After the Blast

by Garth Callender

  I don’t recall there ever being any real resolution to this, and at times it caused some heated debate. I don’t believe the major commanding the combat team ever weighed into the debate either.

  The infantry soldiers, in their role providing local area security, had a long, hard four-month tour in Baghdad. While we spent a lot of our time on the road, seeing the city and beyond, they spent their time rotating between static security positions around the Flats, the embassy and the hotel. This was only occasionally broken by foot patrols around the neighbourhood. Otherwise they sat behind machine guns in windows on the third or fourth floor of the Flats, or at the front gate of the embassy, or at the front security desk of the hotel. They were long, slow days.

  The monotony and boredom got the better of at least one young soldier. While on late-night security at the hotel, he chose to relax a bit. His orders were for him to remain at the desk, alert, with his webbing and body armour on, while the embassy staff slept in the hotel rooms above. He was the last line of defence after the Iraqi private security team that ran the checkpoint leading to the hotel, who were generally considered poorly disciplined and untrustworthy. Rather than adhere to his orders, this young soldier was found fast asleep at the desk, with headphones in his ears and his rifle and ammunition under the desk in front of him.

  Witnessing how this case was dealt with, I questioned, for the first time, how effective military discipline was, and how ingrained and contrary to good command the military legal system had become. Rightfully, this soldier was landed with a serious charge that saw him returned to Australia to spend fourteen days at the defence correctional facility at Holsworthy – military jail. But after that, rather than being sent back to his unit in disgrace, inexplicably he was sent back to us in Baghdad. This soldier, who had been negligent in his task of providing security for the embassy staff while they slept at night, was returned to continue the job. The legal officers had insisted that not returning him to Iraq could be construed as a second punishment, a form of double jeopardy, because he would miss out on the deployment allowances. For me, it was obvious, even common sense – if you take off your webbing, put your rifle at your feet and your headphones in your ears, then allow yourself to fall asleep while providing security to the embassy staff, clearly you do not have the required training nor frame of mind for the job and you should be returned to Australia for retraining.

  Sadly, this was not the only time I questioned legal interventions in military decision-making, nor the only time that I would see soldiers fail to take their responsibility seriously. The extravagant deployment allowances for operational deployments seemed to lead some to see themselves as more like mercenaries than soldiers.

  6

  TASK TO AL KASIK

  AL KASIK IS A SMALL TOWN IN THE NORTH of Iraq, situated about halfway between Mosul and Tel Afar, not too far from the Syrian border. The town, which seems to materialise out of a patch of desert as you approach, is on low ground, but the whole area has the high craggy mountain range of Iraqi Kurdistan as its northern backdrop.

  Al Kasik, originally an Iraqi army base, had several monolithic structures, in stark contrast to the flat treeless environment. These buildings were home to an Iraqi army brigade, and through 2004 and 2005 the Australian army had a team working to mentor and train the Iraqi soldiers. While they had some initial successes, later, after their task changed in 2005 and they were withdrawn from Al Kasik, the Iraqi brigade regimental sergeant major (RSM) was kidnapped and publicly executed. This event triggered the informal disbanding of the brigade, for the simple reason that the soldiers were too scared to turn up to work.

  While the execution of the RSM was the final straw for the Al Kasik brigade, it had been plagued from the start by seemingly minor issues that then snowballed. For example, the civilian kitchen staff served a variety of poisonous dishes that Iraqi bellies could hold down, but Australian bellies could not. These staff were paid more than the local soldiers who served on the base. So while the kitchen staff ensured massive weight loss in the Australians, they also collected a large pay packet. This caused extreme ill feeling among the Iraqi soldiers towards the kitchen staff.

  Perhaps the pay discrepancy was warranted. Before my arrival in Iraq, a large truck bomb had detonated outside the dining facility one lunchtime. Somehow, this explosives-laden truck passed through several checkpoints, drove to the top of a dirt mound next to the facility and detonated its cargo. The blast tore through the corrugated iron building and many of its occupants during the crowded lunch. The number of fatalities and casualties was extreme, and among the victims were many kitchen staff. When I arrived in Al Kasik, many of the Australians were still a bit shaky from the experience.

