Just prior to leaving for New Zealand my posting was abruptly changed to that of adjutant of the Army Schools in Waiouru. An adjutant is essentially a personal staff officer for a unit commander. I was very disappointed by this late change but I was now committed to returning to New Zealand so there was not much I could do. This was a captain’s appointment whereas I had been a substantive major in the British Army. Moreover, I was to lose some six years seniority with my New Zealand Army peers. There were obviously a number within the army who felt I had been disloyal by previously leaving and this was my punishment. The fact that I now probably had more operational experience than any other officer in the New Zealand Army as well as having attended military courses in the United Kingdom that New Zealand officers were most unlikely to be selected for, was ignored. This reminded me, if I needed reminding, of how parochial the New Zealand Army could be.
But, by this point, I was fully committed and duly took up my appointment in Waiouru. It was certainly an interesting situation because, despite being of a more junior rank to the officers I worked with, I had known them all as snotty little officer cadets or subalterns from my earlier years in the New Zealand Army. A number had delusions of grandeur, but this carried little weight with me as I knew their foibles from long before.
I was reminded of the vagaries of life during an incident in Waiouru. While attending a senior staff officer course we were perched on a hill carrying out a Tactical Exercise Without Troops (TEWT). This is a military exercise where officers are given various tactical problems to solve against a fictitious enemy which was, in our case, the ‘Musorians’, a mythical force loosely based upon the Indonesian Army against whom we deployed our own mythical troops. The exercise involved us walking the area concerned in order to decide where we would place our troops, weapons and any supporting elements such as tanks and artillery.
On this particular day we were supported by an Army Air Corps Sioux helicopter piloted by Captain Pete Speedie. It would take two officers at a time to look around the area of the exercise. The Sioux buzzed in and out with its passengers while the rest of us studied maps and wrote our plans. Suddenly, I detected an unusual note in the noise of the helicopter and looked up. To my horror I saw it was descending at great speed. I could see it was going to land very, very heavily. The helicopter smashed into the ground, bounced into the air and then crashed down again. As it hit the second time the exterior fuel tanks fell away, the tail structure bent and broke and the Plexiglas bubble shattered. The three occupants were lying limply inside. My colleagues and I rushed over to the wreckage and, as we saw flames, removed the casualties from the wreckage and took them a safe distance away before examining them for injuries. They were all suffering from impact trauma and, as a Special Forces trained medic, I carried out injury checks. One of the occupants was unable to feel his legs and I suspected a serious injury to his spine. We immobilised him and the others as best we could and by this time an ambulance had arrived from Waiouru Camp. The injured were all taken to the base hospital there. Two of the occupants recovered and the pilot was able to continue flying but sadly the third occupant, Phil Blundell, was permanently injured and is a paraplegic. He continued in the New Zealand Army and was a very successful senior logistics officer for many years.
The Sioux is designed to break up on impact thereby dissipating the shock of a hard landing on its passengers. The two outside seats are designed to fold and bend in a crash but the passenger in the centre seat is on a rigid part of the aircraft and there is little or no give in his seat at all. This is where Phil had been sitting.
As a family we really enjoyed living in Waiouru. It is situated on the volcanic plateau in the centre of the North Island and the environment has dramatic, vast rolling tussock-covered plains dominated by the imposing mountain collection of Ruapehu, Tongariro and the active volcano Ngarahoe. The New Zealand Army family housing, as always, was spartan and houses were completely unfurnished with the only heating coming from a ‘chippy’ stove located, for some reason, behind the kitchen door. It was bitterly cold in winter when there was always snow on the ground.
It certainly hadn’t been the job I had wanted but I was fortunate in that I had a decent commanding officer in Lieutenant Colonel Graham Talbot, a very efficient and good-natured Corps of Transportation officer. One day the CO was in his office reprimanding a young officer for some minor infraction. The reprimand complete, the officer saluted and marched smartly into the nearby broom cupboard. Much to his credit he remained inside the cupboard until we had vacated the office.
My luck held as my next CO was Lieutenant Colonel Neil ‘Nail’ Bradley, an engineering officer, who, like me, had previously completed an operational tour of Vietnam – he had been with the NZ Artillery there. Immediately prior to this new appointment he had spent time attached to a US Army school of instruction and was now a complete zealot, committed to reorganising the training philosophy of the New Zealand Army schools. It was good to have such a serious task to sink our teeth into and we got along well.
I did well in my new appointment and was soon promoted to major and then, following good grades on the promotion courses, I was selected to attend the New Zealand Command and Staff College. This gave me a great deal of personal satisfaction because I had previously decided not to take up the opportunity to attend the prestigious British Staff College in Camberley where I had been selected as a ‘direct entry’ candidate.
The New Zealand Joint Services Staff College was situated in the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) base at Whenuapai, north of Auckland, and was very much an RNZAF-controlled staff college with little joint military education carried out. We learned, amongst other things, all about the various bomb loads of antiquated New Zealand aircraft and the turn-around times for a strike on Indonesia’s air force bases from Changi airbase in Singapore. The course took the best part of a year and I graduated in December 1984. The most useful part of the course was working and discussing military and political matters with my fellow students including a fellow infantry officer, Major Rob ‘Shorty’ Hughes, and Major Keith Rawlings of the Royal New Zealand Army Service Corps. At the end of the course it was very satisfying to be able to use the title ‘psc’ (passed staff college) but I still cannot tell you what is the bomb load of a Canberra bomber or the loiter-over-target time for a Skyhawk!
In January 1985, after two years in Waiouru I was posted as the second-in-command of the 2/1st Royal New Zealand Infantry Battalion in Burnham. This unit had been called the 1st Battalion Depot for many years and it was where I had completed my infantry soldier training and where I had been based prior to travelling overseas to join 1 RNZIR in Singapore in 1969. With the permanent return of 1 RNZIR, a name change took place, and it officially became the 2/1st Royal New Zealand Infantry Battalion. I obviously knew Burnham well and it was great to be back working with Kiwi infantry soldiers once again. I also had the pleasure of working closely with ‘Shorty’ Hughes, my classmate at Staff College.
But as much as I enjoyed the day-to-day challenges of my role, it also became increasingly obvious to me that I had limited further promotion opportunities. I had reached the top rung of the ladder, not due to my abilities, but because I had obviously committed a sin of disloyalty by having previously left to pursue overseas opportunities. The New Zealand Army was, and still is, small and insular and the careers of officers could be permanently affected by the subjective views and comments of a single more senior officer. The British Army had been too large for personality clashes to permanently affect an officer’s career but here in New Zealand it was a different matter. I was not aware of having any particular ‘enemies’ within the system but I did realise that there were a number of officers who were resentful and envious of my military travels.
I had been contacted by the newly appointed CO of the Sultan of Oman’s Special Forces, Keith F, with whom I had worked when still part of KMS, offering me an appointment. This was certainly a more challenging prospect than what was on offer with the New Zealand Army so on completion of my three-year contract I submitted my resignation from the New Zealand Army for a second time.
There was some ill-feeling amongst a number of senior officers when I did this but, considering their generally appalling officer management, was I really expected to stay and become a tired, boring, passed-over major – I don’t think so! Besides, there was very little operational experience to be gained if I remained with the New Zealand Army. Odin was calling, it was time to get back in the thick of it.