Heston: My entire career in the special forces is private, so to have the summary of your entire career come down to an article in the public that says you're war criminals, it was just, it was overwhelming and needed to be corrected.

Kumi: Hi, I'm Kumi Taguchi, and welcome to Insightful. For someone whose career has to be built on anonymity, he was a special forces commando. Heston Russell is now far from anonymous.

Heston: There was this very unique point in the campaign where the ABC accepted my editorial complaint.

Heston: But then the very next day launched a new article.

Kumi: He famously sued the ABC for defamation, and he won.

Heston: My papa called me up and he just said, Don't let them do to your soldiers what they did to mine when we came back from Vietnam. He's become a public figure after serving, and he's finding new ways to lead.

Kumi: Heston, so good to see you. You too, Kumi. You grew up in Brisbane. What was childhood like for you?

Heston: Uh, ended up going to Brisbane when I was 5 years old. Before then it was Sydney, then over to the US, but Brisbane, I enjoyed it. Mum was an aerobics instructor, Dad would just got out of the military and was jumping between jobs, they were divorced.

Heston: But going to primary school, you know, put your backpack on and walk the 2 ks to school as a 5 or 6 year old. You know, it's playing in the parks with your mates, on the weekends, we'd put on dad's army gear and go swimming in the local creeks and go exploring and setting up tree houses and all these sorts of stuff, finding ways and means to be outside, riding your push bikes, your BMXs, all that stuff, played a lot of sport, just enjoyed that.

Kumi: You are 5th generation military, and you went into the military at 17.

Kumi: It's like you almost didn't have a choice to serve, or did it feel like a choice?

Heston: I think, particularly for me, there was a decision point in my teenage years. I really struggled in high school. I put on a lot of weight. I was like the fat kid at school, and I really struggled to connect with people socially. I was quite the loner. I didn't really have friends. I never had a girlfriend throughout my entire school. I really struggled to understand who I was.

Heston: And that's where I got to this point where I identified that the most aspirational men in my life were in the military, and I just saw that as a means to be able to.

Heston: Explore the world, explore myself, be the best version of me, have the structure that could help me to become the best version of me, and then I always wanted to go into the special forces from an early age as well, so.

Heston: I think it came from a place of underachieving, feeling undervalued, feeling underperforming in myself, and then wanting to get into a system and a structure that I had seen produce some of the most aspirational men to me and then take it even further.

Kumi: What did you like about those men when you looked up to them?

Heston: They were fit. They were confident, they were engaging. I even remember like being around my dad or some of his mates, you know.

Heston: You're driving along and there's a car crash and all of a sudden they're out and they know what to do, like they were just, they had this bias for action, they were there to support people, they were very values based and wherever we were in whatever occasion, they were always very engaging, very charismatic. They just had this extra, you know, this sort of X factor about them that sort of set them apart and.

Heston: There wasn't this arrogance, but there was just this confidence and particularly for me as a young, fat, lonely kid, I just didn't have the confidence and I saw so much of that, you know, gravitating from them.

Kumi: You spent 16 years in the military. What was the life of a soldier like day to day?

Heston: It's hard to explain, but basically a day is, first thing in the morning everyone's exercising. 7:30 to 8:30 is PT and particularly for me as a platoon commander, I love to do at least a few sessions like that a week as a group. Fitness is such a leveller. It doesn't matter if you're a general or a private, a push-up is a push-up, and you sort of can't cheat with all those eyes on you.

Heston: Then 8:30 to 9:30 is breakfast, get changed, get ready for the day, and then you're training up till lunch and then training in the afternoon and particularly for me in the commandos, you might be out at the range shooting.

Heston: Rounds at a target till your finger hurts and then when the guys go home at about 5 o'clock, I'm there doing my paperwork at night and I remember living in Sydney. I used to live at Randwick, I lived at Coogee, I lived at Little Bay, all different times, you know, you'd wake up when it's dark, catch the train or drive to work and come home when it's dark, and then you'd sort of live for the weekends where you just might rest or go out and catch up with the guys and have a beer and.

