Conversations
I was a teenage Navy diver in the Iraq War. Then I had to make a new life for myself
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Aaron Tate grew up with the dream of joining the Navy, like his big brother and his dad, his grandad and his great-grandad all had. Aaron saw the Navy as an adventure, a way to see the world and a means of making him a man. Aaron got his dream and then some.
At just 17, he was deployed to the Persian Gulf as a military officer, where he excelled in the highly dangerous work of boarding and stopping illegal Iraqi boats.
Chapter 2: How did Aaron Tait's childhood influence his decision to join the Navy?
But what Aaron learned about himself and the world while at war eventually set him on a very different path. His memoir is called Far Horizons. Hi, Aaron.
Hi, Sarah.
You spent a lot of your childhood in New Zealand. How big a part did war and fighting play in your imagination as a kid?
We had, you know, G.I. Joes were our toy of choice. Dad would go to the back shed and craft these fake machine guns for us. And every afternoon was armies and in our bases. And we watched war movies. You know, Top Gun was the most watched VCR in our household. And we read books like Douglas Bader, Reach for the Sky of these World War II heroes. So We were surrounded by this.
We knew that the men in our family had joined up. Ideally, they'd gone off to war and had adventures and found glory.
Your dad was a keen hunter. What did he wear when he went hunting?
There's always a pair of short Canterbury rugby shorts and a swan dry, which New Zealanders will know it, but Australians, you know, the dry as a bone is the equivalent here. It's a very thick woolen smock, basically. So his legs would be exposed to the gorse bush and the thorns and he'd put his boots on, his Canterbury shorts and his hunting smock and out he would go.
And then he'd come back three days later with a wild boar on his shoulders and he would sort of thump it on the kitchen bench, much to my mother's horror.
So you were 12 when you were first invited along with him on a hunting trip. How did you feel about the prospect of that?
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Chapter 3: What were the challenges Aaron faced during Navy training?
So he started using hand signals. And I just thought, this is like the movies. And he was down the hill, 100 yards away from me. He told me to count down a couple of minutes and then we would open fire and almost sort of ambush this herd. And I pulled the trigger for the first time on my weapon and I killed an animal. I saw it go down.
And there was shock and surprise and there was a pungent smell of the gunpowder and Also a screaming of that animal as well. And I was sort of frozen up as this 12-year-old. And then I saw Dad just running down the hill like this New Zealand madman with his hunting smock on and his weapon at his shoulder. And I realised I've got to do that too.
So I ran down the hill and I was shooting these animals.
One goat was still alive at the end. What did your dad want you to do?
So Dad... said, you have injured this animal. This animal is in pain. You need to finish this animal. And I didn't want to. I could feel almost like a lump of fear and adrenaline coming up, almost like I wanted to vomit. This was so extreme, what I'd been doing as this 12-year-old boy. And he said, you have to finish this. And I said, no. And he said, this has to be done, Aaron.
It was your doing. So I pick up my rifle ready to shoot that animal. And he said, no, no, not with a rifle, with a knife. And this is the knife he's gifted to me.
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Chapter 4: What experiences did Aaron have as a Navy diver in the Iraq War?
And that's the last thing that I want to do. But he sort of With strength, but also with heart and with love, he says, you have to do this, Aaron. So I finished that goat with that knife and we sit down and my chest is heaving and dad wipes some blood on my face and he says, you're a man now.
Literally wiped blood across your cheeks.
Like a rite of passage.
Did you and your family then eat the animals that you'd hunted that way?
That particular day, there were so many that we had shot, you know, tens and tens of animals. We brought some of those animals home, but we're 15, 20 kilometres from our car. So you bring some meat home and that goes into the freezer.
We weren't a very well-off family, so usually the meat would be in the chest freezer for the next three or four months, which mum was thrilled about, helped the budget.
Yeah.
Alongside hunting and being out in the bush, your parents were passionate about religion, Christianity. Where had they discovered Pentecostal Christianity?
So they had fallen in love quite young and they did what a lot of New Zealanders and Australians do, which is they just packed up a backpack and they left and they went off to Europe and travelled. This is, you know, the late 70s.
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Chapter 5: How did Aaron's perspective on war change after his deployment?
We'd get into a van, which must have been a ludicrous sight driving through Auckland. But then they would set up a small PA and they would perform a clown's mistake, which was this seven minute performance about, it was a little scary what was coming if you weren't a Christian and why Christ could save you from that.
How did you feel about being involved in that as a kid?
At the age, you know, you're five, six, seven, you just think that everyone does this kind of thing.
Did you convert many New Zealanders with the clown's mistake?
My parents tell me, I don't remember this, but they tell me about a miracle that happened where it was pouring with rain, which it often does in New Zealand, and the clowns got together and prayed. And this 90-foot
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.
Well, those hamburgers worked and you made it in. How hard did you push yourself in your initial training?
