John Wilson was born in 1948 at New Plymouth and moved to Dunedin with his family when he was two years old. He attended Arthur Street School followed by Otago Boys High School during which he was a member of the army cadets where he had spent time at Burnham and moved through the cadet ranks.
As a teenager John very much enjoyed tramping and hunting in the hills around Otago and in fact under his father’s guidance began shooting rabbits at age seven and deer at age twelve, where he made money to assist in his university studies in later years. While at Otago University, where he studied medicine and continued to tramp and hunt in the hills John also worked on the Aveimore and Benmore Dams as well as on various farms.
In 1968 and still at university John joined the Otago Medical Company with the hope of serving in Vietnam. He joined up as a private and moved up through the ranks and then undertook an officer’s selection course becoming a Second Lieutenant and later a Captain.
While at university as a staff sergeant he was seconded to the First NZ Services Medical Team in Vietnam where one had to virtually perform the duties of a doctor, which he was not at that stage of yet. John quickly discovered just what he could do given the situation and being thrown in the deep end, really had nowhere to go but swim and he describes the experience as one of several really meaningful times in his life.
John spent four months in Vietnam where he served with the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps. He spent half his time with the Civilian Surgical Team in Qhi Nhon and the other half with the 1st New Zealand Services Medical team in Bon Song, in the Binh Dinh province. He also went down to the 8th Field Ambulance base in Nui Dat and the 1st Australian Field Hospital in Vung Tau, Phouc Tui provence, where our soldiers were based, about 750 km south of where our medical teams were.
The medical teams played very much a hearts and minds role and were put into areas where they treated both sides and this was the reason why they were allowed to survive in what was usually a Viet Kong held area.
Theoretically they were pretty defenseless even though there were bunkers and they all had arms. “Because we treated civilians on both sides and military personnel only in emergencies we were tolerated and in fact only one member of the NZ medical team was ever killed and that was by accident as a result of being blown up by a command detonated mine. To give you an idea of the trust and warmth we were shown there was a situation where an American shot dead a schoolteacher in a Viet Cong dominated village. The locals understandably were incited and rioted in the hospital grounds turning vehicles over and there was a stand off for a considerable time. We were dressed in the New Zealand Jungle Green uniforms very similar to those of the Americans, and from the Vietnamese point of view I would have thought one round eye would have been much the same as another, but they were completely friendly to us while they were extremely hostile towards the Americans. They told us later that we were never in any danger as they knew we treated both sides and had no hidden agendas.”
“After Vietnam I returned to Dunedin and finished medical school. I was always interested in high altitude pathophysiology and I loved the mountains and flying, so I joined the RNZAF Active Reserve and spend a lot of time at the Aviation Medical Unit at Hobsonville, which subsequently became the Defense Environmental Unit. In those days it was run by a live wire fellow named Wing Commander Len Thompson. He had paid his way through medical school by flying P51 Mustangs out of Taieri Aerodrome. He got me into a parachute course although I had had very little training, which included jumping with the SAS, which I enjoyed very much.
I used to go out on search and rescue missions aboard the C130 Hercules, UH1H Iroquois and P3 Orions for several years, and I really liked that. I had transferred as a Flight Lieutenant in the Air Force Active Reserve from the Territorial Force army because I liked flying so much in search and rescue operations and I could do more things there than just sitting in tents.
Wing Commander Len Thompson had been to Nepal some years before, and suggested I should make inquiries about going to the Himalayan Trust Hospitals run by Sir Edmund Hillary’s Himalayan Trust organisation. I knew there was a hospital at Kunde, at 12,800 feet, so I contacted Sir Edmund Hillary and ended up going to Nepal after I did my Medical Registrar year at the end of 1975, as a Volunteer Service Abroad doctor at Solu Hospital, Phaplu, at 8,500 feet. It was a much bigger hospital than Kunde, which I also worked at, and there was a lot more medical work. Although it was in the really high mountains by New Zealand standards it was still sixty miles away from the Everest region.
