by Sandra Lee
‘I did it about five times till she worked out it was the same smell and said, “Hey, haven’t I seen you?”
‘The Yanks were more than accommodating,’ Jock says now in recognition of the Americans’ hospitality that had provided the cheerleaders and their free cuddles.
‘Those Marines, they were awesome.’
With the fresh perfume of cheerleaders cutting through the manly soldiers’ smell, Jock and the Australians exited Rhino bound for Kandahar.
Living with hundreds of brawny, bearded blokes in a tent-and-Portaloo city in a foreign country crawling with al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who want nothing more than to kill you in the name of Allah does something to a man’s psyche. If that man is Jock Wallace, it makes him resourceful.
Jock spent most of the War on Terror in southern Afghanistan at what was once known as Kandahar International Airport but was now called FOB Kandahar. In its heyday the airport was a thing of beauty, its terminal an architectural adventure reminiscent, in some abstract way, of the Sydney Opera House, with a row of huge arched windows several storeys high overlooking the main runway. And it was all encircled by a spectacular mountain range off in the distance.
But those days were long past and until recently the airport had been occupied by the Taliban, who captured Kandahar in 1994 and turned it into the new power centre for Afghanistan before embarking on a violent program to conquer the rest of the country, finally seizing Kabul in 1996. The Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had established the fundamentalist regime’s top decision-making body, the Supreme Shura, in Kandahar. As a result, he rarely left the city that was settled on a fort originally built by Alexander the Great. The airport was key to protecting the regime as it was within striking distance of the ancient city.
A paved road led up to the terminal whose external side walls were covered with murals of passenger planes and fighter jets, marking, of course, the country’s most recent history of war. The Taliban’s days were seriously numbered, though, and it had been living on borrowed time since Mullah Omar’s most notorious international guest, Osama bin Laden, launched the September 11 attacks. Almost exactly two months later, coalition forces secured the airport and removed the Taliban without a single shot being fired.
The damage, though, had been done already. The airport was the scene of previous heavy fighting and parts of it had been blown to bits. Windows were shattered, doors had been kicked in, and anti-Western graffiti was scrawled everywhere. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and some offices inside the terminals that once housed Taliban forces had been left booby-trapped.
The Americans were the first troops to arrive, followed soon after by the Australians, and the airfield went from housing 400 soldiers in the first months of war to almost 5000 by the time Jock rotated out of the country for home at the end of March.
The Americans had commandeered the prime real estate in the terminal, overlooking the runway, leaving the Australian SAS Regiment to set up its HQ inside a small office looking out over the carpark where taxis would, in peacetime, drop off fare-paying passengers and where, during this war, the locals had set up their ‘muj feeds’. It was also directly opposite a beautiful rose garden which Jock was happy to see still in bloom despite the rapid onset of winter.
The terminal was located 200 metres behind the forward perimeter of the airport, opposite the main road that was ably guarded by vehicle patrols from the US Marine Corps. For accommodation, the headquarters set up three old Vietnam-era green canvas tents better suited for the steamy climate of a South East Asian jungle than the bitter cold of an Afghan winter.
‘Everybody else’s tents have got liners and built-in heaters and all these other filtration systems, et cetera, and we’ve got the old jungle tents,’ Jock says now. ‘You beauty. We looked like the St Vinnie de Paul-dressed kids at a private school, but we could hold our heads high.’
The fighting Sabre squadron under the command of Major Dan McDaniel set up a hundred metres down the road, past a mosque and near the Germans and a small contingent of Kiwi Special Forces troops.
‘On the other side of the road was what we called The BC — The Body Club — The British Columbians — Canadians — who would sit round in their jocks all day rubbing suntan oil on each other and pumping up at the gym,’ Jock says with a laugh. ‘These cats were at a holiday resort. They didn’t give a shit about their guns, they didn’t care where they were as long as the coconut oil was on and they were punching 300 on the bench press.’
Despite being driven out of their spiritual homeland, Mullah Omar’s Taliban had not given up the prospect of re-forming elsewhere in Afghanistan and reclaiming what they believed was rightfully theirs, especially Kandahar.
