After the Blast

by Garth Callender

  These blokes had seen a large vehicle-borne IED detonate out the front of the Flats. They had seen the blood smear on the footpath from a young boy who helped his family run the small roadside stall there: it had been obliterated when the IED detonated. From the Flats they had witnessed with their own eyes his father’s grief.

  They had been involved in a horrific high-speed accident where an ASLAV had flipped end over end after hitting a mound of dirt on the side of the road at speed. A colleague of mine, my old squadron sergeant major back in the cavalry regiment, had been in the back of the vehicle. When the American soldiers came to assist, they opened the back and assumed he was dead, as the large steel fridge had broken free and scalped him as the vehicle flipped. It was only later, when they heard him moaning, that they realised he was still alive. He made a full recovery.

  They had been through so many rocket attacks and been roused from their sleep by so many random explosions that they were on edge. I couldn’t blame them for driving the way they did. I definitely couldn’t get them to slow down, or tone down their aggressive driving, until all their commanders had rotated out. So it was later, when the handover was complete, that I spoke to my blokes and told them that, yes, we were driving too fast, and yes, we were too aggressive. I felt that we were missing the point of what was trying to be achieved in Iraq and that the way we were acting was playing its own small part in adding to the instability of the country. I also felt that we were putting ourselves at far greater risk of injury from high-speed vehicle accidents than from anything the insurgents could do to us.

  Later events may have proved this wrong, but I stand by what I said. I even reprimanded a soldier for hitting a civilian vehicle for no obvious good reason and moved him so that he no longer drove an armoured vehicle but was a shooter in the rear hatch. This bloke had been there for two months longer than me and he was pissed off with my decision – but I was comfortable it was right, and my troop sergeant did a good job backing me up.

  What so much of this came down to was that there were many people in this country who wanted to kill us – and a far greater number didn’t give two shits whether we lived or died. This is something that as Australians we had never been exposed to. In Australia, homicidal people are few and far between, and most are identified and locked away. Not in Baghdad. They lived in huge numbers among the population, actively looking for our vulnerabilities, or rather, for any way at all to attack Coalition forces. If they had their chance, they would drag our bodies through the streets and relish their victory over their country’s invaders.

  I don’t think that I truly understood this in 2004. I also believe that those soldiers who did grasp this were the ones who didn’t fare so well when they returned to Australia.

  Our route took us through Baghdad, out into the rural area to the north of the city and west of the Tigris. It seemed the only place you would see women in niqabs was in the rural areas; in Baghdad the women were a lot less traditional in their dress. Many wore jeans and scarves that covered their hair, but not their faces. Most younger women were well groomed and used make-up. So I was surprised to see small, dark niqab-clad figures working with the men in the fields in the hot sun: I had assumed that women working the land in scorching heat would be more likely to have a relaxed dress code than women who lived in the city, but this was not the case.

  When we turned off the highway, we were met with a series of signs in both English and Arabic. These were the same signs that you saw all over the country as you approached US military checkpoints.

  STOP

  Show ID

  You are approaching a Military Checkpoint.

  And then we saw:

  Welcome to LSA Anaconda

  Queues of Iraqis in cars were waiting to have their IDs checked so they could enter the base. Thousands of locals came to provide services to the soldiers. They would run small shops, sell trinkets or give haircuts. They would work as cleaners, collect garbage, act as interpreters, or acquire and sell local produce, including vegetables, to bolster the freeze-dried, bulk-packed rations that had come from the US or been flown in from elsewhere in the Middle East. The locals employed on the base all made good money, significantly more than they could make in the local markets. That was why they risked sitting in the queues out the front of the base.

  A checkpoint onto a base was one of the most dangerous places you could ever be. There was a chance you would be shot by a nervous soldier who mistook you reaching for your ID as an attempt to trigger a suicide switch that would blow you both to Allah. Or you might become collateral damage as a real suicide bomber detonated his deadly payload when the guards approached his vehicle.

  But we drove past the queue without incident, down the lane marked ‘Military Vehicles Only’. A quick flash of an ID and we were through the gate and onto the base.