I spent nearly two years there, and did a lot of high altitude work while continuing with my passion for long distance running, clocking up some five hundred miles a month running and walking. I realized that people could easily extend themselves past their comfort zone and in fact were suited to this type of endurance work. My subsequent experiences there in person, in medicine and general reading, confirmed that people are very good at relatively slow speeds and very long distances. I would cover up to eighty kilometers in a day made up of jogging and walking. It is not outside most young fit people’s capabilities and that’s what hunters and gatherers used to do in prehistoric times.
It was at a time that I really didn’t know what I was capable of. At school I had only played mediocre second fifteen rugby and occasionally first fifteen. I found something in the Himalayas that I was really good at, the ultra distance stuff. After Nepal I came back to Dunedin as a GP and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t particularly like the type of medicine I was doing and I couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life as a physician. Len Thompson came into the picture again, he kept calling me and telling me I wasn’t suited to this type of work, “I know you, come and spend time with me in Singapore”. He was the commanding officer of the New Zealand Forces Hospital in Singapore and ultimately became the Director General of Defence Medical Servicese as Air Commodore. So finally late ’78 I went over there for two and a half years and worked in the New Zealand Forces Hospital at Terror Camp, Sembawang, treating soldiers and their dependents. There were about one thousand five hundred servicemen and dependents in Singapore at that stage, and I was also involved with treating the servicemen and dependents at the Royal Australian Air Force bases at Tengah in Singapore and Butterworth in Malaysia.
I also took care of our battalion soldiers and would go out in the jungle with them at any opportunity on manoeuvres. We would live in hoochies and move tactically through the jungle. I gained a lot of experience from them and the SAS there. This included diving with Bro Terry, my diving partner for a while, who later died in the Philippines.
This guy was as tough as nails and when I first met him I thought he was a little sceptical about me. However we ended up getting along really well and had some neat dives together.
While I was in Singapore I helped organize the first Adventure Training Exercise to Nepal because I knew the Solukhumbu area of Nepal intimately and I had a lot of ideas based upon my experience in the mountains of Nepal with my passion for long distance endurance.
I recall I was really struck by a comment Sir Edmund Hillary’s chief sirdar, Mingma Tshering, made to me. He was about 55 years of age back then, and in those days I thought that was pretty old. He was a tough old coot and a bit of an alcoholic. He used to say, “walking faster than flying” and what he meant by that was, that aircraft could not leave Kathmandu for the mountain airstrips until the morning fog had lifted about 10 or 11 am. However, the winds pick up in the afternoons in the mountains, so there was a narrow window of only an hour or two in which planes could take off and land. The pilots were also very open to bribery and if people with more money wanted to go somewhere else they wouldn’t come in at all. So Mingma knew there was a good chance a plane would not arrive for two or three days, and in 3 days you could have walked a hundred or more miles. He used to walk all day and all night and all the next day, never stopping for sleep or anything else, sometimes for 24 to 36 hours. He used to say, “18 hours long day, 24 hours very long and 14 hours a little soft”.
So when I went to Singapore, Lieutenant Colonel Brian McMahan, who later succeeded Len Thompson as the Brigadier Director General of Defence Medical Services, I, and another guy called Rob Hungerford decided that battalion soldiers were a bit fat and unfit and we needed to get them lean and mean. To do that we needed to set an example and had to be as equally as fit as them.
We came up with a program where we measured their body fat and physical fitness and anybody who didn’t get up to G2 grading was threatened with going home if they didn’t come up to standard within 3 months. When I went there in 1978, 20% of the battalion was overweight by athletic standards, and after two years only 2% were. That was a dramatic and significant difference which was reflected in their capabilities.
Subsequently I noticed when I went to East Timor where they had a no alcohol policy that the battalion soldiers tended to maintain a much higher fitness level, despite being confined to the camp area much of the time.
The adventure training exercises were intended to extend soldiers way past their normal limits of physical activity and resources. We took 20 people to Nepal on the first trip and we did 650kms from a place called Bharabise up to near Base Camp Everest, to Thami and back out over several mountain ranges down to the British military base in Dharan.
A couple of years later when I was back in New Zealand when I was Base Medical Officer at Woodburn, I organized another one, again for servicemen based in Singapore, including many ex SAS personnel and one female who was as tough as nails. She walked a total of 600kms with a broken fifth metatarsal in her foot, leaving about an hour before us in the morning and finishing up to three hours after us in the evenings, but did it. This made people realize that being fit for rugby, a marathon or a walk in the hills was not the same as being fit for 650kms, walking long distances day after day, every day. It was a great result even if not completely politically popular, for it exposed some deficiencies in the overall fitness of some of our troops.
