'There’s just this extraordinary level of trust.' John Bale and James Millis didn’t know each other when their mutual friend died in Afghanistan. But a surfing trip cemented their friendship. | GoodWeekendMag
John Bale, 38, and James Millis, 47, became great mates following the death of a mutual friend in Afghanistan in 2008. Today they both work in organisations supporting the wellbeing of veterans and first responders.
I met James in 2014 at an SO-organised surfing weekend, near Batemans Bay [on the NSW South Coast]. He’d read about it in the paper and is a super-keen surfer, so he and his wife, Emma, came. He was introduced to me as the medic who’d tried to help Fuss. He was pretty guarded, with that classic digger folded-arms stance and distant look in his eyes, but when he learnt I’d been to school with Fuss, he started to relax.
James lives on the NSW Central Coast and I live in Canberra, but we’re constantly on the phone. He and Em were both paramedics and we began to talk about how their careers were affecting their mental health. Paramedics can be a bit of a closed shop, only talking to each other about the trauma they witness daily, but we’d built a rapport, so in 2019 I co-founded Fortem [an organisation supporting the mental health and wellbeing of civilian first responders].
You go over there feeling bulletproof; it’s a shock to realise you’re not. I came back to Australia a few months later, married beautiful Emma and transferred straight into the paramedics to concentrate on being an ambo and a husband. I thought I was doing okay, that eventually I’d be back to being the social, fun-loving person who could talk to anyone, but after Michael’s death, I didn’t leave the house for two years unless it was to work or surf.
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