The Crossroad Read online

  He was badly shaken up by some of the horrific things he’d seen. One bloke, he said, had had to be ‘hosed out of his cockpit’. Later, Dad would also be scared about another after-effect of Vietnam. He believed he’d been exposed to Agent Orange, the defoliant that, among other things, could cause genetic defects in the children of those who’d ingested it. The Americans dropped it in a mist from above, to kill off vegetation and deprive the Viet Cong of cover, for ten years from 1961 to 1971, only stopping the year after Dad’s tour.

  There are funny stories though as well, like one I’ve been told about when he was on piquet – this is when soldiers are maintaining a watch for the enemy so they can provide an early warning of any threat. He and the guy he was with heard a rustling and grunting in the bushes late at night. They knew it was a bush pig sow and her piglets. For whatever reason Dad wanted a piglet, so he jumped the wire in the middle of the night and tried to chase one down. Apparently he got it, but was chased back to the relative safety of the pit by the squealing and raging sow.

  Family members said that when he came back, he was a changed man. He didn’t look for recognition, but he was pissed off that Vietnam veterans were not honoured with a homecoming and, more than that, were spat at and abused on the streets. He wasn’t any great anti-communist ideologue, but he thought that a man who’d served his country deserved better. Mum’s sister Margaret, who always got on very well with him, found him to be short-tempered and sometimes agitated after he came back, traits she’d never seen in him beforehand. The one thing they couldn’t do to Greg now was creep up on him from behind or give him any kind of surprise: he might swing around and throw a punch.

  One thing that hadn’t changed was his commitment to Bernadette, and they got married in 1972 at St Columban’s in Mayfield. It was a Catholic wedding, but Greg was proud of his Scottish Presbyterian background, and they had bagpipers in tartan kilts to celebrate that side. He’d bring this influence to bear a few years later in naming me Mark Gregor Strang, strong Scottish names.

  Mum and Dad went to Papua New Guinea for their honeymoon and had five years together before my brother, Brent, was born. After Vietnam, Dad retrained as a meat inspector, Mum kept working as a secretary, and they saw a lot of Margaret and her husband Ken, their three kids Kay, Tony and Christine, Mum’s brother Kenny, and also Ross and Val, who’d moved to Sydney and had three kids of their own, Christine, Fiona and Brodie.

  For holidays they went to Lake Macquarie to the south and Tanilba Bay to the north of Newcastle. Mum would like to kick back and relax, while Dad was up early every day to go out fishing, waterskiing, snorkelling, scuba diving or trail bike riding. He was very fit and was often found under his car. He couldn’t sit still, and seemed at his happiest if he was outside fixing or building stuff or going on one of his expeditions. He was highly strung and quick-tempered, but his siblings and their partners knew they could get a laugh by taking the piss out of him. They just had to make sure they picked the right moment.

  TWO

  I was born on 2 April 1979 at the Mater Hospital in Waratah, where Mum had been working in the records department. I don’t know if Dad was there. Brent was a two-year-old, so the old man might have been with him at home, which at that point was a rented house in Waratah on Christo Road, basically next door to the hospital.

  The first house I remember was one we called ‘the farm’, though it wasn’t really a farm, just acreage on the fringe of Denman at Sandy Hollow near Muswellbrook. One of my earliest memories of that place is seeing our dog Angie’s tail sweeping back and forth through the grass paddocks as she was chasing rabbits and rodents. Dad used to go hunting out there with her. There were mountains beyond the house, and I have a fond memory of tagging along with Dad into the scrub, Angie going ahead and sniffing out the prey before Dad would whistle her to come back and take a shot. He kept a couple of guns, and even a bow and arrow. Sometimes he’d let us come, and we’d do our best to keep up with his slouch hat moving through the bush. Mum didn’t like him having the guns around, though, especially as Brent and I got older. We knew where he kept them and were quite interested, but at some point Mum persuaded him to get rid of them.

