by Sandra Lee
‘It’s like being in an AOL chat room with 36 other people and you’re trying to have a conversation with one person,’ an air officer would later tell Elaine Grossman of InsideDefense.com.
‘Can you get us CAS, any way you can?’ Achey asked Jock, who started to call the Bossman on a different frequency.
No joy. But Jock didn’t give up. Failure under fire was not a fuckin’ option, he thought.
Jock could see that al Qaeda had pinpointed the casualty collection point and begun walking fire in on Hell’s Halfpipe. Things were not looking good. The bastards, he thought.
Jock tried a different tactic and radioed the Regimental Headquarters. Clear as a bell.
You beauty. Jock’s radio was a lifeline. He had a direct link back to his HQ and it rarely went down. The information was subsequently filtered and calls for CAS were radioed to US pilots in the region who flew in to send a rain of fire down onto enemy targets.
‘One Oscar this is Niner Charlie,’ Jock said. ‘Over.’
Clint was beside him, writing up a sitrep in his notebook.
‘One Oscar, over,’ came the reply from one of Jock’s fellow chooks back at the HQ.
‘We are getting smashed by mortars. We need CAS. Over.’
It was tough getting messages out over the radio because the battlefield was loud and soldiers were running around, yelling and answering calls for fire, helping their brothers in arms.
‘There was a lot of noise and tension, pandemonium — not pandemonium as in people freaking out — but people trying to do the right thing, people trying to see something that needed to be done, screaming it out,’ Jock says now.
His fellow chooks at HQ could hear the gunfire. Al Qaeda were ripping mortars along the front and sides of Hell’s Halfpipe where the men were huddled. Shells exploded all around. For those on the ground the noise was earsplitting, and explosions reverberated through the troopers’ bodies.
‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie, over,’ Jock said again, as calm as ever. ‘We are being bracketed. We need CAS urgently.
‘We have just taken multiple casualties. We can’t move from our position. We need it now or you won’t be speaking to us in a minute. Over.’
The next voice Jock heard was that of the squadron’s commander, Major Dan McDaniel.
‘What kind of CAS? Over.’
‘Any kind. Over,’ Jock said.
Jock says now: ‘I don’t want a tick in the box for calls for fire, I want an aeroplane that drops bombs. But we got the plane eventually. That was a pretty hairy moment.’
Senior Airman Achey was on the radio and in the middle of attempting to call a B-52 when his signal went down. He looked at Jock who instantly opened a line of communication. Achey jumped on Jock’s radio, giving the location of the al Qaeda targets on the eastern ridgeline for another run. Pure synchronicity.
But the wrong grid references were being read back. Clint, with eyes like a hawk and ears like a bat, abruptly and with authority cut into the transmission.
‘Wrong coordinates,’ he bellowed quickly and clearly, correcting the references.
Clint asked for a read-back to make absolutely sure they were right the second time around. They were.
‘Roger. Out.’
Clint had averted a potentially fatal error. Given the circumstances of the full-blown battle, it was nothing short of a miracle, not to mention a sterling example of soldiering. Had Clint not been as alert as he was, a bomb could have taken out the entire company in Hell’s Halfpipe.
You can always rely on Clint to get it right, Jock thought, well pleased that he wasn’t the lone Aussie out there.
Jock and Achey were putting in call after call for CAS when they got the alert that CAS was inbound. The American AWACS radioed Achey telling him they had a B-52 in the air. It was manna from heaven, loaded as it was with Mark 82 bombs and JDAMs — the joint direct attack munitions bombs that could wipe out a small village in one fell swoop.
The B-52 was twenty minutes away. Jock hoped it was on course. He was looking through his binoculars, searching the sky for the plane when it came into view.
‘Lying on your back, looking ten kilometres up in the air, you can see the B-52s overhead and see the bombs drop, and you hope you’ve got more than a few seconds to live,’ he says now.
Jock was looking up and watched as the bomb bay doors of the B-52 opened. Bombs away, he thought, knowing it wouldn’t be long before he found out if the deadly delivery would find its mark on the eastern ridge about 400 metres away.
