Pod Insights I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin 'I owe it to the guys who died to do something': Mark Wales Pt.1 About this episode Mark Wales joined the military as a wide-eyed 17-year-old recruit, and quickly rose through the ranks, eventually leading one of Australia's most elite special forces troops in some of the most dangerous combat environments on earth. He saw the war in Afghanistan evolve from targeted counter-terrorism into something far more complicated, and ultimately, far less certain.
In this episode of I Catch Killers, Mark opens up about what it takes to earn a place in the SAS, the psychological toll of repeated deployments, and how he watched the Afghan war slowly lose its sense of purpose from the inside. Mark speaks candidly about kill lists, mission creep, the counterinsurgency strategies that were doomed before they started, and the moment he knew the war was effectively over… long before the politicians admitted it. Gary and Mark also tackle the recent war crimes allegations, the complex environment that shaped those events, the chain of command responsibility that rarely gets discussed, and why, no matter how it unfolds, almost nobody comes out of this saga looking good.
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Transcript 11,138 words · 2 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 The public has had a long-held fascination with detectives. Detectives see a side of life the average person is never exposed to. I spent 34 years as a cop. For 25 of those years, I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operate. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world.
0:46 Speaker 00 Mark Wales is not a man who does anything in halves. He's a former SAS commander who's been tested at the absolute limits of human endurance in some of the world's most dangerous war zones. And he's paid the price that comes with it. In this episode of I Catch Killers, we go deep into Mark's time in the special forces, the brotherhood, the burden, and the controversy surrounding the war crime allegations that have polarised Australia. This one is going to stay with you. Let's get into it. Mark Wales, welcome to I Catch Killers.
1:20 Speaker 01 Great, thanks for having us, mate.
1:21 Speaker 00 I've been doing this for years and had hundreds of guests on. And normally I can introduce one way or the other, and this person's done this. But you've done a whole range of things and different extremes. You're sort of living life to the extreme. So rather than describe you, and I've made some notes here, as a soldier, businessman, author, entrepreneur, reality TV star, actor, boxer, family man, I'm going to approach things a little bit differently and ask who you are.
1:49 Speaker 01 Mate, I still see myself as a soldier or a retired soldier. I think that's... And, you know, in my professional life, that's kind of the thing that I'm most proud of. But and then on a personal level, I think being a parent and a partner is probably the other thing I'm most proud of.
2:07 Speaker 00 So. Yeah, yeah.
2:09 Speaker 01 Ex-older and father is.
2:10 Speaker 00 It's funny that, isn't it? Because I I feel that, like I've been doing podcasts and working in the media for now, six or seven years.
2:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:18 Speaker 00 I still feel like I'm a cop.
2:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:19 Speaker 00 I I I think someone once said to me, you join the army, you join the police. And that sort of that sort of defines the different ways you look at those. It it does shape you and mould you to the person that you are.
2:31 Speaker 01 Especially if it's formative, like I was seventeen when I went in and you you don't really, you're still growing up really.
2:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
2:37 Speaker 01 It is an institution.
2:39 Speaker 00 I've read your read your books, both your books, I've got them here, The Survivor, I read that before I knew you were coming on. I think I I read that, read that book and thought I'd get you on the podcast. But and you're one that you've got coming out now, Mission Ready. I get the sense, and, you know, when we talk about the type of person that you are, you like to challenge yourself. And I also get the sense that you like to learn from your mistakes, failures and all that, of which we all all have them.
3:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:07 Speaker 00 But just give us a sense of your philosophy on life, like you you do put yourself in positions of pressure.
3:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think, well, when I was a kid, I thought, I remember hearing about the SAS thing and that'd be such a great career. And I didn't really know how to get there, but was able to kind of chart a course there and just hammer away at it over time. And it kind of gave me a sense of, well, if you do kind of plan and kind of execute on something consistently, you can get there.
3:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:34 Speaker 01 Eventually, or you can stack the odds in your favour a bit. So after going through the armies, young fella, and then and then SAS, I kind of took that same philosophy out after I left the military. And just use it for anything else I've tried to to do. But I think, and one of the reasons I've I've I've done a fair few different things.
3:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:54 Speaker 01 And I kind of just try and latch on to whatever I think is a fun opportunity or something good, like the Survivor thing that I did. I'd never done anything in TV, but that to me just looked like something fun to do. And I'm glad I did it because it kind of changed my life a bit. Um, and, yeah, it's just kind of how it's good. I think after coming home from Afghanistan, I remember thinking. We're lucky to get through that and I kind of, I owe it to myself and the, and the guys who died to make sure I go out and, and do something, you know, don't just sit around, try and, try and do something good.
4:28 Speaker 00 Well, through, uh, through challenges, growth comes, doesn't it? Like, if you, if you push yourself, you, you learn something about yourself, even if you fail, that, that changes you.
4:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's a constant, obviously, and if you're okay with the embarrassment, then, um, you know, then you'll, you'll be fine.
4:45 Speaker 00 I, I think, like, I file a shitload of stuff, but I always, I hold my head up high and say, I gave it my best shot, like, I'm, I'm trying. So I, I don't mind, I'm, I'm embarrassed if I fail and I haven't tried, if I've given it a hundred percent, it's okay, well, have a, have a laugh at me, but I'm, I'm doing my best.
5:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think that fear, it stops, it stopped me a lot in the past, is you're just worried about getting, you know, being embarrassed or screwing something up, but no one's really, no one really cares, no one's really paying attention, just you might as well just try anyway.
5:18 Speaker 00 Let's talk about your childhood, first of all, you grew up in the Pilbara, was it the up?
5:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, born in, uh, Newman, so the Pilbara in W A, and my parents worked in the iron ore mine up there and, and my dad had taken work because it was a kind of high paying job back then. This is even well before, obviously, the mining boom. So, um, we started up there and I had two brothers and we eventually moved to Perth in Western Australia and also Geraldton. So he joined customs from there and did a stint in customs, he was actually an investigator in customs as well, but, so, yeah, we were in coastal, coast of W A for most of my childhood.
5:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, Newman and up around there, that was, it's still the Wild West.
5:59 Speaker 01 Pretty rough.
6:00 Speaker 00 It was, I, I've spent a lot of time up at Caratha and, uh, yeah.
6:04 Speaker 01 It's, it's a time forgot, that part of the world, but it's also pretty cool, it's like.
6:09 Speaker 00 It's beautiful.
6:10 Speaker 01 It's remote, yeah, stunning.
6:11 Speaker 00 So, yeah.
6:12 Speaker 01 Lot of characters up there.
6:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, cer- certainly is. Okay, so you grew up in Perth, you, um, always had the, the desire to join the army that, that formed very early?
6:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was when I was, I had other ideas about a career and then in high school, but then I remember seeing. A mate who was a bit of an army nut and he was in cadets and he had this military magazine that had the Princess Gate siege.
6:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, the counter terrorist siege, people being rescued by the SAS in London. And I thought, that's pretty crazy. And I found out they were a military unit, which was even more surprising. Like, how can you be a military unit and do counter terrorism?
6:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:53 Speaker 01 So the more I read about as a kid, and there was no internet, it was just whatever you could find in the library. The more I was like, this looks pretty amazing. And I found out Australia had their own unit that we'd formed. And I remember at one point I opened the phone book and I looked for Campbell barracks and I rang the guardhouse. And I think it was in grade ten, I'm like, hey, look, I want to try and join the SAS, what do I have to do?
7:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:15 Speaker 01 There was just some guard, he's like, mate, I'm not telling you anything. Like, you've got to go through the army chains. So, um, yeah, I eventually ended up figuring out that I had to go through the army and apply to go to the officer training in Canberra and got in.
7:28 Speaker 00 Right, okay. And that was at seventeen?
7:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I left, I was applying when I was sixteen and then, um, by the end of kind of high school, I was seventeen and off I went.
7:39 Speaker 00 Okay, and that was your dream. And I think a lot of people were inspired by what they saw, because that was the first time SAS really came out of the shadows with that siege.
7:48 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah. Anything publicly, anyway.
7:51 Speaker 00 Everyone just looked at it and went, wow, who the fuck are these guys? Like, it was.
7:55 Speaker 01 And the same year I saw that book, also Bravo Two Zero came out,
7:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:00 Speaker 01 which was kind of the first modern SAS memoir, they just didn't write about any of this stuff. So he was the first guy that came out and wrote about the Gulf War.
8:09 Speaker 00 We had Andy McNab here on this.
8:12 Speaker 01 No way.
8:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I told him about that book and I'd read it thirty years ago and still could remember it.
8:18 Speaker 01 It's, it's, I remember reading it a couple of times at that age and just going, this is madness, I have to join.
8:25 Speaker 01 But um, and he got him to sign, he did a book tour in camera, go to sign it. But um, yeah, those two things were kind of what made me want to go that direction.
8:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay. And one other thing, I have read your book, so that don't cover up. You watch, what was it called? Tour of Duty, that song with the Rolling Stones playing in Vietnam or?
8:44 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
8:45 Speaker 00 What was that called?
8:46 Speaker 01 Paint it Black.
8:47 Speaker 00 Paint it Black. Tour of Duty.
8:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
8:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay.
8:50 Speaker 01 Great show.
8:51 Speaker 00 All right, so seventeen, you would have been very raw and innocent.
8:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, pretty young.
8:56 Speaker 00 How did you find the army experience? And just explain to people, like, we understand the concept of joining the army. But if you go down the course as an officer, because that's the course that you went. So you would have had to pass, yeah, a fairly high standard to get in. They don't accept anyone.
9:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:11 Speaker 00 What did you have to do?
9:12 Speaker 01 It was a bit tricky because I was at a, I was at just a basic kind of school in West Australia. We didn't really have any support outside of, um, you know, classes. It was just a basic school. So I had to get the right grades to get in. But the officer's stream is essentially if you go through, you'll get an undergraduate degree in something. So you spend three years doing that and then you get a year's worth of more direct kind of officer training. And you graduate as a platoon commander, which is about thirty people. So you're given a commission as a lieutenant. And then you go and join an army unit as a platoon commander, which is, you know, it's a big responsibility for your early twenties and.
9:51 Speaker 00 And the, the platoon that you'd be leading.
9:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:55 Speaker 00 You'd have some old hard heads in there.
9:56 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
9:57 Speaker 00 And you're the fresh face kid.
9:58 Speaker 01 My sergeant was, I think he was in his early thirties and I remember him just going, oh, I've got a new keen bloke, you know?
10:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
10:04 Speaker 01 But we became good mates and because you're, you have the technical training and they have the experience. And you've kind of got the leadership, uh, formal training. It just works.
10:14 Speaker 00 That relationship would be crucial.
10:15 Speaker 01 That relationship's a hundred percent crucial because he, he generates the support of all the soldiers. And you are kind of planning and working with your team leaders at the same time. Yeah.
10:26 Speaker 00 And did you find that you were enjoying it, the, the life of in the army?
10:30 Speaker 01 Because I loved it, yeah. I found Canberra hard. I didn't love Canberra. But after we left there, we went to an infantry unit in, um, Townsville.
10:37 Speaker 00 Yep.
10:38 Speaker 01 And that was a light infantry unit and we ended up doing deployments at East Timor. So joining and just going through the mechanics of of training for it and deploying and having the responsibilities of it, I really enjoyed it.
10:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:52 Speaker 00 And that deployment, cause there was a generation, or not a, not a generation, but we, your time in the army was a busy time by, by standards of, yeah, the generation beforehand.
11:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:03 Speaker 00 Because um that uh deployment in uh Timor, that was the first in, uh, there would have been other stuff that we're, we're not aware of, but that was the first major deployment, so.
11:12 Speaker 01 The ma- the most major combat deployment before then was Vietnam, which we stopped in the early seventies.
11:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:19 Speaker 01 And for really twenty years, there really wasn't much.
11:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:21 Speaker 01 And then we started some peacekeeping missions, so Rwanda, this is in the nineties, uh, you know, Rwanda and Somalia and a few others.
11:29 Speaker 00 Yep.
11:30 Speaker 01 And the guys that had been on those operations were kind of legendary.
11:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:33 Speaker 01 In the unit, cause there were no operations then. But East Timor started in nineteen ninety nine.
11:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:39 Speaker 01 The crisis there, and I was just finishing my training. And from that point on, for the next twenty years, the Australian military was constantly deployed.
11:48 Speaker 00 Out there, out there, being deployed.
11:50 Speaker 01 Pretty good timing, yeah.
11:51 Speaker 00 Yeah. Okay, so Timor, that would have been a good basis for you to get, to get some experience.
11:56 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah.
11:56 Speaker 00 Like there was stuff happening over there, but it was, uh, you weren't being dropped in the total chaos.
12:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I thi- and I think some people are disparaging about, so like, it's not real operations, you learn bad habits, but it is, you're still going through the mechanics of going over and doing your trade constantly for a six month deployment. So you get a lot of experience just in your present and doing your work for that entire time, so I thought it was a great deployment.
12:21 Speaker 00 So at what stage of your career did you wanna go to the Special Forces?
12:25 Speaker 01 Uh, you generally have to do two or three years as a, as a lieutenant or platoon commander, and then they'll take you just when you're about to become a captain. Um, but there was an SAS guy who deployed with my battalion. We went to uh the Solomon Isles for a peacekeeping mission in two thousand and three. And I was talking to him, I was like, oh, I might go, you know, play another year of footy and then I'll do it, I'll wait a bit longer. He's like, don't wait. You, the planets will never align, just go.
12:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:50 Speaker 01 So I applied the next year and went two thousand and four.
12:52 Speaker 00 How old were you?
12:53 Speaker 01 Uh, I think I was, I was twenty four.
12:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, pretty, pretty young, yeah.
12:57 Speaker 00 Yeah. Preparation for it, yeah, it's you're not talking, talking stuff that the public don't hear about, but the it's pretty grueling, the selection course.
13:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's um, it's pretty, it's bloody shocking. Like, it's three, the major one was about three weeks long.
13:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:14 Speaker 01 That has the really high fail rate.
13:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:17 Speaker 01 Um, and you just, you they're trying to see what you've got as a soldier when you're operating them, beyond your kind of limits with food and sleep and technical ability. And they'll put you in environments that you've never encountered and just see how you go.
13:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:33 Speaker 01 Whether you can kind of a- adapt to whatever the mission is. And so, yeah, I prepared and trained for it. I was waiting to do it that whole time I was in the unit and it was still pretty, I still found it hard.
13:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:45 Speaker 01 But it's a great, I I remember going through and going, well, if I don't pass, it's actually, there's nothing more I can say because it's a really fair process. You actually have a lot of eyes on you, a lot of people watching, taking notes.
13:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:58 Speaker 01 So I'm like, if it's, if it doesn't work this time, then it's probably fair. I can try again later. But um, but yeah, was able to get through on that selection call. There was no real info about how to prepare for it. There was a bit from the, there was like a training wing in special force and they gave you a training package, but a lot of it is character and temperament based, you know. So that's, that's a hard thing to kind of prepare for, I guess.
14:22 Speaker 00 And and put you in that time where they they burnt you out physically, mentally, lack of sleep and all that and see what decisions you make.
14:28 Speaker 01 Exactly.
14:29 Speaker 00 I think the thing that would freak me about it is that I can understand preparing yourself for it, but the sense I get looking from the outside and what's readily available to the public is you're not getting a lot of feedback either.
14:41 Speaker 01 No, no.
14:41 Speaker 00 So that that can play, that that can play with your mind.
14:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's just.
14:45 Speaker 00 Am I doing good?
14:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:46 Speaker 00 And nothing.
14:47 Speaker 01 And they would tell the instructors, like, you you were just to have a total mask of neutrality. It's very unsettling and no one. They actually don't even shout really. They're just, they're talking to you, but they're, they're intimidating people because of the, you know, they're highly capable, they're a bit older, they've always got combat experience. So to me, I was like, oh, what have I done?
15:08 Speaker 00 They can attack your insecurities just by the way they look at you.
15:11 Speaker 01 Oh, just they look at you, you know, like, oh, I didn't do that well, did I? Yeah.
15:15 Speaker 00 Now, as going in as an officer too, there would be additional pressures, I would imagine. Cause you'd have to, uh, have to, yeah, do the leadership part as well.
15:23 Speaker 01 Additional pressures and also that, that was the time I realised they're going, we're gonna like, this isn't a joke, you're gonna be in charge of people and if you get it wrong, people are gonna die. Yeah, people are gonna die. So that, I remember a few times seeing, oh, kind of, I'm in over my head here. I wasn't, I'm still quite young, I'm still quite junior, I was at least at that point. But after selection, if you get through, you do eighteen months of further training, which is where you really develop into a proper soldier. But yeah, the officer component, they take you aside, they get you to do a lot of planning, a lot of technically difficult missions when you haven't had sleep or anything like that. And they're just trying to see whether you can come up with a plan in a short period of time, communicate it well and execute.
16:08 Speaker 01 That's, that's all they're looking for.
16:10 Speaker 00 There was a lot of good stuff in, in your book, uh, Mission Ready, that was talking about keeping the plans simple. And I, I, I could see that with some of the, the policing plans and what, what's a mission? And the, the mission creep, there was examples about that.
16:24 Speaker 01 Always happens.
16:25 Speaker 00 And that's in that training phase, that's the type of things that you, you, you're learning. So how long before when you, you qualified for the SAS and in, in saying that, there's a, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's a small percentage that actually get through the selection process.
16:40 Speaker 01 Ten to twenty percent on average. Yeah, it's just a small room.
16:43 Speaker 00 And, and when you put, you're not grabbing average Joe citizen into the course and never, never run a kilometer in their life. You're getting, getting the tough guys that think they can do this, that prepare for it.
16:56 Speaker 01 I remember seeing on day one, I was just like, there's a lot of capable people there. They're, they're not there, you know.
17:02 Speaker 00 And there's, there's no, you know, shame in failing, just the fact that they step up and wanna have a go. So you've got people that are very committed and for such a small percentage, it says a lot about how hard the selection process is.
17:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I had, I've, I didn't go back twice. I did, I got it first time, but I've had mates who went back twice a few times and it just. It's just bloody hard. Not everyone gets there first time and injuries are common too.
17:26 Speaker 00 After, so you were based over in Perth.
17:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:29 Speaker 00 When did you get deployed in uh special forces?
17:32 Speaker 01 So the the first deployment was at the, towards the end of our training, the RSM counter goes, hey, we're we're doing a job, uh we're taking one of the, I think it was one of the generals into Iraq, you're gonna lead the security detachment.
17:47 Speaker 00 Yep.
17:47 Speaker 01 That goes, I didn't, I hadn't been to the Middle East, I was like, so I went home, we started planning this job and I just had no idea the names of the bases and you know, there's, it takes a bit of familiarity to get used to where you enter the the Middle East and how you fly in and so we planned this job and we ended up taking, it was me and about six or seven guys.
18:07 Speaker 00 Yep.
18:07 Speaker 01 We ended up escorting a general, going over and reconning all the sites and then.
18:11 Speaker 00 So close personal protection.
18:12 Speaker 01 Close personal protection and then take him through these different parts of Afghanistan and Iraq. And that was a real eye opener. It was two thousand and five. And I can still remember landing in Baghdad and just seeing how, how much that place was just in disarray.
18:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:29 Speaker 01 And Afghanistan, I I had mates that were deployed there at that time. They were talking about the fighting that was happening and we were kind of none the wiser back in Australia, we didn't know.
18:39 Speaker 00 So that was your your first deployment to the Middle East. How how many tours did you you do?
18:45 Speaker 01 Ten in total and probably half of those were to the Middle East, probably six were about to the Middle East.
18:50 Speaker 00 Okay. When uh when was the next time you went over there after the close personal protection? When did you go over there?
18:56 Speaker 01 So over a year, I I did about three or four of those close, those jobs kind of going in and out, but then we had a deployment to East Timor and I went over to do uh bodyguard work for the president.
19:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:09 Speaker 01 So we went over and helped train his team and did bodyguard work for him. Then there was the Renato job where we flew a squadron in to try and apprehend this rebel that was in East Timor. So we're there for another six months. And then at the end of that, my squadron commander, um Ben Prong is like, hey, I think we've got a slot for the next rotation in Afghanistan for you to be a true commander.
19:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:34 Speaker 01 Um with uh one squadron. And so uh we opened the, you know, we we're gonna be basically a filler rotation at the end of the summer fighting season going into winter. Um. So yeah, we planned it and um raised a new troop and off we went.
19:51 Speaker 00 Right.
19:52 Speaker 01 Actually, it was E troop, which is a, that's two squad or nothing. Yeah. So yeah, we formed under E troop and um off we went. We're a composite troop.
20:01 Speaker 00 Okay. And what what was your role within that that troop when you say a troop? So how many men were you leading?
20:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we're about.
20:06 Speaker 00 And what was your missions and?
