by Rob Maylor
I went out on the first casevac flight with SG and PF as I was classed as a priority two, as on examination Wal, the medic, noticed my stomach was sore in front of the holes in my back, he assumed the shrapnel may have penetrated deeper than it appeared. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. The SSM met us at the helipad back in Tarin Kowt looking quite concerned. This was understandable: seven of his lads had just been hurt.
I was carried on a stretcher to a Dutch ambulance, which drove directly to the field hospital. As I reached the treatment room the doctors and nurses went into their drill conducting a thorough survey of my body and injuries, then inserted a canula into a vein on the back of my hand.
They asked me all the usual questions: ‘Are you allergic to penicillin?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you on any medication?’ ‘No,’ and then pumped me full of morphine. They didn’t operate until the early hours of the next morning.
TS, one of the engineers, PF and I were all in the same room. PF was in a bad way. His legs were pretty messed up. After several operations they told him he would be looking at a 12-month recovery period. He’s still not 100 per cent but he’s improving all the time.
SG went to the big American hospital in Germany and underwent many hours of surgery. He came out of it well but I doubt whether he’ll be able to parachute or dive again. But of course you can’t tell him that. He’s a tough little bastard!
There was a small American hospital at Kamp Holland as well, and a couple of their guys went there. A few more went to Kandahar.
I was in hospital for about five days because I had to keep going back into surgery to have my wounds debrided, cleaned and repacked. It wasn’t until they were confident the wounds were free of bacteria that they would send me back to Camp Russell.
I was able to call George from Kamp Holland, which I did the following day. The day after, General Mike Hindmarsh, the Special Operations Commander, the Chief of the Army and a few other VIPs came through and spoke with us, which we appreciated.
I didn’t see Evan again after that, and didn’t get to speak to him about our experience. He had been taken to the American facility to treat his calf injury. Maybe one day.
I didn’t see the bomb dog Sabi either. She went missing after that RPG hit us; and then when her handler was wounded and put out of action she was lost in the confusion of the battlefield. It wasn’t until 12 November 2009–more than 14 months after the ambush–that the Americans were able to retrieve her through negotiation and return her to Australia.
17
The Final Days
It was a pretty short rotation for most of the injured guys but I stayed on. I had about three weeks off work getting over my injuries and by that time I was itching to get back into it. But I was a bit concerned about the first job on my return because it took place during a full moon. We were always a bit reluctant to work when the illumination was too high as it meant we didn’t have the advantage of our NVGs. The enemy could see clearly 600 metres on a full moon and at times a full kilometre.
On this occasion we were after a particular target when we got dropped off by vehicles about 4.5 kilometres from Tarin Kowt. Our target was approx 3.5 kilometres further and the plan was to walk the remainder of the distance to come up quietly onto his compound. As we approached the village we were contacted in the open. My first job back and suddenly we’re getting shot at! I darted forward to take cover in a small aqueduct, hoping this wasn’t going to be bad. No-one was hit but there were quite a few rounds coming our way and this split the troop.
TS had been repatriated back to Australia because of his wounds, which meant another sergeant took his place as our patrol commander. I remained as patrol scout. The PC and TF were behind me, slightly elevated on the hard-packed ground, which gently sloped towards me. I could hear crack, crack, crack over my head. I had a pretty good look around. Crack, crack, crack, again. I looked over my shoulder and up the rise and said to the PC, ‘Hey, is that you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, mate.’ He then fired a couple of shots with his suppressor on, but this made a totally different noise. Someone else was doing the shooting.
Then both joined me in the aqueduct. There was a building ahead of us that could provide cover, so I said, ‘Come on, let’s go to that building.’ We made a run for it while the other boys in the troop pepper-potted towards another. The rounds were falling between us and going over our heads.
When we reached the compound the first door we came to was locked. There was a family inside so one of the guys covered me and I remembered the Pashto words for ‘Open the door’. A guy came up and indicated that he couldn’t open the door, but pointed around the corner.
I looked around the corner. This would expose us to the guys shooting at us from the building 50 metres away, but sure enough there was a door. He opened it for us and we slipped inside. I cuffed his hands and feet and told him not to move, and told his family to stay inside the house. They were good. Then we made our way up to his roof.
On their roofs they generally have a parapet which is usually about half a metre high. We took cover behind the parapet and had a scout around. We heard a bit of a gunfight going on with the other half of the troop. We noticed fighters moving around on roofs opposite us. We decided to engage.
The patrol commander saw a bloke crawl through a gap between two walls on a roof; we were onto him straight away. Then suddenly we got information from a Predator that there was a vehicle heading towards us, possibly a police vehicle. We then saw about 12 guys appear from a corner 50 metres to our right flank. They were dressed in local civilian clothes but with chest rigs and AKs. We looked at each other and I said, ‘This doesn’t feel right.’ So we shouted at them in Pashto to stop. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’ When the other half of the troop saw them they called them to stop as well. But they kept on coming. Eventually they too realised something wasn’t right.
