One Life One Chance Read online

  When the area was secured, our section commander said we could go check out the body if we wanted to. I jumped at the chance, as did the rest of the men. Seeing my first dead body didn’t affect me at all really. He looked like he was just sleeping but I knew, judging by the bullet holes riddling his body, that he was dead. I think I was that desensitised by all the books I had read about wars and genocides that a dead body in real life had lost its effect somehow. The fact that he was a mass murderer and deserved to be dead helped me handle the whole situation. He was typical Timorese build, short, skinny, and a rough beard. I took some photos while our commander wasn’t looking then went back to my position. The entire scenario was a bit of an anticlimax at the time, but years later I would appreciate not being the man who pulled the trigger.

  Our tour was coming to a close and all of us were glad to be going home. It’s all we could talk about in the last couple of weeks. What we were going to do and what we were going to buy with all of our money. The tax-free pay and the danger bonus had all added up to a tidy amount after six months and Timor had given me the opportunity to see a different culture and had fortified the love of travelling and adventure that I had grown up with.

  We withdrew from East Timor in much the same way that we had arrived, on the back of trucks and with the jungle and mountainous scenery whipping by. We had to spend a few days back in Dili getting debriefed and packing all of our equipment into trunks for the trip home. The debrief and packing base had a small security force of Fijian military looking after it. They were a great bunch of friendly guys and I got to enjoy two nights of singing songs and drinking kava with them. Kava is a drink made from the root of a pepper plant and looks like dirty dish water. It turns your lips numb and gives you an overall feeling of relaxation. I had a big evening on the kava with them on my last night before I was due to leave, leaving me feeling quite rough the next morning when a big, friendly Fijian face came in to wake me up and said, ‘You go home today.’ I was over the moon hearing those words, a feeling of accomplishment and pride swept through my body.

  Getting back to Australia was the last hurdle to jump over before the celebrations could begin. We weren’t flying commercial aircraft back home on the return journey, we were going to catch C130 Hercules aircraft back to Townsville instead. Three planes departed Townsville bound for Timor, enough for all the men due to go home. One had to turn back with engine trouble and another one made it to Dili safely but couldn’t leave again, citing mechanical issues. This left one working plane with an entire company of men all keen to get home to their families.

  The single plane was loaded to its capacity with men but one unlucky platoon was left behind on the runway and would have to wait until the next day to fly back. There was nowhere to sit down – bodies and bags were everywhere – so the only thing I could do was try and find a comfortable spot to get some sleep. The old plane was deafening and cold. The only place I could find was literally on the back tailgate. It was loud, freezing, but funny enough, I could stretch out because it was such a terrible spot to sleep that no-one wanted it.

  Upon landing I’m sure I had mild hypothermia and I felt terrible, but I was home on Australian soil again.

  My successful tour of East Timor was a big achievement for me and I had honoured my family legacy by serving my country. The travel and adventure was like a shot of adrenaline and I wanted more of it. I was a young man and I had my whole life ahead of me, I had seen the outside world, I had glimpsed its far horizons and I wanted to see more. I wanted to explore and experience the vastness of our world and the mediocre life was of no interest to me. Adventure and adrenaline had me hooked and I wanted it all.

  CHAPTER 4

  LONDON AND THE DEMON DAYS

  …

  My military service term of four years as an infantry soldier was fast approaching its end, and with six months to go I had decided it was time to move on. I had achieved my goal of serving my country and now I wanted to achieve my other goals of travelling the world and having adventures.

  The discharge process was long, very tedious and I thought at one point I would never get discharged. The convoluted administrative nightmare took six months of lost records, sign here, lodge that, scan this, but in the end I was finally out and on my way to Europe. I had booked the long-haul flight from Sydney to London, I had sold all of my possessions and had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account. It was 2005 and I was twenty-one. Freedom never felt so good.

  London is a city with its own life force, it’s a city of cities filled with people from all over the world. I realised quickly that Australians and New Zealanders were everywhere, all with the same mindset of working and travelling. Jobs were easy to come by in London, travel to anywhere in Europe was cheap, and in summer the festival season was something that should be enjoyed by everyone at least once in their lives.

  I arrived into town on a winter’s day wearing flip flops and a pair of board shorts. It was drizzling with sleet, and a grey sky enveloped the city. The underground train system was easy enough to figure out and I made my way to Angel station, right in the heart of London. I had a friend with a place to stay and by the time I arrived at his front door I was shivering uncontrollably. My mate laughed as he opened the door and let me in.

  I was living in a share house with Australians, Scottish travellers and some locals. I didn’t have a bedroom, most of the time I slept on the floor in the lounge room. I was known as a ‘dosser’, someone who just sleeps anywhere and pays the absolute minimum of £5 a night for the privilege. My diet consisted of the bare necessities and during the coldest months of winter I lived off tomato soups and bread – it was hot comfort food that cost 55 pence per serve. It suited all of my needs at the time, sustaining my life for the cheapest possible price.

