The mission: to establish and maintain law and order in the fictional country of Nesos Mikros, whose government has requested the help of the Australian Defence Force. Two local tribes (the Lenevians and Balmerians) are in conflict over the alleged poor treatment of Balmerians by the Lenevian-led national government. The RAAF is sending approximately 80 members of 381 Expeditionary Combat Support Squadron to set up an Aerial Port Of Debarkation (temporary air-strip) that is expected to operate for up to 30 days.
They say half the fun is getting there. In order to replicate the travel required to get to the Pacific nation of Nesos Mikros (which I soon discovered was merely the relabelled south island of Fiji), and for some members of the unit to get in some much-needed convoy practice, we drove from Williamtown to Tamworth (286km), and then swung back to Taree (333km). This is just over eight hours of ordinary driving, but you can pretty much forget about that timing when it comes to a military convoy’s pace. A particular highlight for me (apart from sneering at the Golden Guitar at Tamworth, for although 12m is quite large for a guitar, it’s not as big as I remember it to be) was stopping by the now defunct Leyland Brothers World.
It took about twelve hours for our packet to reach its destination, with minimal toilet stops, and wonderful opportunities to catch some fresh air and open the less bus-friendly bits of our ration packs to eat. Gotta love digging into a stone-cold pack of salmon mornay and pasta while there’s a McDonald’s and a Subway within smelling distance! Oh yeah, due to ‘not being able to ingest local food’, we had to get by on rat packs for the first few days. Fortunately, at Taree’s Army Reserve Squadron, where we were camped whilst doing force preparation, our rat packs were supplemented by cooked breakfasts and dinners thanks to The Salvation Army. Bless. Judging from the desperation that our troops dug into the fresh rations after only 12 hours on rat packs, there was no doubt going to be some pressure on Catering to set up our kitchen ASAP once we got out bush.
Luckily, I got as much sleep as I could during the convoy, because as soon as we landed at Taree, we got straight into force prep. This involved various ground defence lessons for most of the day, as well as two sets of piquets (guard duties) during the night – let the sleep deprivation begin! It seemed kind of pointless to sit and watch a bus with weapons locked in its hold, and then to rove the perimeter for a further hour, when we didn’t have weapons in our hands to actually guard the weapons with. Who said the military was bursting at the seams with logic, though? The real kicker about doing force prep was finding out that despite having to sleep on the ground in mozzie domes, we weren’t going to get field allowance for the privilege!
By the time we made it to the site of the APOD in Salt Ash (about 15 minutes away from Williamtown), we were wishing for an increase in field allowance. The land was once an orchard, with a north-south downwards slope that undulated with troughs of poorly cleared plant matter. Just perfect for building pits from sandbags, and setting up a nice level kitchen on! There was something about the location which must have appealed greatly to mosquitoes, ticks, and leeches, because they certainly didn’t clear out just because we arrived with our industrial insect repellent. Medical was kept busy with the steady stream of tick-victims, and progressively filled a jar with a still-twitching collection of the parasites. I joked that the person with the most ticks pulled out at the end of exercise should win the jar – either that, or they should start a guessing competition to see how many ticks would be in the jar by the end of ten days, but if the prize is the jar, no one would want to win that contest anyway…
I’d heard rumours that Catering always gets reamed out bush, no matter what the scenarios, but I wasn’t expecting to struggle before anything even started. Seems that we were a target for plague as well as pestilence – in the first couple days we lost our Sergeant to a mysterious illness, as well as an extra Corporal (a Physical Training Instructor that was tacked onto Catering) to indigestion or perhaps strategic dehydration. Our kit wasn’t even set up fully yet, and we were two men down, from a ten-man section! It was up to the remaining Corporal to step up to the plate, and a surprise 2IC to also jump into the mess headfirst. We also copped it on the first night of major contact, because one of the cooks had an unlawful discharge, so he didn’t have a weapon for about 12 hours.
