The Grey Man (5 page)

When we got back to base there was the usual drudgery of cleaning out the boats and eventually we were released back to Puckapunyal army base. I spent an hour in a hot shower trying to get heat back into my body. The next day we were called on to parade. We looked like crap and the commanding officer walked past each of us, said a few words here and there, and his adjutant handed us our green berets. I couldn't help being disappointed; I'd been expecting a formal parade, but it was as if the casual handing out of something we'd strived so hard to earn was a reminder to us that this wasn't about pomp and ceremony and glory – just about proving we could do the job.

While the pragmatist in me realised that the path to reaching a goal was always more enjoyable and fulfilling than actually achieving it, my new age side found that earning the beret had freed up a lot of energy inside me. I'd gotten over the ‘ineffective' tag and now felt I had the strength and determination to get on with my life. It was as though I had passed through some sort of barrier. I was now an achiever, and no longer the ‘ineffective' label that had dogged me for so long. I had set my mind on achieving something difficult and fought through the pain and mental obstacles to reach my goal.

I also learned from my time in the army that while so much of the training and ethos emphasised the importance of working as a team, I was happiest on those rare occasions when I was left to my own devices.

Once, I was asked to help train potential green berets by playing enemy for them. I was tasked with ambushing a section of black hats (soldiers who had yet to earn the coveted commando headgear). I was largely free to come up with my own game plan and there was no one to tell me what to do. It was liberating. The supervisors had instructed me to be reasonably visible, so first I hunkered down behind a twiggy branch and opened up on the patrol with my F88 Steyr rifle, full of blank ammunition. The new guys began their counter ambush drills, but couldn't find me even though I had chosen a fairly exposed position. Next, I lay along the lip of a ravine and gave a few bursts from my Steyr. Then I ran down the ravine, popped up behind them and opened up again from a different direction. When they swept blindly past my new position I shot them all again.

Finally, the sergeant asked me to stand out in the open so they could see me in plain view, which I thought negated the whole point of the exercise. Reluctantly I did as I was told, and stood between two gum trees while the section patrolled towards me. I opened up again and this time they spotted me and overran my position. It was pointless, I thought, making the exercise so easy, but I'd had fun while I'd been free to do my own thing.

A few people join the commandos because they want the chance to fight, others to test themselves, while some are more ‘be all you can be' kind of people. I remember being in the back of a truck at the end of a commando exercise. We'd parachuted into some godforsaken part of Victoria, conducted a raid and some ambushes, frozen our butts off and now we were going home after a long, hard weekend. I was sitting next to a mate of mine, John Warburton. John was a smart guy, with a PhD in political science; definitely one of the be-all-you-can-be guys.

John and I were chatting about what we wanted to do in life. For the first time, I voiced a thought I'd had for some time. ‘I've had a strong feeling for a few years now that the first thirty-five years of my life I lived for myself, but the next thirty-five years are going to be for the human race and the planet.'

‘Doing what?' John asked.

‘I don't know,' I replied honestly. ‘I'm still trying to work that bit out.'

TWO

Epiphany

I'd had an interest in Asia, and perhaps injustice, ever since I first read about the plight of the Penan people, and during my time in the army I was becoming similarly concerned at the treatment of the population of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.

Australia had turned a blind eye when Indonesia launched a military invasion of East Timor in 1975, and news was regularly filtering out of the tiny state about human rights abuses perpetrated by the Javanese invaders. I felt our country's lack of action over Timor was a black mark against our international image and showed a lack of concern for our neighbours. I wrote several letters to the then Foreign Minister Gareth Evans voicing my concerns.

Some time in the early 1990s I learned through the Special Forces grapevine that as a result of quiet moves to strengthen ties between Australia and Indonesia, the Australian SAS had begun training their Indonesian counterparts. Indonesia's elite troops, known as Kopassus, stood accused of perpetrating some of the worst crimes against the East Timorese freedom fighters and their supporters, and I was outraged that our guys would even be working with them, let alone teaching them, and that the government had sanctioned this.

I was disillusioned with the Australian government's lack of balls and their duplicity. At the same time, I was losing interest in the training I was doing with the commandos. Some of our earlier commanding officers had had a vision for what we should be training to do, and how we could be employed in imaginative, unconventional military roles. Others, like the officer in charge during the time of my growing disenchantment, had the view that commandos were simply infantry soldiers who had been trained to insert into the battlefield in novel ways, such as by parachute or by water. The unit had lapsed into what I thought was a pretty boring routine of practising conventional infantry skills.

