With the Australian federal election campaign in full swing and with Prime Minister Julia Gillard saying she “fully supports” the current 1550-strong deployment to Afghanistan, it’s worth focusing on the families of the brave Diggers who have lost their lives in the Middle East.

Since Australia deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, our nation has lost 17 soldiers – the most recent six in the last two months as the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists increase their deadly campaign of burying improvised explosive devices in the countryside.

I recently spent some time with Victoria Hopkins, the widow of Corporal Mathew Hopkins, for a story in the latest edition of sunday magazine.

Victoria and Mathew Hopkins

I had written about her husband shortly after he was killed in action in March last year, and again when the Chief of Defence, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston released a report into his death.

Victoria Hopkins, who is now 24, is one of the bravest women I’ve met. When her husband was killed, she had been married a mere five weeks and had a five-week-old son, Alex.

Like many wives, husbands, partners, parents and family of the serving members of the Australian Defence Force, the unimaginable possibility had lingered in the back of her mind and she lived with the constant dread of that unwelcomed knock on the door ever since he left home in October 2008.

“Mat told me in his last email that he was going to try to ring me as soon as he got back from patrol. I hadn’t heard from him at all that day, I thought he must have been busy. I was actually up typing an email to him when there was a knock at the door.”

Three officers wearing their full dress uniforms and medals broke the news. “It felt like I had all the energy sucked out of me, like what should have been a happy time in my life – being married and having a baby and being a family – was just suddenly taken away by one bullet. They said it was instant, that there was nothing that could have been done to save Mat.”

Every time another Digger has died, Victoria is reminded of her loss in more ways than one.

It happened most recently when 23-year-old Private Nathan Bewes, who was on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, was killed by an IED on Friday, July 16, 2010, taking the loss of Australian lives to 17.

Mathew Hopkins and his newborn son, Alex

And yet there is no easy way to cope, each new aching tragedy adds to the last, she told me, especially when she thinks that her young son will not grow up with his proud father. These are the small things that the rest of us don’t know about, but should.

“You just learn to move your life around these sort of things. There is no real way of moving on because it’s always going to be there; you just learn to accept that these sort of things can happen.”

Importantly, though, she has beautiful memories of her time with Mat. She smiles remembering the night they stayed up going through the alphabet from A-Z thinking of names for their unborn son (they chose Alexander Robert John, because it’s a strong name and will stand the test of ages); the night they had a “Sounds of Silence” dinner in the desert under Uluru, listening to an Aboriginal guide telling stories about the constellation; how thrilled Mat was to claim the honour of being the first to change their newborn son’s nappy; and how Mat loved her weekly care packages.

“I sent Mat a can of Spam once and he rang me up and told me off,” she says with a laugh. “For Christmas I sent him a gingerbread house which actually remained in tact all the way there, and a triple choc pudding that he ate in one go, and his Top Gear magazine – he loved his Top Gear magazine.”

She laughs at the folly of him taking on patrol a 1kg bag of lollies she sent so he could share them with his mates. His fully-loaded pack already weighed 60kg but Corporal Hopkins would not leave base without his sweet reminder of home and the woman who loved him.

Corporal Hopkins on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan

They wanted two or three kids and decided to settle in Darwin, where her husband hoped to continue his rising Army career.

“Mat and I had discussed that our kids were going to join the defence force if they didn’t have continuous study like TAFE or uni or they didn’t have a job. That was our decision,” she says.

Those dreams for a shared future were shattered by one single bullet.

But, as Victoria says, she has her memories and a treasured wooden box made by the Army carpenters in Afghanistan who deployed with her husband. It contains dozens of letters written by his mates.

“Reading the great things that they said about Mat really opened my eyes up more as to who he really was. There was a side of Mat that I knew but the side of Mat they were talking about was the side I didn’t know yet. They said Mat was a great leader, he was a funny guy, which I knew about, and it just made it very special hearing and reading those things and knowing that Mat meant more to a lot of other people as well as to Alex and me.”

This is Victoria’s story, as it appeared in the most recent edition of the sunday magazine (July 18, 2010) which is inserted in The Sunday Herald Sun in Victoria, and The Sunday Telegraph in NSW.

Lest we forget.

Victoria’s story, as it appeared in sunday magazine on July 18, 2010

Corporal Mathew Hopkins on patrol in Tarin Kowt last year.

The Australian Army has released a new report on the fatal wounding of Corporal Mathew Hopkins who was Killed In Action on March 16 while on patrol in Afghanistan.

The Inquiry Officer found that the gunshot wound from Taliban insurgents was fatal and that “no medical intervention would have saved him”.

