Without A Song

Prologue: Saudization they called it

Prologue: Saudization they called it

Never as a child did I ever want to be a soldier or to work for any armed nation. Yet it's been in the company of these hardy men and women that I've spent most of the years of my life, a veritable band of brothers. To Joe Bloggs, the man in the street or Sally Cornish, the tidy young mum in the hairdressing salon, the television pictures of war can seem a million miles away from their own front door. Like millions of others they see what their governments and the free press want them to see. To the man in the boozer, the mums doing coffee and kids on the street, the pictures are much the same: various combatants in camouflaged uniforms all touting guns. If it were not for the battles our governments throw our armed forces into, what use would they be and where else are you going to hear about life in the expanding corridors of the Middle East? Certainly not from the safe environment our leaders want you to grow up in. Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Iran? Am I being cynical but does everywhere that ends in '-an' have a battle raging? Syria maybe but it's also a Syrian war.

More gunmen, women and kids dying in misplaced wars, suicide bombers, jihadists or radical and impressionable young people who are bringing war to our own streets. We see political leaders offering thanks in hot sandy places, royal princes getting stuck in, press reporters sheltering under fire or hanging out of helicopters. What they don't see are the intangibles, the commitment, the trust that members of our armed forces put in their comrades and their commanders. They don't see the calculated decisions made hundreds of times a day or the strain this sort of guerrilla warfare places on those very same combatants.

Whatever side of the gender divide you place yourself, whenever you take the Queen's shilling, you learn exactly what it takes to look after yourself and your mates. You learn to survive until relieved, you learn whom you can trust unreservedly and without preconditions.

These are the sort of lessons that stay with you for life.

The hardest thing for a service person to do is to join the civilian race. With each treasury cut soldiers, sailors, airmen and reservists, husbands, their wives and their children move from the security of a community with a common cause into a world where chaos thrives. Civilians behave differently, theirs is a different code. Their jargon, patterns and working traits are alien to the serviceman and woman. With courage, perseverance and expectations whole families move forward to embrace their new worlds. Marriages cannot cope and many fall apart because of it. They take their families forward and embrace their new worlds or fall apart at the seams to become ex-husbands and ex-wives because they cannot adjust or adapt. There is no way of determining if or when failure will occur. No magic formula to determine when chaos will take hold. Very often it's that loss of comradeship that drives the ex-serviceperson to despair. Meanwhile, back home their kids make friends easily, their wives find common ground working locally or sharing with parents, only the hunter-gatherer is at a loss. Unable to provide for their families in the same way as they did in service within a regiment or squadron, escape rears its head like an ugly swan. Therefore working indirectly for an old boss in the form of overseas aid, mercenary or government employment, seems the obvious way out. Arabia and the Middle East beckon.

It's only natural that when you put ex-service personnel of many nations together that they'll forge lives full of trust, support and loyalty that can be inspirational, undeniable and almost unbreakable. Group them all together on unfamiliar territory and anything's possible. History shows us that ex-service men and women form bonds of friendship so solid they cannot be broken.

When the opportunity of working in Saudi Arabia was first mooted my wife Sue was all for me taking a post in the sweat pits of Dhahran. I'm sure what Sue really looked forward to, whether it was soaking up the sun on golden beaches or spending our money in Dubai and her time in the United Arab Emirates. That wasn't going to be me and I told her so. I was probably too direct but, as I told her, either I changed my clothes six times a day in summer or I froze my nuts off in winter. Five hundred kilometres south of Jeddah and another one hundred and fifty inland from the Red Sea made sure that the mountain base at Akhbar won. The unspoilt beauty of the place took my breath away on a regular basis. I took pleasure working in those crags that rose to ten thousand feet above sea level. The prevailing environment made living there a challenge. Rather Akhbar than the perspiration of the Persian Gulf was my view, one I was very glad to have made.

RSAF air-bases litter Saudi Arabia in the same way as the Royal Air Force (RAF) stations once did in the United Kingdom. With each role that the RSAF identified FlightPath provided one instructor for every six RSAF engineering graduate students. To those of us who made the transition between western society and working in Arabia calling trainees graduate students sounds wrong but after a RSAF student completes his trade training he's assigned a post where an instructor will teach him his job for life. As far as the specifics are concerned there are none. Students the world over approach education differently. Like every student they are driven by many and varied reasons. In my experience of Saudi Arabia it was the position of one family over another in an ancient hierarchy of families that determined progress, not necessarily how good you are or how much effort you put to your job. In fact some students duly expected to cheat their way to the top or be given promotion over their peers purely because their family name was higher up the tribal pecking order than others. The house of Saud might have its place elsewhere but in Asir they were not at the top of the pecking order.

Thus it was that in November 1995 that I joined an élite team of British and Australian engineers at the King Faisal airbase, at the

farthest eastern edge of Akhbar City. We would be working side-by-side with our Canadian and American cousins, imbibing our raw trainees with the necessary skills to take our jobs from us. Saudization is what they called it but perhaps imbibing is the wrong word to use in an alcohol intolerant free country? I loved life, loved getting stuck into something new and I was totally unprepared for the changes waiting for me out on the precipitous spine of the Asir Mountains, the roof of the world known as The Escarpment. Going to Saudi Arabia would change me more than I thought possible. I loved my friends, my life and my wife. Nothing was ever going to change that.

Could it?

My name is Stephen Bannister. I'm English by birth, I've got Australian citizenship and for most of my life I've taken my pickaxe and my can-do attitude across the globe.