25 September 2024
During time spent away from home on operations, ADF members will sometimes set personal goals to achieve in their downtime, like learning new languages or testing their physical limits.
Captain Nicholas Perry, at Headquarters Middle East, made his goal on Operation Accordion to improve his German to better communicate with his partner’s family in their own language.
They live in the Pinzgau region of Austria and speak a rare dialect of Austrian-German – Pinzgauer – that can be difficult to understand, even for fluent German speakers.
“I studied German in school, and my parents travelled to that region a lot, so I have practised a bit, but my partner’s parents don’t speak English at all,” Captain Perry said.
“Pinzgauer has a lot of accent differences and it’s generally spoken a lot faster than German.”
He found a helping hand in medical officer Flight Lieutenant Jeannine Paterson, who lived in Austria from the age of 11.
Not only did Flight Lieutenant Paterson speak Pinzgauer, but she had lived in the same remote region, only a 15-minute drive from Captain Perry’s partner and her family.
An even more unlikely coincidence came to light when they realised Flight Lieutenant Paterson’s step-father lived only a few doors down from the ski-lodge Captain Perry’s partner runs.
She even has a photo of herself in the dining room of the lodge during a holiday in 2018.
“I’ve spent 57 years of my life telling people about where I grew up and nobody has ever known where it is,” Flight Lieutenant Paterson said.
While the languages are similar, many root words and phrases are completely different, which means Captain Perry will have a head start when it comes to speaking the local lingo.
His goal is to become “comfortably conversational” by the end of the deployment and, though he believes there is a long way to go, Flight Lieutenant Paterson said he was well on the way.
“He’s going well; German is a pretty difficult language to learn, so I think he’s being hard on himself,” Flight Lieutenant Paterson said.
Learning a new language is a popular choice for deployed personnel, with others on the operation also learning Portuguese and Spanish, but some prefer more physical undertakings.
After learning there was a challenge to run 1000km over the course of a deployment, Warrant Officer Class Two (WO2) Rick Pepper thought he would give it a go, with an even more ambitious goal on top.
“I was originally going to run 10km a day just to tick the time over and for a bit of fitness, then I saw the challenge for 1000km and thought, I reckon I can do that in 100 days,” WO2 Pepper said.
“Being 43 now, the body didn’t like doing those 10km hits, so I started doing 5km in the morning and in the afternoon.”
He set out to run 10km a day for the first 100 days of his deployment, starting outdoors for the first month until the heat set in and he switched to indoor treadmills.
To pass the time during the runs, WO2 Pepper watched movies, getting inspiration from the training montages in Rocky, and listened to podcasts.
“I started learning Spanish while I’m here as well, so I downloaded a few podcasts for learning Spanish. They go for about 30 minutes so I get two episodes per run,” he said.
WO2 Pepper finished the 1000km on August 22 and said while he didn’t think it was a big deal, the reactions from others had been encouraging.
“I just wanted to challenge myself. I wasn’t doing crazy times or anything. I just wanted to get it done and as soon as I hit that thousand I was pretty happy,” he said.
WO2 Pepper decided to keep the pace going and is now training with three others for the 2025 Dubai marathon in January.
