by James Harden
The briefing was quick. But it put all of us on edge.
Today, everyone, all the civilians were to be tested. The whole town. All 1,348 people. The township of Woomera was being put under an ‘unofficial’ quarantine. This basically meant they weren’t going to announce this quarantine to the media.
At least, not yet.
We were ordered to wear flak jackets, body armor and gloves during the testing process.
The troops let out a collective grown. No one wanted to wear body armor. Let alone flak jackets and gloves. Not in this heat. Especially when we weren’t even being shot at by enemy forces.
The townspeople were to be gathered up and herded through testing gates. Like cattle, I thought.
The testing gates measured core body temperature.
Apparently a low temperature reading was bad. If a person had a lowered core body temperature, the alarm on the testing gate would flash red.
If this happened the person was to be escorted away to an isolated wing of the local hospital for more testing.
This was the quickest way to identify any possible infected or carriers of the virus.
They also had sniffer dog teams patrolling the lines for some reason. They were mean looking German Shepherds. I don’t know what they were trained to smell or detect or whatever. But every person the dogs singled out had a lowered core body temp. Every single one of those people were taken away at gun point.
Testing was conducted in the main street, out the front of the small town hall. Drake, Franco and I were situated on the rooftop of the town’s one and only bank. We had a bird’s eye view of everything.
Throughout the day most of the people were pretty cooperative. Even when the light flashed red and they were taken away at gun point, most people remained calm.
There were a few incidents, a few guys freaked out when the light flashed red. Initially they refused to go, forcing the soldiers on the ground level to get rough. But when they realized there was no point in fighting back they eventually calmed down and cooperated.
So yeah, for the most part everything was going smoothly.
We were nearly done. We had managed to process everyone in a couple of hours. We only had about a hundred people left.
Franco, Drake and I were getting a bit bored with our supervision duty. At that point I was a little jealous that Gordon was still in the sweet air-conditioned comfort of the hospital. It was well over a hundred degrees today. And up on the roof of the bank it felt a lot hotter.
We had been scanning the lines all morning, making sure everyone remained calm during the testing process.
Like I said, for the most part people had been well behaved.
Until this one guy had to go and ruin everything. This one act of stupidity has put the whole town in a state of panic. Thanks to this guy, the whole town is on the verge of rioting.
He was one of the last to line up. We were so close to finishing up for the day.
Drake saw him first. He pointed down to the street, towards the back of the line. "Check that guy out. Looks jumpy as hell."
I looked through the scope on my rifle down at the street below. The guy Drake had pointed out kept checking over his shoulder. He kept looking back down the road, and then up at the sniffer dog team that was slowly but surely making their way towards him.
"Yeah he looks pretty nervous," I said, agreeing with Drake’s assessment. "You think he’ll put up a fight?"
Before Drake could answer me, the guy bolted.
The troops on the ground shouted out to him, ordering him to stop. But the guy ignored them and kept running. Even when they told him they would shoot. He kept running.
I aimed my rifle at the man. I had a clean shot. I could take him out if I wanted to. Not that I did want to.
I lowered my aim slightly. I was confident I could clip him in the leg. Put him down without seriously injuring him. Yeah, I thought. That was the better option. There was no need for more bloodshed. Not after what happened yesterday.
I was just about to squeeze the trigger. But I never got the chance. The soldiers on the ground opened fire. They didn’t lower their aim. They didn’t fire a warning shot.
The man fell in the street, face forward. He skidded for a few feet before coming to rest in the gutter.
The other people lining up were all shocked into silence. A few of them ran out of fear. They just took off. Most of them were tackled to the ground and taken away. But a couple ran down the side streets and completely disappeared.
News of the shooting spread quickly through the small town. Anger and panic followed.
Security has been increased throughout the township. By night fall we had a squad on every block, making sure everyone kept indoors. Making sure there were no riots.
People have been ordered to remain in their homes, or risk being shot on sight. The perimeter of the quarantine area was reinforced with more troops. Machine gun bunkers were set up right around the outskirts of the town.
This is bad. The whole town is on edge. So are the troops.
This isn’t a babysitting job anymore.
January 24th – Hell on Earth
We’re back.
Finally.
And after a grueling two days on patrol the last thing I feel like doing is writing in this goddamn journal.
But I have to.
I have to get this down on the page. Maybe then it won’t sound so crazy. Maybe then I won’t feel like I’m losing my mind.
Firstly, the day after the shooting, we were ordered to supervise more testing - this time within the immigration center.
The Woomera immigration center looked a bit like a prison complex. It had a couple of perimeter fences that were topped with razor wire. There were even gun towers at each corner of the compound.
There were two main warehouse type buildings where the refugees were housed. Or kept hostage as prisoners, depending on how you viewed the situation.