Heston: Wait for the next deployment, it was really fascinating where your whole life was fulfilled by what you did on base and the rest of life outside was just,

Heston: Focus towards assisting you to work and focus towards making sure you have your whole house in order, getting ready for the next deployment. Well that was me and that was my focus and that's what it was for many others as well.

Kumi: You completed more than 100 combat missions with the special forces. How do you train for that?

Heston: Special Forces in particular is just such a mature organisation where when you're not deployed overseas, you're back at home doing the training, the preparations, the rehearsals to ready you for that. I just on one deployment alone with my platoon in 2012, you know, we did 67 missions in 5 months, killed 117 insurgents, captured so many more. That wasn't our measurement of success, but that was the operational tempo. We thrived in that tempo because you trained and prepared and you spent 5 months doing your job for real, and

Heston: I love to say, even on deployment, life is so much more simple on deployment because you are dealing with life and death. You know, I'd go in and brief the colonel or the general about my plan, and you're having conversations about the risk to mission or the risk to force, and I need an extra Black Hawk or I need an extra gunship for this 15 minute window, otherwise there's a higher risk that I could lose people or fail the mission. You're having very 1 + 1 equals 2 conversations.

Heston: It was life or death, facts, and it was simple. You could really clear your mind from all the others. What should I be doing to this is what I need to do.

Kumi: As a commando, you also trained other soldiers, sort of testing their limits. There's a story that you've shared with me which I love, which is about this kind of temptation that's put in front of them at one selection. Yes, on the selection course. Tell us about that.

Heston: The selection course is about selecting the right people, and we do that through selecting their values because we know we can then train them to become commandos.

Heston: And we have this period that's called the food and sleep deprivation period. Well, they'll go 3 days without food and without sleep. And we make them do the most strenuous physical activity. I remember doing it myself thinking, it just blew my mind how much further your body can go when you get your mind out of the way. But I remember there was one particularly mischievous part where, I think it was on the 3rd day without food, they're required to put their packs on that must weigh probably about half their body weight at this time, and, you know, march 5 or 10 kilometres up and down these hills and.

Heston: One of the directing staff would drive up in a ute onto the top of one of the hills, and he'd just done a Macca's run. And we just all know you can smell, everyone knows, even if you're not hungry, the smell of McDonald's, but I think he definitely made sure he got a Big Mac, a cheeseburger, and the McDonald's fries, so there are some synonymous smells in there. And he just pull out like a, you know, a little deck chair, open up the door to his ute, and he had a little fan inside the ute as well, blowing from behind, so the smell was going down the hill.

Heston: And as individuals would come up, he'd say, Hey mate, you know, you wanna have a cheeseburger, you wanna have some McDonald's. All you need to do is pull out your form, withdraw. I've got a spare chair. He'd have a spare chair there, come and sit with me and we'll enjoy a burger. And he'd be sitting there eating this as people would go past. And even just from a fun sociological perspective, when candidates would come up, um, with a group, you'd all hear them whisper to each other, Nah, don't do it, go on. But when you'd pick that wounded animal that's coming up there that just,

Heston: It is inside their head. They've got blisters, it hurts. They're so hungry. The person, they just prey on them and they get up in their face, stop candidate, come and smell these fries and you know, at least have a few people pull out every time. So they'll actually hand over their discharge form and go, I'm out.

Heston: Well, that's the whole thing. 80% of the people who withdraw from the commando selection course pull out their own form and withdraw it and request.

Heston: And that's what it's designed to do. It's designed to make people doubt their purpose or find new purpose in leaving the course. The power of self-selection, because at the end of the day.

Heston: We are given no fail missions. There's no one else coming to do this if you fail. We can't have people who are potentially going to self-select.

