We got our new bandages and confirmed which pocket to put them in so whoever was giving you first aid knew where to look. We were issued with a last round of equipment: new helmets, cold weather gear, including sub-zero puffer jackets (which seemed ridiculous at the time, but we were to be in northern Iraq during winter), a fifth set of fire-retardant gloves.
Finally, the day came when we got on the C-130 Hercules. The flight was painful: we wore all our protective equipment, and the seating in the plane – aluminium poles slung with fabric straps – was cramped and hot. As we approached Baghdad, the pilot started manoeuvring in a way designed either to piss us off or to avoid surface-to-air fire. Maybe both. Shooting at planes was a regular pastime for the insurgents. They’d sit just off the perimeter of the airfield and take pot shots at the landing aircraft. I swore as sharp pains jabbed through my ears from the changes in air pressure as the aircraft banked, turned and dropped sharply into Baghdad International Airport.
*
Baghdad – flat, hot, congested, a city of seven million situated along a series of bends in the Tigris River. In the region known as the ‘cradle of civilisation’, it lies just 80 kilometres north of the ancient biblical city of Babylon. But I don’t recall the Bible mentioning anything about Australians in armoured vehicles.
On arrival we were picked up from the airport by a patrol of blokes who were about to hand over to us at SECDET.
I quickly learnt about one of the habits you had to adopt when moving through Baghdad with your head up in an armoured vehicle. The leaking sewers that kept the median strips green also left large puddles of shit water across the road. The veteran crew I was with knew to duck their heads, but I wanted to take in as much of this new city as possible from my position in the front crew hatch. I watched the vehicle hit a puddle of raw sewage and, without time to react, was covered in a bow wave that went straight in my mouth and left me dry-retching at regular intervals throughout the day.
Streets of Baghdad with overflowing sewage.
The road from the airport forked as it approached the Tigris. Crossing over the river to the east took you towards the Karadah Peninsula and our accommodation, known as ‘the Flats’. Heading north-east led you into the International Zone, or Green Zone as it was sometimes called.
The Flats, a ten-storey building, was an obvious landmark in a city that was relatively low-rise. It was surrounded by dusty weather-beaten hotels and an old hospital. Nearby, on the same long stretch of land, was the University of Baghdad, with a fairly extensive campus that took up several square kilometres.
The Flats was the hub of all our activities – our accommodation, kitchen and dining hall, command post, vehicle parking and servicing area. Most importantly, it was the backbone of the defences, not just for ourselves, but also the Australian embassy, which was next door. For twenty-four hours a day we had infantry manning machine guns at each corner, covering all approaches to our building and the embassy. The snipers sat on the roof, day in, day out, covering our movements and watching for anything out of the ordinary.
My first couple of days at the Flats were a blur of activity. The handover from the outgoing troop leader involved meeting the embassy staff, familiarising myself with the building defence and routine, understanding the condition of the vehicles, and starting to get to know this strange new city we would be working in. Even just finding my way around the Flats at times got me unstuck – there were so many dark corridors that looked the same.
The Flats.
I had a bed allocated in a room with two other officers, but during those first few days I only saw it for the few seconds before my head, which was spinning, hit the pillow.
As in most parts of the city, the sewage system leaked regularly and the electricity was intermittent due to an over-extended power grid. From the sentry position on the fourth floor, you could hear the air conditioners thump on, then off, as you looked out on the green grassy median strips and trees that lined the roads.
The Flats itself had obviously been designed to be one of the more opulent buildings in Baghdad. At times I would imagine how it would have looked had it ever been completed. From the outside, the building would have oozed wealth, with its sandstone façades and high windows that gave it a classical but also unmistakably Middle Eastern look. The large entranceway that opened onto the four-lane road at the front would have had arched doors of highly polished metal and glass. Entering through these doors, you would have found a large, cool, open expanse. I imagined white tiles across the lobby and a glass elevator that rode up the centre of the cylindrical building, all the way to the tenth floor. The rooms, whether hotel rooms or apartments, would be cool and chic, with the well-appointed bathrooms and kitchen overdone and tacky in the style of many of Baghdad’s high-end buildings.
The tenth floor, I envisaged, would have been either a restaurant or an extremely large penthouse for only the wealthiest visitors or tenants. The large archways on two of the four sides would be set with glass to give one of the best views over Baghdad, a city that I came to find strangely beautiful.
However, construction on the Flats had stopped after the basic structure had been completed. A few rooms had been tiled, but on the whole the building was a shell. There were no windows or doors: only what the Australian occupants had put in place by way of plywood sheets that used a unique self-closing mechanism, fashioned using water-bottle weights and a rudimentary pulley system.
When I first arrived, I couldn’t help but think of the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The interior of the building, an open cylindrical area about 7 metres in diameter, made the rest of the dark, gaping doorway and scaffolding seem to loom over my head. The makeshift elevator that groaned up to the tenth floor only added to the feeling that at any minute two opponents would swing into the open expanse and attempt to sever each other’s limbs with chainsaws.