Initially the plan was to conduct more testing within this area. But then they closed it off completely.
They sent in the guys in the bright yellow HAZMAT suits and one of the main buildings was draped in huge sheet of plastic.
We were told this area no longer concerned us.
And for a fleeting moment I thought maybe we were going to be sent home.
No such luck.
We were sent out on patrol. A lot of fireteams were sent out. It was basically a long line of soldiers that stretched for miles. The idea was to sweep the area between the town and the target area.
We were to look for anyone who had broken through the quarantine.
We were authorized to use deadly force if necessary.
There had been reports of people packing up their things and making a run for it. Apparently they were younger males, between the ages of 20 and 25. They had come out here for work. Cattle farming, coal mining. Anything they could get their hands on. The reason a young male would come all the way out here for work?
The pay.
The pay was extremely good. Especially work in the mines.
But after the initial outbreak and the shooting, a few of these guys figured the pay wasn’t worth it.
So it was our job to find them. Our orders were to sweep the section for anyone who had broken through the quarantine.
I personally thought it was a waste of time.
Of course, I didn’t say anything other than ‘yes, sir’.
It’s not our job to argue.
But as I predicted we didn’t find anyone. Whoever had escaped through the perimeter of the quarantine was either already long gone, or they had died out in the middle of nowhere. If someone ran off out here, without adequate food or water, they wouldn’t get very far. They’d be dead within a few days.
So yeah, in my opinion the patrol was a waste of time. But that was only the first part of the operation.
The second part of our assignment was to supervise more Testing. Our destination - The Unofficial Immigration Ce
nter.
Yeah that’s right. Unofficial Immigration Center. Or Temporary Immigration Center. Blew my freakin mind when they told us that.
It was a completely separate section. It was hidden in plain sight, in the middle of nowhere. It was listed as ‘unofficial’ and ‘temporary’. I’m guessing no one knows about it. Certainly not the public. No freakin way.
Now I knew why they had brought a whole regiment of troops down here. It all made sense.
The Unofficial Immigration Center was located about twenty miles further north-west of the ‘Official’ Immigration Center. It was located within the military testing ground.
It was basically a slum.
They told us it was where they housed the criminals of the refugee population. Put simply, it was where they took anyone who had committed a criminal offence whilst in custody of the immigration center. The most common offences were assault and sexual assault.
It was also the place where they took anyone who allegedly worked for people smuggling networks.
But that had to be a lie.
There were thousands of people living in that slum. The population was massive. There’s no way they were all criminal offenders, or people smugglers. There was just too many. And there were women and children. Elderly. There were entire extended families.
These were scared, innocent people who had left their homes, saved up all their money, sold all their earthly possessions. They had risked their lives and the lives of their children to come here. And against all the odds they had made it. They had come here in search of asylum, in search of safety and a new life.
Instead, they had found a nightmare.
Now they were living in a slum, a makeshift shanty town in the middle of the Australian outback.
No one knew how many people called this place home. But estimates were as high as ten thousand.
And since it was located in the middle of the Woomera Military Testing site, the largest land-based testing site in the world, it was basically hidden from the world. It was a dirty little secret of the Australian government.
The site was initially the same size as the ‘official’ immigration center. It was basically the same set up, the same buildings and design. But overtime the population, the number of immigrants had grown and grown. The shanty town kept expanding. Most of the little huts were made of corrugated tin and aluminum sheets, metal shipping containers, plastic tarpaulins and ply wood, anything the refugees could get their hands on.
And since it was in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but miles and miles of desert in all directions, it appeared that this site was free to just keep growing and growing.
It was out of control.
I was now starting to wonder if a regiment of troops was enough to enforce the quarantine.
As we approached it we couldn’t really see how big it was. It sort of blended into the horizon as a shimmering heat mirage. But as we got closer… then we could see.
It was late afternoon when we finally made it to the immigration center. The sight of it, the enormity of it took my breath away.
This place was huge. It was massive.
And the smell. My god, the smell of the place was unlike anything I have ever experienced in my life. The stench hit us all in the face, causing some of the soldiers to gag and throw up.
The size of the slum was big enough that Command had even set up some temporary barracks just outside the shanty town. And we figured after we’d just trekked twenty miles in the desert we’d be resting up for the remainder of the day.
Again, no such luck.
We were ordered into the slum.
They were about to conduct more testing. Just like the other day. Same set up with the testing gates and everything. If the light flashed red, the person had a lowered core body temperature and they were to be taken away for more testing.
The difference being there would be thousands more people to process. And I’m guessing not many of them spoke English.
This was going to be a nightmare. I had no idea how right I was.