Corporal Hopkins was 21, married and a father.

An Army press release distributed earlier today said Hopkins was the first member of Australia’s Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force to be killed since it was created last October. Eleven Australian soldiers have been killed in action in Afghanistan since 2001.

The Army’s 2IC, Lieutenant General David Hurley said that Hopkins’s fellow troops performed brilliantly while under heavy fire north of Tarin Kowt in providing medical assistance to their mate while evacuating him. They relied on their training and followed procedures, and they were also blessed by a bit of luck.

It was chaotic, LtGen Hurley said, which would be under-selling the nightmarish details of the attack.

Having spent months and months with a former trooper from the Special Air Service Regiment I have some idea of the chaos, terror and fear that our troops experience on the battlefield in modern warfare.

I wrote a book (18 Hours, The True Story of an SAS War Hero) about Signalman Martin ‘Jock’ Wallace who won the Medal for Gallantry for his courage and bravery under fire in Operation Anaconda in 2002.

Anaconda was a joint operation led by the Americans from the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), otherwise known as The Screaming Eagles. Jock Wallace was attached to the 10th Mountain division to ensure there were no friendly fires between the US troops and the Aussie SAS patrols doing extremely dangerous work out in the valleys and mountains of the Shahi Kot in southern Afghanistan.

SAS Trooper Jock Wallace under ambush in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan on March 2 2002

The operation, though, was doomed from the start. The intelligence was wrong, and the incoming troops were ambushed by up to 1000 Taliban terrorists who had the higher ground. Jock fought for his life for 18 hours, at one point lying on a live hand grenade with the pin pulled to booby-trap his body and equipment in case he was shot.

He did what Corporal Hopkins’s mates did: showed extraordinary resilience and courage and kept his cool.

Wallace ran into the line of fire several times to rescue wounded Americans, risking his own life to save others. That is the type of action recognised by the prestigious Medal for Gallantry.

The thing that impressed me with Jock was his honesty. I can still hear him saying “any bloke who tells you they aren’t scared when the bullets are flying by and the bombs are raining down is either lying or stupid”. It was, he told me, worse than hell.

Chaos doesn’t begin to describe it. Nor does it begin to describe the horror Corporal Hopkins and his fellow diggers found themselves in.

That they acted with such bravery under fire and kept their cool speaks volumes about their character and training.

The Army’s report into Corporal Hopkins’s death recognises that, as well as properly acknowledging its troopers’ professionalism.

We must not forget them.

Australian special forces troops on patrol in Afghanistan (file pic supplied by Australian Army)

ON the 16^th of March this year, Mathew Hopkins became the 9th Australian soldier killed in action in Afghanistan – a country in which our troops have been operational in the eight years since the mass murder attacks of 9/11.

In the four months since Corporal Hopkins was killed, another two brave young Australian men have died.

Later today  in Canberra, the Vice Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Lieutenant General David Hurley, will announce the findings of an inquiry in to Cpl Hopkins’s death in the Oruzgan Province. This fits with the Army’s new policy of transparency and disclosure. And that’s a good thing.

Yet there is much we already know about Corporal Hopkins, who was serving with the Australian Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force. And it is really good stuff. Stuff about character and heart. Stuff that shouldn’t be lost in the jargon-rich environment of the release today of an “inquiry officer’s report” that is sure to be, as they always are, mired in Orwellian speak designed to camouflage and confuse.

Stuff like the starting point: that Mathew Hopkins joined the Army in 2005 – as soon as he could, effectively; that he was first deployed to Afghanistan in 2006; and that he was involved in the training of his allied soldiers in the Afghan National Army.

There’s more: he was a happy bloke who loved a joke and was known as Hoppy by his mates; he was a leader who led from the front and a good mate who cared for his fellow soldiers; and he was born in New Zealand, came to Australia and was just 21 when he died.

Trooper Hopkins was a proud husband to Victoria and prouder father to newborn son Alexander. He was killed in the Baluchi Valley when Taliban terrorists attacked his unit while on patrol.

At his funeral on March 27 this year, Mat’s mother gave an eloquent eulogy in which she spoke about the qualities – well, some of them – that defined her son.

Worth noting is what she had to say about her child’s career choice: “Mat only ever wanted to join the Army, and when everyone else in year 12 was studying or out partying you would find Mathew reading every book you could read on Army life, or out training so he could be the best possible soldier.”

Who knows what tomorrow will bring from the brass at Army HQ.

Let’s hope it brings some measure of peace to the family of Corporal Mathew Hopkins, a respected and dearly missed member of the 7^th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment.

