Speaker 1: Special Operations, cobert O.
Speaker 2: Spionage.
Speaker 1: The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 2: Hi folks, I'm Jack Murphy.
Speaker 3: This is The Team House episode three hundred and forty eight,
Speaker 3: and our guest on tonight's show is Mark Dereen. He
Speaker 3: served in the Australian military, including the Australian Special Air Service,
Speaker 3: multiple deployments to Afghanistan and a couple other places.
Speaker 2: A lot to talk.
Speaker 3: About here actually, from his time in the conventional infantry
Speaker 3: all the way to today where he is a expedition
Speaker 3: and adventure travel guide.
Speaker 2: So Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a huge honor and pleasure.
Speaker 4: You've had some phenomenal guests on this podcast.
Speaker 3: But I don't think we have had a Australian SAS
Speaker 3: guy on the show unfortunately until now.
Speaker 2: So I'm glad we can make.
Speaker 5: Up for that, jeez.
Speaker 3: So Mark, tell us a little bit about you know,
Speaker 3: your upbringing and how you grew up and sort of
Speaker 3: how that eventually took you towards military service.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I grew up in Tasmania, the little island right down
Speaker 4: the bottom of Australia and I've moved back to live
Speaker 4: here now, but.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Tassy was a pretty.
Speaker 4: Small place growing up here in the eighties, and I
Speaker 4: didn't leave. Dad was a trap driver and sort of
Speaker 4: Mum worked night shifts stacking supermarket shelves, and we didn't.
Speaker 4: I didn't leave Tazzy at all. I don't think until
Speaker 4: I was almost ready to join the army. I think
Speaker 4: I went to Melbourne one weekend to watch the footy.
Speaker 4: But yeah, growing up, Dad was a big fisherman. We
Speaker 4: used to go hunting a fair bit, you know, lot
Speaker 4: of time our bush, going camping and and things like that.
Speaker 4: So I think, looking back now that I'm older, a
Speaker 4: lot of adventure in my youth, motorbike riding and stuff
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 3: I don't know if this reference means anything to you,
Speaker 3: but it is Tasminia sort of like the West Virginia
Speaker 3: of Australia. It's like a very remote, out of the
Speaker 3: way place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we've got it is out of the way.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm an our plane flight to Melbourne, which
Speaker 4: is sort of one of the biggest cities in Australia,
Speaker 4: but I think it's a third of our island is uninhabited.
Speaker 5: It's like National Park, and it's a long way out there.
Speaker 4: We get some wild weather, especially in our south and
Speaker 4: southwest coast, so a bit of snow on the mountains.
Speaker 4: We're a fair way south from the equator, so it
Speaker 4: gets a wild weather, and there's a lot of remote areas.
Speaker 5: And the vast majority.
Speaker 4: Of our population sits along the Hobart and the east
Speaker 4: coast and the north coast of Tazzy.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it's pretty pretty rugged in spots.
Speaker 3: I so military service, like, what was it as like
Speaker 3: a young guy, you said you hadn't even you know,
Speaker 3: left the whole island until just before you joined. I mean,
Speaker 3: what was it that kind of took you out into
Speaker 3: the world like that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I had a little bit of an
Speaker 4: interest in the military growing up. I used to read
Speaker 4: a few Vietnam novels, if you like, and watched a
Speaker 4: few Vietnam movies. But I actually wanted to be a
Speaker 4: moto mechanic because I loved I suppose probably Dad burn
Speaker 4: a truck driver, and I love motorbikes and things like that.
Speaker 4: I wanted to be a mechanic when I left school,
Speaker 4: but unemployment was pretty high in Tazzy in the late
Speaker 4: eighties and early nineties, and so I actually struggled to
Speaker 4: get a job, and eventually I applied to the military
Speaker 4: to go in and be a motor mechanic in the military.
Speaker 4: And even though I sort of read a few Vietnam novels,
Speaker 4: I think I was pretty naive about what joining the
Speaker 4: military entailed, and so when I went into recruiting to
Speaker 4: join up, that was then when I started watching the
Speaker 4: recruiting videos for the Australian military, and I think infantry
Speaker 4: just looked a lot more exciting than fixing motors in
Speaker 4: tanks and stuff like that. So I sort of changed
Speaker 4: my enlistment stream at the last minute and just went
Speaker 4: general enlistment to go in and do recruit training and
Speaker 4: basic infantry training.
Speaker 6: AIR.
Speaker 5: That was ninety three.
Speaker 4: I think I joined the Army Reserve for six months,
Speaker 4: which is like our National service, I think sort of
Speaker 4: part time. I did that for only about six months,
Speaker 4: but then when I enlisted into the regular Army, they
Speaker 4: took me right back to the start to do the
Speaker 4: full basic training and full infantry IAT training.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: The way it's been described to me is that the
Speaker 3: Australian military has like a small but very professional military, like,
Speaker 3: it's actually very hard to qualify just to get into
Speaker 3: the military in general.
Speaker 2: I've had people tell.
Speaker 4: Me, Yeah, I don't know so much about today. I
Speaker 4: do read in the papers that recruiting levels are low,
Speaker 4: so I'm not sure whether it's easier to get in
Speaker 4: or not.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Back then, as I said, the reason I joined the
Speaker 4: Armor Reserve in ninety two was because they weren't taking
Speaker 4: regular Army infantry.
Speaker 5: They were full up.
Speaker 4: And they are only taking reservist and another scheme that
Speaker 4: they had called the Ready Reserve, which was twelve months
Speaker 4: full time, and I didn't want to do that. I
Speaker 4: just wanted to enlist into the regular Army and sign
Speaker 4: up from a four years service. So yeah, there was
Speaker 4: a lot of testing that did a lot of aptitude
Speaker 4: testing and side testing and things like that. Yeah, as
Speaker 4: you said, pretty small military and even today, pretty highly trained,
Speaker 4: I think being small.
Speaker 3: And so, how did our infantry training treat you as
Speaker 3: a young man?
Speaker 5: I loved it? Yeah, it was it was great. It
Speaker 5: was hard work.
Speaker 4: I mean, the recruit training wasn't really a shock because
Speaker 4: I'd done the little Army reserve bit.
Speaker 5: You know, it was you got tortured a bit, but
Speaker 5: that was fine.
Speaker 4: Infantry training I really enjoyed because we didn't We no
Speaker 4: longer had to sort of march around the parade ground
Speaker 4: and do what we call drill less theory and more
Speaker 4: just going out bush and practicing our patrolling and ambushing
Speaker 4: and defensive and offensive operations. Lots of weaponry and a
Speaker 4: learning machine guns and claymores and yeah it was hard work.
Speaker 4: They tortured us as they do with with pt and stuff.
Speaker 5: But I enjoyed it. Yeah, and it was.
Speaker 4: And as I said, I hadn't left Tazzi before I
Speaker 4: joined the Army, so all of a sudden, I'm up
Speaker 4: in New South Wales. We could go down to Sydney
Speaker 4: or Newcastle for the weekend and it was the big
Speaker 4: city and pretty foreign to me after a sheltered childhood.
Speaker 4: And what was the first unit you got assigned to.
Speaker 4: I was the first Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment we
Speaker 4: call it. A few of the instructors I had on
Speaker 4: my on my initial employment training or my basic infantry
Speaker 4: training were from different infantry battalion. Regular Army infantry battans
Speaker 4: in Australia at the time. We had the first and
Speaker 4: the second battalion. Three hour hour was our para battalion
Speaker 4: and five to seven was our mechanized batain. But one
Speaker 4: of our instructors had deployed to Somalia with the first
Speaker 4: battalion in ninety three, and yeah, I just he had
Speaker 4: a lot of good stories, you know, he had a
Speaker 4: lot to teach just from his operational service. And so
Speaker 4: we got to put down our choices of which battaining
Speaker 4: to go to. I put the first battan and got
Speaker 4: that it was. It's a light infantry pattaining. I think
Speaker 4: it still is today. But because how Blackhawk Calicopters and
Speaker 4: Chino Calicopters were based in Townsville in the nineties, they
Speaker 4: did a lot more of the air mobile operations, which
Speaker 4: sort of appealed to me. So, yeah, it went off
Speaker 4: to Townsville in North Queensland.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 3: And so tell us a little bit about like kind
Speaker 3: of proceeding through the ranks, like you served in a
Speaker 3: rifle platoon, a recomp platoon, a snaper platoon. It sounds
Speaker 3: like you're kind of enjoying what you were doing and
Speaker 3: wanted more and more of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when I first got to the to the battanon,
Speaker 4: I mean, promotion was pretty slow in the nineties.
Speaker 5: People didn't really get out too quickly.
Speaker 4: A lot of guys I think, stayed in after their
Speaker 4: Somali deployment. They enjoyed that operational service, you know, doing
Speaker 4: the job overseas, and so not a lot of people
Speaker 4: get out got out.
Speaker 5: Promotion was slow.
Speaker 4: When I got to the battin it was just as
Speaker 4: they changed over from what we call a mag fifty eight.
Speaker 5: Machine gunner seven sixty two machine gun.
Speaker 4: They changed over at the time when I got there
Speaker 4: to a five point five to six machine gun, a minimi,
Speaker 4: and we had two machine guns per section, so I
Speaker 4: carried a machine gun from my first twelve months, the
Speaker 4: number two gun we called it. But my second year
Speaker 4: in the army, I was the lead scout of my
Speaker 4: ten man section. I think we had about eight in
Speaker 4: our section at the time, and it was I suppose
Speaker 4: doing that scouting job for twelve months.
Speaker 5: It's where I started to get.
Speaker 4: It a little bit of passion for leading the way
Speaker 4: I suppose, like being the guy at the front, and
Speaker 4: from being a scout.
Speaker 5: That's where I did.
Speaker 4: Our reconcourse, which was a pretty tough course they ran
Speaker 4: in the Batanion back then, I'm sure it still is today.
Speaker 4: It was a six week course. They punished you with PT.
Speaker 4: There wasn't really a high dropout. Maybe one or two
Speaker 4: out of a course of about twenty five about platoon
Speaker 4: size would sort of drop out, but it was pretty tough.
Speaker 4: We did maybe two or three weeks in Townsville where
Speaker 4: they did a lot of the reconnaissance theory and smashed
Speaker 4: us with heavy PT, and then we went up to
Speaker 4: Tully for a few weeks which is our jungle, one
Speaker 4: of our jungle training areas in North Queensland, and we
Speaker 4: just lived in the jungle, I can't remember, for about
Speaker 4: maybe about three weeks or say, and really focused on,
Speaker 4: you know, getting good in the jungle. And they used
Speaker 4: to say back then, if you can be a soldier
Speaker 4: in the jungle, you can be a soldier anywhere. I
Speaker 4: suppose survived that rain and work in that close country.
Speaker 4: We still didn't have night vision goggles and things like
Speaker 4: that then, so a lot of the tactics in the
Speaker 4: mid nineties sort of pre the advancement of equipment, thermal
Speaker 4: images and.
Speaker 5: Mvgs.
Speaker 4: The tactics were probably still pretty similar to what they
Speaker 4: used in Vietnam.
Speaker 5: I suppose, so I really enjoyed that training.
Speaker 3: Now, and also we're in the nineteen nineties here, so
Speaker 3: I'm wondering, you know what you guys were training for.
Speaker 3: I understand you're doing basic infantry and I guess advanced
Speaker 3: infantry training here. What was there, like a mission set
Speaker 3: or a particular Australian national security threat that you were
Speaker 3: training for at that time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I mean we trained for war, I think
Speaker 4: a lot more than specifically. But the battalion I was
Speaker 4: in was what they called the ODEF Battalion, and every
Speaker 4: twelve months we swapped with two r ur and one
Speaker 4: of our tasks was to go overseas and help do
Speaker 4: services assisted evacuation.
Speaker 5: There was.
Speaker 4: A South Pacific nation, for example, that had a lot
Speaker 4: of Australian expats living there and civil unrest occurred. We
Speaker 4: would be tasked with going over to perhaps secure an
Speaker 4: airfield so that they could help evacuate Australian citizens. That
Speaker 4: was one of the sort of specific jobs we trained for,
Speaker 4: I suppose, But now I mostly just you know what
Speaker 4: we call war roles.
Speaker 5: I suppose defending the nation.
Speaker 3: Was this around the same time frame when you went
Speaker 3: to East Team or.
Speaker 5: Yes, I moved to the sas by all the time.
Speaker 2: Okay, well let's talk about before we get into team more.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, the reconnaissance course, as I said, spent twelve months.
Speaker 5: They really enjoyed that.
Speaker 4: And I think going to the battalion sniper cell was
Speaker 4: kind of this to me, it seemed like this natural progression.
Speaker 5: I'd gone from working in a platoon strength.
Speaker 4: Sort of environment down to a four or five man
Speaker 4: recon patrol and then I just wanted to move into
Speaker 4: that sort of one to two person sniper pair operating.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I hadn't been on operations yet. I think
Speaker 4: I went to y once with the Batain on a
Speaker 4: training activity with the Marines there, and I just it
Speaker 4: was like a br natural progression. Guys in the battalion
Speaker 4: that I was from, when they went to recon or
Speaker 4: went to snipers at some point in their career, everyone
Speaker 4: just gave this thing called the SAS selection a crack.
