The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  We did have a better outcome on a patrol near Baluchi near the end of the trip. We were getting mortared, and saw about twenty enemy fighters on the side of a hill. The JTAC called in a 2000-pound (900-kilogram) bomb, and the whole hill looked like it caught fire. Flames poured out, a massive fireball. A couple of nights later we did a BDA around the enormous craters. The ground was burnt, a car was incinerated, nothing had survived. It’s impressive firepower. It was hard to tell how many had been killed in the strike as it had been a few days and the Taliban would usually remove the bodies before sunrise the next day. But when you’re ducking mortar rounds and at a disadvantage on lower ground, you tend not to think of the men firing them as people like us, with families and homes; they’re a military force trying to kill us, and at the end of the day one force is going to defeat the other. Them or us, one or the other, is going to survive this fight. We were grateful that we had the firepower to enable us to be the men who walked away.

  As I prepared to come home, I had to stash these thoughts at the back of my mind, away from my home life. Afghanistan had become a central part of my world, but not the central part. It was the first time I’d been away for such a long time, and readjustment would be difficult. We didn’t have the internet in Afghanistan, so I couldn’t send photos, but Emma had been sending photos in the mail as she grew from not having much of a belly to having a big soccer ball. It was a sobering contrast to reflect on: while our job was about killing or being killed, the essence of war being that brutal reality of the fragility of human life, I was going home to see one precious new person come into the world.

  A week or so after that fight, we were on a flight home, and a fortnight after I landed in Perth our baby was due. I wanted to go for a 14-kilometre walk around Mundaring Dam. It was the type of thing I liked doing to decompress after a trip, and Emma was stubborn enough to want to come with me, even though she looked about fifteen months’ pregnant. I can still see the walkers on the track giving me dirty looks – imagine the type of man who’d make such a heavily pregnant partner go through this!

  Three days later, Kaylee was born. I was there, which was fantastic and emotional. It was something I had not really processed and yet here I was, in the hospital about to see my daughter arrive into the world. To be frank, I had no idea of how I was going to crack this new mission. All I could really do was try to be there for her when I could. It would have made my mother extremely happy, that’s for sure. Emma reckons I fell asleep in the birthing suite, watching TV. I dispute that: I was resting my eyelids, saving my energy for the big event.

  Taking Kaylee home, like any young parents we said we would still go out to dinner and do all the things we’d always done. A couple of weeks down the track, we realised Kaylee had a stronger will than either of us. I was surprised and still am at how much will and resolve a little human can have. So life changed.

  But the other life, the life of world affairs that the Regiment was responding to, wasn’t going to stop for my convenience. Kaylee was born in October; in early November I was told I would have to go to East Timor for three months to do a security detachment for the President, Xanana Gusmão. Neither Emma nor I was really happy about it, but at least this time she had a focus. With Kaylee in the house, Emma would be too busy to dwell on my not being there, and compared with the previous time it was probably easier for her. But as I’ve said, she didn’t resign herself to it willingly.

  Luckily for all of us, the three-month detachment was cut short at two weeks. We accompanied Xanana Gusmão from his house to events, tagging along to help his personal security staff. He went to Dili’s main football stadium to hand out medals to freedom fighters one day, and we saw it as a high-threat environment. At the end of the presentation, a couple of women started getting up and shouting at him that they should have got medals. His PSD crew got around him, and the crowd started firing up. We got him out of there, and that was the most exciting thing that happened.

  Two weeks into our stay, the SAS suffered a terrible day in Fiji when a Black Hawk helicopter collided with HMAS Kanimbla while trying to land on it. Two men were killed, Josh Porter, from the Regiment, and helicopter pilot Mark Bingley, which hit all of us pretty hard. At the same time, we were told the East Timor operation was being shut down, and were brought home in time for Christmas. Xanana Gusmão thanked us for our help and gave us ceremonial scarves, but I have to say, as much as we were happy to help him, it was quite a deal better to be back home for Christmas.

  EIGHTEEN

  Early in 2007, there were rumours about squadrons going back to Afghanistan. I was warned that I’d be going back, but for something different, not just war fighting. It would be the first time I would go away as a father, but the pain of leaving Kaylee wasn’t as acute as it would become in later years. In 2007 I was excited that our operations were ramping up and that we were gaining experience in combat. In another compartment of my mind, and heart, I was on a high that Kaylee had been born, but she was still a baby and her bond with Emma was stronger than it was with me, and if I was happy about our family situation as I went away it was partly for the selfish reason that Kaylee was now giving Emma a daily focus.

  The 2007 trip was an alternate mission set near Kandahar, the former Taliban capital in the south of the country. Due to operational security reasons I can’t say too much about it. What I can say, though, is that we nearly got locked up in a civilian jail, which would have been hairy, until the Brits came and talked our way out of it. Unfortunately, that’s about as much as I can say about the operation.

  Kandahar was much more traditional than Kabul. You didn’t see people wearing Western clothes. It was turbans or skullcaps for men, and full burqas for women – sometimes they would wear high heels, but that was the most you could tell about who was under them. The old city, on the southern side, was very slummy, with tight little streets of hard-packed earth, garbage and raw sewage, and women begging in the open. It seemed much poorer than Uruzgan.

