While the Indonesians lacked side-looking airborne radar (SLAR) to provide moving- and fixed-target indicators, they did have aerial reconnaissance drones with traditional cameras. This left the Australian ground forces at risk of detection. Even vehicles and encampments hidden in dense forests or beneath camouflage nets were still at risk of other habitation indicators through pattern analysis. Muddy tire tracks emerging onto paved roads was only one example.
On one of his scouting trips, Caleb heard about the McKenzie horse farm, four miles up the Adelaide River. It had several large hay barns and an enormous covered riding arena. The elderly owners of the farm had scaled down to just a few horses and were anxious to move to southeastern Australia. Caleb was able to negotiate a lease for the Army on the entire 1,800-hectare farm and unlimited use of the water bores for just two thousand dollars per month. The buildings provided excellent concealment for the FLB, so long as all of the vehicles were kept indoors. The farmhouse was used for officer billeting and administrative offices as well as relatively cool storage for field rations.
The McKenzie farm was dubbed Site M. The riding arena provided a concealed location for supplies that was large enough for trucks to drive in and drop off cargo. Only the fuel blivets were stored outdoors, well away from the other supplies, under redundant cover of both camouflage nets and eucalyptus trees. There were large ventilation fans mounted at both ends of the arena. Since the Mains grid power had been shut down, the fans no longer worked and the temperature quickly rose. But power from a trailer-mounted 12 KW multifuel generator set soon remedied the problem. The same genset also provided power for lights inside truck-mounted shelters. Given the blackout in the region, the shelter doors had to be kept closed to maintain light discipline. The last thing they wanted was to be a target.
The interior of the farmhouse became cramped after cases of CR1M, PR1M, and CR5M rations were stacked from floor to ceiling in every available space, making the hallways quite narrow.
The Combat Ration, 1 Man (CR1M, spoken “Crim”) was the army’s ubiquitous field ration. It was the equivalent of the American military Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE). Like the MRE, the CR1M was the butt of many jokes, both exaggerated and fabricated. For example, Army legend had it that CR1M rations had been invented by “a ninety-five-year-old German nutritionist named Herr Doktor Crimspeil who’s first job was planning menus at Dachau.”
One step up from the CR1M was the PR1M: Patrol Ration, One Man, or “Prim.” These were similar to a CR1M, but with some more palatable freeze-dried components. The PR1Ms were sought after by Aussie soldiers whenever they had the chance.
All three of Caleb’s FLB sites were designed to strike a balance between camouflage and ease of access. Roads were laid out in sweeping curves rather than straight lines. Road gravel was used sparingly and was carefully selected to about the same color of the soil at each site. It was hoped that the graveled areas would blend in, at least from aerial or satellite observation. They made the decision to minimize the amount of gravel spread and to immediately add some grass seed from the local native grasses both to the roads and to the adjoining soil to make the roads at the FLBs blend in. They wanted aerial observers to see only irregular green blotches—no sharp contrasts or straight lines.
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The Crunch removed most of Australia’s access to satellite reconnaissance. Long accustomed to being granted access to this compartmented access intelligence, Australia’s spy agencies were suddenly left in the dark. The American National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) constellation of Keyhole series spy satellites were no longer being properly controlled from their ground-based satellite control facilities, so they reverted to default “dumb” orbits and their cameras went “off gimbal”—meaning that they ended up pointing almost randomly. Only one satellite was still producing any useful imagery, but its highly elliptical orbit brought it over successive swathes of Australia and Papua New Guinea only once every sixteen days.
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Under the exigencies of the expected hostilities, Task Force Dingo tossed many regulations and procedures out the window. For example, there was extensive use of civilian housing for billeting. Civilian trucks, SUVs, and aircraft were rushed into military service, often without a new paint job—or with just a perfunctory slap of flat tan or olive drab paint with a hand brush. Some off-road vehicles like Volkswagen Amaroks were also used “off the shelf” in large numbers.
