Tour of terror

After one of the most explosive encounters involving NZ soldiers since Vietnam, traumatised soldiers returned home from Iraq - to silence. 

- PETE MCKENZIE

On a Saturday morning in late 2019, in a barracks on the outskirts of Darwin, Maddi van Sitter woke up with an aching hangover. He had spent the night in bars with a handful of junior New Zealand soldiers, knocking back beers to ward off the Northern Territory's stifling heat.

It had been a double celebration. Van Sitter - tall, with tousled brown hair and a sleeve of tattooed ships - had just turned 21 and in a few days' time would deploy to Iraq in the final rotation of New Zealand troops to the fight against Isis. It would be his first deployment. He saw it as his first chance to actually serve.

Van Sitter joined the Army in 2015, six months after leaving Rotorua Lakes High School at age 17 - by his own description, a "lost" kid in search of a purpose. He went on patrols through the tussocky desert of Rangipo, did first-aid training in Waiouru classrooms, stood through stiff-backed inspections on the Burnham parade ground.

When the opportunity came in 2019 to be considered for Iraq, where New Zealand Defence Force troops had spent years training the country's soldiers, van Sitter was ready.

Along with several dozen others, he travelled to Darwin for pre-deployment training with Australian partners, learning how to spot improvised explosive devices, how to respond if their vehicle got hit, how to extract a casualty under fire.

Days after that Darwin bar crawl, van Sitter flew into a war zone. He wasn't sure what to expect. Some soldiers had returned from previous deployments muscle-bound from months of idly lifting weights.

He didn't yet know his rotation would involve an assassination, a missile attack, brutal injuries and dead bodies, all of which brought Iran, Iraq's neighbour, and the United States to the brink of war and meant van Sitter's deployment ended in a rage of rockets and trauma, making it one of the most dangerous in the recent history of New Zealand's regular forces.