After this I needed to find something else to do in medicine. I had arranged to do Diplomas in Aviation Medicine, Tropical Medicine, Child Health and Hygiene in Farnborough and London, because I had eighteen months paid leave and allowances from my military service. The idea was to end up working in developing countires with WHO. Unfortunately about a month before I was due to go to England Maggie Thatcher changed the rules and all of a sudden I had to pay twenty thousand pounds and I did not have this sort of money.
I heard of a job in York, Northern England, through a friend of mine at a very highly regarded hospital with the highest pass rate in anesthesia in the whole of the United Kingdom. It was a very enlightened department that put education first.
There was fierce competition and obviously the best British candidates got in first and there was one position reserved for someone from another part of the world with an interesting Curriculum Vitae. Usually it was someone from Africa or India.
I applied and they accepted me because of my experience in Vietnam and Nepal. It really got me on my feet for when I got there, there were these two girls who I thought were bog standard English graduates but they knew 10 times what I knew and put me to shame, making me work twice as hard as I would have otherwise. I subsequently found out one of them went on to win the Nuffield prize for topping the whole of the United Kingdom, including all foreigners. No wonder they set such a pace.
Because they were so good and the environment was so supportive of learning, they helped me through. I got my Fellowship in the Royal College of Anaesthetists in a rather rapid time and then I came back to New Zealand and did the Australasian College exams and here I am as a specialist anaesthetist.
Since the air force I hadn’t maintained military contact for there was little offering in Dunedin, but in the last two years I did a tour of duty in east Timor in May 2000, at the end of the 1st Battalion and beginning of the 2nd Battalion stints. At that time conditions were still pretty rough, although by the time I did my second stint in August 2001, it had changed quite considerably from a barbwire concentration camp full of mud to a dry tropical paradise, more or less.
Because some medical personnel had done two and even three tours of east Timor and we simply didn’t have the available medical personnel, we had to hand the role over to Slovakia. In fact I headed the hand over. So the Forward Surgical Team was then no more and in fact I am now due to go up to Waiouru and help set it up again so when we next need to be deployed we have the people and expertise at our disposal.
This is important as one of the big things that happened post Viet Nam was that we lost a lot of the expertise and there were no old-timers to show the way to do things. You can write things down all you like but without that practical experience being handed down you will find yourself reinventing the wheel and that was very apparent the first time I was in East Timor. The old knowledge from the second world war, Korean war and Viet Nam had been lost. However, hopefully lessons have been learned and there are times coming up that I think are going to be less stable. We were nearly to be involved in Afghanistan and will be possibly in the Solomon Islands or some such tropical place of strife. To keep us ticking over, there’s nothing like real experience with real patients even if it’s not war, but things like natural disasters or people in strife economically. It’s important to keep the knowledge going so that when there is a real crisis, and there will be, we will still be there and can do something effectively. Hopefully I won’t be too old for that because I certainly would want to be there.
One difference I noticed between my first and second tours in East Timor was how the medical teams on the first tour were all regular serving personnel and how on second tour numbers were made up of mainly civilians and territorials. These civilians had worked in some hot spots and disaster areas around the world and provided a valuable para military service. It’s so important that these valuable volunteers are listed and made to feel useful and wanted, so we will see them again. East Timor really opened my eyes about these people, who you would think coming from civi street wouldn’t be able to hack it under fairly severe military conditions. But they do and there are these people out there that can not only hack it but also do very well.
There are a lot of people out there that are as tough as nails like those that do the Southern Traverse and iron men events, but if you don’t know who they are, its not as if you can look them up under ‘tough as nails’ in the phone book. You need to keep records of such people.”
When asked of his Singapore ‘dawn till dusk’ marathon success, John referred to it to as a bit of a farce. He’d run enough marathons before this and had managed to get third in the Singapore National cross country marathon, finishing in three hours three minutes, which back then he didn’t consider that good a time but he would love to be able to do that time now. John and a friend had heard of this ‘dawn till dusk’ ultra marathon being organized and decided to give it a go and just to see how far they could get and last.
