I’d done a fair bit of this work in my previous employment and I was accustomed to selecting surveillance spots – what we called observation posts – to not only surveil the primary action but also to look at the people who are looking at our own people. This is an ‘overwatch’ operation.
We’d be briefed on three different possible routes, and we’d be given an area to cover; then we’d have to find the choke points of each route, scout a place to spot and shoot from, and then stand-by. When the commanders told us which route was being used, which they did at 5 am, we’d then plan to deploy to that place and set up.
Then there was the mental exhaustion you feel when you do twelve hours on a dusty rooftop, in forty-degree heat. You can’t miss a thing when you do this work. Even among people who are contractors and don’t necessarily feel a sense of camaraderie, there’s a very strong culture of not letting down the other guy – not letting your own loss of concentration be the reason that one of the good guys gets shot or blown up.
On my first day in the job, we were up and about and eating breakfast at 4 am. The other team was around too, but we had virtually nothing to do with them – not enemies or anything, just not much to say.
We packed food and drinking water from the dining room into our packs, and Ken ensured I had my own knee pads and elbow pads, and a good hat. And when an SAS person talks about a good hat, he means a bucket hat that will break up your profile and make it harder to detect you. Then we stood by for the order on which route we’d be covering. When the order came at 5 am, we sat down and went over our plan for the morning, and then we slipped into our man-dresses – the long cotton garments worn by Afghani men. If you wear one over your tactical clothing, you reduce the attention that locals give you. We also used Afghani hats, which are like very large berets, made of wool serge. As we were being driven out to the observation post, Ken turned to me and said, ‘This is hard on the mind – don’t be surprised if you lose concentration after an hour. Don’t give up, though. You can make yourself come back.’
I thanked him for the pep talk. We were dropped a block away from the site and we walked in our man-dresses and Afghani hats to the building we’d chosen, climbed the back stairs and stealthed into position before Kabul had woken up. We established a lying-down hide on the roof, and covered ourselves with hessian draped over a piece of old wire used to hang clothes on, and a chair. By 5.30 am we were in position.
The first two days of working on that roof were a real test. It looked down on a major intersection where a security route passed through from the airport in the north, on its way to the palaces precinct and Old City in the south. I won’t name the street, for reasons that will become apparent. Let’s just say that anyone who has visited Kabul knows this is one of the main thoroughfares that connects the north of the city to the south.
Our hide looked along the street in such a way that we could see down it for several blocks. We waited, concentrating, and I lost the thread after about ninety minutes. I’d gone half an hour longer than Ken had predicted, and he was right: I was able to force my mind back into the game by simply not giving up. Finally, as it started getting hot, we got a heads-up from the convoy on the radio.
‘Scopes up, we’re coming in,’ said the American voice, and we focused down on the intersection looking for obstructions, laden-down trucks parked on the street and bad guys hiding in windows.
Our job was to call the drivers through and ask them to turn off if there was an obstacle, or start shooting if the convoy was approached by a hostile. Across the intersection we could see our counterpart overwatch team, who were lower than us and set up with a slightly different field of view. Our job was also to keep watch over them.
When the convoy of five vehicles came through, they galloped past so quickly that it was all over before we’d really focused on anyone.
‘Fuck me Jesus,’ said Ken. ‘All day, for that!’
We were now faced with sitting around until four o’clock, waiting for another convoy.
Ken wanted to stay alert and wanted me to see some sniper action. So he keyed the mic and said to the team across the intersection, ‘Blue Camry.’ Then, ‘Remington, please spotter,’ he said to me, and I passed him the camo-green sniper rifle with the suppressor on the end.
‘What are we doing?’ I asked.
‘Shooting a car,’ he said.
‘Won’t we get in trouble for that?’ I said. ‘It’s someone’s car.’
‘I’m finding my range,’ said Ken. ‘It’s crucial for my work.’
He shouldered the Remington 700, looked down the scope, and said to me: ‘Blue Camry, driver’s wing mirror.’
I looked down my spotter’s binoculars and as I focused on the wing mirror, it shattered and disappeared. The Remington was amazingly silent – no louder than dropping an iPhone on concrete.
I kept watching and the passenger-side wing mirror shattered too.
Ken levered the bolt action and reloaded. Now he took out the front left tyre, and the other sniper took out the front right tyre. This went on for ten minutes, while the duelling snipers reduced a civilian’s car to Swiss cheese.
At 4 pm, with no more calls from the convoys, we put on the man-dresses and hats, stealthed out of our hide and made for the street. As we headed to the RV with the Black Tower vehicle, we walked past a well-dressed local man who was standing beside his blue Camry, palms turned to the sky. I felt totally sorry for him and annoyed with Ken.
It was my first day in an overwatch team, and I’d just seen a whole new world.
