Category: Defence

A ceremonial handover took place at Robertson Barracks in Darwin today marking the introduction of the fighting vehicle to the army’s 7th Battalion. The vehicles are not new but are an upgraded and redesigned version of the Vietnam-era M113 personnel carrier. The old APC with 7RAR on operations in Vietnam-1970 The new APC almost ready for deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan – 2007

“The extensive upgrade to the M113s have successfully concluded a long and rigorous testing program and the ADF (Australian Defence Force) will receive a vehicle that delivers increased firepower, protection and mobility,” said 7RAR commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Shane Gabriel.

Lieutenant-Colonel Shane Gabriel emailed me yesterday highlighting the event and in reply I wondered;

I don’t know how many APC fleet upgrades or buys there has been but I wonder whether the APC that we trained on in 1968 in Puckapunyal could be there in it’s second or third life. I recall Normie Rowe (the Pop Star) as the driver of our track and Kevin C*** as the Ops O. Are some of the new fleet that old or is it just us?

It’s a rhetorical question but an answer would be interesting. More on the upgrade at Tenix, the contractor responsible and here for the 7RAR website.

On 11 November 1918 at 11 am the guns of the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of continuous warfare. This year marks the 89th anniversary of the armistice, when Australians remember those who fought and died for our country in war and armed conflicts. Adele Horin says;

Australia is unique in its enthusiasm to fight war on distant shores. The explanation is simple. Successive governments have used troop deployment to curry favour with first Britain, then the United States

It’s strange how those who sit at home and slander hundreds of thousands of their countrymen have this warped view of history. My family have put in appearances in all conflicts since the Boer War. My Grandfather went there under age to be discovered after some time and returned to Australia. I still have photo of him wearing the Queens South African medal riband. His cousins, my great uncles, served in WW1 and two stayed over there while grandfather trained the troops at Blackboy Camp in West Australia. My father and all of his brother and cousins served in WW2 and a host of my cousins served in all the post-WW2 conflicts and yet I’ve never ever heard any of them question the reasons we fought. Us young bucks did our best to slow down communism; our fathers the Nazis and the Japs and our grandfathers, the Germans. It certainly would never have occurred to any of them in WW2 that the reason we were fighting in the Pacific was to curry favour with the Yanks. Some of the family were in Europe and any thought of currying favour with the Brits would’ve been overshadowed iin their desperate struggle to quell the fires of Hitler. The only rationalization I can make from Adele’s piece is that she is currying favour with her peers -those who would denigrate our service and weep tears for the enemy. Poor show Lest we forget I borrowed the graphic from the Australia War Memorial Visit the site and pay homage to the sacrifice of the servicemen who have played their part in the Nations history. I searched for “Horin” – didn’t get any hits. UPDATE: I got this email from fellow blogger Wallace Craig from Midland Texas.

All Veterans should be so blessed as to live in a place like Midland. For the past 7 years Rusk Elementary has had Remembering Veterans as their school project. I get letters of thanks from the kids at all major holidays every year. Today was their big Veterans Day Event. A 1.5 hour show put on by the kids. Probably 1000 people crammed our big CAF hangar, with probably 400+ veterans. At the end of the show all Vets stand and the kids bring a “present” of thanks to each……this year the plaque below. After each Vet has his gift, the kids, 100’s, line up on two sides in a long row and all the Vets pass through, the kids cheering the entire time and shaking hands. There was a Vietnam Marine in front of me and a guy who spent 2 years as a POW in Stalag-Luft 15 behind me…..there wasn’t a dry eye among us. Every Vet then gets a sack lunch made by the kids to eat with the kids. An incredible amount of time and work…

A digger has died in East Timor. Various sources attribute the death to an accident or suicide. Only time will tell but both could be possible. When you are under stress in a war zone and weapons are everywhere accidents do happen. Air Chief Marshal Houston said arrangements were being made to bring the soldier’s body home.

It would be carried on an ADF aircraft or an aircraft on permanent charter to the ADF, he said, and would be under constant escort by ADF personnel.

Good idea, we don’t want a repeat of the Kovco drama. My thoughts go out to the next of kin – nothing will make them feel better…ever.

PAUL Tibbets, the pilot of the US bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945, died yesterday at age 92, a newspaper reported.

“If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified,” Tibbets said later. “The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire.” The bomb instantly killed about 78,000 people.

and saved the lives of countless Allied serviceman as the need to invade Japan melted with the bombs. There’s all you need to know about Tibbets and the Enola Gay here

Picture: HMAS Sydney This report from the West Australian The 66-year search for the wreck of HMAS Sydney on which 645 Australians lost their lives is almost certainly over. A group of West Australians using just a grappling hook and an underwater camera last weekend found what they are sure is the Sydney, which sank after a battle with the German raider Kormoran on November 19, 1941. Sydney was also the largest vessel of any country to be lost with no survivors during the war. The 645 Australian’s are all shipmates of my father who was hospitalized whilst stationed on the Sydney. He and another shipmate were sent to Flinders Naval Hospital on the day prior to the Sydney sailing to it’s fatal appointment with the German raider ‘Kormoran’. My very existence is thus based on the stroke of the ship’s Medical Officer’s pen as I was born after the war. If it is the Sydney, then a 66 year old mystery can be cleared up and many a family can hope for closure on the death of their loved ones. It will, of course, be declared a war grave but cameras should give sufficient images to help us understand how a capital ship was clobbered by a merchant raider. Just pause for a moment and think of the last minutes of those 645 Australians. Fathers, brothers, lovers, sons….dreams, aspirations, hopes…. all extinguished in a short 150 metre descent to the seabed. Horror, terror, screams, cries, prayers….silence

