The View From the Pointy End.

Written by Lauren Somers

Major Chris Roe says he lacks patience. And yet we talked for hours over lunch at the Naval, Military and Air Force Club of South Australia on Hutt Street, which he describes as private dining, not fine dining. A distinction that matters to him. Most things do.

He is also, it becomes apparent, a reader of people. Midway through a conversation about geopolitics he paused and said it plainly: "I can tell you're passionate about this. Your body language has changed." The welfare officer and the facilitator - the man who spent years reading soldiers in complex situations - entirely present at a lunch table. Astute is the word that comes to mind. He would probably find a less flattering one. And at the centre of almost every answer he gives is the same word. Team.

How it started

Chris completed a history and politics degree at the University of Adelaide with no strong plan for what came next. His closest friends had enlisted in the Army and the Air Force, seemed to be thriving, and the lifestyle appealed.

"I wasn't strategic about it. My friends were doing well. The lifestyle looked good. I went."

What followed was more than fifteen years as a Regular Army infantry officer and then many more in an active reserve and contractor role. The early years gave him two things that have never left him: a discovery that he was physically and mentally capable of far more than he had imagined, and - harder to learn - humility.

"When you're a commander but the youngest person in the room, the right thing is to take the advice of people more experienced than you. I didn't always do that early on."

He says it without defensiveness. It reads more like a man who has spent a long time sitting with that truth.

The pyramid, and what you see from it

The military is, by design, a pyramid. Most people who enter it will not reach the top, and the system - efficient, unsentimental - makes that plain in time. Chris describes the moment you realise the game has a natural limit for you not as a ceiling, but as a vantage point.

"The view gets sharper. You stop looking up and start seeing what's actually around you. Who needs what. Where you can genuinely be useful."

For Chris, that clarity arrived in the form of a welfare officer role within his original home, an infantry battalion. Not a deliberate career move. Just his people, in a complex situation, needing someone to show up.

He built the role as he went - knocking on doors, building relationships across the network of health and welfare professionals who supported soldiers, learning the framework from the inside. He asked for the independence to run it his own way. The results followed: the number of cases without a clear way forward greatly reduced.

"The stakes can be just as high in a welfare issue as they can on the battlefield," he says. "Once I realised I could make a difference - once a soldier sent a text thanking me - I knew that was a big deal. If they didn't mean it, they wouldn't bother."

That realisation - that being genuinely useful to a team he cared about was the most meaningful thing he had done - reframed everything.

What team actually means

Ask Chris what he most wants civilian organisations to understand about military culture, and his answer is immediate. Not discipline. Not hierarchy. Not resilience.

Team.

"One of the biggest challenges for any employer - not just in the context of ex-military people, but for anyone - is ensuring the individual feels genuinely part of a team working toward a clear shared objective. That's not a soft idea. It's a structural one."

The military understands that people do not perform in isolation. They perform in relation to each other, toward something shared, with a fallback position - someone to consult, someone to support, someone to absorb the weight when it gets heavy. Alongside that: shape, structure and clarity around the role each person is there to fulfil.

His decades of conversation across the military-civilian boundary have clarified, above all, how rarely civilian organisations provide those structural conditions - and how rarely they acknowledge the cost.

"Do what you say you do on your tin. When you actually do what you say, the branding and the values on the wall become the same thing. When you don't, people notice. And people remember."

It is a conviction he lives beyond the workplace. He describes a quiet concern about the declining membership of RSLs and institutions like the Club where we are sitting - whose motto, Pro Aris et Focis, For Hearth and Home, says plainly what it stands for, and which acknowledges that what it offers is "a sense of belonging that feels increasingly rare." These are not places of performance. They are places of team. And they are slowly emptying out.

His response is not to lament it from a distance. He holds monthly history talks at the Club - turning up, every month, creating the conditions for people to gather around something that matters. Doing what he says. 

The gap that still needs closing

He came to work with Military and Emergency Services Health Australia (MESHA) the way he comes to most things - through plain speaking. At a provider breakfast, introductions around the room, he said what he actually thought. MESHA noticed.

His work as a lived experience facilitator sees him facilitating a variety of programs to veterans (and their prospective employers) preparing to move into civilian work. At its core it is a translation program: helping people who have spent years building skills in an environment civilian employers often don't understand, to find the language to make those skills legible.

"The most common thing people are struggling to articulate is how their skills translate. Not because the skills aren't there. Because the language doesn't cross the border cleanly."

There is also a narrative he finds persistent and unhelpful - the idea that veterans arrive in civilian workplaces primarily as people who need accommodating. The wounded digger. The person to handle carefully.

"There is such a thing as strong mental health. Good mental health. The term has been used as a negative for too long."

"People leave for all sorts of reasons. Most of them are not broken. What they need - what any of us need - is to be part of something with a clear objective and a real team around them. Give them that, and most of them will do the rest themselves."

He will invest deeply in people willing to invest in themselves. He has little patience for the alternative - and considerable reserves of it for anyone genuinely trying.

What he knows now - and what he didn't always

Near the end of our conversation comes the question that produces the most interesting pause.

Has he always held such a strong personal sense of values around impact - around doing what you say, showing up properly for the people around you?

He thinks about it. Then: "Definitely not."

The clarity he now has was not innate. It was built - through his career as an officer, the welfare role, through years of conversation with people whose worlds looked very different from his own, through the slow accumulation of experience that changes not what you know but how you see.

His fascination with the American Civil War is perhaps the clearest window into how he thinks. It began without design: a long flight, a big book chosen at random from an airport bookstore, and something that never let go. Decades later he is still reading. Not a man drawn to simple answers, but to the hard questions about command, values under pressure, and what people owe each other when the stakes are at their highest.

Asked what he would tell his Duntroon self, he doesn't hesitate. "I wasn't a mentally strong enough person for the job I was put into to begin with. I would have been less arrogant. More collaborative. More consultative. I would have taken more little victories."

It is, perhaps, the sharpest lesson of all. "Your subordinates are watching you. Example is everything. That's not a principle. It's how the whole thing works."

Little victories. The welfare case that found a way forward. The veteran who finally finds the words. In a career built around large objectives, he has come to measure what matters in much smaller denominations.

Major Chris Roe spent decades in an organisation that asks everything of the people inside it. What he carries out - into every room he now walks into, as a facilitator, as a leader who has not yet run out of questions - is a clarity about what leadership is actually for.

Not rank. Not recognition. Not the view from the very top.

The view from the pointy end. Sharp enough, it turns out, to see exactly what needs doing.