Dario Nustrini entered the army for many of the usual reasons young people do. The way he left it was anything but usual. After six years in the service, on deployment alongside Nato forces in Iraq, the communications specialist had an epiphany: “The money and the resources and the manpower going into this weren’t really helping. And in a lot of ways, there was a good argument that we were the bad guys. Not as bad as Isis, but there was definitely a large amount of self-interest [shown by] the countries there that wasn’t really that altruistic.”
So the lance corporal quit, did a creative writing course and, as of this interview, the now-32-year-old has been a firefighter for two weeks.
Until Iraq, he hadn’t given the geopolitical implications of his chosen career much thought, although he’d been in uniform for a long time. As outlined in his new memoir, Nothing Significant to Report, he joined the Army Cadets at 13.
“I joined because my best friend at the time was in it and his older brother had gone through and done all this really cool stuff. We’d go shooting and hiking and learn bush craft and get to wear soldiers’ uniforms and all that.”
It provided some order and sense of achievement during teenage years that were more than usually turbulent at home and at Auckland Grammar School, where Nustrini was an outsider.
“For me, it was a very archaic, pretty backwards way of running a school,” he says. “Everyone says it’s a really great school but I think it’s only a great school if you play First XV rugby or are a maths prodigy. You have to fit into these very specific boxes that they have.”
Physical activity, fitting into boxes – it sounds a bit like the army? “I didn’t realise I liked sports until I got to the army. I didn’t play all through school. I was too busy smoking cigarettes behind the bike sheds. Then I got to the army and you had to play, and I was like: ‘Oh, I’m not actually bad at this and it’s actually quite enjoyable when you get a team together.’”
His family profile did not fit the school’s elite demographic. “It was quite obvious from my uniform. I have three siblings, and we lived in a very small rented house on the very outskirts of the school zone. Going to the houses of people I went to school with after school was quite an experience.”
There was also a resource deficit: equipment costs were prohibitive. “If I was interested in something, even fleetingly, I didn’t really have the means to follow through.”
He “aged out” of cadets. Then there was a drifty year after school “doing sweet fuck all” before he decided to go back and give the army a go, which “I would chalk up as a good thing because I’m pretty sure I would have not done much with my 20s. I flipped between two extremes. I went from having pretty much no structure from 13 to 18, and then, maybe subconsciously, I was like, what I need is all the structure all at once. Or maybe it was just a happy accident.”
The path he took to an army career is not uncommon. “A lot of the guys you talk to come from very similar backgrounds. Then there’s people who have been gunning for it their whole lives and have lived very structured lives on purpose, and it suits them really well.”
The daily grind
The army, with its discipline and challenges, gave a drifting Nustrini focus, so he presumably has a view on how effective boot camps for “troubled teens” will be. “I think it’s a pretty terrible idea, to be honest.”
But it didn’t do him any harm. “Absolutely not. But the key difference was that I chose to go there. Because you’ve been ordered to be there, you’re gonna resent whoever put you there. In the army, we talk about a positive outcome from a negative experience, like carrying a big pack up a hill.
“With boot camp, you’ve removed the positive outcome from that negative experience. You’re just inflicting discomfort on people because you think it will do them good. They’re not going to dig deep and find what it is that makes them tick.”
Which is not to say the army was constant stimulation and insights. In fact, the book does a good job of conveying the monotony and grind of the life. How did someone with what has turned out to be a bit of a sensitive, creative side cope?
“The best way of getting through basic training was that sometimes you have to just switch your brain off and be like, ‘If I start thinking about this too much I’m just going to walk away.’
“But also, I’d had the stress of flatting and working a very badly paid job, and all of a sudden, you get food brought to you and your accommodation is sorted and life’s little stresses are gone. Now, I’m just worried about the big stress of the giant corporal yelling at me.”
Nustrini was a communications specialist in the Signal Corps, which has put some limits on the book he has been able to write. “The difficulty was that my trade was classified. Just the nature of the other countries that we work with and pretty much everything I did on a daily basis was for our eyes only. So it made writing the book a bit of a challenge. But I think I’ve kept it vague enough to be safe, but specific enough to be interesting.”
As he describes it, his work involved needing “to know how to do everything from carrying and operating the section radio for a 10-man patrol, right up to connecting to a satellite network so a brigade commander can talk to other countries”. In other words: considerably less digging than was demanded of the grunts in the infantry. “I don’t think I would have lasted as long if I’d been a grunt or an engineer.”