‘There was a real air of trepidation and expectations of something really big. It was still early days,’ Jock says of the Australian contingent’s arrival. ‘We thought, “Cool, we’re going into Kandahar, we’re not waiting for the Taliban, we’re going in.” And I got off at the airport and it just fizzled. It didn’t keep building.’
The SAS patrols worked the surrounding countryside in the Helmand Valley, searching for remnants of the fundamentalist regime and al Qaeda terrorists, but Jock was stuck at the regimental HQ at the FOB, sorting out the communications traffic to and from Australia for the chain of command. Being bound to the HQ and the commanding officer, though, had its advantages. It allowed Jock to hone his diplomatic skills. He made new friends with valuable members of the US Marine Corps with whom he engaged in improvised trade negotiations.
The Aussie regimental staff including the chooks quickly became known as a hospitable bunch of blokes who always kept a coffee pot on the boil. The only country that could outdo the Australians for coffee was Turkey which, at that time, had a single liaison officer stationed in a small office next to the SAS HQ. He became snakey if his brew wasn’t up to scratch, something the Aussies loved to rib him about.
The Americans drank some foul-tasting mass-market brand that the US Government dutifully shipped in and, despite its less than smooth taste, it soon became the preferred accompaniment for the GIs who also had a habit of chewing a particularly nasty type of tobacco called Copenhagen and Skoal. The dip, as the chewing tobacco was known, came in a wonderful array of flavours, including cherry, bourbon and wintergreen, and rotted the men’s gums and gave them a stinking, foul breath. The long-cut variety of tobacco was wadded up and stuffed between the front lip and teeth of the bottom jaw. Experienced dippers, though, would chew the fine-cut blend, which had a tendency to make a mother of a mess in the mouth of a newbie dipper, who invariably ended up looking like he’d had a couple of front teeth knocked out.
Some of the soldiers who chewed Copenhagen and Skoal, including some of the Aussie SAS troopers, wore small bottles tied around their necks into which they spat the rancid mix of tobacco and saliva once it had lost its flavour and high-octane kick. It was a disgusting habit but, despite its obvious drawbacks, the dip had its advantages, ones that Jock would see in Operation Anaconda.
‘If you are out in the field and you’re a smoker, the dip is the perfect thing,’ he says. ‘If you do it silently and spit it into a bottle then you can keep your mental chemistry at its normal level and not go off on a nicotine withdrawal rage. The alternative is to have a cigarette and leave a scent as a signal for the enemy. That would be one of the advantages of the dip over smoking, and it doesn’t affect your lung capacity.’
Jock could get his hands on the dip and coffee or anything else, for that matter, thanks to his connections with Jeremy, a three-toed banjo-picking Marine from West Virginia. Jeremy was the go-to man on base.
Jock met Jeremy while on one of his customary recces around base. Jock referred to this habit as a little bit of anthropological exploration. He toured the base and scavenged objects that took his fancy, including bits of shrapnel, Afghani pakhul hats and even discarded Osama bin Laden propaganda sheets written in Arabic, Chechen, Dari or Pashto.
; He also bought and traded items with the local friendlies. Luckily for Jock, the local Kandaharis were renowned traders, taking after their ancient forebears who’d plied the trade routes almost since the beginning of time, and they lined the streets leading to the base hoping to find like-minded souls among the coalition forces. They hit pay dirt with Jock, who in turn struck gold with Jeremy. Jeremy liked Jock’s ‘Ossie’ accent and Jock liked Jeremy’s unorthodox entrepreneurial vigour. Together, they were a formidable, if incongruous, team.
The Yanks, Jock found out from Jeremy, were exceedingly generous when it came to outfitting their beloved troops. Just about every item marked for the Quartermaster Store in Afghanistan had been written off as a capital expense as soon as it was loaded on a US cargo plane and shipped out of contiguous USA. The brass expected nothing to return and, generally speaking, little did.
