Mark Wales, M-A-R-K-W-A-L-E-S.

So I was in the Australian army, I was in infantry and then transferred to special forces later, uh, special ed service regiment.

Yeah, I had a call sign, echo Alpha, and I.

Nickname was Chewy for sure, for Chew Backer.

Oh, I just look like a bit of a wie once I grow my hair out.

Uh, so I was with the second Battalion initially.

Uh, and then when I, when I joined Special Forces, I was in Special Air service regimen and I was in one, two, and four squadrons of SAS.

So a few different squadrons.

I joined because when I was young, I'd seen pictures of a hostage rescue mission in the middle of London and it was carried out by the British SAS, it was Princess Gate, uh, 1980 where they rescued all these hostages in the Iranian embassy in London.

And I was really intrigued by how, how much of a specialist specialist force they look like.

And I thought, well, I just wanted to be part of a team like that.

It looks so cool.

It looked like it was hard to get into as well.

And the more homework I did on it, the more I realized this was a really tough career path.

And to get there, you, you had to go through the Army.

You can go through any service in Australia, but mostly it's com comprised of people from the Army.

So that's what got me interested in it.

I'm a corporate speaker now, so I do presentations for companies around leadership and resilience and, uh, I've been doing it for five years.

I'm getting better at it, so it's a, it's a good job.

And if I'm not doing that, I can do other stuff on the side.

So I do a lot of riding and also run a small apparel business.

Kill capture.

I think it's a, it's a window to a world that is quite secretive.

People dunno much about it.

It's hard to grasp what it's like being in a foreign country, being in combat, running these special forces missions, our frame of reference is pretty much popular culture.

All the news.

And they only show part of the picture, uh, in some cases a totally inaccurate picture.

So I think hearing from veterans about what they've done is good because, I mean, I, I can only speak for myself, but I like talking about it because it kind of validates your service and it's, it's something I'm proud of.

And I think it's good too, 'cause there's an interest in it and people wanna know about that world.

They wanna know about the impact it has on.

People, uh, aside from just the sexy mechanics of the whole thing, they want to hear about the, the human story.

When I was young and going to the military, there was still quite a lot of Vietnam veterans around Australia.

We committed troops to Vietnam, including special forces, and I'd heard a lot about the stories about what Australians had done in country in Vietnam, and they had a pretty, pretty revered history, a pretty.

A pretty high regard held among the allied forces for Australian soldiers as well.

So I was always interested in what they'd done in that war.

'cause Australian Special Forces are not actually that old.

We're fairly new.

We, we've at their SASU was formed in the late, uh, early fifties.

We had a Z Force unit in World War II that did some special submissions, but the SAS and Commando saw.

Service in Maia, Borneo, uh, Vietnam, and then the Middle East and, and Central Asia.

So we had, yeah, there was a few veterans floating around Australia.

Been involved in wars not that long beforehand for me.

So I was interested in that.

Yeah.

So I had a grandfather that served in Morita, which is an island in Indonesia during World War ii.

He fought the Japanese there.

In a cavalry unit.

And I think the ba mortel was like 30 days.

It was a joint, uh, US Australian clearance, um, of the arm.

So yeah, I remember that.

Uh, and he showed me a Japanese officer sword that he'd taken from a Japanese officer.

Yeah, I thought that was crazy.

When I first joined, we were coming out of a 20 year.

Cycle of peace.

After the Vietnam War, the Australian army had been degraded quite a bit.

Uh, a lot of money had been taken out of it.

And so there was no real war on the horizon.

It was the end of the Cold War.

Uh, it seemed like a funny career, but for me, I felt like it was the right thing to do.

And uh, as luck would happen, I happened to mature in the Army, the point where we had the busiest operational period in the history of the Australian military.

I thought I'd get some really good experiences.

I didn't wanna sit down when I was 80 and think I could have used my youth a bit better.

I thought I'll, I'll push myself as far as I can go, and if I don't get into the SAS, that's fine.

