The Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network and Happy New Year. I'm Kelea Akeena, President of the Grassroot Institute. Today is January the 4th, 2020, and the Hawaii State Legislature is back in session. Just today, in testimony said to the House Ways and Means Committee, Governor Ige has proposed breaching the state spending cap in fiscal year 2021 by another $80 million. And this won't be the first time. Since 2012, as you know, we've reported, Hawaii lawmakers have exceeded the state's constitutional spending limit to the tune now of $1.4 billion. Today, I'm delighted to have with me state legislator or former state legislator, Barbara Maramoto. She was a delegate at the 1978 Constitutional Convention that established the spending ceiling. We're going to talk with her and get her perspective on why it was established and what the implications are. Our conversations will explore the dangers of Hawaii's government spending and what should be done about it.  Barbara Maramoto was elected several times to the Hawaii State House of Representatives starting in 1978. She represented Kaimuki, Waili, and Kahala. Maramoto is a Republican and she served as the House Minority Leader from 1984 to 86 and again from 98 to 2000. In a tribute written by then state Senator Sam Sloan, Maramoto is described as a lawmaker, quote, best known for supporting small businesses, children's safety, tax reduction, and fiscal reform. That was Senator Sam Sloan. Well, Barbara, welcome to the program and a happy new year to you. Thank you for joining us today. Happy new year, Kelly. Glad to be with you. Oh, I'm so delighted looking forward to learning from you. You know, in 2012, you decided not to run again for another term and retired from the state legislature. What changes have you seen in our state legislature since the time when you were in office? Since the time I first was in office, that was a long time ago, in 1978. I served for 34 years. So that was, I've seen a lot of changes then and since then. And right now, I'm glad I'm not in the legislature. It's a very tough year for the people who are dealing with the state finances. Indeed. What about bipartisanship? You've seen a reduction in the number of Republicans, a significant one since you were in office. What does that portend for our state? You know, that's a good question. The house is pretty partisan. It's a larger body, so they tend to be more structured. And the Senate being only 25 members, they tend to be more personal. And the same with the city council. So like today, we see Andrea Tupola, Andrea Tupola, who is now a floor leader. So she's serving in the leadership of the city council. The house was pretty much partisan. So it was very difficult for Republicans to get bills heard and to get bills passed. So, you know, and I like to work collegially. So, but less, I think today, it's more polarized than ever. I think following the federal pattern of the state too, is very much polarized between the two parties. And it's a shame to see that. Well, certainly that makes it difficult for the minority party to get things done. But beyond that, you know, whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats who are the dominant party, what are some of the problems of there being primarily one party state? Well, I think you see certain special interests having stronger sway. And I think what gets lost, especially with the lack of Republicans and conservatives, is small business really doesn't have a very strong voice in the legislature. And it's very difficult for businesses to survive in a state with so much paperwork and high taxes, high land costs.  Well, absolutely. Now, before you were a state legislator, you were a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1978. And when I think back to that, when I was not really involved much in adult politics at the time, I was still finishing high school, it was an historic event. There were some long-term changes that were put into motion, not the least of which was the formation of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. People talk about that a lot, but there was much more than that that impacted our state. And it must have been very exciting when I think back to that time, for you, you were not yet in politics, you were not yet a legislator. What motivated you to get involved in the constitutional convention and what was it like back then? Well, you know, when I first had children, people were telling me, you've got to have your child go to a private school, not a public school, private schools are better. And I had gone to school in California and I attended public schools and I went to the University of California. And I thought public school should be as good as private schools. I thought that we could improve public education system here in Hawaii.  So I thought, you know, I really should get involved in the legislature. I was a volunteer during the legislative session. I got hired by Senator Fred Wolffing for several sessions. And then I was hired full-time during session by Senator John Carroll. And after that, I was hired into the Senate Minority Research Office by Senator Pat Psyche at the time. So I really cut my teeth in the legislature and I could see several problems with a heavily one-party state, heavy expenditures on the state part, heavy taxation, not enough attention to small business. So that's why I got involved. That's why I ran for con-con. Do you think it's time for us to have another con-con? People are bringing that topic up all the time. We didn't go with the opportunity most recently but it'll come up again. What would you say are the pros and cons to another con-con? Well, you know, I think there could be another con-con. I introduced a proposal which actually passed in 1978 which says we should put the question up on the ballot every 10 years, shall we have a constitutional convention? And the first two times that it was proposed, given to the electorate, the electorate voted it down. So the people apparently didn't see a big need for a con-con. So if you have one today, it's hard to say what would happen. It's still a heavily one-party state. So I think the outcome might be more liberal rather than business-oriented conservative. Well, back in 1978 at the con-con, you proposed a measure that would work its way into our state constitution and it basically limits the spending that the legislature can do. Can you talk a little bit about that proposal and what motivated you to introduce it back then? Yes, well, excuse me if I get into the weeds a little bit but you know, in 73 we had, we're showing deficits the spending was, revenues were down but our spending was still up. We have a very strong government governor system in Hawaii whereby the governor can restrict bills that have been passed. He doesn't have to release the money to spend, authorize some of the bills. So governor Arayoshi at that time restricted a lot of money. And actually, you know, it was, well, it was a conservative thing to do. There were some repercussions but I again, we started picking up spending as the seventies progressed and I thought there should be some check on how much we could spend. So I ran for the constitution convention and when I got in, I had the first proposal in for to change the constitution to reflect a general fund spending ceiling. And I think most people thought it was a good idea since it did pass. I mean, not without a lot of trouble but it was based on changes in total personal income which is a national figure put out by the Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. So if you take an average of the past three years the increases or decreases in total personal income then our budget should reflect that. We were able to go up a little higher or you have to lower expenditures. So this is the way it passed and it was later flushed out in the vital legislature. Now it makes sense to have an expenditure ceiling and but when you go over it, the legislature determined you have to say which bills of these are taking you over the expenditure ceiling for the general fund. Well, the legislature apparently did not want to do that. So the powers that be put that language into every bill or became boilerplate language. Every single expenditure bill said this measure will take us over the expenditure ceiling. Now that's okay as long as the legislature passes it by two thirds vote but everybody votes for the budget, right? It's like you're afraid to vote against it because somebody will say, oh, you voted against this children's bill or this one that affects senior citizens. So most people vote for the budget and there might be one or two Republicans that decide to vote against it. But we have been exceeding the spending ceiling every budget session. But the good thing is that you're able to know what the ceiling is and how much you're going over it. So that's a good exercise. Well, since 2012, our research shows we have been exceeding the ceiling by a total of $1.4 billion which is quite a bit the rate of state spending per capita has gone up significantly since the time you were in the contact. So what was the difference back then were the delegates and were state legislators more sensitive to overspending than they are today? Has the moon changed from the part of the public and or the part of the legislature? I really can't say too much. I'll give you a definitive answer on that but we had good leadership from the tax foundation headed at that time by Fred Benyon and working for him was local Colapa. You may recall that he was an excellent resource for legislators. And they were advising us that spending was climbing too fast and we must put some checks on it. A lot of people agreed with us and so this is why we were able to enact a spending ceiling. Well, we're going to take a quick break, Barbara and come back and finish up our chat about the state spending cap and get a little more insight into that. My guest today is Barbara Marmoto, former state legislator and we'll be right back on State Tech Hawaii for Hawaii Together. Don't go away. Welcome back to our conversation former state legislator Barbara Marmoto. We're talking about spending cap that was enacted back in the 1978 Constitutional Convention or at least proposed then went on to become state law. Now we've seen since then the state legislators spend far more than it actually brings in and that's put us into a very difficult situation with a lot of debt. But as I returned to Barbara now, Barbara, now it may not be an easy thing to talk about spending caps, especially in light of the impact of the coronavirus and the massive impact it has had on the economy. It looks as though a lot of legislators and our governor are looking to if some way spend far more than we bring in out of the necessity of dealing with the coronavirus impact. What are your thoughts about that kind of spending? You know, we're really in big trouble these days. I think it's nice to have spending caps and control our spending, but in this pandemic atmosphere, everything, all the rules go out the window. I think last session, the legislature actually used bond money for expenses. Correct me if I'm wrong, but did they use it for the health fund, which is a pay-as-you-go insurance for our retirees? Well, unfortunately, the governor has proposed and enacted a plan to stop paying down the unfunded liability portion of our EUTF health plan. And so we're gonna go further into debt on that. There seem to be basically two mechanisms that our government is looking at to deal with the exorbitant costs that we have today. One is to borrow more money and another one is potentially to tax people. And so what you said is truly it's a tough time to talk about the spending limits, but we have to think ahead in terms of the long-term impact. What do you think the long-term impact is of continuing to steep our spending limits? Well, I think we will go into debt and I think furloughs will have to be enacted in one form or another, although I hate to see it enacted on teachers because what happens is our children suffer from lack of education. But everything's out the door. I don't know what's gonna happen, we'll have to borrow. And unfortunately, like the federal government, Hawaii's not able to print its own money. So you tell me how they are gonna solve this problem. They're gonna have to slash and cut and burn and it's gonna be quite painful for many people. Well, as you know, at the Grassley Institute, we've tried to study this problem with best practices across the country. We've come up with the roadmap to prosperity which has 23 proposals as to what could be done. We believe, and I don't really wanna you today show talk so much about it, but we believe that there are alternatives taking on massive debt and taking on and increasing our taxation of our people. But as you mentioned before, there's some pain involved. You talked about furloughs. I'm just thinking there's no easy way in this environment now to cope with the drop in revenues for the state. We hope that the state can enact processes to encourage the business climate and that that would result in more tax revenues. But we're talking about a lot of time. If you were in the legislature today, how would you handle that conflict between the pain that we have to go through now and the pain we may suffer later on in the future? It's a real tough call to make, isn't it? I would have no idea on how to handle it.  