Even though 2011 was a very successful trip for our squadron, there were always moments of frustration. I was used to them, but sometimes they tested us to the limit. One early morning in May, we got word that an Australian had been shot in the Chora Valley, in what was the first green-on-blue attack on one of us. These attacks – where a uniformed Afghan serviceman turned on coalition soldiers – had been getting progressively worse in 2011, but until now they hadn’t involved Australians. We asked to be sent up to Chora to find the perpetrator. It was a matter of honour and urgency. An Australian soldier had been killed; we thought there should be no debate. We had good intel, and thought we could lock up one part of that valley and force him to show his hand.
The hierarchy outside of our squadron were toing and froing for eighteen hours before finally allowing us to do something about it. We were agitated. In those eighteen hours, he could have got to the other side of Afghanistan.
Intelligence came up that he was near the Pakistan border in another province, near his family. The insurgency had facilitated his movement up there. Two SAS teams, a headquarters element and Devil and I were put together to go. The Americans were fully behind us, treating our morale issues very seriously. They gave us three helicopters and full logistical support, plus a place to stay with some of their Special Forces. We were going to get a C-130 Hercules up there. But at the crucial moment, the RAAF had reservations about the dirt airstrip we were to land on: dirt strips they were supposed to be able to land on, unseen, all the time. The US were landing C-17 aircraft, twice as big as a Herc, on that strip every day. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for the RAAF. Go figure. We were wild with frustration. We thought showing people what would happen if they treated us like that should override whatever managerial and political issues were going on. But in the end our mission petered out, and we handed it off to American Special Forces. They ended up finding and killing the target, but we were feeling let down, extremely disappointed, that we hadn’t been able to take care of a matter that involved one of our own.
*
Towards the end of our 2011 trip, Devil and I were involved in a big day of fighting that gave conclusive proof of his value as a lifesaver. I wouldn’t be here now if not for that dog.
We were going after an insurgent leader who helped supply a stream of enemy fighters into the western edge of Uruzgan. I’d had a bad sleep the night before, and was grumpy at the 6 am update. It was mid-June and getting hot. I sat down and the briefers said, ‘There’s nothing going on today.’ We were going back to our lines when the word came through: ‘We’ve got a hit on this guy; we’re off.’ Within twenty minutes we were flying out.
I slept through most of the forty- to fifty-minute flight. At the five-minute call I woke up, and woke Devil. When his one-minute call came – that change in the machine’s sound – Devil sat up, ready to go.
It was an unusually hot, steamy morning. We were going into an area full of flat, yellow wheatfields with a river winding through. We had an action-packed start to the job. I had to shoot a mongrel dog that charged out of an aqueduct to attack Devil, and then Devil ran down the riverbank and caught a bloke trying to squirt. Soon after, rounds were cracking over our heads – friendly fire, thankfully. We moved into position to see what they were shooting at. I caught sight of an enemy fighter in a paddock less than 50 metres from us. He was lying face-down, possibly dead. But the insurgents had developed a technique of lying on a grenade if they were wounded, so as to turn themselves into a bomb when we rolled them over. If they had to go, they were highly motivated to take one of us with them. I sent Devil out in front to turn him over. It’s a gut-wrenching but necessary exercise. I obviously didn’t want Devil getting hurt, but it was the alternative to one of us taking the risk. Fortunately, it turned out all right: the dead fighter had an AK, grenades and ammunition, but had not booby-trapped himself. Devil had done his job well, as had my mates by picking the enemy off over my head, but I hated the feeling of putting Devil at risk.
The heat intensified through the morning. A mate and I pushed off towards where that fighter had come from. We could see a village, separate from the main green belt, with about fifty compounds and some visible insurgents talking on their ICOMs. We took a few shots at them, and they manoeuvred out of sight. When we linked up with the rest of the teams, Daryll, who was now my troop sergeant, said he’d seen some local men acting erratically at another building further down the valley. Devil and I went where he indicated, and saw two men ducking in and out of a dry yellow unharvested wheatfield. These types of vegetation are dangerous areas; you can almost step on an enemy before you know he’s there. I sent Devil in front, and he launched himself in and got them. The insurgents didn’t yell or scream when attacked; instead, they fell silent, whether out of fear or courage it was impossible to tell.
In a nearby compound, we found and destroyed a lot of weapons, ammunition and IED material. Daryll and two others went onto a bare hill overlooking the fifty-compound village, and within minutes we heard them getting smashed by PKM machine gun fire. The team I was with and another team pushed up quickly through some dead ground, out of the enemy’s sight, to assist and return fire, and we were eventually able to get a different angle on the insurgents. From about 300 metres, we returned fire, and the JTAC called in some Apaches to help identify the enemy locations and, we hoped, drop some ordnance.
The insurgents lay low when an Apache came over them, and then opened up again when it flew away. Our JTAC tricked them, pushing the helicopters off target. Thinking they’d flown away, the insurgents bobbed up again. They fired a few fruitless rounds at Daryll’s group and, as usual, were shouting over their radios, ‘We’ve had a great day, we’ve killed hundreds of them!’ and more of the usual bullshit about the magnificent victories they were having. Then the Apaches swooped back in, fast. A couple of rounds from those amazing machines and the targets had no hope of survival. The Apaches left a distinct smell on the earth, where rocks had been literally cooked. They were still smoking, with that cordite-charred smell, long after the helicopters had flown off.
