Matt Clarke spends his workdays driving a haul truck at Hunter Valley Operations (HVO), shifting coal from the pit to the surface. It’s not the truck he’s always driven though. In 2012, he was driving a truck thousands of miles away in Afghanistan and Matt said the only reason he and his crew are alive today is because of ‘Debbie’, a Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle.

Matt’s first job out of high school was in construction, but it didn’t take long for him to realise that his calling was elsewhere – the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Matt joined in 2009, signing up as a rifleman. He went to Kapooka at Wagga Wagga for three months, learnt the trade at the School of Infantry in Singleton for another three months and finally earnt his rifleman qualifications.

He was posted to Brisbane and after almost two years was picked to go on deployment in Afghanistan.

“One of the biggest things we say in the army is that you’re training for a game of football that never comes. Everyone is generally excited to be deployed, because you finally get to put all the training into action.

“Fear and nervousness don’t really come into it. Our job was to be a mentoring taskforce, to work and train with the Afghan army and put them through similar training that we go through so they could stand on their own two feet.”

Matt was only in Afghanistan for three weeks when he and five others were in a Bushmaster travelling through the Deh Rawud district on July 10, 2012, when they struck an Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

“When you’re driving around, you’re sharing the road with civilians, so you know it’s pretty safe around them. As soon as you go off road you try and make your own path and make it as unpredictable as possible.

“We somehow found ourselves funneled into a dry creek bed near Eshauzi and on either side of the track was about an eight foot drop off. I was driving in the lead vehicle with my crew commander and our four engineers.

“Looking back, we probably shouldn’t have gone the way we did, and we definitely should’ve gotten out and checked the area but there was an Afghan checkpoint 500-metres away so we thought it would be okay because they should’ve been monitoring that area the whole time.

“We were traveling at maybe five kilometres an hour and then bang. Explosion. First you see a flash of dark dirt and dust and you instantly know what’s happened. The volume of the explosion was incredible, we were inside the vehicle with crew helmets on that have active hearing protection, but we still had instant ringing in our ears.

“I have described it as being like in Saving Private Ryan when they’re doing the beach landing and Tom Hanks’ character has a mortar go off nearby, it’s exactly like that,” Matt recollected.

Matt said after what felt like a hundred years he came to and went through a checklist in his head.

He was alive, check. His back felt okay, check.

“But I looked down and my right foot was shaking and my left foot looked totally mangled. Then I thought about everyone else, our crew commander Bebbs was out the hatch when the explosion went off and he was covered in blood and unconscious. Thankfully he regained consciousness fairly quickly.

“Compared to other situations we were lucky. In some cases there can be secondary explosions that go off when you get out and start searching, then there can be machine gun fire.

“The Bushmaster vehicle saved us. They are a 14-tonne armored vehicle, the tyres weigh 225-kilograms each and they are designed with a V-shaped hull so the energy from a blast is sent upwards and away from the other side,” said Matt.

Forty-five minutes later the crew were picked up, Matt and Bebbs were air lifted out and taken to Dubai. Matt was then patched up and taken to Brisbane Hospital. He underwent five surgeries for more than a dozen broken bones in his feet and ankles.

Matt lived in two moon boots for six months and had rehab on Base for five months, for about four hours a day.

“Mentally I was okay. I did have to work through some things. When I was able to drive a car again, at random moments, I would notice something on the road and think ‘oh that would be a good place for a bomb’, and seconds later snap out of it.

“I dreamt a little, for about five months after coming home. All the other guys I was deployed with were still in Afghanistan so that played on my mind a bit. It eased off when they came home safe.”

For Matt, the injuries marked the end of his army career, so it was time to think about what was next.

“Going through the discharge process with the army was great. I was discharged back to Singleton and I thought what on earth I should do next. I had all these plans for career progression and that all came to a stop. So, I applied for a job at HVO.

“I started off as a trainee truck driver, was upgraded onto crew and I’ve been there ever since.

“I love it. There seems to be a high success rate of ex-defence transferring over to mining.”

It was while he was working at HVO that Matt was scrolling through Facebook and saw a post from the Australian War Memorial (AWM) with photos of an IED damaged Bushmaster they had gotten hold of.

“I thought it looked familiar, I pulled out some old photos, compared scratches and the number plate and it all matched. I got in contact with the AWM and told them I was the one who was driving the vehicle in Afghanistan. They had no idea about its history!

“They are including Debbie in a new exhibit to show the more recent history of Australia’s involvement in conflicts. It’s an honour really. The vehicle could be in this new exhibit for 300 years and the tens of thousands of people who will see it is incredible,” said Matt.

The first Bushmasters were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in mid-2005. Their reputation grew as it came to be seen as the key reason why so many Australian soldiers survived IED blasts.

The war in Afghanistan was Australia’s longest war spanning 19 years from 2001 to 2021. Of the 26,000 Australian Defence Force personnel who served in Afghanistan, 42 lost their lives.

The AWM acquired Debbie in 2013 and it will take pride of place in Anzac Hall when it opens sometime in 2026.

If you want to hear more about Matt’s story (and why wouldn’t you!) you can download Digging Depper with @ The Coalface: Episode 5 from all your favourite streaming services and at our website: www.thecoalface.net.au/podcasts