Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling
had defeated 1,500 Viet Cong. Darlene wanted to follow in his footsteps and sign up for the Army at 16, the earliest she was allowed, but he put his foot down: the Army, he said, was ‘no place for a lady’.
Two years later, by now old enough to do what she wanted whether or not he agreed, Darlene joined the Navy. It was 1999, and right from the start she loved Navy life – loved it so much, in fact, that she volunteered for extra sea deployments in place of shore service, an attitude greatly appreciated by her senior officers.
It wasn’t until much later that the effect of such a relentless schedule would become clear.
Darlene was assigned to the frigate HMAS Adelaide as a Communications and Information Systems Officer. In the aftermath of 9/11, when all eyes were on Afghanistan, the Adelaide’s concerns were closer to home. In October 2001, 100 nautical miles north of Christmas Island, it intercepted a vessel carrying more than 200 asylum seekers.
This wasn’t the first time a Navy ship had been called into action this way, and the illegal immigrant issue was controversial, especially with a federal election only a month away. ‘We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come,’ said Prime Minister John Howard, and it seemed most Aussies agreed with him.
Politics or not, the Adelaide’s orders were clear: they were to ‘deter and deny’ the vessel entry to Australian territorial waters. A party from the Adelaide boarded the vessel and set it on a course back towards Indonesian waters. The situation grew tense. Some asylum seekers began sabotaging the vessel: 14 men either jumped or were thrown overboard.
In the confusion, there were rumours that the asylum seekers were also deliberately throwing children into the water in order to force the Adelaide to rescue them. The 14 men in the sea were fished out and put back on board the vessel; the ‘children overboard’ rumour turned out to be false. As it was, the vessel subsequently sank while under tow by the Adelaide, and all the asylum seekers ended up on board the frigate anyway.
It was only through a combination of chance and the professionalism of the Adelaide’s crew that no one had been killed. But the incident affected Darlene badly. It wasn’t the only one to do so, nor was it a game-changer in itself, but little by little she was feeling her reserves ebbing away. Every time she came across a life-threatening situation – and there were some, of course there were, this was the Navy – her resistance was stretched thinner and thinner.
By 2004 she had been at sea almost constantly for three years, and she was changing – ‘I was in the Gulf and I was starting to get angry. I wasn’t the same person I was before. I was screaming my head off at people.’ With the rages came the tears: long periods of uncontrollable sobbing, totally disproportionate to anything which could possibly have triggered them.
She needed help. But if she didn’t know what was wrong with her, how could she know who to ask?
In 2016, when the BBC were looking for new Top Gear presenters, Bart Couprie (with tongue firmly lodged in cheek) put himself forward – ‘I’m tall, balding, un-PC, slightly obnoxious, and I own a suitable wardrobe.’
Top Gear could have done much worse. Bart is funny, articulate and a good talker. But the BBC’s loss is the New Zealand Navy’s gain. At 49, he is still serving after 31 years.
He never wanted a normal nine-to-five job, and his father was in the Royal Netherlands Navy (the Dutch heritage is strong: Bart’s full name is Bartus and his twin brother is Boudewijn), so a life at sea was a natural progression.
In those 31 years he’s been stationed in many different places, including the South Pacific, South-East Asia and a 1999 peacekeeping stint in the Solomon Islands, ‘which all went pear-shaped. We were playing a rugby match with the islanders, and not long into the second half we had to abandon it because a bunch of rebel groups were shooting at each other. Which was really annoying because though we were 13–8 down, we were coming back strongly.’ Eighteen years on and he can still remember the score and the match situation.
Only a Kiwi …
In Hawaii, he laid a wreath over the wreck of a New Zealand ship sunk by a Japanese submarine in World War Two. For Bart, history and the traditions of the Navy aren’t adjuncts to his role, they’re an integral part of it – the past inseparable from the present. From his first days in uniform at the local Sea Cadet Corps unit – ‘old, scratchy, ex-Navy surplus, but a uniform’ – he and his colleagues would march to the local cenotaph every 25 April, Anzac Day.
‘During my first parades, I would fidget, look about and try to get a glimpse of what was going on. I noticed all the men – some aged in their seventies, some in their fifties and sixties – who would gather and talk, but at a certain moment their backs would straighten, their shoulders would square up and at the order to step off, they would begin to march. You could almost see the years fall away as they stepped forward, the bodies remembering the drill from so very long ago. There always was a sense that there were many more people marching than I could see. There was always a presence, in the pre-dawn darkness, that the fallen were marching with their old comrades.’
Bart’s first Anzac Day parade was in 1979. He hasn’t missed one since – ‘I’ve paraded at Anzac services in places like Dargaville, Whakatane, Mt Maunganui, Browns Bay, Birkenhead, the Auckland Museum, Apia, and most memorably at the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore.’ And time has marched alongside him. When he started out there were World War One veterans still marching – ‘Now they’re all gone and even the World War Two vets are rarely seen.’
He remembers the medals those old-timers wore – ‘Row upon row of medals. Always worn humbly, almost out of a sense of obligation rather than pride.’ Over the decades he gained his own medals, for his length of service and peacekeeping missions like the one in the Solomon Islands, but he always felt that these baubles paled into insignificance compared to the ones from yesteryear, the ones ‘awarded for a time when it seemed the whole world was aflame, awarded for years of combat, for the struggle for civilisation itself’.
Then one Anzac Day, before dawn, he had an epiphany. They were marching ‘onto the hallowed ground at the Auckland Museum’, and the number of serving personnel exactly matched the number of veterans: ‘We halted on either side of the cenotaph and turned to face each other. They looked at us, we looked at them, and I imagined a mirror between us. In us they saw their past, and in them we saw our heritage. They gave us the traditions and the values that we in the military hold so dear. We gave them the knowledge that the ideals and values they fought and died for lived on in us.’
From that day on Bart saw his medals, the ones he had felt second-rate and undeserved, in a new light. He realised that ‘they represent more than just my service. They represent all the values that I live by, and they are a touchstone to the past they fought in, and the future they left for us.’
But no matter how laudable the values, life in the armed services is often hard to reconcile with maintaining a happy and stable marriage. After more than two decades together, Bart and his wife split up – ‘From a happy house full of family, I ended up in a small townhouse, with the cast-offs of my 22-year marriage strewn around me. Without knowing it, when my life started to unravel, I started setting myself goals. Goal one, keep a relationship with my children, which has been difficult, but rewarding. Goal two, try to have an equal and fair settlement. Goal three, buy a property (not easy in Auckland, but I did it!). As each hurdle came up, I set another goal to overcome it.’
He was about to come across the biggest hurdle of all.
In November 2014, still reeling from the effects of his divorce, Bart’s future in the Navy – and by extension his entire life – was suddenly thrown into jeopardy.
Over the years he, like most men, had taken a ‘perverse pride’ in highlighting the times his body had almost failed him, like ‘the minor leg infection picked up from a rugby field which flared up into a full-blown fever at sea, halfway between Papua New Guinea and Manila. X-rays later showed I was within millimetres of the infection reaching the bone, and that would have led to an