Welcome back to The Voices of War. Today we’re recording the first episode of a two-episode series, unpacking some of the realities behind Australia’s longest war through the lens of the recent award-winning documentary, Bravery and Betrayal. The film sets the experiences of our special operations community within the wider pressures, expectations, and contradictions of the war in Afghanistan, and offers a rear window into what was asked of our troops for over more than two decades. To explore the operational and legal terrain behind that story,

 I’m joined by two guests who feature prominently in tne documentary and who lived it from inside the tent, but from different angles.

 First, Vando, who grew up in Niger before coming to Australia and embarking on a 24-year military career. He began in the infantry corps before spending 16 years in special operations, serving as troop commander, squadron commander, and senior staff officer within the Special Air Service Regiment. Across 10 deployments, including to Iraq, East Timor, the Solomon Islands, North Africa, and three tours of Afghanistan, he carried command responsibility at both the tactical and operational levels.

 Second is Brett, who first studied law before joining the army and becoming an intelligence officer. Among other appointments, he served as the principal intelligence officer, the S2, at 1st Commando regiment, where he also passed the arduous Commando Selection Course, and later as the S2 for SASR. After transferring to the Legal Corps in 2007, he continued supporting special operations on some of the most complex legal and ethical questions they faced. With five deployments under his belt, including to Kosovo, three tours to East Timor, and an extended deployment to Afghanistan, Brett has engaged with the complexities of war first through the intelligence and later through the legal lens.

 Both men are now retired from the military and together they offer an insider’s view of how mission, law, operating environment, and human pressures intersected on the ground. All issues that Bravery and Betrayal has placed squarely in the national conversation.

 Vando and Brett, thank you both for joining me on The Voice of War.

Vando

Thanks, Maz.

Brett

Good to see you, mate.

So just a quick disclaimer before we kick off. I’ve known Vando for a couple of years now and we’ve talked about doing an episode for that long, really. And Brett, I know Brett from Afghanistan, we were both there at the same time and he’s certainly helped me out on a couple of tricky situations, if I can call them that.

So, gents, before we dive into the documentary proper and the lived experience of the war fighter, I just want to bring the documentary to the forefront initially. So how did it come about, firstly? And what story did you feel needed to be told? I’m happy for either of you to start.

Vando

Yeah, so I was part of the original genesis of the documentary idea. It had been something that myself and a number of senior members of the unit at the time that we were just post the IGADF announcement or the findings announcement. We were deeply troubled and unsettled at the overwhelmingly, what we felt was the overwhelmingly negative story that had now been told about the unit for, I think we’re at that point, it probably about six years. So continuously sort of negative story. And we were the guys, you know, between myself and a few others, the guys that were trying to pick up the pieces in the unit day to day,  seeing the deleterious effect it was having on guys, their sense of self, their morale.

You know, it was, you know, to the point of, you know, almost imprinting on even the new guys that were coming into the unit who, you know, Afghanistan was not their experience, but they were then, you know, that, that, that sort of, that cross was being, was being laid on their shoulders as well. And in the, in the absence of any sort of balance in the story from our own senior leaders, there, and there were no military or political leadership were willing to balance the narrative with stories of service and sacrifice as well. And so we, in the absence of that, we felt that we needed to do something about it. We had no idea how to put a film together or even what that process looked like. But the start point was that I think we came together and we ended up having a core group of about, I think it was eight guys in total  who you know, just Tuesday nights, we started to sketch out on a Zoom call what a film might look like.

Choco Tuesday, huh?

 Exactly right. I mean, by this stage, I think we were all, we’d all separated from service. And so we, yeah, we just started to sort of pull together the bones of what a docco theme or what a docco structure might look like. What were the key themes that we felt, you know, if we had five seconds of fame, what would those themes be and for what purpose. So that was the genesis from my perspective, but I’ll throw it to you Brett.

Amazing.

Brett

Yeah, that’s exactly what happened, Maz and As you know, I work with a charitable veteran charity called Wandering Warriors and Vando and a couple other fellows approached us to support the cause and get behind it. We thought with all that’s going on in the media, the scrutiny into Afghanistan and then more specifically the special forces, we thought what better cause than to get behind this and that’s what we did. That’s how I got involved with it.

But on a personal level, there was so much negative media around at the time that I thought this is a great way for us to contribute in a way, in a meaningful way that was unique as well. It wasn’t just us getting around on social media. There’s a platform where we’re able to get out to the whole of Australia and that’s what we set out to achieve. So it was, it’s been a terrific project and something that we’re really proud of.

And you should be. It’s incredible. So, from both your perspectives, how did you feel seeing the final cut and did it capture what you wanted to capture? And, you know, are you happy with what Australians now finally get to see?

Vando

Yeah, I mean, if I was to sort of, think, sum it up in two words, I think would be relief, first of all, relief that it was over. It was a long process. I mean, it was, yeah, was far longer than I actually thought it would be from, it was really sort of two years. Two year commitment to build the film and shoot the film. And then, you know, this last sort of six to eight months, or almost a year really has been quite intensive because we wanted to take it to the people. We wanted to do the in-person screenings with the question-and-answer sessions so that we weren’t just sort of faces on a screen. We’re actually flesh and blood humans with all our, you know, all our fallibilities, imperfections, different views.

And we could stand in front of an audience and say, Hey, this is us. This is our story. Any burning thing, you know, anything that you’ve ever wanted to ask or that the film has raised, just ask us directly as opposed to getting online and, and, know, and trolling or because this social media is just this sort of hub of outrage, but it’s so much more difficult to be angry at someone when they’re standing in front of you.

So relief that that that was over because that was a pretty significant process. And then I think watching it was sadness as well. Because it is, I think it’s a sad story in our, it’s a sad story in our national sort of tapestry of military history. And it sort of still makes me feel a bit melancholy when I watch it. So that’s me.

Yeah, what about you, Brett?

Brett

Look, it’s hard not to be melancholy with the theme. Obviously, it’s not just about Vando and his experience or my experience. I think the real essence of the film is the fact that it is the story from the families most acutely. And then, of course, we’ve got the three prime ministers in there as well to give it a lot of validation. So between those three viewpoints, I think it’s a really special film, but it’s designed to I think, to bring those perspectives and it can’t be anything but melancholy when you’re talking about families who have lost loved ones.

Absolutely. And that comes through so loud and clear through the film. I’ve watched it three times in preparation for this and just to kind of to wrap my head around everything you guys try to cover in there. And there’s just so much. The things that resonated with me, perhaps mostly is the kind of real lived experience of what war is like that is so often distant from the minds of Australians on a day-to-day basis.

And perhaps I want to pivot to that, if you’re both okay with that, because I think that really was the thing that I’ve been trying to do on the podcast as well is to kind of shine a bit more light on what war is like, because too frequently we just go to war. And because we’re voluntary force, we send our troops away and it’s fire and forget, essentially from the everyday lived Australian perspective. There’s very small number of people in Australia that are affected by wars or service. It’s only small, we’re a very small force and a small number of people that have any touch with the lived experience. So maybe Vendo, I can start with you. You’ve done three tours to Afghanistan. So we’ll focus on Afghanistan, obviously, because that’s what the documentary is about. But feel free to also throw in any other experiences that might be relevant.

 The first question I want to start with is, it’s often said that the special forces in general are the force of choice. How does that sit with you and why are you the force of choice or were you the force of choice?

Vando

I mean, so how does it sit with me? I guess there’s probably two answers to that first question. As my younger self, it sat really well, right? Like you, my natural career progression was through the third battalion,  through recon and snipers, and then this aspiration to join the SAS, which was lucky enough to come up. But so at the time, that was the driver for so many of us going into that recruiting pathway was the SAS was where you needed to be deployed to, you know, to a war. Because, you know, I came into the game pretty late as a, you know, I got to the unit in 2008, didn’t deploy until I was fully qualified in 2010. By then there was, you know, there was almost 10 years of combat experience across the guys that I was coming into to lead.

So it had been going, the game had been playing for a long time. So, first of all, wanting to get into that, absolutely.  My older self would actually look at that force of choice tag and actually question it from an ethics standpoint, I think now, having seen the, because it’s actually, I don’t think it’s well known the actual longitudinal volume of combat that was undertaken, particularly by the men of the SASR. It was the first guys into Afghanistan in 2002 to the last boots on the ground. My last trip of Afghanistan was 2014. That’s a long period of time. And the work that was there, there was…there was so much work that you could have consumed an entire combat brigade in terms of roles and tasks and not had too much duplication or overlap.