I didn’t know for sure why the Flats had not been completed, but the rumour was that during the building process the owner had become aware that one of Saddam’s sons was interested in acquiring it (by dubious, most likely illegal and possibly violent means). To forestall this, the owner had just stopped building. In the long term he may even have done all right from the venture, as the Australian government was paying exorbitant rent for use of the half-completed structure.
The building was poorly lit, and only the first couple of floors were occupied. Many areas were mazes of dusty concrete walls and dark corners. Despite all this, since the arrival of the first security detachment in early 2003, the Australians had done a good job of making it home. They had sandbagged up the open windows for protection and furnished the rooms they were allocated with pictures of home or pages from men’s magazines. As time passed, heaters were put in for the cold winters, and air conditioners were fitted to make the scorching summers bearable. Army stretchers were replaced with beds, and deals were struck with the US military to supply bulk rations; a kitchen opened on the first floor, ending the need to live on ration packs.
The focal point of the building was the Australian flag that flew in the open expanse that ran up through the centre of the building.
Open shaft at the centre of the Flats.
Around us, Baghdad’s low-rise central business district slowly melted into urban sprawl, then thinned into rural areas on the outskirts. The Tigris was the lifeblood of the city. Tracks of green palms and grass extended on either side of the river, out as far as the water would reach. After this, there was desert: undulating hills of dirt and sand.
The city was scattered with palaces: Saddam’s legacy. These were usually poorly built sandstone façades on steel frames. The façades had limited life spans in the harsh conditions. The war had blown many of the sandstone panels off to reveal the frames underneath, like rips and tears in the leathered skin of a dead animal left to rot in the desert sun. Rockets had left gaping holes in other buildings.
Several of these large palaces were just to the east of the airport, and about 12 kilom
etres from the Flats. This whole area had been taken over by the Coalition forces and turned into a set of mini-cities: Camp Victory, Camp Stryker, Camp Liberty and Camp Slayer. Each was a jumble of palaces, demountable buildings and tents.
Al-Faw Palace, the largest one of all, situated in Camp Victory, was the headquarters of the occupying forces. Next door, about 300 metres away, was the Australian headquarters, occupying a smaller building, all tacky marble and gold fittings. These palaces had been built on the banks of an artificial lake that Hussein had had excavated and filled with fish. Small hills in nearby Camp Slayer were formed from the spoils of the excavation. The hills made good aiming marks for insurgents firing rockets into the base.
The interior of the palace used by the Australians had been partitioned into office areas, using plywood and folding tables. All Australian operations in the Middle East were run out of here, under the command of a brigadier, or equivalent from the navy or air force. I would come here often in the months ahead.
Large, solid, wooden double doors opened from the Australian headquarters onto a roadway that ran around the lake and joined the maze of roads running through Camp Victory, linking it to the other camps. The way to Camp Slayer was via a tunnel that our armoured vehicles only just fit through. With the antenna folded down, you could drive through it and run your hand along the ceiling.
Near the Slayer tunnel was the main entrance to the whole base complex, a series of chicanes to slow traffic, concrete barriers, machine-gun towers and boom gates that led onto Route Irish. This was, at the time, arguably the most dangerous road in the world, due to the sporadic sniper fire and constant threat of improvised explosive device (IED) or roadside bomb attacks. It was the main route for Coalition forces travelling to and from the airport. For anyone keen to try their hand at attacking a Coalition convoy, it must have been like shooting fish in a barrel.
3
FIRST TASK
OUR VEHICLE, THE AUSTRALIAN LIGHT Armoured Vehicle, or ASLAV, was a workhorse, and a real source of pride for the cavalry soldiers. The first ASLAVs were bought in the early 1990s as medium-range reconnaissance vehicles. Some of them carried the formidable 25-mm chain gun in a two-man turret, and there was also a personnel-carrying variant with room in the back for nine at a squeeze.
The ASLAV was the obvious choice for Baghdad. It had eight wheels, all with run-flat tyres – so it was fast. It could sit on 110 kilometres per hour without a problem and keep up with traffic on the highways. The chain gun could elevate to fire at insurgents shooting from high-rises, and the two-man turret could quickly traverse 360° to cover the rear of the vehicle just as well as the front.
The personnel-carrying variant was used for transporting lower-ranking embassy staff or military people, while the ambassador preferred to travel in his armoured BMW. When escorting the ambassador, we usually positioned an ASLAV with a .50 calibre forward. The .50 calibre was a great gun, but quite unwieldy and inaccurate. An ASLAV with the 25-mm chain gun would be at the rear. The ambassador’s car would be wedged between the two and driven by the military police close personal protection team.
A few months before my arrival in Iraq, the BMW had been crunched by the rear ASLAV in heavy traffic. The ambassador, who had been in the job since the invasion in 2003 and who was not shy about expressing his views, was not happy about this, and the boys heard all about it.
*
The model governing our introduction to Iraq, in fact the whole tour, involved staggering duties as much as possible. New blokes would always be paired with teams who had been there for a while. Individuals would be scattered among experienced crews, or else a new vehicle crew would form part of a patrol with experienced teams. Even SECDET rotations were staggered, with troops rotating in and out every two months. Generally we kept with the teams that we had trained with back in Australia, but some individuals and crews would come earlier or leave later.
