Ice Journey saves veteran's sanity

In retirement David, pictured in England, has continued to travel.

FORMER Rockhampton weather forecaster David Morgan was so traumatised by his war service in Vietnam he ran away...to the coldest and most desolate place on earth.

Now he’s written about how Antarctica saved his sanity, even though it almost killed him. His book Ice Journey is a remarkable account of how months of isolation amid the ice soothed his troubled mind.

David was a regular soldier who turned 21 in Vietnam where he was buried in a gun pit during a Viet Cong mortar attack. When he returned to Australia he got married, raised two children and tried to live a normal life.

But the horrors of war returned to him every night in his sleep and he says he felt an overwhelming need to escape.

He worked as a met office forecaster in Rockhampton from 1992 to 1998. And it was the clatter of the Singaporean helicopters on their annual visits to Rockhampton Airport that made him seek an extreme way out.

“That particular noise of the rotors was too much to bear,” he said. “It caused me a lot of stress and flashbacks and the anxiety attacks became so severe. The demons became more difficult to handle and like a lot of Vietnam veterans I started to run.”

As a Bureau of Meteorology employee there were ways to find the solitude he craved. First he headed to Giles, the most isolated posting on the Australian mainland, but what he really wanted was to flee to the land of perpetual ice.

In the book he describes being driven to leave his wife and teenage children as the struggles with post traumatic stress order created an obsession to find peace.

“The dream of romantic isolation drove me to work for a posting in Antarctica. When a man fights nature, it’s easier to forget that a man is fighting himself.

“It was easier to appear normal while fighting my demons down there. Everyone who seeks the challenge of Antarctica has their own reasons for doing so.

“Surrounded by intoxicating beauty and the challenge of various co-expeditioners, I believed I was in control. My mask was strong.”

But there were twists in the tale.

He remembers watching his colleagues succumb to depression during the winter months of perpetual darkness. But he says he enjoyed the research work and filled his spare time making beer, taking photographs and keeping a diary.

David, 62 who has just left Yeppoon for the Sunshine Coast, said though he thrived in the isolation and enjoyed the daily battle with the all-encompassing cold, a slip on clear ice almost claimed his life.

“I smashed my head and sustained severe injuries. My brain started to swell and bleed and it would have killed me in any other climate. But it was so cold that the blood turned to gel and the bleeding stopped.”

Now he’s retired he’s found writing about his troubled life and extreme experiences has helped.

His second book, which he’s just finished, details his Vietnam service, from training through the battles and the horror of war to the disgust he felt at returning to Australia to be spat at and abused by anti-war campaigners.

“I’ve written to let people know about Antarctica, but my story is dominated by Vietnam and how it has affected my entire life.”