by Sandra Lee
Yeah, ya insensitive bastard, real nice time for a smoko, he thought.
The last time Jock had really enjoyed an MRE was a few weeks earlier: Menu No. 7, Chicken with Salsa. Almost as wide and long as a sheet of A4 paper and about five centimetres thick, MRE meals are packed with a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce and disposable moist hand-wipes for hygiene. And they are sealed in a brown plastic wrapper stamped with the improbable warning, ‘US Government property. Commercial resale is unlawful’.
Jock always got a laugh out of the jumped-up caution. Who in their right mind would want to resell an MRE? Jock hadn’t actually removed the chicken with salsa from its packaging, nor had he tasted it, but he had used the wrapper to write a line to his mum back home using thick black smudge-proof Texta. She’d love his ingenuity.
Hello Mother,
Ran out of paper here so I’m using my initiative. Happy N Year 2 U. Have you been paying my credit card? Hope so.
As if he’d be belting the plastic in a war zone. His mother would appreciate the irony. His note went on:
Hope you are well. I am fine. Not sure how much work we have left here, but sounds as if Bougainville & the Philippines are about to go off. Had the last 2 days back in base camp — nice, good rest, food, warmth, etc. Spoke to you yesterday. It’s good to be the patrol sig. Not really meant to test the phone in that manner, but hey, what are they going to do? Send me to war — ha, ha. Go to a net cafe, they will show you how to send me a message, okay. Cheap, instant and a lot easier for me to use compared to voice calls. U can even contact me in the field.
Love 2 U,
Take care,
Martin
Funny how things go in war, he thought.
The last truly decent feed Jock had had was weeks earlier at FOB Kandahar, where he had noticed a group of Afghans hanging around outside the perimeter of the compound. The rugged-up locals were as curious about the allied forces as Jock was about them.
Dozens of Afghans with connections to the ruling clans — including many of those in the recently installed temporary government under Hamid Karzai — had been given jobs on the base cleaning out the latrines. It was putrid work but they were getting paid handsomely for it — as much as US$100 a day, which was more than they had been earning under the Taliban. Groups of about ten locals were escorted on and off base by armed soldiers in the course of doing the dirty work.
They also brought with them a wide social circle. Jock suspected there would be a few among them who still had a strong allegiance to the ousted Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, and so did the brass, hence the armed escort. But they did not seem overtly threatening — they were unarmed and smiling most of the time. The children, particularly, hung around hoping for a bit of American largesse, grabbing a soldier and posing for photographs and asking for candy. Jock didn’t really trust the adults — well, this is a war and they are Afghans, he reasoned — but it didn’t stop him making the most of their hospitality.
The locals weren’t afraid of the coalition war effort. Quite the contrary; they’d decided to exploit it as much for their own commercial gain as for anything else, and if they could make a quick buck cleaning the crappers, then so be it.
Aged mud huts across the road from the old Kandahar airport had been turned into a makeshift kitchen for the Afghans, complete with barbecuing facilities. The Afghans set up huge aluminium pots on burning wooden piles over which they cooked rice pilaf, and stewed vegetables with chicken and tomato and nan, the unleavened bread, a staple of the Afghan diet.
At lunchtime, the men were escorted by American soldiers onto the base and into a carpark at the front of the airport terminal where they rolled out long mats. The cooks dragged the pots of steaming food to the gate where the food was loaded on a Humvee and driven the hundred metres to the mats. It was a bigger, badder version of meals on wheels.
Lines of Afghan men and young boys shuffled into place, sitting cross-legged on the ground, shoulder to shoulder, while a couple of Afghans walked behind them throwing pieces of nan onto the carpet in front of them, followed by small bowls of rice and stew. With a solicitous bow and a generous sweep of the arm motioning them to sit if they were not already, kitchen staff welcomed whoever chose to dine with them, including the uniformed and heavily armed soldiers who worked inside the security fence.