Another striking change was the rejection of the long-standing admonition that soldiers, sailors, and airmen should never take their issued weapons off post. Soldiers soon were seen carrying their AUG rifles at all times on and off post, even when they went home on leave. Likewise, civilian contractors were no longer restricted from having firearms, but in fact were encouraged to do so, especially in forward areas like northern Australia.
The government in Canberra also rescinded most of the civilian firearms restrictions and declared a general amnesty on the possession of any previously banned weapons or explosives. These moves offended many staunch anti-gunners. Newspaper editorials bewailed seeing Australia “turned into an armed camp” and warned of a “resurgence of the gun culture” that they had spent the past four decades systematically destroying.
Back in Wyndham, Alvis Edwards scoffed at these gun control proponents. He told his wife, “That band of fools would rather see us invaded and subjugated than let the general populace have guns. They won’t see the error of their ways until they’re behind Indonesian barbed wire.”
Having the general populace armed at all times was reminiscent of the darkest days of early World War II, when a Japanese invasion—or at least air raids—had seemed likely.
After the Indonesians made their evacuation decree, a large number of men opted to serve as Stay Behind resistance fighters. Most of these individuals formed into loosely organized groups of two to four men.
The Stay Behinds ranged from ages seventeen to seventy and came from all social strata. Among them were a sixty-seven-year-old retired male park ranger who carried a Mini-14 rifle he had kept tucked away in his attic during the ban; a twenty-three-year-old female grocery store employee who had a penchant for kung fu movies; and a nineteen-year-old male skateboarding champion who was armed with just a .22 bolt-action rifle. His hope was to use the rifle to get something better.
Another Stay Behind was an Aborigine named Sam Burnu. A thirty-five-year old ex-convict bachelor, Sam worked as a groundskeeper in Marrakai Heights. Like most aboriginals, he had two names: an English name and a “skin name,” representing the section of his kinship group. But because of his criminal record, he used a third, fictitious name when he signed the Stay Behind roster. From the items offered, he took only CR1M rations, a MultiCam bush hat, and a set of web gear with a canteen. He already owned an old Essex 12 bore single-shot shotgun, and he knew its shooting characteristics intimately. He did accept the offer of four boxes of Hexolit shotgun slug ammunition from a friend who was about to take his family to Brisbane. These slugs were specially segmented to splay out into bladelike structures that looked almost like a hunting arrow broadpoint when they hit their target. He subsequently used these slugs to great effect. He killed seven Indonesian soldiers over the course of three weeks, most of them sentries. Each time he took a life, he would go back to his solo camp and sing a death song. Then, before going to sleep, he would prepare his mind to direct his dreams. His father had always said, “Those who lose dreaming are lost.”
37
LUAU
“The only things of value which we have at present are our arms and our courage. So long as we keep our arms we fancy that we can make good use of our courage; but if we surrender our arms we shall lose our lives as well.”
—Xenophon, The Persian Expedition
Near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia—February, the Third Year
Even after nearly one hundred truckloads of supplies had been stockpiled at the FLBs,
the tents had been erected, and the camouflage nets strung in position, Caleb Burroughs still didn’t feel quite “ready.” Each night became progressively more tension-filled along the coast in the Top End, with wild rumors circulating of Indonesian and Malaysian Army landings. The only sleep they got came from the utter exhaustion of working sixteen hours a day.
The same night that there was the first confirmed report of a landing at the Bay of Carpenteria, there was a false alarm on the perimeter of Site G, caused by two feral pigs. A nervous guard felt convinced that Indonesian Kopassus troops were probing their lines. He “dialed Triple Zero” to let loose two full 30-round magazines from his Austeyr, pulling the trigger all the way back to the full auto position in long bursts. The next morning, following a reprimand of the guard, the debate centered on how to roast the 70- and 100-kilo pigs without generating smoke that could be seen from the air. They ended up eating boiled pork, cooked over gas burners, which didn’t provide quite the same festive atmosphere of the boar roast that most had expected.