  The city was busier than Kabul, and more volatile. It was in that year that a lot of IEDs were starting to go off. These homemade roadside bombs would change the tactical nature of the conflict. Trying to drive around wasn’t easy at any time. If you were caught in a traffic jam, which you didn’t want, it felt high-threat. Out towards the west of the city, where the Canadian and US troops were based, there was constant danger and a visible Taliban presence.

  There were also incongruities, such as a Gold’s Gym. We had an ongoing bet of $100 for anyone who did a single run into Gold’s Gym, did a hundred push-ups, and came out alive. Nobody took it on.

  We befriended a trader in the markets who showed us photos of himself in bodybuilding competitions. He said he could get us anything we wanted, and just to test his claims we asked if we could have a black bear to keep as a pet. He said he had one but it was up at Mazar-e-Sharif. When he couldn’t get it – or a lion cub, which we also requested – we asked for a Russian desert tortoise. We got two from the marketplace, but they could climb up walls, and one kept escaping. We got another. When they escaped, people brought them back to us. With a female one, Trixie, we painted on her shell: MY NAME IS TRIXIE. PLEASE RING THIS NUMBER FOR PICKUP. Every week or so we’d get a call from someone asking us to pick her up. Trixie doubled up as our barmaid. If someone wanted a drink at one end of the bar, we stacked the cans on Trixie’s back and laid down a piece of cucumber at the other end. Sniffing the food, she would reliably carry the cans down.

  We also got a Kandahar fighting dog we called Barry Dawson, after the character in the Australian Cougar bourbon TV advertisement at the time. Barry was a good little dog, but unfortunately got run over.

  So we had a bit of time on our hands.

  When I returned home after five months, I didn’t have to be on-team, meaning in readiness for hostage recovery either domestically or internationally. Emma, Kaylee and I spent a beautiful summer together in a little cottage we’d b
ought in Fremantle. The downside was that Emma suffered a couple of miscarriages, which got us both down. We had such joy with Kaylee, we were determined to add to the brood.

  In the Regiment, though, family life is always subject to sudden disruption. One day just before lunch, they called five of us into the office and said, ‘There’s a job in East Timor, the prime minister’s going over. They want a quick response for protection.’

  I rang Emma and said, ‘Can you get some jeans and collared shirts and underwear out for me?’ I went home for lunch and said, ‘I’ve got to go away.’ I couldn’t give her any idea where, or how long I would be. I went back to work, and by then it had changed. Alfredo Reinado, a military officer who’d gone rogue, had just tried to assassinate the East Timorese Prime Minister, José Ramos-Horta. They wanted a whole troop to go over and pick up Reinado’s number two and three. In the space of an hour, we were scaled up from a five-man outfit to an entire troop with a different job. We flew out that night on a C-17, landed in Dili the next morning, and went to our base. That’s how quickly life could change.

  We were under the command of the army CO, Major General Mick Slater, who gave us three days to get our stuff sorted. We said we would be ready in two hours. I think he was shocked, and impressed, that anything in the army could move so rapidly.

  It’s that informality that I love about the Regiment. The romance, or anachronism, of being allowed to be a non-conformist while in the military was what had appealed to me ever since I’d read about Special Forces. We don’t quite have free rein to tell everyone to do as we say, but our standards are kept so high that we’re entrusted to make our own decisions. It’s a sacred contract – we have to justify that trust – but it always makes you aim up and be the best you possibly can. There’s no incentive or comfort in sinking down to doing the bare minimum.

  In Dili, the official intelligence on the suspects we were chasing was unclear. A couple of our blokes had been chasing Reinado on their previous trip to Timor, and they’d found a few good contacts in the local pubs. Someone phoned a number, and the same guy still had that phone. He gave us new intelligence, which intel were sceptical about, but it was first-hand and much better than they had. It’s a credit to the Regiment operators who’d done it outside the official chain.

  But the job turned into a fizzer. One night we went into Dili and our informant grew confused about which house the target was in. We dismounted and walked through people’s yards. We felt like ghosts, sneaking through their lives without them being aware. We climbed up into the second storey of this house, but the man inside turned out to be the wrong one. In any case, our target gave himself up and we were home within six days. But it was an illustration of the changeability of our lives. We’d been told it could happen that suddenly, and it did. You go to work for a normal day and find yourself in Dili by nightfall.

  *

  The SAS was changing fast. After decades of long-range reconnaissance, it was being turned into a more aggressive force. That suited me. If we only did reconnaissance, I doubt that I or others like me would be so drawn to the Regiment. When we went out to Cultana, near Whyalla in South Australia, for a week and a half’s training before leaving for Afghanistan in 2008, we were told that there would be a push to do more targeting: going after enemy networks and/or individuals. We had to prepare for more night work and getting our CQB (close quarters battle) worked up as a team. We would build intelligence then execute a plan based on it. This was the start of the ‘Find, fix, finish, exploit, analyse’ period. Most of my SAS generation had been wanting to do that for years, and were pleased that the system was catching up with our way of thinking.

