War Dogs

by Shane Bryant

  *

  Not even Benny’s sixth sense, however, picked up the traitor who was living among us.

  It was about six-thirty in the morning when a noise in the corridor outside the door to my room woke me. I rubbed my hand over my face. Benny stirred at the foot of my bed and there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Shane?’

  ‘Yeah. Joe? What is it?’ I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for my trousers. Joe was one of the sergeants on the team. ‘Come in, man.’

  ‘Get your dog, Shane. We need you to do a search.’

  I shook off my sleepiness. ‘Sure. Where?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  I pulled on a T-shirt, slid on my boots and first took Benny outside for a quick piss while Joe waited. There were more voices down the corridor when I got back inside and I was keen to find out what all the fuss was about. Nothing like this had ever happened on the FOB before.

  ‘This way.’

  I thought I was being roused from bed to go out on a mission or something, but Joe led me just two doors down the hall from where I slept. ‘Search this room,’ he said.

  ‘What the fuck? That’s Bari’s room.’

  ‘Yup.’

  I took Benny in there and he started sniffing around the bed. There was no sign of Bari, but there was gear all over the place and it looked like someone had already been through the interpreter’s room.

  As Benny and I were searching, Lee appeared in the doorway. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him. ‘Doesn’t look good. I got woken about six and told to go search the terps’ hooch in the other compound, then Bari’s room.’

  It looked like I’d been brought in to do a double check in case Lee and Spaulding had missed anything. ‘You find something?’

  Lee nodded. ‘Weapon, ammo and detonation cord – plus a detailed map of the base.’

  ‘Shit.’ Detonation cord was explosive cord used to link a number of charges so that they all went off at the same time.

  ‘Word is,’ Lee said, ‘that Bari was arranging for a suicide bomber to attack the next team to come through, either in the camp or in the village bazaar.’ Bari would still have needed to get hold of some C4 or TNT, or some other explosive, to make a bomber’s vest, but there was no reason why he should have had detonation cord in his room.

  Benny and I searched Bari’s room thoroughly as the incredible news started to sink in. Later in the day, as events unfolded, Lee and I discovered that the intelligence people had been monitoring Bari’s mobile phone conversations for some time. The allegation was that the plan was that he – or someone else – would execute a suicide attack against the team using the vest that Bari had been assembling, piece by piece. He’d been PUCked – arrested as a person under consideration – and taken to the cells in another part of Cobra. When the next ‘Brown Ring’, the regular scheduled resupply and transport flight, came through, Bari was taken to the landing zone, handcuffed, had his eyes covered by darkened welder’s goggles, and was put on a Chinook. I have no idea what happened to him after that.

  As Lee and I sat and talked about the morning’s amazing events, we started putting the pieces together.

  ‘He showed me a video of this girl in Pakistan with her tits hanging out,’ I said. ‘It was like he was trying too hard to fit in – to be one of the boys.’

  Lee nodded. ‘I’ve seen him in some pretty good TICs – shooting back and all. He’d always turn up some pretty good intel, or so it seemed, but now that I think of it, nothing much ever came from it.’

  Bari had been the consummate actor – lulling the Americans into a false sense of security and getting them to accept him almost as one of their own, even to the extent of conning them into applying for his American citizenship, while all the while he was hatching a plot to kill them. It blew me away, the way he’d appeared to leave his Muslim beliefs behind and become Americanised, and then sucked everyone in. I wondered if his not being accepted by the other terps was due more to their fear of him than to jealousy over his unusually close relationship with the Americans or his wheeling and dealing.

  The word around camp in the days that followed was that Bari the likeable interpreter was actually a senior Taliban commander. With the access he had, this one man could conceivably have destroyed an entire Special Forces A-Team.

  SEVENTEEN

  Indiana Jones

  I went out on a mission with Brad, the other American K9 civilian dog handler, who served at Cobra when Lee and I did. I was in the GMV behind the 240, with Benny at my feet, and Brad was riding inside the ETT Turtleback humvee with his dog, Rex. Brad liked Rex to travel in his portable kennel.

