What happened that night was the the dev group component was offset several kilometers away and would walk in once they were more or less in and on the target.

The range element was to land on the target when I say on the target within 100 meters and the target had basically been wrapped up and just as I'm getting on and I just happen to be one of the last on basically scarlet up with

the immediate and heavy machine gun tracers coming over those top of those blades and those arcs like almost gives a lot and from an operator perspective you know there's not a word for it straight away I was just like oh like yeah this is not good.

Welcome to combat story I'm Ryan fugit and I serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and CIA officer over a 15 year career.

I'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite and combat on this show I interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story.

Today we hear the combat story of West Hennessey a retired Australian Special Forces Commando and 20 year veteran who deployed on numerous occasions to Afghanistan Iraq East Timor Somalia just to name a few.

He fought for years at the upper echelons of the Australian Special Operations Community and was on joint operations with US equivalents like DevGrew and critical missions.

He was later recognized with two US bronze star medals one with valor for his efforts in addition to the coveted Australian conspicuous service medal.

Since leaving the military West has gone on to become a sought after brand ambassador public speaker and most importantly veteran advocate in Australia.

He stands out from the crowd with a down to earth honest and truth to power personality and I hope you enjoy his combat story as much as I did.

Age thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with us today.

Thank you really good to be on the line.

So I want to start out for the for the American audience here which is the preponderance of who ends up watching combat story.

I just want to want to get a sense of where you grew up in Australia I understand it's Queensland.

And I want to see if you might be able to ground us a little bit with what as you grew up in Queensland what state in the US are a region of the US does that most resemble just so we can get a frame of reference as we dive into who you are and how you grew up.

Yeah okay cool so a few things on Australia first of all because I've worked a lot in the US and worked for several US companies so as I used to say I didn't give them some perspective and then let's just do rough numbers.

You got 300 million people we got 30 million but we're not that much smaller than you so most of this country is you know quite uninhabited and quite quite remote.

So the part of the country I spent most my time on is in Queensland Australia other than when I served in a unit but I was born in Queensland.

Also to note before I draw down the second part of that question is our states are massive compared to yours so you know if Australia was to have state sizes the size of the US we'd probably be I don't know some around a 30 state country if that makes sense and I noted a lot of your states are quite varying in size but you get my point there so we only have the several states and territories.

So Queensland is a big state in the in the northeast component of Australia so as you're looking at Australia at the top right hand corner.

How would you describe it so we've got no mountain mountains here so it's certainly not like that but you know it's a lot of cattle country it's hot it's dry so it'd probably be a cross between Texas and that be Arizona or something maybe.

You know it's in the far west it's almost desolate and like I said that the primary industry you know would be mining you know a lot of big military bases and and agriculture you know and primarily with that you know cattle and cropping and stuff so I call it God's country.

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