So there was enough there for everyone, but that comes with an increasing price tag or an increasing unrealized risk. And so I think that’s why we were force of choice, because the risk versus reward equation was actually quite balanced.

What is that? What is that equation? mean, let’s zero in on that a little bit because I think that’s an important aspect that’s not really discussed often enough.

Vando

Yeah, I mean, and so in the case of Afghanistan, you’re looking at a war of it’s a it’s it’s a war of choice, right? It’s not it’s not an existential threat. It’s not it’s so it’s so first of all, there’s a there’s a choice to commit to the war. The rationale behind it was very much as a show of support to the Alliance. So when you when you look at that, you’re actually trying to hedge your hedge your risk a little bit, not commit too much, because actually the war doesn’t, the war isn’t existential to Australia’s national interest on home soil, but it is very important to our, you know, to our great sort of strategic alliance framework. So you the balance between how much is enough and how much is too much. That’s the tightrope that I think the Australian politicians and senior leaders were walking. And I think they landed very squarely on the idea that for a return on investment versus the risk incurred.

The special operations task group was the right choice because for the volume of combat conducted versus the number of lives lost versus the operational effects achieved, it makes sense. You’re avoiding the Vietnam effect of having 19-year-old soldiers coming home in body bags on scale, on mass. There’s a public acceptance that when a special operations soldier or officer is killed in action that they are a professional soldier. They’re generally in their thirties, forties. This is the life they’ve chosen. It’s a, you know, it’s sad. It’s a, it’s a personal tragedy, but it’s a national, you know, it’s a national cost.

Whereas, I think if, you know, as soon as you start having a large number of young diggers killed, the Australian public very quickly starts to sit up and take notice and therefore the war enters the national debate. Politicians are forced to rationalize or justify the war.  And then it becomes a more difficult political tightrope. So, giving it to SOTG,  allowing us to do the vast majority of the combat operations,  and also wrapped in the secrecy that the SO community naturally is able to pull down in terms of the curtain. It was the perfect fit, I think, for a decade-long war.

Yeah, makes absolutely sense. about what do you think, Brett?

Brett

Yeah, look, everything Vando said, obviously, but I think it’s also performance punishment. you’ve got a unit that’s demonstrated, SOTG demonstrated their capability over a period of time. And the more deployments, the better they got, which brings another set of issues.

But also you’ve got a coalition force that were almost demanding that they had the special forces on their side, by their side during combined operations. So I think that when you’ve got those layers sitting above you, you can sympathise with the leadership and politicians while they want to continue to send. And I sat in planning rooms a couple of times in my career, was fortunate enough, and saw how good the SAS leadership was at selling the capability so they were very good at that.

Yeah. And I like the fact that you bring it up as performance punishment because the way I see it from a political perspective and Defense senior leaders perspective, yeah, it’s an easy choice. The strategic risk and the kind of Australian public willingness to accept casualties, as Vando said, it’s much easier to accept the loss of a special operator.  which is all shrouded in secrecy anyway. So there’s a perception that some of these operations are kind of very secret, secret squirrel, you know, deep in enemy territory, that sort of stuff, which without a doubt they were absolutely. But having been there myself, I also have to reconcile with the fact that a lot of the operations, you know, certainly when I was there in 2010 and into 11, many could have been done by regular infantry. But again, that risk of having young 19-year-old, 20-year-old grunts coming home in body bags, despite the fact that, you know, many did, I think the casualty of the out of the 41, think half is about SO and the rest are kind of infantry and others. So that really does make sense.

 But what doesn’t make sense to me is that that is an enduring policy towards this war. You know, we’ve been there for nearly 20 or more than 20 years and that that remained the policy as government shifted, as Defense leadership shifted. We just kind of kept pushing that down the line as though that’s the band aid for that problem. Let SO and of course our commandos and one commando included, let them carry the heavy load of the combat operations. And in many times to the displeasure of our regular infantry and other units who were more than ready and perhaps capable of doing those jobs. So how do we reconcile that fact? What haven’t we done here? Because to me, it doesn’t appear as though we’re talking about this. The longevity and the enduring nature of these operations just doesn’t seem to feature in our broader discussions. Brett, maybe you can open up on this one.

Brett

Yeah, look, you’re right. It opens up a whole series of questions and whether or not, I don’t know, but whether or not there were, you would think there’d be some sort of operational pause where we sit back and go, right, where are we in 2010? We’ve been there since 2001. What’s the next 10 years look like? And I’m sure that occurred.

But then it comes back to that political will. As Vando says, are we prepared to, and we’ve got a highly capable, greater army, greater military. I always, I felt for those people who were stuck inside a FOB and weren’t allowed out within 100 metres of the wire, right?

Highly capable but you’ve got that political unwillingness to as Vando describes it to for young men to be coming home in body bags and women. By the way as soon as you push it outside of the SF SAS and commandos you’re now dealing with women in operations and that’s a whole other moral…

Hmm. Yeah, that changes dynamic. Yeah.

Brett

…dilemma for Australians. I think personally that we’re definitely not ready to see young women coming home. So that’s an interesting for a war choice. And then as you start getting into the fatigue issue and the desensitization of sending the same fellows into the battle space every, what, know, at least every four months out of 12.

So you start getting into the, you know, what’s the issue there? Well, I mean, the issue is pretty obvious when you start sending people into the same battle space and they keep coming against the same adversary and then there’s a legal requirement on them to release back into the battle space and they’re being shot at by the same person again. You can understand that that would eventually cause some psychological impacts on people.

Vando

Yeah, so I think that this this this question around, you know, force of choice as well, like it’s a it also does come down to the to the resource bill. You know, I think that you could have you could have very comfortably placed an Australian fully enabled brigade into Uruzgan province to provide the security for Uruzgan, including, you know, root security FOBs, you know, aggressive sort of safe haven denial, patrolling programs, you know, training, advising, mentoring, as well as a, as well as a sort of targeted surgical strike capability. But that requires, that requires dedicated lift that requires organic ISR that requires fires that requires, you know, AME and CASVAC. All of a sudden, the bill increases exponentially from, from what it was to something that I don’t think the Australian government was ever willing to pay for a war of choice for a fly the flag. We covered it the doco. The only reason that we were able to evolve the targeting from essentially ground-based, so circa 2008, 2009, we were doing ground-based targeting primarily, and you really had to fight hard to get rotary wing assets. You might get a Chinook here or a Blackhawk there.

And it wasn’t until sort of late 2009 when the relationship was formed with the US aviation task group for a dedicated four and two package of four Blackhawks and two Apaches. that was actually, you talk about a step change in combat capability, that changed the whole fundamental operating paradigm for SASR. And then you saw the same likewise across with the second commando. They opened a whole other line of operation countering the counter drug trafficking. And that pushed their operational reach out into Helmand province in particular. And that then came with DEA rotary wing. So you’ve got this lack of enablement by the ADF. But the operational missions, roles and tasks that existed out there that needed to be filled were opportunities that the SOTG looked to fill, but had to of beg, borrow, steal to find assets, to find resources to do it. Now, if you talk about Australia taking over responsibility for Uruzgan, that resource bill would have been exponentially larger and that comes with exponentially more risk.

You have a fallen angel if it’s an Australian platform. Now you’ve lost an Australian crew, you’ve lost the people in the back, and you’ve lost a multi-million-dollar platform. And we were never willing to take that risk.

And that’s a real issue for me. If we’re going to war, if we’ve decided to go to war, despite the fact that it’s a war of choice, which I have a huge issue with from an ethical and moral perspective, because it goes against the Just War Tradition that we so dearly espouse and shove down the throat of soldiers,  the reasons for war and then the conduct of war. And one of the reasons to go to war is last resort, which is a total contradiction when we talk about a war of choice. So to me, kind of waving a flag and it’s openly admitted, right? It’s openly admitted. was General Andrew Hocking who did the 20-year review of the Afghanistan campaign.

You know, he had a speech at ADFA, I believe it was, and he openly states, you know, the number one objective was the Alliance objective. That to me is a real issue for how Australia goes to war, because if it’s the Alliance objective, firstly, is that morally okay? Maybe strategically in our interests, perhaps, but for the people we’re sending there, we’re basically openly admitting that we’re going to send those, we’re kind of okay with losing, we don’t want to, but if we do, it doesn’t look as bad. And then sending them without the equipment to do the job that we’ve asked them to do, they have to, as you said, steal and borrow and beg, steal and borrow from our allies. To me, that is just irresponsible. And I think it requires some accountability as to how that’s being done. And that the 20-year review doesn’t talk about that at all. It doesn’t talk about it mentions, you know, lack of support and some operational tempo challenges. But it doesn’t talk about our orientation as a nation and as our orientation as a Defense force on how we should and ought to fight our wars. 