Jock dubbed the daily ritual the ‘muj feed’ and noted that the happy social atmosphere contrasted with the wartime backdrop of Hercules, Chinooks, Apaches and Black Hawks thundering down the nearby runway. It didn’t seem to matter to the locals. Jock put it down to the ever-present inconsistencies and surprises of war, not to mention the fact that the Afghans had been living with civil war for the better part of three decades. They had got used to the snap, crack and boom of bullets and bombs. And they had long lived in terror of the lethal firepower of the Soviet’s MI-24 Hind helicopter gunship that the mujahideen had dubbed the ‘devil’s chariot’. In contrast, the sight of a non-firing Apache gunship coming and going was benign. At least there on base.
‘The muj feed was pretty popular with me and Ando, the SAS’s water operations man. We worked it out after the first couple of days … you could sit down and have a feed there and then all the Yanks worked it out as well. That sort of style of cooking is not uncommon in that they [Afghans] all do bulk feeds. There’s no snacks or little yoghurts or individual portions,’ Jock says.
‘You just go and if the mats are there, sit down, and they start filling up. Once they say “Sit down”, you had to get in quick and jockey for position. If you came in late, you’d just tap them on the shoulder and they’d squeeze around.
‘You just smile, “Thanks, mate.” You could say anything you want to them.’
Even though Jock was suspicious of the Afghans outside the base perimeter, he didn’t feel any danger once they were inside. They were under escort the entire time. And Jock was locked and loaded with his superior and ubiquitous firepower. It was his American Express card. Jock never left home without it. And he was also with Ando, who was as tough as they come.
‘I’ve got a 5.56mm fully automatic M4 and a 9mm pistol on my belt, and a killer stare in my eyes,’ Jock says. ‘They didn’t ask for any money, but they wouldn’t anyway. They were getting paid handsomely by the Americans. That was a good deal for them and they probably never had it better in their lives. Christ knows what their jobs were before that, but monetarily I would say they were remunerated quite substantially and there was talk of $100 a day — which is shit-loads for them.’
Shit-loads for shit loads.
Jock also didn’t give a damn about the possibility that he was breaching any official protocols by fraternising with the locals. The Aussies were nothing if not anti-authoritarian and Jock, particularly, was nothing if not an amateur anthropological adventurer.
‘It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission,’ Jock says now, chuckling. ‘Telling Ando to do something? I don’t think so. They [the Command] are more likely to deny a request like that because they can’t be bothered looking into whether it’s feasible.’
It was 12.13pm in the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram. The Predator vision was still rolling on the main video screen at the front of the room. The operations staff were compiling sitreps and intelligence was being sifted to determine the extent of the enemy’s position and the likelihood of reinforcements. Major General Hagenbeck pulled his Aussie counterpart aside.
‘LaCamera has it pretty much under control right now,’ the two-star told Lieutenant Colonel Tink after hearing from LaCamera’s position. ‘It’s pretty much a stalemate.’
At 12.20pm — 0750 zulu — Hagenbeck picked up the phone and asked for close air support elsewhere in the valley. The battle was not confined to the men in Hell’s Halfpipe and the general, who had control over the entire region, was constantly receiving information from the frontlines. Tink recalls that Hagenbeck had already decided to bomb the small town of Marzak later that day. Marzak was teemi
ng with enemy fighters whom the soldiers from the 10th Mountain and Rakkasans had been sniping at with some success from nearby positions. He also planned to conduct a last-light attack and was revisiting the second airlift to be flown in on the Chinooks that evening, as previously scheduled in the original OpOrd, but the second wave of reinforcements depended on the situation on the ground and so far it had been too volatile to air-assault them in.
Last light was still several hours away; the sun wasn’t due to go down until 5.50pm local time. A lot could go wrong, but equally, a lot could go right and elsewhere in the Shahi Kot, it already had. Despite the battles, most of the blocking points, Hagenbeck said, had been secured.
