The death of a young officer from friendly fire during a training drill would almost certainly not have occurred if the Australian Army had followed its own mandatory training procedures, an inquest has been told.
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Northern Territory Coroner Greg Cavanagh held a two-day inquest to investigate how 25-year-old Private Jason Challis from Geelong came to be shot in the head last year during a live-fire drill south of Darwin.
He was crouched on the outside of a mock building in an exercise to get the troops combat-ready for urban warfare ahead of international exercises with Japan and the US.
Another soldier on the outside shot a dummy target but a couple of bullets passed through the wall and hit Pte Challis in the head, killing him.
The Australian Army's Range Safety Policy requires practice runs with "dry fire" and "blank fire" be conducted before any live-fire exercise.
The position Pte Challis was in should have been marked a no-go zone.
"If even a dry rehearsal had been conducted it is almost inconceivable Pte Challis would have been in the danger zone behind a target," counsel assisting the coroner Kelvin Currie said.
Mr Currie described the exercise as "shambolic".
When the unprepared team got the exercise wrong it was paused and reset but section commander Spencer Gregory should have noticed Pte Challis was missing and behind the house, Mr Currie said.
Mr Cavanagh said the situation reminded him of war movie Heartbreak Ridge, in which Clint Eastwood's character describes a bad battle situation as a "clusterf***", although he did not say it out loud.
The comment drew laughs, including from Pte Challis's mother and step-father.
"I am just glad it is not my son," Mr Cavanagh said.
One of the officers running the drill, Lieutenant Steven Cross, said he knew he was supposed to ensure a rehearsal with blanks but had been told there were none.
When he and another officer complained they received a sharp "pushback" and were put under significant time pressure because of the looming international exercises.
According to Lieutenant Cross, commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Paul Shields, who has since left the army, said he was "sick to death of people saying they can't do something and to just do it".
In a statement Mr Shields partly blamed the breakdown on an army mindset to keep live-fire exercises dynamic or tactical - in other words unknown beforehand - which "runs counter to the risk mitigation measures" of practising first.
Several army officers told the inquest they did not even know it was mandatory to do dry and blank rehearsals and it was not mentioned in live-fire training.
Mr Currie urged the coroner to recommend the army improve how safety information is delivered.
Defence lawyer Fiona McLeod said the army rejected the characterisation of the exercises as "shambolic" or "chaos".
It was accepted there were vulnerabilities in the "current competency and currency" of troops involved in live-fire exercises but changes had already been made, she said.
Australian Associated Press
