Digger's Skype baby joy!

Soldier Martin Vanzwol tells GLEN WILLIAMS why serving in Afghanistan couldn’t stop him from seeing the birth of his son.

Cuddling his sleepy baby Jack, the look of rapture on Martin Vanzwol’s face tells of the special bond between father and son, one that stretches vast distances – more than 10,000 kilometres. Martin was serving in war-ravaged Afghanistan amid the heat and dust of Tarin Kowt military training camp the day his wife Tanya gave birth to Jack at a Townsville hospital.

“There was no way a war was going to stop me being there for the birth of my son,” says gadget-savvy Martin, 41, who put a plan in place that would allow him to “virtually be there”. “I kept telling Tanya, ‘Be prepared to do this via Skype’, ” he explains. “So we were prepared. I got an iPad for my 40th birthday and I left that behind so Tanya could have that in the ward, and I had the laptop with me.” As if war isn’t hard enough, all the while Martin knew Tanya was dealing with the uncertainties of pregnancy alone, as well as having to fret about a husband caught up in the unknowns of life in a war zone.

Seated in the dark on his bunk, alternating between worry and joy, Martin was glued to his laptop for 12 hours, praying his baby boy and Tanya would be OK. Jack’s arrival was all the more moving given that the couple had tragically lost their first son, Harry, in October 2010, due to foetal anaemia. “Harry’s passing really was the most unspeakable sorrow,” says Tanya, 36.

“It was gut-wrenching. We tried so hard to conceive, went down the IVF path, and it finally worked. We were over the moon. But when I went in for a scan, I was told our baby had died. I had to give birth to little Harry knowing he had passed away. They did an autopsy – they know what happened, but they don’t know why.” Naturally, when Tanya fell pregnant with Jack – again through IVF – she says she spent much of the pregnancy “very worried”.