What I think of as violence has changed throughout my life.
When people talk about a sport being violent,
I can't even associate that word with violence.
People might say, you know, fighting in a cage,
mixed martial arts is violent.
People are punching each other,
kicking each other, choking each other.
There's a referee there, it's not violent at all.
I think when your head's removed from your body,
I think when people stab you, people shoot you,
your body comes apart, you get blown up.
You kill children because they go to school, I think that's violent.
Violence has always been part of my life.
I've been in street fights,
lost friends to gang violence, and family to war.
As a nation, violence is justified, demonized and glorified.
I want to explore violence, but to do so,
I need to understand our relationship to it.
[Violent Times]
State sanctioned violence is probably the most offensive
and publicized form of violence.
But it's also the most applauded.
Sergeant Paul Cale is a Special Forces soldier
and a founding member of the 2nd Commando Regiment,
a unit that's seen more violence and casualties
than any other branch of the Australian Defence Force.
In 2013, Paul made headlines when he stormed an enemy compound
and strangled a Taliban leader.
Since then, Paul has developed an instinctive model
for close quarter combat that he teaches to elite special forces
around the world.
Paul's built a career on state-sanctioned violence.
So, we're going to unpack what that feels like.
What's happening? Good to meet you.
-Yeah, same, same. -Honor to meet you.
What are you guys doing here?
The idea is to use combat sports.
So it's a related fitness to combat, but it's not combat.
I can use techniques and skills, like understanding, balance,
and control of my body, which relates to combat,
but in a sporting context.
The body doesn't identify one stress from another.
So, I've got to learn how to put the body under stress
and how to put soldiers under stress.
I would have thought that the way...
because the violence isn't in itself real,
it's kind of simulated, that you'd have to almost overdo that kind of--
It's the opposite, because what will happen is
I'll just overwhelm you with violence.
If you're overwhelmed, you won't do anything.
-You'll just become... -Scared.
Pray. You'll have a fear for violence.
I don't want you to have a fear for violence.
I want you to thrive in violence.
I want you to treat it as if it's ordinary.
Alright. I'm going to choke out the presenter now.
It wouldn't be the first time.
Won't be the last.
Alright, come on in mate.
-Just jump down on your knees. -Yeah.
I'm lifting myself up here. Up, hook.
OK, I want to try and cut this angle, and then choke.
There you go.
-Do you want to fall unconscious? -Nah.
-It's funny, it's funny.
It'll be great for the camera.
You won't die. Come on, you trust me?
Yeah, go on, go on.
OK, you'll feel like you just went to sleep.
I love strangling people.
Good work.
Gives you a bit of a head spin.
-You'll feel great. -Yeah.
Oh, I love it. Feels like you've had a sleep for...
-Yeah, for like, a while. -for like, a month.
Yeah, you kind of go, "Wow, that was fantastic."
We're going to do some close-quarters battle.
So we'll move around this space tactically.
All my guys are Special Forces.
Go on.
OK, push right.
Covering.
Could you tell me a bit about your childhood
growing up in a neighborhood right near mine in Cranbourne,
what was that like?
It was terrible.
My family was not well-to-do.
That wasn't a problem for me.
But that led to a lot of being picked on
with not understanding why.
Dealing with a lot bullies...
targeting me each day at school.
And I looked forward to, I guess, not being there,
which is the reason I joined the army.
I knew that it would extract me straight out of Cranbourne
and I would end up somewhere else.
As I went through school,
I was never good at running,
so I thought I better learn how to fight because they keep catching me.
So, I took up martial arts. I had a goal to get a black belt.
It was a simple goal, I must get a black belt.
It just kept rolling over. And then I thought,
when I'm older, I'll join the army and understand about modern warfare.
I'll understand how it applies today.
What was it about fighting that you felt like you needed so much?
You only have to be beaten up every day of your life to be sick of it.
All these solutions I hear about bullying means nothing to me.
The solution to bullying is learn how to stop bullies.
How do you stop bullies?
You talk to them in the same language they speak.
The first time I was violent towards a bully,
I was never bullied again.
The child ended up unconscious, and you know,
he could have been badly hurt.
I harmed him.
Violence is a shocking thing.
That's why terrorists use it.
I'm doing something so that you change your behavior.
But in a way, you're playing their game
and you're fighting fire with fire, aren't you?
-Yep. -That's the way forward?
-Yep. -Your experiences dictated that
that's the way to get a solution.
Well, I'm not going to get a solution
by telling you that that's not the way to go.
Do you think you'll get a solution out of me
by telling me that's not the way to go?
In the military, the whole political jargon
is winning the hearts and minds of everyone, you know and its--
No, no, no. That's not what the military is for.
