The officer said, ‘Did you try to detain him?’
I was dumbfounded. The question showed a complete lack of understanding. We were in a war situation, not a policing situation. There’s often a lot of exaggerated talk about ‘Kill or be killed’, but this time, that was what it was. If I, or others that day, had not killed, then we wouldn’t be here today and my children would not have a dad.
TWENTY-NINE
Because of Emma’s pregnancy, I came home from Afghanistan at the beginning of July, a week before the rest of my squadron. Our squadron leaders were very understanding and flexible in that way. Earlier in the trip, when I’d rung Emma for her birthday, she’d said, ‘Are you sitting down? Right. The house has burnt down.’ Our place in Fremantle had gone up in smoke after an electrical fire. It can be hard sometimes when you’re away doing the job and catastrophes, like a house fire, happen back home. You want to be home to help out, organise it all and tell them everything will be all right. The normal things you would do as a husband and father. When you can’t, it can be stressful. Emma and Kaylee weren’t living there at the time, having moved to a house near Campbell Barracks, but her father had been in the Fremantle place. Fortunately he was all right. Nevertheless, my troop sergeant, Daryll, had asked me if I wanted to go home for seven days. I hadn’t needed to, but it was considerate of him to make the offer.
I got home on 5 July and was staying up late each night to watch the Tour de France, which Cadel Evans won that year. Settling into home life and the Australian time zone, it can be hard to re-establish your sleep patterns. I was also wondering what the boys were up to back in Afghanistan. Just like when I was a little kid running around after Brent and the others, I had a phobia about being sent to bed early and missing out on the fun.
On the night of 9 July, Emma came out of the bedroom and said she thought she was going into labour. We weren’t sure, and I crashed out on the couch, but just before dawn she got up and said it was time to go. We dropped Kaylee with Taylor’s wife on the next street across – he was flying in from Afghanistan that morning – and went to the hospital, where Hamish was born a few hours later. Emma had done a great job of keeping the sex of the new addition a secret while I was away. She had found out but I wanted it to be a surprise. The labour was a lot quicker than Kaylee’s, and the thrill of seeing my son wiped away all thoughts of the war I’d been fighting in just a few days earlier. We gave him a good Scottish name that Dad would have loved. Most importantly, if I’d come home with the rest of the squadron, I would have missed his birth by two or three hours. If that had been the case, I might have needed Devil to protect me from Emma.
She and Hamish stayed in the hospital for five days, and he was easy with feeding and sleeping from the get-go. Over the next six months, family life with a newborn and a five-year-old was bliss. We went to Thailand for ten days, splashing out on a resort near Phuket. It took me seven days to wind down and stop wanting to race around sightseeing, seeing Buddhas, riding an elephant, going to town, checking out the nightlife. Emma kept saying, ‘Stay here and enjoy it.’ By day seven I was listening to her.
*
The 2012 trip to Afghanistan, which would start in February, would see another transition for me. I was going to hook up with Bruce’s team as his patrol 2IC. That meant handing Devil over, which was hard. I was convinced he wouldn’t take easily to Nick, his new handler, but they just clicked. Devil was pretty unsentimental! He made the transfer easy for me by going off and training Nick, getting his job done. It gave me a chance to reflect on how I’d contributed something to the Regiment’s practices through the dog program. Bringing Devil into the team was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. Seeing someone else have success with him was massively gratifying. And, as I’ve said, Devil might have been the difference between me coming home and not coming home in 2011.
In January 2012, Bruce was knitting us into a tight team. I’d always admired his professionalism and his skill in pushing hard to achieve an objective, and it was a privilege to work under him. Being 2IC was a new adventure for me. As a corporal in a patrol, you take charge of admin, ammo, food and water, which are basic tasks for an SAS operator, but they still have to be done, so your mind can be switched on to the task ahead. The 2IC is also an intermediary between the PC and the men. You can explain to them in greater detail why they’re doing something. The PC isn’t always able to do that, whereas the 2IC can back him up by explaining it in terms they understand. I don’t know if anyone would have seen me as a leader earlier in my life, but it was another sign of how the Regiment had brought out the best in me.
