*
The type of PSD we were doing wasn’t overly difficult, but with a VIP of that stature, if something went wrong it went wrong big-time. The replacement warrant officer, Fergs, went down the line shaking everybody’s hand, and when he shook mine I felt him slip me something. It was two packets of cigarette papers, courtesy of Emma. I’d started smoking again, after a break of several years, since I’d been in the Regiment. That’s not uncommon, but it might seem anomalous, considering the emphasis on physical fitness. Later I gave up smoking – to take up dipping, or chewing tobacco, with a vengeance, but I only did that when I was away. The things that you get into during a war can be unnecessary at home. Over the years, I developed a whole series of habits, such as growing a beard, taking a lax approach to personal hygiene, listening to certain music, and developing a highly questionable sense of humour, as well as dipping, that I wouldn’t dream of bringing into my home life. When you’re away in a combat zone you become almost a different person, as a way of dealing with the stress and fitting in with your mates, so that coming home isn’t just a matter of adjusting to the needs of your family, but also of switching back to your non-combat self.
Six to eight of us were in the detail to go ahead of General Leahy to Tallil Air Base in Iraq. We linked up with the Australian battle group that was already at Camp Smitty, near Samarra. This was where I ran into my old sergeant from infantry training. We tried to blend in, but we stood out, being new faces without name tags or Australian flags on our cams. The base was enormous, surrounded by checkpoints with a lot of procedures to do with unloading weapons before getting through the gate. I felt they were overcomplicating it with three or four weapons-readiness processes. No wonder they had so many unlawful discharges. Then again, a lot of people were coming in and out who didn’t touch weapons much of the time, and that could be quite dangerous.
General Leahy was going from one secure base to another in a Bushmaster, a big armoured vehicle, and we had to stick right behind him wherever he went. Because I suffered from motion sickness, I threw a headset on and got up into the hatch with the gunner. I wanted to see the landscape, too. Iraq was a lot dirtier than Kuwait, with rubbish on the side of the road and less infrastructure. There were open sewers, mongrel dogs, walls riddled with pockmarks. Kids were throwing stones at us as we drove past, though generally the roads were pretty good and everyone knew to get out of a military convoy’s way. The women were fully covered. What was eye-opening to me was that little girls of ten or eleven could run around like normal, and then at puberty they were covered up. By the river there were kids with a donkey and a big flat cart. They were whipping the shit out of the donkey, which was bellowing in pain. I remember thinking, You wouldn’t get that in Australia. These kids must have grown up in a tough environment.
The key problem we had to watch out for was an IED followed by small-arms fire. I was scanning around, watching vehicles coming alongside, taking note of parked cars and passing this information to the guys below. I was thinking, This is what you do your training for. Everywhere, I was seeing good spots from which to shoot up a convoy. This culvert – they could hide in there. Those long reeds – they could get away through those. All these possibilities were going through my mind.
General Leahy had to go across the Euphrates into Samarra for a meeting, and then he wanted to see an abattoir where the Iraqi Army used to torture and kill prisoners. It was now being secured by Australians and reopened as an abattoir, putting life into the local community. We had to go up a very tight street. I was out of the hatch, with buildings very close on both sides, and I said on the radio, ‘If anything happens in here we’re stuck. We can’t turn the cars. We’ll have to reverse out or break into a house.’ We came out into a big roundabout, where the abattoir stood. I was sitting on the roof while the chief went in, and was looking down an alleyway towards some kids in their early teens mucking around. A power pole with thick wires was in my way, and I was only catching glimpses of them. They were near an Iraqi police post, a makeshift hut with some sandbags. One of the kids looked a bit like he was holding a gun.
I said to my mate, ‘Is that an AK-47?’
We agreed it didn’t look right. It might have just been a toy gun. I was waiting for them to do something. I wasn’t on a hair trigger, and wasn’t that nervous that I might have fired; it was more that I couldn’t quite believe that this was happening. Was it a real gun? Was I now in a world where kids would shoot real AKs at you? Suddenly anything seemed possible. Then they ran off down an alleyway. I thought, You could get yourself killed playing with toy guns here!
