“A FEW DAYS LATER, I GET A PHONE CALL SAYING, ‘WE’VE GOT YOUR CERTIFICATE AND CLOCK HERE. WHERE SHOULD WE POST IT?’ I FEEL SO ALONE. EVEN A GUY WHO’S BEEN AT THE COUNCIL FOR A FEW YEARS GETS A SPONGE CAKE.” Parade. Eventually, the Australian government agreed to a financial contribution, the veterans raising the rest. The site was selected, a small wooden cross was erected and stood there for four years before construction started. The grey concrete memorial was finished in 1992 – just after the first Gulf War. Solemn, mammoth and stark, it fits in with it’s neighbours. When I look at it, I can’t help wondering about that small wooden cross. Somehow, it said so much more. The Anzac Centenary program says the next four years will honour all Australian men and women who served their country in the past hundred years, not just the original Anzac’s. But many will not recognise their reflection in the mirror of commemorations. There will be inevitable omissions, some all the more obvious for their absence – those involved in the “Skype scandal” for example, when an 18-year-old female cadets sexual encounter with a fellow cadet at the ADF Academy was broadcast to other cadets. Nor will the 100 personnel who had sent denigrating emails about females get a look-in. Other omissions will be less obvious, Dan Herps was a navy man with an easy smile and blue-green eyes. In photos, he seemed, even at 37, to have a childlike quality about him. At 1am, in January this year, his partner found him propped against the woodpile under their house, a Queenslander. She had been looking for him inside and out for about half an hour. “Oh for god’s sake Dan,” she said, “come upstairs.” But her words were not heard. The same week, a search party had returned from Scarface Mountain in upstate New York after finding the body of missing Australian soldier Paul McKay. Herps was one of three confirmed suicides of serving ADF personnel in the first three weeks of this year, not including McKay. “People keep saying to me, “If only he’d asked for help,” says Michelle Zamora, Herps’s sister. “But in my mind, he was screaming for help. I heard him at night, screaming in his sleep.” In Sydney’s northern suburbs, Zamora remembers her brother as a scamp of a kid. She had been amused when he signed up with the Royal Australian Navy, but in time she saw her younger brother turn into a proud and capable man. They emailed each other regularly when he was on deployment. “He’d tell me about dolphins he’d seen, or
write about the loneliness of being out at sea,” Michelle said. But he never mentioned his work. Herps was a specialist in electronic warfare, also known as “the eyes and ears of the ship”. “I’d know when they were in trouble, maybe under siege, or someone had died, because we’d receive these official broadcasts saying all communications were to be shut down and then directed to counselling services.” When Herps did come back online, he was often unable to say what had happened, except that he was fine. “But I do know there were incidents on border patrol that haunted him,” Michelle says. “And also his last deployment to Bahrain, there were decisions that had to be made that had no textbook answer. But other than that, I can’t say.” She puts me in contact with a navy colleague who can. Nervous and speaking on condition of anonymity, “John” tells me over the phone about some of the operations he and Dan Herps were on. He tells me about the 20-hour days at sea for a month or more at a time, a few days off and then another month. Their first deployment to the Persian Gulf saw them protecting Iraq’s oil platforms, riskily boarding suspicious vessels. Small suicide boats loaded up with explosives were a threat, and often the Iranian Revolutionary Guard toyed with them. “They’d shoot over our heads as we travelled in small boats to the oil platforms. Other times they’d send out F-14’s, fighter planes which can drop a missile that would take out the whole ship, and just dip in and out of our radar.” As John is talking, I notice his voice echoes. “I’m in my car,” he says. “A rare occasion I’ve left the house.” The doors are locked, he adds, windows wound up. His home in Queensland suburbia, he explains, is equipped with motion sensors, security cameras and double deadlocks on external doors, including the door leading to the garage. There is a latch on his bedroom door and he sleeps with a baseball bat, a Maglite torch and a bowie knife in his bedside drawer. The space on the double mattress beside him is empty – his wife left six months ago. He is now medically discharged from the navy. John adds quietly, “I let Dan down. I was so absorbed in my own stuff. I knew he had his dark moments , but he always did it on his own time.” John takes a breath. “And then there was Operation Relex.”
14 THE LAST POST - REMEMBRANCE DAY / SUMMER EDITION 2014
It was 2001 when then Prime Minister John Howard implemented his tough stance on boat people. “Well before Operation Relex we used to be called the ‘big grey taxi service’,” John says with a bitter laugh. He describes how Indonesian crews would ram a boat loaded up with asylum seekers ashore, burn the vessel, and the navy would taxi everyone to Darwin. It was, in John’s eyes, the age-old law of the sea – to assist any vessel in distress, no matter the politics. “But after Relex, we went from providing aid, blankets, water, food and medics to having to ask the government every time we even considered handing a bottle of water over,” he recalls. On the rickety boats, the asylum seekers were often suffering from heatstroke, infections, dysentery and vomiting. “But we had to be tight-lipped, hands behind our backs.” He describes the boats filling up with human excrement, maggots and flies in their food, people crying and in pain. “And the stench – there were dead bodies on occasion and the stench, it was…” John stops and is quiet. Then he tells me he is haunted by the children on board. “They’d be crying and coughing, sometimes screaming, their eyes glued shut with conjunctivitis.” The sailors were ordered to turn back the people smugglers’ boats. “So we’d smile and tell them to follow us, that we’d look after them. We’d tack south-east by day, then double back at night, wearing out their fuel and keeping to the 12-nautical-mile boundary.” When the boat had barely any fuel left, John says, they’d stop smiling and lying and order them back to Indonesia. “The crew, the Indonesians, they’d plead with us not to leave them. They were scared. They were just kids. We’d ignore them and say, “Don’t chase us, we’re not looking back.’” Dr Jonathan Shay coined the term “moral injury” in the 90’s, during his two decades of work at an outpatients clinic run by the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs in Boston. In a National Public Radio interview in 2012, he defined a moral injury as occurring when there had been a betrayal of what is morally correct. “Did I follow our government’s orders? Yes, I served,” says John of his part in Operation Relex. “But I will always think I committed a disservice to humanity.” While a moral injury can lead to depression as well as PTSD, it is not solely the soldier’s problem. It is not, says Dr Shay, a medical