  Rex was a creature of habit, who went out for a shit at precisely seven every morning, come rain, hail or shine. We left the base on the mission in what the Americans called hours of limited visibility – in this case, just before dawn. We weren’t expecting that much would happen until we reached our objective a few hours later, but not long after leaving Cobra, we drove into a TIC.

  The rounds started coming in like a swarm of angry, deadly bees and I let rip on the 240. The Taliban, so I learned later, had zeroed in on the Turtleback, and Brad was firing back from the turret. Brad could hear bullets pinging off the chicken plate armour that surrounded the gunner’s position.

  Never ones to shy away from the fight, the team continued pouring the fire back on the insurgents, chugging away with their Mark 19s and sending back a fierce storm of .50-calibre slugs. As the fight dragged on, so did the time, and before Brad knew it, seven o’clock had come and gone.

  Rex was going crazy in his travel kennel. The din inside the Turtleback was unbearable for man and animal alike, and he started spinning around, trying to get away from the noise and the rain of empty brass cartridges falling around him.

  Unable to hold on any longer, Rex crapped in his kennel. The problem was that as the poor animal did so, he continued to spin around madly, and chunks of dog turd started hitting the wide steel mesh of the door and spraying around the inside of the humvee. It was getting hot inside the enclosed vehicle and, although Brad didn’t notice much from his position in the open turret, it was getting too much for the driver and the other guy inside.

  ‘Holy shit, man,’ the driver yelled. ‘Do something about that . . . do something about that fucking dog!’ He was gagging while getting pelted by shredded dog turd and empty brass bullet cartridges. Humans have pants to crap in during a TIC – dogs don’t.

  While they were all part of the same army, each SF team was subtly different in its ways and idiosyncrasies. Much of that difference came from the people in command, some of whom were real characters.

  Paul, the US SF team sergeant, wanted to be an Australian. He had served down-under on exchange with the Australian Army and loved it there. He told me he would have loved to live in Australia, and asked me, jokingly, if there were any way he could become an honorary Australian citizen.

  Wanting to be an honorary Australian wasn’t the only thing that set Paul apart from some of his comrades. To start with, he wasn’t your typically pumped-up, weight-lifting hard-arse American SF solider. He was tall and lean, and a bit older than the rest of the guys. To look at him, you might think he was a slightly nerdy middle-aged school teacher rather than a Green Beret. All the same, he commanded the respect of everyone in the team and took no bullshit from anyone.

  Paul dressed differently, too. Some of the guys carried so much gear they looked like robo-soldiers, but he lugged the bare minimum of equipment. He didn’t wear body armour or a helmet and, instead of a combat vest, he wore the old-style military webbing consisting of a belt, a harness, a couple of ammo pouches and two water bottles. It was the sort of gear that dated from the time I’d joined the army.

  If his webbing was old, his rifle was a museum piece. He carried an M-14 that had been designed for the US Army and Marine Corps back in the late 1950s. It was an updated version of the old M1 Garand rifle that the Americans had used in World War
II. It had been re-chambered to take the 7.62-millimetre NATO rimless cartridge and fitted with a 20-round box magazine, on account of the fact that, unlike the old Garand, it could fire on full automatic if required, and therefore needed more ammo. The M-14 had been superseded early on in its life by the lighter, mostly plastic M-16, which became the standard infantry weapon in Vietnam and, in its various forms, right up to today. However, the M-14 had gained a reputation for being a very accurate weapon and, with a cartridge bigger and heavier than the M-16’s 5.56-millimetre round, it saw service in Vietnam as a sniper rifle. I’d heard that the M-14 had come back into fashion in Iraq, where insurgents had started wearing body armour, which could withstand the 5.56- millimetre round but not the M-14’s larger bullet. Engagements could be fought over much longer distances in the open fields and mountains of Afghanistan than in the streets of Baghdad – another reason for Paul’s choice of this reliable old weapon.