Where there is smoke…
We had been testing all day. The sniffer dogs had been busy. The testing gates would flash red every five minutes or so.
Hundreds of people were being taken away at gun point. Children torn away from mothers. Families ripped apart with no explanation.
The suspected cases were taken into the main buildings, the original buildings of the immigration center for further testing. This meant that whoever had been lucky enough to call those buildings their home, were now displaced once again, forced to find homes out in the slum. It was sickening to think that they were refugees inside an asylum for refugees.
Fate can be cruel sometimes.
After awhile I began to feel like I was going to throw up. The cry of young children. The desperate pleas of mothers and fathers.
It was a gut-wrenching, soul-crushing exercise. But it had to be done. People were getting sick all over. The virus was spreading fast. The situation was getting out of control.
We worked through the day and into the night.
It was late, almost midnight when we were finally relieved of duty for the day. We were walking back through the small laneways of the slum.
As we made our way back to our temporary barracks, winding through the narrow laneways – the people, the refugees stared at us with a kind of scared, fascination, like we were aliens or something.
The men made sure they stood between us and the women. The women made sure they held on to their children, making sure the kids didn’t run up to us.
At first I was nodding and smiling at them. But after awhile I gave up trying to be friendly. I was just too tired. I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept much the past couple of nights. Pretty soon my eyes glazed over and became unfocused. My surroundings kind of blurred into one messy scene of dilapidated huts and the sick, scared faces of refugees, of people that I didn’t know the names of and never will. I was basically walking in a daze through the narrow laneways of the shanty town. And I’ll admit, at that point, I was getting a little disorientated. OK, I was completely lost. But I was following Drake and Franco. I trusted they knew the way.
We must’ve been close to the edge of the slum when everything went to hell.
I was so tired my brain didn’t even fully register what was happening at first.
Off in the distance I heard gunshots.
At first I thought they were firecrackers. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because there were so many kids running around.
Drake and Franco stopped. We heard more gunshots.
We crouched behind a small shanty and listened. My brain still wasn’t functioning.
Gunshots? Why was there shooting? Who was shooting? What were they shooting at?
Then my mind flashed to the day before. The shooting in the street. That man running, refusing to stop, getting shot in the back. Dying in the gutter.
If these people started to resist here, in this slum. If people started to run…
"The shots are coming from the testing area," Drake said.
We all listened for a few more seconds. At first we could hear single shots being fired.
Controlled bursts.
But then we could hear automatic gun fire. And then we could hear the heavy machine guns. The fifty cal’s mounted on the Humvees.
"Jesus Christ," Franco said. "Let’s go!"
We started running back the way we had come, back to the testing facilities. But the small walkways and laneways were disorientating and confusing. The slum was a maze, a labyrinth. Now I really was lost.
Men, women and children were now running in the opposite direction. Not just running but sprinting.
Shouting in broken English, "They are coming. Run. Get away."
They all looked scared, every single one of those people. Young and old. Even the smaller kids, they probably didn't understand what was happening but they were scared.
We tried to ask them who was co
ming? What were they running from?
But no one was stopping to answer us. I guess most of them couldn’t really speak English that well.
We tried to stop one of the men. He was carrying a small girl, his daughter. I grabbed him by the arm to stop him from running away. He looked Arab. I thought maybe Franco could speak to him. But we never got the chance to ask him what his nationality was or if he spoke English, or what he was running from. He wrestled away from me, kicking me hard in the shin.
We gave up trying to stop anyone after that. We kept moving against the flow of the crowd.
I could smell smoke. And ahead I could see flames reaching up into the black sky. If a fire broke out in this shanty town there would be no stopping it.
Franco was on the radio, trying to find out what the hell was going on.
We continued to force our way through the fleeing masses. It was slow going.
Finally, we made it back to the main buildings where they had been conducting the testing all day.
The buildings where they were taking anyone who might be infected.
The buildings were on fire.
Huge, angry flames engulfed the entire structure. The heat blasted us, keeping us at a bay. I could feel the heat on my face. The smoke was making my eyes water.
But I couldn’t look away.
Something was wrong with this scene.
These buildings were the only buildings on fire.
And the soldiers were watching them burn.
None of the refugees remained.
No one was trying to put out the fire.
The Humvees were all facing the burning buildings. The barrels of the fifty cal machine guns were smoking.
I heard a crash. Windows and glass shattering. There was a man inside the building. He was trying to get out. My natural instinct was to go and help him. I was about to run over there but Drake held me back.
The soldier manning the fifty cal machine gun pulled the trigger.
The orange flames reached up and out of the broken windows. The fire continued to burn steadily throughout the night.
It was late when we got back to the barracks. We were all covered in ash and soot. Our cammies and hair smelt like smoke. We were all exhausted.