But if I do get in, it's gonna be amazing.

I'll have great stories and it can be dangerous, but it'll be a great career.

So that's, that was probably the main thing I wanted to get out of it.

And I also wanted to go and fight too.

I wanted to do.

I wanted to do the training so we could eventually go and fight and do something on behalf of the country.

So there were a few near misses for me in combat.

I think probably the more serious ones were in Afghanistan because it was a couple of times we went into valleys, uh, in the, in the green belt where we were really close to enemy forces.

In one case in particular, we're going to.

Heavy contact in the early morning during a clearance.

And so me and my team were kind of pinned down with a serious casualty right up close to enemy forces.

They were trying to out flank us.

We had airstrikes going in and our snipers were shooting beside us.

So it was pretty, pretty intense.

And I, and during that battle, I know there are a lot of, uh, near misses with small arms fire that nearly hit me.

I had a round hit a tree right near my head.

I was lying down, knit next to a mount of dirt, a round hit that mount of dirt right next to my head again.

Um, yeah, it was just like there was a lot of chance, but also we're well trained to avoid fire.

Like if you stay low, if you use cover, you don't overexpose yourself, you won't get killed.

Uh, you know, your chances are much lower.

So we were really well trained in that regard, just to not expose yourself too much.

And, um.

Shoot and don't get shot know.

That's the main, the aim of the game.

Um, so that was one.

And then later on that tour, uh, towards the end there was a, a car in front of me.

We were moving towards a target at night and the car in front of me hit a pretty large roadside bomb.

That was a close one.

I mean, that could have been any car really, like you miss him quite a bit, but no one died in that.

A few people got injured, but no one died.

And then, um.

Towards the end of my first tour were involved in a really heavy battle.

It was almost conventional like I had, there were some Al-Qaeda guys that were in the Valley.

They were really experienced fighters and they brought all their heavy weapons out and they were lobbing mortars and that Addison and mortar had just miss my car during one battle.

That was one.

And then a few years later, I remember I was stuck in um, river Valley and we had heavy machine guns open up on this ridge line.

They were shooting down.

Our team, we were kind of a little bit exposed 'cause the sun had come up and we were just tucking ourselves into folds on the ground to try and get outta the way of this fire.

But luckily we had, uh, aircraft and Apache overhead, so, uh, we managed to get out of it.

So yeah, a few, I mean, I had probably.

Probably lost three or four of my nine lives.

I still got a few left.

Yeah.

I felt like everything from that point on was gonna be a bonus for me.

So I've definitely done, I've been grateful for what I've got.

I've got, I'm lucky to be here.

I was, I thought I wasn't gonna see my 30th birthday for sure.

I thought it was probably gonna be a short line for us.

I think when I was a younger soldier, I was far more.

Wary of it.

I was more worried about being killed.

I think I probably lacked the confidence you get as a more experienced person and a more experienced soldier.

And so initially I was quite worried about it.

But there's also this, uh, naivety.

When you go into certain situations, you don't know how serious they can be.

So sometimes you potentially take risks, you shouldn't, and then you'll learn that, or you see a fatality or you as, as we did in my team, and you realize that it's not a game.

This can be.

Life and death stuff.

It's, it's pretty serious.

And so it took me a few years.

It wasn't until I was about 30, I think that I became much more at peace with, I guess my own mortality.

Um, knowing that if I went out on a job, I could be killed.

But, uh, we were really well trained to get ourselves outta trouble.

We had the tools and the skills and, and the resources to fight and not get in trouble.

So I got a bit more confident as we went on.

As we went on for sure.

If you have had those near misses when you come home, you are, I'm, I was much more appreciative of like my limbs and having, I've still got my body intact.

A lot of people were killed or injured and uh, yeah.

So I got lucky.

I know when I first joined, uh, in the first year I joined, there was a guy in, in our unit that was killed in a vehicle accident training.

I didn't know him, but it was the first time I was like, oh, we can get killed doing this training the next year.