*
The chief was going from Iraq to Afghanistan. We flew back to Kuwait and then on to Uruzgan province, where the Australian contingent had its main base in the town of Tarin Kowt. Uruzgan has about the size and population of the Australian Capital Territory, but Canberra it ain’t. The population is 97 per cent rural and almost 100 per cent illiterate, farming in the green belts that run down between the towering mountain ranges and barren dasht, or desert. More than a kilometre above sea level, Uruzgan is strategically positioned between the former Taliban strongholds of Kandahar and Helmand provinces to the west, and Pakistan and the tribal areas to the east. Tarin Kowt is the capital of the province, and we would operate there and in three other areas, around the towns of Deh Rawod to the west, Chora to the north, and the Khaz Uruzgan area to the east. The north of the province was more mountainous and desolate as the land began to rise towards the Hindu Kush, while the south and west were more flat and open, with plenty of farmland in symmetrical gridded paddocks that resembled, in my mind, the wheat belt of western and southern New South Wales.
With the focus of the War on Terror shifting from Iraq back to Afghanistan, Australia was just starting to take responsibility for Uruzgan. I was excited to be going to Afghanistan, even without the slightest hint of how important and familiar the country was going to become. When we landed in Tarin Kowt, the wind was blowing from the east and the first thing that hit me was the stench from the rubbish tip outside the base. A strong smell of burnt plastic got into the nostrils and stayed there. When we ventured out into the town, Tarin Kowt had that south-Asian urban aroma of stale water, rotting garbage, food spices, sewage and diesel fuel. Even though it’s not a big city, a smoggy diesel smell always settled over TK, like the old diesel vehicles I remembered from the 1970s.
It was November and there was snow on the mountains, while the streets had turned into mud and cold slush. The base, on the southern side of the city, was primitive: green army tents and only ration packs to eat aside from one hot meal every second day. The base was about half the size of the town itself, and at that point contained about 2000 personnel: American Special Forces, the Australian SOTG, and a small Dutch contingent.
There was a feeling we were in a fortress. The base’s perimeter was made of HESCO barriers: big cubes, about head high, made of galvanised metal caging. They were filled with dirt, which was held in by a fine mesh, and then each cube was blocked along and linked together around the perimeter, with barbed wire along the top. At intervals there were wooden overhead guard boxes, sandbagged, with machine gunners inside. All of the forward operating bases (FOBs) around Afghanistan were constructed in much the same way.
Some of my mates from Reo were already there, and told us about a big contact they’d been in in the ‘badlands’ around Bagh Koshak, where they were attacked by a large Taliban force. I was fascinated to hear their stories. One guy had had his earmuffs shot off. A rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) had hit the radiator in their car and not gone off. One of the blokes had bullet holes in his car seat, which had been made as he bent down to pick up some ammunition. Even hearing it second-hand, it felt like we were in the thick of things. I was all eyes, watching the senior operators, picking up hints, wanting to absorb some part of their experience. But ultimately I knew there would be no substitute for getting outside the wire and doing i
t myself.
We flew up to the American air base at Bagram for the chief to have some meetings, then back to Kuwait. General Leahy thanked us, and gave us a coin commemorating our service. He mentioned again his appreciation of our professionalism after Dave’s death.
Our next VIP would be the Prime Minister, John Howard, on his first trip to Afghanistan to visit the troops. I went on a reconnaissance to Kabul, which was very different from Tarin Kowt. It was just three of us, and we flew into Bagram. We hung around the base feeling like backpackers, looking for a hut or somewhere to crash. All we had was a sleeping bag and essential personal items. In a funny way, I felt like when I was younger, thumbing my way around New South Wales and North America. Who would have thought being a bum would set you up for this sort of stuff?
