Residents and veterans attend Warrnambool Remembrance Day commemoration service

Remembrance Day guest speaker and Afghanistan veteran Steve Lamborn said it was a day to remember the sacrifice of all involved in past and current conflicts, across various agencies.

Mr Lamborn was working with the Australian Federal Police in 2009 when he was sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan as part of the Combined Joint Interagency Taskforce.

There, he joined the counter-assassination committee, working closely with American forces, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Australian Aid for 11 months.

"My role was basically working with American forces in the corruption sphere, stopping drug operations which fueled the insurgencies," he said.

"Rather than just having the military go in and blow up drug dealers, we were trying to get Afghan police to go in and get fingerprints to build up a brief and take people to court.

"I was in a specialised American unit trying to work out how to limit the number of people getting assassinated. There was a lot of crime and corruption - there was so much corruption it wasn't funny."

He said the base he stayed at was hit numerous times, causing multiple casualties.

"Our base roughly had the same population as Warrnambool, with 33,000 people," he said.

"It was 22 kilometres in circumference and was hit by rockets hundreds of times. There were cases of rockets hitting the mess - people down having their dinner and the rocket falls through the roof and kills and injures a whole lot of people.

"The risks were the same, whether they were police or military on the base."

He said in a two-week period, four Australian soldiers died, including two on the same day.

"It was a terribly difficult time to be over there because these were all lovely young men who were killed. One of the two who died was from our base.

"But it was very well done whenever a soldier did die - hundreds of soldiers from all over the base came out to farewell the coffin going onto a plane going back home. It was a very sombre time and it just gave you 30 minutes of time to think about your mission there, before the mayhem of war came back, but I would often think of what their family would be doing back home.

"Because we were a novelty there (police) we were highly regarded. What we found was the American special forces got to know of us and they would want us over at their camp just to try and get a break from everyone talking about war.

"I remember one time the US special forces major rang us up at about 11oclock at night and asked me and the other Aussies to come over.

"He said they really wanted us to come over because they just had a patrol go out (we met these guys at a recent thanksgiving) and they said they'd just been hit by the Taliban and there were guys we knew who had both legs blown off.

"The special forces guys wanted us at their base just to be with them and give them some non-military support, which we took as a really big honour. We were with them until probably three or four in the morning."

Afghanistan veteran Tony Geyer was also based in Kandahar in 2011, where he served as a major attached to the regional south command headquarters' raise, train and equip taskforce.

He said this Remembrance Day, he would reflect on not only what was lost but what he and so many others had worked so hard to gain.

"The capitulation of the Afghan army was very hard to take," he said.

"But the public never really got to see the good work being done there. For example, the Taliban was partly funded by growing opium poppies which were harvested and turned into heroin.

"When allies realised they could slow the Taliban by stopping the farming process, they destroyed the crops and replaced the farmers' income by convincing them to grow melons.

"Because of the climate and time period of when crops matured over there, they were able to get those melons to the markets such as in Dubai before all of the other farmers, so they got the best prices. That was a successful program which gave more money to farmers and stopped the production of heroin, therefore cutting the funding the Taliban were getting.

"Other successful programs also included the number of roads we turned from goat tracks into proper roads - we did kilometres of them in and around the regional command south area.

"There was some really good work done there - especially seeing young girls and women at school was a real highlight for me - helping them get an education and seeing them learn to read and write."

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