Jim Coulter (born 1922) was a cadet journalist with The West Australian when he enlisted in the RAAF and trained to become a Sunderland pilot. Despite three crashes, he survived the War and was awarded a Légion d’honneur for his part in D-Day. War left its mark on the rest of his life. Realising that ‘if you sweat more in time of peace, you bleed less in time of war,’ he resigned his career as a journalist and ‘enlisted’ a second time with Moral Re-Armament to secure the peace, beginning in post-war Europe including Germany; and then, with three other Australian veterans, on a mission of peace to Japan. One could say his life was more about impacting the headline issues rather than reporting them. His decades of service – together with his childhood sweet-heart, Rita, who became his wife – led to significant encounters with six Australian Prime Ministers and, as a life-long sports buff himself, with a number of well-known sports stars who became friends. His book Met Along the Way… in war and peace, says an Australian national columnist, ‘speaks modestly of the place of hope in an uncertain and dangerous world’.