We eventually got a lift with some Americans in a HiLux heading into Kabul. A year and a half later, there was no way in hell you’d do that. There were shops out the front of the air base, where hawkers and hustlers prowled the footpath urging people to come in and buy. The Americans were allowed in there until a suicide bomber came in and blew himself up.
The roads were bad and the traffic eye-opening. There were HiLuxes and Corollas carrying ten times the number of people they were built to take, and ‘jingle trucks’, colourful, highly ornamented lorries overloaded with people and cargo. We were shown some burnt-out Russian tanks from the 1980s, in spots where, it was explained to us, the Mujahideen had realised they could neutralise the tanks’ firepower and ambush them. It was like having a history lesson, seeing the wrecks still there.
Kabul was very busy, with no road rules that we could make out. You had to get used to it quickly and go with the flow or else you’d get frustrated. It was much more westernised than Tarin Kowt, with short-haired men in jeans and leather jackets rather than in turbans and traditional dress. There were apartment buildings, hotels and advertising signage for local products like their telephone network. Everywhere we came across big posters of the Lion of Afghanistan, the assassinated war hero Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the current president, Hamid Karzai. We were shown a run-down picture theatre and streets where all the retail was concentrated on one product. For example, there was Chicken Street, Carpet Street, Tailor Street, and Pots and Pans Street. Women sat in blue burqas on the side of the road, begging with their kids. There was a lot of poverty and a lot of security, with civilian contractors standing at the front gates of buildings ringed with barbed wire.
Our planning included establishing primary and alternate routes for the prime minister’s convoy. One alternate was a dirt alley behind some houses. On a wall were bullet marks and a large rust-coloured stain. We were told that this was one of the places where the Talibs used to execute people who’d broken a law.
Sometimes we felt vulnerable, driving around in a soft- skin Pajero. Unable to access the airport from one of the alternative routes we’d been checking out, we ended up driving through a paddock into a grassy dry watercourse. A couple of kids were hanging out at the back of their houses. I said, ‘This is a dodgy road to be trying to enter an airport by.’
That was when we noticed white-painted rocks beside the track. Alarm bells were going off. I said, ‘This isn’t going to be good, man.’ White-painted rocks meant there were mines around. There was a system of white and red to show you where to steer to avoid the mines, but the Taliban often painted red ones white or turned them around to cause confusion.
A young boy came running out of his house, dodging the painted rocks, waving and shouting to us, trying to get us to stop. We pulled up, and he told us not to continue down the road. He was miming explosions, making a noise and throwing his arms about. We thought we should get out of there. One of the guys said, ‘Let’s give him something for his troubles,’ and flipped him an Australian dollar coin, showing him the kangaroo on the front. The boy stuck it in his pocket and ran off. One probably useless dollar for potentially saving our lives.
I was trying to absorb every sight, smell and sound during those recces. Once we got stuck in a heavy traffic jam, which was complicated by there being no traffic lights or policemen. Whether Afghans are in the right or wrong, their paramount value is never losing face. One local had T-boned another, but he wasn’t taking a backward step, and the two drivers were going to town on each other. Kids wove among the stationary cars asking for money, followed by men who’d had their legs blown off. A little boy was following us, banging on our window for the entire duration of the traffic jam. We stayed well out of the incident. Even if we got into an accident ourselves, our instructions were to slip them a hundred bucks and get out of there. The last thing we wanted was to be part of a big scene.
A couple of days in, the prime minister arrived and jumped into his car with some of us and a couple of his Australian Federal Police security detail. We’d had some delicate negotiations with the AFP. They wanted to run the show, but they didn’t have cars, didn’t know their way around, didn’t even know how to get to President Karzai’s palace. Even with the reconnaissance we’d done, they didn’t want to be in our hands, for some reason, so we let them get another car and look after themselves.
We had the opposite problem with the big media entourage following the PM. A reporter blew up because no one with a gun was coming in his car. I said to him, ‘We don’t have to worry about you. You’re not our problem.’
