. You had to learn the lay-up position (LUP), which was four blokes sitting with their backs to each other, the shoulder turned in, each scanning a 90-degree arc with his weapon. The patrol commander (PC) sat in the middle, receiving and dispensing information. It was good for me because I hadn’t done a recon course, hadn’t done snipers, hadn’t been in the battalion for four years like the others. For me it was all new. I always had to work extra hard to keep up and was never anywhere near the top of the class. For the more experienced ones, the challenge was that the standards required were a lot higher than where they’d come from.

  One key difference from the battalion, which I really thrived on, was that they made sense of each skill. In the battalion, if you were taught to move slowly in patrol, it was just a task you had to do. In the Regiment, you were told that it was because you were in a high-enemy-threat area, and had to take everything in during your scans. Being such a small element, you had to use stealth, cunning and awareness to be in front of the enemy’s thought process. Everything was tailored to the scenario you found yourself in. In the weapons course, we did a lot of live fire, blowing up Claymores – 700 grams of explosives with ball bearings inside. I’d done Claymore ambushes in the army before, but these instructors made sense of it, explaining specifically how to protect ourselves. Likewise, in the patrol course we had to take our time to pick our route, scan our arcs, find the enemy fire positions, stick to all the shadows we could find – all useful skills in themselves but doubly enjoyable because the reasons for them were fully explained.

  And it had results. At the end of each course we did a full mission profile (FMP), where we had to combine the skills we’d learnt into a complex jungle-war-fighting scenario. In a camouflage exercise, we had to walk through an area scanning the bush, and if we spotted anyone from another patrol, they had to stand up. Sometimes we walked on top of a bloke before seeing him. I remember thinking, They aren’t kidding, it actually works.

  There were funny moments on that patrol course. Silence being the be all and end all, in one of the patrols, a guy named Baz decided to do a loud fart. A DS came over and said, ‘That was too loud.’ He looked at the rest of the patrol sniggering and said, ‘Flatulence isn’t funny.’ Baz had his name written down – ‘Found flatulence funny while passing wind on patrol.’

  It could be awkward if you were on patrol and your guts were falling out. The rule was, when you needed to do a shit you couldn’t go more than one metre away from your LUP. You did it into a plastic bag and took it out with you. On our patrol, one guy did his shit and then dropped his plastic bag onto my pack. We started chucking it from bloke to bloke. This was after a rainy seven-day patrol at the end of the course. We were getting a bit silly because we were near the end.

  But the lighter moments were a reaction to the ongoing tension. One of the big shocks on the Reo was when people started getting kicked off. The patrol course culled those who weren’t picking things up quickly enough. They weren’t sent back to square one, having to do selection again. They might get sent to Singleton for a twelve-week infantry patrol course, or have to go to infantry for a year, but they could come back and enter the patrol course the next year.

  It was surprising who dropped out. We had this hard old bugger who never wore socks. He watered his boots in olive oil. Fuck, it stank. Everyone in his room hated it. On the patrol course, out of nowhere he said he was quitting.

  I said, ‘What do you mean, mate? You’ve done all this hard work to get here and now you’re talking about pulling the pin?’

  ‘Yep, but Donno, this isn’t what I thought it was. I thought it’d be different.’

  I thought, Mate, why throw it away after all that hard work without knowing how it’s going to turn out? We didn’t know how life in the actual Regiment was going to be. We were still only in Reo. But he was gone that afternoon. I guess there could have been other factors. You don’t know what people have going on in their lives outside the Regiment. Another advantage I had was a very uncomplicated life outside, though that was to change soon enough.

  We got instant feedback after the courses. A senior instructor (SI) said to me after the patrol course, ‘We think you’ve done okay. Don’t let this go to your head. There’s guys that are good and guys that are really good. It’s a long Reinforcement Cycle, so keep working.’

  I was thinking, I’m just happy I’ve got through another course.

  We did the Special Forces rope course, which was a lot of fun, over two weeks: how to fast rope, how to rappel with your pack on out of a helicopter, suspended rope extractions, roping off buildings. These skills reminded me of the books I’d read about the SAS’s activities in Vietnam, such as Terry
O’Farrell’s Behind Enemy Lines, and again they were integrating it with scenarios that made it all the more enjoyable, and encouraged us to use our brains in ways the battalion hadn’t deemed necessary.

