EASY MONEY WORDS AJ SHINNER PICS ADF AND SHINNER COLLECTION
Wayne Cooper is taking a break from his account of 3/4 Cav Regt’s tour of duty in Somalia in 1993. Rather than drop the series, however, Wayne has passed the baton to AJ Shinner, a former 1RAR digger, to recount the same mission from an Infantry perspective...
PROLOGUE The visit to the War Memorial with my fiancée had been a bit disappointing. The post-Vietnam section was being renovated and the chance to easily explain a part of my past with pictures, maps and dioramas was lost for the time being. After working our way through the memorial and browsing through the shop for a few minutes, we found ourselves standing at the entrance to the honour-roll courtyard. Lisa would comment later that I had unknowingly gripped her hand tighter as we walked into the open space, which was far from inviting on that cold winter’s day. While standing there – like the tourist I was, with my camera around my neck – a sudden morbid curiosity took hold of me. As I looked around trying to get my bearings, a non-descript guy in his late 30s came down the nearest steps. As he walked closer, with a gait that can’t easily be explained but is instantly recognised, we both saw what lay behind the eyes, understood each other’s pedigree and, in unison, nodded our respects. He was a few metres past me when he looked back and said, “New section’s up to the right, mate”. I forced a smile and nodded again. “Thanks mate.” True enough, tucked away in the far right-hand corner on one of the newest – and maybe over optimistically – one of the last panels available on the wall, it reads: SOMALIA 19921995, AUSTRALIAN ARMY, ROYAL AUSTRALIAN REGIMENT, 1 BATTALION, MCALINEY.S. Although I could never claim to be a mate, standing in front of, and touching Shannon’s name on the polished black wall was a surprisingly moving moment for me.
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That night, I called one of my long-time mates, J Conway, to tell him I‘d been asked to write a few words about Somalia for CONTACT magazine, and to generally shoot the shit. We talked about old times, the up-coming 1RAR reunion in Townsville and getting together with old mates, both of us stubbornly ignoring the fact that with finances, work and family commitments, neither of us, in all probability, would be attending. After chatting for a while, I confessed that writing about Somalia was turning out to be a bit harder than I expected. I was never conscientious enough to keep a diary of my time spent in Somalia and, therefore, could never hope to give an accurate chronological account of Operation Solace above our platoon level. But it wasn’t as simple as that – there was more to it – things that are hard to articulate at the start of this project. So, for now, what follows, in no particular order, is simply a collection of yarns involving a group of young dusty diggers far from home. And how four short months serving our country so long ago opened our eyes, shaped our lives and, for better or worse, set our moral compasses forever.
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