\u201cThe physical challenge was bearable,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was the weight of processing my thoughts that proved the hardest. And that\u2019s exactly why I\u2019m walking.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Anderson, 44, the march north with dog Missy is not just distance. It is a confrontation with guilt, memory, and the long shadow of a life once spent as a warrior.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know how to talk about these things,\u201d he tells the Herald. And then he does exactly that.<\/p>\n
Shane Anderson and Missy at the start of their 3000km trek. Anderson is marching for mental health, wanting those who served in the military to be recognised – and to find peace.<\/p>\n
Anderson was 22 when he joined the New Zealand Army in 2005, older than many recruits arriving for basic training at Waiouru.<\/p>\n
Those few extra years of life experience pushed him naturally into a leadership role. Unofficially at first. Later, the stripes on his arm marked his progression.<\/p>\n
The Army had long been on his mind. \u201cIt was like a boyhood thing coming true,\u201d he says. And while others might sign up to learn a civilian trade, Anderson chose the infantry. His trade would be war.<\/p>\n
He was posted to 2\/1 RNZIR, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment. Its soldiers march under a single-word motto: Onward.<\/p>\n
The word captures the essence of the infantry creed: advance, close with the enemy, finish the fight.<\/p>\n
For the past two weeks, that has been Anderson\u2019s direction of travel.<\/p>\n
What happens after the fighting stops is harder to measure. There are no reliable figures on how many veterans New Zealand has. There are no comprehensive records of mental health outcomes or other war-related injuries. There is no official count of suicides among veterans.<\/p>\n
In Australia, when the number of veteran suicides became known<\/a>, it led to the announcement in 2021 of a royal commission of inquiry.<\/p>\n Here, the picture is far less clear. Anderson is one data point in a dataset that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n As his journey progresses, he will walk the story of his life. And, he hopes, find a way to come to terms with the deaths of many friends, and particularly the death of Lance Corporal Rory Malone<\/a>. <\/p>\n Becoming a soldier<\/p>\n Anderson grew up in \u014ctaki, largely outdoors in the bush and rivers around the K\u0101piti Coast town.<\/p>\n Although ethnically Fijian, he was wh\u0101ngai\u2019d to a M\u0101ori family and grew up around marae, speaking te reo. <\/p>\n His first trip to Fiji felt strange. \u201cIt was confusing, to say the least.\u201d<\/p>\n Life shifted again when the family moved from rural market gardening to the city. Anderson attended St Peter\u2019s College in Auckland, leaving school around the time his parents split.<\/p>\n Soon, he was working the doors at Karangahape Rd club 420, the centre of Auckland\u2019s hip-hop scene. He describes himself at the time as a \u201chooligan\u201d; at some stage, concerned parents intervened, and he left for Fiji, where he worked as a diver.<\/p>\n Eventually, he returned to Auckland and, not long after, joined the army.<\/p>\n Basic training began in Waiouru before shifting to Burnham Camp outside Christchurch.<\/p>\n His transformation into a soldier took place across the open country around Tekapo and the rain-soaked bush of the West Coast.<\/p>\n Anderson laughs as he recalls the name the soldiers gave it: the \u201cWet Coast\u201d.<\/p>\n Humour stitched together the bonds between soldiers grinding through days of cold, mud and exhaustion.<\/p>\n It was a band of brothers, and sisters, bound by the knowledge that survival depended on each other.<\/p>\n \u201cYou look to your left and your right. The guy next to me wants me alive more than I do.\u201d<\/p>\n Anderson\u2019s career progressed steadily: training, promotion and overseas deployments.<\/p>\n In 2006, he was among those sent to Tonga after riots in Nuku\u02bbalofa left six people dead while large parts of the capital burned.<\/p>\n New Zealand troops were there to protect infrastructure, patrol the streets and help stabilise a tense situation.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were 160kg Tongans burning and rampaging through the city. You can call it what you like, but it was f***ing wild.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Anderson deployed to East Timor on a six-month stabilisation mission after unrest in the young nation.<\/p>\n That led to further training and a promotion to corporal.