They grew up with largely absent fathers who'd been called to serve their country in Afghanistan in the wake of September 11.
While those elite soldiers were engaged in enemy combat, their children lived in fear of Dad being killed or injured.
Now those children are adults, and they're sharing their stories of how Australia's commitment to a distant theatre of war altered their adolescence and shaped who they are today.
My dad always seemed to belong to everyone. When he was in Afghanistan, he was serving his country and when he was home his time was split between everyone in his life.
When I was nine, my class made Christmas decorations for our parents, but my dad had already gone on tour and wouldn't be back until the following year.
I made an angel from Styrofoam and put it in a parcel to send to him. It was already falling to pieces when I packed it and I wasn't sure how interested my dad would be in a Christmas angel that would probably arrive in January, but we taped up the box and posted it.
Almost a year later, after dad had come home, he had to stop into the training office at the barracks to pick something up. My brother and I tagged along.
Canvas has a pungent smell when there's a lot of it in a room. The floor was covered in army green ropes and straps and big plastic trunks. The walls were cluttered in overlapping maps and documents and posters of half-naked tattooed biker chicks.
But behind my dad's desk, my crappy angel was pinned to the wall, wings extended and perfectly preserved.
I thought about my dad showing it off in Afghanistan and how he and his mates must see it every day.
I realised something I wasn't consciously aware of before — my dad loved me.
Trauma revisited
Like my dad, Laura's dad was also in the SAS.
She was born in 2001, two months after me, and we grew up together.
I remember swimming in her pool and then playing with her LeapFrog while she sang and strummed the strings of her Hannah Montana guitar.
Laura always assumed her father had PTSD, but it wasn't until her mother told her the story of one particular incident that she felt she knew for sure.
"He was on his computer one day and mum tapped him on the shoulder, and he didn't realise she was in the room," she says.
Laura said he quickly sprung up and grabbed her mum.
"He was like 'You can't do that, you actually can't sneak up on me and not make noise because that's what will happen'. And I was like, oh, so he definitely has PTSD."
Laura believes the stoicism of army culture ingrained in her dad prevents him from seeking a diagnosis or treatment for mental health issues.
"My dad won't ever go to a psychologist or get diagnosed or anything like that. In his mind he doesn't have it [PTSD]," she says.
Wearing the pain
SAS, or Special Air Service Regiment, soldiers are chosen based on physical fitness, intelligence, mental toughness, teamwork and leadership skills.
The selection process is famously rigorous. They are required to undergo training to withstand torture.
It often including beatings, sleep deprivation and light deprivation.
They are trained to conceal their emotions and – as journalist Chris Masters puts it in his book No Front Line – "conditioned to wear the pain".
Laura thinks this process conditioned her dad to be emotionally closed off from her family and caused problems in his adjusting to family life.
"These people are literally trained to be sociopaths," she says.
"Like they're quite literally trained to not feel a single f***ing thing in the world because they can't, because emotion will get you killed."
Family struggles
My friend Kate can relate to the strain her father's deployment had on her family, but unlikeme, Kate can remember a time before her dad was in the SAS, when they were extremely close.
Her dad used to come into her room at night and tuck her into bed. He would tell her stories and wait until she fell asleep.
But when his deployments began when she was nine, things changed.
"I think for a girl that's different. You want that more emotional connection, and you need them to be there for you," she says.
Their relationship was further strained by her increased household responsibilities in his absence.
She had to grow up fast and suppress her own pain so she could take care of her younger siblings and support her mum, whostruggled emotionally with her father's decision to be a part of the SAS.
Kate says it felt like he chose to be away from the family because he didn't want to be around them.
"Mum would tell me things like 'your dad's going to come back and we're going to be gone', 'we're not going to be here because I can't do this', [and] 'he can't keep doing this to our family'.
"And that's really f***ing traumatic to hear at 13 or 14 years of age," she says.
"She would say 'your dad was never there for you or your family, so now we're not going be there for him.' That was a lot."
Kate says the biggest blow to her relationship with her dad came when he caught her using drugs in high school.
Years of struggling with mental health issues and changing schools had led to a breakdown, but she says her dad downplayed her issues as teenage angst.
