by Sandra Lee
‘When we got into that fight when it first started, I thought to myself, “This is as scary as hell.” No one is born as some brave kick-arse warrior,’ Peterson says now. ‘You have to make decisions and when we got initially pushed away from my tube — we were driven back a little bit from my mortar tube — I thought to myself, “I’m sitting in a ditch and getting shot at.” I didn’t care about God and country, didn’t care about anything else. I just didn’t want to disgrace the Army. And whatever anyone read about this fight — and if we all died — I just wanted them to think that the mortars fought their butts off, that we got up and went back to the tube and started hammering again.’
And they did.
Jock watched out of the corner of his eye as AQ tracked the mortarmen’s every step, lobbing 82mm mortars on them one after the other with stunning precision.
It was bedlam, and extraordinary that no one had been killed. Jock was running on pure adrenaline. He was charged. ‘We have had about three pisses in the first hour and half a packet of durries,’ he says.
He looked over at Clint five metres away and yelled at him. ‘Hey, Clint, let’s get a bloody photo, get your camera out,’ Jock said.
Jock wanted a photograph to capture the moment but Clint was having none of it.
‘I was getting a bit cheeky. I shuffled over to him and said, “It’s in your bum pack.” And he didn’t get it. So I went and got it and he’s literally trying to get his thoughts together and probably trying to work out the best way to utilise the men on the ground. Taking a photo wasn’t his priority,’ Jock says.
‘So I took a photo of him and he took a photo of me.’
In the photos, Jock looks all gung ho. Clint doesn’t look happy. He understood fully the gravity of the situation; Jock, obviously, did not.
Sergeant Pete’s mortar was getting belted big time, as were other infantrymen in the kill zone.
About 100 metres away, Jock saw a couple of the packs that the US soldiers had dropped when they ran for cover getting mortared and blown to pieces. The enemy on the hill had started to use the packs as target practice and would continue to do so all day.
What the fuck? Jock thought.
It was then that he realised the valley had previously been DF’d — direct fired — and the reality of the situation became crystal clear. The enemy had already ranged the valley floor and knew exactly where their weapons would land their fire. But as Jock explains, they still needed to know where the US soldiers would be.
‘You can have as many of these as you want, but unless you know where the enemy is, it’s no good to you,’ Jock says. ‘Someone must have been on the western ridge to report our locations, and, as it was, we soon learned how many were on the western ridge.’
The soldiers in the halfpipe had all been trained in the best ways to limit the enemy’s ability to put effective fire on them, and they fought back with intensity.
Jock Wallace made about five calls back to the Aussie Regimental HQ in the first hour, relaying, via the chooks at One Oscar, details of the firefight and the ambush to Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink, and the commander of 1 SAS Squadron, Major Dan McDaniel. Each radio contact updated the sitrep, and Jock called for close air support (CAS) from the Apache gunships and fast movers overhead.
The staff in the TOC were no longer able to watch the action in the lower Shahi Kot Valley on the video screens. At 7.30am the unmanned Predator drone flying above had locked its cameras onto a compound at Sherkhankhel, further north, in the belief that a ‘high-value target — UBL’ was in the region. UBL was the shorthand the Americans used for Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, spelling his first name with a U.
Calls for CAS were answered as the enemy fire intensified, and the Apaches — known as the Killer Spades — from the 3–101’s A Company hit targets called in by Grippe’s battalion fire-support officer, Captain Taylor, who was in Hell’s Halfpipe with Grippe.
Just before 8am, AH-64 Apaches roared overhead again and opened fire on an al Qaeda position north of Ginger, Jock’s initial objective before the ambush. The choppers were under fire, but refused to genuflect to the barrage coming from AQ terrorists just a hundred metres below them.
