Doing Extraordinary Things in Stressful Environments
The toilet’s a long drop, the place is constantly dusty, washing is done by hand, and they’re running low on instant pudding – apparently it’s energy food here so it’s okay to indulge.
Welcome to Chunuk Bair, a Kiwi forward patrol base in the Yakawlang district, in the north western part of Bamyan Province, Afghanistan. In this stunning Hindu Kush area, overlooking the District Capital of Nayak, the Kiwi-One patrol conducts daily meetings with local villagers and government officials, as they work to improve the lot of the Afghan people.
The New Zealand Defence Force has 135 NZ PRT personnel working in Bamyan Province and a two person medical mission in support of the Canadian-led Multinational Medical Unit at Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan. They form part of seven nations working together within this medical facility to provide the highest level of medical care available in the southern Afghanistan area of operations.
“The unpredictability and tempo of war means that the numbers and types of injuries are not always known before arrival,” says Lieutenant Soren Hall of the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps.“ The reality that some injuries are not survivable is also a lesson learned very early in your time at the Multinational Medical Unit.”
New Zealand provides two United Nations Military Observers and one Staff Officer to the UN Mission in Sudan monitoring the comprehensive peace agreement between the Government of National Unity and the Government of South Sudan.
In the dry season temperatures climb to 50 degrees celsius. In the wet it doesn’t just rain, the sky just turns to water and 30 minutes of rain is enough to cause enough damage to the roads to cease vehicle movement for days.
“This is a very difficult and complex country, fractured many times and not easy to describe as simply a fight between North and South or Muslim and Christian,” says New Zealand’s Captain Aaron Wright. “There are many underlying currents and it will take a concerted, sustained effort by the international community to rectify, something I wonder if our western lifestyle has the stomach for. I pray for the lives of the millions of innocents here that we do.”
In Timor-Leste a Royal New Zealand Air Force Iroquois helicopter crew serving with the Defence Force recently performed a life-saving evacuation when they saved a baby suffering from respiratory difficulties.
The baby girl was born five-weeks premature, and was unlikely to have survived if it wasn’t for the quick actions of the Iroquois crew who flew 20 nautical miles off the coast of Dili to the mother’s home on Atauro Island.
RNZAF Iroquois detachment commander Squadron Leader Daniel O’Reilly said the emergency medical team administered constant CPR to the infant during the flight back to medical facilities near Dili: “If we’d arrived 30 minutes later it’s likely she would have died.”
New Zealand’s Commander of Joint Forces Major General Rhys Jones says these are just some examples of “Ordinary New Zealanders doing extraordinary things in stressful environments”.
He says the New Zealand Defence Force currently has around 600 people deployed throughout the world, serving on 15 peacekeeping operations, UN missions and defence exercises, from Antarctica to Sudan, the Solomon Islands to Timor-Leste.
In the past year Defence Force personnel have served in UN missions in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, the Republic of Korea, and Kosovo. At the same time non-UN missions in the Solomon Islands, Afghanistan, Sinai, Timor-Leste and the Arabian Gulf illustrate New Zealand’s commitment to global peace.
Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant General Mateparae says participating in United Nations and other appropriate multi-national peace-making and peacekeeping operations underlines New Zealand’s wider commitment to collective security and our credentials as a good international citizen.
“It is clearly in New Zealand’s national interest to have a robust, combat-ready Defence Force that can quickly and actively get involved – be it in our own backyard or the other side of the world,” says Lt Gen Mateparae.
Defence Minister Phil Goff says that given the increasing focus on the need to intervene in failing states, military intervention will generally be an essential component in controlling and stabilising a situation to prevent widespread death and destruction.
“But for the resolution of conflict to be sustainable, we need more wide-ranging interventions to deal with the causes of state failure including actions to build institutions of state and social services, and deal with issues of ethnic, tribal or religious conflict.
“An effective and efficient Defence Force, trained and equipped for combat, but also with the skills for peacekeeping is essential. So too are the complementary whole-of-government actions necessary for the peace to be sustainable,” he says.
Age of NZDF personnel
- < 24 33%
- 25-34 25%
- 35-44 23%
- 45-54 13%
- 55 > 6%