And this brings me to the operational tempo question, because I think that’s another really important aspect that Brett already mentioned. What was your operational? So, you deployed for four months in theory, and then you had, I guess, two respite four-month blocks-ish. But maybe explain that to us, how that works, so that people understand what the tempo was for the operators.

Vando

Yeah, so the year was really, each year was split into two.  So, you deploy the deployment window was about four and a bit months. If you’re in the command team, patrol commander, troop commander, squadron commander, you’d be a bit longer because you’d go in a couple of weeks early to understand, start taking over the responsibility for the target decks, to go out on the ground, see how the last squadron was doing business. So there’s an active handover of tactics, techniques, procedures as they relate to, as they relate to how the Taliban was evolving, how we were evolving based on new resources, new assets available. So it’s about five months for command teams. And then, so you’d have a squadron in Afghanistan, say five months, a squadron preparing to go that would hand over. And then the third sabre squadron would be at home in Perth holding down the domestic counter-terrorism and the offshore recovery capability  for the ADF. And that was shared with the 2nd Commando Regiment as they grew in capability and capacity on the East Coast.  But essentially across three squadrons, you had a squadron deployed, a squadron preparing to deploy, and a squadron on very short notice for anything else that could happen either in a domestic or a regional or global context.

So in other words, the respite piece is…

Vando

There was no rest. No. So rest, you had to essentially rest, rest in hide.  You know, you’ve, found as a, as a, as a troop commander, as a squadron commander, you looked to find opportunities to, to rest your guys where you could accept risk.  But I have to say having, served,  having served in a coalition context with a, with a tier one,  US unit and having worked with the, with the Brits as well, There’s a reason why other like forces have four Sabre squadrons. And that’s because you have a squadron deployed, a squadron preparing to deploy, a squadron holding counter-terrorism duties, and you have a squadron on rest. It’s the only way that you build long-term campaign sustainability into your force, if that is how you are going to be employing and deploying your special operations subunits.

If you’re going to be deploying them at subunit level, you have to have that that force structure to be able to provide the requisite level of rest. I mean, we’re talking about having guys that did two years on and off in Afghanistan, and then they’re on their third year and they’re on they’re on counterterrorism duties. But they’re on such a short leash that they can’t attend family weddings on the East Coast. They can’t go overseas holidays because they…so you create this pressure cooker environment that that doesn’t end.

Guys, enter the pipeline. You’ve just finished SAS selection, two years of training. You straight into the operational rotation model and you what? You get spat out 12 years later, completely burnt out because you’ve never rested. And the only rest you’ve ever been given is sort of organically when your troop commander says, hey mate, take a knee. We can do without you on this. Or your squadron commander manages to sort of sort something out for you to take some rest. Or you get posted out of a Sabre Squadron into a training environment that’s considered rest, but actually you’re just in the training squadron and now you’re running, you’re 15, 20 courses during the year. So yeah.

And plus you’ve got to do your courses as well, your own promotion courses, development courses, et cetera. That all comes in there as well.

Vando

Yeah, that’s right.

Yeah, and I remember, I remember getting onto, you know, coming from the third battalion where the operational tempo wasn’t particularly high. We deployed to the Solomon Islands, we deployed to East Timor, but I think that was the reality of being in the battalion. We hadn’t been deployed to Afghanistan yet at a battalion level. And getting to the unit and being on the reinforcement cycle, you’ve got all your assistant instructors because you have to, not only have you got to qualify, you qualify on a skill, but then in your progression to become a patrol commander, you have to then qualify as an instructor on the skill. So, across, roping, demolitions, close quarter battle, communications, med, dogs, snipers, you’ve got all these courses that you not only have to tick, but then you’ve got to re-qualify as an instructor. Those instructors are all corporals who are returning from deployments.

So, I remember being on CQB, Close Quarter Battle,  and the instructors that had just come off, there was a couple of corporals had just literally been in the last Afghan rotation. And they were so intensely wired.  I remember thinking, wow. They are, their minds are still back in Afghanistan and how they are functioning on such a high level, but with such low tolerance for failure.  They were difficult instructors to be working for. The benefit of time and distance from that training ecosystem has made me realize that actually they were a product of the system that they were working in, where they had, you they’d done as a corporal, you’ve probably done five or six deployments to Afghanistan already. Maybe if you in the earlier years, you’d done Iraq as well. And so they’re trying to get by. They’re coming back and being told, hey, we now need you to, you know, in this sort of short period off, we need you to now go and be an instructor on this course. Yeah, it was a system that was incredibly pressurized and compressed through no fault of the individuals who were, you know, who were being affected.

Of course, products of their environment. Brett, how, surely, surely this was obvious at some point and how is it even legal to do this? Like at which point do we draw a line and which point and who should have done it? Where does the responsibility lie for such an oversight that over 20 years, we did what Vando just described? And we did this to other units as well, right? I was a source operator, as you both know. And our unit was absolutely decimated, absolutely decimated. We supported every theatre, had teams in every theatre, et cetera, right? So we felt the pain, that very same pain.

Brett

I don’t know if it’s a legal issue per se, Maz, but it’s obviously a leadership issue, isn’t it?

But at some point it’s got to cross over into the dereliction of duty.

Brett

Well, I mean, well, I don’t know if it’s dereliction, but it’s certainly, you know, there’s a leadership liability when you, like I was saying earlier, if you keep sending the same people back. It’s a risk that we’re taking. So it’s a risk mitigation process or a risk tolerance process. And we understand the risks where we’re sending the same people back.

Well, did we? I guess that’s a really good question. Sorry to interrupt you, but you’re saying we understood the risks. Who understood it and did we?

Brett

Well, it well, I know, presumably right some assumptions here that that the leadership, you know, had made that conscious decision and it was a risk tolerance issue. But then the flip side to that is if you if you did make a conscious decision that we would be going through this then at the end of the war, you you’ve got to acknowledge that and say, right, well, well, we acknowledge that we sent the same people back again and again we acknowledge therefore that there were going to be some some desensitisation to war and therefore we accept that risk, we’ll rehabilitate people as they come back. To the extent that they need that support network and I’m not sure that that was done particularly well. So I think if you’re asking about liability from the leadership perspective, sure, absolutely any leader who sends their people into a construction site, One of my jobs earlier getting out of the army was at Downer, I was an oil and gas site. If construction managers were sending the same people back onto the construction site 24 hours a day to do multiple shifts back to back. And there was a safety incident and it’s there, you’re culpable from a workplace health and safety perspective. I don’t think ComCare reaches into Afghanistan, but, and nor should it, but you know, at what point does this become a health and safety issue? And I don’t, I don’t subscribe to this being part of that, by the way. I think it’s completely extracurricular, war. But if you’re talking about leadership, this then bleeds into the whole conversation around acceptance of some leadership and the liability of whatever has occurred or the allegations and where’s the leadership standing up now? I would say right well we accepted the risk, this is the consequences and we’ll take that on the chin.

Well, yeah, we’re yet to see that. One of the things that people could easily say, especially those who haven’t served or don’t understand the context. well, you know, they could have just said no, right? Or, well, no, you as the soldier should have spoken up or you as the junior officer should have spoken up. But I think what’s important there is to really bring it into context. As Vando already alluded to, you’ve just trained for so long. And I throw myself into this as well. You’ve trained, you’ve qualified on these courses. Now it’s, you know…many people have drawn kind of a metaphor to, know, a football club, you know, you’ve trained. Well, send me in coach. I’m ready to go. Right. So the, this idea that if you didn’t feel well, or if you thought it was a bit too much for you, well, now you should have put your hand up. I think that’s, that’s an illusion because the incentives to go are far too great.

Firstly, from the training and doing the job and the, and the sense of purpose and being part of the team and the sense of camaraderie and the unity and the brotherhood, blood bonds that you refer to as in the documentary. And the other thing we also have to really reconcile is the fact that we were very well paid, very well paid. It’s without a shadow of a doubt that there are certainly people who were putting their hand up to go on deployments because they’d come back with another home loan deposit. So that’s also something that’s not, I certainly don’t want us to get paid less, but that incentive needs to be understood as a motivator, motivating tool for people to say, no, no, I’m good. Same in coach, along with all the other ones. So Vando, you’re shaking your head. Jump in, mate, please.

Vando

Yeah, so I mean, I have a tendency to disagree on the on the financial thing. think, you know, financial…

Yeah, I’m just saying that’s not the only one, but I’m saying that’s certainly one aspect.