So you will have to make cuts. And I don't see any other way to do it. You will borrow up to the hilt and that you must do, but eventually we'll have to pay it back. The last thing I would like to see are tax increases. Well, the governor recently presented his budget adjustment with a billion dollars of quote, unquote, other revenues. We did a little research on that and asked his office about it and they referred us to an interview in which he had said that those other revenues are likely to be tax increases. Where do you think another billion dollars of tax or how do you think another billion dollars of taxation is going to impact our business climate in Hawaii? Well, I think it's really gonna hurt. And I noticed what legislators tend to do rather than pass tax increases, they do away with tax credits. And so I'm afraid some tax credits will be disappearing. And I don't know how many you could get rid of to realize enough funds to keep us existing. It's really terrible, but I'd like to see our businesses come back. I'd like to see the vaccine take hold and so that our small businesses can open up again or small restaurants. We're just dying on the vine here if we don't do a little business, but our tourists come back. I know it's dangerous, but the vaccine is on its way. Cutting costs is something that is truly painful. One of the ways the state might consider cutting costs would be to privatize some of the businesses that the state operates. For example, as you know, over the last five years, we've been able to see some of the state hospital system transition from the public sector to the private sector, especially Mali Memorial Hospital, which is now run by Kaiser. And it's on a pretty good track to being coming profitable. There are other proposals that have been out there like privatizing the management of the airport and so forth. Or even what the judiciary does, it's allowed to hire its janitorial staff from the private sector and they save at least 25%. Do you think this is a direction that could be fruitful in saving some money for the state? I would support privatization of more functions, but you will get a big fight on the part of certain unions. So it's gonna be an interesting battle, but I think the legislature must undertake, consider some functions that should be privatized. Well, you know, that brings up the broader issue of statesmanship when it comes to bringing all parties together. Just as you mentioned earlier, furloughs would be difficult for teachers. We definitely know that that's a sore point for the teacher union. Any thoughts on how we can bring disparate parties such as unions that defend the rights of their union members and others all together so that we can somehow reach a happy medium. At least something that allows our institutions like the schools and other institutions to survive and to do well despite the cuts that have to take place. How do we bring people together at a time like this? Well, over the collective bargaining table, it will take some tough negotiations and there's a lot of bad choices really, but something has to be ironed out just so that we could go forward. So I think it can be done, but it's the art of the deal. So I hope that there's some good negotiators out there. Well, we've been through so much in 2020. It was an unprecedented year in many, many ways. What are your thoughts about 2021? What prospects do you think we have in Hawaii moving forward? Well, as I said, I'm hoping that that vaccine will take hold and we will be able to reopen our ports and our airports and we don't have highways here, but it'd be great to be able to get back to normal. And it's gonna take a while, but we could do it and it will happen, but it's just a lot of people will be suffering meanwhile, lost jobs and a lot of people who are gonna suffer from COVID, but we will come through this eventually. I can't say exactly two years, three years, but it's gonna take a while and I'm looking forward to things being normal again. It'd be wonderful. That's right. They definitely will be a very new normal. Going back to the Constitutional Convention in 78, the 70s were a booming time for our tourist industry. What I recall is the Wai'i-Fa'u and how it brought people from across the planet through beautiful Hawaii and those images of our islands in the Ilikai hotel and so forth were so prominently marketed across the world. But at the same time, I know Governor Ariyoshi and our other government leaders were saying, we've got to diversify our economy because tourism cannot be the only industry, although it will always be a dominant industry. I think that's one of the things we've seen in 2020, the ramifications of not having diversified our economy. What are your thoughts about that discussion of diversifying the Wai'i-Fa'u beyond George? A very good idea. I think the state could assist in that. I'd like to see the Department of Economic Development and Tourism come up with some proposals and really support new businesses and people opening up their lands for development, not necessarily a casino, but I always wanted to see more schools in Hawaii and I thought state could offer inexpensive land or tax exemptions. And we could build schools from different Asian countries. We could attract students from all over Asia. And so I'm looking forward to new ideas like that and new industries, more high tech. And I think we could do it. I mean, a lot of people are working from Hawaii now because they're just using their laptops and going to work. So we should encourage that and come up with some bright ideas. We need some new young people, fresh ideas, and we could do it. That's exciting to hear. Earlier, you alluded to the fact that the two-party system, a more robust balance and competition between the parties, would help business, it would help the business climate and that certainly could help diversification of the economy. Any thoughts as a senior state's person in the Republican Party? Any thoughts on the current condition of the party in Hawaii and the directions it might take in the next few years? Well, I would certainly like to see some new exciting leadership emerge from the Republican caucus. I haven't been too close to them, but I supported Lauren Cheep, Matsumoto, when she first ran. Jean Ward is an old friend. Valo Kimodo is an interesting young person. I have really not met her, but I've supported her. And so I'm expecting to see, oh, Bob McDermott. Yeah, he's always been great. I'm very sad to see Cynthia Thielen retire. She was a cohort spouse with me. And so we've got to encourage them to speak out and come up with some good ideas for us to survive. Well, thank you for spending time with me today at the beginning of the new year. I appreciate your insight into some of our history and the development of our law here in Hawaii. And I wanna thank you for your service, your many years of public service that has continued even after your years in office. Thanks, Barney. Well, very four years was plenty. But I do appreciate what the Grassroot Institute is doing for our state.  Thanks, Kelly. Thanks very much, Barbara. My guest today has been former legislator Barbara Maramoto. And I hope you've enjoyed our time together on Keiwiki Hakina on Hawaii Together on the Think That Hawaii broadcast network. Until next time, aloha.


Yes I get it now it's like a vessel for you know it's it's it comes down to hearts and minds that's all it is it's it's a hearts and minds operation and one rogue soldier can ruin a whole whole operation one soldier doing the wrong thing at the wrong time the wrong place can have a detrimental effect on months and months and months of work and that's that happened. I was gonna say how are you Tim and I'm now I'm gonna say how are you colors? I'm great thanks. Is that the same in the army as it is in the Marines we we call our color sergeants colors and that that's an acceptable thing to call them. No in the army it's called color so they don't put yes on the end it's quite funny because I work with the Marines quite a bit I did three deployments with three command overgate and they were all calling me colors and and when I moved into London they all called me sir working with the guards and then I had an opportunity to go back and work with my regiment and they called me color so it was it was quite bizarre the way I was treated in the different regiments. So Tim you sent me an email to introduce yourself and I was immediately fascinated because I don't think I've ever met anybody with such a vast experience not just looking at the notes over here folks I'm not not being rude to Tim I've got them on my other screen but such a vast amount of military experience and of course the one thing I'm getting asked a lot is Chris what about psychological warfare how does it work people ask me such terms as 77 Brigade and an SRR and this sort of stuff and the truth is I have no idea I mean how how how could I I'm I didn't really know about that sort of thing when I served closest thing I got to an intelligence officer was one of our Lance Corporals in Northern Ireland he ran the he ran our company's intelligence office but I went to him once because I'd found the the drogue chutes the so the little black parachute that some IRA player or maybe their mother had very carefully stitched up it was the parachute off the back of a a drogue bomb so a homemade grenade they'd obviously lobbed it at a military vehicle and this parachute had ripped off and I found it when I was out in patrol so I took it to the intelligent our intelligence guy and I went I found this and he went he threw it on the side and I'm like hang on what about forensics and you know so you probably destroyed all of that yes it's got all his DNA on it now and probably a bit I think even I was careful enough to pick it up with a plastic bag or something so Tim let's just cover the intelligence groundwork so what who are these units what do they do how do they fit into the grand scheme of Allied military and then of course we're going to go back to the beginning and tell your your your story okay to start with 15 UK psychological operations group set up in 1998 in Chick sands the intelligence corps moved to the Chick sands in I think it was about 97 and it was it was a growing place they closed down Ashford which was the Defence Intelligence School there and they opened up at Chick sands after the Americans moved out 15 UK cyber group moved in and started recruiting at that stage it was eight regulars and they had places for 20 reserves and that's where I ended up coming into it I'll come into that in a bit also on Chick sands there was it was the Defence Intelligence and Security School where they chained all the intelligence stuff joint services by the way they had Navy and RF there they all start to move in and do their basic courses also on there was up at building 600 was DHU