War Dogs
Page 8
When you buried something, you had to let it lay there a while before calling the other handler and his dog in. Explosive detection dogs generally air-scent what they’re looking for, which means they smell the explosives on the wind, and it takes some time for the odours to escape up through the soil once the training aid has been buried. A good dog might also notice if the surface of the ground has been disturbed.
It can be challenging for a dog to stay focused when searching a wide open area or along an empty road. Indoors, they have more stuff to sniff and check out, which keeps them interested, but in the outdoors, they can easily get bored. You can tell a good handler and dog team by the way they work open areas. The trick is to know your dog – when and how to motivate him to stay focused and keep searching, and when to give him a rest so that he doesn’t zone out.
Our dogs weren’t landmine-sniffing dogs, so we had to continually keep them focused on having their noses close to the ground when doing route clearances and searching open country. When it was our turn to search for the hidden explosives, Ricky and I approached the landing zone from downwind. You want to give your dog every advantage – just as you do when doing the job for real – and, if the wind is blowing towards them, their sensitive noses can pick up traces of explosive before they get there.
Ricky did a good job, as did Nero, and after each exercise, Jason and I would reward them by letting them play for a while. I bounced and chucked Ricky’s ball to him, and he fetched it and brought it back to me, grinning from ear to ear. Ricky hadn’t needed any time to settle into the new environment at the FOB. He was away from the kennel at Kandahar, and out in the fresh air working and getting plenty of attention from me and from the other soldiers at the FOB, once they got to know him. It was all good fun for the dogs, and I was really starting to feel like I was in my element.
In the six weeks we were at Cobra the A-Team did a few missions, leaving the FOB in Black Hawks and Chinooks to go out into the mountains in search of the Taliban.
Jason and I sat on a stack of sandbags and watched a pair of Black Hawks lift off, creating a mini tornado in the dust. ‘Man, this is bullshit,’ Jason said. ‘How come they aren’t using us?’
I shrugged, and watched the choppers and their Apache escort gradually disappear over the plains, to be swallowed by the hills. I knew there was no point in pushing the issue, and that we would only be accepted slowly. It was harder for Jason, as he’d already worked with a few different SF teams in Afghanistan and proved himself in battle. I figured the war would find me, eventually, and there was no point coming across like some madman who couldn’t wait to get into a fight.
SIX
For real
July 2006
Finally, after weeks of training and marking time, I got the word that I was needed on a mission.
I’d found out on the quiet, from some of the other Americans at the FOB, that the two dog handlers we’d replaced had been bad-mouthing Jason before our arrival. From everything I’d seen, Jason was a thoroughly professional operator and good guy; later, I’d work out that if anyone needed to have shit put on them, it was the guys we’d replaced. However, all the ill feeling might have had something to do with the SF team’s reluctance to take Jason and me out on patrol.
In any case, it seemed the team now needed a dog handler, so I reported to the briefing hooch to be given the details of the patrol. Instead of going out by helicopter, I’d be part of a road convoy with the guys from the team, the Psyops detachment, and the ETTs and their Afghani soldiers.
The briefing was a PowerPoint presentation on a widescreen television. There were aerial photographs, and slides with maps showing the route the patrol would take, likely enemy positions and friendly forces in the area. Other slides gave a run-down of what air support would be available to us. There was a lot of information to take in and plenty of abbreviations that I didn’t understand. I concentrated on absorbing the details that were most relevant to me, such as what vehicle Ricky and I would be in, and likely choke points along the route where we might have to get out and search for IEDs, or mines. The mission was pretty simple – we were to show our presence and check out a village where the A-Team had recently come under heavy fire.
I was assigned to one of the ETT trucks, a turtleback humvee with a gun turret in the centre of its roof. To my surprise, I would be manning an M240 machine gun in the turret.
After the briefing, I sought out Jimmy, the US Army captain in charge of the ETTs, and made myself known to him.