Kumi: Did some of those who withdrew regret that decision and then come back stronger another year?

Heston: Massively. I think the most important part for me and my directing staff on that course was when someone took out their form and withdrew to just sit there and wait with them till they had that moment of reflection and take them through that moment of reflection and go, hey.

Heston: You're actually performing really well, but you made up this story thinking that you were struggling or you weren't good enough. It's so important for you to realise how much your head got in the way of your performance. And a lot of people would go away and do the work and come back and pass. And others would say, Hey, I learned something new about myself. No, this isn't actually for me, but still went on to have, like, great careers.

Heston: In the military, because we found if we didn't do that, it was then very easy for people to operate out of trauma and be like, oh, you know, they weren't good enough for me, it was a crap course, all these sorts of things. You need to actually coach people through that moment because you can imagine people having to admit that they withdrew themselves in a sort of hyper masculine environment is vulnerability that most people aren't willing to take on further. So, yeah, it was, it was brilliant, and most of us don't have that chance. The selection course for me was the hardest thing I ever did in my training career.

Heston: And it's meant to be, because when you're at the 2 day mark in Afghanistan on a mission and haven't eaten, you know you need to have something to eat in the next few hours because otherwise your cognitive function starts to drop because I learned that on my selection course. Yes, it gives you reference points for how far you can go.

Heston: If ever your head jumps in the way and says you can't, you're like, hey, I've done this before, I've done similar to this, I can't keep going.

Kumi: You were officially discharged from the military in 2019. You say the transition to civilian life was challenging. Why? What was challenging

Heston: about it? I've always been quite, well, particularly during my time in the military, I was quite emotionally intelligent but not emotionally mature. A lot of our personal life was also making sure you had your house in order because if you ever had any

Heston: Issue with the law, anything that could potentially impact your deployment, you'd be taken off the deployment list. So you lived your life like a saint outside and kept a very low profile so you could maintain mission, focus and be deployed. I never had relationships, never maintained civilian friends.

Heston: And I sort of had to really reinvent all of that, and particularly for me, I did that through being public about my sexuality, or actually just being less private about my sexuality. I'd kept myself in the closet my whole military career because, one, I didn't understand it, and two, I didn't want it to impact my job. And then my whole transition was transitioning from the military into a public relationship with my first public boyfriend. And as a part of that, adopted a new identity.

Heston: As me as opposed to truly understanding who I was outside of a relationship outside of a job.

Heston: Relationships actually require you to be vulnerable, not simply continue achieving and making a nice standard of living.

Heston: I was never comfortable having any conversations about things that I was struggling with jealousy, all the rest. I'd come from, the only real relationship I've been around was my divorced parents, where I thought,

Heston: Differences of opinion had to be arguments, all these things that I'd never learned.

Heston: Being a normal human being, did not compute with me in my high performing leadership, outcomes, mission, focus. So I just found myself holding onto all the things I didn't understand, being too afraid to be vulnerable because I saw it as weakness, and essentially leading things to culminate with collapse, sort of all or nothing, and not appreciating it could actually be a much softer middle ground in between.

Kumi: 2019's not that long ago. No. It's a lot to learn, it's like you're a, you're learning from scratch as an adult.

Heston: Yeah so many skills. To start off with, it felt very embarrassing, it felt very emasculating. It's become actually instead now very humbling. When you came out and you'd been hiding your sexuality, especially in the military, or not knowing where you sat with it anyway.

Kumi: Did you hear from people you worked with in the military or what was that like?

Heston: Yeah, it was pretty incredible because I, I took all the steps I could to throw people off any scent if I was gay, you know, I was actually hyper heterosexual. But uh, I went to one of my soldiers's weddings and uh I never officially came out, like I told my mum, my sister, my dad.