which is the Defence Intelligence or Defence Human School and then they had the other schools there they had S branch, R branch, I branch which is reconnaissance surveillance and interrogation so all those schools were based in one place in 1998 was it yeah 1998 the there was a big recruiting day in across the country for reserves and the guys from 15 cyber group came to the center that I was in in Bedford I wasn't actually there that particular day but the guys knew what I was up to and they asked me if if I'd like to give them a call so I gave the squadron the leader a call he asked me to come down to Chick sands went across to Chick sands had an interview and I had the sort of the skill set that they were looking for so a few I think took about a month later six weeks later I transferred from the TAU that I was in across to the 15 cyber group so Tim just to clarify what was the unit that you were in I was with 36 signal regimen okay so you were a signalist so you had a bit of background in communications and you've now you've now been recruited by this 15 UK um psychological operations psychological operations and what what's their mandate then what's the what what what do they basically do well the reason they took me on is is I have a a bit of a background in print my wife used to work for printers in Milton Keynes and occasionally I'd go along when I was really busy and I used to mine the machine they had a a single colour press Heidelberg they need to run for 24 hours and I would go in and mine one of the machines which was um which is where I learned the print trade print is one of the medias that psychological operations use I was also a driver I had um my class one having a good license and I could also drive a class one bus or a d plus e is now so I can drive a a coach with a trailer on it so that was one of the reasons that they took me on what's the what's the link then with the printing and the methods that they use is this sort of some dissemination of propaganda or something absolutely so psychological operations basically is planned operations to a commander's mission to affect a change in attitudes of behaviour of a pacific target audience and that's all psychological operations I like to think it is propaganda lies and deception and the way we go about doing that is using all the available media to hand so there's print radio TV mobile phones any way that you can communicate is a way of putting across a message to affect a change in attitude and behaviour of a target audience yes and of course in modern day we're talking social media aren't we in facebook and infiltrating you've always got that obnoxious person that pops up on your facebook and starts calling you names like conspiracy theorist and you're like yeah hang on mate I have no I I you're just a fake profile as far as I'm concerned what who's paying you to put I've seen it done you know I saw it done after the Las Vegas shooting you know these these these catastrophic events that crop up and yes so these people that are against this this program are you saying they're being subjected to a possibly being subjected to a campaign of disinformation or discrediting oh absolutely it goes on all the time against everything pretty much I mean you look at for instance Brexit the the Ramon and the Brexiteer side and they were at each other's slopes all the way through the whole thing I mean the part of the government spent the last four years trying to not come out of Brexit and they just made it really difficult for those that voted for it and a vast amount of 52% of the country voted for it so there was yeah that that that campaign of of not yeah they're very good at putting sound bites in people's ears that they just then repeat as almost like a mantra so yeah for example with the medical issue that we were we mentioned earlier they're very they love to blame it on this rogue doctor that wrote this uh you know illegal paper you know this paper of nonsense and when you look into that story you realize it wasn't some one rogue you know poor guys actually freaking legend the guys but of course Joe Public they hear that oh that was just one doctor and then they just repeat repeat repeat um with the brexit it's very much the um you know blame it on the thick the thick O's in the class system who don't who don't understand the benefits of Europe whereas those of us that that you know we want an independent land wonderful country that England is it's one of the most amazing places to live on the planet why should it not be independent right yeah um though that that kind of view gets made to look like they're all kind of country bunkings or or or or sun sun readers yeah you see a garden readers you see the trends you see them put this info yeah you know and and every everything that they said that there was going to be the doom and gloom just hasn't happened in in fact the opposite the the the amount of trade deals that we're getting at the moment Liz trust is doing a magnificent job of going around the world and and securing these massive massive trade deals with the rest of the world which we should have been doing in the first place yeah it we're getting a little bit off to one side but the notion that the England will fail and no one will want to trade with us just completely goes against what trade is trade will find the way if there's a penny to be made it will find the way it's just the way you know it's but so let's just um before we dig deeper into this so we've got um this was 15 UK psychological group yep or psychological warfare group operations group operations group we've got 77 brigade what what's the difference between these okay 77 brigade was set up um just a few years ago they all it amalgamated media operations and um m m s t which is the military stabilization force so so the engineers and everything that go out looking at projects and they swallowed those three units into one unit and called it 77 brigade because it was all to do with media and people basically so it's just a way of bringing that together under one umbrella to be able to push out the same sort of narrative i'm not sure it it it works particularly well i've not actually seen too much of it because i moved away from the unit um in 2009 so i missed out on that that era of moving into 77 brigade but i have been back there on a couple of occasions for meetings to see people um we we have a an association 15th arc group association that tries to instill some of our knowledge on people today but the nature of the the military is that you get a new broom comes in and and wants to make their own mark and then goes about reinventing the wheel rather than looking back at lessons learnt yes so and we're saying that s r r is more your kind of spy handling or agent handling no dhu dhu and the agent handlers s r r are more um intelligence gatherers okay and how would they gather that intelligence through a network of of of um assets or yeah i think so i'm not 100 percent sure how they actually operate i know that they we've used them in the past for for for getting information that we need on target audiences and and they feed that back in um when we were in afghanistan there was a what they call the x group that bring together all the intelligence and then look at disseminating it across the the work piece as it were and we would feed in questions that we needed answering about a certain target audience that we're looking at and the agent handlers the dhu types will be out on the ground s r r be out on the ground the m s s t will be on the ground so all the different agencies are out there can we um can we just can we just um explain those acronyms acronyms tin because i don't even know what so what does what does s r r actually mean do we know that's a special recu regiment special recu regiment you you did you say d dsu dhu dhu yeah defense human unit um and our base at chicks hands okay and you did mention another one there and i i haven't got the memory to remember what you said the x group x group oh the m s s t m s s t yeah military stabilization security force team yeah and and they're small teams made up of generally engineer type people that work with local authorities in in areas to provide assistance basically to rebuild schools to put in irrigation systems that type of thing and and those guys are really good on the ground they they work out small um forward operating bases small patrol braces and they work in a pacific a small area and they get to know the locals and particularly well and they were a great source for us to tap into in uh in the last stages or in around about 2006 seven in afghanistan we introduced a thing called radio in a box and it was a radio transmitter fm radio transmitter in a box uh that we used to be able to play music on and put messages out on and we used to use the m s s t teams to run these for us they would have their own interpreters and they would be on the ground they were getting ideas of of what people wanted to listen to and they were able to push out messages so that's the way that we operated that and one of my my um my roles particularly in my last deployment in 2008 nine with three commando brigade i spent six months bouncing around helmond from kajaki in the north to garmacere in the south to sanguine um installing the radio in a box network basically training up the guys how to operate it training up the interpreters to be able to be presenters um and we had a really great success down in garmacere um it was it was in the most southern area of helmond that we were operating in and they managed to push out the um the safe zone from from garmacere and we were using the radio in the box to be able to project messages and we i trained these guys up and we went live to air this particular day we two guys are really good as presenters we put together a program they played some music they were putting out some messages they were chatting in the like smashy and nicely they were chatting away to each other uh and we we did that for two hours in the morning and then we have a shutdown during the day because people don't listen to the radio during the day and then they start listening again in there's what we call the drive time show well during the day um we had several people approached the camp with bits of paper asking to have a mention on the radio and play a particular tune that they were listening to on day one we have four notes come in asking so we we put this on the afternoon show so we mentioned these guys on the afternoon show we played their song for them and we put out their bit of news and stuff like that and that afternoon show went out for i think it was about two hours again so the following day we got a stack of um requests coming people just coming up to camp bits of paper radio radio and um so we've been going for about two or three days like this and i said wouldn't it be a good idea if we slipped in a couple of messages from girls because all the messages we've been getting so far were for boys um asking for the tune for their mates and stuff like that so i said what about if we put a couple in for girls so we mentioned a couple of girls names for their friends well that afternoon we had i don't i think it was about 10 or 15 bits of paper come in requests from girls this this had taken off like a skyrocket so we didn't need to do any more other than read these messages out we've got a listenership then so we had a good idea of how many people were actually listening to that particular radio station and then we were very able to to feed in the messages that we wanted to get across about reporting activities of the the Taliban and stuff like that and we were getting little messages back in about this going on in this area and it was we fed it all in to the chain and it was going up and the directors of operations were able to target pacific areas where this illegal activities was going on so that was one of the great successes that we had uh at that time are we to clarify tim are we saying that the this radio station was a was a cover operation and this mess these these kind of messages was a cover operation for actually putting your own messages out there