Jeremy, says Jock, was as dumb as the proverbial and could barely spell his own name. His accent was so thick hick hillbilly that Jock couldn’t really be sure his name was Jeremy. The vowels rolled into the consonants like molasses and Jeremy could have been Jeremy or Jamie or Jeremiah, Jebediah or Jimmy. Or even Jonathan.
‘He was illiterate, but he had a way with people. He was a salesman. We had this hell racket going on, it was poetry in motion,’ Jock says now. ‘But it was not for personal gain. I would get stuff for other people in the contingent and trade it. They all wanted the American boots. I couldn’t understand it. The Australian Government had just spent millions of dollars reinventing the wheel and made its own army boot. They did it, and in my opinion they did a good one. But all these blokes wanted to go and swap them for a pair that’s about a hundred dollars cheaper. There’s nothing flash about the Yank boot.’
Soldiers also wanted the American uniforms, badges and emblems. Weaponry was also popular, particularly the K-BAR knives, M16 bayonets, and the American Benchmade flick knives. ‘They are cool knives,’ Jock says.
Whenever the grunts saw Jock and Jeremy walking down a path together after sunset, they knew it was trading time. Soldiers lined up to swap boots for badges and knives, or cold-weather gear and blankets for the souvenirs Jock had found littered around base. Some of the Yanks would trade the more expensive GORE-TEX items, knowing they could always report to the Q Store and get a new one courtesy of Uncle Sam. The Aussies, on the other hand, kept a tight watch on inventory.
The Americans had another tradition of striking coins to commemorate their wartime endeavours. A coin might be struck to honour the commander of US Central Command, General Tommy Franks, or the 5th Marine Expeditionary Unit or the Rakkasans from the 101st Airborne. The Yanks used the coins as a type of currency and traded them for desired items. The practice amused Jock, who thought the big hulking troops in their camouflage gear were more like pre-adolescent schoolkids playing with their swap cards in the playground.
‘There’s a big trading thing with them,’ says Jock. ‘They’d go, “Do you want coins?” “Nah, mate.” It’s not like it can be redeemed. It’s just a gay thing the Yanks do. Basically that became currency around there; everyone got into swapping these Yank coins. It was just funny watching the personalities. They were hoarding this one, or they wouldn’t declare that they’ve got one of the other ones so no one would nick it. It kept them entertained. Me? I was too busy getting sleeping bags and tents and stuff like that — the legit sort of stuff.’
After two months of steady trade, Jock’s kit was first class, and he’d done a pile of favours for his mates, too.
He didn’t know it then, but his enterprise would stand him in good stead in the Shahi Kot Valley.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘I remember thinking how much enemy fire was going into Jock’s position. I have never heard so much firepower.’
TROOPER JOHNNY, B TROOP, 1 SAS SQUADRON
COMMAND SERGEANT MAJOR FRANK GRIPPE decided to take a stroll down Hell’s Halfpipe to see how his men were coping under the intense pummelling they were taking.
‘G’day, Digger,’ Grippe said to Jock humorously, the way Americans do when they try to pronounce the unique Aussie greeting and know they haven’t quite pulled it off. ‘You having a good day, soldier?’
Jock had to laugh. This guy is unfuckin’ believable, he thought as bullets bounced into the bowl.
‘It could’ve been better, sir,’ Jock replied, typically understated. Grippe laughed. There was nothing like a bit of humour to keep morale up.
Despite the sun, which was high overhead and had mercifully warmed the valley a couple of degrees, it was still freezing. Jock was still digging in. His little trench was almost deep enough to lie in. He hadn’t spoken to the Australian headquarters for at least an hour and now radioed in a sitrep, getting a bloke called Ben from the chook pen.
Ben asked Jock where he’d been.
‘Digging in, over.’
Jock updated Ben, who passed the information through to Tink, who in turn passed it to Hagenbeck’s people. Tink had been watching the battle unfold, ensuring all the SAS patrols were safe and in contact, keeping informed of the situation and liaising between the Australian HQ and the TOC. Six JDAMs had been dropped over the valley but al Qaeda and Taliban elements were still shooting. Jock’s information was vital. He relayed the condition of the wounded soldiers: some were critical, others less so but most were coping with their injuries and several had received pain medication.
