Colonel Hay takes reins of Kapooka's Army Training Centre

THE military is no place for sentiment and after two years in command of Kapooka's Army Recruit Training Centre, Colonel Graeme Finney is almost ready to shuffle off to Canberra to embark on his next challenge.The man replacing him in January, Colonel David Hay, is all too familiar with the rigmarole of relocation for a new posting and this week he has been preparing to do just that, spending four days at Kapooka to get a feel for the challenges that await.Yesterday he boarded a plane bound for Brisbane where he will gather his wife and four young children, "pack up the Tarago" and make the long drive to Wagga to settle the family in to its new environment before Christmas.Col Hay anticipates holding the role of commandant at Kapooka for three years and feels well equipped to take the baton from his predecessor."My biggest challenge will be to maintain the standard of recruit marching out of the place," Col Hay said."I've been really impressed - it's a robust training environment and I want to make sure that continues."Although the main conflicts Australian troops are flying into at the moment are in the middle East - Iraq and Afghanistan - however, Col Hay does not believe it is his role to train recruits for a specific war."It's more appropriate to have a generalist approach ... to teach skills to survive as a soldier," he said.Having served in Cambodia, the Middle East, Bosnia, East Timor and as a sub-unit commander with the British Army in Germany, Kapooka's troops will no doubt get the benefit of Col Hay's experience as they learn what it takes to be a soldier.