David Harrison’s chest is bedecked with medals. Of service. Of war. Of memories.

So many, so weighty, they pull at the drape of his jacket on those formal occasions, the Anzac and Remembrance Days. Most recently for Vietnam Veteran's Day at Moama RSL. And next Wednesday, Remembrance Day.

But often it’s when those medals are gently put away for safekeeping, for the next time, that he will remember the fallen, and the broken who survived, with whom he served, that the burden becomes even heavier. Harder.

Not every day, but on too many days. Days, and nights, where those memories pull at the darkest recesses of his mind, the recesses where David doesn’t want to go. Is often afraid to go.

Yet which he finds still reach out for him, even on what he thought might be good days, and pull him back in. And down.

They are always there, sometimes subdued, sometimes just fleeting shadows. But never forgotten. Never gone.

That’s David’s burden, and he’s not sure whether he can ever fully escape because the memories, the uncertainty, the insecurity and the pain are now part of him. Of his service. Of his war. Of his life.

David can sit in a crowded room and feel totally alone.

He can sit in his house, in his kitchen, on Echuca’s outskirts, in a quiet, bucolic surround, and tell you, one on one, the story of David Harrison, and in a surprisingly matter of fact way, go through the life choices which led him to the frontline and which have left him fighting personal wars of which he had never dreamt. Choices which in hindsight were so innocent, even so logical, finally, so radical and so permanently lifechanging.

Like something out of the Victorian era, David said his young life’s first crossroads was when he faced a choice between joining the police or the army – or going to jail.

“I think I was a pretty good kid growing up, and yes, as they say in the classics, I started to hang out with the wrong crowd, but I chose to do that,” he said.

“It was my choice to go the way I did, the mistakes I made, but when the Victoria Police eventually caught up with me and then delivered me to my mother's doorstep in handcuffs, the disappointment on her face broke me,” David confessed.

His mother Pauline then told him: “You need to join the army and make something of yourself.”

One of Pauline's greatest fears was David would follow in the footsteps of his late father, which did lead to jail.

“Oddly enough, the movie Stripes had also been a major influence on my army decisions,” David admitted, still laughing at the idea.

“So, in November 1996, at age 19, I joined up, sort of a ratbag on the run, looking for a direction in life.”

It might sound like a cliché, or the script for a B-grade movie, except if it’s true.

Not surprisingly, however, David would find the military and its rules, regulations and insistence on doing everything it's way, just as difficult to manage, and he still had issues with authority.

“I almost didn’t march out. It’s only 12 weeks, but it feels much longer, it really tests your resilience, and I was fighting the system and I was failing.”

In the end David did march out, which he credits to his new mates in his section who refused to let him quit.

“That 12 weeks, it is a total culture change – especially the part where you discover your recruiter may have been playing a little loose with the truth about what you could do once you were in,” David smiled.

“I had wanted to get into Signals as a computer operator, the hi-tech end of the army but just before we marched out, I was told there were no vacancies so I chose artillery, but in the end, I was blindsided again and allocated to the ordinance corps,” he said.

David planned to stay in ordinance for as short a time as possible and transfer to signals in a year or two, until a chance friendship began with a senior Military Police investigator with whom he was playing ADF basketball. David also remembered being distracted by the MPs cruising around Kapooka in their marked vehicles and distinctive red berets.

Understandably David was in no doubt he could not be accepted to the MPs for the same reasons Victoria Police had declined his application. But he was wrong and in 2001 he transferred to the MPs.

Without realising it, David had just made a crucial decision which would change his life trajectory forever.

Surprisingly, he excelled on his MP basic course and had already decided all he wanted to do was join the Special Investigation Branch (SIB), a specialised plainclothes MP unit which operated much the same as civilian police detectives.

In 2004, the movie Stripes would play out in real life. While patrolling Puckapunyal army base one night he pulled over a female driver named Kyile, who just so happened to be the daughter of a former Sergeant David served with before being an MP (and yes, just like the movies, they were a match made in heaven and married in 2011).