‘Everyone was holding their breath. It’s a very tense moment from bombs away to explosion,’ Jock says now.
Jock put his head down in the dirt and covered his ears, waiting for the bomb.
Boom.
A sonic boom reverberated throughout the valley sending shockwaves through the soldiers’ bodies as the ordnance found its target and obliterated al Qaeda bunkers and weaponry.
You bloody little beauty, Jock thought. That’ll teach you to fuck with us.
‘You are feeling shockwaves from the RPGs and mortars, and from your own air strikes going in — the big shockwaves from when the B-52s drop their guts. Every molecule of your body moves, every single atom is hit by the shockwaves — the sound. First you see the light, the vision, then the shockwaves, the sounds, and then the shrapnel snivels in overhead.’
Jock kept his head down as shrapnel tore through the air just centimetres away — another potentially fatal moment. About ten seconds later, he looked up and saw that a shard of hot metal had landed about half a metre away from him over the lip of the halfpipe. He reached out and grabbed it, burning his hand in the process. He wanted it as a souvenir, a reminder of the awesome power of the B-52 and the accuracy of the pilots and bombers overhead.
‘I thought, “You’re mine.” I keep it with my medals,’ Jock says now.
‘It’s a comforting feeling, once you know that they can drop a bomb from that height. You know those guys are backing you up. It was pleasing that they were that accurate. It was a helluva bang. There was nothing else all day that was as big as that.’
It was all over in a couple of minutes.
Soldier on, Jock thought.
The bombing was unequivocal, but it didn’t stop the hail of ordnance from other enemy positions in the valley and more AQ would filter in.
Doc Byrne was trying to get round to the back of the halfpipe where the most seriously wounded had been taken. The medics had done all they could for the kid with the shrapnel chest wound who now needed more specialised treatment. The Doc was trying to navigate a steep gradient about five metres high to reach him.
Referring to the Doc, Jock says with a laugh: ‘He’s not in the best shape physically, he’s a little bit older, with thick glasses and a big mouth that I’d previously encountered. He just grabbed his bag and started running up the hill with his escort who had come to get him, and the ground just started dancing all around him.’
‘Get down, Doc,’ the soldiers yelled at him.
Jock watched as the Doc made another three attempts to get over the rise but he kept getting shot at and had to scramble down.
Grippe was watching, full of awe and respect, for the Doc was as brave as any of the war-scarred grunts in the halfpipe.
Grippe stood up, typically ignoring the lethal rain of ordnance, and began walking down the bowl again.
‘Give me suppressive fire up on the hill,’ he hollered at his troops.
Jock recalls: ‘Everyone just jumped up and started shooting shit out of the eastern ridge, which was great. Got the doctor over, saved that guy’s life, but chewed up a hell of a lot of ammo at the same time.’
Twenty-year-old Private First Class Jason Ashline from the 120mm mortar platoon was lying prone on the dirt providing security when the order to shoot reached him. As he lifted himself up on his left knee, he got hammered by a hail of bullets and was knocked flat on his back.
‘I really wasn’t thinking at that poi
nt,’ Ashline recalls. ‘I thought I was injured, but it didn’t hurt. It just felt like someone smacked me really hard in the chest with a baseball bat. I remember feeling a lot of pressure and that kind of threw me off balance. I didn’t really feel anything and everything went really quiet and I remember lying there and I looked at the sky and snapped back to it.’
Ashline was lucky. His bulletproof vest had saved him and while mortar rounds had injured some of the Americans, the al Qaeda bullets didn’t have the power to puncture the Kevlar lining provided by Uncle Sam. Two bullets lodged in the front of Ashline’s vest, about three centimetres from the edge. Ashline said a quick prayer of thanks to his Lord and then got back to work.
After the battle, he claimed the vest as a lucky charm and keeps it on his dresser alongside pictures of his two children. But Uncle Sam made him pay the cost of it!
