Banda Aceh

I got personally familiar with this area on maps pretty good after the 2004 tsunami, which just was a fascinating, horrible, horrible tragedy, but a fascinating disaster in terms of geography.

Phuket's up at the top on the Thai side there, and Banda Aceh is at the tip of Sumatra and That's across the water from the mouth of the Strait.

Anyway, the whole thing is about 700 miles long, about the size of Florida with jungle and mountains down the middle and the water on its west side between Malaya at the time and Sumatra.

And that's the Strait of Malacca, which itself is 500 miles long.

And he has witnessed some of the most confronting events of our time.

He covered the tsunami in Banda Aceh where over 130,000 people died.

He photographed the losses of Black Saturday in 2009 and the challenges of Black Summer in 2019 and '20.

He spoke about the difficulty of showing widespread destruction in one photograph, being stuck behind roadblocks, sleeping in his car and the fine line between getting close enough to make a photograph meaningful and too close for comfort.

Although in 2005, the Indonesian health minister updated that total to 220,000.

In the northern provincial capital of Banda Aceh, one of the hardest hit areas, there were 30,000 deaths.

The

casualties in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka also numbered in the thousands, with the overall estimated loss of life near to 300,000 and within the vicinity of 1.7 million people losing their homes.

Wow.

I actually went to Banda Aceh in Sumatra to investigate that.

It's one of the wildest things I've ever seen.

That was wild.

The governments of the developed world, there was no benefit in that.

The tsunami came in, it whacked a bunch of towns in Thailand.

It totally destroyed Banda Aceh on the northeast tip of Sumatra, just completely wiped the place out.

Really one of the greatest natural disasters in all of humankind.

Really? Has that much time passed? Wow.

I actually went to Banda Aceh in Sumatra to investigate that.

It's one of the wildest things I've ever seen.

That was wild.

I mean, the tsunami came in.

It whacked a bunch of towns in Thailand.

It totally destroyed Banda Aceh on the northeast tip of Sumatra.

Just completely wiped the place out.

We need the manning.

Do you want to deploy to Banda Aceh? And I was very selfish at the time.

I was having too much fun on annual leave.

And I said no.

That grey space is our operating space.

That wide environment, we've seen how rapidly we had to respond to places like Banda Aceh and things like that.

And it's those types of responses that underpin the sustainment of modern international society.

And part of that is speed.

Yes, we did, Jody, we did.

The thing that followed on from that ALG thing was JDF 633.

I went over there knowing that having seen the brutality of Banda Aceh and that, like we were moving around piles of bodies with excavators over there.

I've seen things and felt things that collectively are on the edge of overwhelming me.