If we could keep moving fast, our speed would give us an advantage. The enemy couldn’t have IEDs set up all the time, because they would blow themselves up. They had to duck in between our patrols, set them up, and get us coming back. If we moved quickly, we could beat them. But because we were stopping at every lump or bump and sending out the engineers, we were losing our speed and making things easier for someone to set up an IED ahead of us. We decided to go a bit faster, and pick a path around the fresh diggings and indicators instead of stopping at every one.
We came to a cemetery on a spur line, and the engineers got out and swept over the top of the hill, where we would drive up to the higher ground. As we came down, I stopped at a divot that had been dug in the track marks left by other coalition vehicles that had gone through there, avoiding a choke point. I said to Adam, ‘I don’t like the look of that divot, let’s drive around it.’
The message got passed back on the radios to the other vehicles: ‘Turn right, don’t follow the deeper tracks, follow our tracks off to the right.’
The next two vehicles did that, without any problem. We paused on a mound to hold security while they came through. I was looking back. In the fourth car of the convoy were our troop sergeant, Deano; a JTAC; a terp, and sig Sean McCarthy manning the .50-calibre gun mounted on the back. The terp was in the tray by himself. I didn’t know Sean extremely well. He was a sig rather than an operator, but he was frequently out with us and the information he provided was critical. He was a good guy, who got along well with everyone. Some signallers feel a bit apart from the operators, but Sean was good mates with Blue and some others, and blended in easily.
The three cars that had already been through, weaving to the right of the divot, had left deepened track marks. Maybe for this reason, the driver of the last car got confused and followed the earlier tracks. As the car came through, there was a massive bang and a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke. Oh fuck.
Deano was thrown so high he was doing somersaults in the air. A tyre flew a couple of hundred metres. Bodies were getting thrown out everywhere. Our first instinct was to race back, but we had to restrain ourselves. This could be a classic ambush, the enemy laying an IED and waiting for us to converge on the damage before hitting us.
The whole village had come out to have a look. Masses of women and children started leaving towards the south, the surest sign that something bad was happening. After setting up security, some of those closest charged down the hill towards the car. A couple of bodies were lying there. The car had hit an IED right in that divot we’d veered away from. They were only a metre or two out from being in the safe tracks. Their front tyre had set off a pressure-plate charge. IEDs were typically made of two metal plates which, when pressed together, completed the circuit. A battery pack with wires connected the plates to a detonator in the actual charge, the explosives, which sent out a mass of rudimentary metal, often just saw blades and pieces of machinery. This one was made of two anti-tank mines stacked together.
What was new and lethal was that the charge was offset from the pressure plate. The enemy had figured out that a lot of their IEDs had exploded right under the wheel of a car, which would disable the vehicle but not injure anyone. If they offset the charge, as they had here, it would blow up under the passengers, not the engine or the wheel. This one had blown a hole directly under where Sean was standing.
An AME was called for, but it took forty minutes to get there from Kandahar. Some Apache gunships came overhead and shot at a few Talibs in the mountains. The patrol first-aiders and the medic were doing their best to look after Sean, who had been torn in half. He also had a fractured face. One of his arms was severely broken, which hampered efforts to get an IV line in. The terp had lost his leg from the knee down, and his other leg was badly broken. The AME came in and got Sean, Deano and the JTAC, who’d been blown out of the car too and had some shrapnel wounds. The medics kept Sean alive until the AME came, and he fought for about an hour. They lost him on the helicopter.
We stayed at the site for the rest of the day while some regular army came up from Baluchi with a flatbed truck to take the damaged LRPV away. One of them said to the medics who’d worked on Sean, ‘Why the fuck would you drive through there?’ It was pretty inconsiderate, and he nearly got bashed out in the field.
Some locals zoomed down to the bombsite on motorbikes, probably Talibs seeing the results of their work, and we detained them before sending them to the FOB for questioning. We were angry and frustrated. We sat in the sun all day holding security, and only when we got back to a safe position were we told that Sean had died. We were pissed off that they hadn’t informed us straight away.
Looking to catch the people who’d done it, we walked the four or five kilometres back to the site that night, and created an event with some gunplay to draw them out. It didn’t work. We wandered around looking for suspicious characters, and only left as day was breaking. When we returned to the FOB, which was a pretty rough, dusty place, everyone was ratshit.
Still without much sleep since Sean’s death, we moved to the next FOB further south with some intelligence about a Talib target. We were pissed off that one of our mates had been killed, but were not acting with vengeance in mind. We had to focus on the next job, and the immediate legacy of that incident was to heighten our awareness of the IED risk. We crept through the green belt, sensing danger. We weren’t taking any chances. When we came across farmers working in their paddocks, we hog-tied them. We couldn’t let them go, as they might have been Taliban or might go and alert the Talibs to our presence. It was a precaution to tie them up, and they generally accepted it, even putting their wrists out to be tied the moment they saw us. They were questioned and released once the operation was finished.
We got to the double-storey building where we’d been told the target was. It was midsummer, and in the heat the Afghans slept on the roofs. I was the first one up the ladder. I had a pistol with a suppressor. It was like being the first to breach a ship on the water exercises I’d done: you feel very vulnerable in case there are sentries up there. I breached the edge of the compound keeping as low a profile as possible. The rooftop was clear and I signalled for the others to follow.