Vando

No, no, I agree. And I agree with your I agree with your with your premise on the whole.  I certainly found that, you know, financial incentives just they lose their incentive, they became they essentially become a hygiene factor, right? Like they become expected. So and they just become sort of part of the part of the background noise.

I think the biggest stuff is what you touched on. It’s that sense of brotherhood, not wanting to let the team down, having worked so hard for this as the pinnacle of your career. That’s the front of mind sort of cognitive piece or sort of rational piece. But then there’s also the frog in the boiling water analogy as well, the heat’s getting turned up by degrees over a really long period of time. You actually don’t realize you’re boiling.

I can talk to that. was my own personal experience, right? I got to 2015, 2016 and stopped sleeping, tried to sleep by putting a bottle of whiskey down every night. That wasn’t working. Put sleeping pills down with the whiskey. That wasn’t working. Felt like I was going crazy. And then eventually I went outside of the unit. mean, this is during this as well as a squadron commander. I was leaving work, I found it, I found an after-hours psychologist, and I was going and spending two hours several times a week just sitting there trying to unpack what I had not realized had happened to me. And it was only it was it was only at the point that I started to physiologically fall apart was at the point that I realized something was wrong and I needed to do something about it.

So, I put my mind, I put myself in the shoes of an operator who had done 20 years in the unit. The pressure is continuous. There’s always something to be doing in support of the team. There’s always something to be doing in support of your career. There’s always another operation that needs you. You never had the time until you fall apart to actually stop and address it. The frog boils long before it realizes it.

Why did you go outside the unit?

Vando

No, because you have to. As a, and you know, this, well, no, as a, first of all, let’s talk about the…

Go on. No, because I want to because there’s an interesting piece here. I think really there’s a really interesting piece to discuss.

Vando

Yeah. Well, there’s, there’s a huge, there’s a huge stigma around, around mental health. There’s a huge amount of, and it may be just purely a reflection of my own ego, but my sense of self having been a troop commander, squadron commander was, was one of you are impervious. You’re a combat leader. You know, you need to, you know, you need to show up and, and be, bring your A game every day because you’ve got a squadron of hitters that are looking up to you.

And so for me, going internal to the unit was never an option because it would have come with individuals talking and it would have undermined  my reputation, my command capability and capacity in the eyes of some. And so I was never going to allow that to occur. And so I went external and I paid for it out of my own pocket. And that was a choice that I made because I think at the time, if I had taken a knee, I don’t think from a career standpoint that I would have been able to recover.

Hmm. Yeah, these are the exit costs. Yeah.

Brett

Vando, do you think that’s changed now, mate? Do you think someone, a squadron commander can now throw his hand up?

Vando

I don’t think so. I think that you do have the… I think one of the things that DVA has done  that is… think one of the best things that DVA has done was the creation of the White Card and the access to  mental health services  that you can take outside without it coming out of your own pocket. So I think that’s been a game changer to open the aperture for soldiers and officers to access mental health on DVA coin. think, you know, one of the, one of the things I will tip my hat to DVA that they have done.  I think that the culture in the unit, I mean, because of the nature of what it is and what it does, weakness is, weakness is, is, is very poorly tolerated because the…you can’t have a fail point anywhere in the operational chain. You just simply can’t have it.

It’s the mission, the men and me. And me comes last.  So, yeah.

And the team relies on each individual operator, especially in those kinds of small units.

Vando

Completely, but if you did have a, if you built an operational model where there was a more significant respite window where individuals could access mental health outside of the day-to-day operational pressures. So, if for instance, you were a squadron commander, but your squadron was, you know, was on leave, taking sort of significant amounts of leave and maybe doing some training. Yes perhaps that there would be an opportunity there where you weren’t under the microscope, that your decisions weren’t being interrogated day to day, that you weren’t standing up and being required to lead on a daily basis that you might be able to access, you know, within, you know, defence mental health services, perhaps, but I’m not sure.

What did it look like from your end, Brett? I mean, obviously, maybe tell us a little bit about what a legal officer does and what that looks like on the ground in support of the Special Operations Task Group. Because again, that’s one of those things that’s very poorly understood that we even had legal officers and we did as HUMINT as well and very, very stringent rules as to what we could and couldn’t do. So, maybe tell us a little bit from your perspective, what the kind of operational temper look like and life on operations.

Brett

Well, it was 24 hours for me and that’s because, you know, by day we’d have things going on and then by night we often had things going on. So it was highly intense, but I describe it, Maz, as the best legal job in the country. And I’d go back, if I had the opportunity to it tomorrow, if Vando said, let’s go, I’d pack my bag right now, kiss the family.

It was an amazing opportunity as a legal officer because I was at the pointy end and a nationally strategic capability assisting this SOTG with everything from operations law…it was the whole gambit. There were contractors there working on the base, so there was a commercial element to it.

So it was the entire gambit, but most acutely, obviously, it was the laws of armed conflict that were being applied at the time. And then all of the various policy, the layers and layers of Australian, ISAF, US policy that applied. So I was very fortunate and I took it that way. And I took my role very seriously as every legal officer does. And it was a privilege to be providing that legal support.

So what did a day in the life of look like? I mean, so Vando’s out with his guys. What are you doing? Where are you? What are you doing?

Brett

Well, I mean, I’ll be a little bit circumspect about it, but…

Obviously within constraints, of course. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Brett

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it waw a long time ago, but. That varied, mate. Often, I like to think that I was a trusted legalO by comparison to a lot of the others. So very much everyone who’s an enabler to the SOTG is often seen as an enabler and not necessarily welcomed in. I had a good background with both the units that I was there, including the engineers. So I was welcomed in.

I think that was really important. Likewise with you, mate, when you’re involved in the fusion setting, the targeting, it was important that the legal officer was in there. So, it might have been sitting in that making sure that our concept of our future operations were done within the legal envelope. It was then sitting with the commanding officer when we had troops in the field.  Depending on what assets we had, I’d be sitting there. Then every evening or late afternoon, I’d welcome the operators back inside the wire and very often we’d have detainees and it was about detainee handling, detainee management, accepting the detainees from the operators and making sure that they were handled appropriately and according to the rules of law or humanitarian laws. That, and then we’d go through that whole process again. And then by night we had other things happening. So it was, and we do debriefs, but I was very fortunate that I had a very good relationship with all the CEOs that I was, and the OCs, during my time in Afghanistan. I think that made my job exponentially easier.

A question to both of you, perhaps I’ll start with Vando first. So we’ve just touched on the operational tempo and the requirements and what was actually expected of troops deploying. So as the war went on and you’ve described your reality, Vando, how you coped with it, but now talking about it in theatre, how did that tempo, continuous repetition, the fatigue begin to shape behaviour and decision making or to what extent did it?

Vando

Yeah, so I mean, that’s difficult question because I think…

Yeah, yeah, I recognize that. I really do recognize that.

Vando

So I can, again, I like to talk to my own, I guess my own experiences rather than sort of guessing about others. But I will say that over successive deployments to Afghanistan, I feel that it does affect you from a, you feel yourself hardening for starters. And I think I can talk about that honestly now.

What does that mean, hardening?

Vando

Probably callous is the wrong word, but I think you lose a little bit of humanity, your own personal humanity, the longer you are in that environment and your decisions potentially reflect that in terms of looking at just the cold calculus of coordinating a strike or taking a mission out to conduct a kill capture.  It’s not about a complete disregard for human life. I’m not saying that at all, but I think it’s just a, you feel less and less impacted by the reality of what you’re doing in terms of the taking of life.  It becomes, and I certainly felt this, it becomes something that is just day to day and really should be far more…Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you’re talking about taking human life in a, you know, in some sort of national security construct where what you’re doing is deemed as right, whereas in society, it’d be deemed as wrong.

And initially when you know, I can remember the first gunfight I was in, I can remember the first the first, you know, combatants killed, etc. And it does, it’s a morally shaking experience.  But it becomes progressively less so and then it just becomes routine. And I think that is something that, I think that is just that, that is a reality, that is a reality across time.

But I think it is nevertheless something that we should, that we should acknowledge because it does affect the decision-making. It does affect your decision-making. It affects how you are, the lens through which you are looking at the world around you. It affects the decisions you’re making out on the battlefield.

