Rodney MacCormack remembers pushing a supermarket trolley towards the check-out. He stopped when he saw the queue snaking its way around the counter. Abandoning the trolley, he left as quickly as he could.
'Where's the shopping?' his wife Lesley asked when he returned empty-handed. 'What's wrong with you?' 'The crowds,' he said. 'I couldn't handle it.'
For former navy peacekeeper MacCormack, social avoidance was symptomatic of his post traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, along with hypertension, sweating, isolation, substance abuse and horrendous nightmares.
After joining the Royal Australian Navy in 1968, MacCormack's active service brought him into close contact with death and violence. He remembers hauling dead bodies from the shipwrecked MV Noongah off the New South Wales coast in 1969. On Christmas Eve 1974, Cyclone Tracey pelted sandstone bricks around him and ripped the uniform from his body while he manned the Darwin naval telephone exchange.
Along with other peacekeepers, MacCormack has faced a lack of recognition of the traumatising situations peacekeepers can experience and their susceptibility to PTSD. He believes the role of peacekeepers often becomes lost in Australia's commemorative calendar.
In the shadow of Canberra's Australian War Memorial, Australia's first peacekeeping memorial has been completed on ANZAC Parade to address this lack of recognition. This Thursday 14 September will mark 70 years of Australian peacekeeping with a commemorative service and dedication of the memorial by Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove.
Australian peacekeepers are defence force personnel and police deployed by the United Nations to provide security, political and human rights assistance to conflict-ravaged countries transitioning to peace. Up to 60,000 service personnel since 1947 have served throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Missions include Rwanda, Timor-Leste, Persian Gulf and the former Yugoslavia, and non-UN deployments such as the Regional Assistance Mission in the Solomon Islands.
Dr Rosalind Hearder (pictured) worked with the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping and post-Cold War Operations project and has researched and written about PTSD. She believes stereotypical perceptions of war and peace can leave Australians with a misguided understanding of peacekeeping.
"I was picking glass out of my skin for a year. The vehicle was travelling at 125km an hour when it crashed. That's the equivalent impact speed of an explosion causing traumatic brain injury." — Paul Copeland
'It's not the same experience as combat. Instead of fighting an enemy, peacekeepers' role may be to stop former warring groups from fighting each other,' she says. 'That doesn't mean that peacekeeping is easier