10/01/2026
Somalia, 1993
Thirty-three years ago this week, Australian soldiers walked into hell with their eyes wide open.
Baidoa, Somalia. The "City of Death." Bodies in the streets. Children with jutting ribs and haunting eyes. Three hundred thousand dead from a famine weaponized by warlords who hijacked food convoys within sight of UN compounds.
Platoon Sergeant Paul von Kurtz went in weighing 75 kilograms. Five months later, he walked out at 52. That's not a typo. That's what happens when you're conducting nine-day patrols deep in bandit country, living out of your pack, es**rting aid convoys to 137 different villages while armed gangs test whether you mean business.
They meant business.
The 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment didn't sit in fortified compounds. They patrolled aggressively. They confiscated weapons. They protected the food distribution points. And when bandits fired on them their first night in Baidoa, the Australians' disciplined response established one simple fact: the aid would get through.
It did. Over 400 convoys. The market reopened. Local police were re-established. And by the end of that brutal tour, von Kurtz recalls something that still sustains him: "The kids were putting a bit more meat back on their bones and you saw them playing."
But this wasn't a sanitized peacekeeping mission. Lance Corporal Shannon McAliney, 22 years old from the Riverina, was killed on patrol in April 1993. Private Graeme "Brownie" Brown watched a water truck strike and kill a six-year-old Somali girl, and couldn't arrest the driver because there was no functioning law. That's moral injury. That's what these men carried home.
The official history calls Somalia "The Limits of Peacekeeping." For the sailors on HMAS Tobruk who shuttled supplies for five months, for the RAAF crews managing one of the world's most dangerous airspaces under sniper fire, for the AFP officers who stayed behind to rebuild a shattered police force until February 1995, it was the limit of everything they had to give.
And when the call came for East Timor in 1999, they were ready. Because they'd already learned the hard way in the dust of Baidoa.
On 10 January 2018, the Australian War Memorial held a ceremony. The Last Post sounded. Some veterans attended. Most Australians didn't notice.
But 1,600 Australians went to a collapsed state and saved tens of thousands of lives. They deserve more than our footnotes.
They deserve our memory.
Lest we forget
Rod Hutchings
Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans Association