All of my frustrations came to a head when we were sent to northern Australia to take part in an exercise called Kangaroo 92 (K92). The Indonesians had been invited to come and watch, as our training engagement with them was now stated government policy and widely reported in the media. I was part of a force of 160 commandos playing the enemy for the opening of K92, which was witnessed by the top brass from Indonesia and Australia. We flew into RAAF Base Curtin in Western Australia and tried to acclimatise to the heat. It was 50 degrees Celsius in my tent and 60 degrees out on the runway. We were doing pack marches and our guys were dropping like flies from heat exhaustion. I was carrying a 40-kilogram pack and I only weighed 65 kilograms.

One of my jobs as a member of the intelligence cell was to make sure everyone was ‘sterile' before going on a patrol – this meant that they weren't carrying any identifying information or personal effects. I told a captain who should have known better that he would have to remove his T-shirt, which had ‘1st Commando Regiment' emblazoned on it. As usual, I had a running battle with guys who loved to sneak cameras through so they could take pictures of their exploits. I always thought this carry-on was a waste of time, because if I was the enemy I would have singled out as a commando anyone with a large multifunction watch (the preferred watch of special forces). A camouflaged C-130 Hercules transport aircraft sat waiting on the desert strip ready to deploy us. We had no idea what our destination was going to be.

It turned out to be Melville Island off the northern coast of Australia. Our small force of heavily armed, fast-moving commandos wiped out the ‘invading' force of Australian regular army soldiers who landed at an airfield and outnumbered us five to one. This wasn't part of the script and the people in charge would have been embarrassed if the Indonesians saw how such a small force could defeat Australia's much-vaunted conventional army. As such, the word came down via the umpires that the commandos had all now been defeated and those of us who hadn't been killed would be taken prisoner. Our boss was pissed off as he had led us brilliantly, only to be shafted by our own people.

Our government's behaviour in this instance and in relation to having the SAS train Kopassus just outraged me. I didn't blame the SAS, as they simply go where they are sent. I went to see the captain who had taken over as the boss of the commando regiment's intelligence cell and told him of my concerns over East Timor and the Indonesians.

‘Off the record,' the new captain said, ‘I agree with you. But it's the way of the world.'

‘Not my world, sir,' I replied. I took leave from the unit I'd worked so hard to be accepted into. Who, I wondered, was ineffective now?

When I left the army, at the age of thirty-five, I decided to travel overseas in search of an answer to the question that had plagued my life: why was I here? As well as my interest in martial arts I was also fascinated with medieval history; a good friend of mine, James, had a plan to retrace the routes of the great crusades, and I decided, along with another mate, Tim, to join James on the adventure. I'd also been interested for some time in one of the local philosophies, Sufism, and so I travelled through Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel to try to broaden my horizons and find some clues about what course the rest of my life should take.

I hooked up with a Quaker woman for a while in Ramallah and wondered if my purpose in life would be to help poor people in that part of the world. What soon dawned on me, however, was that even though I was meeting people who hardly had two pennies to rub together, let alone two cars, they didn't really need my help. They might not have had many assets, but they had strong extended family networks whose members all did the best they could to help each other out when times were tough. In that way they were richer than I had ever been, or ever would be. I wondered if that was what was missing in my life – a simple sense of family.

While in Israel I decided that my time in the army was long over so I sent a letter of resignation to the commandos. After I'd finished my travels in the Middle East I backpacked on to Scandinavia, where I stayed with my good survival buddy HÃ¥kan Strotz whom I had met at the Tracker school some years earlier. The Tracker school is a famous survival school in America I attended in 1989. During the six-week course I learned native American survival skills, including how to track animals. I had a chance to further develop my survival skills and even teach on some courses that HÃ¥kan was running. On a hunting and fishing course, I met the head of survival training for the Swedish Army, Captain Lars Falt, and was invited to attend his Swedish army officers' course as a civilian. I was the first Australian invited to attend. Later, in the UK, I was introduced to Ray Mears, who went on to become the star of a popular BBC series about living in the wild. Ray became a good friend and he and I would later teach survival to military instructors from fourteen countries. The course was in the Arctic and other renowned survival experts, including Mel De Weese, Turkka Aaltonen and Mors Kochanski, were also there. They all became good friends of mine. I have a favourite photo of Ray and me using a wooden hand drill to light a fire on a block of ice with a blizzard sweeping in. We travelled on skidoos, and dog-sleds, went ice fishing and skied cross country. It was a great trip.

I had a great time in Europe; however, when I got back to Sydney in September 1995, I was just as lost as when I'd left. I called James, who lived in Brisbane, and took up his suggestion that I move to his hometown. Now aged thirty-seven, I enrolled in a degree course in anthropology at the University of Queensland, studying the ways indigenous and ancient peoples lived off the land. This gave me an excuse to formalise my qualifications while studying something that fascinated me.

