With the Australian federal election campaign in full swing and with Prime Minister Julia Gillard saying she “fully supports” the current 1550-strong deployment to Afghanistan, it’s worth focusing on the families of the brave Diggers who have lost their lives in the Middle East.
Since Australia deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, our nation has lost 17 soldiers – the most recent six in the last two months as the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists increase their deadly campaign of burying improvised explosive devices in the countryside.
I recently spent some time with Victoria Hopkins, the widow of Corporal Mathew Hopkins, for a story in the latest edition of sunday magazine.
Victoria and Mathew Hopkins
I had written about her husband shortly after he was killed in action in March last year, and again when the Chief of Defence, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston released a report into his death.
Victoria Hopkins, who is now 24, is one of the bravest women I’ve met. When her husband was killed, she had been married a mere five weeks and had a five-week-old son, Alex.
Like many wives, husbands, partners, parents and family of the serving members of the Australian Defence Force, the unimaginable possibility had lingered in the back of her mind and she lived with the constant dread of that unwelcomed knock on the door ever since he left home in October 2008.
“Mat told me in his last email that he was going to try to ring me as soon as he got back from patrol. I hadn’t heard from him at all that day, I thought he must have been busy. I was actually up typing an email to him when there was a knock at the door.”
Three officers wearing their full dress uniforms and medals broke the news. “It felt like I had all the energy sucked out of me, like what should have been a happy time in my life – being married and having a baby and being a family – was just suddenly taken away by one bullet. They said it was instant, that there was nothing that could have been done to save Mat.”
Every time another Digger has died, Victoria is reminded of her loss in more ways than one.
It happened most recently when 23-year-old Private Nathan Bewes, who was on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, was killed by an IED on Friday, July 16, 2010, taking the loss of Australian lives to 17.
Mathew Hopkins and his newborn son, Alex
And yet there is no easy way to cope, each new aching tragedy adds to the last, she told me, especially when she thinks that her young son will not grow up with his proud father. These are the small things that the rest of us don’t know about, but should.
“You just learn to move your life around these sort of things. There is no real way of moving on because it’s always going to be there; you just learn to accept that these sort of things can happen.”
Importantly, though, she has beautiful memories of her time with Mat. She smiles remembering the night they stayed up going through the alphabet from A-Z thinking of names for their unborn son (they chose Alexander Robert John, because it’s a strong name and will stand the test of ages); the night they had a “Sounds of Silence” dinner in the desert under Uluru, listening to an Aboriginal guide telling stories about the constellation; how thrilled Mat was to claim the honour of being the first to change their newborn son’s nappy; and how Mat loved her weekly care packages.
“I sent Mat a can of Spam once and he rang me up and told me off,” she says with a laugh. “For Christmas I sent him a gingerbread house which actually remained in tact all the way there, and a triple choc pudding that he ate in one go, and his Top Gear magazine – he loved his Top Gear magazine.”
She laughs at the folly of him taking on patrol a 1kg bag of lollies she sent so he could share them with his mates. His fully-loaded pack already weighed 60kg but Corporal Hopkins would not leave base without his sweet reminder of home and the woman who loved him.
Corporal Hopkins on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan
They wanted two or three kids and decided to settle in Darwin, where her husband hoped to continue his rising Army career.
“Mat and I had discussed that our kids were going to join the defence force if they didn’t have continuous study like TAFE or uni or they didn’t have a job. That was our decision,” she says.
Those dreams for a shared future were shattered by one single bullet.
But, as Victoria says, she has her memories and a treasured wooden box made by the Army carpenters in Afghanistan who deployed with her husband. It contains dozens of letters written by his mates.
“Reading the great things that they said about Mat really opened my eyes up more as to who he really was. There was a side of Mat that I knew but the side of Mat they were talking about was the side I didn’t know yet. They said Mat was a great leader, he was a funny guy, which I knew about, and it just made it very special hearing and reading those things and knowing that Mat meant more to a lot of other people as well as to Alex and me.”
This is Victoria’s story, as it appeared in the most recent edition of the sunday magazine (July 18, 2010) which is inserted in The Sunday Herald Sun in Victoria, and The Sunday Telegraph in NSW.
Lest we forget.
Victoria’s story, as it appeared in sunday magazine on July 18, 2010
