Aghanistan war’s impact explored in ABC Radio series Retrospect

THE end of Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan raises questions about its impact on our service personnel.

Australians on patrol in Afghanistan.

AS we approach Anzac Day, the folded letters, diaries and faded photographs come out of archives and old chests to illustrate a distant war. But what of more recent conflicts in which Australian soldiers have faced battle? What of the more than 33,000 Defence personnel who served in Afghanistan? In an ephemeral era of Skype, Facebook and email, what traces of Australia’s longest war will remain for historians and war museums to reflect on in another 100 years?

Creating that archive was one of the objectives of Retrospect: War, Family, Afghanistan, a multifaceted project that has resulted in, among other things, a six-part radio series on Earshot, ABC Radio National’s flagship documentary program. It explores the impact of the war in Afghanistan on the lives of six former Australian Defence Force personnel and their families. The timing is apt: today, veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan assemble around the country to march in Operation Slipper welcome home ­parades in each state capital.

The emerging portrait of Afghanistan war service is intended to be a multimedia archive, a dynamic set of digital era memories from Australia’s engagement. It has secured support and input from the Australian Defence Force Academy, the Australia Council and the Department of Veterans Affairs. It has been enabled by Australian Research Council Linkage funding “to prototype new digital forms of war memorial”.

The series of in-depth radio interviews is the first element, but the voices have been matched with evocative imagery planned for use in afuture exhibition and digital cache. Photographic portraits were created by award-winning photojournalist Stephen Dupont of six ex-soldiers and their loved ones. Then there’s harrowing — and in some cases hitherto unseen — video footage on Retrospect’s website by ABC cinematographer Neale Maude, shot on location in Afghanistan for Four Corners.

Overlaying the whole is an original music score by Oonagh Sherrard, evoking the musical traditions of Afghanistan and the hard-rock ballads that blare out in army camps worldwide.

Yet the disparate elements that hang off this project come back to the essential art of storytelling, and even letters. Like the handwritten note Rob Cashman sent to his mother before going into his first combat zone in Afghanistan, attached to 1 Squadron SASR A troop.

“I’m going away to war on Monday,” he wrote. “As casual as that sounds, I am a bit nervous. There is always the thought in the back of my mind of ‘What if I don’t come back?’”

Cashman did come back. Twelve years on, he sat down — as did the other ex-army personnel and their families — to record their lives with producer Michelle Rayner.

“These people are living with very powerful recent lived experience — it’s not even history yet,” observes Rayner. “We weren’t able to interview serving soldiers, and that’s been an advantage in many ways because settling back into civilian life has emerged as a major theme.”

Perth-based Cashman was an army cook, but his anecdotal account of military life reflects far more varied experiences. He found himself training at SAS barracks in Swanbourne, Western Australia, in night-vision driving, weapons testing and range shooting, desert camouflage and concealment. “I was deployed as a guard on the ammunition plane carrying over 25,000kg of ammunition and weapons,” he says.

At his station base at Kandahar airport he witnessed “David Hicks (being) captured (with) other enemy combatants, and saw them housed and heard them screaming in the jail at the airport”. He witnessed boarding parties of those prisoners being shackled and transported to Guantanamo Bay.

Alongside such events are amusing glimpses of life on an international army base. Cashman made illicit “moonshine” brew from his provision orders of yeast and tinned fruit, “items that would not raise eyebrows with the top brass”, and traded the brew for German beer, Cuban cigars and Swiss army pocket-knives.

Like everyone else, Cashman lived with the daily spectre of violence. “The unknown can be terrifying,” he admits. “The unpredictability of ambush, drive-by shootings, grenade attacks, religious fundamentalists, sleep deprivation, mutilated injuries, the fear of landmines, death of friends and so much more. That’s the real unhappiness. The unknown.”

One of his close friends, Andy Russell, was blown up by an anti-tank mine and died while being ferried back to base by helicopter. “Andy didn’t get to see his newborn’s photos … We had to leave (Afghanistan) with that memory.”

Arriving back in Perth, says Cashman, was bizarre. The soldiers were ushered on to buses with blacked-out windows, amid the deafening noise of helicopters hovering overhead. “We were quickly brought inside for another welcome party from dignitaries,” Cashman says. “Very surreal. Our lives, by choice or not, had just been turned upside down, and my journey from this was about to begin …”

Life has mellowed for Cashman, who is now married. His first child is due in September. He is a loyal supporter of the Fremantle RSL branch. But Bev Murray, mother of Corporal Tyson Murray, commander, high-risk search team, sums up the sense of displacement her son and his mates felt on their return.