Heston: But I just started living more openly with my life, and then when people ask me, I would just say yes. I remember having one of my soldiers come up to me at the reception and be like, hey, I've sort of heard that you might be gay. Is it alright if I ask? I was like, yeah, absolutely. And he's like, that is just so incredible to me, because just knowing how high a level of performance we were required to perform at, the fact that you were at any time putting any energy into feeling like you needed to suppress any part of you.

Heston: It's just incredible and it's like one, we wish you felt more safe to be able to be openly with that and that's why I tell them like I wasn't ready, it wasn't you, I just wasn't ready in my own place.

Heston: And just for them to appreciate the energy that does go into suppressing any part of you and learning the true power of authenticity with responsibility as opposed to entitlement is incred and it just, it just speaks to the calibre of people that why I was so willing and needed to go and defend them. Everyone thinks, you know, these hyper alpha male guys like, we were such a family, and my dudes probably loved me even more now knowing that I was like, I'm the only openly gay commando or whatever, like, you know, there's this.

Heston: It's just this mateship that we talk about in the military that's so hard to describe, but you just have each other's backs regardless. It's like my sister said to me, are you hurting anyone or are you doing anything illegal? No, she's like, so why are you afraid? I was like, wow, it's just it's pretty simple. It it is.

Kumi: Lawyers for the ABC have told the Federal Court the broadcaster will not hand over documents in a defamation case that will identify a source.

Kumi: The ABC published reports saying the platoon you led had been involved in shooting and killing unarmed Afghan civilians, breaking the Rules of war.

Kumi: What was your reaction, Heston, when you first heard those reports? How did you feel?

Heston: I couldn't believe it was happening. I think as the story goes, that article came out on the anniversary of the death of my soldier Scott, who's the only soldier I lost in Afghanistan. And that night, we were getting together as a platoon to meet with his mum, who we hadn't seen in 8 years. So it was, it was quite a sort of, it really put me through quite a mental health episode that I haven't realised until afterwards with therapy, but.

Heston: I went into that with this ignorance thinking someone's got it wrong, this is just impossible when you read through it, to then subsequently realise no, it was very purposefully intended and it didn't matter about accuracy, it was about being right in your opinion.

Kumi: What was it like knowing that it was your platoon being spoken about?

Heston: Yeah, it was pretty crushing. Up until that point, my entire career in the special forces is private. You're not allowed to have social media. The only people who know about what we did are our friends and family and those in the unit, but straight away they're all the people who immediately know when November Platoon is named. That's Heston, he was the commander. So to have the summary of your entire career come down to an article in the public.

Heston: That says you're war criminals. It was just, it was overwhelming and needed to be corrected.

Kumi: You weren't named, but you ended up outing yourself. Why?

Heston: Well, you know, I spent 4 years going through the Defence Force Academy and Royal Military College learning the science of leadership and developing my own leadership qualities, and you're taught that when you're the commander, it's your responsibility. So when they named November Platoon, I was the commander of November Platoon. So therefore, it was my responsibility to stand up and take this on. And that's the conversation I had with my guys that night on the 21st of October 2020. I've always seen it as my responsibility to represent them.

Heston: Especially a lot of my guys have families, have kids, have jobs. I sort of had the least to lose in stepping up. But furthermore, you know, that's that moral courage, that's what we're taught is trained to do. So for me, it was just literally my job continued.

Kumi: You put your name out there, then other news reports about your behaviour started appearing. What was that like?

Heston: That didn't really start to happen.

Heston: Until after until 2021. So there was this initial period where there was just overwhelming support, including from Ben Fordham and the rest, and then there was this very unique point in the campaign where the ABC accepted my editorial complaint.

Heston: But then the very next day, launched a new article, that was again where a lot of my ignorance and innocence in this process really started to get withered away when I appreciated it again, OK, it's not about the accuracy of this article, it's about disproving me personally.

Heston: To try and validate something that they've gotten wrong.

Kumi: So what kind of things were they digging up?