After that had settled down, we had to clear the village. There were only twelve of us available, and we split into three teams of four. Each team picked a compound to break into and started the clearance. Daryll gave us overwatch of the initial front. We left the JTAC with one other operator on another small bare knoll to watch and provide cut-off to the rear of the village. The place must have had some kind of tactical importance to them, because it was completely deserted, more like a fighting location than an ordinary village. No civilians, minimal animals, few signs of life. There weren’t even any trees or bushes. It was unusually desolate. We were clearing one deserted compound after another, watching every step for IEDs or barricaded insurgents. We’d seen some suspects still hanging around in there, and I was sending Devil ahead of me into each house, each room, one at a time. As usual in these situations, he was wearing a video camera mounted on his back in a rectangular metal frame, and I received the pictures instantly on a screen that I wore on my body armour. It was extremely tense work. Every alarm bell was ringing, especially for IEDs. Mentally we were ticking off each compound as we cleared it.
Devil and I came to a room and saw what looked like one of the plastic tubes they used as containers for RPG warheads. It was left there almost too obviously, and we were concerned it was a ‘come on’, or a trick to draw us in, with an IED trip set on it. We stood a fair way back and I cast Devil near the room to see if he would pick up any scent of explosives. Luckily he didn’t. The tube was just left behind from the initial contact. You had to be able to think ahead and see all these potential threats.
Not long after, Daryll reported seeing enemy moving around the village not far in front of us. The JTAC, who was still on the hill, has just called in an Apache for a gun run on some suspected fighters outside the village. The shells of the 30-millimetre cannon were pinging and bou
ncing around us. Devil and I pushed in to clear the next compound with another operator. Suddenly we heard some shooting and grenades. Devil and I went onto the roof and saw a firefight in a house about 70 metres away. Two SAS troopers were pinned down in a courtyard, and rounds were coming at them out of a doorway. I put some fire into the doorway over our guys’ heads to try to suppress the shooter. On the roof of the building above the shooter’s head, two of our guys moved along and dropped some grenades down a small chimney hole. There was a dull thud as the grenades inside the closed space went off. The percussion from the blast created a small dust plume that puffed out of the building.
But the Talib continued to fire; the grenades had apparently not been effective. We started to move down to help. Devil and I jumped a wall to get into the compound. The enemy was holed up in a warren of small rooms in this mudbrick structure. We moved in behind an adjoining wall. Our guys were continuing to drop grenades through smoke holes in the roof, and rounds were punching back through the roof at them. Even after five grenades had gone into the little room, whoever was in there was still firing back out.
On the other side of the wall, they were only a couple of metres from Devil and me. We could hear them shouting. Their resilience was truly amazing. A fighter came out blazing with his gun and the boys shot him. He was down to his last three rounds when he made his suicide dash. The call was made to use anti-structural grenades now. Normal ‘frag’ grenades work by exploding a packet of shrapnel in all directions. Anti-structural grenades don’t have shrapnel, but cause overpressure that will collapse a structure from the inside. Outdoors, they create nothing but a bang, a shockwave and a brief ball of flame. Inside, they can bring down a house.
Our guys threw one of these grenades into the room. Boom! – it collapsed. We let the smoke clear. The grenade had ruptured the wall we’d just been standing on.
I sent Devil in, but the smoke was still obscuring the picture on my screen. I followed, with Blake behind me. Blake was the 2IC of the team I had flown in on. He is a good friend and we had served together on a few operations by this time. He is a solid operator. He saw a PKM set up at the back of the room among the blankets under a shelf, its muzzle pointed at the opening we’d just walked through. Devil was carrying on among the blankets, his tail wagging. We could hear a low groaning. Not knowing what state the wounded Talib was in, or whether he was armed, we fired into the blankets, killing him. When we ripped off the blankets, Devil found the fighter, all bombed up with guns and chest rig.
I hadn’t noticed the clouds massing overhead. Most days in Afghanistan in summer are clear and blue, but this day was more like Melbourne. After the initial heat, there had been a smell of rain in the air and that electric pre-storm feel, and now a thunderstorm was gathering. There were still plenty of fighters scattered through the other buildings, and plenty more compounds to clear. On the radio, their leader was bragging about what a great day they’d had. But the fighters in the village were screaming with panic, telling their commander they were trapped. Our assault had caught them completely off guard. Their commander said, ‘Allah is with you.’ From the tone of his voice, he was nowhere near the village. They were telling him they were scared. His response was, ‘Take one of them with you when you go. Farewell.’
Knowing how desperate and suicidal they were, we cleared the buildings with caution. In one, we found three women with maybe fifteen kids. ‘Close the doors,’ we said in Pashto, ‘and don’t open them or come out until the morning.’