Before the Indonesians arrived and forced the FLBs to hunker down in stealth mode, Caleb’s unit was able to distribute gear to some of the local Stay Behinds. The gear included camouflage nets, hand grenades, satchel demolition charges, Claymore command-detonated mines, and dozens of cases of CR1Ms. There were also a few L1A1 rifles available for veterans who lacked combat-capable rifles of their own.
More than ninety-five percent of the population had already fled from the Darwin area. Evacuation was recommended, but not required. Those who remained were mostly scrappy bogans and a few assorted eccentrics. Some of them claimed they were too set in their ways to leave their homes. There were also some naïve internationalist idealists who hoped they could carry on their lives under Indonesian rule. Caleb was worried that some of the latter might talk too much to the Indos. Therefore, everyone involved with the FLBs was warned to keep the FLB locations on a strict “need to know” basis. Similarly, the Stay Behind fighters were warned to avoid all contact with the starry-eyed idealists.
Randall Burroughs and Bruce Drake both accepted job offers with the same commercial explosives company near Brisbane that had recently turned to making military demolitions. With Chuck’s urging, Ava Palmer and her parents evacuated to Adelaide and lived with relatives. Rhiannon Jeffords and her daughter, Sarah, accompanied them, with Rhiannon driving the rusty Datsun ute. The truck made it to Adelaide despite a leaking radiator that had to be refilled seven times en route.
Thomas Drake packed up his guns and relocated to his hunting property, which bordered Garig Gunak Barlu National Park. He fully expected to die fighting the first time an Indonesian patrol entered his property, but that never happened.
Wyndham was occupied six days after Darwin. The town had been completely abandoned. Driving the Tanami Road in their Range Rover towing a trailer loaded with gas cans, Alvis and Vivian Edwards relocated from the Kimberley region to Geraldton, but soon after moved on to Perth, where they both worked at a small factory that made camouflage nets for the war effort.
Other than the troops at the FLBs, the only regular Australian Army troops still in or near Darwin were seven widely scattered two-man Stinger missile teams. These teams were directed to lie low, hiding in abandoned houses or bivouacking in small camouflaged tents, waiting for opportunities to shoot down Indonesian aircraft. The teams each had eight Stinger RMP missiles with passive infrared seekers. These missiles were man portable—about the size of a bazooka. After firing, a new missile tube could quickly be mounted to the gripstock, allowing another missile to be launched in less than a minute. The shoulder-fired Stinger was added to the Australian Army inventory shortly before the Crunch to supplement the heavier and more bulky Swedish RBS-70, which was launched from a pedestal mount. This procurement was dubbed Project LAND 19—Interim MANPADS. Because of their compact size, the more portable Stingers were particularly suitable for guerilla warfare. Meanwhile, the larger RBS-70s were all used in the defense of the large cities on the southeastern coast.
The main goal of the Indo-Malaysian invasion was to seize intact all of the oil and natural gas fields in the northern half of Australia, along with their associated ocean shipping terminals at Darwin, Weipa, Townsville, Broome, and Dampier. The largest population center in the Top End was Darwin. It needed to be secured first before the petroleum facilities.
The Stay Behinds were a thorn in the Indonesians’ side from the beginning. Snipers like Quentin Whittle would fire just one or two shots from long range and then disappear into the jungle. Indonesian infantry platoons dispatched to find them were nearly always frustrated. Through the use of foxholes with well-camouflaged covers, the pursuing soldiers would walk right past the snipers and spend an entire day fruitlessly searching the jungle, returning exhausted. The next day there would be another shot, another dead Indo soldier—usually an officer or NCO—and the process would be repeated. On the few occasions when a fleeing sniper would engage his pursuers, the Indos often found themselves out-ranged. At distances between four hundred and seven hundred yards, their 5.56 rifles lacked the requisite accuracy when they were up against a man armed with a .243 or .308 bolt action with a 9-power scope.
Meanwhile, the Stinger teams took a deadly toll on any low-flying aircraft. The rate of attrition grew so high that the Indonesians’ few remaining aircraft were effectively grounded. The few planes that found shelter from the sappers in the six-pointed star revetments on the south side of the Darwin airfield were eventually picked off by the Stinger teams whenever they would take off or approach for landings. Only ship-based helicopters were safe, and then only if they stayed well offshore. The combined efforts of the Stay Behinds and the Stinger teams turned the campaign in northern Australia into a ground war for both sides.