<\/p>\n Afghanistan loomed next. For soldiers like Anderson, such deployments were the natural evolution of training.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t get there. And what happened to those who did? That\u2019s part of the reason he\u2019s walking.<\/p>\n Walking with ghosts<\/p>\n There are cemeteries along the route of Anderson\u2019s long walk.<\/p>\n Soldiers often look around after a few years and realise how many who began the march beside them are gone. It is different for civilians. A soldier\u2019s life is one shaped by violence and chance.<\/p>\n The first stop will be Yaldhurst Cemetery in Christchurch. There lies Clinton-John Henry Botha.<\/p>\n Botha was Anderson\u2019s second-in-command in East Timor. He died aged 21 after complications from surgery in Christchurch in March 2009<\/a>. An inquest later identified missed opportunities to save his life.<\/p>\n Anderson\u2019s route north is marked in this way. In Kawerau Cemetery lies Corporal Luke Tamatea<\/a>, killed in Afghanistan. <\/p>\n In Hamilton Park Cemetery at Newstead lies Private Kirifi Mila<\/a>, who died after a Humvee rolled, also in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Rory Malone rests at Manukau Memorial Gardens in South Auckland. Kane Te Tai<\/a>, who died fighting in Ukraine, is buried in Waikumete Cemetery in Glen Eden. In the north, Corporal Dougie Hughes<\/a> lies at Pakotai, near Kaikohe.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of my journey is to stop and pay my respects to the boys. There\u2019s a few of them.\u201d<\/p>\n The ripples of grief extending from each of those deaths still cause pain in the lives they touched. <\/p>\n For Anderson, that\u2019s particularly the case with Malone, who died in the 2012 Battle of Baghak<\/a> in Afghanistan, a firefight that also killed Lance Corporal Pralli Durrer<\/a> and wounded six others.<\/p>\n The extent to which friendly fire contributed remains debated. The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) conceded it contributed to two of the six injuries.<\/p>\n Anderson didn\u2019t get to Afghanistan, and there\u2019s pain in that. He asks if it would have been different if he had. Malone took the spot Anderson had hoped for. Now Malone is dead, and Anderson walks with ghosts.<\/p>\n A soldier\u2019s life<\/p>\n He sighs. \u201cEveryone thinks we\u2019re peacekeepers.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s such a distance, he says, between soldiers and society.<\/p>\n Most civilians wouldn\u2019t understand, but an infantry soldier has learned a trade: warfighting. It\u2019s not necessarily a trade our modern world has comfort with, because it involves learning how to dominate and kill your opponent.<\/p>\n That trade is drilled until it becomes instinct. Each soldier knows exactly what the others will do when it matters. <\/p>\n Anderson explains it through a scene from the film 300. When a group of Arcadian soldiers offers to join the Spartans, King Leonidas asks of their professions: potters, blacksmiths, carpenters.<\/p>\n Turning to his own men, Leonidas asks: \u201cSpartans, what is your profession?\u201d The answer comes back in a thunderous chant. \u201cHoo! Hoo! Hoo!\u201d<\/p>\n Leonidas says to the Arcadian leader: \u201cI brought more soldiers than you did.\u201d<\/p>\n For Anderson, this is what he wrestled with when deployments were made to Afghanistan. Instead of sending the tight groups of infantry soldiers who had trained together for years, the NZDF mixed personnel from different trades and services into a cohort intended to carry out infantry tasks.<\/p>\n He feared that infantry soldiers, drilled to operate instinctively together, were being separated, and worried what it would do to their precision.<\/p>\n \u201cWith my instinctive fighters, I know exactly what they are going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n He told the Herald he raised those concerns with commanders. <\/p>\n Then he lost his chance at Afghanistan anyway, after punching a drunk private.<\/p>\n \u201cI was removed from the patrol because of the altercation I had with the private, but it felt like they were trying to quieten me down.\u201d<\/p>\n NZDF disputes that, saying combined-arms units are standard practice. <\/p>\n A spokesman told the Herald it was best military practice<\/a> to have a combination of skills and attributes available for commanders on the ground.<\/p>\n A spiral downwards<\/p>\n By the time the Battle of Baghak unfolded in August 2012, Anderson had left the Army and was working at a marina in Papua New Guinea.<\/p>\n When news arrived that Malone was dead, he was crushed.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was a bone-cruncher that took me straight to the bar.