  Paul wore a non-regulation camouflage smock that hung down low, almost down to his knees, but even more distinctive than that was his trademark broad-brimmed hat. It looked exactly like the battered old hat Harrison Ford wore in the Indiana Jones movies, so Paul’s nickname, naturally, reflected that.

  Indiana Jones had his own way of operating on missions. While the majority of the team headed out on patrol in their gun trucks and turtlebacks, Paul and four or five other Americans, and a few Afghanis, would set off cross-country on foot, sticking to the ridge lines. As we were mostly driving off road, to avoid mines and IEDs, our progress was slow, so the foot patrol could keep us in sight. Despite all the armour and guns on a GMV, it was somehow reassuring to know that this old-school warrior was walking the mountain paths and rocky ground above us, keeping overwatch.

  The Taliban would usually have spotters hiding up in the hills, and Indiana Jones and his followers were playing them at their own game, sneaking up on them while the enemy were watching our vehicles trundling through the passes and valleys far below. He was using the same tactics as the bad guys, which showed he could think outside the box.

  After prayers one afternoon, I went to Paul’s bedroom and knocked on the door. ‘On behalf of the people of Australia, Paul, we’d like to present you with a token of our esteem.’ A couple of guys in the hallway were grinning because they already knew what was coming. The rangy team sergeant stepped up, and I produced the certificate that I’d asked Nat to bodgie up on her computer back home. ‘It gives me great pleasure to officially proclaim you as an honorary Australian.’

  ‘Thanks, Shane,’ he said, surprised by the presentation. He read Nat’s certificate, which bestowed honorary citizenship on him and gave him permission to visit any time he wanted. ‘I’m very grateful and proud to be an Aussie.’

  In many ways, Paul was just like an Australian SF soldier. He was quiet, mature and intelligent, and, while he could draw on some of the most modern and fierce technological weaponry in the world if his guys ran into trouble, he knew that it was just as important for soldiers to be able to go up into the mountains, armed with not much more than a trusty rifle, and seek out their enemy, man-on-man.

  We went into a village in the mountains a couple of weeks later, and Indiana Jones, who arrived on foot, told the rest of the team that he and his men had seen from a distance some males of fighting-age bug out when they saw our approach. The men had run off to hide deeper in the mountains.

  The village was empty by the time we got there and had a spooky feel. Benny and I were tasked to search the houses and a small bazaar. The shutters were down on the stores, so one of the guys got a pair of bolt cutters from the GMV and we busted in to the small stalls.

  I didn’t find anything in the buildings, but the team guys discovered an aqueduct that was channelling water into the village. It was quite an elaborate system of trenches, which led into a tunnel that had been excavated in the face of a slope. It looked like a place where insurgents could hide out, perhaps during an air strike, or move from one firing position to another without being spotted if the village were under attack. Given the suspicious behaviour of the men who had left earlier, and the eerie emptiness of the village now, we had no doubt that this was a Taliban hide-out.

  ‘Blow the water supply,’ Paul said.

  One of the demolitions specialists, Billy, got to work rigging up an explosive charge and, as an ex-engineer with an interest in blowing things up, I offered to help. Once the charges were ready, Billy and I had to wade through and crawl up into the tunnel to place them where they would cause the maximum amount of damage to the water supply and the tunnel network.

  Taking water away from your enemy was an almost medieval way of fighting. By the same token, one of the ways to win hearts and minds was to go out and sink a borehole or install water tanks in a village. It seemed that we were giving with one hand and taking with the other. By removing a source of fresh water, we’d deny the Taliban this hiding place, yet the village was also home to civilians. Where they were now, though, was anyone’s guess.

