Sent to war to fight an enemy she didn’t know existed: herself

SENT TO WAR TO FIGHT AN ENEMY SHE DIDN’T KNOW EXISTED:

HERSELF

BRAYDEN MAY

like any service

veteran, Kylie Pearce knew her enlistment in the Royal Australian Navy came with that unspoken but fully understood caveat.

She might end up in a shooting match somewhere, at best.

Or in a war, at worst.

And when her war did arrive Kylie was under orders at HMAS Nirimba—at 4am she would be in a plane and headed for Desert Storm in the first Gulf War.

Still not finished with her two-year basic training it must have all been overwhelming.

Until the stand down came at 2am—the extra Australian forces were not needed at that time.

Even though Kylie and fellow trainees were ‘disappointed’ her mother wasn’t.

“I said to mum I’ve got to go, and I’m being posted out only a few hours before the decision came through,” she said.

“We weren’t allowed to tell anyone anything, not even where we were going.

“I couldn’t even tell her if I would be back. It was one of the worst phone calls I have made, she didn’t cope very well with it.

“When I called her the next day, she thought I was playing a joke on her.”

That might have been as close as Kylie came to combat in her six years with the Navy; but by the time she was discharged she was well on her way to becoming collateral damage.

Because she might have been out of the firing line but too many she joined up with were not—some were gone before she left the service; others in the decades since.

So for the next 22 years she would find herself fighting an enemy she didn’t even know existed.

Herself.

Life in the civilian world wasn’t all smooth sailing, it was more like the some of the rough seas Kylie had endured many times before.

But one day on the calendar would increasingly prove the hardest of them all.

For the military it is ‘the’ day.

Anzac Day; April 25.

The day Australians stand side-by-side; honouring those who have fallen and those who have served.

But not Kylie, she would sit in a darkened room in her Echuca home; alone with her thoughts and memories of friends lost.

“I would try to avoid everyone; I wouldn’t talk to anyone. Not even those closest to me,” she said.

She felt hapless in the war against herself, and although she never once considered running up the white flag from where she was looking Kylie could never see her winning.

None of which stopped her being in the frontline of working with, helping, others in trouble, because she was lucky enough to have several support networks—extending from her husband Bruce to those with whom she had served.

She doesn’t want to discuss where she might be without them.

“Veteran suicide is the highest rate of any group of people in this country and it’s very sad. It is becoming more and more prevalent for those who are serving in places like Afghanistan,” Kylie said.

“You help each other because you’ve gone through a lot with that person. You know they will save your life if they can,” she said. >>

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“They are there to defend you, they are there to defend everyone else.

“You can see the people who don’t have that feeling because they don’t last, quite often they don’t make it to the end of the training.

“It is an internal security you gain during your service.”

“Because Bruce doesn’t have a military background it was hard for him to understand what I was going through at times,” she said.

“As a couple we’ve had to work through a lot; but no matter what he has continued to be an amazing supporter of mine.

“If I’m on the phone to one of my military friends, he will say ‘I’ll see you in a few hours’.

“Along with my family, he never pushed the issue and always gave me time to work through the challenges I was facing.”

Those phone calls and face-to-face meetings continue to help Kylie and her fellow veterans get through some of their darkest days.

“Even to this, you might not talk to each other for months but then someone is having trouble with PTSD so you are on the phone trying to help them,” she said.

But finally getting herself to Anzac Day would need more than support and friendship—it would need a sign from beyond.

“Eventually I had my medals and badges framed and hung after I had received my service medal; and at that point I still hadn’t decided whether or not I wanted to do Anzac Day in public,” Kylie said.

“Then on April 26 in 2017 we heard this thud at two in the morning.”

Her newly framed medals had fallen from the wall, the glass shattered and it all went everywhere.

If that wasn’t a clear enough message, nothing else would be.

“We thought it was a bit too eerie,” Kylie admitted.

“To me that meant next year (2018) was the year.”

