Courage under fire

Photography by David Hahn. Styling by Teagan Sewell.

There is no greater honour than the Victoria Cross – a medal so rare it had not been granted for 40 years. So just how has VC hero Mark Donaldson gone from dodging bullets to family life? Sue Williams reports.

It hurts to send the man you love off to war. For Emma Donaldson, wife of Trooper Mark Donaldson, the first Australian to win the Victoria Cross in 40 years, it is always an agonising wrench. Emma has sent Mark off to battlegrounds in East Timor and Iraq, but the time she remembers most vividly was when she sent him off to fight in Afghanistan.

Standing outside their home in Perth, WA, Mark hugged their then 18-month-old daughter, Kaylee, before kissing Emma and turning to step into the waiting car. Urgently, Emma pulled him close, holding his face in her hands. “I love you,” she said. “And if you die doing something stupid, I’m going to be so angry!”

Emma, 34, is nothing if not a realist. As a soldier herself, she knows that when Mark, a member of the Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment, goes into battle, doing a good job automatically puts him in harm’s way. Yet, in August 2008, Emma had no idea that the man she loved was going to do something so extraordinary, so heroic, that it would change their lives forever.

The first she heard about it was a few weeks later, as she was pounding the treadmill at a gym in Perth. On the TV news was a report of a fierce gun battle in the distant deserts of Afghanistan in which a number of Australian troops had been injured. Emma’s thoughts turned to Mark, but she pushed her fears away, knowing that if something was wrong, she would be told soon enough. Two days later, her fears evaporated when she picked up the phone and heard Mark’s voice.

They chatted about their daughter and their lives at opposite ends of the world and, just as they ended their conversation, Mark added, almost as an aside, “I’ve done something you’re probably not going to be too impressed with, but I’ll tell you about it when I get home”.

Almost two months later, when his regiment returned home, Mark sat Emma down and sketched in the details of how he and his mates had fought, under heavy machine gun and rocket fire, to escape a bloody Taliban ambush, the same one she had heard reported on the television. She was stunned by what she heard.

“I lost the air from my lungs and I had a sick feeling in my stomach,” she tells The Weekly. “I didn’t want to listen, but I had to and I couldn’t show how scared I was because I didn’t want to upset our child. He told me there had been bullets going everywhere and that a guy had been blown from a car, and he had got him and brought him back. In the end, I thought, ‘Okay! That doesn’t sound too bad!’ ”