ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A local army reservist who stopped telling other pub-goers he was in the Special Air Service Regiment during the Brereton report war crimes inquiry has now resumed doing so and many in the wider ADF family say that’s a sign that the reputation of the nation’s most elite fighting unit is now on the mend.
Even though the most special forces thing Dale John Bradley has ever done was touch a SR25 when nobody was looking, it didn’t stop him from getting a gutful of piss in him and telling anyone who’d listen that he was once in the SASR.
“I honestly don’t know why I do it when I’m pissed, I think I’m actually mentally not all there sometimes,” he says.
“But now half the town thinks I’m either a war criminal or a pathological liar. I’m going to have to leave one day, I’m sure of it,”
“However, I stopped doing it for a while during the inquiry into so-called war crimes and that investigation some obese yuppies at the ABC and Roy Masters’ extremely nosey brother. The SAS was a bit on the nose then but she’s come good now.”
The 28-year-old went onto explain that his role as an army reservist, or a chocco as regular soldiers call them, is essentially him going for extended bushwalks with other strange blokes while 24-year-old lieutenants named Lachlan and William yell at him for not having his pants tucked into their boots correctly.
“It’s not exactly fast-roping from Blackhawks and shooting insurgents through the brain with a suppressed long-arm in the dead of the night, is it?”
Our reporter shook his head.
“Oh well, could be worse. I once heard a yarn about a bloke who said he was a clearance diver while on the tiles to a bunch of stripey shirt country boys at the Mooloolaba Surf Club – then proceeded to be rescued by lifesavers twenty minutes later in full view of the country boys standing in the smoking section,” he said.
“It’s enough to send a shiver down your spine.”
More to come.