10
How do snipers and spotters do this? They make small talk to stay awake and alert. I hadn’t been aware of the fact, but soldiers become experts at meaningless chatter. The form – which I learned on the job from Ken – was one of duelling monologues. Ken would start with something about his car, back in South Australia. I would listen to a five-minute mix of automotive philosophy and whining, about say – a Ford Falcon – at which point I’d be expected to speak for roughly five minutes on a related topic, for instance, the difference between Ford and GM. You’d announce your monologue was over with a quip like, I guess it just proves you can’t trust any of the bastards.
This wasn’t very comfortable for me. Given the world I’d come out of, where talking too much – or just for the sake of it – was considered a bit suspect, having to share my thoughts all day long was not easy. I went along with it because I knew why we were doing it: if it kept me or Ken even slightly alert, then it was worth it. I did learn something: I found out the hard way that soldiers’ two main topics of conversation are women and money. So when things went quiet, and we were scanning the street with our optics, Ken would inevitably start with, ‘So seriously, Mike. What would you do if you were given ten million dollars?’
That’s a big one with soldiers and it never gets old. He’d ask me that one maybe twice a day, with variations such as, ‘Assuming you could only spend your money on cars . . .’ or, ‘Assuming you can only spend it in Las Vegas . . .’
The other one is fairly obvious: ‘Mike, seriously, mate, if you could fuck any woman . . .’
So there you lie, on a dusty rooftop in Kabul, wet with your own sweat, looking through binoculars for the ninth hour straight and wishing you’d never broken that Russian’s wrist because then you’d never have to hear a soldier tell you what he’d like to do with Pamela Anderson or Charlize Theron.
We were into one of these monologues early one morning. The sun had just come up when we noticed something unfolding beneath us.
‘At your two, below us,’ I said as I peered through my binoculars.
Ken scoped the street with his optics as the noise rose: a man was shouting at a woman in the doorway of their house. It was a two-storey townhouse that fronted the street and I noticed that a silver car was parked at the footpath opposite the house. The noise got louder and I can tell you th
at all that talk about Muslim women being subservient to their men? Well, this wife was giving it to him, right down to the wagging finger and the spittle flying off the lip.
Ken chuckled. ‘Reminds me why I’m divorced.’
We watched this unfold and then the husband disappeared into the house and the wife stayed on the street and was now yelling into the house after him. She was crying and then the husband stormed out into the street, and my heart bounced up into my throat because he had a huge kitchen knife in his hand, and the woman started screaming. By now half the neighbourhood was standing around that doorway but no one attempted to intervene. I felt nervous – I wanted to go down there. There was no way I could lie here and watch a woman being killed or even threatened by this bloke. But before I could do anything, the man with the knife had walked across the footpath to the waiting car, reached in the driver’s window with his knife, and attacked. Until he did this I hadn’t seen the person in the car – now it was clear a man was in the driver’s seat, and if I was putting it together properly, I’d guess this bloke in the car was the wife’s boyfriend. The attack was over in a few seconds but the husband kept hacking, and suddenly a human head was bouncing on the tarmac and rolling along the road.
‘Fuck!’ I said.
‘Fuck!’ said Ken.
We were stunned. I’d witnessed my first beheading and it wasn’t cool. But what happened next was even more bizarre. Did these people make a citizen’s arrest? Try to stop the knife-wielding man? Protect the woman from the next attack? No, what happened was the neighbours walked up to the woman and started yelling at her, remonstrating and further reducing her to tears. The man just walked back into the house, I guess to change his shirt.
My instinctive reaction to this was to go down there, call the cops and then lead them inside to the person I’d just watched commit murder. I don’t really buy this crap about different cultures being different: murder is wrong in all cultures and always has been.
But I was also under Ken’s command.
‘We gonna go down there?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Ken, who was writing the incident in his logbook. ‘I’m noting it and I’ll get a photograph too. But we don’t go down there and you know why.’
I did know why. A couple of Aussie soldiers turn up on the street, in their sniper gear, and the grapevine quickly alerts the local al-Qaeda affiliate and you might have ten minutes left of your life.
‘Okay, so we don’t go down,’ I said. ‘How will you get a picture?’
The answer was that we had to wait. The first truck convoy came through at 9.45 am without incident. Ken made his confirmations over the radio comms and then filled in the logbook.
‘I reckon we have about twenty minutes,’ he said, ‘before the head shed wants to talk to me again.’
By which he meant that there was no way anyone in the Black Tower chain of command would permit either of us to go down into that street, after a murder among the locals. No way. We were going to toss a coin, see who went onto the street. Ken eventually decided that since he was the smaller of the team, he was less likely to be picked as a foreigner masquerading in a man-dress, and therefore, less likely to trigger a frenzy of phone calls to a cell of people who would love to kill us.
My role would be to cover him with the Remington 700, a weapon I am very comfortable with, having trained on it with several government employers; it’s also a popular weapon among Australian hunters. But when I stood to have a look at the street, it was obvious that I couldn’t cover him from the roof. The angle wouldn’t give me 100 per cent cover of Ken, and the more I tried to make it work the further over the parapet I’d be leaning, alerting the local Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders and blowing our observation post.