A cheer went up from the men pinned down in Hell’s Halfpipe when they saw the fearsome attack helicopters sweep over the valley on rocket runs. The Apaches had been engaged since well before dawn, laying down suppressive fire on known enemy positions, and were now flying in a racetrack circuit over the northern and southern end of the Shahi Kot. With an AQ location captured in its high-tech target acquisition system, the gunner co-pilot sent a fusillade of 30mm chain-gun and rocket fire into the ridgeline, wiping the enemy combatants out in a triumphant puff of smoke.
‘It was great. We’d just been jumped, got to ground, got our composure. Vick and Achey [two of the forward air controllers from the US Air Force attached to the 10th Mountain] have put out the calls for fire and have been able to contact some Apaches who were willing to come in,’ Jock says now.
The Apache is a terrifying bird of prey. Armed with Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, air-to-air missiles, and a 30mm automatic M230 chain gun tucked under the fuselage, it is capable of flying at a maximum of 197 knots — or 365 kilometres an hour. Able to manoeuvre at enormous speeds, it is an exquisite example of electronic warfare technology and perfect for a close support role like this — where the pilots are almost close enough to the enemy to see the whites of their eyes.
According to Major General Hagenbeck, enemy detainees considered the Apaches the most feared weapons on the battlefield. ‘The helicopters were on top of them before they knew what was happening. The Apaches came as close to “one shot, one kill” as you can get,’ Hagenbeck told Field Artillery magazine.
Even though its metal frame has been engineered to withstand an enormous amount of firepower in combat situations, the Apache is still vulnerable to certain weapons.
‘When the helicopters came over, at first they were kicking arse. They were ripping rockets off and hosing the hill with the gun and then they turned, right in front of the rock face they had just been brassing up, and it seemed like the whole hillside came alive with small-arms and automatic gunfire,’ Jock says.
Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters opened up on the Apaches, shooting at them with everything they had including Kalashnikov rifles, RPGs and machine-gun fire. One helo took a direct hit, and a bullet ricocheted through the cockpit and hit the pilot.
‘The Apaches became stationary to the enemy when they banked right in front of their position,’ Jock says, explaining the rocket runs and tactics used by the gunship pilots.
‘So the Apaches were coming straight at them, brrr, brrr, firing rockets, and then they turned. That’s when they’re vulnerable because they are now pretty much pulled up in front of them [al Qaeda’s machine-gun nests] and they’ve got to slowly take off. You can belt in there and they have to try and get you, but as soon as you turn broadside and you’re closer and slow moving, the choppers are vulnerable. The enemy did it perfectly — they held up, held up, held up, and obviously you duck when the Apache is shooting at you, but then they all just propped up and hooked in.
‘And all of a sudden [the Apaches’] guns ceased. You could hear the rotors slap as they were turning and then the mountain came alive and opened up on them. There was just hundreds of small arms belting into these Apaches,’ Jock says. ‘I might be exaggerating when I say hundreds, but to me that’s what it seemed like.
‘The Apaches got pasted up, got the shit shot out of them. Two of them, one after the other. You could hear them getting whacked. They were definitely getting impacted.’
Jock had no doubt, especially when the Apaches limped off the battlefield.
An hour after the first Apache blasted the snow-covered ridgeline with cannons, Captain Taylor called for another rocket run.
The gunship roared in but the co-pilot gunner couldn’t fire.
‘Summit Four Zero. This is Killer Spade Si
x,’ the pilot radioed to Taylor, who had called in the grid coordinates of the targets. ‘We’ve taken small-arms fire and have to return to the FARP to deal with it.’
The forward air-refuelling point, or FARP, codenamed Texaco, was halfway between Bagram and the Shahi Kot Valley. In all, four Apaches were damaged that morning and, with fuel running low, the wounded fleet limped out of the valley.
‘That was the last we saw of any choppers until way late in the day,’ Jock says now.
Watching the birds disappear was soul-destroying for the men left behind, including Jock, for it meant one thing. The men of the 10th Mountain were on their own and facing shocking odds. About the same as the Aussies in Long Tan, decades earlier in the Vietnam War, Jock thought.
