My name’s Kyra Marr, I am a medic in the Royal Australian Navy. When I first joined the Navy as a medic it was sort of nursing work, working in the Navy wards, looking after our Navy members when they had operations and when they were sick, and as I sort of developed through my career it then moved to being in charge of small sick bay, going to sea… and now I manage the careers of all those junior medics, which is quite funny.
Okay, I actually grew up in Canberra, and if anybody has been to Canberra or grew up in Canberra there’s not a lot to do except become a public servant or work in a shop. I tried working in a shop, didn’t like it. I had a government traineeship as a public servant, found out I was a really bad public servant, and I was walking past a recruitment centre one day and thought ‘There’s my ticket out of Canberra’, and I walked in and the guy asked me ‘what service?’ I said Navy. Told him the reason Navy is that I’m not a very good flier, I’m not very good at running, but at least I can swim if the ship sinks… and they recruited me on the spot. Two months later I was in uniform down in Melbourne. Yeah, it sort of set me on my career and it’s helped me get to where I want to be.
If you’ve got big brothers who pick on you and big brothers that like to tease you a bit you can survive in the military easily, ‘cause that’s what it is, it’s not harassment or bullying if you’ve got a male friend in the military who might be having a bit of a go of you, you give it back, you’re fine. And that’s it, there’s no harassment or bullying I think I have ever faced.
I’ve deployed twice on peacekeeping operational type deployments, the first one was the Solomon Islands in 2000, we went over there on (HMAS) Kanimbla to… for peacekeeping operations and medical support, and the second time was just after September 11. I was deployed on the same ship again, we went to Afghanistan.
I was the leading seaman medic on board and my job, my day-to-day job was to maintain all the medical equipment onboard the ship and to help out with medical evacuations. It turned out that the young medic that we took with us was afraid of helicopters, so it became my sole job on that deployment to be medical evacuations. So every time we had somebody sick on a ship on the coastline we would get deployed with the helicopter to go and retrieve them and bring them back to the ship for treatment. And also part of my job was as the comfort checks team, so when our boarding parties seized a vessel in the Persian Gulf, if they were smuggling people I would have to go on board the often rickety vessel and assess that the people were fit and healthy and they could be transported to the staging area.
Deployments are funny things, they’re generally quite long, I mean the one to Afghanistan was just over six months, and whilst you’re away all you want to do is come home, but the minute you get home you sort of go ‘Actually, that was really good. Can we go back again?’. But I think the best things are the friendships you form, I know it sounds very strange but people that I met on that deployment, through the ship that we were on and other ships… some of them are my best mates today. I’d never met them before and one of them was even my bridesmaid at my wedding, I’d never known her before but we just formed such a strong friendship on that deployment that… it’s probably the friendships that you make .s the best thing… and coming home.
You do, I think when I came back from the Gulf… before I left I was still not dependent upon my family but I sort of turned to me family for advice when I made decisions in my career, if I was going to take a posting to the other side of the country, that sort of thing and I became more self sufficient on that six months because I couldn’t do that, I had to make my own decisions and stand up for myself. So it became very clear when I came home, my family noticed it immediately, that when I… if I was going to do something I just went and did it. I didn’t ask, not ask permission but I didn’t ask them what their opinion was. Not that it didn’t matter it was just, well, it’s my life now and I’ll do what I want to do.