  Before long we moved into Denman town proper. The XPT used to race past on the train track just behind us, which might not have been a great selling point for adults but as kids we and our friends loved it. The yard was a bit of an adventure playground. We had a swing set and a big paddock of long grass, where Brent and I built an intricate tunnel system and played with Angie, whose dried white poos had the added advantage of exploding spectacularly when we kicked them. Scotty and Michael Pritchard, sons of the milkman and rugby league teammates of ours at the Denman Devils, would play war games in the long grass with us. Scotty and Michael always used to fight, just like we did, and eventually we sorted ourselves into warring factions, the two youngest against the two oldest. They turned into big pitched battles, and sometimes all the kids from the neighbourhood joined in.

  We were always excited to come home because Mum was there with some hot Milo, keen to listen to the amazing things we’d been up to. If it was rainy, she’d have a favourite meal or some hot soup to dish out and let us watch Wide World of Sport, before it became all about horse racing. One of the great things about Mum was, she genuinely cared about our adventures, no matter how real or imaginary they were.

  Brent and I were always following Dad around the Denman place, getting into everything. He built a rotunda and a barbecue by hand, and all we wanted to do was be involved. He had a practicality you don’t often see, and a can-do approach that I now recognise as soldierly, even if he didn’t see himself as part of the military set. He looked after all his tools and equipment meticulously, and had some of them for years and years. Everything was looked after. Nothing got thrown out if it was broken – and often it wasn’t broken for long because he found a way to fix it.

  One of the most striking things about Dad, looking back, was that he wore his khaki army shirts, with the pockets and epaulettes, whenever he was working at home or going out fishing or camping. He always wore his slouch hat from Vietnam. There aren’t many photos of him in his later years when he doesn’t have that slouch hat on. If you listened to what he said – or didn’t say – he was anti-army, anti-RSL, anti-Anzac Day and all that went with it, because of his Vietnam experience. But if you looked at what he did, there were telltale signs that he had a soldier’s nature through and through, and was proud of it as well.

  Unfortunately, his fastidious soldier’s nature added up to a short fuse when Brent and I were trying to help, and my instinct for pushing things to the limit put us on a collision course.

  We were always covered in mud, with the hose out, mucking around in the dirt, making a big mess of his garden. If we weren’t helping him the way he wanted, he’d tell us to do something else. Generally by that time we’d have the shits with him, so we’d wander off and make trouble for him. We would climb up a pine tree and drop down onto his beloved Kingswood, which drove him crazy. Once, a mate and I went into the scrapyard next door to play with the kangaroos that hung out there, but ended up finding some old engine batteries and tipping out the sulphuric acid to get the marbles from inside them. Dad had a distinctive whistle when he was upset – loud and sharp. Sure enough, when I heard that whistle I realised we were in trouble, but I was so excited that we had these marbles I kept on playing. Dad came upon us with steam pouring out of his ears. He took me home and gave me a whipping with an electric cord or a wooden spoon, I don’t remember, whatever was within reach.

  At the end of a typical day, we’d come into the house for dinner covered in grass stains and mud, all itchy from the overgrown fields, eyes watering, grass through our hair. We sat down as a family every night. Mum and Dad were pretty firm and traditional on this. Dad set the four-seat table in the kitchen and Mum always cooked. Brent and I had to be sitting down and waiting. I was particular about having my
Mickey Mouse plate and fork and spoon and knife, just so. If I didn’t have them, there’d be problems. For some reason, as soon as we sat down, Brent and I would swap our knives and forks into the opposite hands, left and right instead of right and left. We still do. I don’t know why we do it, because Mum and Dad didn’t.

  Dinner was always a home-cooked meal, usually steak or lamb cutlets with vegies. Dad brought home whole carcasses from the abattoir, chopped them up and put them in the deep freezer, and from an early age I was familiar with the sights and smells of butchering fresh meat. When the food was ready, Dad would come in and sit, the last one at the table. We didn’t have the TV on. Dinner was a pretty straightforward affair, Mum and Dad doing the talking while our job was to eat what was in front of us. If you didn’t eat everything on your plate, you couldn’t get dessert or even leave the table. Brent was fussy about vegetables, so there were plenty of stand-offs.