“It was only after a matter of hours of them being back in the country, they wished that they were back over there [in Afghanistan] because that had become the norm,” she tells Rayner. “You had to really not take it to heart that they were calling someone else their family.” Says Rayner: “It raises the knotty issue of lost identity when people have left the defence force. It’s particularly visceral for soldiers for whom the armed forces are often referred to as ‘the other family’. That’s a telling metaphor.”

Tyson Murray was a young man from a small rural town who joined the army at 17, and soon felt right at home. He trained as an engineer, and went to Afghanistan in 2010 as part of a bomb disposal unit. That year a bomb blast killed two of his close mates in the unit.

Murray returned to Afghanistan in 2012 but suffered a major breakdown that led to his discharge from the army. He avoids media interviews yet agrees to talk frankly with Rayner about his slow journey back from the brink.

Two of the six interviewees in the project suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and underwent medical discharge from the service. One was an expert in psychological counselling who faced her own struggle with PTSD.

Major Louise O’Sullivan studied psychology on an ADF scholarship. She joined the army as a qualified counsellor and was attached to special forces troops deployed to Afghanistan.

She gave daily counselling sessions for combat soldiers who had survived violent and traumatic episodes or were suffering from sustained exposure to stress.

Inevitably her parents, Dennis and Catherine O’Sullivan, shared her anguish, during and after their daughter’s deployments, and they describe how they supported her in her decision to leave the army two years ago.

“The unique aspect of this series is hearing about the war experience at home,” says Rayner. “Louise’s candid story sheds new light on the psychological toll of conflict, not just for those on the frontline but on family and loved ones back home.”

The stories of war service are a mix of good and bad, says Rayner. “We have a helicopter pilot who talks about settling happily down into a bucolic existence on the far north coast with her husband and four kids.” That pilot is Major Susana Henderson, commander, CH-47 (Chinook) Rotary Wing Group. Her episode, Khaki and Flying the Big Fat Cows, tracks her path from becoming the first woman to graduate from ADFA in the pilot training course. After peacekeeping duties in Timor, she was deployed as a commander in the Australian military aircraft unit in Afghanistan, where she flew Chinooks, known fondly as the “big fat cows”.

She talks pragmatically of sitting down to update her will with husband Jerrod, an army engineer, “once I had a far better appreciation of the threat level in Afghanistan”.

She prepared a picture book to leave for her two sons, then aged one and three: “I wrote things in there like, ‘Your mother is doing this overseas.’ I think I said, ‘She’s off fighting baddies,’ or something. They knew the words, they knew ‘Taliban’, they knew what they were. My eldest could say ‘Afghanistan’.”

Eventually Henderson turned down the rank of colonel and being put in command of all Australian army helicopter personnel in Afghanistan. She left the ADF 18 months ago after taking maternity leave with her fourth child.

“We’re great, and we’re happy we’re all together now in a close community. We feel very settled,” Henderson tells Review. But she agreed to participate in the radio program because of her concern at the growing list of Afghanistan veterans suffering post-conflict trauma.

“It needs to be spoken about, or normalised, so people can speak out and seek help. I feel very fortunate Jerrod and I haven’t been affected, but we know of two suicide attempts among friends and bad marriage breakups. It’s a huge issue, even though there’s a lot of good work happening. The army doesn’t keep in touch with people who have left. And a lot have left.”

A question of comprehension hovers over the issue of Afghanistan. Have we, as a nation, sought to comprehend our most recent war engagement — and its political and personal fallout — with anything resembling our levels of devotion to Gallipoli and Anzac Day?

Future elements of the Retrospect project may inspire such comprehension. Plans are under way for a 3-D interactive exhibition, created by the iCinema Research Centre at Sydney’s University of NSW, and an interactive database will be made available to researchers and the veteran community.

Henderson says most Australians are ignorant about Australia’s longest war. “They have no idea. There are some well-read individuals, but for the rest of the population it must have been white noise for them. Everyone asks me if I went to Afghanistan, but then they often ask if there was any fighting. I say, ‘Well, yes.’ They are shocked that we were in danger.”

She baulks at comparisons with World War I and its huge casualties “because, back then, even Australians at home were at war. With our engagement in Afghanistan, life at home went on as normal.” Yet Retrospect hints at a different reality, at least for the families of military veterans. Those who come home are changed, and so are those left behind.

Cashman ends his letter to his mother with a sentiment that could have been penned in Gallipoli’s trenches. It hints at glimmering awareness that his war service is inflicting pain on loved ones. “You never need to think of this letter as a goodbye letter, simply one of my expressions of thanks and love for you, my mum.”

Retrospect: War, Family, Afghanistan airs daily at 11am from March 23 to 27 on ABC’s Radio National. More: retrospect.abc.net.au.