‘But what if something happens to us?’
‘The only guy we’re worried about is John Howard. The rest of you can find your own way.’
They didn’t like that at all, but we weren’t there for them.
It ended up being a ridiculously large convoy. Our part was only three cars, but we were followed by about a dozen vehicles carrying the entourage. First up, the American lead car took us the wrong way out of the airport gate and down a back alley. Our radio was going off with people saying, ‘What the fuck are we going this way for?’ We decided to go with it and stay prepared. We knew this way. It went past the wall with the bullet holes and the stains.
We took the PM to a military meeting and then to President Karzai’s palace. Outside, we chewed the fat with the AFP. One of them looked at me and laughed. ‘How come the smallest bloke’s got the biggest gun?’
I had the machine gun, and a cigarette in my mouth. I said very sarcastically, hamming it up for all I was worth: ‘Usually because the smallest guy is the toughest.’ We all had a laugh.
The prime minister’s visit was quick. The same day, we got him onto a plane to Islamabad in Pakistan. He had a chat with us on the flight, thanked us and said, ‘I hardly knew you were there.’ He also mentioned the fatal incident in Kuwait at the start of the trip and said it was good to see how professionally we’d handled ourselves.
When we were flying over the mountains back to Kabul, I jumped in with the pilots and watched the snow. I was frothing, looking at the lines and taking photos. I wrote Emma an email saying I was in a place with lots of mountains and snow, and when we got out of the military I’d open the extreme skiing resort to end them all, where people could pay lots of money to ski and get shot at at the same time. We’d run the resort and hire locals to take pot shots at the guests.
*
In the entire PSD with General Leahy, Mr Howard and the Defence Minister, Robert Hill, we didn’t have any security incidents, so the whole thing was a success. The nearest we came to any trouble was when Senator Hill was meeting the Iraqi defence minister in a big open football field where people started showing up from everywhere and things were getting too loose for comfort. The Iraqi minister’s personal bodyguards were tooled up a lot better than their down-at-heel countrymen: jeans, big boots, bomber jackets, over-shoulder gun holsters, silver-chrome AKs, white T-shirts and aviator sunglasses. They looked like they thought they were in a Hollywood movie. Their guns were on instant, fingers inside the trigger guards. As far as we could tell, they were just local thugs with money, and we wer
en’t confident in their training.
We told the minister we had to wind it up and leave. It wasn’t violent, just potentially so, with the mob mentality and these heavies with their chrome weapons. We got the minister back to Tallil on the British Merlin helicopters, famous among the military for their luxury and cost. The seats reputedly cost $50,000 each; ‘Merlin’, they joked, stood for ‘most expensive rotary lift in NATO’.
After a month away, we were back just before Christmas. We sat down with Dave Nary’s wife to tell her how he died. It was an extremely hard thing to do. Though nowhere as difficult as the emotions she would have been going through and dealing with at the time. Emma and I again hosted the military orphans. She and I were trying for a baby again, and starting to plan a wedding. But things were up and down. She was frustrated because she wasn’t getting pregnant, and because all I was worried about, having learnt that our squadron was going to go to Afghanistan in May 2006, was gearing up to go away again. It’s an occupational hazard that I didn’t understand at the time. Once you know you’re going, you begin to disengage mentally from your daily life. You want to maximise the time you have together before you go away, but your head’s not really there. Emotionally you can go a bit cold and you don’t pick up on it, whereas your partner does. So, for instance, if Emma came home and said something like, ‘I nearly had a car accident today,’ my normal response would be to enquire what had happened, and where, to agree with her that Perth drivers are crap, and to ask if she had given him the bird. But in the days before going away I’d just say, ‘Oh, really.’ That’s the level of interest I would show. I wasn’t doing it willingly or consciously, and I never thought mentally preparing myself to go away was more important than family life, but there came a point where I could be in transit between the two headspaces. It was part of a new reality we both had to come to terms with.
The Crossroad Page 19