Correct response. It happened in my time as well. I have been involved in excessive consumption of alcohol for a number of reasons – some reasonable some not. Sometimes to bury a ghost, other times in the spirit of the moment. The difference? We never had YouTube and the stupid inclination to brag about it, and The Media didn’t hang around waiting for us to prove we were human and then make it front page headlines. Look at the politically incorrect soldiers…see how they misbehave. My thoughts: Look at the selective reporting media….see how they emphasize negatives. Guys, don’t film your escapades – it’s stupid and we don’t want to read about it or see it. A soldier involved in the party explains why one of them appeared covered in a sheet, the image that brought screams of KKK from the media.

A former soldier who appears in a video of Australian troops binge drinking, with one apparently dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, says the footage was a bucks party prank, not a racial slur. “We had a surprise made up for him so we went and pretty much kidnapped him and we needed a costume so he couldn’t find out who it was. “The cheapest way to do it was to put a bedsheet over our heads. It wasn’t in any racial terms.”

Seems reasonable to me.

US troops in Iraq, at risk of being killed or maimed by roadside bombs, will soon travel safely in an Australian-designed armoured vehicle. The Bushmaster Infantry Mobility Vehicle has impressed commanders in Iraq where the US-built Humvee has provided little or no protection for their troops.

The Bushmaster, with its blast-resistant V-shaped reinforced steel hull and other blast-resistant features, can transport up to 10 fully equipped troops at high speed across all terrains. It also carries enough fuel and provisions to last three days. Under the US deal, which is due to be signed within days, up to 1500 Bushmasters will be built under licence by US firm Oshkosh.

Good news all round. The troops are protected and Australia gets increased cash flow and recognition as quality builders and suppliers. Officers and executives of my Regimental Association recently traveled to Darwin to welcome the new 7RAR back into the Army Orbat. The one common opinion from observations of these old soldiers, from ex privates to Generals is that the Army, and particularly our regimental reputation is in very good hands and they all like the Bushmaster. Australian defence firm Thales (formerly ADI) is building more than 400 of the vehicles for the Australian Army and another 50 for Dutch forces at its plant at Bendigo in Victoria. The Bushmaster Infantry Mobility Vehicle sounds a lot better than my issued Infantry mobility vehicles that were made of leather albeit with a metal plate built into the sole and called Boots, GP – I still have them in the back shed.

THE filing of civil claims for shell shock by 1200 of the estimated 16,000 veterans of the East Timor peacekeeping operation has rung alarm bells in defence circles. And so it should. The high incidence of compensation claims for post-traumatic stress disorder from the East Timor operation has been attacked as disproportionate, particularly when compared with the stresses under which troops operate in the far more dangerous Iraqi and Afghan theatres. Someone needs to say it so it may as well be me. Undoubtedly there were bad days in Timor and I’ve been told of some, but the fact remains it was mostly a low level clash. Unkind of me to say this but yesterday when talking to my old forward scout I suggested that in one year 7RAR would have fired more rounds accidentally (Unauthourised discharges) in Vietnam than 5/7RAR fired in anger in Timor and lets not even mention the 1st and 2nd/7th battalions from WW1 and 2. I am on the side of the soldier, particularly the modern soldier, and I’m the last person to denigrate a man’s service but I am the first one to question spurious claims to get on the PTSD bandwagon. Vietnam veterans opened the gates on PTSD and the people who were in the forefront of the compensation claims rush were people least traumatised or least likely to be traumatised. Infantry, and other combat arms, may well be up the front in battle but are definitely down the back at parades and compensation claims. Cooks, bottle washers and crewman of a certain large Grey Funnel Line ship beat us hands down. Infantryman tired of hearing about trauma occassioned by hearing hand grenades exploding in the water to prevent VC divers mining a 22,000 ton metal bunker in Vung Tau harbour and eventually sort help. For some too late. I’m also a little confused about the ‘immediate’ effect of PTSD. I may have been traumatised when I returned from Vietnam but it took me 20 odd years to recognise or admit to the fact. Admittedly Vietnam Veteran’s Counselling services forced the issue and it is now a recognised condition whereas our forefathers, and initially Vietnam vets, suffered an unknown disability. It can now be diagnosed quicker but on demob? – I’m not convinced and research on the subject suggests time after the event is also a part of the definition. I’ve read that continual adrenalin overload eventually impacts on the brain and causes an chemical inbalance. The word ‘eventual’ has been the common denominator in my experience but then it does effect everyone differently and maybe I’m just being infantry-hard arsed about the matter. I’m of the opinion that there needs to be a benchmark. Whatever word-clever, life-experience-deficient lawyers might argue, if the soldier wasn’t in danger in his particular war; if he never went outside the wire; if he never experienced near death or life threatening circumstances; if he was never rocketed, bombed or shot at or never shot back; if he never did long patrols in enemy held territory or never had to deal with friend or foe body parts then what the hell has he got to be traumatised about? Six months without a home meal or a cuddle at night doesn’t, or shouldn’t, meet the benchmark. If there are any young readers left after this tirade, indeed if there ever were, then attack me in comments but get your facts right – been there…still there.