One of my close mates.

It was killed at a helicopter crash off, uh, Fiji, crashed on the boat, went in the water.

A few, uh, two people drowning.

He was one of them.

And, uh, the rest of the team that were in there were my mates that I joined with.

So a lot of people got injured, but one mate in particular die, his name was, uh, Josh Porter.

And so that was kind of the, I'm like, this is a really serious business.

And then the next year I went into my first combat tour in Afghanistan and one of my team leaders who was the most, one of the best soldiers that, that we had in the unit, uh, in the first bit of combat we're in, he was shot and killed in that, in that battle.

So this is our first, that was my first clearance mission.

It was like we were the advanced force element for a, a huge clearance of this valley.

Very traditional role for our unit.

We.

We do, uh, strategic special reconnaissance and, uh, recovery operations and targeting.

But this is a quite a traditional like advanced force operations role.

We were riding behind Emmy lines.

We got caught out in the morning.

It was a battle I was talking about previously, but got in heavy contact.

He was shot in the, um, high, right up high in his chest in the early stage of the battle.

And, uh, we spend the next probably 45 minutes trying to get him out of the line of fire, trying to treat him.

Going onto helicopters.

Uh, American evacuation helicopter sent him back to base and he was, he was declared dead before we even got back to base.

So that was a shock.

That was a real shock for all of us.

And then 2010, another guy in our squadron was killed, uh, by small arms on a mission.

I wasn't there with that.

I was in the ops center, but I was in country with him.

And then, um, at the very end, a guy I knew that had trained me was shot and killed.

I think it was his last, last mission, last tour, last day.

Basically killed, killed in action not far from where my mate was killed in that first battle.

So considering how many battles we were in, we didn't lose that many people, but every one of them, you, you felt, I think this was hard 'cause there was no training on this, there was no experience on it.

In the Australian army, really, most of those people.

That had served and lost soldiers in combat had kind of gone.

So I don't know if, if I was sitting there as a young soldier and I was listening to something like this, I'd say like, don't expect these missions to go smoothly.

No matter how well you do, if you're a team leader or a participant or a platoon leader, you can do everything right and people can still get killed just by chance.

So the important thing is that you.

Don't blame yourself.

It, it happens.

Secondly, if there's something you can learn from it, definitely, definitely learn from it straight away and try and capture that and share it.

But on a, on a human level, uh, just acknowledge the, the stress and the grief on it.

Like, don't try and like, you can put your mask, you know, your commander's mask on and get on with it.

You're gonna have to do that eventually, but don't be afraid to acknowledge.

What you're feeling, because that gives other people permission to feel the same, doesn't make them feel like they're the only idiot that's suffering from grief.

It's totally okay to share that, um, with your team.

The bond between combat veterans is in some ways stronger than family because they've seen you in situations where you're at your best and also at your absolute worst in a lot of cases.

So you share an unspoken bind about.

The hardships you've been through together, and you don't necessarily need to talk about it, but just having that person nearby, you know, they understand you, they understand what you've been through, and therefore they kind of know what you need day to day.

And I think when people leave, having that network of peers around 'em is, is such an important thing that you get in the military.

And when it's when you leave, you don't have it as, uh, it can expose people to carrying that stress in ways that don't.

Normally have to, if they're with their peers.

The fact that when you join these units, the special forces units are leased.

They're very small.

You, you train together at the start.

So you might spend a year and a half just training you.

Sometimes you're really eating shit when you're doing, it's really hard, so you're bonded by the time you finish that, and then you go through these deployments and combat tours and you pick the pieces up back home when you're together.

So they, you might see all that and that's why the, the bonds are so strong.

I think the greatest courage I saw was people that, uh, deployed with us that weren't trained necessarily to the level that we were, but still put themselves in the same situations that we were in.

Like we were highly trained for combat, but relatively speaking, some of the other people that I took with me were not.

So in some cases there were electronic warfare operators in, in one case.