  *

  The Phase 3 ASLAV happened to come into service while I was in Iraq. The job of rotating out the old Phase 2 vehicles fell on my shoulders. There were about twelve ASLAVs all up in Iraq: seven in Bagdad and five in Al Kasik. What this meant was that I would have to drive five new Phase 3 vehicles half the length of

  Iraq, so they could be swapped at Al Kasik, and then drive the Phase 2 vehicles back. If I had been a bit older and a bit wiser, I probably would have told someone to fuck off. But at the time I saw it as an opportunity for adventure – with the bonus of being able to meet up with a good friend who was a member of the training team.

  He had been married less than a year before and I had been best man at his wedding. As was common, he had had to leave his bride soon after they were married: within a couple of weeks he left to attend a three-month language training course in Victoria, then, after a short return home, he was deployed for six months to Iraq. We had seen little of each other since training together at Duntroon, so we were keen for a coffee and a chat and any excuse to smoke the cheap Iraqi cigarettes.

  My five-vehicle patrol, about twenty of us all up, left the Flats at first light, making our way through the city to join Highway 1 and head north. Our maps were bad and our communications even worse. I had a satellite phone to communicate with headquarters – if the batteries held out. I had been given a bunch of frequencies on which to contact the Coalition’s quick reaction force in the areas we were going through. I was lucky we had a crew commander who had driven the route before, because the directions were poor and I really didn’t know what to expect.

  We stopped briefly at Balad, near the old armoured-vehicle graveyard, and I asked some US soldiers what frequency they had for the quick reaction force. It was different to the frequencies I had been given, which confirmed my suspicions that if we got in trouble we were going to have a tough time calling for help.

  We drove up through Samarra and Tikrit, stopping at small US forward operating bases to get fuel and check on the condition of the road north. Some of these little bases were getting smashed with regular indirect fire, and the routes in and out had seen regular IED strikes.

  Highway 1 was mostly one lane in each direction and the traffic flow was constant. Every so often we would pass burnt-out trucks on the side of the road. As we passed one truck, my gunner remarked, ‘Look, that bloke’s asleep in front of his truck.’ I had already noticed the man as we approached, and commented back, ‘He’s not sleeping, mate …’ It wasn’t clear how or why he had been killed, but from his blood-soaked face, his lifeless body as vehicles sped by within metres of his head, and the dark patch of blood that stained the asphalt around his body, it was clear he had met a violent end. The road – in fact the whole country – was pretty lawless.

  As we travelled further north, the population thinned out and the boys wanted to test-fire their guns. I kept my eyes out for a deserted stretch of ground on which to loosen a few rounds off, but it seemed that every crest revealed open desert with a handful of mud huts with satellite dishes on their roofs. I didn’t want to take any chances, nor did I think it was fair to terrify these poor villagers by firing a burst near their homes. So we continued on, getting to Al Kasik by late afternoon.

  We were exhausted
when we arrived, but we did some work to get the old vehicles ready for the return trip the next day. I met with my friend, drank some coffee, smoked a few cigarettes and stayed up too late.

  My friend explained to me that they had been issued with new vehicles just before the attack. These were parked near the dining facility, about to be handed over to the team, when they were torn to pieces by the blast. Instead, the training team was given little Eastern European four-wheel drives that were ‘agricultural’, to say the least. My friend had decided to personalise his by unbolting the roof and doors.

  I always felt uneasy in the big dining facilities. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of soldiers all jammed in the one place. Easy targets. There were constant stories of suicide bombers targeting these buildings, and rockets would often be fired by insurgents at about lunchtime in the hope of a lucky strike. Hearing about the recent attack at Al Kasik confirmed my fear of eating in such places, and throughout the tour I never unloaded my pistol before going to meals.