or or for understanding what was going on on it from what you said it sounds like you just started a radio station and i'm wondering what was the what was the point of it it was just to get our message out because in afghanistan is really difficult do you mean like the western message like you know girls can have beards and guys can go to school and all that sort of stuff no not quite um we weren't pushing it that hard it was basically just a way of getting the commander's message out to people on the ground to to i mean to to turn in the Taliban basically ah okay because because because the general population because it was so unsafe for guys to go out on the ground i mean i went out four times i actually had to go out on a patrol four times in 2009 on two of those occasions people died they were blown up and that's that's the difficulty of being able to get out to see the target audience again in 2006 2005 six i was i was again in helmand um one of my main roles at that time was producing radio messages and we came up with a um we were going to do a radio series we're going to call it the afghan archers so it's a bit like the archers so it was about rural people it was about trying to get that message out of reporting stuff and to keep it fairly current we were using what was actually happening on the ground where um for instance we there was a bomb went off in las kagar market and the following week i had uh the the program was about reporting what had gone what people had seen so we had a couple of the guys talking about about what they should do um is it safe to go to the market still because of the the threat of of this this being bombed again so we had a couple of guys coming down in a in a in a truck from garmacia with their goods wondering whether they're going to be able to go home again at the end of the day without being blown up from that message going out that that following week we had several informants um pointing the finger at certain people so that that that's the sort of success that we were having at that time and my greatest greatest coom of the whole afghan archers i managed i've been working on it for a few months and just down the road from las kagar camp there was the the women's centre um we'd we'd been getting in there or the the mss t team had been getting in there for quite some time and i wanted to do uh an episode with women in the home talking about stuff that had been going on and we finally managed to get um i think it was about six women come in and it was a massive little operation i say massive little operation that we we got these six women in a van all covered over bringing them into the into the into las kagar compound the mss t had a quiet room where nobody else had access to we managed to get them in there we sat them down and we we i was in there for about four and a half hours to record a 10 minute episode and we went through this and we recorded this episode and it went out and it we got massive massive feedback from it and i did a second one a couple of weeks later and then unfortunately i left afghanistan my tour was over but one of the women that we had come in she was i think something like a minister but i'd seen her up in kabul in 2002 that the lawyer jerga she got up on the stage and she was able to speak and say about asking for women's rights that the lawyer jerga in in afghanistan and the bravest woman i've ever seen and and and i remembered her from from kabul and she kind of remembers me see seeing me there because i had a brief conversation with her while while she was waiting to go up on the stage so you you actually started like a radio soap opera and it was the afghan version of the arches so i'm guessing it's like there's trouble at at compounds bloody ied's gone off oh i sorry you can probably gather i i detest the bbc so and and even when i was brainwashed enough to listen to the bbc i hated the arches i absolutely i used to think why are you stealing my license for this after just sorry gone off on one there as you can probably tell i don't like the arches but this sounds this sounds amazing you you yeah i mean i i had some the first the first one that we put out we put the script together and and we got it approved and we got it translated and it didn't translate too well so what i decided to do is to get the the interpreters to write the script for me in in past two so these guys they sat down we told them what we wanted to put into it they wrote it transferred it back into english which didn't make too much sense but you could get the gist of what it was doing so i put this script into to be approved because it everything that we put out has to go through an approval process it has to go to the legal department the political department before it gets to the commander and at the the end of the day the commander's the one that says yes or no so i put this script in and within 10 minutes i've got a phone call saying can i go to the commander's office so i offered it down to the commander's office and he said what is this gobble the goop you've written dear so i explained exactly the way that the process worked that that we got we gave the the interpreters the brief they wrote the script they translated it back into english that doesn't make a huge amount of sense but it does in past two so all we're getting them to do is is to say yes to the the concept of what that particular episode was about which they did he got it and that's the way we did it from then on the the church would write the script or we would we would give them a brief they would write the script we get it approved the neighbours record it and that's that's the way we went on and the messages that we were putting out were on the same milk so we got what we wanted to achieve done i'm feeling sorry for these poor afghanis because people believe that when they watch a soap opera here that it's real having this thrust upon having the arches thrust upon them for the first time but um did was there any um big kind of like intelligent successes through through running this this show what what what was you know was there a particular kind of aim was yeah the the main aim of it was to for to get the local people to report on on illegal activities basically okay and yes we were getting some success you have to understand that people that live in in the local area are susceptible to intimidation by the taliban they've been living under their regime for an awful long time and to be seen to be um colluding with the the ally forces would mean almost certain death it was it it's that simple and to get their trust to get them on side to get them to be reporting these guys um was a difficulty and that's that's that's the reality of it and anything that we could do any little snippets of information that we could gain through what we were doing helped yes i get it now it's like a vessel for you know it comes down to hearts and minds that's all it is it's it's a hearts and minds operation and one rogue soldier can ruin a whole whole operation one soldier doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place can have a detrimental effect on months and months and months of work and that's that happened to me i'd be working on a do you mean an allied soldier or yeah yeah yeah um i'll give you a for instance i was working on a project in in macedonia we were doing the task force harvest i don't really remember it it was the weapons collection of the national liberation army of afghan a valbania i've been working on this this this little project for ages and i just got it to the stage where this this particular village were happy to sort of talk to us and stuff like that and then the paris came in and the two months that i'd spent on this village going in the trust and stuff had gone in a day they went in there using their um brute force and ignorance and lost all credibility and unfortunately we lost the intelligence that we were getting out of that village yes you're i'm getting images coming back of belfast when i think in the four and a half months we were on tour there we fired i think three three baton rounds maybe there was a threat to fire more but not a lot i'm i'm talking outside of riots and stuff obviously um the paris joined us for a day they'd fired three baton rounds by the time they and they were still in inside of the camp so they hadn't even left the road outside the camp and three they'd fired three three baton rounds at the uh you know at civilians yeah so yes i i i get it i get it wow okay let's let's if we made him go back and just just talk about your story and and some um um you know anything that um any dits you've got to spin really do you join the royal ang anglion regiment in 1974 what what made you well i started life out as um a c cadet when i was of 12 um i wasn't old enough to join the army cadets at the time um and then when i got to 13 i joined the army cadets and all i wanted to do was was be in the army basically applied to join the army went down to caution did the courses did the selection down there and i got placed as a junior soldier in the royal anglion regiment and on the fifth of august 1974 i turned up at a depot the queens division at baston born barracks and did my training there my first posting was to munster in germany and i was in munster for almost a year before we moved back to jilligan in jilligan we we were barely in jilligan actually we were on exercise or away on operations more than we were in jilligan then we went to berlin berlin at that time was the best posting ever um everybody enjoyed berlin we would ever just over just over two years and in some bright spot decides that um and next posting would be london dairy so we go from the fantastic city of berlin to london dairy so two years in london dairy wasn't a lot of fun it cost me a marriage um and at the end of it i i was posted the battalion was coming back to colchester and i was being posted to sendybridge as a as a driver clark stormen basically now for the army hang gliding center right let we're going to come on to him but i want to hear about um dairy because that's you know not sure the right expression but that's an iconic name in in in the history of the history of the troubles isn't it a very staunch ira stronghold or republican um republican area you said you were there for two years so yeah prior to that in 77 i was in belfast and that was that was a really fruity tour for us it was really busy we a company was in the ballet murphy and at that time in the ballet murphy was a real bed of discontent we couldn't go out on the streets without um without some sort of incident going on i think in in the four months that we were there we had some sort of major type of incident every day in our area we had shootings rocket attacks we had one rocket attack just up from the camp there was a post office fan that used to get escorted by two saracens and on his way up to kelly's corner post office which is just at the top of the road they fired a an rpg out of the ball ring which is which is in the center of the ballet murphy across the springfield road missed the van missed the two saracens but hit this house the the the front wall of this house collapsed bringing down a guy that would have been working on nights he was in his bed and he ended up in his front garden it's quite funny but um he that was one of the major incidents we had lots and lots of riots um going on lots of people did you lose anybody yeah we did we lost a couple of guys on that we had um i think the raw scots came in our area to help us out i mean we were on a chin straps we were working 18 hour days practically every day in and out like yo yo's the only time we got a little bit of downtime was when you were on sangers um these guys went out on a patrol and they were and they got hit by an ied and it killed one of them we're on another patrol for two months all during the training we were in four man bricks and we go out on a patrol of 12 generally my four man brick i was a for two months when we were in training we trained and when we come around the corner and say change we swap sides two months we've been out there we hadn't done that at all i travelled