‘It’s funny, human nature,’ Jock says. ‘There’s one guy and he’s been wounded pretty badly up and down his side and he doesn’t whinge at all. And this other little prick, he’s got a few nicks and cuts and he’s obviously hurt, but he’s whingeing and carrying on enough so they just shoot him up with morphine. “Shut up, you little bastard.” He went down. This other guy, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t take the painkillers and they didn’t even know he hadn’t had any. I remember asking him, “Have you had any?” and he said, “No, no” and he’d been there for a couple of hours already. “Do you want any?” “No, no.” I’m pretty sure he wanted to be compos, switched on — he managed his pain.’
The fact that al Qaeda didn’t inflict greater damage on the men they had pinned down in a bloody ambush continued to amaze Jock, especially as the Americans’ ammunition was running low. Much of it was sitting in the rucksacks out in the open. Sitting ducks, just like the soldiers in the halfpipe.
‘I can’t really explain how such a big force in such an advantageous position didn’t manage to do more damage. I really can’t explain it,’ Jock says now. ‘It seemed like at times on the battlefield there was just so much shit flying around you that it would be impossible not to be hit.
‘And you’re watching guys with bullets landing right up the side of them, both sides of them, all the time, all bloody day. You’re thinking, what? Almost four guys simultaneously with rounds lighting up both sides of them for what seemed like ten, fifteen seconds … tttt, tttt, tttt, tttt, tttt, all around them, without getting hit and you think, “How the hell did that happen?”
‘We’re watching this one guy. We were screaming at him, “Get down, get down, get down, you dickhead.” He didn’t understand. “What? What?” “Get doowwwwwwwn, you’re about to get shot.” And he did. Whack, fair in the arse. He knew what we were talking about then, slipped two steps down the bottom of the hill.
‘I don’t know if he was confused, didn’t realise what was happening, but the ground was alive, boom, dancing around him. Four or five of us were screaming at him.’
Jock thought the soldiers would have learnt from past experience. Earlier, another soldier got caught in the free fire lane about 50 metres from Jock’s position. Al Qaeda had the GI directly in their cross hairs.
Ya bastards, Jock thought.
The enemy were taking well-aimed shots at the bloke, firing all around him, and he just stopped for a split second before he began running in a zigzag.
Jock couldn’t believe it.
How the fuck could you be so stupid, mate? Run one wa
y; don’t keep turning and doing circles backwards and forwards across this tiny little space at half speed, crouched, thinking you’re hiding from someone.
The soldier was like a deer in the headlights. He had bullets landing at his feet, cracking overhead, and people were screaming at him to get one way or the other. He was completely stunned by the volume of fire.
‘I just thank Christ I have never reacted like that — except in the presence of a woman,’ Jock says. ‘That’s the most intimidating of forces.’
At 2.32pm, the Tactical Operations Center received the word that General Zia Lodin and his battered Afghan Force was definitely en route to Gardez and would come back to fight another day once they had recovered and reinforced. One American special operator would later tell The Los Angeles Times newspaper that Lodin and his men were extremely resilient throughout the rest of Operation Anaconda despite the beating they took on D-Day. ‘He got knocked down and then he got back up and he came back into the same place where he’d lost about ten per cent of his people. And then he did it a third time.’
But for now, al Qaeda’s promise to fight to the death as a test from God had temporarily stalled Task Force Hammer.
Jock knew how they felt, so did his SAS mate Johnny, who was on a hill further south with his patrol, sighting al Qaeda positions and calling in grid references.
Johnny could hear the amount of firepower going into the valley and was worried about his mate Jock. He hadn’t heard Jock’s voice over the radio for a while. An SAS veteran, Johnny could tell who was firing by the sound of the bullets. The coalition forces were using 5.56mm and the Taliban had the 7.62mm heavy weapons that make a bigger punch. A bigger whoomph.
‘I remember thinking how much enemy fire was going into Jock’s position,’ Johnny says. ‘We are not on any kind of death wish, but you always prefer yourself to be in that kind of position because I know how I would handle it.