Speaker 5: They just they give it a go.
Speaker 4: At the time, the ESSAYS was the only full time
Speaker 4: special Forces unit in the Australian Army. And yeah, again
Speaker 4: probably naive, but I didn't know a lot about the
Speaker 4: ESSAYS I just signed up to do the selection course
Speaker 4: because it sounded challenging and it would seem like a
Speaker 4: natural progression all for people that I had looked up to.
Speaker 5: In the Bataan had to have to go at some stage.
Speaker 4: Some came back because they didn't weren't selected, and then
Speaker 4: there were these other guys that you never heard from again.
Speaker 4: They just went off to the essays and you didn't
Speaker 4: know what they were doing now. So yeah, it just
Speaker 4: gave it a crap. What was the hardest part of
Speaker 4: selection for you? Yeah, it was just generally hard, I
Speaker 4: suppose towards the end it runs over several weeks.
Speaker 5: It's sort of ebbs and.
Speaker 4: Flows by a day here or there, but normally about
Speaker 4: three weeks and it's running into the last week that
Speaker 4: they sort of really lift the work rate. They stopped
Speaker 4: feeding you, they start the sleep deprivation and things like
Speaker 4: that sage. It's not like one event. I don't think
Speaker 4: for me that was super difficult. It was just like
Speaker 4: the further you got into the course, the more drained
Speaker 4: you were, you know, the more exhausted you became, the
Speaker 4: less food and sleep they.
Speaker 5: Gave you, the harder it got. There were a few
Speaker 5: events that.
Speaker 4: Were a bit like arrest for me, I suppose, coming
Speaker 4: from that recon and sniper background, I was pretty good
Speaker 4: with my navigation, and we did a couple of solo
Speaker 4: and navigation exercises on selection.
Speaker 5: It ran for two or three days.
Speaker 4: I think one ran for three days, had to navigate
Speaker 4: around a field training area, did about one hundred and.
Speaker 5: Ten kilometers or so in full gear.
Speaker 4: But I kind of enjoyed that one because I had
Speaker 4: no directing staff barking down giving me push ups for
Speaker 4: not having my water bottles full or something like that.
Speaker 4: You know, Like that was the bit where I got
Speaker 4: left alone. Even they had to do a lot of
Speaker 4: walking so that they were good. But yeah, it just
Speaker 4: got hard towards the end for me, as it does
Speaker 4: for most people.
Speaker 5: I do recall.
Speaker 4: It must have been like maybe within the last five
Speaker 4: days or so. They gave us a two hour period
Speaker 4: to sleep one night, and so within our little team
Speaker 4: there was probably about five of us or so left
Speaker 4: in our little patrol, and we just divi it up
Speaker 4: whatever whatever.
Speaker 5: The amount of time was. I can't remember. Maybe twenty
Speaker 5: minutes picket.
Speaker 4: And you could sleep for the rest of the two hours,
Speaker 4: and I hit my twenty minute picket and I actually
Speaker 4: couldn't physically stay awake. I can remember, and one of
Speaker 4: the guys that was in my team was from the
Speaker 4: sniper section in Towns were with me. It was just
Speaker 4: sheer coincidence that we both applied for selection, both got
Speaker 4: as far as we did in it, and to that
Speaker 4: point we were both in the same team. It was
Speaker 4: just like fluke. But I was comfortable enough to wake
Speaker 4: him up and go, hey, mate, like, I'm going to
Speaker 4: fall asleep here and it's not going to be good
Speaker 4: for a lot of us. And so he just did
Speaker 4: my picket for me, which was awesome. But the next
Speaker 4: day I sort of spotted for him as well. He
Speaker 4: was struggling after an obs course and I helped him out.
Speaker 3: I'm so then talk to us a little bit about
Speaker 3: after selection and going into sas training.
Speaker 2: What was the pipeline like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so our selection course is exactly that. It's the
Speaker 4: only course in the Australian military at the time and
Speaker 4: for a long time after. I mean, I'm not current now,
Speaker 4: but it's the only course in Australian military where it
Speaker 4: was that was not designed to teach you anything. It
Speaker 4: was purely designed to test you. So they ran that
Speaker 4: three week course break you down, find out who you are,
Speaker 4: and just decide whether.
Speaker 5: They want you in the unit.
Speaker 4: And so if you got selected from the selection course,
Speaker 4: it was that they deemed you suitable for training. We
Speaker 4: then went into a For me, it was a bit
Speaker 4: over twelve months, about twelve month period where we did
Speaker 4: all our courses to go to an operational squadron and
Speaker 4: that was phenomenal. I'd come from a military in Townsville
Speaker 4: where there was always you know, you were counting the
Speaker 4: number of blank rounds that you had for training, or
Speaker 4: you know, you'd go away to do a training activity
Speaker 4: and there was one set of cam cream per two
Speaker 4: people or something like that.
Speaker 5: You know, everything was very budget restricted.
Speaker 4: And we got to the SAS and it was kind
Speaker 4: of like here, you can shoot as much as you
Speaker 4: need to, just you got to pass these shoots. The
Speaker 4: training was was excellent, and we just did lots of
Speaker 4: it for twelve months. Whether the course ran for five
Speaker 4: days or whether it ran for two or three five weeks.
Speaker 4: You'd finish course one course on a Friday and you'd
Speaker 4: start your next one on the Monday. As long as
Speaker 4: you passed.
Speaker 5: Most guys. I mean my selection course, we had.
Speaker 4: I think about a thousand or twelve hundred or something apply.
Speaker 4: We had about one hundred and twenty or thirty start
Speaker 4: the actual selection course, we had twenty eight finish, and
Speaker 4: I think we had about we had twenty five selected,
Speaker 4: so there's only about three or so that didn't get
Speaker 4: selected off the course, and then out of that twenty
Speaker 4: five or so we only had one or two fail.
Speaker 4: Training in the reinforcement cycle and one of the toughest
Speaker 4: courses to pass in that reinforcement cycle would generally be
Speaker 4: what they are calling now I think is our target
Speaker 4: prosecution course.
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 4: For me what we called our basic close quarter battle course,
Speaker 4: where you do room entry and you had to get
Speaker 4: good with the whole suite of weapons. I mean they
Speaker 4: trained us on the M four because Australian Army.
Speaker 5: Used the OSTA.
Speaker 4: But yeah, not only the M four, you'd be I
Speaker 4: mean it was my introduction to pistol shooting. I hadn't
Speaker 4: done pistol shooting before that, and that was pretty difficult
Speaker 4: to pass. Yet I only had a few weeks to
Speaker 4: get up to speed to pass the qualification shoot.
Speaker 5: We did the H and K weapons systems and things
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but the actual reinforcement title a lot of courses.
Speaker 4: One of the first ones was an actual reconnaissance course.
Speaker 4: In the Sas they called it the patrol course. It
Speaker 4: was a bit similar to the reconnaissance course i'd done.
Speaker 4: It was out in the field in the bush environment,
Speaker 4: five man patrols, close target reconnaissance, things like that, but
Speaker 4: it was a lot more special operations focus than I'd
Speaker 4: done in one hour.
Speaker 5: In one hour, we had three methods of insertion.
Speaker 4: We either walked in, got a truck, or we were
Speaker 4: which we thought was quite special, qualified to repel out
Speaker 4: of helicopters. So we did a lot of black Hawk
Speaker 4: repelling into the jungle and things like that. Even on
Speaker 4: my basic patrol course in the Sas, the half a
Speaker 4: dozen training patrols, I think we had to swim in
Speaker 4: on one from the ocean, we walked in on one.
Speaker 4: We had a light aircraft insertion on another one sort
Speaker 4: of an agent sort of insertion, things like that. So
Speaker 4: a lot more special operations focused. You had to pass
Speaker 4: that one ice. Different patrol members in the Sas specialize
Speaker 4: in different areas. We have both medics and sikhs for
Speaker 4: our basic patrol qualification. I qualified as a medic, which
Speaker 4: at the time was a six week advanced first aid
Speaker 4: course if you liked, but you could annulate and do
Speaker 4: tracks and a few more sort of advanced medical things
Speaker 4: and then you would do some ride alongs with the
Speaker 4: local paramedics in Western Australia or Sydney or something like that.
Speaker 4: So I specialized as a medic, which was good, and
Speaker 4: then we have different insertion skiols, or we did. We
Speaker 4: had different insertion skills then whether you were a diver,
Speaker 4: a free fall or a mobility operator. And going back
Speaker 4: to my love of vehicles as a kid and motorbike
Speaker 4: riding and things like that, I requested and got to
Speaker 4: specialize as a vehicle.
Speaker 5: Operator.
Speaker 4: So we did truck courses, driving courses, forward driving courses.
Speaker 4: At the time we had our six wood patrol vehicles.
Speaker 4: We did a motorbike course, and we did a quad
Speaker 4: course and things like that, and then the whole suite
Speaker 4: of the courses that everyone else does. Close quarter battle,
Speaker 4: as I said, which was encompassed hostage rescue. We did
Speaker 4: a basic and an advanced course of that did demolitions
Speaker 4: as well as method of entry, did a parachute course,
Speaker 4: a standard static line parachute course, small boat handling, yeah,
Speaker 4: I can't remember them all.
Speaker 5: Survival course was a good one.
Speaker 4: I've done a few survival courses already, but they dumped
Speaker 4: us in the jungle in North Queensland again for a
Speaker 4: few weeks, a lot of training over the twelve months.
Speaker 2: It was great.
Speaker 3: And just to speak for a moment about the mission
Speaker 3: of the SAS, like, correct me if I'm wrong. I've
Speaker 3: heard that the core mission of the SAS is a
Speaker 3: strategic reconnaissance and unconventional warfare.
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's pretty accurate when you sort of say.
Speaker 5: A core mission.
Speaker 4: It was definitely sort of our core mission was that
Speaker 4: long range strategic reconnaissance.
Speaker 5: When I joined in.
Speaker 4: Saying that though Australia, as we always already said, is
Speaker 4: a small military and the SAS at the time would
Speaker 4: do whatever the conventional military wouldn't do. So even in
Speaker 4: training quite a lot they'd come up with scenarios.
Speaker 5: We need this effect, how are we're going to do it?
Speaker 4: And it was up to the squadron commander and the
Speaker 4: patrol commander to come up with some ideas on how
Speaker 4: they might achieve this goal or achieve this effect in
Speaker 4: the battle space.
Speaker 3: One of the things we had mentioned to me is
Speaker 3: you know, of course the Australian mility, terry and Australian
Speaker 3: defense for US is being small. You guys also have
Speaker 3: the domestic counter terrorism mission. And you said you worked
Speaker 3: security for the Olympics in two thousand.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, because I was.
Speaker 4: A sniper in the infantry brittaion as soon as I
Speaker 4: finished my reinforcement cycle, our sniper training within the SAS
Speaker 4: was more of an advanced skill set and so when
Speaker 4: you came, and we also rotated through a system we
Speaker 4: used to they don't do it anymore where we had
Speaker 4: three operational saber squadrons as we called them, and they
Speaker 4: would rotate through a three year cycle. The first year
Speaker 4: would be a lot of training so that the guys
Speaker 4: that had just finished a three year cycle could do
Speaker 4: things like promotion courses and they would be the blakes
Speaker 4: that were dragged back to instruct the new guys in
Speaker 4: the in the training squadron and different things like that.
Speaker 5: The second year they did what was called war roles.
Speaker 4: You were the one that was ready to go overseas
Speaker 4: on a moment's notice. If that's what was required, and
Speaker 4: then the third year you did the domestic count of terrorism,
Speaker 4: which was something that the SAS developed before my time,
Speaker 4: probably in the late seventies and through the period of
Speaker 4: the eighties they really developed the domestic counter terrorism themselves
Speaker 4: a lot because they didn't have much capability sort of
Speaker 4: pre nineteen eighties. But for me, because I was a
Speaker 4: sniper in the Batanion, they had a shortage in sniper
Speaker 4: troop for the Sydney Olympic Games and they recognized this
Speaker 4: by the start of nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 5: The Olympic Games.
Speaker 4: Were in mid two thousand, I think, and so I
Speaker 4: got sent to do the SAS sniper courses shortly after
Speaker 4: I got to my operational squadron so that I could
Speaker 4: go into sniper troop for the Sydney Olympic Games.
Speaker 5: That was good. That was pretty long.
Speaker 4: You did a sniper course which was kind of six weeks,
Speaker 4: similar to the to the standard military one. It was
Speaker 4: field craft and navigation and you know, getting good at
Speaker 4: your basic war roles, sniping tasks, learning how to stalk
Speaker 4: and all that sort of stuff. Again, not a lot
Speaker 4: of laser range finders and stuff around in those days,
Speaker 4: so you're doing judging distance activities and.
Speaker 5: You finish that, and then I, after the six week.
Speaker 4: Sniper course, went on basic sniper course for the SAS,
Speaker 4: went onto a counter terrorism sniper course which.
Speaker 5: Was a lot more urban.
Speaker 4: Containing a stronghold where the terrorists were and things like that.
Speaker 2: And so doing security for the Olympics.