We went inside to have a look. People lay sleeping on their beds of woven reed mattresses raised on blocks above the floor. Whole families shared one bed. The NVGs put a slight green glow under our eyes. A woman woke up and looked at us – that sixth sense again. She sat up, peeked out from a blanket over her head, and mumbled something to herself. Our terp said she would have thought we were evil spirits, humanoid shapes with green eyes, and was probably saying a prayer to make us go away. She lay back down and put her head under her blanket.
Our other patrolmates were sneaking around the compound looking for evidence of enemy threat. We didn’t want to lose our element of surprise. We eventually woke the target by poking him in the face with a muzzle. We had found that if we did that, there was rarely any resistance. We did some immediate tactical questioning – where were the weapons, the bombs, the other fighters? – and had him sent back to the FOB.
*
In early August we did a job in the area between Chora and the Char China Valley, a rat line for Taliban coming in and out of the area. Their leader up there was the big IED maker in that area, with five or six bodyguards.
We flew to a FOB and had a heinous all-night 20-kilometre walk to get to our spot before first light. Nearly everything we did was at night, so it was no surprise that we got very good at nocturnal operations, with the technological advantage of the NVGs. All the same, they required a lot of training to work with. NVGs draw in ambient light and create a green-tinted image from it, but you only have a 40-degree field of vision. Getting into firefights, you need to be aware of where your mates are. You lose a lot of depth perception, because the NVGs are made of two monocles that you have to set to a certain focal distance. On these jobs, you would set
them so everything was clear 50 metres away, but anything closer than 5 metres was fuzzy, and you only saw outlines of blurred shapes. Trying to open a door handle or do fine skills clandestinely, moving tactically, you had to adjust your monocles to get a closer focus. If you were walking, you’d lose balance with them because you’d trip over logs or rocks or aqueducts you couldn’t see. You had to make your movements deliberate – moving your head around to see your mates. And they were a nightmare to drive in. I struggled with headaches if I was driving in NVGs, from looking through two monocles and the stress of trying to drive inside the tracks. I was often popping Panadol to keep these headaches at bay.
We had to walk so far because it was better to be dropped at a distance from the target and walk in to avoid any compromise from the enemy, who could hear helicopters and vehicles if we brought them too close. The rocks were very loose underfoot and I couldn’t get a good rhythm going. With insertions, we tended to go bold early and slow down as we got closer. Our approach became increasingly slow and stealthy, with communication by hand signals or lasers or moving our rifles a certain way to tell our mate what we were going to do. We’d been trained for this kind of ordeal, but some Australian infantrymen who followed us overheated and had to be taken out. We had to delay even longer while waiting with them for their evacuation.
A surveillance Predator was passing us information about where the enemy was. It’s pretty amazing technologically to think that an unmanned aircraft sends down pictures that can be beamed to us in the backblocks of Uruzgan. We came across some dwellings with animal pens and lots of stacked hay. All we could hear was the animals and the trickle of streams. We heard that some Talibs were possibly sleeping in a paddock, information passed from the Predator. Our JTAC got on the radio to ask the Predator to sparkle those men with an infrared beam, visible to us through our NVGs but undetectable by the targets, even if they woke up. It was very cool to see a beam come out of the sky and guide us in.
As we were getting ready to enter the target house, a man on the western side started moving away through low reeds. He picked up some others on the higher ground and they tried to squirt. Luckily we had a patrol around there, which saw them. The JTAC called in a Hellfire missile from the Predator. They were pretty sure they got them all.
Everything had gone loud with the crack and boom of the missile, so we had to work quickly to take the houses. We didn’t find any people in them. We cleared the animal pens and saw a lot of women in there. They came out reluctantly, and among them was a man dressed as a woman. The size of his feet and hands, and the absence of bangles, gave him away. With the way he was trying to hide something and himself under the dress, he was lucky he didn’t get shot.
There was a weird urgency about the place. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s as if I could feel a kind of electricity in the air, a low buzz that I could sense without seeing, like there’s one of those outdoor fluorescent mozzie-zappers around, charging things up, but out of view. It’s a sinister, tingling feeling. We cleared another building and saw the reeds moving in the low ground, as if two people were trying to escape. We took off into the reeds, yelling at them to come out. A couple of our men were about to start shooting when two kids, eight or nine years old, came out with their hands up. We were angry – if someone’s running away it’s a pretty good indicator that they’ve got something to hide, and we could easily have shot them. We told them to piss off back to their house. The professionalism and restraint was a credit to our guys.
The target and his PSD weren’t there, but they’d left their motorbike, which we decided to blow up. We put it in an outhouse with some weapons he’d been using, and put a charge on it. Our charges were used to make explosive entry into a target building but were versatile enough to be used as cache destruction, so were ample for a motorbike. We were only about eight metres away when it went off; we’d seriously underestimated the impact of this explosive. The whole building erupted, taking out the back half of his house, and burying his tractor. We’d overdone it a bit, but felt satisfied that we’d created a nuisance for him.