Uh, another case there was a, a, a nurse that flew into combat on a helicopter that we put a body onto extremely dangerous, like extremely dangerous jobs.

And those people did him with distinction.

And in one, in one case that the electronic warfare operators, they were Sean McCarthy, he was, he fought with me in the Troy Valley and the next year he volunteered for Mission Afghanistan was killed by a roadside bomb.

So it's just, I mean, that's pretty brave.

I did lose a colleague to suicide.

It was, I won't name him, but we served together in the second battalion, we're in the boxing team together.

Um, we went to separate special forces units, but later on, after repeated deployments, he, um, eventually killed himself, unfortunately.

And, you know, he was a, he was a really happy go lucky guy.

He was a nice guy.

And I think he just.

Taken on so much, uh, over so many deployments that it became a crushing burden for him.

I think that people that have served in those wars in those roles know that the stress on your body is incredible.

The stress on your, your mind is a lot.

Uh, the emotional baggage you take from it is a lot.

And if you combine all that with some of the, the stresses you can get in domestic life, just back home, it can be a lot.

It can be a cumulative load that is just too much for people.

Um, but there's always treatment for it.

There's always a way out of it.

Um, if anyone who's listening feels that way, like there is treatment you can get to to improve and improve quickly.

Uh, so yeah, I'd encourage anyone to do that.

So I did my first tour.

Afghanistan 2007 we're in some pretty heavy combat sort of fatality in my team.

Um, and after I came back from that tour, which was about six months, I noticed some unusual behaviors.

I wasn't feeling right, couldn't concentrate socially withdrawn, um, bad mood, just it couldn't concentrate.

All those, all those things which are classic markers.

And I remember at one point.

At one point I remember going, ah, something's seriously wrong.

I was basically out with my mates drinking and just.

I broke down into tears for no good reason.

Um, and so the next day I went to an Army neuroscientist and they're like, no, no, all your symptoms are pointing to, um, PTSD and depression.

So I was diagnosed with both of those.

But I was quite worried about it because it can mean you're not fit for service.

Like if you, if you're carrying these issues, you have a top clearance, top secret in my case, uh, if you have mental health issues like that, sometimes you lose your clearance.

Sometimes you can't, uh, you lose the, the operational status that you've worked so hard to gain.

So I was quite right about it when I first got that diagnosis.

Oh, it was definitely caused by.

Just the trauma of seeing a friend killed close combat.

Um, that's definitely what caused it.

And I think it just, you're not fully prepared.

You don't fully understand what it is when you first encounter it, 'cause no one, we're not really trained to understand what the symptoms are.

Um, but looking back.

Like it was a, the effect of it was quite immediate.

I was, I became a bit more withdrawn.

Uh, mood swings were a bit stronger.

And so all those things were kind of telling me that some, something had affected me quite a lot.

I started treatment after that, I did some cognitive behavioral therapy and that helped and it probably got me about 60% better.

And now I pro I kind of kept deploying on about.

At about that level.

And then by the time I'd finished, I was in the essay six years.

By the time I'd done, I think by the time I left, I'd done 10 tours.

Um, of 10 tours in East Timor and songs.

I was quite burned out.

So I kind of had that cumulative stress of, um, PTSD and recovering from that bit of depression, recover from that.

And then you're burned out and trying to, so you're constantly playing catch up and I think.

I think that's just part of being a special force of soldier.

I think good soldier, good athletes, we play, we can play hurt.

I think you don't just stop 'cause you're feeling not quite well.

Like you do have to accept that you're not gonna be playing in a hundred percent.

Um, all the time.

And I think after I finished my career, I spent about two years starting in the US and that's where I got a lot of rest in and that, that helped.

Oh, I think the best fun I had was the.

You do a 18 month reinforcement cycle, enjoy SAS, and it's just back to back, like the funnest courses you can do, like riding motorbikes, parachuting blowing things up, shooting foreign rocket launches.

It's just, uh, you know, it's just a lot of fun survival courses.