38
IBOMB
“Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.”
—Federico García Lorca
Near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia—February, the Third Year
Colonel Reynolds arrived at Site G just as stocking the three FLBs was nearly finished. He arrived in his personally owned Audi Q5 luxury sedan that had been turned into an ersatz staff car using some flat tan paint with a few irregular wisps of flat olive drab.
Over the course of two days, Reynolds inspected each of the three sites. He thought their site selection and layouts were quite clever and made very few suggestions for improvements. He did recommend erecting a few additional camouflage nets and constructing overhead cover for some of the recently dug perimeter foxholes.
He also wanted to address as many of the Stay Behinds as possible. He repeated essentially the same briefing three times for groups of between six and forty men. He was quite upbeat. He wanted to encourage active resistance and to reassure the Stay Behinds that they’d be given the logistics support they’d need.
One key portion of his briefing was a rundown of instructions from the top command. “We can be as aggressive as we’d like. The PM has said that ‘the gloves are off.’ The rules of engagement are loose. You can fire on any invading soldier at any time. You can destroy any materiel that they might find particularly useful, but please use discretion in destroying telephone or pipeline infrastructure. You may use flame weapons. You may use dynamite, plastique, and even fuel-air explosives. Your only limitations are: No use of chemical weapons—other than irritants—no use of biological weapons, no radioactive dirty bombs, no poisons, and no use of contact-initiated mines or any explosives with a time delay greater than thirty minutes. This is all designed to minimize any collateral damage and to assure the safety of the citizenry when everyone returns. You can do whatever you’d like in the way of command-detonated explosives, but you cannot use traditional booby traps that could go off days or weeks later. So get cracking and make the Indos pay dearly for trying to take Australian territory.”
Palmerston City, Northern Territory, Australia—February, t
he Third Year
Samantha Kyle had become the top-grossing independent systems installer in the Northern Territory, and she excelled in both sales and installation. Samantha was an attractive and slim redhead of average height who walked with a cane. She never had to play the sympathy card to book orders, but she often suspected that customers opted for a lot of add-ons to their systems after noticing her prosthetic legs.
Her disability was self-evident and most new customers, upon seeing her uneven gait, would ask about it. They each got the same thirty-second summary: “I was a RAAF communications specialist with the 114 MCRU—that’s a Mobile Control and Reporting Unit, stationed at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan. On one of my few convoy trips outside the wire, the five-ton lorry I was riding in got blown up by an IED—a command-detonated mine. I lost both of my legs, below the knee. It doesn’t affect my ability to do installations. I just have to be extra careful when I’m up a ladder. No worries.”
Samantha was an independent sales rep for OzCyberHomeAndOffice, a systems integration company that sold hard wire and wireless automation systems from major makers like INTEON, UPB, X10, Z-Wave, and ZigBee. These systems allowed home owners to control everything from lights and burglar alarms to lawn sprinklers remotely—either from a laptop or from a smartphone. Home automation was gaining popularity in Australia. As system prices fell, Samantha’s customer base widened. It was no longer just rich doctors and lawyers who had their homes wired.
Samantha was one of just a handful of women who attended the Stay Behind briefings. She met with Caleb Burroughs after the briefing in Palmerston City, just south of Darwin. She was nervous at first and addressed Caleb formally as “sir” and “Warrant Officer Burroughs,” but Caleb’s informality and his genuine Top Ender manner quickly put her more at ease. Samantha told Burroughs that she was familiar with Robertson Barracks. She explained that as a disabled veteran with a Gold Repatriation Health Card, she visited there regularly. She made Caleb blink when she said, “Look, I know Robertson quite well. We need to be ready to blow part of it up if the enemy gets too possessive, with appropriate size devices, as needed. This isn’t a job for time fuses. We need to be able to do it by command detonation. I have the technology to make that work.”
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