Speaker 3: Was that were you in sort of like a counter
Speaker 3: sniper role in this particular case.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we did.
Speaker 4: We did a lot of training in the lead up
Speaker 4: to the Olympics in sort of late ninety nine. We're
Speaker 4: spending time in Sydney conducting a lot of mission rehearsals.
Speaker 4: And we had a few other roles within the sniper troop.
Speaker 4: Obviously the support the assault troops. We had a couple
Speaker 4: of assault troops and we would support them, so they
Speaker 4: would quite often maybe you want approach shooters for leading
Speaker 4: into a target or.
Speaker 5: Different bits and pieces.
Speaker 4: We used to I used to do a lot of
Speaker 4: liaison with military, with civilian assets, emergency services and things
Speaker 4: like that. But then once the sort of Olympic Games
Speaker 4: rolled around, we were just on standboy in.
Speaker 2: The back of a truck weaving.
Speaker 5: Ah.
Speaker 4: No, I suppose funly and quite good for us. Was
Speaker 4: we would go to the venues. Basically, what was a
Speaker 4: bit of a dead giveaway for the security guys at
Speaker 4: the Olympics was we had these Olympic passes that would
Speaker 4: let us go anywhere no one else had them, and
Speaker 4: so we had every letter of the alphabet and every
Speaker 4: symbol you could get on you on your pass.
Speaker 5: And quite often you're going to watch a sport.
Speaker 4: I mean I've got to fortunately got to see every event,
Speaker 4: I think every international sport at the Olympics, but quite
Speaker 4: often would get stopped by the security guard at the
Speaker 4: entrance because he thought my pass was fake because it
Speaker 4: just had too many too much access on it. But
Speaker 4: we'd go and go and watch the events and remain
Speaker 4: on call, and we'd have to supply guys to the
Speaker 4: DO liaison with just the security control centers and things
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 5: Just be ready to go.
Speaker 3: And tell us a little bit about East Team War.
Speaker 3: This is I take it pre nine to eleven or
Speaker 3: right around that time frame. This was sort of the
Speaker 3: thing that Australia had going on at the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and while the Sydney Olympic Game seemed like a
Speaker 4: huge blessing.
Speaker 5: When I got sent to that squadron in ninety nine.
Speaker 4: It was pretty shortly after that we were in training
Speaker 4: for the Olympics in Sydney and East Team OR kicked off,
Speaker 4: so a different squadron was the first one to deploy
Speaker 4: the East Team OR in nineteen ninety nine. East Team
Speaker 4: OR for the Australian Military went on for a long time.
Speaker 4: I had a great trip. So I finished the Sydney
Speaker 4: Olympic Games in two thousand, got a bit of Christmas
Speaker 4: leave I think, and then deployed to East Team OR
Speaker 4: very early in two thousand and one, which was a
Speaker 4: great time to be there, in the fact that I
Speaker 4: was there maybe February I think, and stayed until about
Speaker 4: September when they had their actual very first Independent Democratic election.
Speaker 5: It was great to be.
Speaker 4: There in the lead up to the election to go
Speaker 4: and see the rallies for voting and things like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I really enjoyed my timing Team OR and.
Speaker 4: A classic I suppose SF role that we had for
Speaker 4: the six or seven months I was there.
Speaker 5: My team we.
Speaker 4: Did that basic sort of field reconnaissance conduct ops ground truthing.
Speaker 4: We would roll through a QRF where every now and
Speaker 4: then if they were militia coming across the border, we'd
Speaker 4: get a call out to go down and rope in
Speaker 4: and conduct a tracking task to try and chase up
Speaker 4: the militia. I did VIP protection for some of the
Speaker 4: Australian diplomats that wanted to come to East Team or to.
Speaker 5: Visit the troops.
Speaker 4: So it was we did some humanitarian a patrols which
Speaker 4: were hugely rewarding, where we would just go out to
Speaker 4: remote villages just to sort of do that classic sort
Speaker 4: of ground truthing and collecting of information. But at the
Speaker 4: same time we would do medical clinics for people that
Speaker 4: didn't really have access to any health care or anything
Speaker 4: like that. Some really interesting situations where you would come
Speaker 4: across people with dislocated shoulders and they'd been dissicated for
Speaker 4: five years from when they found it fell out of
Speaker 4: a tree once. Or the tropical ulses were always a classic.
Speaker 4: You would come across largacles that had had a some
Speaker 4: sort of tropical ulca or skin infection and it had
Speaker 4: grown over months to be almost taking over a lowell
Speaker 4: limb or something like that, and you'd give them some
Speaker 4: oral antibiotics and it'd be gone in days like because
Speaker 4: they didn't really have access to antibiotics.
Speaker 5: Or anything like that.
Speaker 4: It was amazing to sort of see some of those
Speaker 4: things from a medical perspective.
Speaker 5: So yeah, big variety in roles. We did no real
Speaker 5: connetic no contacts for me.
Speaker 4: I mean, I tracked down a few militia and things
Speaker 4: like that, a lot of small style stuff. But there
Speaker 4: was a bit of fighting in each team or with militia,
Speaker 4: but it all occurred before I got there. So my
Speaker 4: six month deployment was pretty quiet but super interesting. I
Speaker 4: mean it was the first time I'd been overseas ands
Speaker 4: carrying live rounds and operations and.
Speaker 5: I was, yeah, I was.
Speaker 4: I was out there in the bush with militia, so
Speaker 4: they they would have had a crack if they could
Speaker 4: have got if they thought they could have got away
Speaker 4: with it.
Speaker 3: And then nine to eleven happens, And I mean I
Speaker 3: want to ask you, like, did the Australian sas think
Speaker 3: that they were going to be a part of this
Speaker 3: war on terror immediately?
Speaker 2: I mean what was sort of the thought process for
Speaker 2: you guys?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: For me, actually, September eleven, I was in East Team
Speaker 4: or and I was cleaning my gear to return back
Speaker 4: to Australia. It was the end of my deployment, and
Speaker 4: we were based at a place outside Dilley in the hills,
Speaker 4: and the next morning I was scheduled to wake up,
Speaker 4: drive back to Dilly and jump on a plane back
Speaker 4: to Australia, and someone came actually running into my tent
Speaker 4: I was sleeping in a tent in our little compound
Speaker 4: and sort of said, hey, man, you've got to come
Speaker 4: and watch the news. There's some crazy stuff going on
Speaker 4: in the States. And at the time I was pretty tired.
Speaker 4: I knew I had to get up early and I'd
Speaker 4: only just finish clean and my geara said, ah, I'll
Speaker 4: check it out in the morning, thanks, and he sort
Speaker 4: of ran off. I suppose to the next tent to
Speaker 4: tell the next guy, and I didn't think much of it.
Speaker 4: I went to sleep, and when I woke up the
Speaker 4: next day and started getting that news coming through, I
Speaker 4: knew it was a big deal, as I think everyone did,
Speaker 4: but because I'd just finished a six month deployment overseas,
Speaker 4: I knew I wouldn't be in the first group to
Speaker 4: go away if Blake's went away. I think it was
Speaker 4: pretty shortly though, after I got back to Perth that.
Speaker 5: Maybe days.
Speaker 4: It's hard to remember but it was pretty shortly after
Speaker 4: I got back to Perth that I spoke to a
Speaker 4: few of my friends, a few of my good mates,
Speaker 4: some that i'd done selection with or served in the
Speaker 4: battalion with, but they are in a different squadron to me,
Speaker 4: and they were like, hey, the whole squadron's gone to
Speaker 4: Afghan So that was yeah, and you know, shortly after
Speaker 4: late two thousand and one, Yeah, they knew it was
Speaker 4: a big deal and Australia was pretty keen to support
Speaker 4: you guys, support our American allies.
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Speaker 2: And at what point did your squadron get brought into it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, we did that first twelve months.
Speaker 4: We did four month deployments and my squadron was the
Speaker 4: last one to go, so I think my deployment was
Speaker 4: around mid two thousand and two until December We got
Speaker 4: home just before Christmas in two thousand and two.
Speaker 5: But yeah, again.
Speaker 4: I can up to the deployment with it was for
Speaker 4: me at the time, it was pretty happy. Again, didn't
Speaker 4: get into any big battles or anything like that, arrested
Speaker 4: a few militia, but by the time I got there
Speaker 4: in mid two thousand and two, it had quietened down
Speaker 4: a fair bit.
Speaker 5: I suppose.
Speaker 4: The Taliban that could get across the border in the
Speaker 4: Pakistan had done so, and they were sort of lying
Speaker 4: low to see how things were going to play out,
Speaker 4: and so there were still a few criminals about. We
Speaker 4: drove through one too many mindfields by accident, but not Yeah,
Speaker 4: we didn't get into any shootouts.
Speaker 2: Part of the we're in Afghanistan, were you at that time?
Speaker 4: The first squadron first essays squadron that went, I'm pretty
Speaker 4: sure based out of Kanadheart, but the second two based
Speaker 4: out of Bagram Bagrom was sort of up and running
Speaker 4: by then. But in saying that, I mean that the
Speaker 4: employment for me wasn't spent in Bagram. We flew into Bagram,
Speaker 4: we got the vehicles. We had our six will long
Speaker 4: range patrol vehicles in country. The squadron, the mobility troupe
Speaker 4: that was there before mine handed the vehicles over to us.
Speaker 4: We spent a week in backroom doing some servicing and
Speaker 4: mechanical repairs, and went out to the range and test
Speaker 4: fired our heavy weapons and all that sort of stuff,
Speaker 4: and we rolled them onto a hirk and flew down
Speaker 4: the Jalalabad, rolled off the herk, and then drove the
Speaker 4: border between Afghanist back Pakistan. I think our first our
Speaker 4: first patrol in country was in the vicinity of about
Speaker 4: fifty days or so. It was pretty long patrol. Mind, yeah,
Speaker 4: it was a big patrol. We we got recepped in
Speaker 4: the field so every few every few weeks to say,
Speaker 4: well we needed.
Speaker 2: It because we needed fuel and food.
Speaker 4: But every few weeks us schnook could come in and
Speaker 4: bring us fuel and food and we'd set out again
Speaker 4: on another two weeks stint.
Speaker 5: And say my four month deployment.
Speaker 4: I actually only did three three patrols, or only did
Speaker 4: three jobs. The first one was that long range patrol
Speaker 4: down the border. We rolled the cars off a herk
Speaker 4: in Jelalabad and just patrolled talking to the locals, ground truthing,
Speaker 4: and it was pretty amazing down through cowst which Is
Speaker 4: obviously had been a bit of a hub for the
Speaker 4: Taliban through the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 5: I think visited some really interesting spots that have been bombed.
Speaker 4: Sort of straight after nine to eleven, at the end
Speaker 4: of that trip, we came back to Bagram and we
Speaker 4: flew out and did I think.
Speaker 5: It was about a six day op.
Speaker 4: They just dropped our patrol back in the field after
Speaker 4: we spent a day in a day or two in base.
Speaker 5: Having a hot feed.
Speaker 4: And it was actually an American I think I can't remember,
Speaker 4: might have been tenth Mountain. We're doing this sweep down
Speaker 4: a valley and clearing some villages, and so we just
Speaker 4: dropped on the hill for the five days pre pre
Speaker 4: that operation and just sort of you know, fed back
Speaker 4: to headquarters before the actual job and then while they
Speaker 4: did the sweep. That was pretty good, but some of
Speaker 4: the most horrendous walking I've done, I mean from sas
Speaker 4: selection and even each team or there's plenty of huals
Speaker 4: to walk up and down in each team, all which
Speaker 4: we did. But to get from our insertion point about
Speaker 4: twenty k's or something I think it was to our
Speaker 4: op point for that for that task was some of
Speaker 4: the most horrendous walking I think I've ever done, and
Speaker 4: you needed to carry the water because you couldn't we
Speaker 4: couldn't get water locally, so that was good. We went
Speaker 4: back to base after that and then went back out
Speaker 4: on another vehicle patrol, which that second one I remember
Speaker 4: was I think sixty nine days. So we just, yeah,
Speaker 4: like patrolled around drinking chai with the locals. And I
Speaker 4: feel hugely fortunate to haven't have done that patrol after
Speaker 4: everything else that came at that time.
Speaker 5: I probably didn't appreciate it. I thought it was going
Speaker 5: to be the norm.
Speaker 4: But to my last deployment where I don't think I
Speaker 4: stayed in the field overnight because we were just flying
Speaker 4: in and out targeting, we lived with the locals. We
Speaker 4: would actually quite often be driving around, you know, we'd
Speaker 4: hide in the in the field a lot, you know,
Speaker 4: go into it a layoup point and run pickets. But
Speaker 4: then often we talk to locals in a village and
Speaker 4: they'd say, hey, come stay with us, and they would
Speaker 4: have chai and they'd give us dinner, and it's amazing.
Speaker 4: It's probably the one deployment where I learned the most
Speaker 4: about the real Afghan culture.
Speaker 5: I think which was really good.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, I've heard that some of the American
Speaker 3: commanders really loved you guys, and I think maybe the
Speaker 3: Danish and maybe the Norwegians also because your wreckie guys
Speaker 3: can stay out in the field for so long when
Speaker 3: the Danes are like, yeah, we can occupy that op
Speaker 3: for twenty days, and they're like, whoa, our teams can
Speaker 3: only do it for like four days, Like what the hell?