The ‘sign’ saw her join women veterans selected to lead marches around the country.

And every step she took that morning, watched lovingly by family and friends, was a strong step into a better future; a cathartic experience during which she began to peel off the memories that haunted her.

“It was a proud and emotional moment as Anzac Day always is,” she explained.

“I was able to do it because I had dealt with the issues that I needed to deal with coming out of the forces and the people I had lost.

“Some people are able to do it straight away and others not. It affects everybody differently. It was purely coincidence that my first march was in 2018.

“It was huge for me as a person to be able to do that, it helped me to overcome a lot of personal barriers.

“When you are marching and you do hear

people calling your name, it does make you feel special.”

Kylie emphasised there were also many positives to serving.

“The group that joined the academy together were meant to celebrate our 30th anniversary with a reunion in Sydney last month,” she said.

“Unfortunately, that was all postponed and hopefully we can hold it next year. We did have our a 25-year reunion in 2015, which was our first one, and it was great.”

Kylie’s family history over military service is a long one, with her nanna, Nora Creswell, serving in the Royal Navy between the wars, and having to leave after three years because she married (equal opportunity laws were still decades away).

And at just seven-years-old, Kylie had already decided she wanted to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps.

“Nanna would always speak about her time in the Navy when I was growing up,” she explained.

“When I was 17, I found out you could enlist before you were 18. It only happened because I stumbled across a newspaper article which said that you were able to join at 15.

“My careers teacher at school told me that you had to be 18. I wasn’t too happy when I found out.”

Soon after, the then teenager was packing her bags and heading to the HMAS Nirimba, where she would undertake two years of training.

But in those two years, there were big changes

taking place in the structure of Australia’s defence forces, with men and women navy members expected to train together.

“The boys made it very clear to us that you had to be better than them, not on the same level,” Kylie recalled.

“It was a lot harder than we expected because we were used to a certain way of doing things and it changed what we could do.

“In our intake there were only three girls, one was 15 and the other was 18.

We had to do twice the work, twice the training. They might be in bed and we would be doing training.

“We just wanted to be seen as equals. It was the only way we could earn that respect.

“There was never a point where I thought this wasn’t for me.

“It was where I wanted and needed to be. That thought process only pushed me further.”

Kylie would serve on HMAS Canberra, HMAS Success and HMAS Westralia but her only foreign ‘battles she fought were those against asylum seeker boats.

Although, she could argue her biggest were against those living on the same ship as her.

Living in such close quarters did mean there was the rare issue between mates.

“Sometimes you would feel like you were going mad,” Kylie said. “On the Canberra we had 130 people but we had 30 women in a space of a dining room. Beds were three high and you couldn’t sit up in your bunk. “

On patrol it often felt as if their days would never end.

“Some days you would be up for 22 hours, so you would sleep where you could.”

In the ultimate twist, Kylie’s career at sea would end with a medical discharge for chronic seasickness—despite trying several injections a day.

In Kylie’s time in the navy came to an end in 1996 when she was medically discharged.

“I was a girl from the country, so I had never really been on the ocean before joining the navy and apart from the injections I walked around with lots of garbage bags in my pocket.

“The worst-case scenario, we were around the bottom of Australia off the Western Australia coast and I was on our biggest ship. We had waves coming up over our bridge. They were bigger waves than those for the Sydney Hobart yacht race which killed people.”

She was suddenly in what many people would call the real world, fending for herself in everyday life and it took several years to overcome those challenges.

But if you ask her if she wanted to get back on a ship, she would be there in a heartbeat.

She is a proud Australian who would do anything to defend her country.

And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

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2020 01 28 Dairy News February copy.pdf 1 24/01/2020 5:45:21 PM

2020 01 28 Dairy News February copy.pdf 1 24/01/2020 5:45:21 PM

Damian DRUM Damian DRUM MP FEDERAL MEMBER FOR NICHOLLS FEDERAL MEMBER FOR NICHOLLS

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