It started at 6:00am and went all day and after about 50 km John realized there were only about fifteen of the many tens of people that started left in the race.
Says John, “Because I hadn’t prepared for this event and didn’t have any food I became hypoglycaemic and had to stop at a construction site where I managed to get some bread and sugar and all of a sudden I was ready to go again and in fact won the race beating my friend into second place. The record of 85km I believe I still hold to this day. Not far by temperate standards, but this was in 28-35’C and high humidity.”
John is very competitive still and there are only three people who have run the Kepler Challenge more times than him at the moment. John’s belief is that if you keep plodding away, one day you will come out the other end and achieve your goals.
John began training in hand-to-hand combat under Geoff Todd in 1985 and is still a member of the Todd Group today. In Vietnam, as well as facing other life threatening situations, he was shot at and was never interested in taking up a traditional or competitive art. He states that when he entered Geoff Todd’s facility Geoff was the first guy who talked sense in regards to close combat training describing the training as realistic without all the time wasting.
John is not into show and has always been impressed by people who don’t need to make much noise but deliver and says “I only wish I could keep up the training but my work schedule is very demanding. Geoff showed me a lot of things about how you can do more than you think you can and I have always been very grateful for that.
My oldest son Michael will always be indebted for what Geoff taught him and I have another son who will soon be ready for training.”
John has always assisted Geoff in every way possible as a doctor on phase tests and at fight nights and brings to such events not only his professional medical contribution but also practical realism, John knows human strengths and weaknesses and just how far and what a combatant can endure.
He is highly respected and regarded for his commitment to everything he undertakes by all his friends at the Todd Group. John has saved many people in his lifetime and thinks nothing of it as he is not one to make a big fuss or wants to have a big fuss made about his efforts. However to recall an incident where John and his family were at a swimming pool in Los Angeles Xmas 2000 where not far from where John and his boys were having fun he noticed a boy playing with what appeared to be a toy on the bottom of the pool. All of a sudden John noticed the boy becoming anxious and went over to find that it was a young 8-year-old Korean girl who had drowned and was at the bottom of the pool. He immediately got her out of the pool but thought she was gone as she was deeply unconscious. He did what he does everyday of his life as an anesthetist, even though from previous experience he was concerned that even if he could resuscitate the girl she would have brain damage. He never stopped trying and after 10 minutes she began coughing and vomited in John’s mouth while he was resuscitating her and finally he got water out of her, got her started again, instructed the paramedics to give her oxygen and 48 hours later she was discharged, fortunately without brain damage.
Some months later John received a call from the chief of the Orange County fire service/paramedics who had been in touch with the chief fire officer here who in return went up to John’s house and presented him with a plaque and citation. John considers the guys who went into the Twin Towers heroes, not himself doing what he does everyday, but whether he likes to admit it or not, he is.
He looks at things practically and says, “Saving a life is his job but he did not have to risk his own life like the bravery shown by the heroes at the world trade center”.
John has moved up through the ranks in the armed forces and in 1980 was the youngest Squadron Leader (Major equivalent) and has come back into the Territorial Forces recently as an army Major. He hopes that he won’t stay a Major for too long and has aspirations of being involved in the higher echelon pertaining to people and teams going to places like Afghanistan or where ever.
John enjoys being involved in the type of work involved in the Forward Surgical Team and in comparison finds civilian work very routine. His civilian positions include Clinical Lecturer in Anaesthesia at the Otago Medical School, consultant anesthetist at the Dunedin Hospital, and specialist anesthetist at the Mercy Hospital. He is currently the chairman of the Combined Medical Consultant group, chairman of the Mercy Hospital Anaesthesia Department and a member of the Mercy Hospital Medical Advisory Committee.
He has reached the top echelon in his field and there is no further he can go. John loved the challenge of the military, Vietnam and Nepal and holds them very dearly, for as he says, anything one did there really mattered, but in civilian life if you dropped dead tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter, there would be someone to fill your shoes. The same could be said of his military work but it is the challenge of where you are in a situation; if you don’t do anything, people die, but if you do your best, a lot of them live and that is incredibly satisfying. When he thinks back to Vietnam and being thrown into the deep end he is horrified at some of the things he had to do out of necessity, but much of it worked. John says you would be amazed at what you can achieve with a great deal of will and the desire to do everything you can. You can actually achieve a lot even with only a little knowledge as long as one has the ability to cope.