Speaker 3: And you're talking about fifty sixty day patrols. I mean
Speaker 3: that's pretty hardcore.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we had our vehicles and we and
Speaker 4: that was my bread and butter.
Speaker 2: We could live out of our vehicles.
Speaker 4: I mean we would changed the gearbox and we had
Speaker 4: a gearbox go in a car, and so we did
Speaker 4: the new gearboxing and set it out to the field
Speaker 4: and we changed it out.
Speaker 3: You guys are the descendants of you know, the long
Speaker 3: range desert patrol right from World War Two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well we like to think so that was
Speaker 4: certainly pretty epic. Those blokes hardcore, But yeah, we just
Speaker 4: we stayed in the field. They I mean, we initially
Speaker 4: got that job. My this is my understanding, and it's
Speaker 4: a story that was told to me or wasn't there obviously,
Speaker 4: but when our sort of our second squadron was in country,
Speaker 4: I think the first squadron that was, you know, a.
Speaker 5: Torah borer, and they did a lot of ops and.
Speaker 4: We had an American We didn't have our own j
Speaker 4: A tax back in two thousand and one, so it
Speaker 4: was around that tourrible at the time we realized, hey,
Speaker 4: we need this skill set inherent in our patrols, and
Speaker 4: so we take American JTEX.
Speaker 5: But they did a lot of.
Speaker 4: Aping, they did a lot of certain they were still
Speaker 4: looking for the Taliban a lot. I mean, one of
Speaker 4: my major jobs in two thousand and two was still
Speaker 4: asked the locals where someone.
Speaker 5: Bin Ladnis, which we did.
Speaker 4: We drove around the border looking asking the locals, Yeah,
Speaker 4: he's over that way, they were telling us then. But
Speaker 4: by the time our second squadron got there, I suppose
Speaker 4: the fighting had died down a fair bit. America said
Speaker 4: to us, what can you do, how can you help us?
Speaker 4: What capabilities can you provide? And whoever our CA was
Speaker 4: at the time sort of just went well, my guys
Speaker 4: are pretty good with strategic reconnaissance. We'll send them out
Speaker 4: in the field and they can drive around in their
Speaker 4: cars and talk to the locals, and I think that
Speaker 4: whoever was in charge back then sort of went okay,
Speaker 4: it sounds good and just let us do our thing.
Speaker 2: But there was then just huge impressed that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we went out into the field for sixty nine
Speaker 5: days and didn't come back, and it's just kept punching in.
Speaker 4: Report after report after report, just been to this village.
Speaker 4: They haven't they thought we were Russian. They haven't seen
Speaker 4: anyone here since the Russians were here type thing.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a difficult job, but you know, you guys
Speaker 3: being so morbile and being out there for so long,
Speaker 3: you got a lot done. And like you said, delivering
Speaker 3: ground truth to the commanders, there's a lot of that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, And if we had oh god, I'm sorry, go ahead,
Speaker 2: Oh I was.
Speaker 4: Going to say, if we could have, if it had
Speaker 4: a state sort of that. I mean, my longer opinions
Speaker 4: of the whole thing was a smaller force, we've probably
Speaker 4: been better and if we had have kept doing what
Speaker 4: we're doing back then, might have worked out to be
Speaker 4: better for us.
Speaker 5: But we were trying to keep people safe too.
Speaker 3: What was the second deployment to Afghanistan. How is it
Speaker 3: different than the first.
Speaker 4: I didn't go back until two thousand seven. The essays
Speaker 4: sort of went back twelve months before that, So my
Speaker 4: second deployment was two thousand and seven, and by that
Speaker 4: time the Australian military had been given the province of
Speaker 4: Urezgan to help with. I mean there was Americans obviously there,
Speaker 4: the Dutch were there. But yeah, I arrived back, landed
Speaker 4: on the dirt strip in Tarancott and got off the
Speaker 4: plane to still just kind of do the same modus
Speaker 4: operandi where we jump in our cars and go out,
Speaker 4: but we were no longer doing.
Speaker 5: Reconnaissance of this sort of environment.
Speaker 4: We were doing reconnaissance to push the Taliban back out
Speaker 4: of TK because they were trying to come back and
Speaker 4: impose their dominance.
Speaker 5: They definitely they'd come back in force.
Speaker 4: To take back over, and so we were literally trying
Speaker 4: to push the teleban back out of TK as far
Speaker 4: as we could so that the reconstruction effort could get
Speaker 4: in there, so that the newly flagling Afghan military could
Speaker 4: get in there and provide the security.
Speaker 5: And that was the full SATG task Force.
Speaker 4: Now with an it was no longer an Essays squadron
Speaker 4: that I deployed within two thousand and two. It was
Speaker 4: just an Essays troop and a commando company, So it
Speaker 4: was a pretty.
Speaker 5: Combat capable unit.
Speaker 4: The old SATG in Afghanistan right back from two thousand
Speaker 4: and six.
Speaker 3: How was that relationship, that working relationship, like with the commandos,
Speaker 3: Like I know they're historically there's been some rivalries, but
Speaker 3: I also would like to ask you, like, how do
Speaker 3: they work together? Like how did that work out for
Speaker 3: you guys? Because there's a lot of capability there too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's obviously well documented that it was pretty
Speaker 4: strained over the years.
Speaker 5: We did some joint operations. I mean I did some.
Speaker 4: I did some support tasks for commando sweeps where you
Speaker 4: know they classic sas control weekend holder put in an
Speaker 4: ap on a mountain twenty four hours before the commandos
Speaker 4: came in for a sweep. We did that a couple
Speaker 4: of times. I think I think it's some of the
Speaker 4: interunit rivalry, and I sort of, in my opinion, interunit
Speaker 4: rivalry can be good.
Speaker 5: We definitely had.
Speaker 4: It when I was in an infantry BATTAI and our
Speaker 4: brother of battalion two our hour across the road.
Speaker 5: We used to get stuck into each other all the time.
Speaker 4: Perhaps over the years the commando sas interunit rivalry went
Speaker 4: a bit fart as in there was a bit of
Speaker 4: dislike on some people. But I will clarify with some people,
Speaker 4: so I never really it. I had mates and commandos
Speaker 4: and and I think regardless of commando or sas, a
Speaker 4: lot of the guys, most guys were focused on their job,
Speaker 4: were getting as good at their job as they could get.
Speaker 4: And a few blakes that were worried about what the
Speaker 4: other guy was doing. I think they were mind already personally.
Speaker 4: I mean, I didn't ever experience any that any of
Speaker 4: the inter unit rivalry much. Yeah, but you know, it
Speaker 4: probably could have been all helped a lot by that
Speaker 4: sort of colonel brigadier general rank.
Speaker 5: Level giving a bit.
Speaker 4: More direction on rolls and tasks. There was a bit
Speaker 4: of blurring of roles and tasks there. If they wanted
Speaker 4: to me, yeah, if they wanted us to do the
Speaker 4: same task, will come out and say that they kind
Speaker 4: of never really did want us to do the same task,
Speaker 4: I don't think. But it was a huge gray space,
Speaker 4: and soldiers don't work well in that grade space.
Speaker 5: They need, they need their.
Speaker 4: Missions given to them, you know, you know, we want
Speaker 4: to know what the strategic contend is so we can
Speaker 4: help achieve.
Speaker 2: It, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the unit of we was blown out
Speaker 5: of proportion by the media.
Speaker 4: Trying to you know, trying to find a story that
Speaker 4: was going to get lots of clicks.
Speaker 5: It was never as bad as.
Speaker 4: It did exist, but it was probably mostly existing by
Speaker 4: people that were more worried about what the other person
Speaker 4: was doing and less about what they were doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it sounds like it's more a few individuals in
Speaker 3: each unit rather than an actual unit rivalry.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it would probably come and go on a particular deployment.
Speaker 4: Who were the big personalities on that deployment on both
Speaker 4: side guides and made clash a bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And around this timeframe you also did a trip over
Speaker 2: to Iraq.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, I was in Afghan in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 4: which I openly say to most people now, two thousand
Speaker 4: and seven was my introduction to war. We we got
Speaker 4: shot out a lot, We got into quite a few ticks,
Speaker 4: fortunately for me, a big battles, but we got into
Speaker 4: quite a few skirmishes, I suppose we we caught and
Speaker 4: killed a few bad guys.
Speaker 5: But it was mid that two thousand and seven trip that.
Speaker 4: I think it was the Defense Minister from Australia was
Speaker 4: doing a trip to the what we called THEAO, the
Speaker 4: Middle East Area of Operations, and so they sent two
Speaker 4: of the teams we had to meeting in the Middle
Speaker 4: East flying to Bagdad so he could visit the troops
Speaker 4: I was, the troops that were there, and then fly
Speaker 4: him into Kabok, afghan to visit the Aussie troops there,
Speaker 4: take him back to the Middle East and then get
Speaker 4: back into Afghanistan and recontinue operations.
Speaker 5: So I focused my time.
Speaker 4: For the protective duty in Iraq. But it was pretty simple.
Speaker 4: It was kind of just a bit of an eye
Speaker 4: opener for me. I mean I landed it the by
Speaker 4: app I Court. I think it was the Rhino. They
Speaker 4: had this armored bus that would drive you from the
Speaker 4: airport into the greens Aint.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: We were just talking about this, like maybe on the
Speaker 3: last episode up arms.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll wear Ossie's and they're like, hey, we need
Speaker 4: you to go and do some wrekis of the of
Speaker 4: the locations that the Minister wants to visit, the US
Speaker 4: embassy and.
Speaker 5: All this and it's like, oh, yeah, well, how do
Speaker 5: we get in there? I will just catch the bus.
Speaker 4: So we got on the bus and yeah, good old
Speaker 4: as military drove into town. We got off the bus
Speaker 4: at the bus terminal, which I from memory was just
Speaker 4: nearby the US embassy was up the road or something,
Speaker 4: and got morted, which I'd been morted a few times
Speaker 4: in afghan but not standing in the middle of a
Speaker 4: city like that was the bit that I was like,
Speaker 4: this joins.
Speaker 5: A bit of a spin out.
Speaker 4: And there was some contacts nearby or whatever, and morted
Speaker 4: as in my medic who was with me actually had
Speaker 4: to give first aid to someone I think it got
Speaker 4: hit by shrapnel.
Speaker 5: We got moretered in the bus stop. We did that job.
Speaker 4: We had Ossie trainers out on a few little fobs
Speaker 4: around Baghdad, so we literally one obviously had helos when
Speaker 4: the minister came in to fly him around and there
Speaker 4: for a few weeks and then headed back to afghan
Speaker 4: to get back into the war fighting again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well tell us about going back to Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: Ah, yeah, we we were doing still doing vehicle operations,
Speaker 4: but obviously a lot more kinetic everywhere we went.
Speaker 5: Someone to chewed out us spiders watching us all the time.
Speaker 4: Because you're in cars, it's pretty hard to hide, especially
Speaker 4: in Risgaran, I mean you're driving around deserts, and so
Speaker 4: we would drive down valleys basically put in a vehicle
Speaker 4: layout point sort of in the desert. And back then
Speaker 4: we could still operate at night, so we do night
Speaker 4: patrols through the green zone. Have a lot of good
Speaker 4: effect doing that, catch lots of bad guys moving around
Speaker 4: at night. But yeah, we'd sort of that was our
Speaker 4: how we operated. We'd drive down valleys, you know, from
Speaker 4: point to point, try and be as stealthy as we could.
Speaker 4: It's pretty hard to do because they just as soon
Speaker 4: as they knew were leaving TK, the spiders would just
Speaker 4: follow you whichever direction you went. Try and catch a
Speaker 4: few spots here and there, try and catch the more
Speaker 4: combat the enemy, combat teams any colorition militia I think
Speaker 4: we called them at the time. We're really trying to
Speaker 4: catch those combat teams that were operating in those valleys.
Speaker 3: Yeah, any success doing that was pretty difficult to quote.
Speaker 5: No, absolutely, some of the best success I suppose were
Speaker 5: we'd be moving in valleys and.
Speaker 4: The enemy would think that we were still out with
Speaker 4: our vehicles basically camped out for the night, and so
Speaker 4: they would be starting to move around between villages or
Speaker 4: visit the villagers to ask them. You know, this is
Speaker 4: what I think they were doing. So we could literally
Speaker 4: just go down fully knotted up patrol around. They had
Speaker 4: no night fighting capability. I remember on one occasion we
Speaker 4: were putting a blocking position in for a commando sweep actually,
Speaker 4: which was meant to come early the next day, and
Speaker 4: moving into position that night, we were literally walking past
Speaker 4: fully tooled up bad guys. I mean they the had
Speaker 4: chest rigs and ak's and they were standing around. And
Speaker 4: later that night we got into a good stoush, but
Speaker 4: we were literally trying to move past them to get
Speaker 4: to our blocking position. And it wasn't that far into
Speaker 4: our trip either to be that real kick in the
Speaker 4: guts that the holy cow, there's like, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of bad guys out here.