  I woke the next morning feeling tired and unenthusiastic about the long day ahead. One of the vehicles being replaced was a personnel carrier with the old swivel-mounted .50 calibre machine gun, which I stupidly said that I would crew on the trip home. I tried to do the right thing as the boss and take the worst car, but this was a mistake. If we got into trouble, I would have my hands full just trying to control the heavy gun in its old-style mount, let alone commanding the patrol.

  Luckily, the return trip was uneventful – relatively speaking. There was some crazy high-speed driving, and the Iraqis showed me just what poor drivers they were by doing things that nearly had me running them off the road or shooting them in fear they were suicide vehicles. A prime example was when a fuel truck pulled out in front of my lead vehicle. I assessed the situation and thought, ‘This could be an ambush – a big truck cutting us off. All they need is a few RPG teams on the side of the road and we’re in trouble.’ I had the safety off the .50 calibre and was close to letting a few rounds go when I thought, ‘Fuel truck … armour-piercing incendiary rounds … this will not end well.’ So I rode it out without firing, and it turned out to be an ordinary truck driver who did not know how close he was to having his vehicle turned into a fireball.

  We all got back exhausted and keen not to do that trip again.

  *

  By now I had been in Iraq for three weeks, and I was becoming more comfortable with my role. I didn’t have much opportunity to consider the bigger picture of what we were doing there, nor how the insurgency was affecting everyday Iraqis, nor where Saddam Hussein might be hiding. I didn’t have time to consider what the embassy was actually achieving in the country, but I did think that their morning bacon-and-egg barbecue on the front lawn of the embassy in the middle of Ramadan probably wasn’t endearing us to many of the Muslims in the neighbourhood.

  In just over a month we planned to be back in Al Kasik for the second half of our tour, but as with so many plans made in wartime, this one didn’t turn out as intended.

  7

  THE ATTACK

  I WAS THE PATROL COMMANDER FOR THE SECOND task of the day on 25 October 2004; the first had been to pick up the embassy staff from the hotel where they were staying. The weather had started to cool a little, and as we pulled onto the main street the warm orange sunlight hit my face. As we drove out of the Flats, I remember thinking to myself what a beautiful morning it was.

  The traffic was flowing steadily at 8 a.m., like in most major cities of the world. My two-vehicle convoy roared down the main street that runs east to west and divides the Karadah Peninsula. The task that morning was very much routine: a drop-off in the International Zone, a pick-up at Camp Victory and back to the Flats. While we regularly travelled with no-one in the back of our vehicles, on this day the front vehicle in the patrol had an extra vehicle crew: three men (crew commander, gunner and driver), one of whom happened to be my troop sergeant. We were also carrying an IT technician from the Signals Corps, which were affectionately referred to as ‘geeks’. After I dropped off the geek in the International Zone, I would head to the Australian headquarters at Camp Victory to drop off the extra crew.

  It was the sort of routine job done by my three patrols up to twenty or thirty times a day. When I look back on it now, I have trouble believing how naive we were to be running what is best described as an armoured taxi service around Baghdad.

  My patrol hit the main two-lane roundabout midway down the peninsula with turrets spinning and horns blaring. Roundabouts created utter chaos in this city. There seemed to be no rules except that the biggest vehicle had right of way. Our vehicles were inevitably the biggest and we had a general rule that we stopped for no-one.

  We came out of the roundabout and accelerated hard, down a wide, tree-lined street with cars parked along both sides. As we passed one of them, the bomb inside it was triggered.

  Of the explosion I remember nothing. Our vehicle careered into a tree, and uprooted it. I must have been unconscious for only a few seconds and came to with the thought that I had been shot in the head. On the ASLAV Phase 3, the hatches folded back to horizontal, unlike the older vehicles with hatches that locked vertically. This meant you could turn and look behind you, but were without the protection provided when the hatch was sitting up straight behind your head. My first troop sergeant, who had done a tour of Baghdad some four months earlier, had told me he saw no good reason for folding it flat, as it took away the extra protection and you could be shot in the head from behind. But I had chosen to fold it flat. Therefore, when I came to, I instantly assumed that he had been right and that I had been shot in the head from behind. It was a relief to find this wasn’t the case, but I still couldn’t breathe or see.