Heston: So there's still an ABC article out there saying that I was sued over not paying for these veteran pins for my charity, whereas we ended up settling that outside of court because the manufacturer agreed there were issues and we came to an agreement there. But that's not the story. The story is Heston Russell sued for not paying for veteran pins, and that still stands.

Heston: And again when I follow up with the ABC saying, hey, here's actually the facts, there's no review, there's publish and forget, so you feel pretty small and inadequate and very powerless up against.

Heston: A platform that has the means and the wills to publish whatever they want, and you have to try and fight back somehow.

Kumi: You entered into defamation litigation against the ABC. It took 3 years. What was the impact on you?

Heston: I think I'm still realising the impact. The true toll has been from I used to do public speaking and things like that for nearly 3 years. Most corporates didn't want to.

Heston: Employ me because, you know, when there's any form of uncertainty around you, particularly a federal court case, most big corporates like to avoid any form of potential risk through to just the personal isolation I put myself through. I think I went into mission mode. There are even times where I'd go out in public with someone and they're afraid to be on social media with me and things like that, and I completely understand because there is all this uncertainty and you're going up against the media and people have lives and relationships.

Kumi: When you say mission mode, what do you mean by that?

Heston: For example, when you deploy overseas on mission, particularly with the special forces, like, you know, you just go into a black hole, you do all the preparations back home, you write letters and all that, but then you just head down, bum up and you're on mission mode, and in particular for me, it's not involving anyone else in my chaos in order to preserve them and to enable me to be focused on what I'm doing, and,

Heston: As opposed to looking for fun and excitement and socialising, everything's sort of on mission, using spare time to research, forming mission plans, all the rest, just a very different focused, almost manic mindset.

Kumi: So what was the mission in this case?

Heston: The mission from the first part where I thought simply, hey, I just need to correct this because someone's got it wrong, and I can talk to them reasonably through to, oh wow, I'm in a fight with an organisation that has more means and might than me and doesn't care about accuracy. It was reaching out to former commanders. It was reaching out to try and get support. There was a whole six month period where I was trying to raise the money required to taking them to court, and then when I couldn't, my lawyers decided to take it on no win no fee.

Kumi: Ultimately, the judge rejected the ABC's public interest defence, and you were awarded nearly $400,000. Was that compensation enough?

Heston: This is the whole thing, it's so, it's actually a really difficult place to be in at the end of a court case and

Heston: Come down to trying to attribute to success to how much money you're given. From the start, I was just worried about my legal fees. And so as long as my legal fees were covered, which they were, that was fine with me, but to answer your question, like, no, in, in reflection, the time I've had to reflect now, nowhere near it, like for 3 years, I've literally probably lost more employment than that money catered for, right the way through to like,

Heston: The fact that it was being taxpayer funded money paid to me as opposed to like I individually sued Josh Robertson and Mark Willacy as well as the ABC and they had to pay nothing personally, so I don't think that one was enough to send a big enough message that it's, you can't accuse Australian veterans of a war crime unless you've got your facts straight, let alone for public interest.

Heston: But 2, for me, it wasn't about the money, the actual accountability to follow these people to be reprimanded, these people to lose their jobs, these people to have to apologise for what they did, that never came.

Kumi: You've said that you pursued the ABC because you felt a responsibility to your soldiers. Was a sense of justice rather than money the reason you persevered with the case?

Heston: Yeah, 100%. I'm a 5th generation veteran all the way through my family, and in particular, my mum's dad, my papa. He served on the hook in Korea and in Vietnam. And when all this happened, uh, in 2020, he called me up and he just said, Don't let them do to your soldiers what they did to mine when we came back from Vietnam.

