A day to remember
Veterans use Anzac Day to remember the good times and the bad. For two former snipers, it means reliving their months in the East Timor jungle. Kelley Tantau reports.
Richie Peters and Vaughan Scrivener once called the jungle of East Timor home. For months, they spent hour upon hour staring down the viewfinder of a sniper rifle, keeping villagers safe.
Conditions in the mountainous country were harsh; when they weren’t in the forest, they were back at the base, which had very basic conditions.
Twenty years later, they can still smell the lush vegetation, hear the sound of gunfire, feel the rifle in their hands.
Peters, 40, and Scrivener, 44, sit in the clubrooms of the Hamilton Returned Services Association, where they are members.
They are a firefighter and hydraulics engineer respectively, but when they were 22 and 26, they went down the unpredictable path of being army snipers.
They both joined the New Zealand Defence Force in 1994. Side by side yet as strangers, they advanced through the ranks.
After going through Army training and courses, the men became snipers and, for the 1999 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation (Apec) summit, were part of the security for US President Bill Clinton.
A month later, on October 23, they landed in East Timor.
‘‘The first patrol we went on was a presence patrol, so just going out to tell the locals we had arrived,’’ Scrivener said.
‘‘We had to go right up into the mountains and as we went up into the hills, there was no one around.
‘‘For a couple of hours, there was just no one there.
‘‘As we were driving along the road, they started appearing out of the mountains, and when we got into this little village, they were walking down the road behind us. They were really happy. They’d been hiding.’’
That year, 1999, East Timor saw the complete breakdown of law and order.
Anti-independence militants created chaos, looting and burning throughout the poor would-be nation, after a referendum for independence from Indonesia was passed.
The International Force East Timor was an Australian-led taskforce deployed to address the crisis before the arrival of United Nations peacekeepers.
The main assignments were to ensure the return of thousands of displaced Timorese from West Timor, provide border security in the New Zealand sector and helicopter support to the military, and offer training to the East Timor Defence Force.
The pair’s goal as reconnaissance snipers was to secure villages and provide safety to the local people.
‘‘Reconnaissance’s job is to seek out the enemy, gain information, observe them. The role of the sniper is to do the same but to neutralise the enemy,’’ Scrivener said.
‘‘We spent a lot of nights out in the open, out in the wilderness. You do a lot of walking. You carry your equipment, you live out of your pack. When we were in Timor, we were pretty much in the jungle constantly on patrol.
‘‘And if you weren’t on patrol, you’d be back at the bases, which had very basic conditions.’’
The men went months without a shower and for a decent chunk of the time, there were no flush toilets. Instead, waste was burnt.
They could use the satellite phone once a week for seven minutes, hoping
‘‘We spent a lot of nights out in the open, out in the wilderness. You do a lot of walking. You carry your equipment, you live out of your pack. When we were in Timor, we were pretty much in the jungle constantly on patrol.’’ Vaughan Scrivener
there would be decent enough reception to make it through a conversation.
Their first stint ended in June 2000. Their second stint began in May 2001.
‘‘By the time we went back on our second tour, the conditions had changed a lot,’’ Scrivener said.
The second time around, Peters returned with his partner, who worked in the logistics division.
In total, Peters and Scrivener spent roughly 420 days in Timor.
The men and their fellow troops were in control of a town in the southwest called Suai.
That was the location of the Suai Church Massacre on September 6, 1999, two days after the results of the independence referendum were announced.
Realisation hit Scrivener on that first expedition into the mountains that the country was in a worse state than he initially realised.
‘‘It’s like it just happened yesterday, but it’s coming up 20 years,’’ he said.
‘‘The biggest thing in the Army is the camaraderie. You can’t quite compare it to anything else,’’ Peters said.
‘‘You go through all your worst moments with your mates, and your best moments. We don’t really talk about it all until we get together on Anzac Day.’’
Peters’ father spent 21 years in the military, and as an Army brat, he always knew he’d join up, too.
As an avid shooter, he was attracted to the sniper training.
"My father was in the 1st Battalion and he’d been to Vietnam ... so I knew of the Army from the outside looking in,’’ he said.
For Scrivener, it was an evening training exercise in which he spotted a sniper dressed in camouflage. He set his sights on becoming a marksman.
This year, the men say they’ll take a day off work, don their medals, attend the service, then have a few beers and spin some yarns with friends and fellow veterans.
They are both members of the Hamilton RSA and encourage more young veterans, men and women, to get involved.
‘‘[Anzac Day] is all about reflection: what you’ve done, where you’ve been and who has been there before you,’’ Peters said.
‘‘The whole of 1999 is a pretty firm memory in my books.’’
‘‘They are all really good memories,’’ Scrivener adds.
‘‘The Army was a massive part of my life and it’s vastly different to my life now.’’
More than 6000 New Zealand Defence Force personnel were sent to Timor from 1999 to 2002, including a total of six infantry battalions, supported by a frigate and a helicopter squadron.
Thirty Hamilton-based personnel have been deployed to East Timor since 1999.
A Waikato soldier – Private Leonard Manning – was killed in an ambush of the small patrol of which he was a member near the border of East Timor in July 2000.
The NZDF still provides assistance to East Timor through the Mutual Assistance Programme.
‘‘The biggest thing in the Army is the camaraderie. You can’t quite compare it to anything else. You go through all your worst moments with your mates, and your best moments. We don’t really talk about it all until we get together on Anzac Day.’’
Richie Peters