After walking five kilometres to the extraction point, we squeezed into the waiting Bushmaster. We were dog-tired. As on the selection course, when you’re that tired you’ll laugh at anything, like madcaps. We had a megaphone that the terps used to call people out of their buildings. Our 2IC at the time was falling asleep, saying how tired he was, and one of the operators, Joel, picked up the megaphone and yelled ‘WAKE UP!!!’ right into his ear. The 2IC was so pissed off I thought he was going to belt Joel. Most of us found it funny. That’s how tired we were.
Among all the work there were moments of comedy as well. One day back at the base we were doing some medical training with the troop medic. One of the guys was very sick with gastro and couldn’t stop vomiting. The medic was going to give him some Maxolon to try to subdue the vomiting. As it was coinciding with medical training, one of the signallers asked to give it, under the medic’s guidance. The medic got the dosage ready in the syringe and prepped the patient’s buttocks for the injection. The medic gave a run- down on how to administer the medicine – he described holding the syringe like a dart as it was easiest to control that way. The signaller’s medical prowess was questionable. As it came time to insert the syringe, he literally took the medic’s advice as gospel and threw the syringe into our mate’s bum like he was at the pub trying to hit a triple twenty! As it went in, very easily and very deep, the patient obviously got a shock, yelped, and his leg muscles contracted in response to the sudden foreign object. Because of that, the syringe was bouncing back and forth and then went dead straight. The rest of us onlookers couldn’t believe it and instantly hit the floor rolling in laughter and pointing at our mate’s misfortune. It was the little things.
*
Now that we’d had a few weeks to digest the loss of Sean McCarthy, we were keener to do some aggressive targeting. It wasn’t for retribution so much as acknowledging that the threat had grown since the previous years, and that we had to work harder to eliminate it. After a few days’ break in Tarin Kowt, we did a job down south where we found a cache of weapons and IED-making materials, and were then put onto a job chasing Objective Spear.
Spear was the codename for a Taliban organiser. Tracking him down was a task shared between us and the Americans. We knew Spear’s bosses were in Pakistan, probably in Quetta, but they needed deputies in Afghanistan like him to help them travel when they visited, to pass on orders, and to facilitate their operations generally. Our squadron had planted some letters in likely areas telling Spear we were chasing him, which might have spooked him, and received intelligence about his bed-down location. We had done a few night operations with the objective of frightening him into moving to a vulnerable area, and they seemed to have worked.
On the night of 8 August our troop got the call. We jumped into Bushmasters, which made our packet a lot smaller – one team could go into one vehicle, making us smaller, faster and more secure. The Bushmasters were big trucks compared with the LRPVs, and much better armoured. Since Sean’s death, we’d pretty much dispensed with the LRPVs.
Before leaving we ate spaghetti bolognaise for dinner in the mess, and I got a touch of ‘TK belly’. As we trundled along, I was vomiting out the side of the Bushmaster. The medic gave me some Maxolon to stop the vomiting, but I still felt pretty lousy.
Our plan was to have a recon team of five or six, including me, go out in front of everyone else across the dasht and see what was going on. At the vehicle drop-off point, another crew would form security on the Bushmaster. Our team set off thirty minutes early, sneaking past tents in the green belt, darting down little alleyways in villages, scouting a route for the main group. We found the target house inside the village and circled it. A sentry was sitting outside with a lamp. We found a different entry point and told the guys behind us to come in from the north, not the east as planned. We wanted to contain t
he place before going in, keep things quiet for as long as possible.
We all got into position. The roof team went up and got eyes on. It was a nice silent approach, and we didn’t wake anyone up. We found the target, and poked him with the suppressor. As he woke up he had two or three guns on him. Again, it was a lot calmer than waking them up by jumping on them and wrestling them.
I was in charge of finding evidence in the house. Still feeling like dog shit, I started vomiting again. I got on the radio and was halfway through saying I needed another fifteen minutes, and my violent vomiting was broadcast to everyone on the ground. It was all I could do not to vomit on the evidence, which, incidentally, was of high importance. There were dual-tone multi-frequency boxes that the Talibs used as a remote control system for IEDs, plus other makings, including pressure plates. It was important to learn what we could from this evidence. Also, it became the basis for prosecuting and locking these suspects up. Most of the targets we detained would later claim to be innocent farmers. When we created a database of fingerprints, and collected evidence in standard police-style fashion, it was easier to get convictions. Importantly, following this procedure showed the Afghans that we were using hard evidence rather than word of mouth or a hunch, giving them an example of the rule of law.
We got back to the vehicle drop-off point, waited till first light and drove to TK. I was still sick, and fell asleep. Blue was on a high because Richa, our combat assault dog, had shown his worth as well. During the detention of one of the objectives’ bodyguards, there was a bit of a tussle and the dog was valuable in taking him down. When I woke up from my sleep, Blue had laid chips all over me and the others were laughing and taking photos. The usual thing. But it was a good job: in TK, it was confirmed that we’d captured Spear, the number one Talib in Uruzgan. Strategically it was big. Without him overseeing it, the rest of their operation would be disjointed, which could cause infighting – which was what we wanted.
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