Speaker 5: And this this stuff is actually really serious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you must have had some sense that it was
Speaker 3: obviously getting more intense with each deployment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was.
Speaker 4: And that was east of Taran Cott, in a place
Speaker 4: called the Mirranbad Valley. There was a lot of fighting
Speaker 4: out that way. That sort of ran from the eastern
Speaker 4: side of Afghan ran into the Uruzgan province, came down past.
Speaker 5: Pardon me.
Speaker 4: The valley sort of started out near Casare's Gharan, which
Speaker 4: was near a fog called Anaconda, which saw a lot
Speaker 4: of fighting. Had an American eight A team there for
Speaker 4: a while, And it was coming back from there that
Speaker 4: I got myself blown up, drove over an Id and
Speaker 4: the next year it was where Mark Donalds and the
Speaker 4: Australian SAS guy won his Victoria Cross in the in
Speaker 4: the ambush where.
Speaker 5: He rescued the interpreter.
Speaker 4: So there was a lot of enemy movement around that
Speaker 4: that valley. The Dutch used to get hit out there
Speaker 4: a lot, and badly. They lost a few blakes out
Speaker 4: there on that deployment I was on in two thousand
Speaker 4: and seven, So a lot of our fighting sort of
Speaker 4: east of tk and north around Shura. We got into
Speaker 4: a few fights north of Tku. And actually just after
Speaker 4: my deployment, I think about a month after that was
Speaker 4: where good mate of mine, Matt Locke got killed in
Speaker 4: a shootout.
Speaker 5: I think that was about October.
Speaker 2: O seven, wow.
Speaker 5: And yeah, lots of fighting we were.
Speaker 4: We were catching bags I mean there was one occasion
Speaker 4: where we literally pulled up in our cars. We'd drive
Speaker 4: off the road. This looks like an area we can
Speaker 4: defend if we need to. We'll stop here and have
Speaker 4: lunch and typical assies, we're pretty security conscious. I suppose
Speaker 4: we thought to ours says, oh, we'll do a patrol
Speaker 4: around our cars once we've we've stopped here, and we
Speaker 4: the road we were on sort of ran down towards
Speaker 4: a river and then did a hard left turn and
Speaker 4: drove sort of along the along the side of the river.
Speaker 4: So we stopped on the approach to this river and
Speaker 4: got out and thought we'd do this bit of a patrol.
Speaker 4: But once we walked sort of fifty to one hundre
Speaker 4: meters away from the car, my lead I was the
Speaker 4: tour I see the patrol for the majority of my
Speaker 4: two thousand and seven trip, the second in charge. We
Speaker 4: had a six man patrol ran out of two vehicles
Speaker 4: to long range patrol vehicles, so we had three guys
Speaker 4: in each.
Speaker 5: And as the too, I see you normal foot movements.
Speaker 4: You stay at the back of the trail, cover the
Speaker 4: rear and make sure no one gets left behind, and
Speaker 4: from the back the lead scout open fire across the river,
Speaker 4: and as soon as he did, I could then look
Speaker 4: up because it was pretty open until you got to
Speaker 4: the other side of the river, and then it was
Speaker 4: kind of classic Afghan orchards and trees and compounds, and
Speaker 4: I could see the two guys sort of returning fire
Speaker 4: but making a run for it, mostly just to sort
Speaker 4: of get away. We cleaned across the river and what
Speaker 4: we found when we got to the other side was
Speaker 4: a massive trench system that they dug. It was kind
Speaker 4: of pretty epic. There was three big, you know, heavy
Speaker 4: weapons pits.
Speaker 5: If you liked.
Speaker 4: They full the overhead protected sand bagged big logs covering
Speaker 4: them up, and it was basically like a perfect in
Speaker 4: trenched ambush position facing.
Speaker 5: Where we'd exactly stopped.
Speaker 4: So if they'd had the fighters on the day, we
Speaker 4: would have got our asses handed to us. But fortunately
Speaker 4: for us, they didn't know we were coming, and unfortunately
Speaker 4: for those two guys, they didn't expect us to get
Speaker 4: out of our cars and clear across the river. But yeah,
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, you're staying one step ahead of
Speaker 4: them because you're doing everything right, but you're doing night
Speaker 4: patrols and you're passing the tooled up bad guys. You're
Speaker 4: catching blokes off guard at night because you know, your
Speaker 4: technology is just better and your tactics are just better.
Speaker 5: You're better trained, you've got better.
Speaker 4: Gear, and then during the daytime you're clearing through entrenched areas.
Speaker 5: I mean it's.
Speaker 4: From before that, from sort of my East team all
Speaker 4: time and a lot of training in an infantry pertained
Speaker 4: you get to the point where you're like, holy cow,
Speaker 4: this is actually really serious and even if you do
Speaker 4: everything right, you can still come unstuck one day, just
Speaker 4: through she bad luck. Yeah, and that's the life we chose.
Speaker 5: To live, I suppose.
Speaker 3: And it sounds like after that you guys were feeling
Speaker 3: more of kind of like a straight counter terrorism roar.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was a weird blend between still sort of
Speaker 4: doing reconnaissance affair bit but trying to be as kinetic
Speaker 4: as we can.
Speaker 5: We're still trying to.
Speaker 4: Degrade the anti coalition malicious capability. We're really trying to
Speaker 4: put the pressure on them so that the military behind
Speaker 4: us can get in and fixed stuff. That My deployment
Speaker 4: ended when I drove over an I D and it
Speaker 4: was up at that five anaicondas, so the American team
Speaker 4: that was based there. Literally I don't know how they
Speaker 4: word got through, but they sent word down to the Assies, Hey,
Speaker 4: can anyone come up and give us a hand.
Speaker 5: We're having a really tough month.
Speaker 4: And they were basically just getting shot at every second day,
Speaker 4: whether it was sort of direct weapons, rockets, machine guns.
Speaker 4: They actually, on I think a couple of occasions, the
Speaker 4: enemy put in frontal assaults on their on their compound,
Speaker 4: which was a bit of you go from that mindset
Speaker 4: where we're chasing one, one and two bad guys around
Speaker 4: a paddock to getting to the end of towards the
Speaker 4: end of your trip and the enemy are actually massing
Speaker 4: in numbers to overrun outposts. It's like, yeah, this is
Speaker 4: it's not getting it's not getting better. So we actually
Speaker 4: went up to do some you know, disruption operations around
Speaker 4: Casarus Garden the valleys around it.
Speaker 5: A lot of bad guys up there.
Speaker 4: We drove round in our cars, which they literally couldn't do.
Speaker 4: Six months later, pushed the enemy back. Commandos came up
Speaker 4: and did a massive sweep through and they got into
Speaker 4: a few big gun shootouts as well up there. But
Speaker 4: it was on the way back from that operation that
Speaker 4: that I drove over the I D and it was
Speaker 4: really again trying to maneuver around the battlefield with cars
Speaker 4: in an environment that's super difficult to maneuver around. When
Speaker 4: we left, I'll tell the story if you like it quickly.
Speaker 5: We left the fob after a couple of weeks to
Speaker 5: head back.
Speaker 4: To Tarran count The only way we could get back
Speaker 4: is drive our cars back, and there's actually.
Speaker 5: Only two roads back.
Speaker 4: One you drive straight down the valley to TK, down
Speaker 4: that mir and Bad valley to get back, or you
Speaker 4: drive sort of north, go over the mountain range into
Speaker 4: the Chora area and then come back into TK from
Speaker 4: the north.
Speaker 5: We had two call signs up there.
Speaker 4: The commandos had their company up there as well, and
Speaker 4: obviously they'd been doing a fair bit of fighting over
Speaker 4: the last few days as well, and they got into
Speaker 4: a few ticks on the way back also. But as
Speaker 4: the SAS troop, we went, well we'll take them. We'll
Speaker 4: take the northern route, go over the mountains. I didn't
Speaker 4: want to just drive out of the fob, noting that
Speaker 4: they could be putting id's in the road.
Speaker 5: We had to go through the town center.
Speaker 4: That's pretty dangerous, so we patrolled on foot for twenty
Speaker 4: for about twelve hours prior through the night, just my team,
Speaker 4: and by this stage as well, my team leader had
Speaker 4: injured his back and so he'd been he'd gone out
Speaker 4: of the field, and I just basically got a field
Speaker 4: promotion to team leader, got another guy to fill in,
Speaker 4: so he still had a six man team, but got
Speaker 4: a field promotion, and I've been the team leader I
Speaker 4: suppose maybe three or four weeks. We patrolled through that
Speaker 4: town that night, seemed all pretty clear. The vehicles drove
Speaker 4: down and married up with us the next morning, and
Speaker 4: our major tactic for the day, I suppose, was just
Speaker 4: go as quick as we can. If we can get
Speaker 4: over the mountain range before the enemy can know which
Speaker 4: way we're going and react, we've got our best chance
Speaker 4: of getting back into the next valley where you don't
Speaker 4: need to drive.
Speaker 5: On roads any longer. Well, that sort of mid that morning,
Speaker 5: we got.
Speaker 4: A message from headquarters saying that there was an enemy
Speaker 4: commander in a particular village that we were going to
Speaker 4: be driving past, and so we stopped nearby, put out
Speaker 4: fire support teams on the high ground, and in one
Speaker 4: of the patrols went down into that village to try
Speaker 4: and locate this target that was down there. They messed
Speaker 4: around for a few hours, couldn't find him. But we
Speaker 4: kind of knew that something was up because there were
Speaker 4: spots everywhere. You could see them. They might be sort
Speaker 4: of out of range of your even your heavy weapons,
Speaker 4: but you could see them. But then by the time
Speaker 4: we jumped back in our cars to drive over the
Speaker 4: mountain range, it was now running into early afternoons, so
Speaker 4: we kind of shot ourselves in the foot for the
Speaker 4: let's get.
Speaker 5: Out as quick as we can.
Speaker 4: And to compound our problems that day, we actually blew
Speaker 4: some CV joints in our vehicles, so we had two
Speaker 4: vehicles break down, which we had to fix on top
Speaker 4: of the mountain.
Speaker 5: We could fix them.
Speaker 4: By either replacing the CV or just taking it out
Speaker 4: and not using six will drive anymore, but it's obviously
Speaker 4: time consuming to do it. When we're on top of
Speaker 4: the mountain fixing the cars, I said to the boss,
Speaker 4: the troop commander of the troop, I'll take my team
Speaker 4: forward and I'll try and clear down this valley, this
Speaker 4: really thin valley we've got to drive through, because that'll
Speaker 4: deny the enemy of the use of the ground. Obviously,
Speaker 4: we want to get to the next valley where we
Speaker 4: can maneuver and not take that predictable route. I drove
Speaker 4: down the valley as.
Speaker 5: Far as I could sort of go.
Speaker 4: The boss had given me a bit of a control
Speaker 4: measure in the fact that he sort of said, don't
Speaker 4: go any further than this grid point. And so I
Speaker 4: got to what I thought was that grid point and
Speaker 4: the sort of high ground both sides. I was on
Speaker 4: a bit of a flat bit with a creek, and
Speaker 4: it was only about one hundred meters wide, I think.
Speaker 5: And we waited there for a few minutes.
Speaker 4: But what happened was a guy came walking out of
Speaker 4: dead ground on the road we were on, walking towards us,
Speaker 4: and straight away he looked really really suss He's actually
Speaker 4: carrying like this box looked like a cardboard.
Speaker 5: Box, maybe twice the size of a shoe box.
Speaker 4: And he's walking right towards us, and we're sitting there
Speaker 4: quietly watching him, and then he sort of gets to
Speaker 4: sort of about that forty or fifty meters away and
Speaker 4: he looks up, and it was amusing in the fact
Speaker 4: that he was so surprised to see us. He sort
Speaker 4: of put the box on the ground and looked to
Speaker 4: me like he was pretending to do his shoes up.
Speaker 4: But that was weird because they don't wear lasers and
Speaker 4: their shoes. They all have to slip on shoes. He
Speaker 4: then he then picked that box back up to the
Speaker 4: left turn and tried to high tail it out of there,
Speaker 4: just get away. And so I turned to the driver
Speaker 4: and said, let's drive over there and pick him up.
Speaker 4: He was still on sort of the flat ground, and
Speaker 4: we started the car up and went to drive forward,
Speaker 4: and that's where the next thing I remember was just
Speaker 4: being being englf by the dust.
Speaker 5: Don't remember the bang.
Speaker 4: Your senses are all shutting down, but I didn't go
Speaker 4: unconscious at any point, and I can still like really
Speaker 4: imprinted on my mind the moment of the Everything was great.
Speaker 4: And then the next thing I can remember is I
Speaker 4: was looking back at and I could see the vehicle
Speaker 4: and because we didn't have roofs on our LRPV, so
Speaker 4: I'd been ejected out and thrown and I think I
Speaker 4: was still airborne, and our cars were fully loaded with
Speaker 4: am and water and everything. They were about seven ton
Speaker 4: bit over seven ton probably, and I can remember seeing
Speaker 4: it off the ground a couple of meters off the ground,
Speaker 4: so that was a bit of a bit of a
Speaker 4: spin out. I landed maybe ten or fifteen meters.