"Basically that was like the complete end of our relationship, like we just never spoke. And that's obviously because he's in the army. He's extremely straight edge. And it's not for him.
"But I think that for the most part, it was hard, because we just could never build a relationship because he was gone all the time."
"I think emotionally, he doesn't understand some things.
"He came from a family that didn't talk about issues – like very toxic masculinity. And my dad's dad was also in the army. So, I think it's literally just where he came from."
'It could be your dad next'
Kate attended counselling sessions throughout her childhood from the age of around six.
"You go to all these funerals of Dad's friends, Dad's parents, Mum's parents, like just people dying, you know, and then having to live with the fact that that it could be your dad next."
It is impossible to talk about the SAS without acknowledging Blaine Diddams and his death. It seems like everybody involved in the SAS knew Didds.
Kate recalls visiting his house and climbing into the back of his truck with his kids for a ride around his property.
"He would just be like, 'Get on the truck!' and then he would just roll you through the dirt. He was a lot of fun," she says.
Sergeant Diddams joined the SAS in 1995 and served in Somalia, East Timor, the Solomon Islands and Afghanistan. He was on his seventh tour of Afghanistan when he was fatally shot during an engagement with insurgents in 2012. He was 40 years old.
It was a rough time, Kate recalls. She found out about his death via a radio news bulletin as her mum drove her to school, which reported the death of a Perth-based soldier in Afghanistan without identifying him.
"And I remember I was so stunted the entire day. Because I just had no idea who it was.
"And then at the end of school, I go to my locker … and I have all these missed calls from my mum. And I was so scared.
"And I remember, I picked up the phone, and I called it, and in that moment, I didn't even care that someone else had died. You know? I was just happy that it wasn't my dad."
'I'd never see Dad cry'
My father had two stints in the SAS, the first one from 1979-1993, then he re-joined after I was born in 2001.
He was home at the time Didds died.
He came to my mum's house after school, and I knew something was wrong, because he would never normally come to see my mum after their divorce if he could avoid it.
He was crying and I felt weird because I had never seen Dad cry while he was sober.
He held me tight around my shoulders and he said, "Didds is dead, baby."
It was the first time I'd contemplated my father's mortality.
In my mind, the SAS were super soldiers. You would never hear about a member of the SAS dying and certainly never someone I had known. Someone close to my dad. In so many ways, someone just like my dad.
Paranoia and trauma
My brother Frank remembers our dad talking about his time in Afghanistan as some of his best memories. But he thinks Dad's nature, mixed with his time in the SAS, contributed to a degree of paranoia.
Once Dad became convinced the house was bugged after he found the glass in a picture frame smashed and haphazardly placed back onto a side tabletop.
For a while he started putting the vacuum cleaner on when he wanted to have more serious conversations with us or tell us a story about the army.
In reality, I had accidentally smashed the picture frame and was too embarrassed to tell anyone.
Ultimately, Frank thinks Dad would have been the same even if he had never joined the SAS.
"Dad's real passion is just breaking the rules and the military let him do that sort of thing. Things that you couldn't do in normal society, but you could do it over there," Frank says.
"And maybe that would have made him paranoid in the end anyway, he would still be looking over his shoulder for the baddies out to get him.
"I guess he would be less traumatised … but I think the things that make Dad who he is he had from day one.
"Maybe the SAS enhanced certain aspects. But it's not like he was a normal bloke, joined the SAS and became a nutter, he was always a nutter."
Cost to young lives
Frank says most children of SAS soldiers know the reality of what it takes.
"But to even want to join the SAS you need to have that. You need to be at least a little bit cooked."
For the kids of the elite fighters, the cost of their parent's profession on their lives is difficult to measure.
It might give them a sense of pride in their fathers. Maybe it has made them stronger people.
But the children of the SAS will continue to wonder what it would have been like not to wake up wondering if your dad has been killed or has killed someone else.
And they'll wonder what it might have been like just to have Dad home.
Credits
- Words and pictures: Georgy Sides
- Additional photography: Kenith Png
- Production: Andrea Mayes, Gian De Poloni
Editor's note: Some of Georgy's friends' names have been changed to protect their father's identity.
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