West Coast to the Middle East: A soldier’s experience

I’ve been in the Army for more than 15 years. I followed members of my family into a life of service, and I just knew it was something I wanted to do.

Specifically, I wanted to join the 2^nd/1^st Battalion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment (RNZIR) because I was keen to get stuck into some bush and jungle exercises.

For us, this current deployment started in the dense bush of the South Island’s West Coast.

We were conducting a pretty routine exercise at the time, with my section providing support to an ambush attack.

I remember the enemy had just made contact with us, before withdrawing. We moved into the harbour and secured our position.

That’s when we got the call.

“No duff, no duff, stop, stop, stop. There’s been a High Readiness call out.” 

When the radio message first came through our platoon signaler, we immediately discussed how to tell everyone the news – because we were in the middle of a high-adrenaline exercise, about to conduct an ambush, and so we wanted to make sure people were calmed down before we announced it.

As soon as we did our training took over - we immediately went into our routine checks, making sure we had everything from our magazines, equipment and any other bits of kit we’d been issued.

We then had to come up with a plan to get as quickly as possible to a main road, so that we could get to some form of transport and make our way back to Burnham.

I’ve been deployed before – to Solomon Islands in 2012 and Iraq in 2016 – and I’ve deployed to numerous exercises throughout Australia and Papua New Guinea, so for me I’ve sort of been down this road before, but for a number of soldiers in my section this was their first experience of it.

Everyone was excited. Our adrenaline and excitement levels were already high because of the exercise, but to have it interrupted by a real-life High Readiness call out just added to it.

The next few hours are a bit of a blur, but it’s when all of our individual and collective training kicks in.

As the NZDF’s High Readiness Capability, we’re trained be more ready, and more prepared than some of the other regular units.

We regularly make sure our ability to mobilise quickly is rehearsed and up to scratch, because it’s all about making sure we’re deployable for whatever Government needs us to do.

One of the biggest tasks was actually servicing our kit to make sure it was in a deployable state.

We’d just spent days in wet, close-country environments, and were about to head to the dry conditions of the Middle East – so everything needed to be quickly washed, cleaned and zero-ed to deploy.

There were still a lot of unknowns at this stage, but there were no complaints, everyone bought into it and just got on with the job at hand.

I remember talking to my partner on the way back from the West Coast. Reception was pretty patchy but she definitely didn’t panic and wasn’t asking lots of questions – she took the news of a High Readiness deployment well and was excited that we’d been called up, she was 100% supportive.

She actually helped me get ready too – in my role as section commander I have to make sure my eight soldiers are good to go, not just myself, so I messaged my partner and said I’ll need this, this and this good to go, and by the time we got home it was all done for me.

Once all our gear was locked and loaded, there was a bit of time to catch our breath as we prepared for where we were heading.

I knew that when we’d hit the ground, it would likely be a lot of hard, fast and unexpected tasks – but that’s what we train for.

By this stage we’d managed to watch a bit of the news and get an idea of what had been happening over in the Middle East, and for us it heightened the excitement in a way – because we knew that we were going into that region to potentially help people evacuate and get them to safety, if required.

But we also knew that there was a degree of uncertainty in terms of exactly what we may end up being tasked to do – so for us it was about preparing for all sorts of outcomes.

Now that we’re here on the ground in the region it’s given me the opportunity to look back at how we responded to the High Readiness activation, and our processes to deploy here, and it really was hard and fast – we had to adapt and get on with it.

In some ways it’s that grunt mentality where we just see the task in front of us and just get after it.

No matter the task, we prepare ourselves to incredibly high standards so that when the opportunity presents, we can deliver.

And that’s just what we’ll continue to do now that we’re here.