You know, I’m not a psychologist. I’ve got no credentials in this space, but I do read a lot  and understanding how longitudinal exposure to trauma  changes the wiring of your brain changes how you are, how you react to a fight, flight, freeze situation, how you interpret threat and all these things combine to inform your, shortcut decision cycle where you’re making a subconscious decision based on patterns and frames that you’ve seen previously. It’s an evolutionary response for humans to survive, to be able to make decisions and act faster than the thing that’s trying to kill them. That extrapolates out onto the battlefield where we become imprinted increasingly with a series of patterns that may or may not go more rapidly towards a lethal decision.

Hmm. And this is and I’m very conscious of the question I’ve asked and my intention is absolutely not to tarnish or to in any way try to expose something. I come at this from a very personal perspective, which is why I started doing a PhD on this very topic on moral degradation in upon operations, because I come at it from a, know, as I said, I’m a child of Bosnia. You know, the first person close to me that was killed was my uncle in the war. I destroyed a kitchen nearly. I took three adults to restrain me from the anger that I felt. And as people kept on dying, they were close to me.  You know, that sense of anger and rage was neutered over time. So much so that the last person that died in my family was my paternal grandmother, the only grandparent I’ve ever known. I didn’t even shed a tear for her, right, at that point.

So to me, that was, you know, this was within the ages of 10 and 14, that planted a seed in my mind of how is this possible? How is it possible that I’ve stopped caring so much? But I think the point you bring up is so relevant that it, you know, it occurs naturally. And something I’ve said on the pod a number of times, you know, when we accuse those of having done wrong, right, we deny them the very humanity that we accuse them of denying their alleged victims, right?

Because regardless of how special you guys are, how well trained you are, how  responsive to the environment you are, you’re still human. And what you describe is very human. And every human will experience that sense of degradation over time if continuously exposed, like you said, longitudinally to some sort of trauma. Again, that is not something that’s discussed. And I think that’s something that sits squarely with ADF leadership, with political leadership.

 Vando

Yeah.

 And it needs to be part of our review of Afghanistan. And it wasn’t.  Brett, from your legal perspective, I have no doubt that the same occurs, right? Because you’re also consistently seeing contributing to the battle space by putting the legal dimension over it. Can you talk to perhaps your own sense of evaluation of, you know, or change in how you perceive the threat picture? Or perhaps even other legalos that you work with, is that something that the legal profession, which is considered to be kind of cold hard clinical, because it’s by the law, by the book, is that something  that exists in your lived experience as well?

Brett

I think it depends on the person, Maz. I would never put myself into the same bucket as the experiences of Vando and his mates, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a matter of perspective, right? So I equally saw things that you’d probably not want to see again necessarily, but I’ve been able to compartmentalize that. But other people, you know, it’s a personal experience, I think. And I think anyone there, whether they be legal,

int, any other name, know, RAEME, whatever.  They’re all in theatre experiencing this tension and each individual deals with that differently. But there’s no good, there’s no reason or rhyme, as you say, it ought to be looked into, think the US much further down that path than we are in terms of the consequences, the psychological impacts of war.  But yeah, I don’t think you necessarily need to be an operator.

But obviously at the acute end, you’ve got great sympathy for what we did with all of our operators, no matter what, and our infantry who were sitting out on a FOB being shot at and not being able to respond. So I think it’s a very personal, mate, but from my perspective, I’m fortunate that I had what I consider to be amazing experiences. I’m immensely proud of what we did as an organisation. I was immensely proud of the people that I worked for and what I saw in the field. And that’s actually part of the reason why I’m sitting here today is because I believe in those people and the whole of Australia or the order believe in those people as well because they did ask prayer.

How did the catch and release policy affect you?  And, and, because you already alluded to it earlier, you know, the, the challenges of that  but even as a legal officer, how did that affect you? And then we’ll go across the Vando because I dare say there would be some, some additional context there as well. And maybe describe to us, describe to us really the problem here. What is the problem for those who don’t understand what catch and release means or what it meant or what it, what it actually, what transpired, in the battle space through this so-called policy.

 Brett

Yeah, well, I mean, it was a detention facility that we had. We always attempted to detain people during the process and very little perspective on that. But when we brought detainees back, then they went through a process and there was only a period of time that we could hold a person legally and we did that. They were out of the battle space for a defined period of time and then if they were deemed to be high value then we would process them up to the next level of the legal system. But if they weren’t they were then released into the back into the field and lo and behold and then I’ll tell you this so they’d pop up again and be shooting at the guys again.

So we did, I’ll just jump in quickly with the rule of law cell that we established when we were there. It was a great initiative where we were trying to establish the rule of law in Tarin Kot and then hopefully that would take hold and then would sort of by osmosis reach its way into Kandahar and elsewhere across Afghanistan and where we were actively detaining people for the purpose of putting them through a judicial system in Tarin Kot. We were training the prosecutors and the judges on the rules of evidence and then hoping that that would result, you know, eventually filter in a local rule of law Afghan style. So not necessarily Australian code of criminal, know, criminal code, but it would be Afghan style.

And I think we made some real inroads, during my short time that I was there, but I know it filtered on and it gained some success. But we often saw people prosecuted, go through the process, sentenced for a period of time, whatever that might be, and seven years, whatever, for murder or mass or whatever. And then they’d pop back out. So it was obviously there was all sorts of problems with their…

And usually not after the seven years either.

Brett

No, days, literally days. So it was a turnstile effect. The impact on Vando and his and you know that those guys, the operators in the field, you know, couldn’t be worse because these people were shooting or very worse killing coalition forces and our partner forces and then popping back out and we’d catch them and then they’d pop back out again. So you can see how that would have a real profound effect on our soldiers.

Vando.

Vando

Yeah, I mean, was a pretty contentious topic to be honest with you because imagine as a troop commander standing up in front of your troop and sort of saying, here’s the next target that’s popped. It’s a guy that we bagged early. It’s a guy we detained and brought back earlier in the trip.  I was really lucky.  I had really good squadron commanders who actually would push back quite hard on cases like that. So, if an individual had been already detained and processed and was back out again and the intelligence assessment said,  here’s a significant part of this insurgent cell in Western Uruzgan or whatever, then the squadron commander would be like, well, no. Like, you need to come back with more derogatory information to justify his position in the hierarchy and actually with a bit more of an assessment about how long what’s the operational effect of us removing him from the battlefield because you know, increasingly the risk of going out when you know, it was basically a 50/50 of whether you get into a gunfight or not every gunfight there’s a risk that you know, someone in the troop will die. And if you know, if the return on investment for that is a guy is going to do two to three days in the, you know, in the detention facility get a fistful of cash and walk out and get put back up on a target board.  I think unanimously the view was in my troop that we’ll know. That’s not a good use of the assets. That’s not a good risk to the US helicopters. That’s not appropriate risk to Australian forces or the Afghan partner forces that we had to take out with us.

But yeah, I mean, it was a running joke in FE Alpha, the catch and release piece was, yeah, some guys would get really upset about it. Some guys would be able to sort of just brush it off and just focus on the job. But I think towards the back end of the trip, there was an increasing focus at the command team level of not going after targets that were not worth the risk.

Hmm. Well, also it’s going to, without a shadow of doubt, incentivize you to make this a kill rather than a capture mission.

Vando

100 percent.

I mean, it would for me, right? Like it absolutely can undermine the entire legal piece that Brett was talking about through no fault, absolutely no fault to the operator. I would have done exactly the same thing. Fuck it. If I’m going to get this guy the seventh time, sorry, see you champ. And I don’t say that callously or ruthlessly or to be you know, ‘wary’. No, but that’s just the reality. I mean, how many times you need to detain someone for them to be filtered through a hugely corrupt system by our standards. And this actually brings me to the next question that I want to talk about is this kind of the cultural lens. How realistic was it to expect to succeed, certainly in the legal space, in an ecosystem, and I use that word intentionally, that is where justice and law are practiced and exercised so vastly differently to back home in Australia. Obviously, that’s a question to you, Brett. How realistic was that?

Brett

It wasn’t realistic at all to expect that we’d have some sort of liberal democracy sitting across Afghanistan by the end of our time there. That was just not… But what we were… the thing what was potentially achievable was some sort of Afghan version, Sharia law version of the rule of law. And that’s what we needed to happen. And we were on this pathway of handing over to the partner forces into the Afghan government and it was then beholden on them to instil this throughout the country. Unfortunately, the way we withdrew, we, the coalition, obviously the US forces in a mad hurry with what seemingly appears to be zeroes of a strategy beyond get people out. It seems to have undermined everything that was achieved there. But at the micro level, we saw the impacts of putting people through a quasi-judicial system there, we saw there were positives out of that. It turned people from, you know, prosecutors from being corrupt to being actually prosecutors and doing their thing. I think, but it would have been a 50-year campaign. It wasn’t, it wasn’t a short burn. And I think we just needed to accept it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s part of the problem, right? It’s the nation building piece.