But Hagenbeck and Tink knew the commander of the Rakkasans, Colonel Wiercinski, was under fire on the Finger and that his two 101st positions on the valley floor were engaged in close-quarters combat. Though the soldiers were taking a pounding, they were winning. Wiercinski had flown his tactical command post into the war zone for an hour to get a feel for the heat of the battle, to see what was going on. His UH-60 Black Hawk came under direct fire as it tried to navigate a landing spot just outside AO Down Under, Tink’s area of operation. An RPG exploded under the nose of the chopper and an al Qaeda fighter with a Kalashnikov AK-47 scored some direct hits on the tail and rotor. Lady luck dealt the crew a decent hand, though, and neither attack was able to stop the helo. After dropping the colonel and his team, the Black Hawk took off in a cloud of dust and raced back to Bagram. But the hour that Wiercinski had planned to stay in the Shahi Kot stretched into several.
‘We had high ground. I think the enemy thought we were just another element, not a brigade headquarters,’ Wiercinski later told Colonel Austin Bay for a report on The Strategy Page website. ‘My C2 bird took hits. I told him to leave us. I had nine guys with me. Then the al Qaeda tried mortars. But we were located on such an acute point it would have had to be a direct hit, with the mortars, to get us. Their fire kept getting closer and closer but we just stuck it out.’
To Tink it seemed that only piecemeal reports from parts of the battlefield were filtering back to Hagenbeck in the TOC.
‘One of the problems was that Wiercinski is up here [on the Finger] fighting his own war, his guys are down here [in the valley] fighting their own war and communications between LaCamera and Wiercinski and us are not good,’ Tink says. ‘Limited information was getting back from LaCamera through Wiercinski to Hagenbeck, and I don’t know why, to this day. I can only assume that this was probably because Wiercinski was fighting his own war.’
Jock had maintained lines of communication all day — except for a ten-second moment when he had had to change batteries — and his connections never once failed. His signalling gear was a lifeline, especially when the few radios still held by the Americans went down.
Wiercinski told Austin Bay that the enemy didn’t think the Americans had the ‘stomach for a big fight’ and made bad assumptions about the US strategy.
‘The AQ did stupid things in Shahi Kot Valley. Very early on I could tell there were no civilians in those three towns,’ Wiercinski told Bay, referring to Sherkhankhel, Babukhel and Marzak. ‘There were no colours, no smoke, no animals, no hanging clothes, nothing to identify it as a populated area, with people living there. I looked down and asked, “What’s wrong with this picture?” There were no civilians in there. They had moved them out.
‘Well, what did that do for us? It helped our ROE [rules of engagement] incredibly. We went in there with good tight ROE. We went in with an initial intent to screen people, but it was very obvious in the first ten minutes there was nothing but bad guys there. The place did not have the look of anything else in Afghanistan. It had the look of a battlefield. I thought, “This is going to be a fight.” And I honestly think they didn’t think we had the guts, the chutzpah, the ability to get in there and duke it out with them.’
Tink came to a similar conclusion about the operational status of Marzak and the other two villages in Objective Remington.
‘I remember, as Jock’s aircraft came in, the Predator came up to the village of Marzak and you could see the people in the village come up,’ Tink says. ‘There was no running around at the time, it was all very organised; and what we subsequently learnt days later, we knew they knew we were coming, they just didn’t know when we were coming. And they had obviously decided to fight and, because they knew we were coming, they moved the women and children out. This became obvious in quick time that there were no women and children in these villages. And once we knew that, a lot of the restrictions placed on us — having to be excessively careful not to kill civilians — were really removed. Those villages were flattened at the end of the day.’
The restrictions Tink referred to came under the Australians’ rules of engagement.
Australian soldiers abide by certain international conventions and take their ROE seriously. Each war comes with a different set of political, geographical and cultural circumstances, and thus its own ROE. The soldiers don’t have carte blanche to shoot at or attack anyone or anything.
Instead, the Aussies deployed in Operation Slipper were all given a general ROE card covered in heat-sealed plastic that clearly and precisely outlined what they could and could not do in war. It was small enough to fit into their fatigues and had to be carried with them at all times. The rules of engagement stated that their mission was to conduct ground operations in Afghanistan to fight international terrorism.
