COURAGE UNDER FIRE
The clock had ticked past 2am when Dr Annette Holian finally emerged into the warm night air. The trauma surgeon had spent the previous hours hunched over in an operating theatre deep inside the multinational military base at Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, saving the life of a Dutch soldier seriously injured after an improvised explosive device exploded under his vehicle.
Having successfully sent him to intensive care, she stepped outside the pressure cooker ER to catch her breath. While gathering her thoughts in the inky darkness, she noticed fireworks in the sky.
“I wondered what the celebration was,” Annette recalls. “Then I got my bearings and realised I was facing north, towards the Baluchi Pass, known as the valley of the shadow of death, where our troops patrolled against the Taliban. What I thought were fireworks were in fact Apache helicopter tracer fire, rockets and flares. In that split second I remembered I wasn’t in Australia any more, and I pretty quickly went back inside.”
RAAF Group Captain Annette Holian is one of Australia’s unsung heroes,
