My name’s Squadron Leader Paul Dawe, I’m an Air Traffic Controller in the Royal Australian Air Force. My services consist of eight years in the Army, I was a technician, worked on helicopters in the Army before I discovered Air Traffic Control. I did my officer training at the RAF Base at Point Cooke, my basic course training as an Air Traffic Controller at RAF Base East Sale, and then I spent thirteen, fourteen years as an Air Traffic Controller at various units around the country, including my overseas deployment to Air Traffic Control overseas.
I was deployed with INTERFET into East Timor at the end of 1999, I deployed to Baucau which is east of Dili as part of the Air Base wing there to establish Air Base Services as an Air Hub into the country.
My typical day would consist of nine to ten hours of air traffic control, so, in the tower, actually talking to aircraft in that specific air traffic role we also did roles outside of that so typically four to five hours a day would be perimeter security, manning the front gate in that security role. We also got involved in getting out to the local community on goodwill visits and escort visits for various U.N. and Defence personnel to meetings in and around the local area as well.
We were involved in quite a number of those goodwill activities. We had airfield engineer and domestic engineers with us, so electricians, plumbers… they did a lot of work in the community, fixing up basic services. One of the goodwill activities I was specifically involved in was a visit to a local village, we went up and we had lunch with the chief and had coffee, and then we went to the village and played volleyball against the village volleyball side. And we got beaten rather soundly, but they loved it, there was hundreds of people there, a lot of kids just standing around and even though we got beaten we got the biggest cheers.
You certainly do form an attachment to the people, very friendly, very open… on that goodwill trip when we were playing the volleyball, as we were leaving we were just surrounded by a sea of kids, and if you had a chocolate or a packet of lollies on you, you couldn’t leave. There was one young fella who particularly… he used to come up to the front gate, and we found out over the course of a number of weeks that his parents had been killed by the Indonesians, he didn’t have family so he bounced around between local families. He ended up spending quite a few nights with us on the front gate, we’d feed him rations and he’d sleep in the pit there with us… it was difficult to leave some of those people, yes.
The most satisfying part of the experience was knowing that we were helping, and you could see that in the way the locals reacted to us being there. So it was… that was very satisfying.
The hardest part of my service was being away from my wife, she was in the Air Force herself at the time, so it was sixty odd days away from home. We got to speak rarely so that was quite difficult. In my unit we had a satellite telephone and that was between a hundred and twenty of us plus a few extra army people that were around, the phone was mainly for operational reasons and eventually they established a schedule where they could make welfare calls home. Towards the end we got access to computers and email but was quite late in the piece. The welfare system was very good mail-wise, we got lots of mail and we were able to receive free care packages up to a certain weight limit from home so it was great to get nice coffee and food and things like that in the care packages, but it’s nicer to actually see and talk when you can.