  The next course would be the basic parachute course, over in Nowra, south of Sydney. We’d be flying across on the Monday night, so we hit it hard on the Sunday night, at the Little Creatures Brewery at Fremantle. One of my Reo mates rang up a girl he knew from the signals section at work, and she was bringing a friend of hers.

  At two or three o’clock in the afternoon, we were sitting back and he said, ‘They’re almost here, Donno.’ I remember my eyes kind of skating over his girl and going straight to her friend. As she walked through the door a voice in my head said, Mate, you’re in trouble here.

  I’d never had that feeling before. Of course, she came and sat right next to me. Emma was a communications worker at the Regiment. I’d seen her a couple of times but hadn’t spoken to her. A slim, tall blonde, she was a bit of a knockout. She was really funny, making me laugh by taking the piss out of the bloke I was with. We had a lot of laughs. But that voice kept saying, You’re in trouble here.

  The group was wanting to move on, but I just wanted to stay and get to know her better. For me, that was really out of character, to break ranks for a girl. She had to go to work the next day, but decided to come with us to this nightclub. She and I went up to the bar at one point for me to order a round of bourbon and cokes for all the others.

  She turned to me and said, ‘I’ve never done this, but I’ve got to go now. Do you want to come to my place?’

  I gave her a look.

  She said quickly, ‘Nothing’s going to happen. I just want to go back home.’

  I looked at the eight bourbon and cokes I’d ordered. My mates were over to the side. I looked at the bourbons, looked back at her, at the bourbons, at her, and her smile was starting to freeze up.

  ‘Nah, I think I’ll stay here and keep drinking with my mates.’

  The smile went off her face. ‘Fine then, I’m going.’ She turned and stormed off.

  Once I was sitting with the boys again, I was telling myself, Smart move. She’d be nothing but trouble. But I was finding it hard to keep up with the banter. This conflict kept going in my head about that girl.

  Around midnight, my mate and I were on our way home, going past the apartment where his friend and Emma were staying.

  He said, ‘Donno, let’s pull up here and see what they’re up to.’

  ‘No, let’s go. It’s midnight.’

  We were pissed and had to get some rest before flying to Nowra. But he insisted. I was really thirsty and found one of those huge water-cooler bottles on the ground floor of the apartment block. I picked it up and lugged it behind him up the stairs. It was about half-past midnight when he thumped on the door. Emma came to answer it. My mate said, ‘Hey, we’re staying here the night.’ He nodded over his shoulder towards me and said, ‘I brought this as well.’

  Swaying about, with the water bottle on my shoulder, I walked in. ‘Hey, how you going?’

  She stood there and watched as I put it down in the lounge room and said, ‘Where’s your bedroom?’

  She laughed. ‘That’s a bit forward, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nah, I need to go to sleep.’ She showed me into her bedroom, and I passed out right there.

  That was how we met.

  *

  Emma had been at the Regiment for about a year, having been in Brisbane and then Townsville, though not at the same time as me. She’d joined the military after high school, planning to stay for a year or two, and ended up in it for thirteen. Rather than take the career path to sergeant, she’d chosen to go to Perth to do a Special Forces signals course. She was in the support staff for the SAS, the group who set up and maintained communications for new operations. Within the SAS, there’s a large group of support staff in various roles who don’t have to do the selection course, a trial reserved for those who are to become frontline SAS soldiers, or ‘operators’.

  In the few hours we had together that Sunday and Monday, I remembered something Kelvin had said, up at Wooli, while we were sitting at his place after a surf. He and his wife were stirring each other up, talking about how you know if you’ve fallen in love. They were teasing me about being a free agent, and I was saying, ‘Nup, not me, no family, kids just hold you back. I just want to surf for the rest of my life.’

  Kelvin’s wife said, ‘You know when you know, don’t you, Kelvin?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You knew when we first met that I was the one.’

  ‘Nah, I didn’t know that until I married you.’