20:08 Speaker 01 We were about a team of thirty, so that's about four teams of six and then the headquarters on which I'm
20:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:15 Speaker 01 Uh, in a part of. And so I was the true commander, but also the the team leaders are experienced. Patrol commanders, they might be sergeants or corporals who have been in the unit for quite a number of years. So they were experienced and one of them um was Matthew Locke, sergeant, who'd fought with Ben Robert Smith.
20:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:34 Speaker 01 In in Afghanistan in two thousand and five, just beforehand.
20:38 Speaker 00 Right.
20:38 Speaker 01 Two thousand and six. Um. So we had plenty of experience in the team and we just, our first mission. This is still in the early stages of Afghanistan, was kind of uh, a combination of what they call advanced force operations where they might be seeking to do a major operation in a valley to secure it. And one of the things our unit's good at is reconnaissance and intelligence collection. So we might visit that area and collect a whole bunch of intelligence by putting in overwatch posts or going uh on patrols at night behind enemy lines. Which is like we call it close target reconnaissance. And it's a really classic kind of SAS. It's a very old school jungles of Borneo and Vietnam, that type of work.
21:23 Speaker 01 But we did some of that to try and discover what was happening behind enemy lines in these important valleys.
21:28 Speaker 00 Hmm. And how how did going in that environment suit you personally? Did you you feel ready for it?
21:34 Speaker 01 Felt like I was trained for it and ready for it. I was excited by it. I'd just never seen, we'd been deployed, but this was a real.
21:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:41 Speaker 01 A real shooting match. We kind of.
21:43 Speaker 00 Consequences.
21:44 Speaker 01 It was it was just a bit, yeah, it was definitely um. And I remember at the start of that tour, I think it was the first Australian casualty since Andy Russell in two thousand and two was uh, Poppy Pearce. I think he was a Cav guy that was killed by an IED strike.
22:02 Speaker 00 Hmm.
22:02 Speaker 01 Which is a roadside bomb. Killed by a roadside bomb in an Australian armored vehicle. And I remember seeing, I remember being at the gate and seeing them tow that vehicle back in. It was destroyed. And I was like, this is a real, this is a real conflict. Yeah.
22:15 Speaker 00 Yeah. And it's one thing I would imagine in an environment where you know you're going into a danger zone. But with those roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices, you'd always be, there'd always be a tension in there.
22:30 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
22:31 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:32 Speaker 01 Yeah. And it got worse as the years went on. They got the, the explosives and triggers got more advanced to defeat our kind of mechanisms. And by the end of my tours, there were now the foot based ones. So
22:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:45 Speaker 01 In the, in the early stages, more vehicle based mines. But then after that, it was, you'd be on foot and get blown up.
22:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:53 Speaker 01 And so I didn't work on a, walk on a bloody dirt track for, you know, six months after I got home.
23:00 Speaker 01 I'd be walking through the bush.
23:01 Speaker 00 Yeah. Tiptoeing. Uh, but, and when did the missions, like what you were talking about, the style of mission you were doing there? Uh, my sense of it, watching from the outside, it started to change or evolved into more, you know, targeting, capturing certain people.
23:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:17 Speaker 00 Capture kill missions.
23:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. So one, a big turning point was, we're kind of prosecuting this war. We're kind of doing our best with, um, vehicle and foot insertions. And then the, uh, the Obama administration is looking at how they're going to seize control back over Afghanistan. So they'd kind of worked on Iraq in two thousand and seven. They'd done a surge there of troops and largely kind of stabilized it a bit.
23:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:42 Speaker 01 They wanted to replicate that in Afghanistan. And it was, I mean, it was kind of too late, but they flooded the place with an extra, I think it was thirty to fifty thousand troops.
23:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:53 Speaker 01 But the most important thing is they bought a lot of, uh, mobility assets. So helicopters, uh, drones, things that can move you around the battlefield. And get you into areas that were, previously you could only get there by vehicle.
24:06 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:06 Speaker 01 It's, it's bad terrain to get, uh, go through choke points and get bombed.
24:11 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah.
24:12 Speaker 01 So by that point, this new level of mobility arrived and we also had.
24:18 Speaker 01 More advanced targeting capabilities. So for example, if someone was carrying a mobile phone, it was much easier to find them. We had some of those capabilities in our task force, whereas before we kind of didn't. So we've got more extra mobility, better targeting capabilities. So we effectively, we started to build out and we followed the Americans because they were doing what they call counter leadership operations. And this kind of came from Iraq where they were, they would get their tier one, their high level special ops unit, so SEAL Team Six and Delta Force, and they would chase the top level commanders in Iraq and they'd just be trying to kill the top, the kind of top level guys. And
24:59 Speaker 01 they called it kind of industrial level counter, counter leadership operations. We kind of tried to follow that. We were doing it on a tight budget being Australians. We built what they called a JPEL, which is a, it's a horrible military acronym, Joint Prioritised Effects List. It was a kill list. Yeah. It was a list of guys that were deemed through intelligence operations to be enemy. Yep. And we were given legal authorization to target and kill, kill or capture those individuals. And so all of a sudden, the unit went from what you would call pretty traditional role around reconnaissance and combat occasionally, but mostly kind of bit
25:42 Speaker 01 of reconnaissance missions and long range patrolling into a far more aggressive, we're actually chasing and killing and landing on troops and fighting them. And so that was the kind of, it evolved completely to that style of operation over kind of three, four years. Yeah. It was, it was very different. But the problem was, is was then it just distorted how we're running operations, became how many you could kill, how many of that list you could take out. That. Each squadron trying to compete with the others. But I don't think, I remember looking at the list and one of my mates made a joke, he's like, this guy's in charge of three blokes. Hmm. He's literally a Lance Corporal in the Australian Army. Yeah, we're taking out Lance Corporal.
26:24 Speaker 01 What, what are we doing here? So, um, yeah, I think that was a. I think that was a mistake. I think we thought we were doing good work. I don't think it was making much difference.
26:34 Speaker 00 At at the time you're over there and it's such a complex thing, you know, we could talk for days about it. But at the time that you're over there, did you believe in the mission? Like you you spent like in years, how many years span that did you spend in Afghanistan?
26:49 Speaker 01 I think I spent two years there.
26:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:51 Speaker 01 About two years.
26:52 Speaker 00 So, yeah, you're battle hardened, you've been there, you've done that, you've seen that, you've seen the horrors of war. You you've been upfront looking at it. Did you believe in the mission that you were doing at the time? Like the or the way that was being approached?
27:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, I I knew it kind of was hanging in the balance. In the early stages, I thought, no, we'll win this.
27:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:11 Speaker 01 Then I realised it was, no, this is actually hanging the balance a bit. And part of it was because of Iraq. A lot of resources were going there. We were just doing our best. Towards the end, though, the thing that changed my mind materially was it was just an open source book written by Bob Woodward, who's the journalist that broke the Watergate scandal.
27:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:32 Speaker 01 He has close access to all of the presidential inner circle.
27:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
27:37 Speaker 01 He interviews him, he writes a book. The book will come out based on interviews he's only done a month or two earlier. So they're very contemporary. And he discussed the process behind the surge planning
27:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:47 Speaker 01 that Obama went through. And when I was reading it, it was it was clear that there was the political interest in continuing the war was gone.
27:56 Speaker 00 Right.
27:57 Speaker 01 Um. And that's the point where I was like, this is really bad.
28:00 Speaker 00 What are we doing?
28:00 Speaker 01 We're fighting our arse off and the people who are actually in charge don't want us to be fighting.
28:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:06 Speaker 01 And that's when I realised we're in we're in a bit of trouble here.
28:08 Speaker 00 Yeah. And that you've mentioned in in the book that about mission creep and how the mission
28:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:14 Speaker 00 mission changes and
28:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:16 Speaker 00 the importance of, yeah, staying true to what the mission is about.
28:20 Speaker 01 Yep.
28:20 Speaker 00 And that's what you were seeing uh seeing over there?
28:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a confusion over what what our role was.
28:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
28:28 Speaker 01 Because when we started, it was, okay, we're gonna go kill or capture the guys that perpetrated September eleven. Then it was, okay, we're gonna get this militia that are anti coalition, they're Taliban, they're bad, you know, we're gonna go get them. And then we stayed on the Taliban for years. There were actually still some Al Qaeda guys when, when I went there.
28:48 Speaker 00 Right.
28:48 Speaker 01 That had come out of other, other battlefields.
28:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:51 Speaker 01 And arrived and they were a real handful. They were, they were really good. But most of our fighting concentrated on the Taliban, which were, they're pretty nasty.
29:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:01 Speaker 01 But they're not, uh, they're not an international threat. They're a local threat. So, yeah, I think, um, we just weren't, we weren't paying attention. I don't think our politicians were being fed the wrong information.
29:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:14 Speaker 01 And, uh, I think a lot of journalists were afraid to challenge what we were doing.
29:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:20 Speaker 01 And we just kind of just drifted along for four or five years.
29:23 Speaker 00 It's that group think.
29:24 Speaker 01 It is. It's like, it must be important if we've got this many people and everyone's.
29:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:28 Speaker 01 People are getting killed.
29:29 Speaker 00 Let's, let's not, uh, not question it.
29:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, it must be important.
29:33 Speaker 00 When, when did it get to the, the point of, yeah, winning the hearts and minds of the people too? Cause that, that adds a complexity to war. Like it's,
29:41 Speaker 01 I laughed.
29:42 Speaker 00 You, you, you wanna see the bad guys over there, we're the good guys and we fight the bad guys. But when you're winning the hearts and minds of the population.
29:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is the other thing that made me really think we're in a bit of strife here. I remember seeing the directive for that. So this is another.
29:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:57 Speaker 01 Change in the strategy. We went from all these targeted missions to counter insurgency. Um, there was this hope that we could win, um, applying this strategy where we, we would protect the population. Thereby kind of separating the insurgents from the popular. It's just a very flawed, like it sounds good in theory, but it only works if you can control the borders of that place. And you've got a functioning kind of replacement for the, for the Taliban. We didn't have any of those things. We had Pakistan. Bordering Afghanistan with thousands of fighting age males just able to come across whenever they wanted.
30:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:33 Speaker 01 Um. So this uh this notion that we could just have counterinsurgency, protect the population and win, was just a terrible idea.
30:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
30:41 Speaker 01 And they were talking about, I remember at one point they're going, you know, we're gonna award medals to soldiers that uh show restraint in combat. And I was just like, what are you talking about?
30:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:51 Speaker 01 You're asking us to do something we have no ability to implement.
30:55 Speaker 00 That's uh that I would imagine that would be uh mess your mind up in in the way that you approach things. And I I I know from policing, I'd I'd look at what the role, the traditional role of army, what I saw army as. Yeah, okay, clearly defined roles.
31:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:10 Speaker 00 Policing is hard because we're working within the community and and that very thing that we're gonna do.
31:14 Speaker 01 It's a whole other job.
31:15 Speaker 00 It makes you do it with your hands tied behind your back.
31:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:18 Speaker 00 And, yeah, you're you're playing what we're doing in policing on steroids in a war zone.
31:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:24 Speaker 00 And I could imagine how it uh does uh cause uh angst amongst the uh amongst the troops.
31:29 Speaker 01 They used to call, I think the S- the S- uh the SEALs or CAG would call themselves Baghdad SWAT. Cause they were just going in, doing all these kind of SWAT style missions. Really flawed. Someone should have just looked at it and gone, this, this is not gonna work.
31:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:44 Speaker 01 And it was clear it wasn't gonna work. At a certain point, it was like, I remember seeing an assessment on counterinsurgency, like for this to work, we're gonna need uh four hundred thousand troops and at least a decade of time.
31:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:57 Speaker 01 And it was something like a trillion dollars. And I was like, there's no, this is not gonna work, guys. Just let it go, just.
32:03 Speaker 00 That that other type of restrictions and uh it's my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, but also stop the missions going at night when you have the advantage of night vision and everything else. And uh yeah, that's a bit confronting to the local population, you scary dudes turning up at night. And so, okay, let's send you in during the day.
32:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's it you're just telling your troops that you're only half serious about the war.
32:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
32:28 Speaker 01 If you're gonna choose, you know, pick and choose when you actually prosecute your missions. Based on offending a population, then guess what, you're not
32:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
32:37 Speaker 01 Serious about the war.
32:38 Speaker 00 And the other factor, the fatigue factor, I I think would come in, I'm not just talking physical, I'm talking the emotional fatigue.
32:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:46 Speaker 00 How long the war went on. I I'm surprised a couple of blokes that I've met, how many times they were deployed and for how long a period. It's just, it's gonna, it's gonna distort your view on a lot of things.
32:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I I remember finding a quote from Robert Hill in, I think it was two thousand and three. Where he was asked about fatigue on special forces.
33:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:08 Speaker 01 Because they'd been in East Timor, then Afghanistan and then Iraq. And he's like, we, it is a lot, they've been through a lot in the last couple of years, so we're gonna monitor and, you know. That was in two thousand and three, that war went on for another decade.
33:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, it it says a lot, doesn't it?
33:23 Speaker 01 Well, I know after doing, uh, kind of all the East Timor deployments and then one tour. And I had, I had PTSD after one of the tours, just because I'd witnessed um the fatality. And I remember thinking, and I recovered eventually, but I remember thinking, if that's one person in one tour, you can imagine what repeated exposure to that sort of thing is gonna do.
33:45 Speaker 00 And and the makeup of the type of people, that yourself included, you're not gonna put your hand up in that environment. Like, you've you've worked hard to get there, you're not warmongers, but you're not gonna let your mates go over there and say, oh, I need some downtime. I saw it in policing, I I see, see the comparisons to a lesser degree. I I think what you guys do is on steroids compared to, compared to policing. But I'd see blokes burn themselves out and women burn themselves out because they didn't wanna let their team, team down. And, yeah, smart play, but we're not all smart, would be, yeah, put your hand up, take a break, six months, we'll get you back.