  The softness in our life came from Mum. She was our constant, always there. She was a gentle instructor, keener than Dad on helping us enjoy learning new things. I remember going to swimming lessons with her in Denman when I was only three or four. Mum wasn’t a good swimmer – she was comfortable wading in the water but didn’t like sticking her head under – so she made a point of us learning at the public pool where family friends ran swimming classes. I hated it the first time but soon got the hang of it. It was an example of how Mum’s softer approach got results.

  If Dad yelled at us, we ran to Mum. Or to be honest, it was mainly me that Dad was yelling at. Brent had Mum’s easygoing nature and didn’t rise to the bait when Dad started getting worked up. I, on the other hand, was desperate to be involved, and, being younger, tended to get in Dad’s way. It was a case of two similar temperaments butting heads, even when I was little. I had a bit of a temper, and when I was in trouble I’d go into a big sulk. There are quite a few photos of me with my bottom lip sticking out, obviously having just been scolded: a nice Christmas photo of all the kids in the family, except Mark.

  If I wasn’t trying to get into Dad’s business, I’d be following Brent around. I remember being constantly afraid of missing out. It’s something I’ve had all my life, even in the SAS in war zones, where I have a reputation for making a pest of myself in a command area trying to find out what’s coming up next and how I can get involved. I just hate the idea that action and excitement are happening elsewhere. As a kid, if I was sent to bed early, I’d stay awake so I could hear what else was going on. When Brent wanted to go riding his bike up the street with his friends and I was told I was too young to join them, I blew up. Dad would say, gruffly, ‘Get over it,’ but Mum had another approach. ‘Come here, come play out the back. We can do something much better.’

  We could piss Mum off as well. Like Brent, she had a longer fuse, but once it was lit it could go off. She hated it when Brent and I were fighting, and would give us the whole ‘When your father gets home he’ll hear about this’ routine. It didn’t matter who was at fault; we got equal punishment. She didn’t like it when we ran off during the day without telling her where we were going. As long as we were home by five o’clock in the afternoon it was okay, but if we missed that, she’d really let us know.

  Being adventurous and mischievous boys, we couldn’t help giving her a rough time. If we were out at the big department stores, we’d take off and hide under the clothes racks, to collect the coloured tags or to jump out and scare each other. She didn’t like losing sight of us, but it was too tempting in those big exciting places. Once, I remember coming out from a clothes rack to discover that Brent and Mum weren’t there any more. I went to the counter in tears. ‘I’ve lost my mum, I’ve lost my mum!’ She was anxious too at first, but once she and Brent had found me she had to laugh.

  Mum remained a practising Catholic and on Sundays made sure we all went to church. In Denman it was a social thing: the parents would get together after church for a barbecue. It was hard for Brent and me to take church too seriously, though. It was all about taking your bit of bread and getting told everything you were doing wrong. When we got a bit older, Dad stopped going. He was pretty anti-religion, and if Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the house he would chase them away. Mum made a last big effort to get him to stick with church, but eventually he flat-out refused. That gave Brent and me the green light to do likewise. I thought, If Dad’s not going, I’m not going. Soon Mum’s attendance began to peter out too.

  The withdrawal from regular churchgoing happened at Dorrigo, where we moved when I was seven or eight. Dad had got a job as a meat inspector up in the north of New South Wales, and he liked the idea of being further out in the bush, where he could work on a house and explore the rivers and forests, and take trips down to the beaches. Our lives really broadened out in Dorrigo. We stayed in a caravan park on the first night, then rented a few houses, and finally moved to acreage Mum and Dad bought. Working on his own house and garden long-term was the ideal project for the old man.

