The Grey Man (4 page)

There was nothing personal in the term, save for the sneer with which he delivered it; the word ‘ineffective' is a military term for someone who has not fulfilled their commitment. All the same, it cut me like a knife, and I did take it personally. When I was growing up my father never missed an opportunity to belittle me and tell me that I would never amount to anything. I'd made my own choice to stop showing up for commando training, and I knew the consequences of my actions, but being labelled ineffective brought back all those memories from my childhood. After all the work I'd done on building up my self-esteem through increasing my physical confidence, being kicked out of the army set me back on my arse again.

And in spite of all my attempts to find a purpose, my civilian life was becoming as directionless as my failed military career. I chopped and changed my university degree, switching from philosophy to geology and even mathematics, before I eventually gave up on it in 1979 and dropped out two years after enrolling. After that I fell in and out of a variety of jobs, never staying in full-time work for more than a year or so. I was a computer operator for a health fund for a while, then I worked in logistics for a photo and film company, and for about four years off and on I was a part-time marine surveyor, directing the loading of cargo ships at the port of Eden on the far south coast of New South Wales.

My life was going nowhere and I still hadn't worked out what it was I should be doing, although my exploration of different philosophies gave me some hope that the answer would eventually come to me. I became involved in increasingly alternative things, ending up with a diploma in rebirthing and transpersonal psychodynamics. Ultimately, I found that in all these pathways there was generally something of value, but these alternative practices also attracted more than their fair share of navel-gazing airheads. I was looking for meaning in my life, but some people were happy enough just to tune out. At some point I decided the new age was not getting me to where I wanted to be, or making my life better.

It had been twelve years since I left the commandos and at the age of thirty I was still carrying the burden of being proclaimed ‘ineffective' by the army. I started to think about giving the military another shot, to prove myself to myself (and who knows, maybe even my father), and to exorcise that ‘ineffective' demon. At around this time I met a girl from the Army Reserve at a party. She persuaded me to re-enlist and also became my girlfriend. I was underweight, probably from being a vegetarian for fourteen years, but my new girlfriend was a nurse and she had a few words with the female army doctor who examined me and they let me through. I signed up for a recruiting unit based at Randwick in Sydney. They were nicknamed ‘the party unit', because they didn't take army life as seriously as the commandos and, while they worked hard, they also spent a lot of time playing hard after hours. I did my two-week training course, which I enjoyed, but unlike the commandos this was no elite unit I had ended up in.

I soon decided I wanted something more challenging, and thought that the military intelligence unit located up the road from Randwick Barracks might be more my speed. A lot of my work in the recruiting unit was administrative and I was getting the hang of the army's bureaucratic love of paperwork – so much so that I was able to organise my own transfer to the intelligence corps without anyone managing to block it. I had no faith in the chief clerk and figured if I'd gone through the chain of command it might never have happened (the last thing a recruiting unit wants is to lose people). I couldn't help thinking my self-administered transfer was a fitting way to move to the shadowy side of the army.

I booked myself into the psychological aptitude test required for acceptance into the intelligence corps. The three-hour test was pretty intense, but I passed and was sent off to do an initial training course for the intelligence corps. We learned about surveillance, interpreting aerial photographs to identify potential enemy aircraft, tanks, ships and weaponry, and operating in a command post. I enjoyed the course and got on quite well with two other soldiers, Jim and Damien, who had come through from my old unit, 1st Commando Company, and were destined to serve in the commandos' intelligence cell.

I particularly liked Jim, who was of Greek descent, and I convinced him to come along to one of the bush survival courses that I was running by this stage. I'd turned my interest in survival into a business and was running bushcraft courses for people who wanted to spend time in the outdoors, or just learn new skills for fun. As we walked through the bush I asked Jim what he had planned for his future; even though I was now in my early thirties I still hadn't figured out what I wanted to do with my own life, so I was always interested in other people's goals.

‘I'd like to go back to Greece one day with enough money to buy a fishing boat or maybe a tourist boat,' Jim said to me.

‘Sounds like an expensive plan,' I said. ‘How much would that cost you?'

‘About three hundred thousand dollars.'

‘Are you going to be able to raise that much?' I asked.

‘I'm pretty sure I can,' Jim replied.

Jim changed the subject and suggested I transfer across to the commandos. I thought about it and decided it was time for me to go back to the Special Forces unit and finish what I'd started as an eighteen-year-old. I went to Georges Heights one night and met the operations officer, a captain, who was Jim and Damien's boss. He told me that he would be happy to have me come across, but unfortunately there were only two slots in the cell and these had been filled by Jim and Damien. One of them would have to transfer or leave the army for me to get a gig there. I was disappointed, but about a week later I got a phone call from the same captain. ‘How'd you like to transfer to commandos and join us in the int cell?' he asked me.

I was surprised. ‘Sure, I'd love to.'

‘Good. Come in next Tuesday and we'll sort out the paperwork,' the captain said.

‘Great. But what happened? How come you've got a vacancy now?'

The captain paused for a second. ‘Jim's left.'

Jim seemed like a really keen soldier, so I had to ask. ‘Why?'

‘Did you hear on the three o'clock news about the armed robbery at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney today?' he replied.

I told him I had. The police had foiled a raid on the hotel, but not before a shootout between the cops and the crims. The robbers had almost escaped with about three hundred thousand dollars.

‘Jim was one of the crooks. He's out of the unit, and you're in.'

After Jim's arrest it emerged that he was also a part-time hit man who had killed several people, and that he and his brother had been importing heroin and steroids. Despite all that, I liked him. He became a Christian and eventually got out of gaol after turning evidence against a few heavy criminals, but as a result he opened the door one day and someone put three bullets into his chest. Jim was a bodybuilder and very fit and, amazingly, he survived the hit and then went into witness protection with his new wife and was never heard of again.

