He said this was an amazing experience, walking outside in broad daylight at 2am in -20C on a good day and -40C with windchill. He said experiencing the places of Scott, Hilary and Shackleton was especially amazing.
John visited Antarcticaseveral times and said he was always overwhelmed by its beauty.
By contrast, he also visited places where the temperatures were the other extreme – places of war where the Hercules were deliverers of vital supplies often at night.
These included East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq, flying to the latter from Pakistan and Dubai where summer temperatures were 55C and 63C on the tarmac.
John said some of these missions were dangerous, one of the missions being very soon after 9/11.
Sometimes the cargo was human. In 2003 it was New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark who was taken from Dubai to both Iraq and Afghanistan for brief visits to meet the troops.
Around that mission, the Hercules also flew out of Dubai to Scotland to support Orion aircraft on manoeuvres.
Missions were not always about military support, sometimes it was humanitarian. The tsunami emergencies in Samoa and Tonga in 2009 required urgent supplies to be sent from New Zealand.
John retired from the RNZAF in 2011 and now works in Dannevirke’s PGG Wrightson’s Store.
He attended the Armistice Day service partly because of his armed forces experience, but also because his uncle was killed in World War II.
Dave Murdoch is a part-time photo-journalist working for the Bush Telegraph and based at Dannevirke. He has covered any community story telling good news about the district for the last 10 years.