In 1987, a booklet of cadet slang entitled ‘LEGOLINGO‘ was released. Compiled by Bill Cowham, the booklet ‘put down on paper the peculiar slang used by cadets at the Australian Defence Force Academy’ (ADFA) in its first two years of operation from 1986-87. In 1993, my old English lecturer Bruce Moore published a book entitled A…
Tag: military
Survival Training
‘You have just survived a crash landing of your aircraft in the jungle’, bellowed the Warrant Officer. It was 3am in the morning, bitterly cold and pitch black. I was one of about 150 officer cadets from the Australian Defence Force Academy, standing on a narrow dirt road in the middle of a thick forest, somewhere…
A Friday Duty Officer Shift Like No Other
On 12 June 1998, just a couple of days before my 24th birthday, I had the misfortune of being the duty officer at the 1st Infantry Battalion at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville. It was a Friday, one of the worst days to be duty officer, because it meant that you couldn’t enjoy the end-of-week frivolity…
The day I kissed the dirt
‘Make sure you eat breakfast in the morning’, the drillie said. If only I had heeded those instructions, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up ‘face planting’ into the parade ground – or ‘baconing’ as it was known in cadet lingo – during the 1992 Graduation Parade at the Australian Defence Force Academy. As first year…