at the front right the section commander was on the front left i had a guy called Chris behind me and he had a guy called Terry behind him we come down out of the Moyard into Spring Hill Avenue and we hadn't gone more i don't know 100 meters down this this road and we were fired upon but just prior to that as we came around the top corner Alan said change so we swap sides he's now on the right and i'm on the left we got opened up on first round went straight through his groin and out his backside the second round went through somebody's kitchen i fired two rounds back my second round took out a stained glass window at the church within within a couple of minutes the the street started to fill up with people i mean there was just a four of us Alan put out the the contact report he said hello one this is one three bravo contact spring hill avenue send starlight i've been shot in the arse out within four minutes the saras and ambulance had turned up and then the first patrols got to us but it was a real real scary scary few minutes with the street filling up with people on the follow-up we we initially followed up the wrong direction because he we thought he got shot in the arse and in fact he got shot in the groin it didn't leave much of a an exit room which was which was quite funny but on the follow-up we found the the weapon and it was an M1 carbine and it was situated between the there's a block of flats a small gap and a church and it was it was just behind the wall there and just behind that there's a field so what we think happened was when my first round went down must have whizzed past his ear because he dropped the weapon yeah M1 carbine can you explain what what rifle is that it's an american made 5.56 i mean is that like that it's it's it's that the same as the armour light is yeah it's a predecessor to the armour light it's the older version of it i guess yeah so they had them in vietnam didn't they yeah yeah yeah got you they also had them in belt fast yeah well we we got sniped at in the ardoin i say snipe because the guy was in a hide they'd taken them they'd taken the occupants of the house hostage earlier in the day they always say taking them hostage i think when the ira when the ira knocks on your door and says we're gonna shoot some brits from your back window you go okay up the stairs do you want a cup of tea right but then they have to say that they were taking hostage right yeah i mean it is the ardoin it's a hardened republican area you don't live in the ardoin unless you support the cause right um and so yeah so the guys up there in the back bedroom snipe to us as we were moving across open ground um hit george uh jock behind me three times and turned out to be a clashnikov firing a 7.62 short short round reason i mentioned it is obviously it's not a not a sniper rifle i guess i guess it's gonna be pretty good that's fired that then yeah it was from quite a distance as well it was at least whoa i say quite a distance we're talking about 100 meters from the firing point to where we were approximately um yeah that was one hell of a day i don't don't think i'll ever be forgetting that one well not till not till the dementia kick the dementia kicks in but uh yeah just you talking about it tim is just bringing back those the memories and and the sensation the feeling of being on patrol in belfast you know that i'd apologise for that well yeah i i for friends listen you've probably heard the story before but jock jock lived fortunately um and i'm all all i can say is belfast was just full on action from start to end i was 19 years old um it's just brilliant probably i'm probably not supposed to say that but it just it was just what one hell of an experience and this is the problem isn't it about war i think the um sebastian is it sebastian junger who wrote the um he made the film um was it restrepo he he he's a journalist famous for writing the book the perfect storm which later became a film and one of his other projects was he embedded with a us marine unit an outpost in afghanistan called restrepo i believe it was cool um i think that was a reference to a marine who'd been shot dead there and at the end of it when he did his ted talk he said you know these guys even though they're in the hell it's dirty it's you know you you you limited drinking water you you wash once a month uh your your friends getting killed left right and centre he said these guys when they get back to civis three all they want to do is go back to war again yeah it's a difficult thing isn't it and he said until we can answer that question why is that what why is that then we're going to keep having probably going to keep having wars um well i think it's just the old boy's own adventure isn't it i mean during the um during the afghan campaign particularly recruiting was really good once we pulled out of afghanistan and we were not on operational tours recruiting is pretty tough at the moment i guess and that's the reason boys want to go to war they want to go and have their own adventures yes yes and it's a whole another you know again i'm not sure the right word but it's a whole another thing again um i think it helped because i was 19 i didn't really i wasn't very politically aware i didn't know any history i i i think we just genuinely believed we were doing the right thing that we were the the cliche good guys and and that meant every time when you hit the street you you just gave a hundred percent right yeah um if i was in uh let's just say other conflicts where the motivation for war was um based on based based on lies if i was if i was mature enough to realize that which i probably wouldn't be if i was a serviceman because you you're quite indoctrinated um i think that would be very that would put a very different angle on it you know running out those gates knowing that i'm actually not doing anything for the security of the planet i'm just making some sociopaths even more powerful than they than they already are um yes should we talk about some sorry tim um yeah london dairy was was when we were there 80 to 82 um so it was a reasonably busy time i mean we was we was based in ebb and barracks um so we was on the the other side of the river from the bogside and all that and it was just day to day patrolling no real big incidents kicked off for anything like that that we had up there it was it was people just getting on i mean they called it the emerald owl for a reason because it bloody rains most of the time it was horrible up there it wasn't my favorite post and i must admit were you was your barracks based in a in a Protestant area if you were there for two years yeah um we're actually lived on the the water side which is the the i guess the north side of the the foil and so the south side was the that the bogside the kregan and all of that and then we used to have straband as well down at the border um but it's a it was it was just general low level stuff most of the time did you did you get to go out of the barracks i mean socializing this kind of thing yeah there was you could you could go up to places like limon vaddy um i was able to place where the dropping were in was um ballamina that so you could move around a little bit but no we generally didn't bother we had a we had for those that lived i lived in nelson drive which was just up from from ebrington barracks so it was it was about half a mile walking to to to work every morning and so so it wasn't too bad um and we used to have a club in the in the in the camp that we could go and have a drink if we wanted to but generally you didn't i mean it was just getting on with life yes um yeah we were going to talk to him won't we about sorry i'm just trying to think if there's this um a question i'm going to kick myself for not asking you afterwards were there any any serious incidents while you were in dairy you said it's quite low level stuff yeah nothing nothing big um london dairy would say it was it was just wasn't i wouldn't say benign you just needed to do your normal checks but we didn't have as far as i can remember any major incidents that went off at that time certainly nothing to write home about um yeah not from from from what it was in belfast in 77 to um london dairy in 82 there was there was there was a bolder difference yes i bet yeah so let's chat about you mentioned hand gliding every time i think of hand gliding i think of that only fools and horses episode where del boy gave it a go and he he he didn't you know he didn't land for 20 miles or something it ended up in a pylon oh one second yeah yep sorry folks we were just on poor poor our volume was paused then yeah so i think i think of del boy yeah i know the guy that actually um did to stunt for him i can't remember his name it's a long time ago so how did you um how did you wangle that number um it was it was it was one of those things that my marriage had broken down um halfway through london dairy tour and this posting just happened to come up the adjutant called me in and said did i want this posting and he said i said yeah so i ended up traveling to wales when in the october of 82 arrived there met a guy called jim taggart who was a captain he was uh brimi he had set this or i was an engineer anyway it set this thing up and they needed a driver clerk stormen to run the accommodation side to do all the sending out the joining instructions and general admin and i kind of fitted the bill hadn't been there there a week and he put me on a course so when i did the the basic hang gliding course took like took to it like a duck to the air um i managed to get out flying as as often as i could and within the year i was on a course to do my instructors course and i became that i need to we need to peel back here a bit i want to know what's it like i mean do you go up with an instance is it like you do a tandem first no no what happens is um you start off on kind of almost level ground we used to go to a a little place called sahawi which is in the just outside of mirtha um to a little slope that we used to use and used to start people on the ground just to get the feel of what the hang glider is and then you slowly move further and further up this slope and until you get your feet off the ground and then you saw coming down from about 100 meters and controlling the glider and and stop at the bottom is there any danger that that a thermal or a gust of wind picks you up and before you know it you're at a thousand feet or something not not in those early stages no you might get hit by a gust and occasionally um but certainly not thermal you don't go out train on those sort of days you're just trying to try and find the the reason to be reason to be still air with the wind in the right sort of direction coming up the hill just to give you that added little bit of lift so you don't have to run quite so hard um and and over the course of the week you're able to move further up the slope get a bit more control over it um and the final the final test to get your pilot's licenses we used to take them to mirtha and throw them off of 900 feet and you fly down in controlled turns down to the landing field and i guess about 90 90 percent people could manage that by the end of the week the hang gliders that we use were highway stubbies which are very controllable they're they're yeah very easy to fly basically wow at what point in this process of learning do you start to negotiate the the thermals to get higher and higher or or have i got that wrong no no um once once you start getting a bit more experience um you we used to go and fly mirtha a lot and that generally just was the wind coming from the west or southwest and you could saw the the the ridge and it's just a big ridge and then during the sort of summer months then you get lots of air coming up which are the thermals and and you can pick a thermal up and you start turning in that and you just try and stay in the the rising air if you follow that out the rising air you go into the sinking air and you go down um so it's yeah it's just gaining experience the more you do it the more experience you gain did you um is it possible to sort of really hit an air a patch of cold air and and and drop