Free Mercenary Mum: My Journey from Young Mother to Baghdad Bodyguard by Neryl Joyce

would only be six flights leaving that day. That meant there would also be long periods of non-action in between. We’d have to ensure that the evacuees kept calm while they waited to be flown out.
    First things first, though. As a chick in the army, one of my priorities when deploying is always to locate a toilet. Men tend to forget about issues like that, as it’s so easy for them to find a wall and just go for it.
    I walked out of our base area and into another part of the airport. Pilfering and wanton destruction had left the airport in pretty bad shape. But the toilets were close by. Yes! My happiness soon turned sour. There was no power at the airport, so the toilet area was completely dark. I turned on my torch to make sure the ablutions block was empty. There was no bloody way I was going to walk on my own into a dark toilet in an unstable country.
    The toilets were empty of people, but full of faeces. It was everywhere. The floor was covered in crap, piss and toilet paper. I gagged as I walked straight out of there and back to the base area. What the hell was I going to do? I was busting! No one else in the detachment really cared about my situation; it was the least of their problems. It was times like this I felt jealous of men.
    I grabbed some toilet paper from my ration pack and walked back to the toilets. I’d just have to squat. I held my breath for as long as I could, and then breathed through my mouth so that I couldn’t smell the foul stench. I found a relatively unspoilt patch of ground and did my thing. I walked out of the toilet, relieved. I smiled wickedly to myself when I saw two female nurses walk into our base. They didn’t know what they were in for.
    We were given approximate times for the RAAF aircraft to land and then transport the evacuees out of the country. I went to get a heads-up from the loadies on what their procedures were for getting civilians onto the aircraft and into their seats. They didn’t know how things were going to run, but said they’d let me know if they heard anything. No one had any concept of what would happen. This was going to be interesting. I couldn’t visualise how we could meet all the security requirements while loading these passengers on board.
    Eventually, I was able to get some information from a RAAF officer. He told me that all the passengers would be brought out onto the tarmac, and it would be my job to guide them onto the plane. After getting them into their seats and showing them how to put their seatbelts on, I was then to check passengers’ tickets. It was better than not having a plan at all, I supposed, but I wondered whether someone should check the evacuees’ tickets before allowing them onto the military aircraft. I aired my concerns but was told that time was of the essence. The pilots did not want to be sitting on the tarmac for very long. They wanted to land, load up and then take off very quickly: a ‘turn and burn’ operation.
    Our first load of passengers was almost due. Would they be scared? Would they act irrationally? I had just had to expect a little bit of everything. There was no known immediate danger to them; we were here to help. This was what the defence force was all about – helping our people. I was where I was supposed to be: here on the front line, giving my all.

A HUGE NUMBER of people waited out on the tarmac: only some of them were the civilians we’d been brought in to evacuate. It was nearing noon and the airport was already crowded. I hoped the approved passengers were carrying their tickets, otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish the authorised evacuees from the would-be stowaways. The officer in charge showed me the type of ticket the approved passengers had to produce once on board.
    Checking the tickets after the passengers were on the plane had sounded okay in theory, but, as I’d suspected, it worked like crap. There’s a reason tickets are checked prior to people getting on an aircraft. The