This is the true account about a very eventful night that I and a good mate of mine experienced whilst on the first rotation to Rwanda as part of Operation Tamar in late 1994. The night was dedicated as a 3 Platoon, Alpha Company, 2/4 RAR piss-up. Such an event was unusual to have in […]

Matt Austin and Dean West and the Kings Cross massacre. On a Sunday night in October ’95, Westy and I decided to get some food from Hungry Jacks in Kings Cross. We’d been to Jason Kieghtly’s wedding the night before and were still on the piss. Whilst waiting at the counter for our bags of […]

With 1 RAR back in 1994, on Thursdays we were at sporty’s after lunch. Everyone had to do a sport – no excuses. Well, I had a fucked shoulder and could not get in the Aussie Rules side and had my discharge in with a heap of other soldiers. It took six months to get […]

On our last exercise before deploying to Timor in April 2000, we were on ex in Wide Bay and the last night of the exercise was spent patrolling at night through a pine forest. It was pissing down with rain and we were all soaked down to the bone. After a very uneventful night, the […]

Early in 1993 in 3 RAR, Charlie Company did a full-on “unarmed combat course” at Gan Gan near Nelson Bay. Funny, on our course of just grunts, some female transport soldiers were at Gan Gan doing their own truckie gig in a lecture room. Blue Curran invited some of the girls in for an informal […]

A few days after Anzac Day my section was called in after the first night of shootings. We got orders after 1300 hrs and didn’t turn up till night after going through five different maps and nearly going over the border to Uganda. We were then escorted to Kabao, which in itself was funny. Nearly […]

While I was on UNTAC deployment in Cambodia in 1992, I was on a job out in the weeds with Stephen McMillan. It was Grand Final day so we had a few bottles of Mekong and listened to our team get done by The Broncos. We had been on it solid for about four hours […]

I was a young 20-year-old private soldier in the 2/4 Battalion, which was based in Townsville and I was on my first promotion course. It was September 1992 and we had just finished the barracks and theory phase of the course and we were out bush, up at High Range training area, conducting the field […]

Rodney “Rocket” Ruthem, was a Legion, who slutted his fork around the various battalions. He was my sarge in the late ’90s; a very fit, hard man who had the whole platoon do Jesus Christ chin-ups almost daily. This one time on ex in Pukka, we were doing fire drills with 1 Armoured using the […]