We had a late-night departure on a C-17 to Diego Garcia, and then went straight in to Afghanistan, avoiding the ‘fobbits’ (a derogatory but common nickname for FOB staffers) and other obstacles in Dubai. The weather was cold and squally when we arrived, and the trip had a fairly slow start. We had to ‘martac’ the relatively new American helicopter crews we were using – basically sweet-talk them into doing things our way – but there was a large mixture of force elements as well as an SAS squadron competing for the same helicopters, same intelligence and so on. Sometimes the easiest part of the mission is when you’ve finally stepped out of the helicopter to engage with the enemy.
After a few small tasks around Tarin Kowt, we were sent out west near Deh Rahwod, to an area that was a big highway for the enemy smuggling weapons and drugs to their fighters in Helmand, where they were giving the Brits a hard time. The roads out there had all been tarred since I’d first come to Afghanistan, a sign of progress in infrastructure, but not a reason for us to get complacent. The IED threat was still high, as the insurgents had discovered that they could wait for the tarred roads to heat up in the day and then dig them up at night and bury a device. They tended to do this in late summer, leaving them in there with the wires unattached through the winter. Then, when the fighting season was about to start again, they would go around attaching battery packs to the IEDs to get them ready. Also, the better infrastructure gave them opportunities: the roads now had a lot of drains running beneath them, which the insurgents saw as handy places to plant IEDs.
We were after a middleman who was linking this traffic through some big bazaars, cashing up through drug-selling and distributing arms. It was interesting to see how, as we decimated the Taliban as a fighting force, the big picture was changing. Whereas we used to target the commanders, by 2012 they weren’t around. They were sending orders across to the lower fighters who were living out in the caves and holes in the ground in Afghanistan. We couldn’t go after the leaders because they were in a different country, but we could still ruin their networks by taking out their minions.
As we came in to land, some enemy fighters, including the target, were squirting from the village towards a river. The farmers stood by and watched as we hared off across their fields after the Talibs. The target ditched his pistol, personal effects and some IED materials into a blackberry bush, which we set fire to. Quake, the dog handled by my mate Craig, jumped into the river and swam after the target. We watched the Talib bob down the river. A dozen of us were within our rights to shoot at him, but we left it for the moment. Bruce called in the helicopters and we flew downstream with another patrol to get him a bit later.
The job had sent out an important message. This target had only been in Afghanistan for two days, and we’d been right onto him. We received a document off our intel that came from the head of the Taliban. It summed up the situation for them and showed us the results of the hard work we’d put in as a Regiment. ‘2011 was a terrible season for us,’ it said. ‘The Australians with the red beards are very good fighters. Do not fight the Australians. We will lose every time.’ There was a bit more to it, but the document was virtually saying they’d lost Uruzgan. That was pretty good, hearing that from their top man.
On our next task, our intelligence was so good that the target had only been in Afghanistan for one day be
fore one of our patrols landed pretty much on top of him. The Talib leaders, panicking that their men weren’t able to make a move before getting hit, put out communications to the lower-downs saying he was still there, but was uncontactable because he was busy fighting. Then they tried to tell them he’d gone back to Pakistan to get more money and fighters. But the insurgents on the ground were freaking out; they knew he was gone and that their leaders were lying to them.
Personally, I was excited to be back in battle rhythm, working in Bruce’s team. It was harder to be leaving my family, since Hamish was just beginning to crawl and Kaylee had a better understanding of how long I’d be away. But professionally, this was a pay-off time, when we were drawing the benefits from several years’ hard work. Fighting is more enjoyable when you sense that your enemy is on the run.