That's a job the military does.
Could you tell us about a time
you had to make a really sharp judgment call?
We ended up in a Taliban village.
When entering the village
we were blown up several times by remote controlled IEDs.
And there was a guy watching us,
but he was just watching us like a spectator.
And he had a phone.
Running through my head,
how this happened, how we've been blown up.
I just thought to myself, he's here for one reason.
So I decided that I was going to kill him.
I aimed at him, he looked at me,
and we didn't speak the same language,
but I could tell he was sort of like, "Are you're going to shoot me?"
And I'm, "Yeah, I'm going to shoot you," and...
I shot him and took my suppressor off, and...
basically, that was that.
It turned out that he was, in fact, Taliban
and it was, in fact IED present.
But it's an odd thing, because for me, it's not a hate,
it's a want to end bad people,
but it's not in a way that you wish to torture them.
Probably the first time I actually thought about it like that.
You want to end evil people,
but you don't want to become evil in doing so.
Paul Cale embodies the necessary function
of state-sanctioned violence.
To gain an objective insight into the role of the military,
I wanted to speak to Professor Kevin Foster,
whose critical research focuses on the nature of conflict.
No military that's worth its name can forget that it's in the business
of delivering force.
We've come to think of militaries as being a bit warmer and cuddlier.
So violence is central to what they do and who they are.
How violent is the war in Afghanistan?
It's, I think, been much more violent then we've been led to understand.
The public are pretty ignorant about what actually goes on in a war zone
and militaries have been active in ensuring that that remains the case.
Is there any merit to state sanctioned violence?
There is a place for state-sponsored violence...
I'm afraid to say.
It'd be nice if there weren't,
but that's not the world we live in.
And so we need to have those resources there when we need them.
At the other extreme, you don't want to be turning to your military
every five minutes.
I think it is important that there is a proper debate about
the circumstances in which state sponsored violence should be used,
and we don't currently have the mechanisms for that
within our system.
It's the prime minister's discretion currently,
or the discretion of the cabinet.
The thing I remember the most was an Afghan family,
and we're cruising along and they had their camels
and their animals with them,
so they're moving slowly.
We're going slowly as well because we're clearing the route from IEDs.
Then we settle down for the night,
and they sort of settled off over the side.
They left in the morning, and we heard an explosion.
And we saw it and we thought,
"Well, we'd better go investigate." Then we heard another explosion.
One of their camels hit an IED,
which was set for us.
And of the sons grabbed the other camel to get it away,
and then he stepped on an IED, which blew him apart.
And by the time we got there,
his father's picking his son up.
His son's children are there and they're crying.
But those little children have work to do.
You don't have time to stop
because you've got to get the equipment off the dead camel.
Cry while you're working.
We just spent the day picking up pieces of human flesh.
We got a body bag and we'd start collecting pieces of body,
so that they could bury their son that night
because of Islamic religion.
But his eyes, the eyes of that father looking at me.
It's just that's the most...
the worst thing that I can think of.
And then that night, they set the grave up and stones.
And then the mother was just wailing at nighttime.
And so all we could hear at night was her wailing at the grave.
The role of the special forces in Afghanistan
was to negate the Taliban leadership,
and Taliban bomb makers, and Taliban recruiters,
Taliban middle management, if you like.
That's a violent job.
How effective do you think violence has been
in the Australian war in Afghanistan?
I don't think It's been effective at all.
In 2013, 2014, as more and more of the country was taken back by
or came under the sway of the Taliban again,
you really basically had a ring around Kabul.
And beyond that, it's manifestly unsafe.
The Taliban might have lost lots of battles,
but they appear to be on the brink of, well not necessarily as victors,
but certainly having got considerably more than we got out of it.
Do you think violence has failed the military
in the war in Afghanistan?
The military recognized themselves when they moved from
more of the kind of decapitation policy to a counterinsurgency policy.
The fact that they were able to recognize that they needed to
move beyond shooting and bombing to a much more genuine engagement
with the people and their leaders and a much more genuine engagement
with the culture was a very healthy sign.
There's a place for violence,
and there's a place where you need other tools of persuasion.
When a body's lifeless, it's like a sandbag,
it just slumps and the limbs just hang
or they're missing or they're bent up the back,
that it's just a slumped over piece of flesh.
And you get much sleep?
No, I don't sleep much. Can't you tell?
I don't have nightmares or anything.
I just don't sleep. When I do sleep, it's no problem.
It's good, but yeah,
you need some medication to help knock you out sometimes.
But I'm busy, so I don't like being too knocked out.
So sometimes I just get three or four hours sleep and off I go.
We all lose a piece of ourselves over there.
But you mend that.
And the end product can probably be better than what you started with.