Dean Burgess

Three weeks later, I was down at Nowra.

And you miss out that whole bastardization period at three.

So I was there back in like 2004.

So things were a lot different.

Yeah, yeah.

That was the old school days.

They call it dead ground counselling.

Yeah, well, we all suffer the same.

We're not trying to go over there and be nice.

They wouldn't send us otherwise.

Well, evidently the government thinks that we can send you there, but you're not allowed to do your role.

I'll say too how a lot of the RAR boys were misused and underutilized with the Afghan campaigns, especially.

A lot of my guys from three RAR and two RAR mates and one RAR mates,

They were very disillusioned with their service after Afghan and some of them just pulled a pin and thought, I'll go back to farming or I'll go back and do a normal job because I'm putting my life at risk over here essentially with the IED threat.

I speak to Iraq, the IED threat and the AFP threat in the early 2000s was unbelievable, which probably makes me more hypervigilant than I probably need to be.

But, yeah, man, after a lot of the guys just sort of thought, what's the point of this?

And I can speak to jobs and tasks that we'd spin up QRF for the boys from Perth or the other way around, which could have been handled by an MRTF or a 3-hour battalion or a 2-hour battalion.

Yeah, and then they get backfilled with reserve units and there's nothing wrong with those guys, but there's a difference between, you know, everyday soldiers and reserve unit guys.

No discrediting those guys because there were some pretty high-speed one-commando guys going over in the winter months when we weren't there doing some pretty nully shit up in those mountains and, you know, power to them.

But, yeah, I agree with the 18-year-old thing.