\u201d<\/p>\n Fifteen days later, Tamatea was killed by a roadside bomb along with Corporal Jacinda Baker and Private Richard Harris.<\/p>\n \u201cI drank and drank, and I failed to regulate myself for a long time after that. Being hit with that tidal wave was crippling.\u201d<\/p>\n The spiral led him to Perth and then to prison. <\/p>\n Already serving a sentence for stalking, burglary and drug possession, he was sentenced to almost five years after an encounter that left a 24-year-old with serious head injuries.<\/p>\n He accelerated his car and braked suddenly to remove the intoxicated man from the bonnet, then left him in a coma on the roadside after stealing his phone and bank cards. <\/p>\n He was later convicted of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm, and failing to stop and report the incident.<\/p>\n The routine of jail \u201ctriggered a military response\u201d, he says. \u201cI created order in chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n He swept the yard, taught te reo M\u0101ori and imposed discipline.<\/p>\n In 2021, he was deported to New Zealand as a 501 returnee<\/a>, his crimes meaning he no longer met the character test for an Australian visa. <\/p>\n Back home, he found work with Slab Specialists, a concrete foundation company run by Quentin Stevenson, who often takes on those unlikely to be employed by others.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you get them one-on-one, they\u2019re not bad bastards,\u201d Stevenson says. \u201cI just hear sad stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Anderson worked hard. Once, Stevenson recalls, he ran 45 minutes back to a job site after finishing because he felt he had not done enough that day.<\/p>\n But he couldn\u2019t outrun his grief. <\/p>\n \u201cThe plasters were coming off. I felt in a totally shit situation mentally.\u201d<\/p>\n Anderson says he planned his long walk half to isolate himself from stupidity and half \u201cto work through a few things. So long as I\u2019m physically tired at the end of the day, my mind stops racing and I can have some peace\u201d.<\/p>\n The walk north is part therapy, part mission. He hopes his story resonates with other veterans.<\/p>\n He carries guilt, too.<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t there in Afghanistan with [Malone]. He had taken my spot. I feel guilt about that, not being there.\u201d<\/p>\n The military court of inquiry into the incident found issues with command, communication and situational awareness, and problems with training and preparedness. That included gaps in pre-deployment training.<\/p>\n It also said the training gaps did not contribute to Kiwi casualties, saying the troops had been together for four months and had become a cohesive unit in that time.<\/p>\n The Red Diamond Club<\/p>\n The walk may be therapy, but it is also Anderson\u2019s statement about the lives he believes soldiers return to after the Army.<\/p>\n He says it took years after leaving the military before he even realised there was a veterans\u2019 support agency<\/a> in New Zealand. <\/p>\n Like many contemporary veterans, he says he struggled to find where he fitted once the structure of military life disappeared, and the weight of loss bore down.<\/p>\n He believes organisations meant to support veterans need to do more to stay close to those who served, and find ways to lend a hand when one is needed.<\/p>\n The Returned and Services Association community, he says, was created to serve generations of veterans, but it needs to evolve to meet the current generation of service people.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to honour the stewards … Those spaces are still there. We just need to shift the use of them to spaces where soldiers \u2013 veterans \u2013 can go.\u201d<\/p>\nJared Collet and Shane Anderson in Kaikoura in 2005 during a stopover on the bus ride from Waiouru to Burnham, only three months after Anderson signed up for the NZ Army, aged 22. <\/p>\n
Shane Anderson on his way north out of Southland with dog Missy.<\/p>\n
Shane Anderson on a previous visit to the grave of Kirifi Mila, who died aged 27 in Afghanistan. The hand signal denotes 2\/1 – 2nd Battalion of the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment.<\/p>\n
Shane Anderson and Missy are walking from Bluff to Cape Reinga.<\/p>\n
Missy is walking the length of New Zealand with Shane Anderson to raise awareness of the vulnerabilities of veterans.<\/p>\n
Lance Corporal Luke Tamatea feeds a baby in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
A firefight in Afghanistan. Lance Corporals Rory Malone and Pralli Durrer were killed and six of their colleagues wounded.<\/p>\n