Speaker 5: From the car. I went to get up and I
Speaker 5: couldn't fill my legs.
Speaker 4: My first thought, and lots of people probably have had
Speaker 4: it in the been in the same situation, is I
Speaker 4: need a gun.
Speaker 5: I need my gun to defend myself.
Speaker 4: And I look back at the LRPV, which was now
Speaker 4: sort of resting on the road, all the fuels emptying
Speaker 4: out of it down the hill towards me. It's a
Speaker 4: bit of a mess. But my M four was sort
Speaker 4: of on the ground near the car. I could see it,
Speaker 4: but I couldn't get up to get it. And it
Speaker 4: was kind of at that point I remember my teammates
Speaker 4: from the vehicle behind running past.
Speaker 5: They were putting out security.
Speaker 4: On the hills and made it come and got me
Speaker 4: and the driver and I were flown out back to
Speaker 4: TK first, but then down to Canahart. I made a
Speaker 4: pretty good recovery after it.
Speaker 5: All.
Speaker 4: The doctors, the American doctors in Canadheart told me that
Speaker 4: it's just the shockwave passing through your body causes a
Speaker 4: lot of swelling yeah, and it's that swelling that was
Speaker 4: restricting sort of movement a lot. And so yeah, thirty
Speaker 4: six hours later I was hobbling out of the hospital
Speaker 4: on crutches. I suppose to start the rehab. But it
Speaker 4: wasn't the only idea you had. In the road that day,
Speaker 4: we lost an explosing detection dog or the troop as
Speaker 4: they continued down the valley lost an explosing detection dog
Speaker 4: shortly after that as well, Ras that was killed in
Speaker 4: September A seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible that you got ballown
Speaker 3: out of the vehicle like that, but we're more or
Speaker 3: less okay. I mean I wouldn't obviously not uninjured, but
Speaker 3: I mean when you've described it as like it sounds
Speaker 3: like you lost your legs or something, I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, now I'm pretty good now. I mean I've still
Speaker 4: got a few injuries. I've got a few injuries that
Speaker 4: have troubled me since.
Speaker 2: Like disks and stuff and the vertebrae.
Speaker 4: Dodgy dodgy back and knees. I have joint trouble with
Speaker 4: my joints, so I think, and more than a fifty
Speaker 4: year old should. And I think it's probably from that
Speaker 4: shop big shockwave. You know, it's just degrading your body
Speaker 4: faster than it should be. But yeah, it was it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was probably that ID. It was pretty big. Could
Speaker 4: have been the years of m as well, could have
Speaker 4: been could have been all the Barrett fifty cow FID
Speaker 4: who knows.
Speaker 3: So rehab, I mean you're still a part of the
Speaker 3: essays going through this rehab process.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: They flew me back to Australia. I think I had
Speaker 4: maybe two months of full sick stay home and rest up.
Speaker 5: I mean up.
Speaker 4: My body was purple, which was I had no shrapnel injuries,
Speaker 4: which was great, but my body was purple.
Speaker 2: Just from that I all the way around.
Speaker 4: Oh no, it was more internal bleeding was superficial. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was just bruising and you know once that went down,
Speaker 4: I mean I laid it on the couch for two weeks,
Speaker 4: I couldn't do anything. But I just literally went home.
Speaker 4: So I didn't go back to the unit at all much.
Speaker 4: It was maybe about two months. I then reported back
Speaker 4: to the docks. They took more m morphine tablets off
Speaker 4: me and I hit the gym and the pool and
Speaker 4: went to the pool, went to the phisier, told everyone
Speaker 4: I was good.
Speaker 5: To go and.
Speaker 4: Redeployed back to Afghanistan. I think about four months later,
Speaker 4: four or five months later. I mean, to be honest,
Speaker 4: I wasn't good to go, but you know, I wanted
Speaker 4: to get back into fight and go back and help
Speaker 4: my mates out. My squadron was going back the next year,
Speaker 4: and the next year. I didn't do a kinetic war
Speaker 4: fighting deployment. I did a deployment that was a lot
Speaker 4: more orientated around intelligence and reconnaissance work and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: So it was a kind of a job that I thought, yeah,
Speaker 4: I can do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's pretty cool that they helped you facilitate that.
Speaker 2: Tell us.
Speaker 3: Let's get into like it sounds like maybe the final
Speaker 3: deployments you had in Afghanistan it was more doing high
Speaker 3: value target strikes.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, and hugely different too.
Speaker 4: I mean from two thousand and two driving rounding cars
Speaker 4: with not much action two thousand and seven lots of
Speaker 4: action driving rounding cars. It evolved a lot while I
Speaker 4: wasn't there. The Americans basically said, hey, we'll put on
Speaker 4: helos for you to really target the enemy leadership, which
Speaker 4: was what we did. A lot more of the rules
Speaker 4: it crept in as well, you know, you couldn't do
Speaker 4: night operations or you needed super high level approvals to
Speaker 4: do them. They were almost impossible. Partnering force ratios were
Speaker 4: quite high, but we had helos and we would literally
Speaker 4: we also had we had helos. We also had a
Speaker 4: lot of other assets that we didn't have in two
Speaker 4: thousand and seven as well, so we were able to
Speaker 4: use a lot of the ICE and R platforms to
Speaker 4: do our targeting, which made it a lot more effective
Speaker 4: to watch areas before we launched on them and things
Speaker 4: like that. Nine times out of ten we were able
Speaker 4: to go, yeah, that's abnormal activity. There's too many guys
Speaker 4: in that town with guns at the moment. We'll launch
Speaker 4: on that and try catch objective whoever.
Speaker 5: We had a few.
Speaker 4: Full sas teams there, which was hugely important. But with
Speaker 4: the high partnering ratio, we had a couple of different
Speaker 4: partnering forces that we would work with depending on what
Speaker 4: locations the target was in, and it was my job
Speaker 4: on that trip to mentor the partnering forces. As it
Speaker 4: turned out, I.
Speaker 5: Spent the majority of my trip.
Speaker 4: Working with one as much as I could, But yeah,
Speaker 4: didn't stay in the field overnight.
Speaker 5: I don't think we would have the heroes on. We
Speaker 5: would launch, you.
Speaker 4: Know, develop in the morning respectable times, jump out about
Speaker 4: at Revaley at six o'clock and grab a feed and
Speaker 4: take it to the ops room and start watching the
Speaker 4: feeds and see what targets are in the area and.
Speaker 5: Maybe there was one that was hot.
Speaker 4: You might launch at eight seven or eight in the morning,
Speaker 4: or maybe you might watch one for a while and
Speaker 4: launch about ten, get to a shootout, catch a bad guy,
Speaker 4: and generally be home by four or five.
Speaker 5: So it was very respectable.
Speaker 3: What was the partner for us that you worked with
Speaker 3: most of the time.
Speaker 4: The one that I liked working with with the NDS
Speaker 4: guys from from up north.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they were.
Speaker 4: I found the ones that I worked with were hugely courageous,
Speaker 4: they were pretty well disciplined, and they were hugely open
Speaker 4: to train as well. So we could do a lot
Speaker 4: of you know, compound clearance rehearsals, and we had a
Speaker 4: training facility within the wire at t K near the range,
Speaker 4: and so we could go out there and rehearse and
Speaker 4: train and.
Speaker 5: They were good.
Speaker 4: They were great to work with, to the point where
Speaker 4: I go with them by myself.
Speaker 5: I mean it's it's really weird.
Speaker 4: To get into a shootout with guys you can't talk to,
Speaker 4: because the terms that we that I used were literally
Speaker 4: civilian contractors, and so they'd come on the hits with us,
Speaker 4: but they wouldn't be keen to be up the front
Speaker 4: with me. But I'd be up the front with with
Speaker 4: the guys a lot of them. A lot of the
Speaker 4: target buildings we'd send the teams in two two sort
Speaker 4: of try and find the HVT that we're after. So
Speaker 4: a lot of the time when I was hitting the target,
Speaker 4: i'd be assisting with cordons or sweeping less priority areas.
Speaker 5: But I suppose we found or I found even.
Speaker 4: Just with the Afghans that I was working with, especially
Speaker 4: the ones that I trusted that i'd go by myself with,
Speaker 4: they'd be that'd be always if there's a h VT there,
Speaker 4: there's always security them and they're never in the same building.
Speaker 4: They're always out and around in those other buildings or
Speaker 4: creek lines or or.
Speaker 5: Something like that. So a lot of the shootouts skirmishes
Speaker 5: that we had were.
Speaker 4: Around those target buildings, whereas the actual teams of operators
Speaker 4: that were clearing those we got into the bulk of
Speaker 4: the combat.
Speaker 3: Are there any particular operations from that last deployment that
Speaker 3: kind of stand out for you.
Speaker 5: I had an interesting little day.
Speaker 4: I wrote a short book, and I had an interesting
Speaker 4: little day.
Speaker 5: One in particular where.
Speaker 4: We landed and there was a bit of random, sporadic
Speaker 4: shooting from sort of the center of the assault force
Speaker 4: moving into the target area.
Speaker 5: I didn't think much of it. It was literally a couple
Speaker 5: of rounds.
Speaker 4: But then after we cleared our sort of non priority area,
Speaker 4: one of my afghans come and grabbed me, Mark, Mark,
Speaker 4: come with me, which I was happy to do.
Speaker 5: I mean, I trusted the guy. He was a good
Speaker 5: little operator.
Speaker 4: But he then dragged me a long way away from
Speaker 4: the troop to the point where I was sort of
Speaker 4: starting to get nervous. Mate, we need to cut this
Speaker 4: here and head back. We're getting too far away. And
Speaker 4: then all of a sudden I arrived at the compound.
Speaker 4: And I would normally operate with about ten ten guys,
Speaker 4: got to that compound and there was a couple of
Speaker 4: other guys standing out the front and they're like, go in,
Speaker 4: go in, and so I'm like, all right, yay. So
Speaker 4: I'm now in clearing this compound by myself with one Afghan.
Speaker 4: But what occurred was I got in there and there
Speaker 4: was a Sivkas in there who was actually still no
Speaker 4: one had done any first aid on him.
Speaker 5: He was actually still bleeding out, and.
Speaker 4: I actually reckon it was probably an ak that he'd
Speaker 4: been hit by, because there was a massive hole in
Speaker 4: his leg, but who knows.
Speaker 5: Could have been a ricochet, could have been anything.
Speaker 4: I patched him up and got the medic over, sort
Speaker 4: of thinking to myself, this is like a bit of
Speaker 4: a big day already, and it's not even a big day.
Speaker 5: We then got into another.
Speaker 4: Small shootout again just after that, where we lost Facts,
Speaker 4: one of our TAC dogs, the handler, and the handlers offside,
Speaker 4: I had to assault a creek line and Facts got
Speaker 4: killed as well.
Speaker 5: So that one stood out to me as well.
Speaker 4: I mean, some guys talk about post traumatic traumatic stress
Speaker 4: a lot, and.
Speaker 5: I've shared that story a bit.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't think I suffer hugely from PTSD,
Speaker 4: but I actually had a reoccurring dream after that job
Speaker 4: that when I went into that room it was my
Speaker 4: son that had been hit. They were about the same
Speaker 4: They are about the same age. I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 4: it's that warfare. It says you have some big days
Speaker 4: that you take a while to get over.
Speaker 5: That one took me a while to get over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, understandable.
Speaker 3: So let's start to talk a little bit about sort
Speaker 3: of your exit from the Australian military. You continued working
Speaker 3: for the Australian government for a while, but was this
Speaker 3: just your natural retirement point at what was kind of
Speaker 3: the auspices under which you got out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really odd in this respect, even amongst sas guys,
Speaker 4: I'm a bit of a bit of a rarity. So
Speaker 4: I actually discharged from the regular Army in two thousand
Speaker 4: and nine after I did that one deployment, after I
Speaker 4: got blown up, and I was sort of in that
Speaker 4: mid two thousand and nine, I was going, I'm not
Speaker 4: really healing up real quick. My back's still dodgy. I
Speaker 4: might get out and do something else. Maybe my time's up.
Speaker 4: And so I kind of discharged. But in hindsight, I
Speaker 4: wasn't ready to get out mentally, I don't think like
Speaker 4: as soon as I discharged from the regular military, but
Speaker 4: stayed in our Army reserve, and because I had a
Speaker 4: lot of instructor qualifications, the essays would keep me as
Speaker 4: an army reserve just to go back and help on
Speaker 4: the selection course or help on a demolitions course or
Speaker 4: a shooting course or something like that.
Speaker 5: So they just kept me in their pool of reserve guys.
Speaker 4: And I went to the Australian Embassy in Kabul and
Speaker 4: worked as a security contractor at the embassy, which.
Speaker 2: Had a hugely interesting eighteen months.
Speaker 4: I loved it, the difference from military to contracting in
Speaker 4: the fact that you now have got You've no longer
Speaker 4: got this rule book to keep you safe. You can
Speaker 4: make as many bad decisions as you like as a
Speaker 4: civilian contractor, and you're the person that's going to suffer
Speaker 4: if you get it wrong. And you have also then,
Speaker 4: obviously the added pressure that this person that you're looking
Speaker 4: after nine times out of ten has no idea the
Speaker 4: dangers that they're in day to day wandering the streets
Speaker 4: of cable, So you have this challenge of reeling them
Speaker 4: in whilst letting them do as much as they want to,
Speaker 4: but keeping them.
