After Pete’s Black Hawk helicopter crashed, he was lucky in more ways than one

Pete Rudland can’t remember much about the minutes and hours leading up to the moment his Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Afghanistan.

It was June 21, 2010 and the former sergeant, a 28-year-veteran of the SASR and the Second Commando regiment, was on an operation with three other Black Hawks with Australian soldiers and American crew members that had flown out of Tarin Kowt.

Afghanistan veteran Peter Rudland at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in Martin Place.Credit: Kate Geraghty

His last clear memories are of the day before the crash, when he sat down with the leader of his sniper team to work out a seating plan for the helicopter.

Then the crash happened.

The American pilot “made an error on height awareness” in the pitch black and amid the fog of war, Rudland says, hastening to add he doesn’t blame the man, who is now paraplegic.

Of the 15 people on board, three Australians and one American serviceman were killed and everyone else was injured, all but one severely.

The 52-year-old Rudland reels off his injuries in matter-of-fact detail.

“I broke my right leg, my rifle was embedded in my quad, I broke my pelvis, I injured my lumbar, I had a thoracic injury, I broke my eye socket, my cheekbone and my nose, I had a frontal lobe [brain] bleed, I damaged my kidney and liver, and I broke my left kneecap,” he says.

“You have to take the good with the bad. I don’t look at it as life-defining, I don’t sit there and think ‘woe is me’ – it happens, it’s part of the job.”

He was airlifted to a US army hospital in Germany – he can’t remember if it was Landstuhl or Ramstein because he’s having what he describes as a “Pete moment”, which happens sometimes because of the head injury – where the doctors saved his life. Then, it was back to Sydney for a year or so in various hospitals for operations, followed by a return home to Perth, and years of physical therapy before he left the service in 2017.

“It has provided a new pathway for me, if it hadn’t happened, I would still be in Defence,” he says. “Now it has happened it has given me a unique opportunity to speak on a veteran’s platform about my experiences and the people I have met.”

Sergeant Peter Rudland (left) speaks with Vice Admiral Ray Griggs in 2017. Rudland was co-captain of the Australian team at the Invictus Games.Credit: ADF

The platform Rudland is talking about is provided by the RSL, for whom he is an ambassador, and the role has seen him attend every session of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicides, aside from some hearings in Wagga.

Like tens of thousands of Australian veterans, Rudland has had to deal with the Department of Veterans' Affairs once he left the army. He still had years of physiotherapy ahead of him as well as a long-term need for pain medication (he also works with Pain Australia).

The DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs) is an extremely complex benefits system to navigate, governed by three sets of legislation known by the acronyms DRCA (Defence-Related Claims Act), MRCA (Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Act) and VEA (Veteran’s Entitlement Act).

For decades, Australia’s ex-servicemen and women have complained about the department and how difficult it can be to gain access to the care and support they need.

Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh set aside $222 million in the budget to simplify those three laws into one new act, the Veterans’ Entitlement, Treatment and Support bill (VETS for short), which will be introduced in the coming weeks.

Much more significantly, buried deep in last Tuesday’s budget, Keogh and his department promised a staggering $9 billion would be the estimated increase in compensation and pension payments over the next five years. Payments relating to military rehabilitation and compensation claims alone are expected to grow by $6.5 billion.

Keogh is determined to clear the long backlog of claims from veterans, which is a national scandal.

On April 30 this year, Veterans' Affairs had 76,149 claims on hand, comprising 2569 that were “unallocated” – that is, they hadn’t been looked at yet – and 73,580 claims being processed.

Incredibly, the figures are an improvement on a year earlier, when there were 36,271 unallocated claims, with close to 10,000 of those claims having sat unallocated for more than 300 days.

Labor’s decision to hire an extra 500 DVA staff in 2022-23 has cleared the unallocated caseload, but the next step is to actually process those claims. The average wait time for a claim to be processed is still an extraordinary 373 days and, again, the waiting time has actually improved by 62 days.

Rudland had it relatively easy – he had to fight the department “because there were some meds they didn’t want to pay for that the army had paid for, and because they’ll only pay for a 30-minute physio session for the average person” each day, where he needed more “because I had so many injuries”.

The decorated soldier did not want to have to make a daily 80-kilometre round trip for his physio session, either.

“It was frustrating, I get they are bound by policies but they need to be a bit more flexible,” he says. “After discussions with them we got a good result. All in all, my dealings with DVA have been good.”

Newcastle-based Paul McGlynn, a former RAAF technician, spent 22 years in the service until 1999 before leaving at the age of 39. It wasn’t until 2019, 20 years after he had left the service, that McGlynn got to the point where his back and his mental health had deteriorated to the extent that he sought help from DVA.

The former technician, now 64, is reluctant to talk about what happened to his back and blames himself for the accident he had as a 23-year-old in 1983.

“In those days, you were either in hospital or working.”

Former RAAF technician Paul McGlynn

“I was fitting a generator onto a Mirage aircraft, doing maintenance, it was my fault, it was back in the day when there was no such thing as OH&S, I was a bit gung-ho and I picked up a large generator, I was trying to do it by myself and I fell over, it fell on top of me and the next minute I couldn’t move,” he says.

“In those days, they put you in traction, so I spent several days in traction at the base hospital at RAAF Williamtown and then got straight back to work. In those days, you were either in hospital or working.”

“When I was a young man I could deal with it but the older I got the worse it got. I couldn’t walk for days at a time, my back would go and I would be out of action for four days.”

So McGlynn put in a claim. Struggling with his mental health at the time, he called on the services of an advocate, Angus Cameron from NSW RSL LifeCare, to help him navigate the labyrinth of DVA forms and requirements.

It took 18 months for his claim to be processed and approved and on the day it happened, McGlynn wrote a long letter to Cameron, thanking him, and gave his doctor, Robyn Fried, a huge bunch of flowers for helping him fill out 20 pages of medical forms.

Former RAAF technician Paul McGlynn.

Approval meant three things: a disability payment, a veteran’s card that gives him cheaper medicines, and most importantly it was “recognition”.

“Someone had put their hand up and said they were going to look after me,” he says.

Rudland is mostly complimentary of DVA, while McGlynn is also grateful but concerned about how long it takes for claims to be processed. Both recognise the inherent complexities the department faces in assessing claims.

“Some of these DVA requirements can really trigger people, for the younger guys coming back from war with PTSD, they’re bringing up significant triggering episodes and they just think ‘oh really, do I want to talk to someone about this again?’,” McGlynn says.

Both men, like the RSL, are delighted the Albanese government has allocated so much money to clear the claims backlog in the federal budget. But when the Royal Commission’s final report is handed down in September this year, more money is likely to be required.

As Rudland, a veteran of tours in Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, says: “A government’s investment in defence is a reflection of how it values its people. And a government’s commitment to the veterans’ community is a reflection of its appreciation”.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.