  I was laughing. When she went inside, I said to Kelvin, ‘Did you know?’

  He said, ‘Mate, I knew within the first five minutes. Trust me, you’ll know.’

  I never believed it happened that way any more, and certainly not to me, but it did. The silly old bugger was right.

  It was definitely good luck to fall in love after I’d joined the Regiment. It can be hard for people who form relationships, and then go into the SAS and find that their life is turned upside down. At least Emma understood what it meant to be with someone in the Regiment. Men who have a successful time with their partners are generally the ones who can communicate with them. If you don’t talk to your partner, and you find yourself just saying, ‘I’m leaving for a couple of weeks tomorrow, can’t say where or when I’ll be back,’ and leave it at that, that’s when you can have a problem. It’s all about communicating.

  That doesn’t necessarily mean Emma accepts it. My friends would often tell me how awesome it must be to have a wife in the military; it’s called going for the ‘in-house discount’. But in the decade that’s passed since we met, we’ve had kids, Emma’s left the Regiment, and real life is not just an add-on to military life. It’s a concrete, ongoing reality, and the demands of work over the next few years would pull me in the opposite direction. It’s not easy, and while Emma’s military background has helped, it’s by no means a cure-all. The best way I can put it is to say she understands when work takes me away from home, but she doesn’t necessarily accept it.

  *

  I wouldn’t be able to see Emma again until after the six-week parachute course at Nowra. I’d only ever done a tandem jump before, and parachuting was a buzz. Guys were still getting culled, and some injured their knees or broke a leg, which could set them back twelve months. I was single-minded about getting through: I only wanted to do this once before becoming an operator.

  We went to Townsville, where I could finally pack up all my stuff, and then moved over to Perth. I had four or five days with Emma down south, which was our time to really get to know each other. During those six weeks I’d been thinking about her a lot. It was amazing what an impression she’d left on me.

  Meanwhile, the pace of the Reo courses was unrelenting: heavy weapons, demolitions and either a patrol signaller or medic course. SAS operators all have a basic trade, which is either as medics or signallers. There’s little choice. They got a list and went down the line of us: ‘Medic, sig, medic, sig,’ and so on, splitting us in half. If you really wanted to do one rather than the other, you could kick up a stink or find someone who wanted to swap. I was happy either way. For me, I got a six-week signals course. Being a sig is an easier course but harder out in the field. Being a medic, the course is much more intensive, but out in the field it’s easy unless someone gets hurt or sick. As a sig, you’re working all the time. In a five-man team you’re in charge of communicating back to base, which may be hundreds of kilometres away.

  I got into some trouble towards the end of the survival course. We had to walk 30–40 kilometres to a base camp and then wait. We broke into ten groups of three, and walked all night. When we got there, instead of waiting outside, some of the guys snuck into the camp where the DS w
ere sitting around the fire having a feed and a few beers. They didn’t realise one of our blokes was hiding under a table. He snuck off with a five-man ration pack, which is quite a large box full of rations. He found the patrols and started dishing out food. In the morning, the DS found us hoeing into it. They almost went to the point of sacking us. We got a lecture about poor performance in getting caught – which was more of a misdemeanour than taking the rations. Some of those who got away with it also owned up, but they were told, ‘We don’t care. You didn’t get caught.’

  Guys continued to get failed on the close quarters battle (CQB) course, which included hand-to-hand combat. The standards were extremely high, and I was among the last three to get through the pistol-shooting component. Some are naturals, but I was one of the ones who took some time. The instruction these days is much better; during my course I was just told, ‘Sort it out,’ or ‘Lock on, mate.’ A big part of the course was not just shooting, however, but how to fight through a building to rescue hostages and kill terrorists. That part I really enjoyed, and still do. There’s a lot of reward in taking down a building as a team. The quick decisions can result in life or death. You need a high level of situational awareness, or knowing where you and your weapon are in relation to your teammates, the hostages and the enemy. The principles I learnt on that course and the patrol course gave me the base level for understanding success and survivability in combat. A great quote I once heard, which rings pretty true in these environments, is: ‘It is very noble to die for your country, but don’t give it to him on a silver platter. Do everything you can to make him die for his instead.’