  Working in the Regiment was now very fulfilling for me, and I had a sense of really fitting into a group of like-minded people for the first time in my life. For once, the army had lived up to its promise. The Regiment pursues excellence. There’s always something that’s not quite 100 per cent for you to improve on. That was my own internal drive, which before I’d been feeding through surfing and snowboarding. Now I had a whole world of people around me who lived the same way, who were competitive about getting better, and who offered me every positive encouragement to do so.

  At Cultana, they introduced working dogs into the Regiment. My mate Blue, a big tall bloke with a shaved head and covered in tatts, had used dogs in Afghanistan in 2007. In 2008, we would be integrating the dogs fully into our work. I helped Blue with the training, renewing my love of dogs. These weren’t bomb-detection dogs, but combat assault dogs (CADs). We were using them in an offensive role. We were training them so we could send them into a room or out into the fields to find enemy fighters lying down or in ambush locations. The dogs’ role was more like the way they’re used by military police, but adapted to our needs. We used a Belgian shepherd sub-breed, the malinois (pronounced MAL-IN-WAH). Their work ethic suited us better than that of the German shepherd. They were smaller and didn’t gas out. German shepherds work until they’re tired, whereas the malinois will go on forever. And they needed to, since they might be asked to trek over many kilometres and then sprint long and hard to run someone down.

  For this trip, my role had changed too, and I was in a new patrol. I was a scout now rather than a signaller: up the front of the patrol and more involved at the sharp edge of what it was doing. I couldn’t have guessed how sharp that was about to become.

  NINETEEN

  When we did the handover at Tarin Kowt with 1 Squadron, they told us that the big change was the proliferation of IEDs. The enemy had also grown in number. The previous year had been cold, and a bad harvest meant the peasants were more open to offers of money and threats of coercion to join the fight. The Taliban, realising we had an advantage over them in firefights, laid the IEDs on the roads we used, at choke points, and on the high overwatch positions they knew we favoured. Just before our arrival, 1 Squadron had been hit in a wide valley we called the TK Bowl. An IED had ripped through the base of their LRPV and wounded an Afghan terp.

  Another change was that our patrols were taking more Afghans with them: ANA soldiers we’d trained up as well as the terps. After hearing about the number of IEDs, we agitated for a change in our transportation. The six-wheeled Land Rovers weren’t well enough armoured underneath to keep up with the IED threat. We also wanted to be inserted more frequently by helicopter. This argument wouldn’t be settled until the following year when we would finally get the helicopter support we wanted.

  In July our patrol was sent on a seven-day driving loop from Tarin Kowt to Chora in the north of Uruzgan, stopping at a government building called the White House (just a whitewashed house), which would become the centre of FOB Locke, named after Matty, our Regiment comrade who had been killed in 2007, nine months after he won the Medal for Gallantry. We would then come back through the Chora Valley. This would be a ‘famil’, or familiarisation patrol, to drive around certain villages, sneak into them at night and see what was going on. We were opposed to this, most of us having been to Afghanistan at least once before. With the danger multiplying, why were we doing a famil rather than going straight into specific targeting? It seemed an unnecessary risk. Everything was a lot more pressurised than in previous years, and soon we had more than enough action on our plate.

  On the patrols, we could feel how the tension had increased. Driving out of Tarin Kowt, we felt like aliens. Men sat in their shops or at tea houses, smoking and watching us. Beside a roundabout near the base, there was a two-storey hotel that we nicknamed the Taliban Hotel because it was full of guys who looked like Talibs, sitting there and watching us malevolently.

  Outside the town, the land smelt soggy and wet as the farmers flooded the paddocks to feed the poppies, a muddy turned-earth smell, sort of cabbagy, very strong in the green belts. One night we were sneaking down a road near a shura house where some men were gathering. We came through a cutting, which threw a shadow onto the road. All of a sudden the blokes got up from t
heir shura to take a toilet break. We dived into the shadow, crowding against the hard rock wall of the cutting. The men were only a few paces away, taking a piss, without knowing we were there. A funny thing about the Afghans is they have a weird sixth sense when someone is looking at them. They feel it. One man stopped washing his hands and peered around suspiciously, but didn’t see us in the shadow. The patrol turned out to be uneventful: we got in and out without detection.

  Just before we left the FOB the next morning, one of my mates came up to me.

  ‘Is this yours?’

  He was holding a piece of jewellery. Emma had given me an amulet with the image of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. ‘Promise me you’ll wear it,’ she said, before my departure. I’d promised, and put it around my neck.

  Taking it back from my mate I said, ‘Yeah, thanks, my missus would have killed me if I’d lost it.’

  It was a good omen for a bad day. We set off with two engineers down the road heading south of Chora. The green belt flared out to the west and came back in at the Baluchi Pass. It was quite an exposed area, and we could see the piles of rocks on the roadside that the enemy used as indicators when they were setting up IEDs. Or they would leave a plastic bag in a tree, which looked like rubbish but actually told them where the bomb had been left. Being in the front car, I didn’t like it at all. There were fresh diggings everywhere. I said to Adam, my PC, ‘This blows, mate.’ He agreed.