It's not easy leaving the military. We know that from the testimonies of countless soldiers who have witnessed horrific events on our behalf. Fighting and facing death takes an unimaginable mental toll.
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But Shaun Barry's transition is different. His trauma is not borne from the fact that he fought, but that he didn't.
He trained with a group of men who were sent to Afghanistan while he was deployed to train more soldiers at an infantry school.
His comrades went to battle. Some died and some survived after performing acts of great bravery but Lieutenant Barry wasn't there.
Only now does he feel he is starting to purge the anguish which nobody else thinks he should feel.
That mental salvation comes because Mr Barry, as he is now known in civilian Australia, has started a company to give work to other veterans - not just of the armed forces but of the civilian emergency services.
They can be seen in the movie Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan, which has just been released.
Shaun Barry's company, Ex-tra Specialists, is a casting agency which supplies actors to the film and television industry.
It has 850 people on its books. Their unique appeal is that they know how to handle weapons - for example, a gun doesn't look out of place in their hands. They can abseil out of a window in a war scene realistically, because they've done it for real.
Mr Barry's business also provides sets and military props, including 25,000 sand bags for Danger Close, which depicts one of the great instances of Australian heroism when little more than a hundred young and mostly inexperienced Australian and New Zealand soldiers held off 2500 North Vietnamese soldiers.
The company provided 50 extras for the film and 40 of the veterans on its books helped construct the sets in Queensland to replicate the monsoon-swept Vietnamese paddy fields where the battle took place on August 18, 1966.
But he says the film doesn't glorify war.
Rather, it depicts the terrible situation faced by the young Australian and New Zealand soldiers. The conscripts who survived did so not only through their own bravery, but also because of a heavy and close artillery barrage.
"Danger Close" is a military term for a supporting artillery barrage which is dangerously close to the firing force's own infantry.
He is also pleased that the film shows Australian soldiers in Vietnam in a good light, when they were vilified at the time.
It's really hard when you train your team for two years and they go overseas and fight, especially when not all of them come back.
- Shaun Barry
Shaun's route to the entertainment industry has been hard. He enlisted in the army as a teenager in December 1996 and served in Timor and Aceh in 2000 and 2004. He then graduated as an officer from the Royal Military College in Duntroon.
In 2010, the soldiers he was leading, with whom he had lived as a band of brothers, were sent to Afghanistan. He was deployed to train more infantry soldiers in Australia.
He doesn't like the word "guilt" - preferring "regret" - but he uses it in this instance. "The guilt and regret was that I was sent to the School of Infantry and they went to Afghanistan," he says.
"It's really hard when you train your team for two years and they go overseas and fight, especially when not all of them come back."
He left the army in May 2011, bereft of purpose. "It's an honour to take your guys on operations. That's what you strive to do, so I felt that I didn't really achieve what I set out to achieve," he says.
And then he was just another civilian on the street. It was difficult. His marriage collapsed.
"It's hard, and for eight years, I struggled to find my purpose and identity. You train and then leave. I had all this skill and I didn't know what to do with it," he says.
He decided to become a movie stunt man, training in Hollywood, no less. He was an extra in Thor: Ragnarok, playing a dead man.
But the company he set up is his true salvation. "My boys went overseas and fought but I didn't get to go with them," he says.
"I've struggled with regret at not going so this is the first time I've started to feel good about my service."
He has just been in Duntroon, where he presented a poster for the film to Captain Tom Neverauskas, the officer commanding Long Tan Company at the military college. A special, private showing of the film was held there.
Captain Neverauskas said Long Tan Company has "a big connection to the movie".
"It's important for us to visualise what happened in the battle," he says.
He served in Afghanistan, but he emphasises that he has not seen combat - by which he means he has not had people shooting at him and him shooting back.
But he has been in dangerous situations - just being a Western soldier there is highly dangerous. "As an officer, it was a privilege to command Australian soldiers," he says.
And he is not a soldier who shuns war films. "Speaking to veterans gives you a glimpse of the realities of war but movies allow you to visualise - though they are unable to convey what actual combat is like," he says.
He thinks that movies can convey the anxiety which soldiers face before fighting - "about where it's going to occur, how, how you're going to react, how your soldiers are going to react" - but not the fear.
Mr Barry's big fight was with depression after leaving the military. His black moods took him as low as human beings can go.
But going to Duntroon and showing the film he had helped to make was cathartic for him. Presenting them with the movie posters "was massive for me because I graduated in Long Tan Company in 2007", he says.
And he is pleased he has found a way to get veterans from the forces and the emergency services into work in front of cameras. It is paid work, but there are so many who want to get involved that many simply volunteer.
They look the part because they've played the part for real. They appear in police dramas looking like police because that's what they've been. They will be extras in Godzilla vs. Kong next year.
Mr Barry feels he has reinvented himself. He didn't like who he was, so he changed.
And the motto which helped him was some advice he received: to "end the life that you're living and start the life that you want".