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 amputation. A manly tale of a manly man doing manly things. Drain pint of lager, burp, refill, repeat.’
But this time was different. He noticed that he was having trouble urinating: his bladder never felt properly empty, and his stream was very weak. He went to see a doctor, who examined him and then sent him for a blood test, which indicated a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) count of 68.
Sixty-eight? What did that mean? Was it good? Bad? Normal?
‘Put it this way,’ the doctor said. ‘We get concerned if a PSA’s more than two.’
Mary Wilson lives in a spotless Edinburgh apartment with her partner, Judi, and their German Shepherd dog, Max. She brings coffee and biscuits. Max sniffs around me, decides that I pass muster, plonks himself down on my feet and promptly goes to sleep. On the far wall is a framed photo collage of men and women honoured for their services to Scotland. Just above the picture of Mary and Judi is one of Gavin and Scott Hastings, the nearest that Scottish rugby has to royalty. Decent company to be keeping.
Mary was always sporty: she played badminton and swam for Scotland, and represented Edinburgh at tennis. She joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps in 1993 at the age of 29, and had only been in the Army a year when she was mentioned in dispatches for bravery while stationed in Hong Kong: not that ‘bravery’ gives any hint of what she actually did, which was to defend one of her patients against a drunken soldier from the Royal Scots, who beat up Mary so badly she needed a hysterectomy.
From Hong Kong she went back to the garrison at Catterick, north Yorkshire, and from Catterick, she went out to Bosnia. She was in charge of mental health for the entire British contingent out there, a responsibility deemed so onerous that her tour was three months rather than the usual six – ‘It was terrible. There was a lot of alcoholism, a lot of underground drinking. It was the only way most people could cope with what they were being asked to do’ – most infamously, as detailed in the TV series Warriors, being forced by their peacekeeping mandate to stand by and watch as atrocities were perpetrated against civilians they couldn’t help, as even to evacuate them would have been deemed assisting in ethnic cleansing.
How many troops were drinking too much out there?
‘Oh, about 80 per cent at least. Maybe more.’
Mary was on call round the clock. If a squaddie wanted to talk to her at three in the morning, she had to listen, no matter how tired she was or how much stress she was suffering – a considerable amount, unsurprisingly, having to take on all these soldiers’ problems but with no one to really listen to her in turn.
The following year, 2000, she was thrown from her horse and into a wall during a course with the Royal Horse Artillery. Mary broke her cheekbone, two toes in her right foot and ripped her bicep muscle from her right shoulder. She needed two operations, but they didn’t really cure her properly: in particular, she was having trouble holding and firing