‘A bit disenchanting, it’s not meant to happen like that, they’re meant to be able to kick the shit out of things, that’s meant to save my arse,’ Jock says on reflection.
Any inkling he’d had that they might not make it out of the Shahi Kot Valley alive was magnified when the Apaches got smashed. ‘We were stunned. We all looked at each other and thought “What the …” as they limped off the battlefield,’ Jock says. ‘That’s when it first dawned on me that we were in some serious shit.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was a three-month crash course in soldiering, the basic training of all new recruits. He was seventeen and a digger.
And within days Martin would be known as Jock, in keeping with the Australian military’s unofficial tradition of handing out nicknames to its members.
JOCK WALLACE IS A Gen X soldier, having been born at the tail end of 1969. With his parents, Margaret and Reginald, and older brother, James, he spent the first four years of his life living in North Epping, a typical middle-class neighbourhood twenty kilometres northwest of Sydney’s CBD. The suburb’s greatest claim to fame came in 1972 when a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl named Shane Gould won three gold medals for swimming at the Olympic Games in Munich. The quiet blonde with huge lungs had gone to the local primary school, a geographical coincidence the locals boast of even today.
North Epping was, and is, a tranquil suburb but Margaret Wallace wanted a country childhood for her children, so when her youngest son was four she packed up the family and headed to Tamworth, 440 kilometres north of Sydney on the New England Highway. Tamworth is the country music capital of Australia and in 1973, the year the Wallaces arrived, the city’s burghers hosted the first of what would become an internationally renowned annual country music festival. Each January ever since, the festival has welcomed about 50000 tourists with affection for all things country and western. They are diehard fans, and must be to endure what is unarguably the hottest time of the unforgiving southern summer, when the sun turns the countryside into a sunburnt parchment as fragile as crepe paper and as combustible as rocket fuel.
The Wallaces moved onto a small farm at Winton, west of Tamworth, and the young Martin and James were given free rein to run wild. The family raised cows, chooks and, for a short time, pigs. They had four blue heeler dogs to work the property and a pet beagle named Queenie.
The boys’ childhood was typically Australian and typical of the times. It was the 1970s, a period of transition both politically and culturally. Martin, or Jock as he would become known in the Army, was born the year that a man first walked on the moon and he grew up in a decade that marked the start of a new computer and consumer age. Polaroid launched an instant colour camera, a huge leap from the old Box Brownie, VCRs began appearing in homes around the nation, and Nike reinvented the running shoe. Two unknown Americans named Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak founded Apple Computers and unveiled the first mass-produced personal computer, and kids began entertaining themselves with Walkmans and arcade video games such as Space Invaders.
The political landscape similarly was undergoing a seismic shift. At home in Australia, the Labor Party came to power in a sudden burst of energy only to lose it just as quickly and explosively with the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. A political scandal dubbed Watergate ended the troubled presidency of Richard Nixon and launched the careers of two journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, and in the United Kingdom a greengrocer’s daughter named Margaret Thatcher became the first British woman to lead a major political party.
At the very end of the decade, on Christmas Eve in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded the landlocked country of Afghanistan, an historic act of aggression that at the time meant nothing to a ten-year-old Martin Wallace, but would be of enormous importance to him more than two decades down the track.
For all its change, the 1970s was still an era of innocence for children, a time when they were unafraid and open to the possibilities before them. Martin’s mother encouraged him and his brother James to express their personalities and opinions, and they did, particularly in their bedrooms which they painted themselves; red for James and burnt orange, the signature colour of the seventies, for Martin. Their cousins were jealous of their domestic liberties, but to their mum it seemed perfectly normal for such strong-willed sons.
‘They were as wild as March hares,’ Margaret Wallace recalls fondly.