The rules of engagement were prescriptive. Jock and his fellow SAS soldiers had them drummed into them repeatedly. The ADF would not tolerate cavalier cowboys and indiscriminate behaviour among its personnel. The ROE were restrictive but standard for the Australian forces, and to breach them was to risk a court martial and charges under the Australian Defence Act.
The Americans abided by similar ROE. As well, US troops were schooled in search methods to ensure they would not offend the faithful in the Islamic country. According to Sean Naylor, one innovative commander told his troops that the best way — the most sensitive way — to ensure that a person wearing a head-to-toe burqa was a female, and not an enemy fighter trying to disguise himself or conceal potentially lethal weapons, was to check the size of the person’s feet. The enemy would do whatever it took to defeat the infidel Westerners; a pair of gnarly men’s feet under a burqa were unmistakable. It was wise to check them out, the US commander warned.
Hagenbeck was studying the sitreps and revising the plan. Men from the 2–187 had come under fire while trying to take an al Qaeda compound at the northern LZs. Inside, the soldiers found a teapot on the boil, half-eaten breakfasts and bedding for about fifteen men. The enemy had taken off into the hills as the choppers landed, leaving their munitions behind. Prayer beads were found in a Nike bag that was stuffed with blasting caps. Soldiers found night-vision goggles, sniper and assault rifles, binoculars, hand-held radios, 50 alarm clocks, Casio watches and books on digital electronics. But as Colonel Wiercinski told Sean Naylor, ‘these guys weren’t taking an electrical engineering exam in that compound’. They were making bombs.
Other blocking positions had also been secured. The biggest problem was in the south at LZs 13 and 13a, right where Jock and Clint had landed with LaCamera and Grippe and their men.
‘We felt very good about the initial landing and then some of the reports began to come in that there was small-arms fire, but all the reports I was getting from Colonel Wiercinski was that they could handle them and take out the bad guys. And that proved to be true in six out of seven incidents,’ Hagenbeck told me, sitting in his office in the Pentagon.
‘And the fight, the momentum, from where I sat … just seemed to grow over the first two hours, just bigger and bigger and bigger down in the south. And I didn’t know if we had literally flown into a hornet’s nest or whether some of the al Qaeda that had been up in the northern part, the east ridgeline, were trying to escape and had headed down there coincidentally. I never knew and never had a sense of it.
I just knew that the fight was getting bigger and bigger over the first two hours.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Each round that exploded out of Jock’s chamber was for one of the wounded blokes lying a metre or two away, patched up and morphed up to their eyeballs.
Pfffat, pfffat, pfffat, pfffat.
JOCK WALLACE WAS DIGGING into the blood-soaked and snow-covered clay of Hell’s Halfpipe with his Babyseal knife like a man possessed, tossing the frozen earth out as he dug a deeper shell scrape. The tips of his fingers were scraped raw from clawing at the sharp rocks buried in the icy dirt and his knuckles were bloody and hurting, but he’d blocked out the pain in pursuit of protection. Pain was not an option. They were eight hours into the fight and, despite the thunderstorm of firepower from the skies that the coalition was directing at the enemy, al Qaeda and the Taliban hadn’t let up.
And they were gloating. Jesus Christ, the fuckers are gloating! Jock thought. Every so often after launching an RPG or another mortar at the men from Charlie Company, the ninja-clad AQ would dash out of their hiding places high on the ridge, yell something in their native tongue, grab their balls and gesticulate at the men down below, taunting the soldiers in Hell’s Halfpipe. They had no fear; the soldiers’ 7.62mm ammo had run out hours earlier and the smaller 5.56mm rounds had trouble making the distance.
Yeah, real religious, Ahmed. Jock decided he was not going down to these smart-arsed bastards.
‘We could hear them laugh at us. They were laughing every time we shot at them. They were 2000 feet above us. Our small arms could not reach them up there,’ said Private Wayne Stanton, a young soldier from Tennessee.