  Unlike the home jobs, where he was a bit tense about getting us involved, he was always happy to take Brent and me on adventures: climbing rocks, trekking up mountain trails, camping, fishing and swimming. Those were the happiest times for us, and would be at the core of my drive to be in the SAS. I always wanted to find an outdoor skill I could improve. When we were still in Denman, Dad would take us down to the Hunter River to swim while he went fishing. He’d float an air mattress for us and we’d drift down the river till he picked us up. Or Mum would look after us. Once I fell off and got caught in a whirlpool. I thought, I’m going under here! Eventually I got pulled out, but it was a wake-up call. My response to these things from the start was not to be afraid of the river, just to make sure I got better at swimming.

  Being further out in the bush also gave Dad more opportunities to hunt rabbits and foxes. He taught me how to trap rabbits using the old style bear-traps that are now banned. I’ve always associated being in the outdoors with the adrenaline rush of hunting, or combating dangerous creatures or just being on an adventure. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was another piece in the puzzle that was turning me into a soldier.

  We could have done with a gun when I was about ten and had a run-in with a red-bellied black snake. It wasn’t my first time. Back in Denman, when I was only two or three, I’d found a black snake on the concrete slab the house’s metal poles stood on. I grabbed it by the tail and swung it around. Dad came down and warned me to stop. The snake was dead – he’d already shot it – but he didn’t like me so enthusiastically taking on a dangerous reptile as a playmate. I was certainly cured of any liking for snakes when I came home from primary school alone one day in Dorrigo. I went to the toilet, which was off the back of the patio under a covered walkway. We kept the keys to the house in the toilet. I went in and sat down, then heard this hissing. That’s weird. I looked for the keys by my feet and saw a six-foot red-bellied black snake cocked and ready to strike. The keys were there, but I wasn’t going to reach for them. My heart was racing. I waited and waited, and one centimetre at a time eased the door open. The snake reared up. I thought, I’ve got to go NOW or it’ll bite me. I dived off the toilet and through the doorway, and then kicked the door shut behind me. I broke into the house through one of the windows and called Mum at work. ‘There’s a snake in the toilet and I can’t get the keys out!’ Dad was away, so she sent one of his mates from the abattoir. He came quickly and grabbed Dad’s long-handled rotary edger. We opened the toilet door. The snake was still there, looking pretty pissed off. Dad’s mate hooked the snake out with the edger and chopped its head off with a shovel.

  Soldiering is not just about defeating an adversary; most of the time, it’s about using your imagination and often slim resources to build things. Another of Dad’s hobbies that had a soldierly edge was his ham radio. Soon after we moved to Dorrigo, he installed a whopping great antenna. He didn’t know how to do it; he just read a book and cracked on. He dug a hole for a tele
graph pole and got some mates to help him sink the pole with the radio’s metal mast attached to the top. He ran the cable into the house and set up the receiver in the hallway. His technical skills were amazing. At one point he bought some electronic components from America to expand the radio’s bandwidth, and had to send Uncle Ross to get them out of Customs after they were impounded as contraband.

  His radio was an early form of social media when I think about it. After dinner, he’d pick up all sorts of stuff. He listened to passenger-jet pilots talking to each other. Brent and I would go and sit with him and ask, ‘What’s this all about?’ Dad told us to just sit quietly and listen, and not press the talk button. He mostly preferred listening in to the jet pilots, but also made friends with other ham-radio operators in America. He told some friends in Arizona that Brent and I were into basketball and football, and they sent us a box with an American flag and an Arizona state flag and all this merchandising from the Chicago Bulls, the San Francisco 49ers and the Miami Dolphins, which we thought was the bee’s knees.

  Although he didn’t talk about it, Dad took a lot of pride in his work. He was a real by-the-book kind of person; even though he had a strong sense of independence, he saw the importance of rules. I have an early memory from back in Denman. We went to the Hunter River, which was flooding, and there was a huge crowd, fifty to eighty people, watching this bloke who was trapped in a tree out in the middle. The Westpac Rescue Helicopter came and winched him out. I remember Dad explaining how that guy was an idiot because he’d tried to swim across the river; he hadn’t done what he was told. The rescue made quite an impression on me.