So if one of us went down there, both of us would have to. Ken threw on his man-dress and so did I. Then I picked up his rifle and had a closer look: I recognised it as the USMC version of the 700, which was called an M40. It was a relatively modern version, meaning it had a fibreglass stock, a ten-round detachable magazine and a Schmidt and Bender scope. I liked the Remington’s weight and balance, which was as perfect as you could get.
We stealthed down from our position, climbed the last few metres into a side alley of the four-townhouse row, and walked to where the alley became the footpath. I stayed standing and kept the Remington under my man-dress, down my thigh. As Ken made to walk onto the street, I saw it. Shit! The driver’s head was still there, on the tarmac in front of the car. The headless body still sat upright in the bloodied driver’s seat, held in place by the seatbelt. I was responsible for Ken so I calmed myself and scanned the street: windows, doors, people moving, cars slowing. Ken said, ‘See you soon, Mike,’ and walked from the alley and very casually walked down the street, away from the front of the car. He kept walking until he reached the corner of the intersection we were guarding. He looked back briefly, saw me and looked away. Then he walked back towards the car and the head lying on the road, and I saw his compact digital camera coming out of the folds of his light brown man-dress, and then the camera was back in the folds of fabric and he was ducking into the side alley again.
‘Jesus wept,’ he said as we climbed back to our perch. ‘That was a fucking mess.’
We oversaw three convoys in total that day, and remained on the roof until 4 pm. There were no police, no army and no Coalition military. The head remained on the road and the body sat in the car, all day, in the hot sun.
When we finally walked away to our ride, a couple of ten-year-old boys were messing around in the passenger side of the car. I think they’d found a mobile phone.
11
A job as dangerous and as whacky as being a road warrior in Kabul eventually wraps you in a fantasy land. It isn’t real – it isn’t real life. It has no relation to any type of living you may have done before and you’ll never live like this again. The community of outsiders with money and resources – who live and work in the secured Green Zone – splits off into two tribes. One tribe acknowledges the strangeness of this world, and realises early that the discrepancy in wealth and welfare between locals and foreigners is itself a problem that will never disappear. I understand why the governments of Europe, North America and Australia committed so many resources to rebuilding Afghanistan, and I am proud that some of my tax dollars were spent in the attempt to achieve something good. The work of my fellow Aussies, in that country, was a source of pride to me. But let’s be honest: a bunch of fabulously wealthy outsiders parachuting into one of the world’s poorest countries, living in compounds, eating their own food, drinking their own clean water and living in their own security, was never going to help the Afghanis. Why? Because as soon as all these wealthy foreigners go home, the one-eyed man is king again.
So these were the tribes in the Green Zone: the people – like me – who knew this wasn’t real or permanent, and didn’t particularly want to live a life of false privilege; and the tribe who wanted this to roll on forever, giving them rock-star status in their protected little world.
I don’t include soldiers in this, by the way. The Coalition troops lived rough, and that includes the Americans. In some of their patrol bases in Logar, their beds were the dirt ground of a shepherd’s hilltop compound. That’s where they slept for a month at a time. I’m talking about all the journalists, government workers, bankers, consultants, transnational agency people and NGO operatives who lived inside the Green Zone and liked to think they were living in a war zone. They weren’t.
Jaded? Perhaps, but I’d also chosen one of the worst times to be working in Afghanistan. By 2008, the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants of the first Coalition strikes had organised themselves and were quite brazen in what they were doing. In June of that year I was watching the news on CNN when they broke in with a newsflash about the Taliban taking over a prison in Kandahar, just down the road. Thirty Taliban fighters had attacked the prison, having detonated a truck bo
mb at the gates, and released 350 insurgents: not suspects or petty criminals. I mean shooters and bombers from various Taliban and al-Qaeda militias.
That put everyone on edge in the contractors’ compound: you only need one person to blow a big hole in the city. What would happen when we had 350, heading north for the bomb capital of the world?
We tightened our procedures after that, especially looking for parked trucks and cars, delivery vans with too much weight in the back, locals driving cars where they shouldn’t have been. The size of the truck bomb that had been used suggested access to large amounts of RDX-based military explosives, and the word was that Pakistan’s military and intelligence were openly supplying the Taliban. The heightened paranoia took its toll: one afternoon three British contractors – from another company – failed to stop at a Delta barrier manned by local guards. A Delta barrier is a steel plate that emerges out of the road on hydraulic rams, and sits at a forty-five-degree angle to the approaching traffic. The contractors were shot dead in their SUV when they failed to stop for it.
About three weeks after the Kandahar prison breakout, I was back doing a PSD at the ISAF precinct, taking two German bigwigs to the airport. We were waiting outside their residential compound inside the precinct, talking to the internal version of us, when the ground shook and the sound of a thousand breaking windows echoed across the city. It was around 8.30 am, and I had a traveller cup of coffee in my hand as we waited for the subjects. I turned as the screams broke out, and two blocks away a plume of smoke, dust and debris was rising several hundred feet into the air.
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