Tributes have been flowing for NZ Army sergeant and French Foreign Legion veteran Ray Trembath who died last week at 67.
He spoke to RNZ's Bryan Crump about his 42-year military career back in 2016.
NZ serviceman and French Foreign Legion veteran Ray Trembath Photo: Supplied
Read: "He would always have a good yarn or a dirty joke, or something to raise morale" (Stuff)
Ray said that growing up in a military family, he was 6 when he decided to join the army.
"Every Friday there was a war movie on TV and half my family had done time in the New Zealand defence force.'
He signed up in 1973 and left in 1986 to do some solo travel around Africa and the US.
By that time a friend who'd served in the French Foreign Legion had already "planted a seed", Ray says, and in 1989 he enlisted with them for a five-year stint.
"Off I went, adventuring."
At that time, about five New Zealanders were signing up every year, he says, "generally for the adventure", but new recruits were most often Portuguese and English.
With the legion, Ray was a member of the elite parachute regiment and served in Chad, Somalia, Ethiopia and Rwanda whose "beautiful people" are even more trustworthy than New Zealanders, he said.
That said, Ray saw very few New Zealand soldiers commit "misdemeanours against humanity".
Unlike some other nationalities whose moral standards are restricted to "their lifestyle at home."
"New Zealanders generally come from a race of people that have high moral standards. I always worked on the principles that what I did over there I could tell my brother or my mother or father and what I do at home I hold the same values."
Raymond Trembath serving with the French Foreign Legion in Somalia. Photo: Supplied
After leaving the French Foreign Legion in 1994, Ray did construction work in Auckland for five years.
Then at an ANZAC service in 2000, he ran into a fellow army officer who told him he was taking soldiers to Timor.
Two years later, Ray rejoined the army as a corporal, eventually serving in Timor and PNG.
When he was diagnosed with cancer aged 60, Ray decided to call it a day on his army career.
"I thought that's me, I'm out of here, eh? I'm gonna have a vacation."
Rather than going to countries to "blatantly fight", Ray viewed his military work as "maintaining stability" in the places he was deployed.
"If you choose to be a soldier and that's your vocation… then I suppose you do get hardened to a lot of things but you also get open to humanity."