This meant that new teams weren’t all on their own and in danger of getting lost – Baghdad in 2004 was not a city you wanted to get lost in. Driving the streets in 13-tonne armoured vehicles, we stood out as obvious targets for insurgents. We made a lot of noise: the exhaust fans of the supercharged Detroit diesel engines shrieked as we accelerated, and the Jacobs (engine compression) brake howled as we braked hard into corners. We sat above the traffic, many of us with our upper bodies exposed, protected only by our gloves, goggles and body armour.
My first proper task was to drive to Balad, about an hour north of Baghdad, to meet the remaining half of my troop. They were flying into Balad direct from Australia with three new vehicles to replace ones that had been in Iraq for a year already and were now in need of a complete overhaul.
Balad, named Logistics Support Area Anaconda by the US military, was the central logistics hub for the Americans. Everything came and went into the country through it, a city built from tents and demountables around an old Iraqi airfield.
One of the sergeants who had been in the country for four months was put in charge of the patrol to Balad. While I was of a higher rank, he had the experience, and I was happy for him to command the patrol so that I could get my head around this new environment.
In 2004 Baghdad was functioning like any other city. There were traffic jams, pedestrians, red lights, sidewalk restaurants, street vendors, markets and streets of shopfronts. It was a densely populated city, and most of its inhabitants were just trying to get on with life. At the same time, they had to deal with the complexities of life in a war zone. Paul Bremer’s ‘de-Ba’athification’ of the ruling class – the removal of all of Saddam’s former Ba’ath Party influences from the new government, which resulted in the dismissal of an estimated 50,000 former regime-affiliated government employees, including military and police – left massive gaps in the country’s ability to look after its people. The army and police were left with poor leadership, and many once-proud officers had turned to the insurgency and were now fighting to destabilise the country and thus prove that they were needed and the Americans were not.
Intelligence reports said Baghdad had up to 40,000 active insurgents. While the Kurds and their armed fighters, the Peshmerga, generally looked after their own, the Sunnis and Shias fought because they saw they had so much to lose; they vied for power and influence in the vacuum left by Saddam’s demise. They fought not only against the American-led forces, but also with each other. Kidnappings had become common, followed by reports of headless corpses floating in the Tigris. Bombs were going off in predominantly Shia neighbourhoods, in marketplaces, mosques, outdoor restaurants and cafes. Sunnis would claim responsibility and Shias would retaliate. At any given time, you could stand on the roof of the Flats and watch smoke rise from far-off parts of the city. An explosion might be heard from a leafy neighbourhood not far from the banks of the Tigris; a busy intersection would erupt as a Sunni suicide bomber targeted a busload of Shia schoolchildren or a military patrol; rockets would crack and fizz from Sadr City and thump into the International Zone. There was always something, and anytime you listened it seemed you could pick up the sound of a siren echoing somewhere in the city.
This was the city we snaked our patrol through, along the congested streets to link up with Highway 1, which ran the length of the country from north to south. This road took us to Balad.
The thinking was that you had to make yourself a hard target: make any insurgent think twice about attacking. We drove with safety catches off – the 25-mm chain gun ready to fire, the machine guns cocked and ready to go in the event that we identified a suicide bomber trying to swerve into one of our vehicles.
We careered through traffic, driving at more than 100 kilometres an hour through the city streets, trying to minimise the time any insurgent might have to shoot at us or detonate a bomb as we drove past. We ran red lights – straight through. We nudged cars out of the way, even on the highway when they were doing 100 kilometres an hour themselves. If they looked like they might be trying to slow us, we would give them a
tap. Sometimes they would be knocked onto the other side of the road, into oncoming traffic, sometimes they would brake hard and spin to face back the way they had come, and sometimes they would swerve off the road and down an embankment in a cloud of dust. We didn’t stop – we couldn’t. This was how we operated in Baghdad, where patrols and convoys like ours were getting blown up every day.
Did we make the city safer? Did we ever prevent a suicide IED attack? Probably not, but we were there to do a specific job, which was to protect the embassy staff and allow them to do their diplomatic work. Getting ourselves blown up, or shot, or caught in a complex ambush with insurgents peppering our vehicle with machine-gun fire while IEDs exploded under us wouldn’t achieve that. We weren’t there to make Iraq safer or to defeat the insurgency.
Was I comfortable with the aggressive way we drove? To be honest, I wasn’t. I was really taken aback by those first patrols in Baghdad and Balad. But I was working alongside blokes who had been there for four months, which may not seem like much, but they had been through a lot in that time. Many had witnessed a large truck being driven through the gates of the base up north and detonated in front of the dining hall. The place had been almost levelled by the explosion, and US and Iraqi soldiers, plus contracted workers from the Philippines and Bangladesh, had been killed. It had occurred only forty-five minutes after the Australian commander had been eating in that same mess hall. And that was just one incident.
After the Blast Page 2