Fiji Times
The secret life of a SAS hero
Nanise Loanakadavu
Monday, April 22, 2013
IT was 1957 and Ilisoni Ligairi had defied the odds as a young boy growing up in a village secluded from the world by the untouched vegetation of Vanua Levu.
The first big step outside — from the shades of Nabalebale Village nestled at the foot of a hill across which now climbs the Savusavu-Labasa Highway — to one of the country's first co-educational schools overlooking the Rewa River — Lelean Memorial School became his window to the world.
Life at Lelean, just as it had been at primary school on Vanua Levu, was tough. It was a school named after Australian missionary Reverend Charles Oswald Lelean but established by New Zealander missionary teacher William Ewart Donnelly, general secretary of the Students Christian Movement in the early 1930s and 1940, who moved with his students from Toorak, Suva, to Davuilevu when his peers fled Fiji at the end of World War Two during the Japanese threat in the Pacific.
An island boy on the mainland, Ligairi's quest and adventure and answers grew.
He would run away from school to dive for scrap metal at the Walu Bay passage for his school fees. After completing Form Five, he joined the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (FRMF) for three years.
He was then the youngest player in the senior grade within the force.
Two years later, while he was still in the army, he was told that he would go to New Zealand for a peacekeeping mission for two years.
That plan failed when a team from the British Army came to Fiji in 1961.
The British had turned to their colonies to help fight its wars and it was the first recruit of Fijians in the British Army.
Ligairi had no second thoughts.
His mother, to whom he was dearly attached, had just died.
Her death was a surprise and the British Army offered solace.
He worked hard and became one of the first Fijians enlisted in the British Army.
Another island boy, Kuata Vamarasi Marafono, came from Navus