During my first year of university I decided to clear up some unfinished business, so I wrote a letter to the then Minister of Defence, Robert Ray. I told him of my reason for leaving the commandos and my opposition to the government's policy on using the SAS to train Kopassus. I was just tying up a loose end and thought that would be the end of it.

Not long after I sent the letter I received a call from a great mate, Greg Ferguson, who was still serving in the commandos. Greg had worked with me for a few years as an assistant, teaching on a survival course I'd run for unemployed young people. He was the best assistant I ever had and one of the most loyal people I've ever met.

Greg also had a good sense of humour. He was once called on to assist with a public relations photo shoot to promote the commandos. For the pictures, they used two Zodiac inflatable boats on Sydney Harbour, with our guys all kitted out in their gear and camouflage paint smeared on their faces. The organisers of the photo shoot selected all the best-looking people and put them in the lead boat. Afterwards, Greg said to me, ‘Mate, they put me in the ugly boat!' From that point on, the ‘ugly boat' became our term for being an untouchable or getting the least preferred treatment, in the army or life.

I was sitting at my flat in Brisbane when the phone rang. A voice said, ‘Mate, what . . . have . . . you . . . done?' It was Greg.

‘Hi mate, what do you mean?' I replied.

‘The shit has hit the fan down here,' Greg said in a hushed tone. ‘They're running around answering faxes from the Department of Defence, Department of Foreign Affairs, and regimental headquarters. Seems you wrote some letter to the Minister of Defence and now they want to know who you are, where you are, and what kind of training you've had.'

I laughed. ‘Greg, you've got to be joking.'

‘No, mate. It's serious. You've got them worried. They have a file on you from DFAT with all these letters you've written in the past.'

I thought it was crazy. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had a file on me? I had written plenty of letters to politicians – most of them to Gareth Evans, because he annoyed me the most – but I had never made any threats, just expressed my displeasure at the way the government handled foreign policy and how it seemed to have been hijacked by the Indonesian elite. Now the letters seemed to be coming back to bite me.

‘What do you think it's all about?' I asked Greg.

‘My best guess is that they think you're a loose cannon and you're going to try and do something that will embarrass us, like assassinate the Indonesian President.'

‘That's crazy.'

Greg said he would keep me updated and hung up. About a week later he rang back to say that the furore had all settled down after Steve, a friend of mine who was also the regimental sergeant major of the commandos, told them I wasn't a loose cannon and there was nothing to worry about. I still like the fact that for a week a bunch of bureaucrats were tearing their hair out over me.

I got my small dose of revenge on DFAT when another Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, visited the commando regiment while I was still in the unit. The government had been seriously considering kicking East Timorese refugees out of Australia and getting Portugal to take responsibility for them. I had gone as far as setting up my own place as a safe house for the refugees if that were to occur. I asked if I could take the photos of the minister's visit, as the intelligence cell had a decent camera. The fact that I had no idea about cameras didn't bother me. On the day Downer arrived he was treated to a demonstration of our skills. Guys rappelled from the roof inside the main hangar building and Downer was shown our gear and transport. He was suitably impressed.

There was a huge external flash fitted to the camera and I took every opportunity I could to take photos of Mr Downer. After a while he began to wince every time I took a photo, because the flash was so bright. He became visibly annoyed. I saw this as a small but enjoyable blow against the oppression of East Timor. What's more, not a single photo turned out. I had a great evening.

While I was at university I met a woman called Anna; we were introduced by some mutual friends.

Anna worked in real estate and was a kind and gentle woman. After going out for a while we moved in together. If I am honest with myself, I think I was just biding my time with Anna – not because I thought I might meet someone better, but more because I was engrossed in my studies and still just drifting through life. There were moments when I felt a strong bond to her and thought the relationship might progress further, and others when I felt constrained and hemmed in.

After about two years with Anna I reached the conclusion that I needed to move on. It wasn't just about my inability to commit to her, it was also that I wanted to do something more – something meaningful – with my life. It wasn't her fault, as she was great. On my return from overseas I'd made contact with Greenpeace. Ever since my days camping in the bush as a kid I'd felt a strong affinity for the environment and a desire to protect it; perhaps due to the other, more martial side of my life, I was drawn to the idea of direct action, such as that used by environmental groups in Germany, who were abseiling down smokestacks to put up banners decrying pollution. In 1995, just before moving to Brisbane, I'd gone along to a meeting in Sydney where the local Greenpeace people were discussing a plan to put up a banner on the Sydney Opera House to publicise the organisation's Save Our Seas campaign. I volunteered to conduct a reconnaissance of the Opera House to look at how we'd go about hoisting the banners. I took photos and made notes of when the regular security patrols were mounted and I was even able to climb up the building's main ‘sail' at night, illegally and undetected.