Brett

Yeah, well, that’s the notion of building this. That’s right. Just coming back quickly, just before we move on that last point, you raised about the incentive to kill within the rules of engagement. And it always amazed me that the guys would bring back these detainees who could have been killed through lawfully through the rules of engagement. The ROE would have given the permission, but they brought them back because of the humanitarian side. But yeah,

Vando

Can I just jump? I was going to say, can I jump in on that, Brett? I mean, just by way of statistics, I think in my, I think it was rotation 16. You know, we, I think we, you know, we detained probably, well, we, they’re called jackpot, probably about 30 insurgent commanders across a five-month trip. But we actually, and I think KIA was probably up in the sort of 70s, 80s, but detained and brought back for processing was over 500. So this sort of notion that the SAS was this killing machine that was just going out and conducting wholesale murder in these villages is in my lived experience, patently false. I spent the vast majority of my time as a troop commander talking to patrol commanders about the number of detainees that we had and try to come up with the plan to back load them for processing. Yeah, so I’ll just, I just place that as a flag in the sand to support Brett’s point. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Brett

Yeah, 100%. There’s one particular case where a fellow was brought back. He was hiding behind children as they often do, shooting at our guys. Our guys eventually wrapped him up, didn’t kill him. Well within their rights to have killed him in collective self-defence. But didn’t, they brought him back. In the process of arresting him, there was a fight. He was butt-stroked or whatever, but he was alive.

He was brought back and then he wrapped us up in investigation for months and months later because he thought someone, you know, assaulted him. And the MO, you know, the enemy knew our MO and at the end of the detention period, they would issue a complaint about the way they were handled. They knew it would then end up in a quick assessment or investigation. And people would come from UAE, wherever to investigate. It was just ridiculous.

Mm. Yeah. And that’s a good segue to the IGADF, which of course features prominently and is the betrayal piece of Bravery and Betrayal.  So maybe I’ll start with you, Vando, again, how were the investigations conducted?  What was the, what do you perceive as the intent? And then what was the actual outcome on the unit and individuals?

Vando

Yeah, so I think first and foremost, and we say this explicitly in the film, that we all believe that the decision to investigate rumours of wrongdoing was and will always continue to be an appropriate response for any organisation, Defence or not. So, I just want to make that point really clear.

I believe, however, having, and we’ve just talked about the nature, the volume of service and sacrifice that  was delivered by members of SASR, of the SOTG.  I think the IGADF as a process was utterly devoid of any compassion, utterly devoid of any humanity about how it approached the soldiers involved. So, I think it would be a fair assessment. If I was conducting an investigation, looking at looking at the looking at the audience for that investigation, I think it would be a fair, a fair start point to say there’s probably some pretty serious repressed trauma in that population. I think that would be a fair start point. And probably a lot of it due to the, as I talked about the enduring constant pressure that you are under in your career in special operations, without that ability to decompress or take a break, I think it would be a fair start point to say that there’s probably some built up pressure there that also needs to be considered in the mechanics of how you conduct the investigation.

And I’m going to be very careful with what I say here, but I was a support officer for one of the guys that went through the process, and it horrified me. I think it’s ethically and morally bereft to put a soldier through a process that denies him access to legal support, that denies him access to medical support, while placing him in a room, denying him access to the material or the evidence that the questions, that the lines of questioning are exploring. You know, we’re talking about instances, patrols, etc., that might have happened 10 years ago.

And you’re asking a soldier to remember clearly what happened on that day out of, you know, that’s one day in a thousand days of his cumulative combat experience. But you’re asking him to remember what happened on that day where on the other side, you’ve got access to all the patrol reports, all the after-action reviews, all the debriefs, any, any incident reports, sit reps, et cetera. So, you’ve got all the cards, the soldiers got none. And then, to make it worse, you’re a judge, you’ve got your of your board of QCs and SCs. So, it’s a pretty significant power imbalance in the room.

Sorry, just to just to see visually. so, the person under investigation or under questioning is sitting against opposite a number of not one or two investigators, but QCs, etc.

Vando

Correct. Correct, so Brereton and his panel of investigators who are supporting him, and then you start flashing up photos of all the people, of all the combatants that were killed on that trip. know, brains hanging out, jaws blown off.

Wow. OK.

What effect are you going for if you set the deck like that? You’re going for a dynamic re-traumatizing of the individual. You’re going for some sort of psychiatric shearing to get them to open up in some way. And I think that you can’t do that in any legal framework to anyone in Australian society. So why could you do it to a soldier who’s given his entire adult life to serving his country?

Mmm. And that power dynamic can’t be underestimated because also, I have no doubt as the soldier on the other end, you’re also thinking that any and every answer you give can and will be used against you and could the end of your career at the very least, if not the end of your freedom at the worst.

Vando

Yeah, so I think that so I think it was made clear that, you know, anything that was gathered could not be used in a court of law and is inadmissible as evidence.

Right, okay, right.

So that’s the first framework for the IGADF. So, it and it also anything collected was not given a level of evidence rating by my understanding. I’ll throw to Brett on this, but when you talk about defamation, I think it’s to balance the probabilities, right? The evidence needs to be tested to the balance of probabilities. In a criminal investigation, it needs to be beyond reasonable doubt. Now, the information that was collected within the IGADF investigation does not meet either of those two evidence thresholds. And I’ll throw to Brett for that because I’m not a legal officer.

And also build on that, Brett, build on that, another question, what was the point of it then?

Brett

Look, yeah, Vando, maybe you should consider a career in law, mate. Look, it’s deeply concerning with the stories that I’ve just heard from Vando, but Vando times everyone I’ve spoken to. And my role beyond the Army was to provide a legal support service to these, to those potentially affected persons. That is Vando, well, people like Vando.

So, what I think the fatigue we deal with here is there was three processes effectively all sort of stacked on top of each other. Firstly, there was the IGADF, which is administrative inquiry at the very top level. So, what that means is there is no rules of evidence. It’s whatever they can gather. They can use to develop a set of recommendations for the CDF and that’s generally goes to your career. But they can also recommend that it goes on to a next, you know, to a criminal investigation, which is the case here. So that’s important to understand the distinction between the IGADF, which was an administrative inquiry and that can compel you to provide evidence in a criminal jurisdiction. You can’t be compelled. You can take the oath of silence.

But in administrative, if you’re in uniform, then you are compelled. And that’s what Vando was exposed to. It’s deeply concerning to the methods and the tactics that were used. And then I think what I’ve heard at least from third party perspective is procedural fairness concerns, I think, around the entire IGADF process.

None the least of which is the lack of allowing legal support during this process, is where I and other colleagues stepped in to provide a legal support to say, guys, this is what this means. This is what you should say. This is what you shouldn’t say. And then we’d arrange for them to have real lawyers help them with the process.  So that’s that. The OSI is a criminal investigation. this is now leading to…

The Office of the Special Investigator, OSI.

Brett

Yeah, sorry, thanks. And that is a criminal investigation by elements of the AFP and the government and the Commonwealth DPP with a view of putting it through a judicial process. And as Vando says, that then brings in the legal standard of proof of beyond reasonable doubt. And this is where I take issue because the processes, or we take issue, the processes taken so long and in any ordinary criminal investigation if the evidence is not presenting itself or it’s insufficient then the prosecutor will ordinary drop that matter because for lack of or want of evidence to end up in a successful prosecution. That’s kind of the standard that they run with.

At the moment, this seems to be going on and on and on. And we say, let’s, and it seems to me, particularly with the fall of Afghanistan back to the Taliban, the chances of gaining direct evidence from Afghanistan is pretty slim. So now is the time to really move on with this because the impact to people’s lives is profound. Profound. We’re talking about not just people on this call, but those who are really affected. Their families, their livelihood, one day, you know, they don’t know when someone’s going to knock on their door and take their freedom away. So, I think that, and just even their livelihoods. So that one particular person who can’t be offered a job because he works in OPSEC field and they can’t offer him a job until he’s exonerated. So, his entire livelihood, even if he’s not guilty and he’s not guilty, he can’t get a job. He can’t secure his own welfare outside of Army because of this. I don’t think anyone’s thought about that bit. These are the second of the third order consequences of this thing going on and on. Time to wrap it up. It’s time to either have the evidence and move forward, prosecute, go through the courts, it’s time to put a line in the sand.

Why hasn’t it been done yet?

