Battalion Group soldiering on

Major Lance Nicholas surveys the ground floor of the Kensington Army Hall where 20 or so territorials are training and notes that the Otago Mounted Rifles used to stable their horses here.

Where once there was the squelch of mud, there is now the distinctive sound of boots on asphalt.

"Thousands of young men and women from Otago and Southland have served in the military over the last 150 years," he says.

"Twelve to fifteen thousand in the First World War alone, not counting the Boer War, the Second World War, Korea, Borneo, Malaya and Vietnam.

"They went from having a sense of adventure and wanting to do their bit for the country to the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front."

"It was nothing to see 700 people on parade here during national service and in the early days of the Territorial Force."

This particular Wednesday night, numbers are low because tertiary students, who make up about 60% of the local territorial unit, are only just returning to Dunedin.

Usually, they would be preparing for a weekend exercise but instead they are drilling for today's charter parade which will mark the 150 years of military service in the South since the formation of the Dunedin Militia district in February 1860.

The 4th Otago and Southland Battalion Group (also known as 4 O South) is an army reserve unit that trains part-time soldiers to bolster numbers and skills in the Regular Force when needed.

Required to complete at least 20 days service each year, many territorials also volunteer for security and peacekeeping missions, leaving behind families and jobs to serve in places such as the Solomons, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

According to journalist John Cosgrove, who has spent the past year with the soldiers documenting their service for an upcoming photo exhibition, many territorials have a long-held desire to be part of the army.

Others "started out looking for the extra cash to pay the mortgage but have stayed on because it offered them comradeship, discipline, travel and an opportunity to pursue an outdoors lifestyle in complete contrast to their current careers, something to do on any weekend they had free".

"We're not cowboys or rednecks," says Staff Sergeant Glenn Vaughan, of Cromwell.

"People join for the adventure, the comradeship and the money.

A lot of this group are uni students, so it keeps their student loans down."

Sgt Vaughan was an 18-year-old builder when he and his friends saw a television advertisement for the territorials in 1988: "It had a Steppenwolf song, Born to be Wild, and helicopters.

We thought it would be fun, so three of us joined together ..."

.

Although he is now in the Regular Force, he remains loyal to the territorials and "despises" terms sometimes accorded them, such as "weekend warriors" and "cut-lunch commandos".

"This unit here has had 60 to 80% of its soldiers deployed on overseas operations ... and they are just as good as their Regular Force counterparts."

In 2000, he left his job, his wife and two children aged under three to serve in East Timor, as part of a UN peacekeeping force.

One of his tasks was to help police exhume bodies from a cemetery as part of a war crimes investigation: "I wasn't prepared for digging graves but you got on with it and did it".

Seven years later, he was the New Zealand platoon sergeant for Operation Rata in the Solomon Islands, the first time reserve soldiers had formed the majority of an overseas deployment of the New Zealand Army since World War 2.

The new commanding officer of 4 O South claims the unit is "punching above its weight" with 19 of its 147 members overseas and says locals are extremely supportive of the military, perhaps because the area is quite conservative.

A former territorial with 25 years in the regular army, Lieutenant-Colonel Roger McElwain says there has been a reduction in expensive state-on-state conflict in the past 20 years.

Other groups know that if they confront the powerful United States on an open battlefield, they will lose, so are trying to achieve their goals through other means.

"We're increasingly seeing these intra-state conflicts, things like insurgencies, terrorism, conflict between ethnic groups and independent movements setting themselves up against the government of the day.

"So in Afghanistan, the Taliban are slowing it down, inflicting casualties on the coalition forces and the civilian population, because they are high-profile things, then melting away.

And when the coalition forces leave, as they ultimately will, they will go back in."