The commandos were an interesting bunch.

What I learned, after joining them again, was that about 20 per cent of them were New South Wales police officers, who got paid military leave to do their Army Reserve time, and about 5 per cent were criminals (or at least tending that way), with the occasional neo-Nazi thrown in.

The other 75 per cent of the unit were pretty average people, and I was happy to be in that majority. One thing I did know, from my earlier time in the unit, was that to gain any respect at all in the commandos you had to earn the coveted green beret. You could serve in the unit in a range of support jobs, such as a clerk, a driver, a storeman, or, like me, in the intelligence cell, without having to attempt the gruelling commando training course, but I wanted to do it, and to win the beret that came with passing. Commandos who had already earned the green beret referred to the soldiers in support roles, and even trainee commandos, as ‘black hats' (because of the colour of their head gear) and ‘maggots'.

As a member of the intelligence cell it wasn't mandatory for me to do commando training, but I knew it was something I needed to do, for myself as well as for my good standing with the rest of the guys. I was enjoying life in the commandos the second time around a lot more than I had when I was eighteen. The intelligence guys were pretty much left to their own devices and when the captain who ran the cell eventually left the unit I ended up running the cell myself, even though I was still only a private.

By the time I attempted the commando training course I was thirty-two. Most of the other guys trying for the green beret were in their late teens or early twenties. I'm not a big guy, or very muscular, but my aerobic fitness was good and I could do plenty of push-ups and sit-ups. As with other Special Forces selection and training courses, this one was a test of your mental willpower as much as, or even more than, your physical ability.

To earn the green beret we had to first do a 3.2-kilometre run and then a ten-kilometre run carrying a rifle and twelve-kilogram basic webbing gear, which consisted of waterbottles, ammunition pouches, and a small ‘bum' pack. In addition to this there were tests involving chin-ups, sit-ups, push-ups, rope climbs and swimming, and we had to qualify on an array of weapons I hadn't encountered in my previous units, such as silenced pistols, anti-tank weapons, the M16 assault rifle, and sub-machine guns. The toughest test of fitness and stamina was a killer 32-kilometre run carrying a rifle, basic webbing, and a 25-kilo pack.

While I had passed all of the tests leading up to this, I had been so busy organising my survival courses for unemployed youth that I hadn't done nearly enough training for the final long run. I knew the only way I would get through the 32 kilometres was by using my mind. My first live-in partner many years before had been a past-life regressionist and hypnotherapist and she had used me as a guinea pig. In the process she also showed me how to hypnotise myself, and as I lay in the back of the Unimog army truck on the way to the drop-off point for the run I used these techniques to stop myself freaking out. I took my mind down through the levels, counting back from ten to one, and then programmed myself: ‘Just keep going, just keep going,' I said to myself in a kind of mantra.

The sergeant supervising the test was Bones Brady – a true hard man. On one training exercise Brady sent some of the boys up and down a hellishly steep hill three times, until they were all knackered. At the end of this seemingly pointless exercise he said to them, ‘The army's not going to want us when we're fresh and rested. They're going to want us when we're stuffed and exhausted and nearly dead. One thing I hate is a quitter. I could give up smoking tomorrow, if I wanted to, but I'm not a fucking quitter!'

When I was doing the earlier ten-kilometre run I had strapped down my water bottles to stop them hitting my hips as I ran and as a result it became too difficult to get the bottles out to drink from. I became dehydrated and Bones walked with me for the final three kilometres to make sure I made it in on time. He strode effortlessly beside me as I staggered along, offering me a cigarette and joking that I'd do the run easier if I was a smoker.

Now, on this final gruelling run, I soon started to lag behind the main body of trainees, and things looked bad. Although I preferred running by myself I also needed to keep up with the pack if I was going to complete the run in time. I was hunched over as I ran, which prompted one of the corporals to call out, ‘Straighten up, Private Curtis – you look like a fucking foetus!'

‘Just keep going, just keep going,' I mumbled to myself. At one point I tripped over and as soon as my body stopped moving every muscle started to cramp and lock up. My hands were like claws from the cramping. One of the other guys came up behind me and hauled me to my feet. I stumbled along and eventually, after a few hundred metres at a shuffling jog, my body started to unlock.

At the halfway point, Bones Brady was sitting in the passenger seat of an army Land Rover, puffing on a cigarette as I shuffled by him. ‘Do you want that cigarette now?' he called to me.

‘No, sarge, I'm a non-smoker,' I croaked. ‘If I gave up being a non-smoker, I'd be a quitter. And I'm not a quitter.' Brady smiled and I laughed as I trudged on.

I made it across the finish line with fifteen minutes to spare, beating a number of the guys who had trained for months. Some other guys helped me get my pack and webbing off and I sank to the ground, lying flat on my back. My whole body ached, I was chafed, and my boots and socks were full of blood from burst blisters.

The presentation of our green berets was a bit of an anticlimax. To qualify formally we had to spend two weeks in the bush on exercise, ending with a simulated commando raid on the Eildon Weir in Victoria. We raced across the huge body of water at night-time, cleaned up some ‘bad guys', set the charges to blow the dam, and then returned to our start point. It was freezing and as we skimmed over the water in our Zodiac inflatable assault boats we were hit by cold, stinging water. Most of us were hunkered down in the boats but one guy, nicknamed Molly, was sitting upright, copping the full blast of wind and water. I reached for him and shook him. Molly responded incoherently and I realised he was suffering from exposure. I dragged him down, pushed some army ration chocolate into his mouth and tried to get him warm, and he gradually improved.