Sarah Kanowski

circle of dry sunny space opened up everyone ran into that miraculous little space and they performed clown's mistake and many people came to christ that day so again one of these stories that we hear about as kids and go that's true isn't it this happened your family left new zealand for australia and you joined the australian navy at 17 were you big for your age

I was so skinny, Sarah, that I had to eat two double cheeseburgers to pass the way in.

But rather precociously, I said to mum on the day I left Perth, we were living in Western Australia by then, I said at the airport, mum, I'm leaving a boy, but I'll come back a man.

Well, I'm kind of like desperately trying to hold my heavy bags with my skinny arms.

So what happened was I joined up with around 80 other officers, men and women.

And towards the end of my officer training in Jarvis Bay, an instructor pulled me aside and said, you're very different from the other guys and girls on this course.

You're always getting into trouble.

And when we give you an eight-hour task to achieve, you're getting it done in 20 minutes because you're thinking of a strange way to solve the problem and then you're just resting for seven and a half hours.

We think you might have what it takes to be special forces.

So Apple's my best mate and a guy called Kel, he'd grown up in Port Macquarie.

The three of us were sort of hand-picked for that world and that is the Navy diving world.

It's away from the regular Navy and that was what we were hoping for.

That was the tough stuff.

The Navy, the clearance diving, as they were called then, now just Navy diving, it's the Navy SEAL branch, Special Forces.

So these are some of the toughest fighting men in Australia and in the world, really, side by side with the SAS.

So initially you begin with selection.

It's just this three-week course to say, can he hold his own underwater?

Is he fit enough for us to think about him?

And is he resilient and tough enough to push through what we're going to put ahead of him in the next few years?

So I turned up to HMAS Penguin in Sydney and there's a lot of guys on course and they are big and strong and they're swearing a lot more than I am.