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Jack Smouch

Jack Smouch
Born on the first day of June 1965, Jack grew up in the Northern Territory town of Katherine. He was the only son of Terry Smouch, a long-haul truck driver, and Sarah, who was the local remote area schoolteacher. The other sibling making up the Smouch household was Helen, his older sister.
Jack grew up about as far away from the sea as you could get. Nobody knows why he wanted to join the navy, but from a very early age this is all he ever wanted to do. Any time his father was taking a load anywhere near the ocean, Jack went with him, often without his mother’s knowledge! He would wag school to join his father on journeys that sometimes kept him away for weeks. Terry didn’t mind; he liked the company.
Fortunately for both of them, Sarah worked remote in the Aboriginal community of ‘Yarralin’, which meant she was usually away during the week. On Friday afternoons she would drive the four and a half hours back to Katherine for the weekend, then travel back in on Sunday afternoons.
Mind you, this only happened during the dry season. Over the wet season the roads were impassable, which meant she had to stay in community, away from her family for the duration. The wet season ran from late December until early April, with the only way out being by air on the mail plane. Passenger seats were limited, so most people chose to stay put.
The only other air service was the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) flights when they were requested, but there were no available seats on these.
Terry taught Jack how to shoot from an early age, and they would quite often break the return long-haul journeys with hunting or fishing trips. By the time he was in his teens Jack had started competition rifle shooting, and over time he became a crack shot and made his way up the ladder to first represent his school, and later the Northern Territory in the Nationals.
Helen was five years older than Jack. To put it bluntly, she was nothing but the local “bike”. She was the talk of the school in Katherine; many a tale was told about what Helen and the boys were doing behind the score board. One could say that she literally seduced her way through high school and then onto boarding school in Darwin, where she entertained the lecturers at college. Whether it was the lack of parental influence at home that sent her in this direction wasn’t clear, but Helen really didn’t seem to care; or maybe she’d stopped caring long ago.
Jack could tell that his parents’ marriage was falling apart, but he never raised the subject with either his father or his mother. As for his relationship with his sister? There wasn’t one!
After leaving school Jack found work locally, working for a tour company as a hunting guide, and showing would-be hunters where go to shoot wild pigs, kangaroo and bush turkeys. He put up with the work, even though he found it boring; he’d much rather be the one doing the shooting instead of having to deal with city folk who signed up for an adventure. He did his best to make sure they went home happy, with a pictorial trophy of something that they had shot; but to Jack it was just a job.
Things changed the day young Jack found himself taking out a group of navy divers. The four mates had decided to do something different to celebrate the impending wedding of one of their number; they figured it was a kind of buck’s party with a twist of adventure in celebration of the groom’s looming loss of independent living!
Jack couldn’t get enough of their stories; he loved hearing about the camaraderie, the grog, the girls and the sea! They got to do all of that and be trained to shoot people as well!
All too soon the tour came to an end. Jack hardly waited to wave them goodbye before heading off to Darwin to enlist. Leaving his never-at-home mother, and his whore of a sister didn’t worry him; the only thing he would miss were the truck driving times with Terry.
HMAS Cerberus, situated at Westernport Bay, south of Millburn in the state of Victoria, was the main adult recruit training establishment for the Royal Australian Navy. This was where Jack was to receive his indoctrination into the navy; and it was also where he would decide what branch of the navy he would go into.
After listening to the yarns of the buck’s party, he wanted to be a diver right or wrong! But he soon learned you can’t go straight into the CD (Clearance Diver) branch; you have to serve your apprenticeship, so to speak, in another branch first. In the past, this had to be a seaman branch, but at the time Jack signed up the navy was experimenting with something new. They knew Jack would eventually try out for CD but allowed him to train as a stoker first.
Stokers these days in the RAN are marine technicians; they operate and maintain the ship’s engineering plant including the engine room, generators, pumps, freshwater distilling equipment and also the boat engines. They also look after fuel stowage and transfer and ship’s stability and have equivalent ranks to other branches.
Jack served his first four years well and made it up the ranks to Leading Stoker; serving on DDG’s in the Gulf War. He had a chance to try out for CD in 1989; by then he was twenty-four years of age, and in perfect shape. The fitness test usually sorted the men from the boys; it was the equivalent of trying to get into the SAS or the US Marines, but also having to be able to swim three miles underwater before you started your assault on the enemy.
The selection course (CDAT) was murderous, but Jack loved every minute of it! Even though he woke up every morning on CDAT with his body screaming at him, ‘Why the fuck am I doing this’, he was up to the challenge, and knew it was what he was born to do. He passed with flying colours.
Then came the real test; the formidable thirty-seven-week basic training course that would eventually turn him into a clearance diver; provided he was still alive at the end of it!
He figures this would be a piece of cake when compared to the demands of the advanced clearance diver course and the clearance diving component of the mine warfare and clearance diving officer’s course. Those pour souls had to endure forty-one weeks of pure torture. The demands placed on potential applicants to that category were not seen anywhere else in the Australian Defence Forces, apart from those training for the special forces.
Jack joined CDT 1 based at HMAS Waterhen, and saw service throughout the world, specialising in bomb disposal. At at the pinnacle of his career he proudly served as a sniper with the TAG(E) as part of 2 Commando Regiment.
At some stage during his service Jack became a married man, and the father of two children, but the marriage didn’t last long under the strain of constantly having to move around. The divorce came through just prior to his last deployment to Afghanistan.
He was injured in 2005 whilst in a Black Hawk chopper being transported to Helmand Provence. The Black Hawk had come under ground fire and Jack took a round in the back; that pretty much ended his career right there and then. Being considered totally and permanently incapacitated, Jack was discharged later that year on a full TPI navy pension.
Jack moved to Taswegia, thinking the slower way of life would be a change; he met Dick shortly after the move, while attending a training course Dick was running on saddle building. Over the next couple of years he’d started riding under Dick’s guidance and became a decent rider in time; settling down to his new life on the farm and helping Dick and Patch out whenever they needed a hand.
Jack had no intentions of ever re-marrying, but things happen. He’d first met April, his wife-to-be, while travelling in France following the end of his first marriage. They caught up again while Jack was convalescing after being discharged from hospital after being shot in the back while on deployment in Afghanistan. They kept the conversation going by snail mail and occasional phone calls for a couple of years, and Jack eventually talked April into paying a visit to Taswegia. The spark between them that had flickered into life in France continued to grow, and eventually April packed up her life in France and moved to the secluded island for good. She loved her new life and it didn’t take long for Jack to ask her to be his wife. Much to his relief, she said “Yes!”

Barrett M82A1 heavy and anti-material sniper rifle, in service with the Israel Defense Forces Combat Engineering Corps
רובה צלפים כבד בארט בשירות חיל ההנדסה הקרבית של צה”ל