The outside political situation was changing again, and we understood that the coalition was planning to steadily withdraw its forces. After coming here six times in seven years, I realised I might be in Afghanistan for the last time. Knowing this experience was coming to an end, I would look around the helicopter as we went into a job and take time to reflect. Soldiers had different rituals and routines for getting ready – some wore lucky undies, some listened to music, some cracked jokes, some got very talkative and others went quiet. The differences were especially noticeable when we knew we were going to get into a gunfight. For my own preparation, I was still into the same music as when I was young: the metal and then Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers. High-stress situations brought me back to that music, and through it I could reach down and find the same feelings as when I was going for a surf or a snowboard. I found that music could not only calm me, but sort of knit my whole self together. Once I had my body armour on, helmet in hand and rifle ready to go, walking out the door heading to the helicopter was the time to focus. It is about a mental preparation and being at peace with what you are about to do. We all have our jobs to do out there and I focused on what mine was.
We hadn’t lost a man for nearly two years by April, when we went out on a job in a wide-open area, all rocky plains and small bald hills in a dry riverbed near Deh Rahwod. Our target was an IED maker who had attacked an Afghan police checkpoint and was a link between those in charge and those fighting. The helicopters dropped us 400 metres further from the target than we’d planned. The fine powdery dust got into my nostrils and throat. It’s not a neutral desert smell, but is kind of gamy, the dust mixed with centuries of goat shit, goat fur, sheep shit, sheep’s wool, an animal smell that gets everywhere and never goes away. We sped off across this bare moonscape to link up with a team led by my mate Paddy, who had four Australians and three Afghans with him. We called him Paddy because he could be a bit loose like the crazy Irishman from the Braveheart movie. These locals were good soldiers, well educated and easy to train. They were not Pashtun, and didn’t work for Matiullah Khan. It was an advantage having armed operatives who were not from the area, because they wouldn’t let tribal ties cloud their judgement.
Paddy’s team was moving towards an abandoned nomad settlement of kutchi huts, low mud igloos held up by sticks. Some of them had been abandoned for the season; they would only be occupied by shepherds during the winter. We paused on higher ground to watch. Paddy’s group approached one hut and discussed who would search it. He was encouraging the Afghans to have a go. One of them, Rahul, went around the doorway. We’d trained them to do the same as us, which was to swap the gun to whichever shoulder was nearer the opening, so as not to expose half the body. For whatever reason, Rahul didn’t swap his gun, and ducked his face towards the opening. There was a burst of fire and he dropped to the ground. As he lay there, more volleys of bullets were fired out of the hut into his body.
A lot of us rushed down to help Paddy. He chucked a frag grenade into the hut while I covered him.
‘Get out of the way!’ he said.
I said, ‘I’m here to cover you.’
He threw an anti-structural grenade in, but it bounced back outside. In the open air, it went off but did no damage, aside from knocking one of our guys onto his arse with the shockwave.
Paddy threw another frag grenade into the doorway. Others from the team were charging in to help and JTACs were suggesting calling in an Apache and hitting the hut with a Hellfire missile. Craig wanted to send Quake in. All the guys were wanting to get in on the action. I didn’t blame their enthusiasm, but it was causing a bit of havoc. Paddy and Bruce told them to back off and let them deal with it.
As I covered him, Paddy pumped a full magazine into the doorway of the hut. There was a small air hole at the top, and I dropped in an anti-structural grenade, which blew the hut apart. As the wind cleared the dust away, Paddy put in another burst of fire, as did some others. When the dust settled, we saw two Talibs who could still have fired at us, and shot them.
We got a medevac for Rahul, but he’d been shot through the head twice and several more times through his body. He was gone, but it was important to show the Afghan partner force, who were pretty shaken up, that we would treat him the same way as any of us.
Digging through the rubble, we found four AK-47s, chest rigs, grenades, a PKM machine gun, a G3 automatic rifle and a lot of ammo. It was quite a heavy set-up for a small faction living in a mud hut. They also had some IED material and componentry for suicide bombs. The EKIA included the target plus three younger boys, most likely suicide bombers who’d come straight out of a training camp in Pakistan, we guessed. Everything we found fit in with the intel picture we’d been given.