Heston: And he died two months later. So there was so much that I just felt was my responsibility. And behind the scenes, some of my biggest supporters, um, emotionally, have been the Vietnam veterans. And so many of them have sort of said to me, we wish we had an opportunity like you have now to take the fight to them there and then for your, particularly for your Afghan, um, generation of veterans as opposed to the government giving us an apology 50 years later. So I definitely felt,

Heston: A lot of responsibility and a lot of opportunity given the platform that I had and was getting with some good friends in the media as well to try and head this off. And at the end of the day, the campaign has been to deter anyone from doing this to people again, but I actually sit here now with the fear that we've kind of proven you can do this, and at the end of the day, it's gonna be the taxpayers who are gonna fund any mishaps along the way.

Kumi: You speak about resilience a lot, especially proactive resilience. What do you mean by that? I find this fascinating.

Heston: Yeah, this is my own little philosophy, uh, particularly when during that transition period 2020, you know, two months before the ABC's article about my guys, I actually had my first suicidal ideation sitting at home. I just got to this point where I thought,

Heston: I needed to be the next veteran suicide because I'd lost more mates at that time to it, and I thought my public profile would help it. It was a very unique place for me in my own mental health journey, but uh.

Heston: What it helped me appreciate and reflect back to is what actually comes down to identity and what actually comes down to resilience. It made me reflect on my time, particularly in combat and particularly in the military where I never once

Heston: Ever felt any issues with my mental health. Never actually felt out of control with my emotions in any way, because I had two proactive layers of resilience. I had my team, I had the mission. And before my thoughts were ever in my own head or heart, I was always forward thinking, what do I need to do to achieve the mission and what do my men need in order to help them and to achieve the mission, and I've always been excellent putting purpose before myself.

Heston: And then when I was sitting there on my couch contemplating and writing my suicide note, I didn't have people that my head and heart were out thinking about. I didn't have a mission. It was just wholly and solely on me, and I truly appreciated that I'd lost community, I'd lost friends, I'd lost people that I was able to be vulnerable with, feel connected with, and I'd lost my sense of purpose, you know, I'd lost a higher reason why I felt like I needed to get up and do things and uh.

Heston: It's been reconstituting those proactive layers of resilience that is still an ongoing struggle. Your life gets decluttered pretty quickly, you get to appreciate real friends and real connectivity based on vulnerability. But yeah, that's my philosophy, because so many people talk about resilience being how you get up when you fall down, whereas I never fell down until it really counted, and.

Heston: That's because I lost those proactive layers of resilience that have otherwise seen me through real life and death scenarios without any mental or emotional hardships.

Kumi: You'd imagine this as a career for life, when you realised that wasn't what it was gonna be, how did that feel? What did you do?

Heston: I had a very soft landing. I, I took my long service leave and I jumped straight into a very impressive employment package that was more than I was getting paid the military equity. It was brilliant.

Heston: But I just failed to appreciate, you actually have to work for profit, not purpose. Not everyone has the same values as you, and being thrust into a big corporate straight away was unique, but sort of 18 months later, I really started to struggle and failed to appreciate where I was at, and it was probably after I lost that job and then was left going, where do I go and I lost my relationship with Blake and all the rest. That was this whole really grounding point. And it took me probably a good year to,

Heston: I'll say get over myself because I'd been such a high performer and I'd never experienced failure, and now I'd experienced it and what I deemed on multiple layers, and I, and it really put me back thinking I'm not good enough. So much of the military mindset is compartmentalization. So for me, it's so easy for me to forget my military career because I've been so involved with this ABC piece.

Heston: And it's so easy for me to forget that I am very skilled in all these skill sets and I have all of these experience and.

Heston: As opposed to saying no I don't because it's not the same situation, but being able to put them through a philtre, and apply them in different language or different scenarios or or actually just bring that level of confidence through, that's been the biggest adaptation because what we spend a lot of time doing is comparing.

Heston: As opposed to carrying through those core parts of our real identity.

Heston: That's been my struggle anyway. And again, I wish I sort of had someone like me when I was going through all my doubts and uncertainties and figuring myself out that I could potentially identify with and maybe learn some lessons from as well.

Kumi: Heston, I could like talk to you for hours and then you have to book another therapist session.

Heston: Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.