Jock and Clint continued calling in sitreps to the SAS HQ, and the information was passed through the chain of command to Lieutenant Colonel Tink in the TOC at Bagram and ultimately on to Anaconda’s overall boss, Major General Hagenbeck.
Jock had detailed at least two Priority One casualties, meaning that unless the wounded were evacuated as soon as possible, they could die. Battle statistics paint a grim picture of wounded in combat. On average, one out of every four soldiers injured in the line of duty will die. Combat commanders know the statistics and those at HQ knew that the all-important so-called ‘magic hour’ had long passed. The magic hour is the first hour after a soldier has been hit. If a seriously injured casualty makes it from the battlefield to the operating table in those crucial 60 minutes, his or her chances of survival are exponentially higher than if they don’t. But the men in the Shahi Kot had already been bleeding for more than an hour, and they would be lying out there all day.
Jock’s sitrep also included several Priority Two and Three casualties which, while less severe than the Priority Ones, were serious.
Jock’s stoicism on the radio was noted in the ops tent and his and Clint’s actions would be commented on by the Commander of Special Operations, Brigadier Duncan Lewis, days later in Australia.
Out in the field, Jock distinguished himself with his ingenuity.
He had a Special Operations Group Babyseal knife, about 30 centimetres long, and began digging a trench in the clay in which to lie, out of the line of fire. Unfortunately, Clint had left his small hand shovel back at base and started to dig in with his bare hands, promising himself never to forget his entrenching tool again. Eventually, Clint’s hole would be big enough to fit three men. It was backbreaking work because they had to dig where they were lying. If they stood up, they’d get shot. It’s fucking hard to dig a hole you’re lying in, Jock thought to himself.
Some of the Americans were surprised, but the Aussies’ SAS training was superior to that of the grunts in the US infantry and they understood that a soldier in a battlefield stood a better chance of survival if below ground level. So they dug. They didn’t get the name ‘diggers’ for nothing.
Known as diggers’ graves or shell scrapes, the trenches would be life-savers later in the day.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Shortly after 11am, an F-15 roared overhead on a bombing run and a blinding light erupted from the ridgeline. A Stinger missile had been launched and was chasing the fighter plane.
WHEN THE SOVIET UNION’S 40th Army delivered its highly trained airborne troops and Spetsnaz commandos to the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Christmas Eve in 1979, it also delivered a sense of unity to the fiercely independent people in the fractious landlocked nation. Afghanistan has long been a geopolitical prize sought after by empire builders, for it provided the one thing that growing nations desire and need: trade routes. Afghanistan had them running to the east and west and therefore serving the rich economies of Europe, the Middle East and central Asia.
As such, the rugged, remote country, nestled in the heart of central Asia just above the 30th parallel, has had a long history of war dating back to at least the sixth century BC, when it was part of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. A series of conquering forces subsequently claimed the forbidding landscape that for a time had been ruled by Alexander the Great and for hundreds of years thereafter was divided, back and forth, between the Persian and Indian empires, until the nineteenth century when the British arrived. And so began another struggle for dominance in central Asia, this time between Imperial Russia and Britain, then one of the most powerful colonisers in the world. The battle would lead to the subsequent creation of Afghanistan proper. By then, Islam had been the country’s religion for more than a thousand years.
The internal politics of modern Afghanistan has echoed the region’s history and been marked by bloody coups, insurgencies and takeovers. The country is a complex mosaic, with bitter and enduring tribal, clan, family, ethnic, religious and feudal rivalries that are as much a result of thousands of years of invasions as they are ancient blood feuds and enmities. Known as badal, the Pashto word for vengeance, the feuds are treated as if they are new battles to be fought and won, whatever the provocation. ‘The Afghan will never turn the other cheek,’ writes Mohammad Yousaf in Afghanistan, the Bear Trap, noting that a killing must always be avenged.
Afghanistan is a country in which homage has long been paid to the tribal warlords or village elders, and clan is everything. Traders, subsistence farmers, shepherds who herd goats and sheep in the high country or desert plains, all pay fealty to the local chieftain.