James and his younger brother were as thick as thieves and, together with their mates, hooned around the countryside and local State forest, first on their pushbikes and then, when they were a little bit older, on powerful trail bikes. Being country boys, they were brought up surrounded by guns, which their dad, Reg, taught them to handle safely. It’s a weapon, he told them repeatedly, and you have to respect your weapons. A shooting range in the back yard gave them ample opportunity to hone their marksmanship, which they did with enthusiasm.
In 1980, when he was eleven, Martin asked for a bow and arrow and began a short-lived obsession with archery that was curbed after he fired one too many arrows straight up in the air; it came down, pointed end first, through the bonnet of his uncle’s car. The boys also had a back-yard trampoline on which Martin experienced another rite of passage — his first broken bone — an accident that resulted in a trip to the local hospital and a plaster cast on his arm which was duly signed by all and sundry at school. He would break his arm again in 1987 while attached to 104 Signal Squadron at Holsworthy.
The Wallace boys revelled in the great outdoors but they were also bookish and devoured novels with what was, for boys, an unexpected and pleasing enthusiasm. Their love for books came from their mother, who enjoyed reading to them, especially Banjo Paterson’s epic poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’. She read it over and over. Every time Margaret got to the point where the stripling on the small and weedy beast rode down that terrible descent, she cried and her boys laughed, both at their mum’s sentimental and predictable reaction and in awe of the man from Snowy River.
The younger Wallace boy became hooked on wild, boisterous adventures and churned through the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island before he turned eight, an accomplishment that amazes his proud mother still. He fell in love with Stevenson’s rollicking storytelling and character-driven narrative. As soon as he could, he’d consumed the rest of Stevenson’s library including The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Even as a child, Martin was intrigued by the mutable nature of human behaviour depicted in the book.
But while he loved reading and was intelligent and articulate, Martin did not thrive at school, not because academia proved too challenging for him, but because it bored him. He went to the nearby Westdale Public School for his primary education and, at the age of twelve, transferred to Peel High School for his secondary. Garrulous and quick on his feet, he took up debating in his first year and talked his way, quite literally, into the final of the interschool competition. But boys being boys, he was too self-conscious to accept an invitation by the debating master to return to it in Year 8. It didn’t help that his mates were outside playing footy and mucking around when he’d have to be practising his oratory skills and sharpening his arguments. It was as appealing as being forced to listen to your best mate’s sister’s lat
est ABBA record.
About the only thing that grabbed Martin’s interest was sport. A skilful footballer, he played centre and wing in the school’s rugby league competition. He was lean and fast and, while not particularly big for his age, could outrun the opposition. Few sports escaped him. Martin played cricket, hockey, tennis and did karate and swimming; and perhaps inspired by that bloke from Snowy River, became a skilled horseman.
Martin was well liked and something of a practical joker with a keen sense of humour that bordered on the mischievous. Margaret Wallace had no illusions about her son’s intellect or his roguish behaviour. She was called to the principal’s office on the odd occasion, but instead of seeing the principal’s point of view, she always launched a strident defence of her son’s independence and voracious appetite for adventure. Her youngest got good grades when he applied himself, but his mother could see that school bored him rigid. She even developed a certain affection for the words ‘too disruptive’ that never failed to appear on his end-of-term school reports.
Margaret had no doubt that the teachers would never approve of her son’s nomination as class prefect when he was in Year 10, but she took comfort in the fact that he had character and a strong set of personal values. Both Margaret and Reg were proud that their sons tended to favour the underdog, and she detected a quiet kindness in both James and Martin. James was rock solid, and Margaret could see Martin’s caring nature and sensitivity in the way he treated his dog, Queenie, and the manner in which he conducted himself with his mates.
Mateship is a foundation stone of the Australian psyche and of the Australian Army, and that’s especially true in the bush. And Martin believed in it absolutely. He was fiercely loyal and had a wide circle of friends. In fact, his schoolmates had once given him a standing ovation when he came on stage at the end-of-year assembly. The foot-stomping and applause doubtless would have irked the teachers who disapproved of his pranks.