down like you can in an in an aeroplane um yes basically i did in spain um we were on a an expede to spain and i took off a a site called asia um up in the the north part of spain and it's a tricky takeoff and it was about 4 000 meters 4 000 meters down to the landing field and i made the area of taking off just before midday and i was just going to have a sled ride down to the to the landing field before coming back up in the late afternoon where the whole valley four just lifts and then you could just cruise around i took off and just got hit by a thermal and it was a big one and i'd gained i don't know somewhere close on about 8 000 feet above the takeoff gosh there was nothing i could actually do to to sort of find a down bit so i was kicked around for a bit and then then finally i found found the stuff going down and it was it was quite a rapid descent but i was up for about an hour and a half trying to get down it was it was fairly scary by the time i got down to the landing field i was freezing i'd only taken off in a t-shirt that is some height i mean when you skydive you generally go from about 12 000 feet and that that is high yeah it was so no jump jump from 15 as well where it was technically supposed to use oxygen at that height but we we we didn't um yeah that is just so frightening yeah it was it was it was it was a moment i think that the the most difficult part was that it was a cold i'd say i just got a t-shirt on and and it was it was getting bloody chilly up there and trying to find enough down every time i'd sort of drop a thousand or a couple of thousand feet i'll get hit by another one coming up and just getting thrown around all over the place and it was yeah it was a challenge that particular flight did they not have vents like you'd have say on a hot air balloon or no it's a wing it is it is a wing it's just i just thought maybe in modern times they factored that in that that you could pull a lever and open a flap and you're going to lose a bit of left but have they not sort of invented one well you can always push the bar out and stall it and what you end up doing then is tail sliding and then the nose will fall through and you recover the drama comes if you do that too close to the ground you don't recover in time stalling was just when you when you do your private pilot's license you've got to stall the plane and it's you've just got to get it to the point all the alarms come on the stall alarms like that and you're literally pulling back on the stick and just as the plane starts to slide you've got to shove the stick forward i think you give it left rudder or something or well it's pretty much the same with the hang glider that's part of the the pilot's license test is that you have to stall it and one incident we had some parrots on the course and they were absolute nightmare absolute nightmare nutters absolute nutters and today they were doing this this guy he took off and then he pushed it straight into almost an immediate stall yeah don't send the parrots up there with with button guns they'd they'd all be shooting each other out the sky wouldn't they oh it was so funny fortunately he bounced off of the the bar and bent it but yeah we didn't give him his license did you have any bad crashes um i had a couple of rough landings um is that the is that the euphemistic way of putting it is it yeah i didn't actually do any real damage um but yeah i got pancaked once flying um a cycle bring cows um i just as i was coming into land i just hit a gust that took me down um and i got slammed into the deck which uh far with that no um generally i i managed to get away from most of the landings tim before come on before we come on and talk about your welfare officer bit and we're going to cover mental health there as well aren't we yeah um let's can we just go back to the intelligence stuff because um we didn't well i wouldn't say we skimmed across it did we we did talk quite in depth but i think people would just be interested to hear some of the um it was quite interesting what we're saying about how they get involved in social media now and all this sort of stuff um is that the 77 brigade or is yeah i'm not quite sure exactly they're the way that they operate but certainly at 15 psyops group um we run a course and and the basic psyops course basically takes you through the whole process from planning a campaign to do the target audience analysis so you look in depth at the target audience that you're trying to influence trying to find their vulnerabilities and their um a way of of influencing them basically then then you're looking at product planning um we use a worksheet called a paw which is a product actual worksheet and on this is is you get all the information you need so you look at what the aim is what the mission wants to achieve look at the target audience analysis looking at the vulnerabilities what influences the target audience um and then what type of product that you want to produce from it from from from all of this whether it's a print product whether it's a radio product whether it's a tv product whether it's something going out on the uh the internet on on a radio on the radio thing was we had a a first in Macedonia um have you seen the old rds radios with which comes up with what station it is yes in the uk static it just tells you what station it is or what's playing at that time in Macedonia you can have it scrolling so we had a message go out and it said NATO the mission continues um so that was just letting the population know that the mission of of gathering up the weapons from the uh the nla was continuing what's that acronym nla yeah um national liberation army okay for Albania basically um and they they wanted the Albanian language recognised in Macedonia which is Greece um so then it then the poll comes down to the um product designers so they'll design a product um whether it be print radio scripts or a tv script and then that go back up for approval and once it's been approved because it has to go for a approval process you have to go through um legal political and the commander once it gets approved then it comes down it gets produced once it's produced then it's it's disseminated and then the the real the hardest part the whole process is measure of effect because you it's so difficult to get to some of the target audiences is trying to get that measure of effect whether the product has worked or not and that's the the real tough bit that's the bit that lots and lots of commanders just don't get when they fire a missile and it explodes some of the bits you can see the effect psychological operations is a long-term weapon system and it is a weapon system but it takes time for that um weapon system to take effect on the target audience and that's the bit that we need to get across to commanders and I think with we we're kind of getting there nowadays there's lots and lots of commanders get it we used to support the um I forget what the the exercise we called it but the staff college there's that they have a planning exercise and the group used to go down there and support that exercise with psyops and products and and briefings and stuff like that and we used to go out on our pre-deployment training the team would go out and they would brief up the commanders on on what we can provide for that brigade that we were attached to and I did JMC the joint maritime course I thought it was just like staff college no joint maritime course they call it joint warrior now I think it's it's like we had three carrier groups on this particular one we had two american and um lusty all coming up either side of the UK and converging on the the hebrides and a big punch up in the hebrides and that was that was actually interesting because um I was I was up there the first week we were going to be in the maritime ops room or just off off the maritime ops room and the second week we were due to go out on ocean to see if we could operate off of ocean well at and that time Macedonia was kicking off and over the weekend where we should have been transferring over to ocean we were recalled down to chicks hands to get ready to deploy to Macedonia for this task force harvest and while we were on task force harvest 9-11 happened and I found myself in in sort of February 2002 in Kabul that was that was scary I was I was flying into Kabul and at that time they do a tactical night landing where they switch off all the lights on the aircraft and they fray around and they stick on the ground I've been fraying around and yeah I'm thinking what the hell have I got myself into this time and we we got we came off the back of this C-130 we would let off in really sort of dim light into this tent um and we were given a brief about all the nasty things that can happen to you there oh and by the way don't step off the harsh standing because they haven't cleared all the mines yet if you know Christ yeah so for me I just it was an opportunity yeah to do something different to to experience different stuff and and do stuff that I was enjoying I mean I had absolutely loved what I was doing in so ups I was I was I was training people up on the the different medias I mean with my print background I was to teaching people how to to put a print product together we were using stuff like Photoshop in design to do that I was working on the radio side teaching people how to to be radio presenters or how to how to teach other people to present because you weren't going to be a presenter yourself you was going to be the producer so you had to teach somebody with a different language to be a presenter and so and how to put a product together how to put a radio show together using radio wheels how to insert your um your ads your messages how to put the news in where to put the music how to break the the programs down so I was doing all of that sort of stuff plus on the we run a pre-deployment package that started six months out from when people were going to deploy so we'll we'll form a team we'll bring the team together and we'll start with a low level stuff the first first few weeks was bringing all their military skills up to date get the weapon handling down to to an acceptable level take them down to the ranges for a week firing all their weapons handling tests so the staff on the pistols and we went from the the nine mil to the clock then the rifle then the minigun then the gpmg and on other occasions we could get hold of her the ulg the underslung grenade launcher thing we had there a couple of times and a couple of times we managed to get out of a couple of fire boats so people had the opportunity to fire some big stuff were you ever worried somebody you were training would turn around and use the weapons on you no not at all we did lose one person um that I trained that really really hit the group really hard and that was I don't you remember Sarah Bryant she was the first female to be killed in Afghanistan I trained her up to go out she was a cracking lass real gutsy did everything that we asked her to do she was she was good on all the weapons she was out she was going to uh on a patrol with some um SAS guys across into Natalie and their convoy was hit with an IED and she was blown up and killed and that that had a big effect on the whole group losing one of her own um yeah that that took the group a long time to get over so talking of mental health then let's um come forward to when you were so did did you say to me on the phone you or you were or you were a welfare officer for the guards yes um when at the end of my deployment in 2009 with three command overgate I learned a while beforehand that I wasn't going to be able to get because my contract was coming up for renewal because I was on a FTRS full commitment um and the group didn't have a post appointment because they've been recruiting heavily off the back of all of our success people wanted to come to the group um so they'd recruited regulars and and some more reserve and there wasn't a a pit for me so I had to start looking around for something else and this particular job came up as a as a unit welfare officer for one of the incremental companies so I came back on R&R went down to London had