TRAVERSE 133
one hell of a ride
Not a rider of bikes , Rod Henderson still took to Australia ' s Simpson Desert as part of the Frontline Safari , he found an event that can change lives , as his had been changed prior .
Good things happen when veterans come together in support of one another .
Serving in the Australian military with Clay Marks and Matthew Porter , organisers of the 2023 Frontline Safari , is a fact that I am proud yet , I must offer full disclosure , I have ridden a dirt bike just once , it didn ’ t go well . I panicked , opened the throttle , and the results were left to physics . I was eight years old and quickly realised that my talent in life lay elsewhere , eventually finding a passion for the military and in particular , the army .
With my interest growing , at age thirteen I joined the Army Cadets , progressing at seventeen to the Reserves . Before I knew it I was that young eighteenyear-old getting my head shaved at basic training for the regular army , far from home in country New South Wales , Australia . That was June 1995 , I ’ d stepped into a profession of arms , something I truly didn ’ t appreciate the enormity of until years later when deployed .
Completing three months of basic training , nothing like the movies although you do get yelled at a lot , I was fortunate to get a position in the infantry and it was here that I learnt the true meaning of soldiering . The life of an infantry soldier was bloody hard work but , it teaches you a lot about yourself . There would be days without food and many nights without sleep , all the time learning how to find and close with the enemy before they were able to use their training against you . This was quite simply learning how to kill other young men , and despite coming from other countries , they were men just like me .
This training gave me the basics of what I would then go on to learn in the 3rd Battalion , a Parachute unit . This was everything you would expect of an organisation that is full of young men amped up on testosterone who jump out of planes . Quite simply it turned me from this naive kid from Newcastle ( Australia ) to someone who was jumping out of a Hercules aircraft at night with 60 kilograms of gear strapped to me . And why did I do it ? Because the man in front of me had the courage to and I couldn ’ t hold up the man behind me . I didn ’ t see myself as a particularly brave person , but I guess that is what bravery is , you jump even though it terrifies you .
Years later in 1999 , a small fledgling nation to the north of Australia , East Timor ( Timor Leste ) had just voted for their independence from Indonesia and with that came an immeasurable amount of violence against the local population , led by the pro Indonesian militias . Our battalion was one of the first into the unrest and was called upon to enforce the United Nations mandated resolution to restore law and order .
As a young man , this deployment , my first , was full of eye-opening moments from mass graves to people threatening me with grenades , to having to use my rifle in self-defence . This was not typical of deployments to East Timor , yet it was my experience , an experience that has had a profound effect on me physically and mentally .
Like my initial years in the battalion , building the courage to jump from a perfectly good aircraft , I went through it all with my military brothers and drew strength knowing they had my back , these people were quite simply my brothers in arms .
Returning from East Timor I changed jobs and applied to become a crewman on the armies helicopters , a door gunner is an easy way to describe my job but , realistically this was a very small part of the role , yet I won ’ t lie and say it wasn ’ t exciting . In this job I was deployed back to East Timor a further three times , as well as Pakistan , Papua New Guinea , and Afghanistan .
Like so many other soldiers , each deployment would unknowingly take its toll with each experience or near miss compounding upon the other until a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2012 was my limit .
I couldn ’ t realise at the time , this was the onset of post-traumatic stress , a slow insidious disease that can and will appear when you think all is well . It wasn ’ t until I was on what was supposed to be a rest posting to help train officers at the Royal Military College Duntroon that things truly started to fall apart both physically and mentally .
TRAVERSE 133