For a fleeting moment on horseback, SAS medic Dusty can escape the demons of war

It's only when he’s riding a horse through the bush in Victoria’s high country that SAS medic turned army warrant officer Dusty Miller can, for a little while, stop thinking about what he saw in Afghanistan.

Instead, he feels.

He feels the cold air biting his face and the rhythmic thud of hooves pounding the earth below. He feels the horse respond to his gentle direction, a slight nudge to avoid a storm-felled old gum and then a firm heel to encourage him down the slope. Then, while flying full canter, for some precious minutes his mind is free of the Afghan man he treated for a non-fatal bullet wound to the leg. A man who suddenly ended up dead, likely murdered by another Australian soldier.

Dusty, who is still in the army awaiting his final discharge papers, is guarded about the incident that still haunts him and which put him in the psychiatric ward of the Austin Veterans Repatriation hospital earlier this year.

He explains that he’s bound by the defence department’s secrecy rules, as well as those of the military Inspector-General’s war crimes investigator, Major General Paul Brereton. So, asked if he knows of Afghan detainees being mistreated, Dusty responds carefully.

SAS medic turned army sergeant Dusty Miller who, with SAS psychologist Mark Mathieson has launched Mounted Missions. Credit: 60 Minutes

“I can’t discuss that other than [saying] yes I did see that and it is under current investigation by the IGADF (Major General Brereton).”

When a horse pairs up and accepts a soldier, it's a very powerful and very moving experience.

Dusty Miller

Other defence sources are more forthcoming. They say an injured Afghan was taken from Dusty’s care by an SAS soldier and executed out of sight.

“It destroyed him,” says an insider who served with Dusty.

But if he won’t stray into operational and inquiry secrets, Dusty is quite willing to open up about the impact of the incident on his mental health. “It's indelible. It's with me. I'm an army medic. And it goes completely against everything that I believe in.”

Talking about his own struggle with his war demons takes rare courage. Mental health issues remain taboo in the regular army let alone the elite SAS, which Dusty served with as a medic on two tours of Afghanistan.  Dusty is known among his colleagues for his relentless work ethic and professionalism. Despite being seconded to the SAS as a medic rather than passing the exacting selection tests, he was among the fittest men in the regiment.

Dusty Miller in camouflage in Afghanistan.

Now he is driven by his desire to help others cope with the cost of war. As he transitions out of the army, Dusty and former SAS psychologist Mark Mathieson have launched Mounted Missions, a carefully designed 12-week program that uses horse and adventure therapy to help veterans and others leaving high stress jobs to heal and manage trauma.

Dusty and Mathieson have already got early backing from federal MP and ex-SAS captain Andrew Hastie, who served in Afghanistan at the same time as Dusty. Mathieson has also recently briefed assistant defence minister Darren Chester about their therapy program.

It’s timely, not only because the Afghan conflict, Australia’s longest war, has produced a generation of burnt out veterans, but because the Brereton war-crimes inquiry is unearthing dark acts that some have sought to bury or cover up.

The inquiry won’t yet say what it has found, but it has revealed it has already interviewed on oath more than 200 special forces soldiers and support staff. On Friday and Saturday, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed the inquiry is probing the summary executions of detainees by SAS and Commandos.

Dusty says accountability is painful but vital. His mates say it was the prospect that an injustice would be hidden rather than confronted that contributed to Dusty's breakdown. Those close to Dusty say he sat on his secrets for far too long, hoping inquiry investigators would one day come to him. He was quietly imploding, but no one around him knew it. Not even Dusty.

Each morning, the 50-year-old would rise before the sun and undergo a brutal exercise regime. His army work flourished. Earlier this year, he was notified he was to be decorated for his innovative efforts to train a new generation of soldiers. He’d fallen in love with Megan, a nurse, and then in love again with their first child, a girl.

Then he broke down.

“It came to a sort of a crescendo,” he says. “And it was probably the toughest time of my life ever.”

Dusty Miller with his daughter.

In March, he was hospitalised for severe depression at the repatriation hospital. The Brereton inquiry has finally contacted Dusty, but he won’t say when or what it is about.  But disclosing his demons to psychologists and the inquiry has helped Dusty confront what Mathieson describes as “moral trauma”.

Mathieson has debriefed more than 1000 Afghan veterans, including many SAS operators. He says the repeated deployments to Afghanistan — the special forces were deployed again and again to a grinding, unwinnable war — was pushing soldiers to the edge and risking the normalisation of battlefield conduct that would once have been unthinkable.

Dusty’s moral trauma stems from his belief that he failed to intervene to save a man’s life. It perhaps explains his decision to tell his story and his passion to help others to seek help earlier, before they land in a psych ward.

“If I can save just one life,” says Dusty, trailing off into thought.

Quieting his mind

Horse and outdoor therapy programs designed by psychologists have been successfully used in the US to do what more conventional treatment cannot. Dusty and Mathieson are liaising with several US programs, including Heroes for Horses in Montana.

“When a horse pairs up and accepts a soldier, it's a very powerful and very moving experience where soldiers can really find some peace with perhaps some of the experiences which have shattered that moral compass,” Mathieson explains.

Dusty learned to quiet his mind by heading bush and riding. Navigating the bureaucracy of the army medical system, sitting in its sometimes suffocating clinics and taking pills, does not compare. “You get instant feedback from that animal. And it knows if you're anxious, it will not work with you,” he says.

It was his very first time riding through the scrub outside of Yackandandah near the NSW-Victoria border that Dusty noticed a change.

“You stop thinking about the things that often just intrusively enter your mind. That might be situations that happened overseas, in Afghanistan particularly.”

Six years after he served in Afghanistan and just a few weeks after checking out of hospital, riding up ridges and across rivers, Dusty's thoughts focused on what was around him. The sun squinting through dense scrub and old gums, the stillness of the bush punctuated by pounding hooves and his mount’s breath.

For the first time in a long time, Dusty felt free.

Mounted Missions website: https://www.mountedmissions.org

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