In 2005, David achieved his goal by joining the SIB. The investigation and forensic roles and courses he did fascinated him, which included courses with the Australian Federal Police and the senior detectives course with the NSW Police.

In 2010, he was attached to the British Army's Royal Military Police SIB, on Exercise Long Look, an annual, reciprocal short-term military exchange program primarily between the armed forces of Australia, the UK and New Zealand. During that time, he served in the UK, Germany and Cyprus. He also assisted the RMP SIB and UK coroner with autopsies of fallen British soldiers.

On Anzac Day, 2012, David was deployed to Afghanistan as the scenes of crime officer for the Weapons Intelligence Team (WIT). David's role involved outside the wire operations to investigate Australian and US forces fatalities and exploit IED scenes and weapons caches.

The WIT was essentially a battlefield crime scene investigation unit. Its role was exploiting incident sites to collect forensic evidence and analyse IED devices to ensure Australian and coalition forces countermeasures were still effective. The concept of battlefield exploitation has origins dating back to the Vietnam War.

David joked it was essentially CSI: Afghanistan.

And it was a dangerous, and rapidly evolving, theatre in which to function as the Taliban and other insurgents embraced technology as their friend.

“In the end they were using low metal and no metal IEDs, so detection was more difficult and we had to rely on other countermeasures” David explained.

“We would watch the Taliban, they would watch us, and it was an escalating spiral to see if they could kill or we could defeat their devices” he said.

“Any time there was a critical incident involving an IED strike, our team would be deployed.

“We would obtain fingerprints and DNA to identify the bomb makers and whoever placed the devices.”

They also assisted Australian Special Forces elements and US Navy SEALS using cutting-edge technology.

But the data that technology required was purchased in bodies, from IEDs, snipers, suicide bombers and combat – and David and his colleagues confronted it all.

“I never believed in PTSD, but after months and months of dealing with that – I think through that tour our unit processed something like 11,000 pieces of evidence including human remains – I started having some issues in 2013.”

In addition to his campaign and Australian Active Service Medal, David was awarded the Army Combat Badge and the US Army Commendation Medal.

It might not have been a case of self-diagnosis, or it might. It might also have been a case of I’m as tough as I think. Or not. But David, keeping part of his life, and health, secret, did put his hand up. To go back in 2017 for what he hoped would be “a normal tour” and maybe give him some closure.

In some ways, by some standards, it was routine. He dealt with some serious politics and just happened to be on base for the worst attack in years, with up to 40 RPGs and mortars fired into the base.

In 2021 David was posted to RAAF Base Edinburgh in Adelaide, in what would be his final two years in the military, and a sad end to his 26-year military career.

“It was another great posting, with a great team and I loved it, until it all started to go so wrong – and it happened so quickly,” David recalled.

“On June 7, 2022, the Army checked me out.”

He might have been checked out, but all the things he had seen and done were checked out with him, they weren’t going anywhere.

David spent a month in the Jamie Larcombe Centre, a state-of-the-art Veterans' mental health precinct located at the Glenside Health Service Campus in Adelaide.

Today is more than four years since the army waved him off, with no pomp and ceremony, and only now is David feeling as though he can reach out.

At first, he even had trouble choosing where to live, but his family has a deep connection with the river country – his maternal great grandparents were John Robert ‘Jack’ Pearce and Florence ‘Flo’ Pearce, pioneers who brought their three young children, including David's grandmother, Nesta Pearce, to live in a canvas tent in the middle of the Gunbower Island state forest in 1925. Jack was the forestry officer, a blacksmith and farrier.

“My great uncles Roy and Nigel Pearce fought in World War II, in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands and their names are inscribed on the Koondrook War Memorial,” David said, with pride in his voice.

David this year marched on Anzac Day, something he has only done twice, and reached out to the Echuca RSL Sub-branch, about joining an organisation mostly filled with Vietnam Veterans and their very well-known understanding of the traumas of war.

But still, and for how long no-one knows, those visits will be on the good days. Unless they suddenly aren’t.

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Thursday, 23rd December 2027

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