‘Grand to have you along,’ he said to me. Jimmy was an Irish American and still had a strong accent from the old country. ‘Ever fired a 240 before?’
I admitted I hadn’t and, rather than being at all fazed by this, Jimmy organised for one of his soldiers to take Jason and me out to the range, and give me a quick soldier’s five on loading and cocking the gun, and the immediate action to take in the case of a misfire or jam on the 240, and the .50 cal, which was another weapon I’d never actually fired. The 240 wasn’t too different from the M60 that I’d trained on in the Australian Army, so it was no big drama. I practised loading and unloading, and clearing imaginary obstructions while he looked on; then, under his command, I fired 30 or 40 rounds through the two different guns.
‘Good to go,’ the US soldier said, indicating that, after my fifteen-minute lesson, I was now qualified to take my position behind the gun and drive into battle in the heart of Afghanistan on a Special Forces mission. There was no briefing on the rules of engagement – what to do and when to shoot – so I figured I’d just take my lead from the other soldiers on board the truck. I had no plans to open fire on the first Afghani man I saw, and figured that if I had to fire to help protect the convoy, it would be pretty obvious where the bad guys were.
In the Australian Army, someone who was new in-country would have been given, probably by a legal officer, a detailed briefing on the rules for opening fire on someone. CAI hadn’t given me that information, and I guess the SF guys assumed I would know what to do. In any case, it was hard for me to compare what was going on here with what went on in the Australian Army, because the Australian SAS didn’t take civilian contractors along on their missions.
I packed my daypack with enough food for Ricky and me for the two-day mission, and loaded the dog and my gear on to the truck. When the time came to leave, we waited until our slot in the convoy opened up, and joined the line of humvees and the Toyotas and Ford Ranger pickups carrying the Afghan National Army (ANA) guys. Just before we left the outer perimeter, we stopped and the driver said, ‘Go to action here.’
I nodded and, pointing the 240 out over the open plains of the valley, grabbed the cocking handle and yanked it back. I’d just chambered a 7.62-millimetre round in the breech, and the machine gun was now cocked and loaded – at the action condition. I reached down and ruffled Ricky’s neck. It was show time.
I was stoked to get out of the FOB, as there was little to do there except work out in the gym, surf the internet, and train with Ricky and Nero. For the first time, as we rolled through the local village not far from Cobra, I was able to see something of Afghanistan other than the inside of a coalition firebase.
If the countryside was a world away from where I’d grown up, the villages, huts and compounds where the local people lived were from a whole other era. It was like seeing people from the Middle Ages, with the exception of the odd guy carrying an AK-47, which made me nervous initially. How, I wondered, were you supposed to tell the difference between law-abiding Afghanis and the Taliban if everyone had a gun?
Kids waved to us and some of the younger men just eyed us coolly. I saw a couple of little girls playing in the street, but all the older women seemed to have moved inside or out of the way at the sound of approaching vehicles. A donkey brayed, and a family of goats trotted through the dust to escape the convoy. I traversed the gun from side to side, watching and not wanting to let my guard down. I was looking forward to doing my job for real.
Soon after leaving the vicinity of Cobra and the outlying village, we left the dirt road and started driving cross-country over the wide valley floor. ‘How come we’re going off road?’ I asked the driver.
‘Mines and IEDs,’ he said. ‘If we do have to get onto the road to go through a pass, or through a wadi, you’ll be one of the first to know.’
He was right, because not long into the drive, as we started to climb into the foothills of the mountains, the convoy came to a halt. I asked what was going on and found out that the convoy had moved back onto the road, as it was the only way up a pass through the hills. The lead vehicle had come to a narrow section, hemmed in on either side by the thick mud walls of compounds and steep slopes behind the buildings. Some ANA mine clearers had got out to sweep the road.
‘Send up K9, over,’ a voice squawked over the radio.
I recognised my call sign immediately. Nevertheless, the ETT vehicle driver said, ‘OK, you’re on.’