Brett

I mean, we could all speculate, Is there a political undertone?  Maybe that…

If there was, what would it be? And this is…we’re hypothesizing here, so I’m not going to hold you liable for your hypothesis, but if there was a political angle, what is it?

Brett

Well, we’ve spent, how much have we spent? 200 million bucks on this? And we got one person before a court? Maybe? Not yet? I’m not sure. And that’s it. So that seems to be a pretty shit return on investment.

And like Vando really articulated very well earlier, no one’s endorsing the fact that these things shouldn’t be investigated. They should be. They bloody should be because we hold ourselves to the highest legal and moral standards and that’s what sets us apart from the enemy, no matter what warfare, what battle space, AO, you’re talking about. But there needs to be a conclusion.

And I know in the criminal sense, there is no conclusion. There’s no, unless it’s double jeopardy, there is no end necessarily. But you can say, right, we’ve concluded our investigation. There’s nothing to see at this point in time. If fresh evidence comes up in 20 years from now, sure, that’s a very small likelihood of that.

Vando, speak to the impact on the unit and the SO community writ large.

Vando

Yeah. So, I mean, I think probably nothing is more compelling than just look at the data around separation rates sort of through and post the IGF process. That’s one of the, I think one of the amazing things about the SAS has been its retention rate.  It holds guys for careers, right?

And the separation rate was sitting around about, I think it was about, you know, 5. something percent.

What does that mean? That’s just for those who don’t understand. Each year they’ll be at 5 %

Vando

Each year, that’s right. So, each year, so there’s at any point in time, there’s around about 200 fully qualified SAS soldiers that that are at Campbell Barracks. Any given year, about 10 of them discharge. And that’s just the natural attrition of, you know, guys moving through the pipeline, you know, promoting and then, you know, potentially, you know, either through injury or just through tenure, moving on to greener pastures.

Mm-hmm.

Vando

In the years after the, so in the, I think it was three years after the IGADF report was tabled and after Angus Campbell stood up and briefed the Australian public and the world, those separation rates jumped to 25, 30%, 35%. And over the next four years, we lost probably about a hundred, over a hundred operators discharged.

And that was out of a complete fracturing of trust. I think there was a lot of moral grandstanding and pontificating that didn’t need to happen. I think all Angus needed to do was stand at that dais and say, I have the report. It is disturbing. It is not who we are as an Army. And if the allegations are proven true, we as an organization will take action. But that is the next step. The allegations then have to be tested to the standard that we hold ourselves, all Australians are held to under, you know, under our judicial process, under the rule of law in this in this country. That is democracy and rule of law in action. That’s all that needed to be said. And you know what, and I think probably the last bit that needed to be said was, and I take responsibility, as the man at the top. Accountability starts with me and it cascades down. It doesn’t start at troop commander. It doesn’t start at the guys that went out on the field. It starts at the top and that is entirely lacking in this whole conversation. And so, when you put an entire unit through a process as bruising and as unethical as the IGADF of investigation was in the mechanics, in the process, when you step away from the ADF stated position on ethics, which is we don’t do consequentialism, we don’t do ends justify means, and you do exactly the opposite and you choose to put your men through a process that is, in my view, deeply unethical because you want to get to the end state, then I think you’ve lost all credibility  and you’ve lost accountability because you’re not standing there and owning it yourself.

And I think at that point, at the point that the ADF senior leaders stepped away and said, you know, this is not on us. At the point that so many guys went through such a horribly traumatic process and were potentially significantly re-traumatized as a result. You know, as I said, I was a support officer for a guy. He was going to his third interview. He was suicidal.  And we had two psychiatrists trying to get him into a facility. So, we had him admitted to an acute care psychiatric facility in Perth. And we were liaising with Brereton and his staff to delay or cancel the third interview. And the response was no, he will be there and he will answer the questions. It’s like at the point that the welfare of the soldier is secondary to the predetermined outcome, all trust is broken between soldier and the organization. And at that point, you saw a mass exodus from the unit. And I think that that was unnecessary collateral for a process that could have been handled far better.

And it speaks to this huge point or the lack thereof of, again, international humanitarian law, we go to war, how we conduct war, and the Jus ad Bellum, the reasons we go to war. And again, just recently, a podcast came out with Major General Chris Smith, who’s the Deputy Chief of Army. And this question was addressed. It was a Cove podcast. And there was this kind of, they danced around the issue, but it was all about, well, you know, can we hold someone accountable if they were that far away? And that seems to me where this lands. And it is so frustrating to me that that’s where it lands. well, they were so far away. Therefore, you know, can we hold them accountable? No, fuck off. The last hour and a half we’ve just spoken about the conditions you had enabled. And when I’m saying you, I’m saying senior Defense leaders, you enabled it. You enabled the rotation of these guys time and time again, the moral degradation that comes along with it. If you didn’t know, you should have known and you should have done something about it. Because now saying, we sat in El Minhad, which was so eloquently put in documentary. You know what?

 That doesn’t, that doesn’t, just doesn’t, doesn’t, as again, someone said in the, in the, in the documentary, I think it was Andy might’ve been, it doesn’t pass the pub test. It really doesn’t. Right. And also doesn’t pass the pub test on accountability, on leadership. How many times, as three of us as officers in the ADF, going through all our officer training continuum, leadership, leadership, leadership, accountability, you know, stand up. And now.

 Where is that leadership? Where is that moral courage that we expect and want from our leaders? And that to me is a huge, that to me is also part of the direction of duty, I would say, because to me that undermines the entire system. And as you rightly point out Vando I’m absolutely not surprised why people left. I can, maybe I’ll pivot on moral injury, because obviously I understand PTSD is prevalent without a doubt. Moral injury is only just being introduced as a recognized condition. But I have absolutely no doubt the moral injury is even greater than PTSD. What’s the thoughts? Maybe Vando first and then Brett as well.

Vando

Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s the concept of, think of moral injury forward in the battle space, but I actually think that the moral injury of your, you grow up in a culture where you believe that we are a, you know, we’re a family, right? The ADF is a family and going up the chain, if you know, each layer above you has a vested interest and a care in your wellbeing and your success. And when that is proven to be untrue, when you have this, you know, this, this, this complete, uh, you know, we call, you know, that’s the betrayal part of the film, right? But when the ADF senior leaders step away and say, you know, you are guilty, you are culpable, but we are not. That, I think, that’s potentially has created some of the greatest moral injury because it’s created a fundamental fracturing of what you thought to be true in your own moral code that as a family, the ADF would at least, the individuals above you would at least accept responsibility for the conditions that created you at the coalface.

Brett

Yeah, that’s right. When you join the Army as a young person, you join with that ideology of wanting to serve your country and serve Australia and all those things. And you believe and it’s rammed down your throat throughout all your cycles, whichever pathway you take, that it’s all about integrity, it’s all about leadership. This is what leadership means and it means standing up and supporting the people who report into you. And when you see that in the most acute fashion now, and it seems to me it’s about self-preservation, let’s be honest. That’s completely missing now and the silence is deafening which is why we put a documentary out there because the silence is deafening.

Yeah, it is absolutely.

 One other aspect that I just want to touch on is, so as I alluded to, I started a PhD on moral degradation and using Afghanistan as a case study and what I wanted to investigate the moral degradation of soldiers, perfectly noble, righteous soldiers, and how the environment then shapes that person. Everything we talked about already was basically the kind of intention of my studies.

 And because of that, I was actually invited to deliver a brief to the OSI. And I hope they won’t mind me mentioning it. But it was an unclassified brief. So nothing in there was particularly sensitive. It was basically laying out what we talked about. I looked at the of organizational factors that contribute, the environmental factors, the cultural factors, and the individual factors. And I laid it out through this lens, very much to what we talked about. And I opened up with my own personal experience of what I’ve already mentioned from Bosnia and why that question stuck in my mind. But one of the things, and the presentation was meant to go like 40 minutes and 20 minutes of question time. I was there for an hour and a half because there was a lot of interest to my initially surprise because I didn’t know what to expect. And it was the full OSI from the DG down, all the investigators, everyone was part of the kind of annual gathering and whatever. And what caught me by surprise, truly by surprise, was afterwards talking to all the investigators, seniors, et cetera, was the overwhelming message that the people they’re investigating are people who normally, and this is paraphrased quote, they will normally have at a barbecue on a Sunday and they will be the kind of most interesting person at that barbecue. But now they’re kind of investigating it. And the message that I walked away with is they actually didn’t understand truly the context that they’re trying to investigate. And there’s another one told me, we investigate bikeys, criminals, right? Which within itself…and it’s not to defend them. I certainly don’t intend to do that, but that brings a certain culture, organizational culture on how you approach those sitting on the other end of you. But that there was no pause forced upon them or an explanation of the context that you’re talking to people who’ve got 20 years of experience of combat experience, who’ve worn the uniform proudly to kind of treat them in the same manner as the bikies and the criminals that you’re investigating. Otherwise to me, that’s, again, I don’t know. It’s very hard for me to place the blame on the individual investigators, despite the end result, but from kind of trying to put myself in their shoes, what their lived experiences, what their day-to-day life is, what their patterns of behaviour are and their habits organizationally.  And I think it sits much higher than that.