But it was too late, the police chief, and some of his guys were already dead. The situation quietened down and the troop boss organised a withdrawal. As we left the compound I removed the cuffs from the house owner and reassured them that everything was okay. We were all mindful of a ‘blue on blue’ (friendly fire casualities).
We aborted the operation. There were conflicting reports about how many others were dead–some said six, others said four plus a few injured. We covered each other as we moved to an unused compound behind us to reorganise ourselves before we patrolled back to our vehicles for a return to Tarin Kowt. That’s when we discovered that the police chief had been killed. But it wasn’t until a week or so later that we found out more about what had happened. The bloke who engaged us initially from his rooftop was getting death threats from the Taliban. They left a night letter on his door saying something like, ‘If you don’t join us or give us what we want, we’re going to kill your family in front of you and then we’re going to kill you.’ So naturally he got scared and employed some family or friends to provide security on his compound. It is also highly likely that these guys had engaged the cops. No-one knows for sure.
This also could have been the night that the Taliban were going to pay him a visit. The guys on the roof of his compound would have seen us coming quite some distance away due to the quality of light, thinking we were Taliban, and it is possible that’s when the police chief was alerted. There was a police compound about 1,500 metres down the road, so when they got the call they would’ve jumped into their cars all tooled up to join the other guys because they knew they were in for a fight. It seems as though everyone had turned up at the same time not knowing who was who, so the guys on the roof of the compound just started shooting.
When it all happened we were taking a fair amount of fire to our left, so naturally we all just tuned in on the muzzle flashes and went into the contact IA and engaged. Had we known the background of this trouble we would have given the place a really wide berth, or even taken a different route.
Actually, just before we withdrew someone had fired some mortars from our
original direction of travel, which landed 300–400 metres away from us. We never did find out who fired them.
The Dutch and the Australians conducted an inquiry and found nothing untoward; it was just a bad accident. No-one knows who shot the fatal rounds.
After that we had a slack period of about a week and a half, so we decided to chase some targets further afield. The Chinooks were back on board to take us to a village that was about a 25-minute flight away. They dropped us 8–9 kilometres out and we walked towards the target compounds. As we got closer we took a couple of detainees who we found sleeping outside with AKs. They might have been farmers, or could even have been security as neighbouring villages do sometimes fight with each other. But we had to neutralise the threat so we took them with us. On the walk up to one compound of interest four blokes squirted–three headed towards the hills, and one bloke thought he’d take the lazy route and come back around. He walked straight into us. We got hold of him, cuffed his hands and took him with us also. Before we started the clearance of our second objective we dropped the detainees with troop HQ a little distance off the three buildings, which were joined to each other.
On the way up to the first building we saw a sentry outside with an old AK. He must have heard us coming in the darkness and was gingerly tip-toeing around trying to find out what it was. One of the other patrols got to him and shot him. Then we started clearing through the buildings.
Once the clearance was complete we sent some guys up onto the roof to maintain security. Not long after they got there two bad guys were seen hunched over their weapons and moving stealthily side by side to the back of the centre compound. The boys on the roof gave them the good news.
We didn’t find the guys we were after–they’d squirted–but we got a few weapons and more IED-making equipment, which we took with us to our pick-up point.
We hit the same area the next night this time using 4RAR. The size of the force required three Chinook drops, but we only had two Chinooks that night, so on the first run our troop was inserted at the southern end of the village while an element of 4RAR were dropped off to the north. The Chinooks then had to go back to pick up the other crew which dropped them 2.5 kilometres to the west of the village. The plan was to totally close down the village and apprehend anyone squirting.
Our patrol had brought two quad bikes out on the Chinooks and it wasn’t long before we started chasing squirters with them. We had apprehended a couple of guys within minutes of rolling off the Chinook, but shortly afterwards we saw another making tracks for the high ground.
TF and JB secured the two we already had, and PC and I rode off towards this other guy. He could hear us coming but couldn’t see as the night was dark. As we got closer we stopped the quads and pursued him on foot. He was doing his best to get away but we caught up. In Pashto I told him to stop and put his hands up. At first he didn’t respond so I told him again.
This time he stopped but wouldn’t put his hands up. He was on a slight oblique angle to me and I was trying to see what he was doing when I got a glimpse of what I thought was a chest rig. ‘Has that guy got a chest rig, mate?’ The patrol commander said, ‘Yeah mate,’ and as he turned I could see part of an AK under his clothing. My laser was already on his head so I didn’t take any chances and released a single 5.56 mm projectile that dropped him like a puppet with its strings cut.
We searched him and removed bucket loads of AK rounds, .303 rounds and 7.62 mm long, which would fit a Russian SVD sniper rifle. The cartridge case of this particular round is 3 mm longer than a standard NATO 7.62 mm and is slightly different in appearance. We couldn’t figure out whether he was going to another location to pick up another weapon or going to meet up with someone who had a weapons cache to suit those rounds.