‘Right-o, Ricky, let’s go, mate.’
My mouth was dry and my heart started beating faster as I climbed out of the turtleback. Ricky jumped down after me and I grabbed hold of his leash. I walked along the line of vehicles, aware of eyes on me all the way. Jimmy waved at Ricky and me as we walked by his vehicle.
‘Fuck, boy, I hope we don’t miss anything’, I whispered to Ricky. I went past the dozen vehicles that made up the convoy, including the heavily armed, up-armoured humvees carrying the US SF soldiers, and the pickups filled with ANA guys just sitting in the back, festooned with AKs and RPGs – the same weapons their enemies carried. At the head of the convoy, a couple of Afghanis carrying minesweepers were talking to each other, occasionally pointing to the ground.
A Special Forces dude in a baseball cap spat a wad of chewing tobacco on the road. ‘Found an anti-tank mine,’ he said, talking down to me from behind his Mark 19. ‘Y’all got to check the sides of the road for any IEDs and such.’
I knew the job and so did Ricky. Up ahead, there was a real-life TM-62 Soviet-made anti-tank mine, which the SF guys were preparing to blow up in place, rather than try to disarm it. I guessed they were worried about booby traps. We weren’t playing with chunks of deliberately hidden explosives anymore. This was the real deal.
I would have much rather worked Ricky off-lead, and kept my distance, but I figured it was too early in the period of my contract to start flouting company rules. All the same, a handler standing well back from his dog suddenly made perfect sense to me. ‘Sook!’ I said to Ricky, the word of command to start him searching, and he took off, straining at the lead. He had no idea what dangers might lie ahead; he was only looking forward to finding something so that he could play with his ball.
In fact, from what I’d been told back in Kandahar, according to company policy I wasn’t sure I should even be searching the roadside. As several civilian handlers and their dogs had either been killed or injured by roadside IEDs, we were supposed only to search buildings, compounds, open spaces and choke points (a place where a road is constrained by natural or man-made features). It was my first mission, though, and the first time the SF team had asked me to do anything, so, while I acquiesced to Ricky searching on-lead, there was no way I was going to say no to searching the roadside on the way to the choke point. I worked out then and there that I was going to have to make some decisions off my own bat.
Working in a pattern, I quartered the road, zigzagging from side to side and going behind where the Afghanis had already swept. They’d been concentrating on the road itself, but it was possible that Ricky’s sensitive nose would pick up a buried bomb or waiting IED that their detectors had missed.
After moving up and down the verges and pushing out towards the steeply shelving sides of the cutting, I called out that the area was all clear, silently praying I was right. I returned to the vehicle and the Afghanis pulled back a bit. The anti-tank mine was blown in place with some C4 explosive. A pillar of dust and rock shot up into the air, and Ricky gave a yelp. I soothed him. It was ironic that only now, after the danger had passed, he was scared.
With the obstacle cleared, the convoy pushed on, further up into the hills to its night harbour position. I checked with Jimmy that it was OK for me to exercise Ricky, then took him for a walk, though we didn’t stray too far from the vehicles. He’d had a good day, apart from the fright when the mine was blown, and I had too. Although I was a civilian, and still not fully accepted by the SF team, I felt good about having contributed something to the mission and not having got anyone killed by failing to spot an IED.