  I snagged a job as a labourer in Kings Cross train station, where we were doing the refurbishment of the old St Pancras hotel and train decks. It was an amazing old building and easy work swinging a sledgehammer. It took time for me to adapt to the cold temperatures and when it started to snow at work one dark miserable morning, in my head I thought we would get to go home now. I was wrong. We were told to have an extra cup of tea and crack on with the job; they really wanted me to earn my £7 an hour.

  I was riding the tube to work one morning when I saw an advertisement for human medical trials that payed a whopping £1000 per week to take untested medicines. I called them immediately and booked in for my pre-screening at the testing clinic. My mindset at the time was I’m young, invincible and this is going to be some quick easy cash. Upon walking into the waiting room it became clear that I was not the only traveller who thought this was a great idea. The nurse took all my details, then nearly all of my blood, and told me to come back the following week to get the screening results and to find out if I was eligible for the trial. I arrived back the next week and was told I was disease free and therefore eligible. I would need to stay in hospital for two full weeks and was not allowed to leave during that time once I committed to the trial. I thought ‘why not, let’s do it!’ and checked myself in the following day. The trial was to test a new drug being developed to help stop blockages of the arteries in the brain that can cause a stroke.

  The ward where we had to sleep was like a flashback to the Army barracks, one big room with ten beds down one side and ten down the other with only curtains to give some privacy. It was sterile clean, smelt like a laboratory and there were multiple doctors and random people in lab coats shuffling around. One young girl in a lab coat ushered me to my bed and told me that the administering of the drugs would begin in a couple of hours, until then just relax. There was a small library and internet cafe at the end of the ward for us to use, however I had brought with me a selection of books to keep my mind occupied so I opened one of those, crawled onto my bed and settled in.

  Alec, also a human guinea pig, walked over to my bed to say hello and he told me this would be his fifth trial. Alec used the trial money to trave
l; upon completion of a trial he would head off to the far corners of the globe and when his money ran out come back and line up for the next one. It wasn’t a bad plan in my opinion, food and shelter while you’re at the hospital and a cheque on the way out. The only downside was the Russian roulette I was playing while taking the untested drugs. Considering how cold I was at work swinging that sledgehammer, Alec’s way of life was very appealing.

  The trial was due to start and we were given our final briefing and told we must consume only the food and drink given to us so that all patients ate exactly the same. This made me hungry immediately. I looked around to see normal-sized people who would eat normal-sized meals. I was a big guy and typically didn’t hold back on the serving size; I began thinking this could have been a mistake. The rules were we had to take all the drugs they gave us and let them steal our blood every couple of hours.

  The first week of the trial I must have been given the placebo. While some of the other patients were doubled over with migraines I was kicking back reading my books and planning how I was going to spend my money. I was right to be worried about the food situation; when the first tray came out for dinner I thought I was going to starve to death. It was a tiny meal of meat and vegetables which disappeared in two minutes leaving my stomach grumbling. I asked for some more from a passing worker but he ignored me. I had come from a military mess hall with unlimited troughs of food to meals measured to the gram.

  Time flew by that first week. It was frustrating getting woken up every two hours throughout the night for blood samples but after three days of getting used to the roster I would typically be fast asleep when they drew blood at night. I didn’t know it at the time, but years later, while on expedition this type of sleeping pattern would be the norm. The second week started and that was when I earned my money. Almost immediately after receiving the dose of medication I began to get a headache. The headache evolved into a migraine, which is something I had never had before, and it was absolutely brutal. I was curled up on my mattress with a throbbing head with no chance of pain relief.

  The nurses told me I wasn’t allowed any other medication to relieve the pain as it would compromise the results of the trial, I simply had to deal with it. The last few days crawled along at a snail’s pace. I was unable to sleep, read or move around as my head would start to pound. The pain began to ease by the middle of the last day and I was able to sit up and start having conversations with the other patients. Some of them had a similar story to my own with only one week of migraines, while a few of them had migraines for the entire time. It was late afternoon when the trial was completed and we were told to get dressed and pick up our cheques at the office on the way out.

  I walked out of the hospital entrance £2000 richer into the icy fresh air that hit me in the face. Although it was cold it was great to be outside. I guessed I had lost a few kilograms from the starvation rations we had been given but I consoled myself by thinking I had helped advance our medical knowledge for the good of humanity; or I just helped another big pharmaceutical company make more profit. Either way, I had three things on my mind: food, beer and sleep, in that order.

  Labourer’s wage just wasn’t cutting it, I was really starting to struggle for money. My poverty line status forced me to develop a technique to eat for free, which involved getting to the cafe just as all the other workers were about to leave. I’d sit down with them to have a quick chat and as soon as they got up and were out of sight I quickly grabbed the leftover plates and piled all the remaining food onto one without the cafe staff noticing. Then when the staff came along a moment later to clear the table they would see me still finishing up and think nothing of it.