34:21 Speaker 01 Exactly.
34:22 Speaker 00 Feel like new, but that's not in in the makeup of the people that do this type, these type of things.
34:27 Speaker 01 No, and and the.
34:30 Speaker 01 The heads of the military knew about this.
34:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:33 Speaker 01 They just didn't wanna, they didn't either know how to address it or unwilling to address that issue.
34:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:40 Speaker 01 And um, and then all of a sudden you've got behavioural issues in troops.
34:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, yeah, the, the war crimes allegations, and that's all they are at this stage. You, you're happy for us to just touch, touch on that. I'm, I'm mindful matters before the court, so we're not gonna cross any, uh, any barriers there.
34:58 Speaker 01 Hmm.
34:58 Speaker 00 My observation, just to start the conversation, it seems to polarise people. If it comes up, that people's in, you know, in the camp for or against, as in it's outrageous what these soldiers have done. Or the other people are just, how, why are we judging these people? But everyone seems to have a strong reaction.
35:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:17 Speaker 00 I try to take a more cautionary step back and go, well, I don't wanna judge anyone in an environment that I'm not familiar with. And that's what I, I caution anyone that's saying this is outrageous if they've done that. Well, hold it, let's just take a step back and let's look at the environment that they, they worked in. The other thing I don't like, and I saw this in police, and I think it, it played in part on, on me too. That tough jobs, you get sent to do the tough jobs. If it goes well, everyone's standing beside you. If it, it goes bad in any way, oh, what's, what's he, he done that for? And I can't help but watching what was happening to guys over there going, okay, well, if we got it wrong. It's not just the individuals got it wrong.
36:01 Speaker 00 There's, yeah, it's a military organisation, there's a structure of command.
36:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:06 Speaker 00 How come no one up that level is, uh, being called into account?
36:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and there's, there's so many like layers to this, and it's such an emotive topic. And I've had so many people at all levels of society.
36:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
36:19 Speaker 01 Talks to me about it, everyone from members of parliament, all the way through to lawyers, through to every, just and the average person on the street talking about this. And I reckon probably ninety nine percent of people are very forgiving
36:34 Speaker 00 Hmm.
36:35 Speaker 01 of Australian soldiers that have been deployed and been asked to do a hard job. So there's that. There's also the other side where if, I, I just, if, if you're, uh, a D P P or whoever authorises an arrest. You wouldn't do, you wouldn't arrest an Australian war hero unless you had a pretty substantial brief of evidence, would you? So there's that. And then the, the, the allegations that have been pitted. And it's not just aimed at one person. This is gonna be, this is uh two people at the moment, possibly more. Some of them are quite severe. They're pretty severe and beyond, if they're true, beyond what you would need to apply in a war zone.
37:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:15 Speaker 01 So there's like, there's that part of it. It's like possible wrongdoing at that level. Then there's the process by which we got there, which was a bit of a shambles. I don't know how, if you're investigating. Uh war crimes, this is kind of unparalleled, but the Brearton inquiry.
37:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:30 Speaker 01 If you're investigating something like that and you uncover some type of an offence which is as serious as that. Surely that would be handed over to federal police or something like that. I imagine.
37:42 Speaker 00 It, it, it should be. Look, this is uncharted territory. That, that, that's the thing. And, and the legislation and the environment and. Having prosecutions for war crimes here in Australia for situations that have happened in another country.
37:57 Speaker 01 Cause it even apply to Australian war.
37:57 Speaker 00 In another jurisdiction. I, I think, yeah, we're really testing, testing the uh, testing the legislation.
38:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:05 Speaker 00 I have concerns, a, a lot of it, I think, I, I see this and I'll use this analogy. So we're not talking specifically uh. You're the situation with the uh war crimes. But I remember there was, and this is going back, it's pre-Royal Commission days in, in the cops. But armed robberies were the thing. People were getting killed in armed robberies. That was, you know, banks were being held up, armour guards and all that. It was out of control. Uh like we've got the gang wars now uh in, in Sydney. They put together a strike force team of all the crazy lunatics from the armed holdup squad. And said, stop these um armed robberies.
38:42 Speaker 01 We stopped them.
38:42 Speaker 00 They stopped them. But then people were looking, oh, years down the track. I can't believe you put all these people of a personality type that were gonna stop them.
38:54 Speaker 01 What did you think was gonna happen?
38:55 Speaker 00 They knew what was gonna happen. They celebrated it when, when it happened. But when the Royal Commission came in or other inquiries or complaints came in, the people that condoned it stepped back and gone. Look at these lunatics, look at what they've done.
39:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:10 Speaker 00 I don't know if that's what's happened with with the war war crimes, but a a allegation, I keep put, I should put allegations beforehand. But I get the sense, the way you guys operate, people know what goes on. It's not like it's just sort of, oh, this has happened, surprise, surprise. How did it go on so long if if things untoward were were going on? And they're they're the concerns I I have about it.
39:34 Speaker 01 Well, if you're if you're given a medal because you're you're showing outstanding leadership of an organisation.
39:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:41 Speaker 01 It implies that you're responsible for the good things they've done. And therefore, if they've done bad things, then you either should have known and didn't.
39:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:51 Speaker 01 Or did know and turned a blind eye. So which one is it? Like, I don't, I I think there's a that is a whole another issue is this, there's this.
39:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:59 Speaker 01 Concentrated justice.
40:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
40:01 Speaker 01 Issue, but then there's all these other accountability components, which I I just don't think is going to be addressed. And this is why I think Australians are pretty furious about the the whole issue. Because I see it as being a us against them type issue.
40:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. I I think the, you know, the average person is thinking, okay, we know the sacrifices soldiers make. I don't think they they fully understand the full sacrifices that that documentary that's going around bravery and betrayal.
40:32 Speaker 01 Hmm.
40:33 Speaker 00 Tells of the story very well. How many deployments people are making?
40:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:36 Speaker 00 What what your actual mission is. It's not you guys are sitting sitting there in the fat lady's arms bar or whatever, just having having a drink. And you get called out once every six months.
40:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:46 Speaker 00 That was, you know, you guys were being deployed constantly and it's got to take a toll.
40:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:52 Speaker 00 And it's not something like in this day and age that we can't go, oh, we didn't see that happening. So, yeah, there's a a lot of a lot of areas that uh concern me about it.
41:04 Speaker 01 The the counter to it would be, well, you're selected and trained for those traits to be able to withstand.
41:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:11 Speaker 01 You know, withstand all that and still operate professionally. That's, that would be a comeback. And the problem is though, that there was clear evidence, and this will be, this will eventually all come out, that soldiers were breaking down psychologically. And this, you, you would know this from talking to your son, I'm sure. And I know this from talking to a psych who since left the military but was involved in reality TV. He's like, we could see what was happening.
41:38 Speaker 00 Yeah.
41:39 Speaker 01 And we told commanders about it, but yeah, well, we, we didn't know how to address it. It was largely ignored by command.
41:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. So there, there's, without not judging, I don't know what's happened. But there's mitigating circumstances in the whole thing, putting it in context, what, what was happening and for us to judge. And then I, I just, I disgusted by the way, Ben Robert Smith was hung out the dry with that arrest. What, what was that about? Like, that was a, that was a statement. It was clearly leaked to the media.
42:14 Speaker 01 How are the circumstances of an arrest normally handled, is it?
42:17 Speaker 00 There, there's a whole, whole range. If, if you got, you know, the president of the, the bikie chapter that's trying to skip over to the, the Middle East.
42:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:25 Speaker 00 You'd probably arrest him at the airport when he got, got to the airport.
42:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:28 Speaker 00 But you don't have to notify the media.
42:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:31 Speaker 00 And like, it's not like he can hide.
42:33 Speaker 01 It sticks out a bit, yeah.
42:34 Speaker 00 He, he's a big, he's a big unit.
42:36 Speaker 01 Hmm.
42:37 Speaker 00 I think it could have been done and I think it would have given everyone a lot more faith that the system. And let's put our faith in the system. Let's hope the system works whichever way it, it swings. But more faith in the system if, if they did it in a more balanced, fair way.
42:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:52 Speaker 00 I, I'm sure, and these solicitors come out and said, um, that, yeah, they would have handed themselves in. I'm sure that would have been the case. He's not gonna, not gonna run and hide.
43:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:02 Speaker 00 Yeah. He had plenty of opportunity to do that if he felt the need to.
43:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I know, I think I heard the, the head of the AFP saying they wanted to make sure that. People who go through the airport are then screened at least. Like, I don't know if that's legit. Like, I don't know. Yeah.
43:18 Speaker 00 It would have been a big media story if Ben hijacked the plane and then flew to a neutral country.
43:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:25 Speaker 00 Um, look, I, we sit here and laugh about it. I, I, I feel for the guys there, the guys that are caught up in it. When your own organisation is turning on you, there's an isolation.
43:35 Speaker 01 Hmm.
43:36 Speaker 00 You blokes have served overseas, seen and done what you've done, and then to be separated from the group, I think that would be hard.
43:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:42 Speaker 00 When these inquiries were going on, my understanding is that you weren't allowed to communicate or anyone that was being investigated, you couldn't communicate with others. And so, yeah, isolation.
43:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I had a lot of mates that were required to present as witnesses in the civil trial.
43:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
43:59 Speaker 01 And so they, they had to go and, and be cross-examined by these top silks.
44:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:06 Speaker 01 Over issues, over things that had happened a long time ago, a lot of them didn't want to remember it. It was just, it's, it's been hard for everyone. And it's also been this retrograde, like going back over a topic no one wants to remember.
44:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
44:20 Speaker 01 It's a bit of a trauma for everyone who was involved, I think. And I just don't, I've said this before, and it was, it wasn't well received by some of my mates, but I don't know who's going to win out of this. I don't know, because there's the justice component, you have to make sure justice is served. There's all these other issues that come out of it, everything from Australia's international reputation through to recruiting and all these other things. I just don't know. Yeah, I don't know how you would tackle it.
44:48 Speaker 00 My assessment is no one's going to win. It's sad. It's, um, yeah, uh, uh, people won't win in this. That's, uh, yeah, if, if crimes have been committed, no, no one wins. Yes, we're, we're showing that we've got integrity if we can prosecute our own, but at, at what price? Yeah.
45:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:06 Speaker 00 It's it's it's a difficult one and I I feel for you guys that it puts pressure and you see some division in in in the squad or different different things and people turning on each other and.
45:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:16 Speaker 00 What you've been through, the one thing that you had was that you could rely on your your mates and that sort of. I and I I do understand that I speak strongly with emotion about it because it's. I felt the same thing in the police and and yeah, with with my story being run out of the police, I was in the cops for over thirty years. That was my world. And then all of a sudden overnight, I'm not allowed to speak to any cops. Cops aren't allowed to speak to me.
45:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:41 Speaker 00 And that isolation from from an organisation that it really impacts on you.
45:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:47 Speaker 00 Dealing with what you're you guys are dealing with, the PTSD and yeah, the moral injury that you have if you you've been doing it long and long enough to. Yeah, it just all adds to adds to the pressure.
45:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, because there is that that contract being that we'll, you know, we'll risk our lives, but the deal is that we. You look after us, like we'll do the right thing, you look after. So just feels like that has broken down and, you know, without knowing exactly what. Is is happened here, but yeah, it makes it hard.
46:16 Speaker 00 And it perhaps could have been done, everything that has been done could have been done, but more in a considered way.
46:22 Speaker 01 More more considered and more equal.
46:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, it would have been would have been better. Look, it's it's a tough one. I I wonder how, yeah, people are going to look, yeah, we're we're. Short with army, I'm going to hit you up in part two about bringing back national service. I'm not sure we'll get it across the line, but I I think it's. And I'm not saying it's, yeah, but. Yeah, if we're short, we're short police, uh, we can't attract people joining police. We're struggling with that. We got shortfalls in the in the military and that's, yeah, these type of service jobs, we we're just not seem to attract. Track people and I I wonder with the way it's played out with the the war crimes.
47:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have to wonder. Like, I don't I don't know how much of an impact it would have. I. I think you you would think the economy is a bigger driver. Overall, like higher unemployment, we generally get to pick up a lot more.
47:14 Speaker 00 Yeah. The economy goes down.
47:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, one plus, yeah.
47:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:18 Speaker 01 So, um, yeah, that's a factor, I guess, yeah.
47:21 Speaker 00 Um, with the your journey from when you got out of the army, what did you baggage did you carry away?
47:27 Speaker 01 Uh, I was, I felt a bit, um.
47:34 Speaker 01 I was a bit dismayed because I was really glad that I'd gotten to do the very thing that I kind of set out to do.
47:40 Speaker 00 Yep.
47:40 Speaker 01 I was disappointed about how things had unfolded overseas towards the end. I was like, this is clearly a, this is a mistake.
47:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:49 Speaker 01 Um, and I also remember being that kind of fork in the road going, okay, you're going to commit to a career now. Where you're going to be in Canberra lot and you're going to be a officer and you're going to be away from that coalface and I, I just didn't want to do it. I didn't have it in me. And I'd also, I'd also lost a lot of respect for a lot of ladies because I was like, I just, I'd seen behind the, I have a sausages being made and I just didn't love it. So, um, I was looking at, uh, I was looking at US business schools. I wanted to kind of, if I was going to jump out of a great career, I wanted to try and jump to something else great and then settle on trying to apply for some US schools and, um, I kind of did it in secret. I studied.
48:34 Speaker 00 And this is when you're still in, in the army. What, what rank did you retire at?
48:38 Speaker 01 Uh, so I, I left the regiment at the end of two thousand and ten and went to Duntr- back to Duntrun as a trainer for a year and a half and I was a major.
48:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
48:47 Speaker 01 At that point.
48:48 Speaker 00 Okay.
48:48 Speaker 01 Um, and then when I was in Duntrun, I was applying to go to the US business schools.
48:54 Speaker 00 Right. So you, you'd made the decision to, uh, to.
48:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, I had, yeah.