And let’s hope, beyond hope, that our government ensures his wife, his son, and his family are properly cared for. For life. It’s the least we can do.

Lest we forget.

Private Benjamin Ranaudo, a brave Australian killed in action in Afghanistan

While the top dog of the Australian Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, was announcing a change to the rules of engagement for our troops in Afghanistan yesterday, one of our finest was being sent home from that theatre of war in a coffin.

Private Benjamin Ranaudo began his final journey to Australia after being killed by a bomb on Saturday (July 18) while on operations north of Tarin Kowt.

The 22-year-old Townsville-based soldier was a member of the 1^st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment and, when killed, was part of the 2nd Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force (MRTF-2) in Afghanistan.

Please excuse the jargon: Private Ranaudo was killed by an improvised explosive devise (aka IED) several hours after 4 Section, 2 Platoon occupied a security position during a cordon and search in the Baluchi Valley.

The cordon and search, according to a media release from the ADF, “was designed to disrupt a known IED facilitation and logistics node which had been responsible for attacks on coalition forces”.

Private Ranaudo’s mates from the MRTF-2 yesterday sent him off the only way they knew how: with dignity, honour, common sense, humour and respect.

Seeing the footage on the television last night after earlier having watched Houston promise a more open and transparent reporting system in the defence force was, quite frankly, jarring.

Let’s talk about transparency. And let’s begin with what our soldiers need.

What these men and women on the global front lines of wars, conflicts, insurgencies and peace keeping missions (oh yes, we have soldiers keeping the peace in foreign fields that are as dangerous as battlefields) need to know is that they will be supported – at ANY cost – while ex-country. But equally, perhaps more importantly, once they return home.

No cost is too high to support the soldiers (and I include RAN and RAAF personnel) we send in to harm’s way for whatever purpose, for however long, for whatever reason.

They need to know they will be supported upon return, no matter how wounded, how scarred, how damaged they are. Or not. And they must be supported for life. No matter the cost. It is our duty as a nation; after all, we call on them to defend our country in any circumstance and we don’t limit the parameters.

Members of our defence forces need to know that their families will be properly and fully cared for.

That their wives, husbands and children will be looked after. For life.

That their immediate and on-going financial obligations will be taken care of. No strings attached. Again, for life.

Families are important. They support soldiers when they’re away. They write letters. They make phone calls. They send emails. They Skype. They keep the home fires burning.

And they are there when they return. They help our soldiers pick up the pieces, deal with what they’ve been through, and chart the unknown courses ahead. Sometimes they do nothing, but doing nothing is what’s required: they are just there.

Defence force families are silent, they are hidden from public view, but do what ever they can, whenever they can. And yet, so often, they are forgotten. Collateral damage.

We should not forget them. We must not forget them. Our government has an obligation to ensure we do not overlook them.

Yesterday was a day that could only be described as wretched for Private Ranaudo’s family, yet, with unspeakable dignity they issued this statement as their slain soldier was sent home. It speaks volumes about the character of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, partners and children of those who put their lives on the line for our nation.

It is important that you read this and acknowledge the enormous loss felt by Private Ranaudo’s family. It is our nation’s loss, too.

Here’s what they said:

Firstly we would like to say how proud we are of our son. Benjamin was a proud solider. He believed in what he did. It was more than a job it was his passion; his life.

He was a son, a brother, a comrade, a life partner. His smile could light up the darkest of days. Ben touched the lives of so many with his warm heart. His strong spirit carried his family and friends through his absence and it will carry them through their loss.

Our heart goes out to the injured solider and his family.

We thank the nation for your kind words and condolences. The response has been overwhelming. We would also like to thank the Defence Force for their support in our time of need; they have been both professional and compassionate.

To Benjamin’s comrades, our support is with you. You have lost a friend and a brother. You are all in our hearts.

We send our support and prayers to all the men and women serving here and overseas keeping our country safe.

Please let’s not let Benjamin’s death, and the death of the other 10 soldiers be in vain.

This is selflessness. This is character.

This is why: Lest we forget.

Lest we forget.

MajGen Jim Molan AO, DSC (retired) named Australian Thinker of the Year for 2009

This is good news, but news you won’t read in the papers. Major General Jim Molan AO, DSC (retired), has been named the Australian Thinker of the Year for 2009 by the international School of Thinking.

Molan is the author of Running the War in Iraq, published earlier this year by HarperCollins Australia (which also published my last book, 18 Hours, The True Story of An SAS War Hero about Martin “Jock” Wallace who won the Medal For Gallantry for outstanding bravery and courage under fire in Afghanistan in 2002).