  After a few months of working with other tradesmen I was promoted to a semi-skilled role. This simply meant that I had good skills for metal work but wasn’t a qualified tradesman. It was a great pay rise, to £11 an hour, and I was given a labourer to help me. Finally I was starting to earn enough to eat a little better, get a gym membership and save some money for adventures.

  My labourer was from Poland and he was a really great guy. He told me his name was Jerry but I think that was just a name he used to be better accepted in London. He was a qualified accountant in Poland but couldn’t get that sort of work so he was labouring. We were both on the same level with our skills so we could help each other out. Whenever I would come in on a Monday feeling rough from a Sunday drinking session he would cover for me as I crawled up into the air conditioning vents and had a sleep for a few hours. Whenever he needed to go and do something for his family, instead of sacrificing hours of pay, I’d cover him. We were a solid team.

  Once I was in the groove of working longer hours, training and saving my money I quickly built up enough cash to have some trips away. I ventured to Scotland to climb its tallest peak, Ben Nevis, and to learn ice climbing, I climbed England’s biggest peak, Scafell Pike, and I drove over to the cliffs of Wales for rock climbing. I spent two months in Africa exploring overland from Nairobi to Cape Town and had multiple weekend escapes to Europe. One summer I even saved enough for a trekking trip to the Himalayas in Nepal with two friends Hal and Shannon. It was during that trip I first laid eyes on Everest and some of the biggest mountains on earth. That trip set in stone my desire to try to climb them, but I had a lot to learn and needed a lot more money.

  London has a drinking culture much like Australia, and I started to develop a Sunday session ritual of going to Church. Not the church typically thought of but a place renowned for a good time of drinking and partying on a Sunday. The Church was an old building in northern London that opened at midday and closed at 4 pm. Only four hours to drink as much as you could and sing along to some classic tunes. As we entered the front of the building we bought our drink tickets first, usually estimated by how much we had consumed last time. Moving straight to the bar, which only sold beer in a four-pack of cans in a plastic bag, we purchased our first one and moved along. Sawdust blanketed the floor for ease of cleaning up after all the spilt drinks and whatever other fluids get deposited there over the following few hours. Then after jostling for a position near the front stage we waited for the show to begin.

  The afternoon spiralled into classic pub songs, sweaty dancing bodies and the constant flow of booze. A comedian performed a set followed by drinking games and on occasion a stripper who rotated from male to female on alternate weekends, to keep everyone equally entertained, would do a show. Four hours went by in a flash and before we had time to finish our last bag of beers the lights were coming on and we’d leave the Church filled with more sin than when we arrived. It was then time to find the second best Sunday watering hole and there was only one establishment on everyone’s lips, The Walkabout.

  The Walkabout was a chain of pubs marketed directly at Aussies and New Zealanders living abroad. Our favourite was a big venue in Shepherd’s Bush that would be jam-packed with our kin by the time the Church emptied into it. A short, sobering tube ride disembarked at Shepherd’s Bush and we entered the Walkabout charged up for more. It was straight to the bar to order the specialty concoction known as Snakebite, a jug made with half beer, half cider and red cordial.

  The afternoon turned into evening as we sang, danced and dyed our clothes red with spilled snakebite. Knowing I had work the following day I always tried to pull the plug and make it home by midnight, which was achieved a majority of the time. No matter how hungover or rough I was feeling on Monday mornings, when Sunday came around again the following week, I could never say no to the pull of the almighty Church.

  As much as having a good time was a priority, so was keeping fit, which I know sounds like a contradiction, but I did my best to make it work. After getting a pay rise I was able to afford a membership at a local Virgin gym and made sure I trained every weekday after work, no matter what. Fitness was important to me and I had achieved so much with my physical abilities in the Army I didn’t want to let myself relax those standards.

  My fitness served me a
nd my good mate Kieren well when a concert called Live 8 came to London. It was a massive event organised to raise awareness and funds to fight poverty in Africa and it had a headline of artists that was like nothing seen before or since. The only issue was it sold out in minutes and the only tickets we could get were for an event with a massive screen showing the concert in the same park. We decided that would have to do, so we went along to watch the show on the big screen. It turned out to be a family affair with picnics set up on the grass and kids running around having a great time. It wasn’t really our scene but we settled in and had a few beers. The show itself was epic and by the time the first few beers had kicked in Kieren and I looked at each other and said, ‘We have to get into this concert.’ We jumped up, threw our empty cans in the bin and started to walk off in the direction of the main event on the other side of the park.

  We had underestimated how hard this was going to be, the paths were blocked off with security, the bridge over the lake we had to cross had a police officer with his dog posted on it and there were fences everywhere sealing off the show. We were in Hyde Park, and the Serpentine lake stood between us and the greatest show on earth – there was only one solution, a military style incursion through the lake. I grabbed Kieren and told him the plan: because the police were on the bridge we needed to slip into the water gently so we didn’t cause ripples on the surface that could be spotted from above. Then we needed to take a deep breath and swim underneath the water all the way across about 100 metres to the far bank.