Speaker 5: Safe while they do it.
Speaker 4: So I definitely enjoyed that to begin with, but it
Speaker 4: was sort of that twenty eleven twelve thirteen period, our
Speaker 4: small little less as unit was sort of starting to
Speaker 4: run dry. I've got mates that, by that time frame
Speaker 4: had done ten. You know, eight deployments was not uncommon.
Speaker 4: Ten deployments was still quite common. So and I all
Speaker 4: my best mates were still over there. I was still
Speaker 4: going back every now and then to help with training.
Speaker 4: And one day someone said, oh, what are you doing
Speaker 4: for the next six months? Do you want to deploy
Speaker 4: back to afghan in the military. So they re enlist
Speaker 4: you back into the full time military, and you go
Speaker 4: on a deployment, and then you come back and they
Speaker 4: discharge you again. And I did that twice, and so
Speaker 4: I say to most people, while I did discharge from
Speaker 4: the military, I really didn't discharge in my head until
Speaker 4: around about twenty fifteen. Sort of that twenty fourteen fifteen
Speaker 4: sixteen period.
Speaker 5: The bulk of my work was.
Speaker 4: Back at the embassy, driving the ambassador around town and
Speaker 4: doing that diplomatic protection, a few odd trips around Afghanistan,
Speaker 4: but mostly in Cabul.
Speaker 5: And it wasn't until sort of.
Speaker 4: That twenty sixteen period we're in my head I kind
Speaker 4: of went, I'm okay with my.
Speaker 5: Life experienced in the military to.
Speaker 4: This point, I'm gonna get out and I kind of
Speaker 4: did a few reserve training things in Australia after that,
Speaker 4: but sort of by two thousand and sixteen, seventeen eighteen onwards,
Speaker 4: I was like, fully out. I don't think i've I'm
Speaker 4: fully discharged now. I'm not even in the Army reserve anymore,
Speaker 4: and I haven't really done anything since twenty eighteen or anything.
Speaker 3: I mean, how many years total in the Australian military
Speaker 3: from where it was the lad Eddies when you first
Speaker 3: went in, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not quite twenty a bit under twenty. Yeah, not
Speaker 4: a bad hit out they No.
Speaker 3: Hell no, it's a great run that you had, and
Speaker 3: I mean you're I'm glad that you weren't injured worse
Speaker 3: than you were considering what you went through.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's a lot.
Speaker 3: I want to talk about the things you're doing today
Speaker 3: as an expedition and adventure travel guile. But one of
Speaker 3: the things we had talked about earlier that I want
Speaker 3: to make sure we touch upon and ask you about
Speaker 3: is that the SAS has kind of had a pretty
Speaker 3: difficult run the last five years, six years. Maybe a
Speaker 3: lot of news story newspaper stories about war crimes, the
Speaker 3: Barrington Report that came out from the Australian government that
Speaker 3: covered this subject, the ongoing defamation suit with is it
Speaker 3: Robert ben Smith.
Speaker 5: Yep, Yeah, Marus is still in the.
Speaker 3: Coats and so this is still kind of like unfolding
Speaker 3: in the public sphere in Australia, and I just wanted
Speaker 3: to ask you, you know, if you have any comments about
Speaker 3: it or thoughts about it that you wanted to share
Speaker 3: with people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, not heaps.
Speaker 4: It is certainly still heavy in the press in Australia.
Speaker 4: It's not resolved, which is a huge shame in itself.
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 4: Myself and all my colleagues that I've ever spoken with,
Speaker 4: none of us were against an inquiry, and not even
Speaker 4: that you don't even need to call it an inquiry,
Speaker 4: a post operation review on what.
Speaker 5: Do we do well? Obviously, what could we have done better?
Speaker 4: How could we improve how can we make tomorrow's war
Speaker 4: fighter better than we were all hugely in believing of that.
Speaker 4: I was bitterly disappointed, I suppose to say, mildly how
Speaker 4: they conducted the review, how they did the investigation. There
Speaker 4: was a massive trial by media. The money that's been
Speaker 4: spent trying to find people guilty by our own country.
Speaker 4: I personally my personal view is pretty sickening when you
Speaker 4: think that the guys we captured have now been let
Speaker 4: out of prison in Kabul, literal murderers that Green on
Speaker 4: Blue murdered Australian soldiers have been led out of prison
Speaker 4: and we're still going through the courts. It kind of
Speaker 4: seems a bit rough. I mean, I wasn't present for
Speaker 4: any of the things that they're investigating. I didn't see
Speaker 4: any war crhymes. I'm sure they can conduct inquiries and
Speaker 4: do their best, but it just seems a bit over
Speaker 4: the top, and a lot of the stuff that's been
Speaker 4: in the press, I know because I read it it
Speaker 4: has actually been untrue. There's been stuff published in the
Speaker 4: media that's not correct, and so that's sad. You sort
Speaker 4: of think to yourself for these guys actually investigative journalists
Speaker 4: or are they just trying to.
Speaker 5: Prove their narrative to sell their story.
Speaker 3: There was the one defamation case with the commander was
Speaker 3: a Russell Heston that I think he won his lawsuit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and good because hopefully in the future that'll make
Speaker 4: them do a bit more due diligence before they start
Speaker 4: publishing their news articles. Yeah, I'm all for the public
Speaker 4: being informed to an extent. I think, in hindsight, we
Speaker 4: should have shared a lot more of the good work
Speaker 4: we did in Afghanistan. Our s O TG especially just
Speaker 4: had this blanket no media, no stories policy, and what
Speaker 4: then inevitably resulted was the only stories that ever came.
Speaker 5: Out were bad ones, bad ones. And so we're at
Speaker 5: this point now where there's.
Speaker 4: No no one knows about the amazing work we did
Speaker 4: for twenty years, the fact that all the Afghan lives
Speaker 4: we saved. To be honest, you don't have to look
Speaker 4: too deep on the internet to find all the suicide
Speaker 4: bombings that I witnessed in Cabul. I mean in that
Speaker 4: twenty and nine to ten period, the guest I lived
Speaker 4: in Cabul City and that guest house behind us that
Speaker 4: got hit there was the UN guesthouse, and I think
Speaker 4: an nex Navy seal and another UN contractor that was
Speaker 4: in there got killed. Those attacks to happen, commonly, if
Speaker 4: one hadn't happened for a month or so, if a
Speaker 4: truck bomb or a car bomb hadn't gone off killing
Speaker 4: another fifty or sixty civilians in Kabul, you were waiting
Speaker 4: for it to happen. I mean that stuff wasn't okay,
Speaker 4: and I still today am comfortable with everything I did
Speaker 4: because that's what we.
Speaker 5: Were there trying to prevent.
Speaker 2: Tell us about this.
Speaker 5: It's hard to see the.
Speaker 3: Finish this documentary you mentioned to me, Bravery and Betrayal
Speaker 3: that just came out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I'm hugely supportive of it. So I've seen.
Speaker 4: It and it's, in my opinion, it's not a huge
Speaker 4: rebuttal of.
Speaker 5: The war crime stuff.
Speaker 4: That's one of the reasons I like it so much
Speaker 4: is that it's actually some SAS guys going, hey, you
Speaker 4: know what, I'm just going to tell some of my story.
Speaker 4: That's good, and so they're getting interviewed and just sharing
Speaker 4: their experiences, pretty much like you've given me the opportunity
Speaker 4: to do today. But to put it puts war fighting
Speaker 4: in a little bit of context, I think, in the
Speaker 4: fact that Bravery and Betrayal is not only interviewing a
Speaker 4: few x SAS guys, it also is interviewing a few
Speaker 4: of our prime ministers. It interviews a few of the
Speaker 4: US pilots that were dropping us off from picking us
Speaker 4: up on.
Speaker 5: These kill capture missions.
Speaker 4: I think there's about three of the minute, which is
Speaker 4: terrific to get someone else's perspective again.
Speaker 5: And it actually also interviews a few of.
Speaker 4: The widows who I know personally, and it must have
Speaker 4: been really difficult for them to get on camera and
Speaker 4: to be interviewed.
Speaker 5: And talk about Matt Locke and Blaine didams, but.
Speaker 4: They did, which I think puts a lot of what
Speaker 4: we were doing and what we believed in so much
Speaker 4: into a bit more perspective than just the negative news
Speaker 4: articles that have.
Speaker 5: Been out there.
Speaker 4: The betrayal part that's in the name, obviously, I think
Speaker 4: really focuses on the one hugely disappointing incident was at
Speaker 4: the end of that Brereton Report where the Australian military
Speaker 4: felt the need to apologize to the Afghan people and
Speaker 4: I personally, my personal belief is that that was just
Speaker 4: insulting to us and everything we sacrifice for over that
Speaker 4: whole time. So yeah, I hugely promote the documentary. I
Speaker 4: think they're working to get it on a streaming service
Speaker 4: at the moment, it's just traveling Australia, so get in
Speaker 4: and see it wherever it pops up. I can flick
Speaker 4: your some one or two. I think there's three previews.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can put some links in the description of
Speaker 3: this podcast and people can check it out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd love to send you those, but yeah, I
Speaker 4: hope that gets out there a few bit.
Speaker 5: And I've spoken to the producers as well.
Speaker 4: They're hoping that in the future they can do the
Speaker 4: same thing, make a similar docade for the commandos, make
Speaker 4: a similar doco for some of the infantry battalions that
Speaker 4: did deployments to afghan and share some more of that
Speaker 4: broader Australian military story. Because it's apart from people's pot
Speaker 4: that have done podcasts, and there's a few podcasts in Australia.
Speaker 5: Apart from people that have.
Speaker 4: Gone out of their way to share their own stories
Speaker 4: and a book are on a podcast, there's really not
Speaker 4: much covered yet in Australia those personal experiences.
Speaker 3: I think it sort of speaks to the double edged
Speaker 3: sort of secrecy.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: In one hand, the military secrecy around these missions is
Speaker 3: paramount in one sense, but after it happens, if you know,
Speaker 3: as we talked about, if you don't publicize it in
Speaker 3: some way, if you don't allow your soldiers to be
Speaker 3: interviewed by the press, then what leaks out is going
Speaker 3: to be the negative stuff, you know, the guys were
Speaker 3: rightly or wrongly disgruntled and angry about what they experienced,
Speaker 3: and you're not going to kind of get the other side.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I can see it both ways. And while
Speaker 3: I think from what I've read anyway, it sounds like
Speaker 3: some guys did step out of line and do things
Speaker 3: that were wrong, but that doesn't speak for the majority
Speaker 3: of the force and most of these guys who went
Speaker 3: over and over and over again and did really professional
Speaker 3: work over there.
Speaker 4: As I said, everyone I've worked with and Seul and
Speaker 4: the vast majority as within my team, and the vast majority,
Speaker 4: if not everyone, I don't know, But yeah, so much
Speaker 4: good was done and so much hard work and sacrifice
Speaker 4: by good people. So it is, as you say, a
Speaker 4: hugely difficult situation, one I don't have the answers for.
Speaker 4: But as you just said, if you look today in
Speaker 4: the Ukraine or Israel, to think that more and more
Speaker 4: information from a battlespace is not going to be shared,
Speaker 4: you're crazy. So to think that you can shut down
Speaker 4: everything is.
Speaker 5: A little bit naive, I think.
Speaker 2: A little bit of out of touch with the times.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, So we need our military, Australian military. I'm sure
Speaker 4: they're doing it today. They need to get smarter at
Speaker 4: that in exactly that, what do we share and what
Speaker 4: don't we.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so talk to us a little bit about your
Speaker 3: post service career and what you've gotten in two cents.
Speaker 2: Then it sounds like it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 5: Actually, yeah, I'm pretty fortunate today. I'm living the dream.
Speaker 4: I mean, after I finished up working at the Australian
Speaker 4: Embassy in Kabul, I didn't really know what I didn't
Speaker 4: know what I was going to do when I got
Speaker 4: to a military That's why I ended up contracting and
Speaker 4: finishing the contracting.
Speaker 5: I didn't really finish it.
Speaker 4: I just sort of thought I'd move into something a
Speaker 4: bit more fun and interesting.
Speaker 5: How can I love to travel?
Speaker 4: I love visiting foreign cultures and doing weird and wonderful things.
Speaker 4: How can I keep doing that but get shot at less?
Speaker 4: And I suppose I was. I thought, well, I can
Speaker 4: do expedition sort of sort of guiding. While I was
Speaker 4: at the embassy, I started a small hiking business in
Speaker 4: Tazzy and it was literally just to fill in my rotations,
Speaker 4: off take people hiking in the mountains and out into
Speaker 4: the remote wilderness. But then that kind of led to
Speaker 4: running expeditions. I worked with some universities that wanted to
Speaker 4: do research overseas, and I worked with some green energy
Speaker 4: companies that wanted to conduct feasibility studies or community liaison
Speaker 4: in different areas where they wanted to do projects.
Speaker 5: And that led me to.