Says John, “That is what Geoff Todd’s unarmed combat teaches you; how to cope, like outward bound adventure type programs today, they promote getting out there and doing it yourself and bringing out the best in you, not just relying on others to do it. The military and unarmed combat operates outside many of the narrow guidelines or civilian boundaries and all of a sudden you can take control and do what you need to do.”
John has always installed in his boys that if you are in a tough situation take care of it effectively and finish it, never do anything half hearted as you could end up dead. You must meet violence with violence and follow through. This doesn’t mean being a bully or initiating violence, but if forced upon you, you have to handle it in an effective way. Its not just physical combat, its intellectual combat. John even had to face violence while working as an anaesthetic registrer in an intensive care unit where an individual with physostigmine overdose began tearing things apart, and then the security staff disappeared as the patient was making his way through the wards and John was trying to block his path until finally he tried to force his way into a cardiac theatre where there was an operation in progress. John had to make a decision whether to physically overcome him or not as all but one female registrar had vacated the scene. He took control and eventually pinned him down so the female registrar could give him a shot of midazolam in the thigh, which eventually made him go limp.
It was only some time later when writing up the medical records that he realized he had fractured his thumb in the incident, which considering the amount of punches and kicks he’d had to contend with and the mere fact as a doctor he could not just use deadly force, which would have been a lot easier, he had to risk personal injury to subdue him.
John’s eldest son Michael has been a member of the Todd Group since 1993 and has moved right up through the ranks to third phase and instructor rank. He has attended courses in New Zealand and Australia assisting Geoff over the past several years and has been trained by such respected instructors as hand to hand combat master chief instructor Lawrence Jordan, Major John Whipp and chief instructor Ron Evans.
John described Michael as a fairly active child, “At age seven I took him and his brother who was aged 5 at the time over the Routeburn track by myself. I carried the 5 year old the whole way and Michael walked by himself in extremely cold and wet weather. It didn’t worry Michael one bit and he did the Milford Track when he was ten.
I was very fit in those days and then suddenly one day Michael thrashed me in running. I remember with only three significant practice runs Michael ran the Three Peaks race and he got sixth up against top national runners finishing only fifteen minutes or so behind the leader.
At school he was rather laid back and enjoyed partying but did well. His worst subject was German and ironically he ended up on a student exchange to Germany where he got a love of languages. On his return to New Zealand he went to university and studied biology and genetics and he passed all right but wasn’t really sure on what he wanted to do. He started to learn Mandarin and Spanish.
When Michael was in Germany age 16 he went to England for 4 weeks by himself with only twenty five pounds and got a job as farm labourer to support himself. Thereafter he travelled all around Europe, the Ukrain, Serbia and South America before coming home. He took off again this time bound for China but ended up in Syria spending a year in a refugee camp learning Arabic. In his travels Michael supported himself by working on farms, busking, teaching unarmed combat and organizing pop concerts.
Since then he has joined the British armed forces after passing his entry exams for officer training with flying colours, graduating as 2nd Lieutenant from Sandhurst in August 2002, and is currently involved in specialist commando training. He represented Sandhurst at the annual officers’ training school competitions at Westpoint where he and his team won the event. Like father like son and grandfather, who was also a Lieutenant Colonel in the army who saw service in WWII and John’s uncle a Lieutenent Colonel in the medical core plus on his mother’s side an uncle who was a regular force Lieutenant Colonel after serving in the Korean War.”
John is definitely not your run of the mill doctor and is and would be just as happy in some far away country out in the jungle or high in the mountains where everything is demanding, resource limited and risks a reality.
From Geoff, “My honest opinion of John who I know as a friend through training and in his professional capacity as a doctor is that he is a man’s man, happy to associate with people of all walks of life and all classes if they are committed to what they are doing.
His life that we have only briefly reflected in this article is one of extreme professionalism and total commitment, physically, mentally and professionally.
The senior members of the Todd Group and I personally consider John in the highest possible regard and are very fortunate indeed that he so freely offers his services and assists us with our medical requirements.