48:58 Speaker 00 And there, there's something, when you've been in the army that long, there's a structure that you, you just become accustomed to.
49:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:06 Speaker 00 It's your institutionalized basically. I, I saw my son come back from a, uh, a deployment just where he's on the boats out at Darwin.
49:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:15 Speaker 00 He came back and he, he'd been working hard at uni, had, you know, deployed and he had free time and he didn't know what to do. He was staying at my place. We hadn't, hadn't caught up and he's just going, I don't know what to do. I can do whatever I want. And that, that played with him and, and you do become that structured in that, in that environment.
49:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:34 Speaker 00 What about post-traumatic stress? Did you have issues from your, your combat service?
49:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I did. So I had, I had some post-traumatic stress after my first combat tour in two thousand and seven. I just remember taking on these unusual symptoms like, um, couldn't concentrate, was unable to sleep. Depression, just, just didn't feel anything. And so I I've talked to a neuroscientist about it, I talk about in this book and he's like, look, you you've, this is what's happened to your brain while you've been trying to fight and survive. And and the way to bring everything back into balance is over time, just apply yourself at these fundamentals. And it was kind of diet, exercise and rest, starting with that. Exercise kind of acting as an antidepressant and
50:20 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:20 Speaker 01 Uh, your diet can clean up your all your hormonal balances and sleep again for repair because we just had no sleep.
50:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:27 Speaker 01 Um, and it kind of works like it was that and some therapy, it kind of did make a a big difference. And over time, I realized that those things are just the basics you've got to really kind of stick to.
50:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:39 Speaker 01 Just to try and keep yourself in in good shape and um, less likely to fall laps into so any sort of mental health issue or just keep high performance.
50:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:49 Speaker 01 So that's kind of what I learned from that. But I was still burned out. I remember being at Duntrun, I was still quite burned out. I couldn't do long days. I was just naked. And when by the time I got out of the environment, went to business school, which was two years full time study. Yeah, I reckon I slept like nine hours a night for two years straight.
51:05 Speaker 00 Well, you do know that.
51:06 Speaker 01 That's buggered, yeah.
51:07 Speaker 00 That sleep, you you think you don't.
51:09 Speaker 01 I didn't have kids either, so I got heaps of sleep, you know.
51:11 Speaker 00 Oh, you you need that sleep when you when you got kids.
51:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:15 Speaker 00 But you talk about the the healthy lifestyle, the diet and all that.
51:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:18 Speaker 00 I I look at it and I I've seen people that have had post traumatic stress and and and I've never seen one that's super fit. Yeah, like, and and, yeah, it is a is that that special power that if you can motivate yourself enough to, yeah, get out and train, uh, it it helps. And that's that's just one aspect of it. It's not the the sole fix.
51:40 Speaker 01 No.
51:40 Speaker 00 But every time I see someone that's suffering post traumatic stress or slightly depressed.
51:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:45 Speaker 00 It's just they're not feeling good about themselves. They're they're just carrying a little bit of extra weight or just feel sluggish.
51:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:52 Speaker 00 And that's a that that routine.
51:54 Speaker 01 And it's not, I don't think it's uncommon for people to fall into that kind of rut during their life. Soldier or otherwise, you know, I think it happens to people, but um. Yeah, there's a guy, I've got a mate who was SAS, two, two guys especially, three really, uh, the Prog Brothers and uh, Tim Curtis that wrote the Resilient Shield.
52:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
52:13 Speaker 01 And they talk about those layers, like the diet, exercise, rest, the social layer and spiritual. Like it just talks about how you can kind of protect yourself just by laying these basic habits down. Yeah.
52:25 Speaker 00 Is this something that's the army are starting to understand to? Like, is this or is it more just?
52:31 Speaker 01 They put more uh, kind of science behind it. They've got, I know there's research organizations in the military that do it. They raised a performance unit in SAS.
52:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
52:40 Speaker 01 Um, so there's more of an interest in it for sure. They're trying to treat it more like a professional sport as well.
52:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, um, we'll, we'll finish up part one in a sec, but I just, the, you join the army.
52:51 Speaker 01 Hmm.
52:52 Speaker 00 They break you down, they build you, they mold you to what you want.
52:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:55 Speaker 00 And then when you walk out, you come, you step out. I've always thought, no, I think this is the same with police. I think it would be a better, better place that, yeah, six months to join the police or whatever, ever it takes. Maybe three months when you're leaving the police that they
53:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:12 Speaker 00 help you integrate back into society.
53:13 Speaker 01 Yep.
53:14 Speaker 00 And probably more so with the army. Do you think there's, there's space there for, for that?
53:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've talked, I've, uh, I bang my bloody fist on the tail about this all the time. The, the US had a GI bill that they released at the end of World War Two because they had.
53:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's right.
53:29 Speaker 01 They had millions of people coming out of uniform that were, you know, veterans. They're worried about another depression because of unemployment. Um, so they introduced this bill, which would, it would pay for tuition and board basically for veterans to be able to study in all these American institutions. And they had this huge influx of highly trained veterans entering business.
53:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:53 Speaker 01 And they were, and they were part of that industrial boom from post-World War Two.
53:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:58 Speaker 01 And became titans of industry, so. They did some um some calculations on it later. They think the return investment of that G I bill was about seventeen dollars on each dollar.
54:09 Speaker 00 Okay, so it was.
54:10 Speaker 01 And and the social issues it saved by uh giving people that opportunity to transition and not have to worry about an income for a bit. I've been saying for ages in Australia, we need to have something similar. And when I left, uh uh it's a good example. I went through a American institution with really high tuition bills. It was two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars and I've got no support for it. I've got like a there's two thousand dollar training bill.
54:35 Speaker 00 I I.
54:36 Speaker 01 It's just nothing, you know.
54:37 Speaker 00 We'll talk about that in part two, but when I was reading your your first book and what you were setting out to do, I couldn't believe what you had to do to get into that bit Wharton um.
54:48 Speaker 01 It was unbelievable.
54:48 Speaker 00 School.
54:49 Speaker 01 It was.
54:49 Speaker 00 And and the amount of practice you had to do and the type of thing.
54:52 Speaker 01 It was a it was probably a part time job for about eighteen months just to get into the school.
54:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, I I was blown away.
54:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:59 Speaker 00 That's why I'm thinking you're you're a.
55:00 Speaker 01 It would have helped if I was actually good at the test I was taking.
55:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, that that aside, you really had to put the effort in. Look, we'll we'll have a break and when we get back, part two, we're going to talk about your life post military. But I'd also like to touch on your your thoughts on a couple of things that I I'm interested in. The world affairs at the moment, like what's the future of of modern war warfare? And the rise, and I I'm just seeing it of extreme ideology, you know, when the the right's this far, the left's that far, and my concern what that creates in a in a society.
55:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:33 Speaker 00 You've worked in all these different places where you've seen extreme ideology. So I'd like to get your your views on that.
55:39 Speaker 01 Awesome.
55:39 Speaker 00 And we'll talk about you appearing in Mad Max as well.
55:42 Speaker 01 Beauty.
55:43 Speaker 00 All right, cheers.
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