  In Afghanistan, the Americans had the same problem as had the previous generation of soldiers in Vietnam – it was often impossible to distinguish friend from foe unless they were shooting at you. The Taliban dressed the same way as ordinary Afghanis did and many Afghani males carried weapons. Even if an Afghani decided not to wear a turban or have a beard, that was no guarantee he was pro-American. What had happened with Bari had taught us that lesson. We presumed the fighting-aged males who ran from us were Taliban. I suppose it was possible that they were just scared, but this didn’t cross my mind at the time.

  I concentrated on working with the explosives. The TNT was in place, with a number of charges linked by detonation cord – the same stuff with which Bari had been planning on blowing us up. We cut enough time fuse to give us three minutes to escape, then fitted an M60 igniter.

  I got to turn the ring on the plastic tube of the M60, starting the timer, and Billy and I sloshed out of the cave and irrigation channel, back up to where the GMVs were parked. The charges went off with a satisfying boom that echoed through the mountains and, I hoped, sent a message to the Taliban that we were not to be fucked with.

  In some parts of Afghanistan, there was a point to trying to win hearts and minds, through, for example, medical and humanitarian aid, but out here we were in Taliban country. It wasn’t as though the Taliban had forced themselves on the people of this village, or were intimidating them. Here, the people were Taliban and all we could do was deny the fighters a place to hide or water to drink. We weren’t going to win a single heart or mind of the villagers in that place.

  Blowing the water supply in the village might sound harsh but we had nothing on the Taliban in that respect.

  I was in a TIC some time after the mission on which we’d destroyed the water cave, and the team called in air support after making contact with some Taliban on the ground. A pair of Dutch Apache gunships circled above the head of the valley where we were operating, like birds of prey impatient for the kill.

  The gun truck was facing forward and the .50 cal in the turret was hurling rounds down at a compound. I couldn’t bring the 240 to bear, so I was watching the action and helping to spot for the gunner.

  ‘Check your fire, check your fire, there’s kids in the doorway, kids in the doorway,’ the JTAC said over the intercom radio.

  I picked up the binoculars and zeroed in on the entranceway to one of the compounds we were targeting. The controller was right. I could see a young boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, crouching there, his hands over his ears. Even from 500 or 600 metres away, I could see the fear on his face. Tracer arced out at us from one of the windows.

  ‘Fuckers are using the kids as human shields,’ the gun truck driver said.

  ‘They can see the Apaches,’ I replied, recognising the heartless strategy for what it was. The Taliban had reasoned, correctly, that the Americans wouldn’t play their trump card and call in an air strike if they could see children were present.

&nb
sp; ‘There’s some more!’

  I looked to where the gunner was pointing, and clearly saw a little boy and a girl, aged no more than eight, running across an open field between two compounds, holding each other’s hands.

  I was furious at the gutless bastards who would pull this sort of stuff during a TIC. It was no secret that the Taliban mingled freely among the populations of some villages, using the presence of women and children to ensure we came in peace rather than starting as a fight, as the Americans would if they thought a village were empty of civilians. It was also true that coalition forces would throw lollies from their vehicles, like an aircraft dispensing chaff, to keep kids close to a convoy and lessen the chance of an IED being detonated or someone opening fire. What was happening now, however, was a new low – dragging kids into the firing line, or making them run from cover to cover, during a TIC.

  How hard, how cold, could a man be? I couldn’t imagine any cause in the world that would prompt me to do something like that – to put my kids, or someone else’s at risk. I’d rather face an air strike and die like a man than use a child as a shield in a fight.

  I watched the little boy and girl running, and could only imagine their confusion and fear. I doubt that an eight-year-old could comprehend why an adult would make them run among bullets. These people; life was so fucking cheap to them. It was bad enough that they would burn or blow up schools and kill teachers, but this was something else again.

  EIGHTEEN

  After-action reports

  February 2008

  I think that the things I was seeing and the constant grind of life on operations was desensitising me to the dangers of living in a war zone.