  The size of Balad was astounding, especially as it had only been built in the last twelve months. Now it was home to over 35,000 US soldiers. We heard reports from the Americans that the base had the same social issues you get in any large population centre, particularly one where the vast majority of the population is aged between twenty and thirty-five. There was rape, drug use, murder and gang violence. There were areas where you were advised not to go after dark, bars (with alcohol-free beer) and salsa-dancing nights. And there was also the occasional rocket strike. The farmland that ringed the base made it easy for insurgents to fire rockets and escape before they could be found by an attack helicopter, which would be up and scouring the area within a couple of minutes of each attack.

  Because the population of soldiers was so densely packed in such a small area, and because the insurgents would aim for the dining halls at mealtimes, injuries were common. A female soldier had been killed the day before we arrived.

  We drove onto the base and went looking for a refuelling station to top up our vehicles. When we rounded the last of a vast row of green and tan air-conditioned tents, the view was awe-inspiring. Helicopters lined the airfield from one end to the other, hundreds of them sitting in the dusty shimmering heat: Black Hawks, SuperCobras, Apaches and Chinooks. Then behind them were rows of transport planes, the workhorses that flew in and out of the country, bringing supplies from Kuwait, Diego Garcia and mainland USA, and taking casualties out to Germany and body bags back home to the US. The airfield was constantly rumbling with something coming or leaving.

  After refuelling we found the garrison commander’s office, called the ‘sheriff’s office’, and were allocated our tents. Each one slept about twenty people in bunk beds. We cleaned our guns and checked over the vehicles. We tried to raise headquarters using the satellite radio, but quickly realised that no-one really knew how to use the unit, nor its strange directional antenna that looked like a small upside-down Hills Hoist clothes line. So we just called them on the satellite phone. We found the ‘dining facility’ and had some dinner. Walking back to the vehicles, the sergeant who was with us would greet passing US soldiers in his broadest Australian drawl: ‘G’day, mate. How’re ya bum grubs?’ They’d reply, ‘Yes sir, good, thank you, sir, have a nice day.’ Who says Australian isn’t a dialect?

  We went to the PX (post exchange, the store on US bases) to get some near-beer (non-alcoholic beer) that we jammed into the air-conditioning vent to keep cold. Then we slowly wound down for the evening.

  The next day, the new vehicles from Australia arrived with the remainder of my troop. The boys were excited to be in Iraq and, it seemed, just as excited that they had been allowed to smoke in the transport aircraft while it was in the air. It sounded as though they had spent most of their time cracking jokes, smoking and winding each other up during the long flight from Darwin to Diego Garcia, smack-bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean, then through to Balad.

  We rolled the new vehicles out through the lifted nose of the plane and drove them to the vehicle park near our tents to prep them for the drive back to Baghdad. Even after all the promises that the vehicles would arrive w
ith ammunition, I wasn’t really surprised that they had arrived with none. I left my troop sergeant to look after our vehicles and went in search of some rounds. After wandering through the maze of demountable office buildings, I came across the quartermaster’s store and a young corporal. It sounded like getting 7.62 mm and .50 calibre rounds for our machine guns wouldn’t be a problem. But I got a quizzical look when I asked about 25-mm ammunition for the chain gun. After explaining that we had the same guns in our vehicles as the 25-mm gun of the US Bradleys, the corporal finally clicked: ‘Oh, you need 25 mike mike.’

  These 25-mm rounds come in several ‘natures’, namely high-explosive and armour-piercing. The high-explosive round has a small charge that detonates on impact. The armour-piercing round has a steel dart that, when fired, is carried out of the barrel in a plastic case called a sabot. As it leaves the end of the barrel, the sabot breaks away and the dart, or slug, punches through pretty much anything in its way. The armour-piercing ammunition used by Australia has a tungsten dart, whereas the US equivalent uses a slightly denser, depleted-uranium dart, referred to as ‘DU’.