The building beside them was fairly small. Three of us went into the entrance point. I turned left with Devil to sort a couple of rooms out. My mate pushed in to the right to clear a few smaller rooms, more like animal pens. As he pushed a wooden door, his light caught and reflected two eyeballs and a gun. Shots rang out and he nearly caught a bullet under his arm. As he pulled back from the room, another gun opened up from his left, no more than half a metre away. Two of us scrambled into place and gave him cover fire, shooting into the room to keep them in there. Two grenades went in, but the enemy was still returning fire. It was an extremely dangerous and intense confrontation.
Devil was meant to stay by my side during a gunfight, but he’d kept wandering off to a room less than three metres to my right. While shooting, I called, ‘Devil!’ He came over, but then disappeared again into another room behind me, against my orders. We threw more grenades at the enemy in the first room, before I heard a commotion behind me. Devil was dragging out an insurgent who’d been hiding on a firewood ledge with a gun. If one of us had gone in, he would have had a clear shot at our head. Even now, as he was wrestling with Devil, he was trying to get control of his gun. I shot him.
In that situation, all I was thinking was, Protect yourself, get a good sight picture, squeeze. This insurgent had a gun. You don’t have time to analyse it. In war, you’re aware that somewhere out there is a bullet that might be coming at you. You don’t know where it’s going to come from, but everything you do is to stop that happening. All your tactics are to stop that. It’s not a thug’s game; it’s tactical and clear-headed. But it is life and death. In this building, Devil had saved me. Again.
I let the boys know I had another EKIA. More grenades were going into the room in front of me. How were we going to get them out? We’d put five grenades in by now. Did we run into the room and risk ourselves, knowing they would have a gun trained on the doorway? Not likely.
We dropped in a red phosphorus grenade to suffocate him out, but didn’t know what effect it had. With smoke everywhere, it was impossible to tell.
Then I had to make a hard decision. There was really only one way to clear the room without taking an unacceptable risk. I sent Devil in. He was half a body length through the doorway when a gunshot came from inside. My heart jumped into my throat. I yelled out, ‘Heel!’
Devil re-emerged, and we shot over the top of him. He managed to back out. Rounds were kicking up around his head.
‘Heel! HEEL!!!’
I was freaking out, thinking he was going to get shot.
As he came out, he looked at me warily and kept his distance. He wasn’t going to come near me. I was too angry. I had to calm down.
‘Heel,’ I said, more calmly, and grabbed him. I dragged him around a corner and checked him. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t got hit. The mounting of the camera on his back, the little black metal rectangle, had a bullet hole straight through it. A round had missed his spine by a couple of centimetres. I grabbed his head and rubbed it and said, ‘Sorry, buddy, I shouldn’t have done that to you.’
Up to that point, we hadn’t known where in this room the fighter was. I checked the angle from which the bullet had hit Devil’s camera mounting, and deduced where he must have been hiding. Another team showed up with an explosive charge, and we decided to blow the whole room up. Mud and rocks flew everywhere. There had been two Taliban inside, one had been killed in the initial firefight and the other was killed instantly by the blast. Devil having got out without being hit was pure luck.
The thunderstorm came and went, and the weather turned fine again. We cleared out the rest of the village, and pushed back to consolidate. We had to continue towards the green belt to clear out the escape route they’d tried to use earlier in the day, and came across a Talib who’d been hit by the Apaches. The high-calibre rounds had basically dismembered him, a reminder of why the gunships were so feared. We still had to get photos and conduct a search of his gear for intel purposes, and the state he was in was stomach-turning. When we searched the dead enemy fighter, one of his pockets had some paper in it. When removed it flittered away like confetti.
I followed Devil and Rex, the other combat assault dog, through a wheatfield, and we found another cache of weapons and money. Once we reached our limit of exploitation we moved back to the village to collect all the gear, and then linked up with the team that was still at the original target building before our extractio
n.
Devil and I had a long, exhausted sleep that night. Our group had killed thirty enemy fighters in a full day’s fighting. A few of my patrolmates had come close to catching bullets, and so had Devil. As dangerous as it was, it was a day that proved the value the dogs provided in heavy fighting. Devil had made a crucial difference, I think, in saving our lives and helping us achieve our objectives.
The 2011 trip was the most successful, at that time, of any SAS squadron, if measured by the number of senior enemy leaders taken out. Without suffering one casualty, we had killed eighty or ninety enemy fighters, among them twenty-three or twenty-four commanders, each running substantial networks. It was a brutal business, but any feelings of compassion towards the dead were suppressed by our knowledge of what they’d been doing – and would have kept doing if left unchecked. We’d set them back by months, if not longer. The next squadron would tell us there was nothing going on in that western area of Uruzgan for their entire trip.
But there are always swings and roundabouts when you’re fighting anything less than a total war. The Q&As and other interrogatories about how we’d operated were putting a dent in morale. Some time after that big fight, I was training with Devil. A senior officer was asking me why, that day, so many people had had to die. I had a simple answer.
‘Sir, they were trying to kill us.’ I explained in detail about being in that house, at close quarters, with those guns firing at us out of rooms. I explained what Devil had done, and how I’d shot the man who was fighting with Devil while trying to get his gun aimed at me.
The Crossroad Page 33