Um, yeah, long range patrol courses.

Just really good training with the good people.

So that was unreal.

Oh yeah, there were some.

Some, uh, jokesters, I think our unit attracted people that were just not, were not people that would tow the party line.

So you always had, uh, people that were total rat bags, people that would play tricks on others.

Uh, had a mate that used to brew moonshine when we were overseas and bowl it up and sell us.

So I think some of that's setting people blind, but.

Yeah, a lot of, a lot of fun.

There's a lot of good people.

Uh, it's funny, every time we would meet each other overseas, you're basically talking to the same, uh, you know, we're all split speaking the same language.

Even though we look a bit different, we have funny accents and, you know, we're basically the same people, um, with the same values, and that makes us really interchangeable.

Uh, I think all those kind of top tier units that are special forces all integrate well and train well together.

I think the Americans have a lot more, uh, capability to be honest.

They have a, they have more experience, they have more kind of horsepower behind them when they do these missions.

So the Brits as well, they've got a lot of experience.

We, we have really high capability soldiers, but we don't have as much experience and we don't have as much, uh.

Horsepower behind us.

Oh, I think the best tailoring and fit went to the, uh, the frenches.

They're pretty, uh, yeah, fancy burrows.

They all looked pretty, pretty flash in their uniforms.

So America, you guys developed Cry precision in about, they started making uniforms, I think 2007 roughly, but that totally changed allied uniforms because they became much more functional.

Uh, they fit better and totally more practical.

And so that totally changed how uniforms looked.

So Allied Special Forces had quite precision gear.

Uh, it was sensational.

I'm sure they're still using it, but, um, it was great.

Well, we called you guys SPOs, which is, uh, came from World War II in, uh, I think it's, it's rhyming slang.

It's like from cockney rhyming slang.

We used to call you guys septic tanks, which rhymes with Yanks.

And that was shortened to spo.

So we called Youth SPOs, which not, it's not derogatory, it's just like a, just a, a kind of funny name.

Well, sometimes you, you'd catch people out with, you know, people ask questions about Australia, like, how dangerous is it with snakes and sharks?

And we'd talk about having, you know, pet sharks and kangaroos we'd run around on with saddles on 'em.

And, you know, you might make stupid jokes like that, but nothing, nothing too serious.

So a couple of traditions that.

I have been there forever that I really like.

One is the, we have an Anzac Day, dawn service.

So Australia lost this huge battle in World War I.

Basically, we got pushed off the Turkish Peninsula.

Gallipoli was called, uh, it was a failure for the Allies, but we celebrate the Landing at Gallipoli as, um, Anzac Day.

So we're, I think we're the only country on earth that celebrates a military defeat.

But, uh, you get up in the morning, you have, uh.

Coffee and rum.

And then you go to a door and service and the, they play the, the bugle and, uh, everyone's there and their medal.

So it's a really good day.

That's always good fun.

And then everyone drinks all day.

And, and, uh, so that's a tradition I really like.

Uh, so when I joined I'd, I hoped I would get experience in fighting, uh, in combat.

And I knew that would be a life changing experience.

But you, you, again, you don't really know until you are confronted with it.

And I think, uh, for me, coming away with it gave me a much, a much better appreciation of what I've got, made me appreciate having all my body parts and being intact and living in the, in the society that we live in.

It's such a valuable experience, even though there are hardships and.

Uh, there's marks you carry from the service physically or mentally.

Um, in my case, probably more mentally, it's still, uh, totally overshadowed by the positivity of the experience.

I think 99.9% of it is fantastic.

It's, uh, it builds you and you, you build other people as well.

I think that's so rewarding.

A really good sense of perspective for dealing with everyday life when you do come home.

So you kind of know what's worth worrying about and what's not.

And that's a blessing and a curse.

But I think mostly it's a, it's a blessing and there's always that bit that's extremely hard and has a huge impact on you.

But even that as well, there's, there's positives you can take from that too.

So very lucky to have done it.