  So when this young corporal asked what kind of 25 mike mike rounds I wanted, I thought I would try my luck and replied, ‘DU.’ At which point he realised he didn’t have the authority to issue depleted-uranium rounds, so he went to find his boss to get permission. We had obviously pushed too far, as his boss asked us a hundred questions and we left with nothing, not a single round. It was probably for the better that we didn’t get any DU – there would have been questions … possibly followed by medical testing. There was a lot of controversy around whether the depleted uranium was carcinogenic.

  We ended up splitting the ammunition from the older vehicles and returned to Baghdad with only a half ammunition load for each vehicle – more than enough, even if we got into a shitfight.

  Fortunately we didn’t. I returned to the Flats that night with a full troop and three new vehicles. I had been in Iraq for four days.

  4

  DAY-TO-DAY BAGHDAD

  WE QUICKLY GOT USED TO DRIVING IN BAGHDAD and working hard to present a hard target. We would have the 25-mm cannon traversing, in constant motion, shifting its point of aim to the spot we considered the most dangerous. As we drove, my gunner and I had our heads up out of the turret. We did this for several reasons. First, moving at speed through a built-up area made looking through a vehicle sight, or periscope, useless, as all you saw were blurred images as you sped by. Second, locals reacted to eye contact. The fastest way to determine a driver’s intention as he approached was to point a 25-mm cannon towards him and look him in the eye – it would instantly become clear whether he was a suicide IED driver or merely a commuter attempting to try his luck passing a Coalition convoy. We also used our pistols a lot in traffic, for similar reasons. Crew commanders would pull their pistol and point it at a driver – the look in the driver’s eye would always let you know what they were thinking.

  Pistols were particularly effective in managing traffic. One explanation I heard for this was that the locals (and possible insurgents) understood that if I fired a 25-mm cannon at them, they would likely die and go to Allah, but if I fired a pistol, it was unlikely to kill and would probably cause them a lot of pain. I was also told that a pistol carried a lot of intimidation value because Saddam’s henchmen had used them in acts of extreme violence against the civilian population.

  The way we drove those dusty roads was manic. We thundered down the highways with the turrets spinning from one side to the other, slewing the vehicles from one lane to another as we passed under bridges and overpasses. Insurgents had taken to dropping grenades on convoys as they emerged on the far side of an overpass, but changing lanes underneath meant we left them guessing where we would appear. We would emerge with the turrets pointing backwards to where any attacker would be waiting, the 25-mm ready to blow him to pieces.

  We also had shooters up with light machine guns on their shoulders. We were always ready for something to happen, always presenting a hard target – poised to unleash a maelstrom of supersonic high-explosive rounds and machine-gun bullets. The idea was to make any insurgent think twice about attacking us.

  *

  Since the first IED strikes on US soldiers in mid-2003, the insurgents had been learning from their successes and failures, targeting both Coalition troops and Iraqi security forces. We said, even back then, that there were only clever IED makers left, as the stupid ones had blown themselves up long ago.

  The IEDs were getting more and more sophisticated. Radio-controlled switches, using remote-control garage-door technology or remote-control toy parts, were common. These were used to complete the circuit that would send a current from the battery pack to the detonator, which would explode, igniting the main charge – an explosive reaction that could blast air and fragments at up to 8000 metres per second and instantaneously create overpressure in the confined space of an armoured vehicle, which could break down the cellular structure of tissue in the human lungs and brain. After IED strikes, armoured crewmen were regularly found dead without a scratch on them, their brains and lungs a mash.

  The succession of wars fought in Iraq had left a supply of munitions, referred to as ‘explosive remnants of war’, that could be easily adapted for use as main charges. Artillery rounds, mortar bombs, grenades and rockets were the most common. There were stories of the Americans and Iraqis alike abandoning huge stockpiles of munitions. So the insurgents had an ample supply of explosives.

  And when we found ways to jam the radio-controlled switches, they would just change back to a ‘command wire’ switch. In this case, the bomb was detonated by a triggerman in a concealed location who would physically press a button, or, even more crudely, join two bare wires, thus completing a circuit. The current would run from a battery pack down the wire to the explosives. While this technique had its limitations, with the triggerman having to be within 100 metres of the bomb, it was still a very effective way of targeting conveys.