We questioned some goat-herders who were near the incident but let them go. Then we saw three squirters from the village running up a creek line parallel to us. Paul got our other two guys to link up so we could cover ourselves as we approached the squirters. In fact they were heading straight for us by now. When we reached them they were empty handed and one guy was only about 14, so we detained the father and another older bloke, letting the 14-year-old go.
The guys on the other side of the valley had killed a squirter and they also had a few detainees. We finished up with half-a-dozen detainees to go back in the Chinooks with us. We questioned them first then handed them on to the Dutch. If the Dutch believed they needed further questioning then they’d be sent to the Afghan Special Police or the Americans.
There was one final task before the tour ended. 2 Squadron had just arrived and we gave them a handover for the following year–2009. We took them out on a job in the same way that 1 Squadron did for us to give them a good heads up of the way we were operating and to familiarise them to the ground. Nothing really came of the job. We found some opium and destroyed it, and uncovered a few weapons, which we took back together with a couple of detainees. We had already hit that compound earlier in the trip and found a good cache of IED-making equipment, a lot of weapons and a lot of opium. Once again we missed the bad guys–including Stiletto. I was disappointed we had missed objective Stiletto as he was causing the coalition forces in Oruzgan a huge headache with his IED-facilitating. But at the same time, these guys wake up to the war every day, and it was only a matter of time before the coalition forces caught up with them. During 2 Squadron’s tour in 2009, they did!
I didn’t realise it at the time but when we took off from Tarin Kowt for the flight home I would be leaving the fight in Afghanistan for the last time. When I arrived home to George and the girls I discovered just how hard it had been for them. Ash in particular was doing it tough. She is a lot closer to me than Lauren, who is more of an individual. Ash relies heavily on George and myself and the thought of me being injured or even worse, killed, frightened her to the point where she couldn’t sleep. Even when I returned she had trouble sleeping, and when she did eventually convince herself to close her eyes, she had to make one last check, either verbally or visually, to make sure I was still at home. This really played on my mind a lot. It was the second scare my family had and I didn’t think they could handle another. So shortly after Christmas I made the decision to leave the army and to pursue a career that wouldn’t take me away from home for extended periods or place my life in danger.
I loved the work and the camaraderie of the regiment. It’s not pretty at times but it is the cutting edge of the nation’s defences. We are highly trained and good at what we do; everyone is focused on the job. And personally that can be very satisfying. But now I had to think of my family for a change and not just what I wanted.
On return home it took me a few days to readjust, as our sleep patterns were totally abnormal. Most of the time in Afghanistan we would try to run reverse cycle, which entailed sleeping during the day and getting up at 5 p.m. for breakfast. So it takes a while to get back into kilter. And at the same time you have to mentally unwind. While in hostile territory there is always something that you are thinking about to minimise the risks and maximise the effect of each operation, even if it’s just about the kit that you need to take; or you might run a scenario through your head and part of that might help you decide what you’re going to take on the job.
The Taliban are a tough enemy to deal with. They know the country and use it against us. Afghans have been fighting since the days of Alexander the Great, recruiting the kids when they’re very young to fight the infidels. The Taliban still consider themselves the rightful power in Afghanistan, so there’s a command structure that mirrors the actual system. If the government has a provincial governor, the Taliban has a shadow governor who runs the operations for the Taliban in the province. He then has district and city commanders under him and he answers to the equivalent of the federal government.
Mullah Omar was the top commander before he was captured by the Americans. He had a network of operational commanders under him but if you knock over one of the top ones, the other
s will move up the pyramid. Afghanistan is also tribal. They fight over who’s going to move up and sometimes this works to our advantage. But in battle the Taliban soldier has all the advantages of playing on his home ground.
Epilogue
I’ve been accused over the years of being modest and quiet, but I have really had to come out of my shell to write this. I know you’ll appreciate that I’ve had to maintain security and only refer to some blokes by either their nickname or initials, and also not mention some towns or villages in our Area of Operations in Afghanistan.
I’ve put my life on the line for other people now for the last 18 years with total disregard to my family. Now it’s time to give something back, and give them the life they deserve. This has also prompted me to seek another career, one where I can spend a lot more time at home.
As I look back on my military career there’s no doubt that my time with the SAS has been the highlight. The regiment has a well-deserved reputation. It is full of characters who are hardened and very professional, as you’d expect them to be. It was a sad time to leave my mates. However, I rarely spent time with them outside of working hours as I really valued ‘family time’, which probably made my separation from the unit a little easier. But you do develop a very strong bond with the blokes, more so if they have been involved in the same incidents. But most SAS operators spend at least six months away from home a year, sometimes more. So when I’m home I like to put as much time in as possible with the family. My recreational activities like hunting and fishing trips have taken a back seat during my time in the regiment, but I’ve had to put my family first.