  I had never been knocked out cold before. I had no understanding that after such a blow to the head you just drop. When I looked through the blood into the bilge below the turret cage of the vehicle, I realised that I had collapsed, and the pain in my legs was from having them twisted underneath me in a tangled mess on the floor of the turret. I quickly clambered up onto the ammunition bin in the centre of the turret and, once seated, tried to think straight about what to do.

  Although I was no good to anyone, I started shouting at my gunner to get the radios working. Unbeknown to us, the blast had tripped the circuit-breakers in the vehicle, so that we had no radio, no power, nothing. I later discovered that both my gunner and driver were doing a brilliant job of fending off the crowd of locals who had gathered around our stranded vehicle. I was blinded and not helping anyone by yelling about the radios and that the two vehicles at the Flats should come and support us. My crew wisely ignored me.

  My driver and gunner were out on their own, with their troop leader wounded on the streets of Baghdad and a growing crowd. After incidents like this, crowds could turn violent very quickly. The number of wounded from this blast was never confirmed, but many locals suffered gruesome injuries. While the locals understood that we were not directly responsible for the bomb going off, their thinking was that if we had not been there to be targeted, the incident would not have happened. It was with such thoughts that a large, volatile crowd gathered, many members of which had just seen family members, friends or neighbours killed or hideously wounded.

  *

  Later, back in Australia when I had recovered, the men described to me what they saw that day. The two local children who would run out to the footpath to wave each time our vehicles passed disintegrated when the bomb detonated. One second they were running, smiling and waving enthusiastically at us as we passed. Then, in a blink of an eye, their little bodies were torn apart and their flesh and body parts showered the roadway.

  A man staggered and dropped, one arm severed at the elbow, the skin and muscle from his face hanging from his chin. The red-hot, razor-sharp fragmentation from the bomb had ripped through him and he died there on the footpath.

  Seemingly instantaneously, the crowd surged around the bomb site, angry, crying, shouting. A news cr
ew jostled to get footage.

  *

  I have since seen video from the Australian snipers on the rooftop of the Flats as they tried to raise my callsign on the radio from within a thick wall of dust that surrounded the site. The other vehicle in my patrol had lost all radios when the explosion occurred; its vehicle circuit-breaker had tripped too. The drill was to travel to the nearest Coalition checkpoint and try to fix the problem. Within a couple of minutes they had reset their circuit-breaker and returned to where my vehicle had come to rest.

  I don’t recall too much of the next minutes. I forced open my eyes only a few times. Each time, I was greeted by the same sight: walls of dust, angry locals, a handful of Australian soldiers attempting to keep the crowd at bay, shouting, chaos.

  An Al Jazeera news crew was on the scene within a minute or two of the blast. They were lucky to avoid being shot by one of my corporals. It may have been chance, they may have just been in the area, but the boys’ tempers were boiling and when they saw a news crew arrive within moments of the blast, they assumed insider knowledge.

  The quick reaction force was sent from the Flats, less than a kilometre away, and arrived with two additional vehicles and the medic. It was only a couple more minutes before a US Bradley patrol also arrived to add to our cordon and help secure the area. The boys helped me from my vehicle and into one of the other ASLAVs. While my head and neck were a mess from fragmentation and burns, my body was alright apart from sprained ankles and raw knees. During the transfer, one of my lance corporals was guiding me, but he had to stop to speak briefly to one of the US soldiers, so he directed me to wait beside the vehicle. Thinking I knew better and would make my own way into the back of the vehicle, I kept walking, staggering forward, thinking I knew the way even though I could not see. He swore and grabbed me, stopping me from walking straight into the crowd.