  There was talk of the insurgents using Russian anti-armour charges, which would explosively fire ball bearings that could penetrate the hull of a vehicle, particularly the light armour of our ASLAVs. The insurgents were constantly looking for new ways to defeat whatever we tried to do to protect ourselves.

  Then there were the suicide bombers. What can you do to protect yourself against someone who has decided to die in order to take you with him? We would get daily threat reports from the intelligence blokes: ‘Look out for a yellow taxi with mixed panels, sagging on its suspension, driven by a male between 20 and 40 years of age, cleanly shaven and sweating’ – which came close to describing a third of the cars on the road. There were heaps of yellow taxis with shitty panel-beating jobs. They all sagged on their suspensions, whether they had bombs in the back or not. As for 20-to 40-year-olds, cleanly shaven and sweating: most men in Baghdad didn’t wear beards and it was fucking hot, so they sweated – probably about as much as if they were about to blow themselves to Allah.

  There was always talk of snipers, and a lot of the boys thought they had been fired on at one time or another, particularly on Route Irish. On one occasion, a patrol commander came back swearing that he had been shot at and showed us the indent in the smoke-grenade discharger on the side of his turret. Something didn’t smell quite right, and this commander had been known to fire off his pistol as he drove down Route Irish. We looked at the angle of the indent. It was all wrong for sniper fire; it was the perfect size of a 9-mm round – the same as our Browning pistols. He must have shot his own smoke-grenade discharger with his pistol. He was about to rotate back to Australia, so we let it slide. But it left a bad taste in our mouths to think that our blokes could be driving around firing off rounds with such careless neglect that they could strike their own vehicle – what else were they inadvertently hitting?

  Then there were the rockets. These were not necessarily a daily event – at least not the ones that landed anywhere near us – but there was
always the threat that a rocket could hit at any moment.

  The Flats had some pretty crude toilets. The urinal on the accommodation level on the eastern side of the building had a sandbagged wall where the window should have been. The sandbags only went up a couple of metres, so there was a large gap between the sandbags and the ceiling. There was a step so you could overlook the four-lane road that ran east. A few restaurants and cafes lined the road out that way. Lots of locals still went to these restaurants, trying to carry on with their lives in defiance of the war.

  The little room had a porcelain urinal bolted to the wall and plumbed in – a touch of luxury. The first time a rocket hit near us, I was using this urinal. The rocket struck in front of a building about 70 metres east of the Flats, one of the restaurants that would have been full of people had it been a few hours later, in the early evening. Because the ‘bathroom’ had a gap between the sandbags and the ceiling, the percussion from the blast thumped through into the room. Dust kicked up everywhere and I was unceremoniously thrown off balance, spraying piss on the wall and a little on my boots.

  *

  Not too long after this, the Chief of the Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, visited, and it made for a surreal day. Beforehand, we had a walk-in, a local who approached the front gate of the Flats to warn us of an attack planned for that night. He told us that about twenty insurgents armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades intended to attack our building at 0100 hours that night. He claimed he had just come from a meeting with the insurgents, who were finalising their plans.

  A few things didn’t add up about this local, but we took the threat very seriously, particularly as the general was visiting. We did our own planning and decided it would be best to move him and the embassy staff into Camp Victory for the night.

  Just as night was falling over the city, I briefed General Cosgrove and his security team on our planed route and ‘actions-on’ in the event of an incident. In the twilight, he nodded along as I briefed; he didn’t ask any questions and seemed comfortable with the plan. He was then directed to one of the personnel carriers, and the embassy staff were loaded into a second. Just on last light, I gave the word over the radio, and the first vehicle of the four-car patrol started to roll. As it snaked out of the checkpoint at the front of the Flats, it hit a spot of sodden soil from the ever-leaking sewage. The engine revved, the wheels spun and it slid back into the mud.