an interview and got accepted for the post so when I came back my um my contract ended and I started this new contract on the 1st of September in 2009 as a welfare officer for nine making company Grenadier Guards well did you it sounds like you didn't have any experience of that before did you have to go on on training courses to be able to do this or was it more of an admin sort of position um no I when I came back I came back in I think it was about the it was June no May came back from Afghanistan in May and I'd already booked on to the unit welfare officer's course which was a two week course at that time up at Bristol University um so I went up there after my leave I did the the welfare course which was which is just a basic grounding and when I actually started the job I had a a clean sheet of paper they hadn't had a a welfare officer in that particular role um so I had to make up the job as I went along and I took a huge amount of liberties huge amount of liberties can you give us an example um well because I wasn't particularly busy to start with I mean the job got horrendously busy at the end but to start with it was just trying to gain the the guy's trust so they'd come to you and to do that I usually used a few different methods I set up a rugby team for the incremental companies so we we got three companies together and we played rugby on a Wednesday afternoon and I've got a team together all the the company commanders agreed to it uh so we got this team together guys playing rugby on a Wednesday our first real game it took them up to catering where I lived and I used to I was playing for the old cats at the time the old Caithamians so we had a big big day because Caitham used to be a guys depot we we put out big posters and everything like that saying that the guards are returning to Caitham for one day only to play rugby against the old cats and we made a big day of it we got RBL down we've got healthy roads down we've got loads of stalls from from the local rotary clubs and that so we made a big big day of it and we had a game of rugby and then we went into the league into the minor units league in the south and we were playing the engineers and bits of pieces like that and then one day we'd be we've been playing for about a couple of years and we came up against two RRF team Fiji which was our downfall really the following day after this this game nine blokes decided they're going to take themselves down the med centre to get out of the guard or something like that which I do and the next thing I've got a phone call from the garrison commander saying come on my office and he pulled the plug on the rugby team I also got the guys into a few guys that we took to the telemarked championships I'm a big telemarked skier myself and I've been taking part in the telemarked championships have you skied with any marines yes I'm thinking lots lots of mates yeah have you skied with Trig yeah no Trig yeah Frank Franky Franky's a really good mate of mine okay I don't know him Trig and I we joined up we were in the same troop and training together all right yeah he's uh yeah major now yeah do you know the uh the davis brothers no not I'm I'm quite unfamiliar with it all really I it's a bit strange that I never really um I never really thought about the marines for like 20 years of my or probably 15 years of my life I didn't really see marines I I think I met two in that 15 years right and then what happened is Facebook came around and people started to out me as a friend that I was I'd be honest I'd forgotten a lot of them it was like oh my god yeah yeah we worked we were at that draft to get yeah yeah yeah got it got it so I'm adding all these people and a lot of them lived in my home city we're talking yeah a good a good 20 of them and I'm a bit of a I'm anti hard men doing sissy little boy stuff I don't know if you're allowed to use words sissy anymore but I'm going to use it anyway right so I've got these grown big rough tough commanders poking me on Facebook whatever the hell that was spoke supposed to mean poking me right and I know I'm not going to poke you back sorry um so what I did Tim is I I I organized uh like a run ashore right and I start this little Facebook group and I added these 20 blokes I'm at calm fellas let's go for a beer like the old days let's stop poking each other on Facebook right and um when I woke up the next day because I'd left the I'd left the invite open on this group there's like 1700 people in the group so I accidentally started off the first like actual official Royal Marines reunion and it just it so I what I'm trying to say is I got back into the the like military circle that way it was just pure like happenstance really I I I didn't really think about the military that much for like I say I just was off traveling and studying at uni and all this kind of stuff um so when you asked me do I know sons are doing that now I I'm getting back to know in a few more people now but I'm still not I'm not really liking that massively in that circle well I I I only had a short break of about um six years where I was on regular reserve so I kind of didn't fall out of it at all um and I was able to transfer back to being Royal Anglian in 2003 um I'd gone off on a a promotion course down to Blamford as when I was Royal Signals and um at the end of this course on the wash up there was a female warrant officer asked me why I was there taking up a place for somebody from a signals unit when I wasn't in the signals unit well I took umpage of that I thought I've been in the signals I'm I'm now in a an independent unit and they don't want me so I got back after that weekend and I was pretty steaming I thought such the raw signals they don't like me I'll um I run up my regiment headquarters who at that time the regimental secretary was an old soon commander of mine really good mate and I said can I come back to the regiment and he said no bomb talk so we sorted out the paperwork with Glasgow and I transferred back to being a Royal Anglian and that's how I finished up um my career as a a colour sergeant Royal Anglian with the guards when you were the welfare officer did you have to break bereavement news to to to to to people yeah I was um because of the job we were doing we we went and did all the different courses up at the um the chaplain's department um what's the name of the place does the order I can't I can't get a name of the place now come to me in a minute um but I did the visiting officer's course I did the notification officer's course uh a few other courses up at um Amport house which is just down from Andover so I was qualified to do it and then because of the nature of the beast lots of people coming back from sort of 2009 onwards from Afghanistan I went out and did notification officer a couple of times with an officer um we did a rotor in London district and then I did my first visiting officer and that was a there was a little bit of a nightmare because there was a big incident in Afghanistan at the time they involved the guards there was there was a couple of deaths in there and I got one of the guys that was on the team that got shot and I had his family and I picked the family up I took them up to um Selly Oak and walking around the hospital waiting to because the guy was in ICU and all the rest of it waiting for them to go and see the husband the press was all over the place that and and the press were a real pain in the arse pretty bluntly um and it was quite difficult to evade them and we did um we just we just took ourselves off somewhere else until we got the call and she was able to go in to see her husband he survived by the way um but I worked with that family for the best part of I don't know six seven months before I was able to hand him over to their welfare officer where the where the battalion was able to take over but that took me away a lot of time from what my job was looking after the hundred guys that we had in the company so doing doing visiting officer is I think should be a full time role for um reserves um to be able to be stood up to do the job for forever how long it takes to look after a family it's difficult it's tough must take it's tall isn't it it's a bit like being an undertaker or something it's just that that yell or police when you're working on the sex crimes unit it's just that constant yeah dealing with a part of life that you shouldn't really deal with in in that bigger quantity yeah I also had a um had to deal with a death now it's what happened was this this this guy he worked he lived in lived in Windsor and he worked in um anyway he had to ride across Windsor Great Park to get to work and he was a keen cyclist and he had uh one of these all singing all dancing carbon fiber bikes you can lift up your little finger that that goes like stink he had overtaken a couple other cyclists in the park and he was he was he was motoring a squirrel had run out and gone straight into his front wheel and disintegrated the bike when the front wheel disintegrated the bike smashed into a thousand pieces he'd come off for he had a helmet on he knocked himself clean out he was taken off to the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford they couldn't find the family of the squirrel unfortunately but I had his wife and I took her to to the Radcliffe to see him he survived by the way the squirrel didn't he took him a long time to live that down he's a squirrel murderer yeah but him and his wife and I had a really good laugh about it when when when it all started to come out properly and I don't think the regiment's quite so I've gotten over him he hasn't been lifted down yet they didn't um adopt the squirrel as their mascot did they I don't know but they were they were squirrel Clara and fur everywhere hey I tell you what you know those bloody bikes are expensive I should know I got one in the garage yes taken out by a squirrel 10 your own mental health I'm I'm guessing that's taking a bit of a bashing at times how how how's it affected you in your experiences and and how have you over oh how do you deal with them I should say um well fortunately I was I mean 2005 2006 was really really tough years um and I still struggle with November but during some some of the training that we had uh as a welfare officer I've done the mental health first aid course I'm a I was a trim practitioner and coordinator and to that end I mean I can kind of look after myself somewhat and I saw trim in uh in 2000 2008 9 in Afghanistan first hand seeing how it was working actually on the ground what is what is trim 10 trim is trauma incident incident management and it's just a process to take people through to help them cope with what they've seen and I've got a few incidents of seeing this first hand in Afghanistan I was traveling around and I was in one of the fobs they had an incident where a few guys had been killed and I was I was actually stuck there for a few days while I was setting up one of these radios and the trim trim team came in and they were I was sharing a cabin with with one of the guys on the team and we were talking about what he was there doing and and what it was all about and then when I when I got back and started doing welfare stuff I did the trim course to be able to become a coordinator and we had a an incident in London where some guys was out on a run one of the guys actually collapsed outside of Knightsbridge barracks fortunately that just happened to have a paramedic ambulance there at the time but it was quite traumatic for the guys seeing this guy and the way he was he'd gone down and they managed to get him across they got him resuscitated on one thing and another and after this incident the Garrison commander decided it would be a good idea because we I just organised having some training about three or four weeks beforehand there'd be a good opportunity to put this into practice first hand so we called together a team from across the Garrison we got everybody that was involved we did the the planning cycle for it worked out who needed to see what who was going to get just an overall brief who needed a little bit more who needed a one-to-one to talk through their emotions and what