Here’s how we got screwed by some of the scenarios:
- I shot the Padre (but I did not shoot the deputy). This was an ‘authorised unlawful discharge’, where I was meant to pretend that I was cleaning my weapon and accidentally shoot the Padre. The scenario was meant to test the response of Medical, Security Police, and also the follow-up checking of my weapon functionality by Ground Defence/Warehouse. Oh, and the Padre was also meant to be relieved by another Padre, so this was just a more dramatic way of doing a changeover, I guess. I was taken out of the kitchen for a couple hours while the Padre got treated and medevaced by helicopter (your taxes at work!), and while I got questioned and counselled. Turns out my weapon was borderline unserviceable anyway, so it was a good thing I shot the Padre!
- One of the fridges was taken out by a bullet. No major drama, just requiring a quick reshuffling of produce from one fridge to the other. The funnier thing was that for authenticity’s sake, someone drilled a hole in something that they probably shouldn’t have, because after the scenario was over the shot fridge actually was shot. It didn’t become serviceable again for another couple of days.
- A fridge-worth of rations got delivered while we already had one full fridge. Another exercise in prioritisation. Some of us tried to argue that various items such as eggs, fruit, and certain vegetables didn’t require refrigeration, but our frazzled Corporal ignored the points we were making about what gets shelved versus fridged at Woolies, and insisted we cram as much as possible into the one remaining fridge. I would have laughed and said I told you so, if the sole fridge then decided to pack it in due to being overstuffed.
- Intruders entered the Area of Operation ten minutes after dinner was ready to be served. Base camp could smell the steaks from anywhere, but someone higher up the hill must have forgot to keep track of the time. Even though we had dinner all ready to go and waiting to be served to the troops, it all had to be thrown out because the scenario went on for so long, it was no longer safe to eat because it was just sitting in hotboxes and not the actual servery.
- Airplane crash during lunchtime, requiring 22 extra meals prepared for delivery to the personnel sent out to help at the crash site. Our own lunches were sacrificed for the cause, to make the delivery that little bit speedier. We ended up going hungry and raiding the fridges later for refreshment. Fortunately there were still enough rations to go round at that point. It got trickier to pull extra meals out of nowhere as the days went on, and sections grew, or other scenarios requiring emergency/unannounced hotboxes continued to crop up. Things got a little desperate when we ran out of coffee and biscuits, and we had to put on a morning tea for a realtime affair – local VIPs and media.
- One of the Military Working Dogs got shot, and the body had to be stored in one of our fridges until it was picked up. Despite our Corporal arguing that once a dead body went into our now-working second fridge, we weren’t able to use it for food even after it was emptied once more, higher-ups decided that preserving a dead dog’s body was more important than maintaining the capacity to feed fresh rations to the remaining living troops. For some reason, shoving a dog’s body into a shipper with ice seems a little cruel. Not as cruel as letting the unit go back onto rat packs until we get another fridge sent to us, obviously!
A typical day in the life of Catering could include:
4 hours general ground defence duties (sandbagging, maintaining pits/camouflage, cleaning weapon, clearing patrols and stand-to periods)
2 hours Vehicle Check Point duty
2 hours day shift piquet in section Alert Pit
2-4 hours night shift piquet in section Alert Pit
8 hours preparing/serving/cleaning up after three meals per day
Sleep happens whenever and wherever possible. I don’t think I slept for more than three hours continuously for the entire time we were out there. The only things that managed to keep me awake and alert whilst on piquet were actual contacts – when there are people firing at you from the treeline 100m away, you suddenly forget you’ve had bugger all rest and your body finds its urge to survive.
I got cranky. I got dirty. I got delirious. I hallucinated. I swore like a trucker’s wife at anything and everything that frustrated me in the slightest. I probably managed to piss off each and every member of our crew at some time or other, but also turned around at other stages to motivate each and every one of them to harden up and push on. There’s something magical about going out bush – I imagine it’s something akin to childbirth – despite the pain and trauma of it all, what you get out of it by the time you come back home and the dust settles far outweighs all the crap that happens to you out there.
No one would believe me when I said it, but I’m glad I actually went. It was an eye-opening experience for sure, and it highlighted a lot of bullshit that I imagine goes with the territory of military exercise (or general practice, for that matter), but I’ve learnt a lot in ten days that I probably wouldn’t have found out any other way.
