9/11 rekindles childhood dream to join the army

Proud to be me is a series telling the stories of Selwyn people. To mark Anzac Day, Coen Lammers speaks to Burnham-based Corporal Charles Cornhill about his journey to become a soldier,and life in the New Zealand Army.

While most service men and women join the armed forces at an early age, you could call Charles Cornhill a late-bloomer.

The communications operator at Burnham military camp joined the New Zealand Army just before hitting the big Three O to fulfil a lifelong ambition to become a soldier and follow the footsteps of his great-grandfather.

“I was just like any other kid running around with a stick pretending to have a gun, but the real pull to join the army was 9-11 when I watched those planes hit the World Trade Centre. I hate people suffering and joining the army felt like a way to do something about it,” says the 41-year-old who took his time enlisting.

“I just never got around to it. I was a musician in Wānaka and worked as an audio-visual technician to make ends meet. I was drummer in one band, drummer and singer in another and played guitar with another guy, so did gigs all the time,” explains Cornhill who mistakenly thought that his 30^th birthday would be the cut-off date to enlist into the army.

“Later I found out that you can join whenever you want, but my wife said that I had been talking about it long enough and just had to get on with it,” says the Corporal who found himself in basic training with new recruits 10-12 years younger than him.

“Most of them were 18, 19 and some even 17, but it helped that during my time as a musician my friend group was much younger, so I found it easy to get along with the young fellas.”

Cornhill admits he had some concerns about the physical aspects of the job, but as a former lifeguard and national water polo player, he had enough natural fitness to keep up.

“I am quite fit compared to most of my friends, but training with 18-year-olds I do tend to be at the back most times,” laughs Cornhill, who adds that the daily training regime can be hard on a 41-year old body.

“Some of them call me grandpa, because I get injured quite a lot. We do physical training every day on the job and I get absolutely hammered physically. So I'm in a permanent state of either being injured in a way or like sore muscle soreness.”

Cornhill says that escaping  to a desk job at an older age is no longer an option, because every modern soldier combines exercise with an certain amount of desk work, fending off emails, writing policies, training programmes or other paperwork.

Two decades after watching Al-Qaeda destroy the World Trade Centre, Cornhill got the opportunity to take a stand against extremism, when he was deployed to Iraq for Operation Manawa when more than 100 New Zealand troops trained and supported local Iraqi troops in their fight against ISIS.

“It was a six-month deployment, but more like 12 months with the PDT, the pre-deployment training. We did a lot of self-protection stuff and medical drills. We weren't expecting to be in combat, but the realities of how ISIS was operating meant that you could be thrust upon you in five seconds.”

Cornhill says that he was motivated by his memories of 9-11 and the atrocities ISIS was committing on their own people.

“It was just horrific. I have Muslim family members and what I saw there had nothing to do with religion. Those guys were just evil,” says Cornhill who is proud of the New Zealand contribution to defeat ISIS and bring stability to the country after decades of war.

On Saturday, Cornhill will be proudly wearing his own service medals as well as those of his great-grandfather Alex Day, who was killed by German counter-artillery fire in World War One, and those of his other great-grand uncle George Harris, who served in the same war in the Middle East and the Western front.

Almost a century later, Cornhill was the first person in his family to renew the military connection, but he regrets he did not join the army earlier because it gave him so many valuable skills he would have appreciated at a younger age.

“The different types of skills that you gather, in my opinion, turn young men and women into fantastic, well-rounded human beings. And whether you have a rough upbringing or you have an extremely affluent upbringing, you all come out exactly the same and after your basic training, you just see eye to eye with everybody, which is very cool.”

Last modified: 28 Apr 2026 8:22am