The official language of Afghanistan is Dari, also known as Farsi, and about half the population speak various dialects of the Persian language. Almost as many speak Pashto, the native tongue of the Pashtuns, who are the dominant ethnic group in the country and come from the Durrani tribe in the south or the Ghilzai tribe in the east.
Ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen and Shi’ite Hazara make up the rest of the population. Effectively, Afghanistan comprises five quite distinct nations within its borders and five very distinct peoples. Some are nomadic, while others are urban.
The repressive Taliban regime, which seized control of Kabul in 1996 under the leadership of the one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar, was mostly ethnic Pashtun. Its fierce opposition, the Northern Alliance, consisted of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazara. According to the anonymous author of Hunting al Qaeda, the Pashtun warlords are most interested in their own personal power and wealth. ‘If it’s advantageous for them to support the Americans they will, but if it looks like the Taliban is winning, you’ll see a lot of people who had just vowed to fight them to the death switch sides in a blink of an eye. Pashtun warlords have spent the last 25 years of civil war betraying each other on a daily basis.’
Geographically and physically, Afghanistan is a breathtakingly beautiful place. Dominated by the Hindu Kush mountain range, it is often the victim of violent earthquakes and both floods and droughts. Smaller than the Australian state of New South Wales and almost as big as the American state of Texas, the Afghan landscape is vast and varied, from spectacular mountains snowcapped all year through to high-altitude desert regions that change with the winds and shifting sands.
It shares borders with six countries. Pakistan runs along the eastern and southern sides of Afghanistan for 2430 kilometres, while China shares 76 kilometres of an almost unnavigable peninsula of land known as the Varkhan Corridor in the far northeast. Iran is on the west, and to the north are Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Just as the locals have remained independent of each other, so have they remained defiantly independent of the succession of governments in Kabul.
Despite its tumultuous history, Afghanistan had in its own way been functional. Surprisingly, the country refused to choose sides during the Cold War and was blessed with aid and friendship from its neighbour the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, the United States — a continent and an ocean away. Both wanted to dominate the strategically located Afghanistan, which by the end of the 1970s was ruled by a struggling communist government.
; But things changed when the Red Army stormed into Afghanistan. A common purpose united the disparate people, who answered the call to jihad — holy struggle — and fought the invading forces with a ferocity for which they’d become known throughout history. They called themselves ‘mujahideen’, or ‘soldiers of God’, and the soldiers of the Red Army in turn called them dukhi or dushman — ghosts or bandits — for their fierceness and ability to disappear into the mountains. Their battle cry was, as it had ever been, ‘Allahu Akbar’, God is great.
Physical courage is central to the Afghan character and to be without courage is considered abhorrent. People without courage were despised, according to Mohammad Yousaf, a Pakistan Army brigadier who witnessed the Afghan spirit while coordinating mujahideen operations against the Soviets in the early to mid 1980s.
A month after the invasion, a Soviet reporter, Gennady Bocharov, was holed up in a hotel in Kabul when the mujahideen leaders put on a terrifying show of psychological warfare against the Soviets. As recounted in George Crile’s compelling book Charlie Wilson’s War, a turbaned elder in Kabul sounded out a cry that was picked up by thousands of Muslim faithful.
Allahu Akbar, he sang as dusk settled on the capital, God is great.
A rising crescendo of Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar echoed across the city in response, from men and women alike. It was soon joined by Marg, marg, marg bar Shurawi — death to Soviets, death, death, death.
‘Each of us knew that the fanatics take their time about killing you,’ Bocharov reported, his terror writ large. ‘We knew that the first thing they do is pierce your forearms with knives. Then they hack off your ears, your fingers, your genitals, put out your eyes.’
It took a certain kind of courage to be so brutal, and the Afghan people were renowned for it.
Jock Wallace was a keen student of history and had a scholar’s thirst for knowledge about the places the Australian Army had taken him. An avid reader, he knew something of Afghanistan’s past and had paid close attention to the traditions and tactics of the mujahideen, who had been hailed at home and in the West as heroes and anti-Soviet crusaders during the long war. Ironic, given the circumstances now, he thought.