An incredibly bright man who is supremely respected in military and political circles in Australia and abroad, Molan has been awarded the prize in “recognition of his unique work as an Australian general overseeing a total force of 300,000 troops, including 155,000 Americans” in Iraq from 2004.

That was no mean feat. In his compelling book, Molan details the horror of war, the fog of war, the body counts, the controversy and political shenanigans, and the life and death decisions that have to be made with regard to the men and women of the Australian and US defence forces who were under his command. And he is controversial.

He writes about the dangers he faced every day during his year in Iraq, and talks of the roster of brave troops from the highly regarded Australian Special Air Service Regiment who were assigned to perform close personal protection for him on the frontlines.

Molan, himself a helicopter pilot and expert in counter-insurgency, details the bravery of the emerging Iraqi Security Service who conducted four-hour road blocks in Ramadi or on the edge of Sadr City, air assaults from helicopters in the middle of the night on booby-trapped farmhouses full of insurgents and daring raids on houses full of jihadists in hostile cities.

“The passing threats that I personally faced disappear in total insignificance compared to the most boring day in the life of many of these soldiers,” he writes. In fact, he was under attack directly on 15 occasions – by missiles, mortars and rockets, particularly when travelling the lethal 12km trip from the Green Zone to the Baghdad Airport.

Molan's book published earlier this year

Molan joined the Australian Army in 1968 and served in Jakarta, East Timor, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and latterly, the Middle East. He was sent to Iraq in April 2004 by the then Chief of Defence, Peter Cosgrove (who launched my book, 18 Hours in 2006), and went on to work with the top US brass on the historic November 2004 Battle of Fallujah and the inspiring 2005 general elections in Iraq. He also worked intimately with Iraq’s emerging political leaders and military commanders.

Late last year he hit headlines when he said the Rudd Government should increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan and that Australia would be in it for the “long haul”, adding it is a winnable conflict.

Molan was at the top in the Army and lived a fast and full life in uniform. Retired from active service now, not much has changed. He tells me “there is life after the Army”, and it’s a pretty busy one.

He is a popular public speaker who specialises in “Leadership and Management in Extremes”; and is also a regular Opinion page columnist for various newspapers and security journals in Australia and United States. As well, he is about to start training future generals in the Australian Army about “advanced war fighting”. On top of that, he’s working on a 20-acre property outside Canberra which, according to him, is a “worked-out sheep paddock”, and recently completed a chapter in a book opposing a Bill of Rights, which is bound to be provocative.

Major General Jim Molan will be presented with the Australian Thinker of the Year award by the School of Thinking in a ceremony on July 22 in Melbourne. For more on the SOT and previous recipients of the award,which was started in conjunction with the Melbourne Convention Centre, go here.

No doubt, he will wear the honour well.

Meanwhile, I highly recommend Running the War in Iraq to anyone who is interested in what life is like behind-the-scenes of a operations command centre in one of the most controversial and bloody conflicts in contemporary times – as well as what it’s like on the front line.

How good to see Australia’s first serious female contender for the top job, Julia Gillard, visiting the last Australian troops in Iraq just days before the US withdraws from the country. The Deputy PM made a secret trip to the strife-torn nation over the weekend and her appearance was greeted with qualified enthusiasm by Iraqi journalists. Yet one thing stood out, to a report by John Lyons in The Australian. Iraqi TV’s Razzak Aqili said after the news conference: “As Iraqis, we are pleased to see a woman politician.”

Somewhere amid the bloodshed and bad news reports and the on-going controversy about the role of the burqa, that progressive element of Iraqi society has been overlooked. Iraq’s history as a progressive country is well known, and women have long had leading roles there, as I came to discover when writing my second book, “The Promise, An Iraqi Mother’s Desperate Flight to Freedom” (Random House) about Guzin Najim, an Iraqi woman whose husband was murdered by Saddam Hussein. Guzin and her two children were kept under house arrest for three years before they fled across the desert into Jordan with the help of the Mukhabarat (Iraqi secret police). They then made their way to Australia where they now live, among the approximately 12,000 people granted refugee status by the previous Federal government in 2002.

One of the strongest messages that Guzin wanted to convey in the book was how progressive Iraq had been and how women were encouraged to get an education and have professional lives. It was important to her that the western world saw another view of Iraq rather than the ‘behind-the-veil’ stereotypes.

For more on Gillard’s trip to Iraq (photographed here at the Australian Embassy by the ADF) – and to see her sense of humour in action – read John Lyons in The Australian.  www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25704927-601,00.html