they've seen and how to cope with the incident so basically 72 hours after a traumatic instance witnessed you sit people down you talk to them and you tell them that it's normal to feel that the way they're feeling about the incident and then you do a follow-up about four weeks later and then you do a further follow-up three months later and if anything's changed if they're not coping with it particularly well then you can sign post them on to professional help so this is this is just given in that first aid to cope with what they've seen the problem comes on the operational front is where you've got guys in conflict day in day out how do you trim them up for that and I think that's one of the things that a marines do particularly well what do the marines can you give an example of what how the marines would do deal with it so if there's a fatality it's not very pretty then they go they go through that same process but they've been doing it for a lot longer than the army the army is now taking it on board and seeing that it does help people in the long term and this is a long-term assistance it's not it's not a quick fix it's just letting people know that it's okay not to be okay basically yeah and the feelings that they're going through what they've seen yes it's traumatic however it's it's normal to have those emotions it's normal to feel that way and it's okay to talk about it and that's the key to it all is to be able to talk about it without retraumatising someone and that's that's the difficult bit is not retraumatising yes yes this is the issue with talk therapy isn't it is you can just be rehashing the very thing that your mind's trying to distance itself from yeah that's probably a conversation for another day I've had that conversation with a couple of people on the podcast and it's it's fascinating Sean Grant he wrote a book called attack panic and he's got some incredibly forward thinking strategies about how how you how you deal with a new balanced trauma yes I was I was just thinking in a combat situation it must be difficult because you're out on one patrol something absolutely catastrophic can happen you come back to camp you have a sandwich and and you're off out you know you're off out again right there isn't yeah there isn't really that time to be signposting people to to therapists and or support support groups or or even I suppose then you have to talk do you promote talking to your team then and your yeah I think I think in the first incidence is is the guys that were involved in it sit down and just talk about it talk about what happened and and it's just getting people to open up to how they feel in themselves in the whole issue and and to keep it there so so I don't be traumatizing each other but they're helping each other through it and it's normal it's a normal process to go through it's like bereavement bereavement affects different people in different ways but it's all normal feelings that people going through it's all it's not unusual to have those feelings and that's and that's the key message to put across that they're not alone in it and people are there to help yes and that's that's the best best it could do is is is to be there for somebody so that's trim explained but we were talking about your situation Tim weren't we um when did this sort of thing all catch catch you up I think I did the welfare officer job for eight years in total and when you when you're actually in there doing the job it's just fine you're dealing with other people's shit day in day out and and and it varies I mean people come with all sorts of problems I mean London Central Garrison or London District is a strange beast there's no other beast like it in in the military you've got the headquarters element where you've got senior officers um you've got all the top brass for London basically and and it's and then you've got the incremental companies so you've got three companies of foot guards of young lads and and they come straight out of the factory and this is their their phase three training for one of another word this is teaching guards to do what guards do which is uh standing and tuning and looking smart and in the public eye then you've got the the foot guards bands and you've got the the fire foot guards bands that we had and they tend to be slightly more senior soldiers but they come with their own sets of issues they are more you lovey types rather than you're roughly tough to sort of get in here with a bandit types so so they're a little bit more that's the word to use a bit tactile is that a good word yeah they tend to be a little bit more sensitive yeah so so the issues they have tend to be different so so a young lad will come out of training um being in London for the first time got a thousand pound disposable beer tokens and they'll go and do that in a weekend and then he's struggling for the rest of the month um wanting under hungry soldier chits and I'm thinking another um with the bands you might get somebody that's um just going through a breakup of a relationship that they're finding really really tough and then again you get a senior officer that's that's having some problems and I've dealt with a couple of those so again all of this stuff and then you've got housing issues on top of it and I don't know whether you've seen the housing the quality of the housing in in central London you've got a couple of blocks of flats that they don't really spend a huge amount of money on then you've got the accommodation in Wellington Barracks itself um yeah so you've got those issues to deal with people complaining about uh complaints about this that and the other so all that all that day in day out does take an effect and when it stops was I found a problem I I retired I actually retired on the the 5th of April 2018 from from service when I was 60 I'd actually finished back in the um the october I ended up going in hospital but I put the back out and I was in absolute clip with it and I didn't end up going back to work but I guess it started for me catching up slightly I was I was getting emotional I was stupid little things I said watch the telly and there'll be a cartoon and they have a sad ending and I'm sat there in bloody tears thinking what the hell's going on um so thinking back to the the mental health first aid courses that I've done I sort of put it into some sort of perspective I went to see the doctor had a chat with him he referred me on to um the the the local mental health people had a chat with him got it kind of sorted out didn't want to go too much into the military stuff that I've seen I mean there's some real horrors that I've got buried back there just leaving there um but it's this this emotional stuff is it's easy to deal with he's just thinking why you're doing it it's a little um but it's just just all those those little things that that's all pile up and it's just sort of sat down chat the wife and we've got it sorted out and now I'm almost fine yeah did you find you were hitting that hitting hitting hitting the bears or um since well always like the odd g and t and and and rum um we go sailing on the sailor we've got our own boat and you always have a drink when you get in but during lockdown um yeah I've could probably stick away a bottle of rum a week I've now sorted myself out I'll just do on a Thursday we call it Thursday Thursday and occasionally I'll go on Facebook and have a bit of a rant and and go do a little bit of fishing see if I can put a bite on somebody and see if I'll get one or two people bite back normally normally over political issues but that's just for a bit of fun so yeah I try and limit my drinking just to a Thursday and I'll probably drink I know quarter half a bottle of rum yeah that old rum core I wouldn't know anything about that mate yeah I used to drink half a bottle by the time most people were getting out of bed yes you start my writing early and um hit the rum early and it's just easily done the problem is so easily done very easy to justify and it's it's all well and good when you're not seeing the damage it's doing to your internal organs yeah but then all that can just bang hit you in a oneer and suddenly you those organs can stop failing and this is when it becomes problematic because by that time you're so bloody addicted to the rum that you still want to drink the damn stuff yeah it's it's a bit like chocolate she puts chocolate in a cupboard it don't stay in a cupboard yeah oh um um um um yeah a Kit Kat's got more breaking strain than I've got yeah but at least you recognize it I think it this and I mean I'm pretty much the same that's that's the key is to is to realize what's going on with yourself yeah and it's knowing yourself and I'm kind of I'm there now with it so I'm coping great yeah it's and self-talk is really powerful I mean I I don't have alcohol in the house simply because I just bloody go and drink you know there there'll always be a time where it seems appropriate to suddenly go and down that bottle of wine you were given for Christmas at some inappropriate time um so I don't really have alcohol in in in the house if I'm in a situation where it's a it's around and I don't want to drink I just brainwash myself with I think about tomorrow I think I think of that lovely feeling waking up without a hangover you can't beat it it's great and then I think of that waking up with a hangover your day is ruined you feel awful and nothing makes sense anymore you don't get your work done you you're just punishing yourself and that's enough for me now to go oh I won't bother doing that then most of the time I that's where I have a problem because I inherited the ability to drink for my old man and he never had a hangover in the morning and I don't get one it's just I could I could kind of function normally on it I haven't had a fair bit to drink the night before yeah yes I found when I drank regularly I was like that you didn't get a hangover because I suppose technically you were still drunk in the morning and what I'd get instead is like a three o'clock craving where it's just wow I need some more alcohol now then back that's that evening taken care of um I think when you lay off it for the months and months I mean I lay off with the years at a time now and then when you have a drink oh my god then I get a hangover hangover from from hell Tim before before we go please give your podcast a mention and let us know what it's about okay I did a podcast it's called the Tim Hill podcast it's available on all the main platforms so um apple podcast amazon music spotify these are google so it's all out there so you just put it in search for the tim hill podcast the first 24 episodes are all about me it's all about my life what I went through growing up my military history and what I've done with my life the series 2 is a little bit more in detail of some of the other stuff that I've done and my latest series series 3 is all about other people I've gone with ordinary people and their extraordinary stories I've had a submarine commander or a submarine technician who was in charge of all the nuclear warheads out at sea I've got a police officer who was in the met police firearms unit and the way he operated I've got some fascinating people so please if you've got the time have a tune in to the Tim Hill podcast well Tim you've been absolutely excellent thank you so much for coming on the bought the t-shirt podcast I think you're as I said you're our first guest that's enlightened are been able to enlighten us as to what what some of these organizations do and so yes thank you for that maybe we'll do a live show together one Friday and we'll let the subscribers on YouTube ask you pick your brains over a few things but yeah hopefully I haven't given away any state secrets wow wouldn't be the worst thing in in in the world because states run by sociopaths and we we shouldn't be defending them yes okay so colors once again thank you very much just just stay on the line Tim so I can thank you properly to everybody at home hope you find that as fascinating as I have much love to all look after each other if you could like and subscribe and we'll get you more of this great content thank you