Speaker 4: Places like Cambodia, it in remote areas of Indonesia, went
Speaker 4: to Africa and started doing these sort of cool, pretty
Speaker 4: cool trips that I really enjoyed. At the same time,
Speaker 4: I was like, how can I keep doing this but
Speaker 4: actually not really have a job to do, And I
Speaker 4: sort of off the back of my hiking up mountains
Speaker 4: in TAZZI came to that sort of tourism piece, well,
Speaker 4: if someone wants to go and see this place, I'll take.
Speaker 5: Them and keep them safe. And I still love my
Speaker 5: motorbike riding.
Speaker 4: So that led me and another excess a mate to
Speaker 4: do a motor bike ride through Mongolia, which was pretty epic,
Speaker 4: about three thy five hundred k's or something around the country.
Speaker 4: I did a hike through Israel back in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: I think the national trail there, the Israel National Trail,
Speaker 4: so walk from north to south that was pretty epic,
Speaker 4: and then just did some motobike rides in Vietnam and
Speaker 4: sort of random stuff, and still peeps in Australia. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm off to the Simpson Desert next week to do
Speaker 4: some photography and do write and document an adventure ride
Speaker 4: that some blakes are doing out there. So I still
Speaker 4: love remote places and still love to travel, and the
Speaker 4: more adventurous the better. I think. Now I love my photography.
Speaker 4: I saw something I learned way back. I started learning
Speaker 4: back in one rur when I did my sniper training.
Speaker 4: Obviously I was a reconsoldier in the essay, yes, so
Speaker 4: a lot of photography training involved in that. So now
Speaker 4: I enjoy my travel and wilderness photography. And as I said,
Speaker 4: I write a book, so I do a little bit
Speaker 4: of writing, and my other fundsie that I have now
Speaker 4: to give back to the veteran community a little bit.
Speaker 5: I suppose. I've got a veteran whiskey brand called dog
Speaker 5: Tag Whiskey.
Speaker 4: So it's not a big business, but we sell a
Speaker 4: few few bottles. And it's Tasmania, where I live, where
Speaker 4: I came from, is becoming more and more well known
Speaker 4: for phenomenal whiskey. They produce some really really high quality whiskey.
Speaker 4: Is that because the climate is somewhat similar to Scotland.
Speaker 4: They say, I'm not a stiller, but they say the
Speaker 4: climate is perfect and we have everything in Tasmania to
Speaker 4: make the white spirit, the new make spirit.
Speaker 5: So we do import our barrels, both from the.
Speaker 3: US sort as Ireland. I mean everyone I think does yes, So.
Speaker 4: It's either from America or or Europe. I've got some
Speaker 4: French ape barrels, but mostly American. Eight got some old
Speaker 4: in America your whiskey. I think they can only use
Speaker 4: the barrels once or something. There's some wall there. That's
Speaker 4: just why we get a lot of American barrels here.
Speaker 2: That might be bourbon.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, we put out I've got whiskey and bourbon barrels.
Speaker 5: I've got some Buffalo trace barrels and yeah makes good whiskey.
Speaker 2: And what's your You mentioned you have a book out What's.
Speaker 5: The Point that's called And it's not an autobiography. It's
Speaker 5: really just myself write it.
Speaker 4: My wife edited it, went to the printers down the
Speaker 4: road and printed my own copy.
Speaker 5: So I just sell them on my own website. I
Speaker 5: can assist.
Speaker 4: And it's just I write because I kept traveling through COVID,
Speaker 4: but we had our mad lockdowns in Australia. So every
Speaker 4: time I'd return from overseas back to Australia half a
Speaker 4: dozen times times during COVID, I'd get locked in a
Speaker 4: hotel in Sydney for a few weeks, and so I
Speaker 4: started just writing some of my stories while I was
Speaker 4: locked in.
Speaker 5: The hotel rooms.
Speaker 4: And then that eventually my wife said, what are you
Speaker 4: going to do with these mad stories You've written about
Speaker 4: Afghanistan and adventure travel and stuff, and I was to
Speaker 4: begin with, I was like, I don't know.
Speaker 5: We're SF guys, we don't write books.
Speaker 4: But I think over time, I was like, well, there's
Speaker 4: nothing wrong with sharing some of these stories. You know
Speaker 4: I talked about getting blown up, which I share on
Speaker 4: podcasts and things like that.
Speaker 5: So eventually, yeah, I just thought I'll share it.
Speaker 4: But I haven't got time to sit down and write
Speaker 4: about my life, so I've just it's a bit of
Speaker 4: a here's a few experiences that I've had in life,
Speaker 4: and here's what I learned from them.
Speaker 5: So I always like to have the positive outcome.
Speaker 4: What I got out of it, which I lit a
Speaker 4: bit of keynote speaking and that's my main topic.
Speaker 5: Really, what do we learn from from.
Speaker 4: These experiences that we might consider the experience, you know,
Speaker 4: positive or negative. It might be a really crappy experience,
Speaker 4: But did we get anything out of it? How did
Speaker 4: we improve as a person? Are we more adaptive? Are
Speaker 4: we more resilient? Are we more are we better leader?
Speaker 4: Will we make the same mistake again? And you can
Speaker 4: pick those lessons up from lots of different places, whether
Speaker 4: it's you know, business or adventure or or your time
Speaker 4: in the military.
Speaker 2: Where can people find you? What's your website?
Speaker 4: Mark Doreene is the best place to find me online?
Speaker 5: I'm on I'm.
Speaker 4: Tinkering and playing with all social media expert if you're
Speaker 4: in America. But I'm on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and I've
Speaker 4: got a Markedine website. But Point Assist is my business
Speaker 4: that I work through and that also has its own website.
Speaker 2: And they can buy your book through through your website.
Speaker 4: Yeah, shipped, not many of ship maybe a dozen or
Speaker 4: two to a couple of dozen to the US, which
Speaker 4: I'm always like.
Speaker 5: I hope it gets it. Yeah, yeah, family, just randomly
Speaker 5: I've ordered.
Speaker 2: Things from Australia before.
Speaker 3: It gets interesting, not not as interesting as when you
Speaker 3: order things from South Africa, but uh, Australia is Yeah,
Speaker 3: you never know where it's gonna or when it's going
Speaker 3: to show up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not sure even legally if I can. I
Speaker 4: don't think I can even legally send my alcohol to America.
Speaker 2: Probably not, probably not.
Speaker 4: But the book, the book, Yeah, i'd love to send
Speaker 4: you a copy.
Speaker 5: I'll send you a copy of.
Speaker 2: I would love that. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially the booze is going to get tariff now too,
Speaker 3: so you're you're screwed. Yeah, but I would love to
Speaker 3: try that, Mark, I mean, thanks for joining us on
Speaker 3: the show.
Speaker 2: Really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: We'll have for listeners or viewers, will have links down
Speaker 3: the description for people who are interested in checking out
Speaker 3: these websites or buying the book.
Speaker 2: Some questions. We've got a couple. We've got a couple
Speaker 2: of viewer questions for you, Mark.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, shoot, from Matt being a big fan of
Speaker 6: Ossie pop culture, from Dundee to mister in between, can
Speaker 6: you tell us about some real life AUSSI heroes you've
Speaker 6: served with.
Speaker 2: Good question.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's a pretty hard question actually off the
Speaker 4: cup well, the bravery in betrayal. I suppose is is
Speaker 4: one dimension again, there's a bloke in that called more
Speaker 4: and and to be brutally honest, when I first heard
Speaker 4: that the guys were making a doco, I was a
Speaker 4: little bit, oh, what's going to be in this? But
Speaker 4: it was Mortz and another another x rs M of
Speaker 4: the regiment, actually Wayne Weeks, that were a big part
Speaker 4: of making it. And as soon as I knew that
Speaker 4: they were involved, I was keen to see it and
Speaker 4: I was kind of happy to support it, and I'm
Speaker 4: helping with some of the touring of it. So Mortz,
Speaker 4: the guy that's a big inspiration of the docade. When
Speaker 4: I got to one Hour, he was there, and he
Speaker 4: was a recon sniper guy that I had been or
Speaker 4: that I wanted to be.
Speaker 5: He did selection for me.
Speaker 4: But when I got to the sas, he was in
Speaker 4: the squadron that I was in two squadron, and it's
Speaker 4: one of those guys that was an excellent soldiers, hugely professional,
Speaker 4: always trying to improve, and I think so I modeled
Speaker 4: a lot of my thought process off that continuous self improvement.
Speaker 5: How can I learn more? How can I get better
Speaker 5: at what I do?
Speaker 4: I think I got that off more when my patrol
Speaker 4: command I heard his back and got taken out of
Speaker 4: the field and I got promoted a couple of.
Speaker 5: Weeks before I blew himself up.
Speaker 4: Mortz was the sixth guy to come back into my
Speaker 4: filling in my patrol, which I at the time thought
Speaker 4: was hugely difficult because I've got this guy that should
Speaker 4: be my patrol commander. He's just going to fill in
Speaker 4: for a few weeks as Taylor and Charlie. But yeah,
Speaker 4: someone I hugely look up to and for probably that reason,
Speaker 4: is usually professional. He's an excellent soldier and had that
Speaker 4: mindset of always improving.
Speaker 5: How can we get better at what we do? Yeah,
Speaker 5: Crocodile Dundee, I.
Speaker 4: Think it is back out at the moment, and Senators
Speaker 4: in Australia, he's making a comeback, the big guy.
Speaker 6: We have a couple more. Did you deploy for the
Speaker 6: Pong Su or Tampa operations?
Speaker 4: No, they weren't my squadron, all right, we got one
Speaker 4: more interesting jobs are at the time, and I think
Speaker 4: that we were we became at that time. We really
Speaker 4: were the force of choice in the fact that we
Speaker 4: were the cheapest to send anywhere and the most likely
Speaker 4: to get positive results, whatever that might be, whether it
Speaker 4: was supporting America somewhere or or catching a drug boat
Speaker 4: or some illegal fishermen or whatever it might be. Maybe
Speaker 4: a few lessons there that there's jobs that we did
Speaker 4: that probably weren't necessarily us. I did chase a few
Speaker 4: people smugglers around here and there, but.
Speaker 5: No, I wasn't on those ones.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: The what was the weirdest thing you saw in Afghanistan?
Speaker 5: The weirdest.
Speaker 4: Not my go to guys that I used to Afghansas
Speaker 4: I used to like to partner with, but partnering with
Speaker 4: the other blokes I had a few other different local
Speaker 4: police forces and things like that, and there was always
Speaker 4: weird stuff happening there. You'd be arresting someone who's clearly
Speaker 4: a JPELD high level target and they're trying to talk
Speaker 4: out of it, like there was.
Speaker 5: So that was weird. Without going into any stories that
Speaker 5: are too crazy.
Speaker 6: Last one, did you ever work with Jayshak in Afghanistan
Speaker 6: or Iraq?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: I didn't.
Speaker 4: What I did do and what I loved was the
Speaker 4: Americans that used to come to the essays on exchange.
Speaker 4: So we did get a couple of green bereys come
Speaker 4: over on the occasion, and I worked with a couple
Speaker 4: of Navy seals over time. Ken, I'm trying to think
Speaker 4: of his last name. Actually, you've caught me off guard.
Speaker 4: Was I worked with He came on that two thousand
Speaker 4: and seven deployment with US. I wish I could remember
Speaker 4: his last name. And he actually got killed on a
Speaker 4: separate deployment in Iraq later on.
Speaker 5: A great guy. Yeah, and he was super staked when
Speaker 5: he got to Australia.
Speaker 4: He'd love to come out and have to be with us.
Speaker 4: We drag him out because a pretty senior guy in.
Speaker 5: The in the US in the Unity was from.
Speaker 3: Well Mark, thank you for this interview and sharing your
Speaker 3: perspectives and experiences with us. Again, love works down the
Speaker 3: description for you, for folks out there who want to
Speaker 3: go check out the website, check out the book, check
Speaker 3: out maybe one of these crazy adventure trips that he's
Speaker 3: going on. And for everyone else out there. Any final
Speaker 3: thoughts before we roll out tonight.
Speaker 4: Mark, Oh, my only final thought is thanks for what
Speaker 4: you do helping blacks share their stories. It's it's I
Speaker 4: think it's hugely important, especially when someone's done a lot
Speaker 4: in their life, and it hasn't always been easy. It's
Speaker 4: good to be out, to be able to share.
Speaker 5: It's not only good for the.
Speaker 4: Person, but it's actually good for the community. You'm a
Speaker 4: big believer of that.
Speaker 2: I think so too.
Speaker 4: Be mature as a nation when we can share some
Speaker 4: of these stories and talk a ban the realisms of life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely so, thank you. We could do it without you. Mark,
Speaker 3: thank you and everyone else. Will see you next week.
Speaker 3: Actually no, there will be two episodes this week, so
Speaker 3: we'll see you on Wednesday and then on Friday.
Speaker 2: Two for the price of one.
Speaker 5: Good work, all.
Speaker 2: Right, take care of everyone.
Speaker 5: Jeez.
Speaker 2: Hey guys, it's Jack.
Speaker 3: I just want to talk to you for a moment
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Speaker 5: Thank you.