Where did he see himself in five years’ time? He shared a vision with two mates.
“The three of us were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll stay in until we’re all corporals.’ Only one of us actually kept that promise, and it wasn’t me. The only definite plan was, ‘I’ll do it until I don’t like it.’ I ended up sticking to that.”
And he didn’t like it in Iraq, though he was happy to go there initially. “I guess I was probably brutally fundamentalist: we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys. And that’s what I really wanted it to be about.”
His view changed when he saw that “people who were quite a bit higher up than me, either in a performative way or in a genuine way, acted like they were saving the day. There was a bit of a swagger to it. And I was like, ‘I really don’t see how we’re helping.’ I wasn’t seeing the results that I thought I would.”
This divergent view sounds incongruous, one his training should have prevented him forming in the first place. “I’m probably a little bit more of an empath than the average person who joins the military. I definitely didn’t buy into that ‘slay the Huns’ mentality that a lot of guys try to have. I don’t think I have a better view of the big picture than anyone out there. It was just my take and my opinion. And I figured that really wasn’t for me, the way it was being done. As a lance corporal, I wasn’t going to be able to change the way it was being done, but I couldn’t participate.”
Helping hands
The possibility of another deployment soon after he got back prompted the decision to leave. Now, he is a firefighter with Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz).
There are obvious similarities with the army: uniforms, discipline, physical requirements. But there is also one significant point of difference: “Every time you show up somewhere, you’re only there to be helpful. That’s basically the whole job. Not to get anyone in trouble, not to tell anyone off, just help out. The cops write people tickets, and alarm companies give people fines if an alarm goes off but there’s no fire. But as soon as no one’s in danger any more, we get to hop in the truck and leave.”
Fenz had been an option before he joined the army but relatives in the service told him “at 19, you realistically aren’t going to get in. They always want people who have had a little bit more life experience.” And, with a straight face, he adds: “So I definitely put that on the back burner.”
His career trajectory took a detour between the army and Fenz, when he enrolled at university to study creative writing. He had always been a reader.
“I got given a copy of The BFG when I was about 7 and I read the whole thing cover to cover. After that, I was like, books are the best.” But when he lost interest in schooling in general, “the whole reading and writing really took a back seat”.
Paradoxically, although school did nothing to foster his interest in writing, the army did. “I got volunteered to write an article for the Signals Corps magazine, and after I’d written one or two of those, it was clear that they were going to get me to write articles for my squadron going forward. I never thought of it as a chore.”
University, however, required a few adjustments for the then-25-year-old. “I felt pretty old being in class with people who had been in high school six months earlier. The army is [more than 80%] males. It’s pretty much the opposite when you go, not just to being at university but to doing an arts degree, then specifically a writing degree. In an average writing class of 30 or 40 people, there would be one or two of us guys. So that was a big, big flip for me.”
Asked to nominate an influential teacher from his University of Auckland course, he names poet Michele Leggott. “Poetry was a branch of English and literature that I really hadn’t connected with. I was fiction all the way. After doing her class – I think because I needed the credit – I definitely wasn’t good at poetry, but I do now have some poems that I read. So that’s definitely credit to her as a teacher.”
He’s done dialogue writing for Shortland Street and is now concentrating on assembling some short stories – mainly speculative fiction with cautionary tendencies – for his website.
Nothing Significant to Report is in the classic memoir tradition of a young person’s journey to find himself. In Nustrini’s case it has involved that most basic part of one’s identity: his name. The book is authored by Dario Nustrini. The soldier in its pages is Dario Davidson. Nustrini is his mother’s original surname.
“I was born Dario Davidson, which is my birth father’s last name. He and my mum split up when I was about eight and our relationship deteriorated more and more over the years.
“About two years ago, it occurred to me that I’ve been toting around this name, and it’s really my mother who is owed most of the credit for who I am.
“She was the person who did all the work, and you know, I’m really close to her side of the family. And I really connected with the Italian heritage as well. I’m really glad I decided to do it.”
Questions of identity and finding yourself are significant, but there are others Nustrini must also face regularly. When they find out you’re in the army, the first question civilians ask is, “Have you ever killed anyone?”
It’s too soon for Nustrini to know for sure what the Fenz equivalent is, but he suspects people are very interested in questions about cats stuck in trees. And yes, it’s fun riding in a fire engine with the siren going.
Nothing Significant to Report: The Misadventures of a Kiwi Soldier, by Dario Nustrini (HarperCollins, $39.99), is available now.