After I fed Ricky, I took a brown plastic Meal Ready to Eat packet from the back of the ground mobility vehicle (GMV). I’d had enough army ration pack food in Australia not to have high hopes for what was inside. The most interesting thing about the American field ration pack was the way in which the food was heated. The Australian Army uses tiny fold-out tin stoves that burn a white pill of Hexamine, a compressed fuel that burns hot no matter what the conditions are like. Even so, it takes a long time to boil a mug of water for tea or coffee, or to heat a tin of food. Aussie patrol rations, usually reserved for the SAS or commandos, are sachets of dehydrated food to which you add hot or cold water. While the patrol rations taste better, they use a lot of water, which can be in scarce supply in the Australian bush. Each Meal Ready to Eat came with a plastic bag with what looked like a pot scouring pad. The pad was actually a heating device, activated by pouring a very small amount of water into it. When the water hit the pad, a chemical reaction took place and it got extremely hot. The main meal in a Meal Ready to Eat, usually containing something distantly related to meat, is in a foil packet, which is dropped into the plastic bag, unopened. Within a few minutes, the foil and the meal inside are so hot that you need a Leatherman tool to extract it. The Meal Ready to Eat heaters, I later learned, had turned out to have other uses in Afghanistan. During the fierce fighting in the Tora Bora Mountains in the early days of the war, US Army medics had used them to warm up saline IV drips, which were near-frozen in the extreme cold, before administering them to wounded soldiers.
Inside the packet I found a pork chop: a slab of something the size, colour and consistency of a rubber thong. This chop was ‘chunked and formed’, which meant that pork, and anything else lying around the butcher’s shop floor, had been ground up and squeezed into a mould with some sort of binding agent. The Meal Ready to Eat had other semi-edible goodies, including peanut butter and crackers, and a long-life chocolate brownie, both of which I stuffed in my pocket for later on.
Even though I was a civilian on my first mission, I was expected to pull my weight, and was to stand picket, in the middle of the night. When my time came, I got up, checked on Ricky and stumbled through the darkness to the ETT vehicle, which was being manned continuously all night. My handover was even briefer than my instructions on using the 240 and the .50 cal.
‘Keep a watch out, that way,’ the soldier I was relieving said. He made a V with his outstretched arms, indicating my arc of responsibility, then handed me a pair of night-vision goggles. I climbed up into the turret behind the .50 cal, slid the goggles’ harness over my head and switched the device on. The mountains, foreboding enough during the daytime, had a ghostly aura in the lime-green wash of the image intensifier’s lens. The stars burned like tiny comets, adding to the surreal aspect of the view.
Just as when I’d walked up the road with Ricky, the main thing worrying me was that I might fuck up and that someone – including me – might lose their life as a result. Compared with missions I’d go on later, nothing much had happened, yet I felt more keyed up than I ever had in my life. On one hand, I’d put into practice what I’d learned as a dog handle
r in the army and the police, and was happy with how Ricky and I had acquitted ourselves; on the other, it was like I was learning everything from scratch, with no real idea of what I was doing or what was expected.
Things hotted up the next morning.
We got up early, as soldiers always do, but unlike in the Australian Army, no-one bothered shaving. The cleaning of weapons and eating were the main priorities. This was my first indication that the US Army in Afghanistan – at least, the SF teams – was far more focused on the job of hunting and killing Taliban than they were on the bullshit that dominates life in any peacetime force.
Ricky jumped up into the back of the truck and I attached his leash to a tie-down ring on the floor. The convoy mounted up and headed towards our objective, a village where the team had been hit badly not long before. I’d heard one of their men had been killed in an attack on this place, and the word to stay alert had come down. The vehicles stopped on high ground overlooking the village, and the ANA troops, with their ETT advisers, were ordered to dismount and sweep through, checking the village for arms and insurgents.
I could hear the Irish accent of Jimmy, the US Army captain who’d been helpful to me after the briefing, over the intercom radio communications. He was there with his Afghanis, moving from compound to compound, looking for the bad guys. It was fair enough, I thought, that the ANA were given the job of clearing a target, and potentially coming face-to-face with the Taliban, but it wasn’t as if they had no support or guidance from the Americans. The soldiers and officers, like Jimmy, were really at the sharp end of America’s war.
I had a grandstand view of the operation and not long after the government troops entered the village, there was small arms fire from one of the compounds. I could hear the pop, pop, pop of AK-47s and it was pretty amazing to think that people were getting involved in a gunfight down there. The intercom radio chatter started increasing in frequency as the Afghanis spoke to each other and the ETTs radioed in reports to the other Americans in the SF team.