It’s a sad fact that the younger fighters were generally much more fanatical than their commanders, more motivated by religious ideas of death and glory, and so more dangerous. It’s also possible that the Taliban leaders were reaching down to younger warriors because they were easier to influence. There were similarities to the Hitler Youth in 1945. Running out of experienced fighters, the Taliban leaders could gee up kids who wanted to make a name for themselves as the boys who’d taken out a local police officer, government official or coalition soldier. Their status would rise if they could get away with it, and the leaders would offer their parents money and houses if their children would undertake these missions. Then these kids would get pushed around like pawns, and live literally the life of a dog in these isolated huts in the middle of the desert or in the mountains. If they were in villages or towns, they had to move from house to house every night to avoid capture. And throughout, they were waiting for someone to tell them to go and blow themselves up at a police checkpoint. If you live in the West, it’s hard to fathom.
That April, we heard there were suicide bombers newly arrived in Tarin Kowt. Our intelligence was that three of them, kids around fifteen or sixteen years old, had been sent to a Taliban handler. The first one went into a team of Americans and Afghans, in downtown TK, and blew himself up. Two Americans and two Afghans were killed. Our priority became to focus on this suicide bomber network, and we picked up four or five heavily involved individuals. The other two suicide bombers were out there still, but the brainwashing had worn off after they’d seen what had happened to the first one. The organisers we’d grabbed had links to the Afghan Government, playing both sides. It wasn’t easy to prosecute them, but our arrests meant the network fell apart and the boss running it from Pakistan apparently abandoned his aim of sending more suicide bombers into Tarin Kowt. We were pleased to have achieved that, and the Americans were grateful. But seeing such young children being used as cannon fodder was a sobering reminder of the types of people we were up against. As they grew more desperate, their tactics were getting uglier.
THIRTY
As the weather warmed up and the enemy increased its activity, recruiting boys and men for the fighting season, I was given more responsibility as 2IC. Essentially the PC runs each job, but Bruce always asked for my opinion. We were directed to do some strike to develop (STD) jobs, which are deliberate actions
to make the enemy do something that will expose them and bring them above the ‘threshold’, to allow us to target them more easily. Bruce wanted to hit a couple of areas to create disruptions, which we could follow up. In the first, we got four Talibs and plenty of arms and intelligence, and in the second we hit a bazaar early one morning.
Our plan was to get into the bazaar before dawn, surprise the enemy and squeeze them up the green belt to the end of the valley where we had people to put fire on them. Bruce delegated control of the team to me for a short period so he could organise the rest of the assault. We had Nick and Devil with us. I said, ‘Let’s go super-quiet.’ We hid in the long grass outside some houses where we suspected the enemy had been sleeping. They were sending young kids out to spot us, some as young as four, five, six years old. They’d know if a single blade of grass was out of shape. It was their backyard and they looked at it every day – no video games or TVs for these kids. They eventually saw us and scuttled back inside. Then some old women were sent out to have a look for us. Lying low, we crept to new positions. One of the little children was searching for me as I moved around in the high grass. Behind a building, I could see a man sneaking around, an enemy fighter. He was about 100 metres away. I got a bead on him. With a suppressor on my rifle, I took a shot but missed him. He stopped, looked around, and made another call on his radio. Paddy was only 25 metres from him, but hadn’t seen him. I calmed down, in a crouch position, making fine adjustments, and then shot him three times in the chest. We sent Devil to check him out, with Nick and a couple of others following. The most surprised person was Paddy, who’d never known the threat was so close to him. Compared with back in the 2006–08 period, I wasn’t now having moments of curiosity or speculation about who these men were, or what they had left to come and fight; as far as we were concerned, the purpose of my action was simply to save my mate’s life.
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