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.
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Chapter 6: What led Aaron to leave the military and seek a new path?
So these are these, we talk with a rope around our waist because it's pitch black. You can't even see your hand up against your mask. And a lot of your diving is at nighttime, so you have to get used to being in the dark. And I felt these five pulls. And five pulls is as an emergency. And we swim to the surface and the instructors are screaming at us to get out of the water.
So we put our fins in our teeth and we're going up this ladder and still they're kind of screaming, come on, let's go, let's go. And we're thinking, what is happening? And we run past, you know, all these like torture devices they've put us through. And we're thinking, they're just trying to trick us again. They're going to try to fail a few of us. We're in the final hours, of course.
I wonder who's going to fail. And I'm thinking, maybe it's going to be me. Surely they've got some final trick that they're going to play that's just going to be so painful that I'm going to raise my hand and quit. But there was no trick. We run into a room where the medic that was on duty was there. And she has a small TV playing in the corner there.
And we watched with horror as the second plane flies into the Twin Towers in New York.
Was it clear right away in that room what it would mean for you and the other men?
Not to me initially, but then one of the older guys said, he was an instructor, he'd served in war zones, and he said, men, we're all about to go to war. But I wasn't a man yet.
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Chapter 7: How did Aaron's time in Africa shape his views on international aid?
I was 17.
So were you thinking, maybe I'm not going to be included in this, I'm still training?
Absolutely. I was like, there's no way they'll send me. And I was frustrated by that. I was like, this has happened in my first year and I'm too young to go. I'm too inexperienced. Like I've missed my shot. But I got a text message the next morning. They let us go to sleep. They knew something big was coming. We'd graduated with our final eight.
And I wake up to a text message on a mobile phone that I bought a month before, the first of my life. And the text message says, get to King's Cross, essentially. You're joining HMAS Sydney and you're deploying. And my initial feeling was I couldn't believe it. Like I was so pumped.
So you went that morning and boarded the HMAS Sydney, the warship Sydney. How noisy was it on board?
Yeah, so there's 230 souls, they call it, on board. There were women on board Sydney as well. And this is a ship that is about to go to war. And it's like a hornet's nest is being kicked. Everyone knows their role. So the weapons guys are literally loading ammunition on. The helicopter guys are getting the helicopters ready. This was a ship that wasn't deploying in three weeks' time.
This is a ship that would move off from the wharf by midday that day. So everyone knows what they're doing except me. I sort of get on board and go, I've barely been on board a warship. I've been in the diving branch. And they think I'm tough over there, but they don't care about me here. I'm a snotty.
A snotty?
Yeah. What's that? So snotty is what the British Navy and then the Australian Navy calls a midshipman. So my rank was midshipman. It is the lowest of the low. Technically, you outrank the sailors, but everyone in the Navy knows that you outrank no one. You're a snotty because you're so pathetic that you wipe your snotty nose on the sleeve of your jacket.
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Chapter 8: What lessons did Aaron learn about leadership and community involvement?
So either that's one of our ways to get on board, the other way is a fast attack boat and we throw grappling hooks up with caving ladders and while that ship is underway, going as fast as it can, we're climbing up the side of the ship and taking control. The smugglers on board those ships are trying to get oil out of Iraq and sell on the black market. They know we're coming.
They expect that we're coming. It's our team, a British Marines team and a US Navy SEAL team So what they do is they're shutting their ship from the inside and locking it with padlocks. They have false steering compartments, so even if we get control of the bridge, they'll be steering from somewhere else. But the most frightening thing is they will have booby traps in the worst scenarios.
And the booby traps are there to blind us, kill us, blow our limbs off, do everything they can to stop us taking control of their ship. It's a very, very... tense diplomatic situation because you can only legally board the ship when it's in international waters.
And as soon as a smuggler knows that we're coming, they hear the helicopter or they see the boat, they will as quickly as they can try to go back into the nation state waters of a nearby country. If we're caught on board at that point, we're technically pirates.
How did your very first mission play out?
So the first mission, you know, I've just turned 18 by this point. They made me a muffin and put a candle in it and I blew the candle out. And you bomb up, it's called, which means you get into your outfit, our weapons. So we have an ass baton. Ideally, we want to use that. And that is if you were to hit someone on the elbow, it would explode their elbow, basically. We had a pistol.
Some of us carried shotguns. Some of us had night vision goggles. We've got tactical goggles, helmets, radios. We're a pretty menacing sight when we're coming onto a ship of a smuggler. And that first boarding is tense. You know, we see that they've shut things up from the inside. We see that they've got booby traps out and it's very, very intense.
And, you know, I almost lost my life on that first boarding. And then I come back from that and then you go out again the next night and the same thing happens and you keep doing this over and over and over again.
So after that first experience, Aaron, was it something you wanted to do again? Like that adrenaline that had been there in the lead up, did that kind of play out in reality?
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