 And that to me is also another question of, know, how do we allow this to occur? And, and the Defense, and you made the, you made the point in the, in the documentary Vando, you threw it square at the Defense senior leaders that the disappointment was with the Defense senior leaders. How could they stay removed out of this? How, how did that occur? Why was that possible that all of this happened?

 You know, with you as the support officer, in an office somewhere in Perth, how did that happen? How was that allowed? Was there no, I mean, I imagine there was, but what was the resistance internally to the process and why was it falling on deaf ears?

Vando

I mean, you couldn’t resist the process. The process was the process and it was directed from the top down. So it was, it was us. So, so I’ll take a step back. I will say throughout this whole thing, I’ll come back to, I come back to one word that I think sums it up. And that was a lack of compassion. So, compassion has been lacking throughout. You talk about that, you the, the, talk about the, I guess the context of investigating bikeys is et cetera. And I remember a clip when this was all coming out and someone was interviewed in Sydney or it was interviewed and said, well, if this happened on the streets of Sydney, would be murder. And I felt that that just so wrapped up the approach that was being applied. A simplistic monolithic murder investigation type criminal lens. And I just, I feel that we are better than that as a, I think as a nation, I think that we’ve got enough, you know, I think Australians are naturally a relatively compassionate, egalitarian type society. We care for our neighbours, et cetera. And so, I actually think the first question should be, or the first step should be to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes. And that story was never told by the ADF senior leaders. It was a very, you know,  very sort of  strict ethical lens through which they were looking at it without attempting to tell the story, paint the picture, set the context as the start point to then building, then, you know, then build the process that actually will allow you to take the soldiers through and the officers through at every rank from the top down and pull those levers of accountability whilst engaging with and respecting the service and the sacrifice that all those individuals had gone through.  I think that’s been sorely lacking throughout and I don’t think that the ADF has learned lesson from that. I don’t think that that’s, you know, I think if we go through this again, and we’ll go through this again at the next war, I think you’ll go through it after every war.  Yeah, it’ll be the same. It’ll be a, you know, there’ll be a there’ll be a feeling at the top that they need to be seen to be taking action.  But without, you know, without, I guess, yeah, without that sort of adequate level of compassion.

Brett?

Brett

Yeah, well, it’s a great point that Vando makes. I think it’s this, you talk about moral degradation, as this over 20-year period of time when we start out with a lot of support and then over time it becomes non-newsworthy and then it becomes newsworthy because someone fills the media with a void because there’s nothing coming out of the ADF to provide information to the Australian community. So, there’s a whole series, I think, of flaws in this and the way that we campaign it. Communication plans need to be well, campaigned as well.

Hmm. Yeah. For all the planning we trained on, wasn’t a lot of decent planning in this one.

 This perhaps a good place to wrap up the discussion. But I’ll ask you both one last question. Given all the costs, given the 41 dead, given all the loss of trust, et cetera, was it all worth it? From where you are sitting now, not from when you were a young man, Vando, but was it all worth it? Whichever way you look at that question.

Vando

So I’m gonna bifurcate the question because I like to kind of take a lens on myself and then a sort of a broader organisational lens. But I think that the, know, as you know, me at 44 years old, circa late 2025, am firmly the belief that you should never regret your actions or you should never regret the journey that you’ve been on as long as you’ve learned something from it.

Hear. Hear.

Vando

And for me, it has been an incredible journey and one that I have learned so much from, has opened so much of the world to me and it has taught me so much about myself, good, bad and really, really ugly at times. But it has been worth it from a personal perspective.

From an organizational perspective or from a national perspective. Unless we learn from it, it hasn’t been worth it. And I’m not confident that we have learnt from this experience as a nation, choosing to engage in a war where, I think the initial, I’ve got a slightly different view to you on sort of whether the war was just or not. initially, I think there is a price to pay.

Initially, I agree. it was just 100%. I’m down with that.  But after that, I’m…

Vando

Yeah, and I think that, you yeah, I mean, I think that you, you know, you look at it sort of from a, from a geo strategic context, and we are a large landmass with a small army at the bottom of an archipelago in a, you know, in a non, in a non-sort of Anglo part of the global sphere. So, alliances do matter.  And so, I think the price of play for being part of an alliance is contributions to occasionally the war of choice rather than the existential war. So I believe that the entry point to Afghanistan was just. I believe our Western hubris and sort of the End of History type mindset just sent us down a decade long rabbit hole that we didn’t need to go down. But we need to learn from it. In the same way that I feel that my experience has been worth it because I’ve learned from it and grown from it. Us as a nation, we have to do the same thing. And we, I feel we are still unwilling to pick the scab and learn those hard lessons. We’re learning lessons in isolation, but we never, I don’t think we’re stitching it together into some sort of coherent learning or wisdom that we can carry through to the next war. And I mean you’re always fighting the last war and I’m not saying that the lessons we learned tactically would be relevant in the next one but I think there’s some great strategic lessons some sort of you know that that you know that contract between the military and society and the political structures you know that stuff this there’s stuff that we need to learn there because I think that if we don’t, what’s the last 20 years been for?

Yeah, that’s right. 100 % agree. Brett.

Brett

Yeah, look, Maz, personally, I guess I’ll brake it down as well. Personally, yes, my time in the military was amazing. And incredible experiences. And I got to develop a brotherhood, you know, without being misogynistic about it. But you know what I mean? Like a bond with people that is unbreakable.

And I carry that today and I’m very privileged to have that. Those experiences, they were good experiences and they were bad experiences. I think on the whole, personally, it was an incredible time to be in the Army. From a professional perspective, I take the view that on entry to Afghanistan, as Vando says, was a just, just initiative for Australia to take part in that. Over time it became about our international policy alliance with the US and I support that for everything that Vando said. I think the fact that we are so isolated it’s very clear when you fly from the US back to Australia how the tension lifts when you get back to Australia there isn’t, whereas when you’re in the US there’s this tension.

There are wars on the foot on the doorsteps in Europe. There’s wars in the Middle East thriving but when you come back here it does feel very isolated, feel very lucky. But we’ve created that luck through the security blanket over the last many years. And I think when you think about our alliances to the US, I think personally, I think back to World War II, Vando mentioned the other day when we were talking about the last real conflict in Australia was then with submarines in the harbor and whatnot, bombing in Darwin and it was the US who sort of jumped to our aid. They’re long memories that I think we ought to hold and without them, without that alliance, I think we’re in a particular precarious situation, particularly in this era when we have particularly imperialistic neighbours who as you read the paper on the weekend planning to sail around circumnavigate Australia and so I think that’s an important alliance. But did it go on too long and was the messaging right? I think when we went in there it was absolutely right the messaging needed to change as the war changed and as the imperatives the mission set changed but I don’t think that was really clear so we could absolutely do that better and then of course the exit was just mayhem. I think we’re seeing that.

What I do want to say, just to conclude my remarks, is the money that we have spent on IGADFs and other sides and whatever else would have been far better return on investment as a nation. Have we committed that to a Royal Commission into war fighting, contemporary war fighting? Had we spent that money? We could have covered off all of these points that we’ve raised today. Maybe it would have exposed war crimes that were 0.01 % of occasions but maybe that it would have addressed all these other issues that we’ve touched on today which are pretty deep so if that would have been a better return on our money. Thanks guys.

Agreed, agreed. And on that note, you know, whilst yes, I think there’s some aspects of our alliances in geopolitics that we might agree on, but that might be time for another podcast. But on that note, I just want to thank you both for the time you’ve given me. I think we’ve addressed a lot of the questions that I had in my mind, and you’ve both done it so eloquently and so openly and honestly. And I can’t thank you enough for that. And on top of that, I want to thank you for your service to the nation and what you’ve done and for now, you know, showing moral courage, dare I say it, to speak up and represent those who might not have the ability to do it.

 So, on that note, gents, thank you both. Speak soon.

Vando

Thanks, Maz. Appreciate it, Cheers.

Brett

Thanks, Maz.