After the Blast

by Garth Callender

  Once I was in the back of the vehicle, the medic gave me a shot of morphine and my gunner stuck his head in to check on me. I remember thinking that the buildings to our east had been named in several intelligence reports as possible insurgent hideouts and I told him to watch for snipers from those buildings. Stupid. The dust was so thick that snipers wouldn’t have had a chance of seeing anything. I was still trying to be a commander, not realising I had lost the ability to command shit.

  They had me to the Coalition Support Hospital (CSH – referred to as the ‘cash’) within twelve minutes. On the way there I held a blood-soaked dressing to my face and tried to make small talk with the medic. Stupid again. By that time I could barely string words together, from a combination of shock and morphine.

  I don’t remember arriving at the hospital, but apparently when the medical staff asked how I was doing, I replied, ‘Peachy.’

  It was lucky the day did not end differently. We were there to protect the embassy staff. My patrol was the second of the day. The first had been tasked with picking up consular officials and taking them to the embassy. Their patrol had passed the IED strike site about five minutes before mine did. Would it have been mission failure if the IED had gone off next to the vehicle with the ambassador in it? Yes, I think so. Was the IED targeting the Australian embassy staff? Maybe, but in that case they had done a shit job. The ambassador travelled in an armoured BMW back then – he was an easy target.

  8

  BLACK HAWK TO BALAD

  IN THE CSH IN BAGHDAD, THEY SLICED OPEN my neck to get to the internal bleeding that had given me a grapefruit-sized lump in my neck by the time I got to hospital. They also cleaned out the big chunks of fragmentation and asphalt that had penetrated through my forehead and into my sinus cavity.

  I don’t remember much of the forty-eight hours in the CSH. I remember some high-ranking US officers visiting and giving me two unit coins, something US soldiers prize – little tokens with unit insignias on them. After a sleep, I woke to find only one of them remaining.

  I caught sight of myself in the mirror a few times and was horrified. My head had swelled so much that I looked like a bear. My eyes had closed over from the swelling and I had to force them open with my fingers and clean out the accumulation of gunk before I could see anything.

  I remember lying there crying at some stage: I don’t know when or why. Maybe it was shock. Maybe my painkillers were wearing off. I can’t remember.

  One of the infantry corporals dropped by to give me a mobile phone. Although I recalled the dialling codes for Australia, I couldn’t remember anyone’s phone number except that of my best friend in Sydney, whom I had spoken to only a few days earlier.

  I finally got through to him, and when he spoke I realised I had no idea what I should tell him, and I felt sick in my gut. All I remember getting out was, ‘Some cunt tried to blow me up.’ We spoke, but not for long. I don’t remember what we said to each other. Bloody painkillers.

  The doctors decided that I needed to be evacuated out of Iraq. I was flown by helicopter up to Balad, the first stop before flying on to Germany and the massive US medical facility that received all casualties from the Middle East.

  The night-time flight out of Baghdad in a Black Hawk was truly one of the more unsettling experiences of my life. I had spent the last two months in body armour and with a pistol strapped to my leg, always ready to defend myself or others. Now they fastened me naked to a stretcher, covered only in a blanket. I had no pistol and I was drugged up to the eyeballs, so if something happened I wouldn’t be able to do a thing. I remember taking off from the CSH helipad thinking, ‘This is fucked … please don’t go down.’

  At Balad, I was seen by a doctor at the triage tent just off the side of the runway. I was deemed able to travel and they had me on a C-17 to Landstuhl military hospital in Germany that night. The plane was full of casualties from all over Iraq. We lay in rows of rattling stretchers, with medics constantly moving up and down the aisles checking our stats. They kept pumping us full of painkillers.

  That was how I left Iraq the first time.

  *

  Crystal had planned to travel to Spain with a friend in late October. The day before she was to fly out, she was walking in Hyde Park, London, when someone from the army called to inform her that several Australian soldiers had been wounded in Iraq. They indicated that families of the injured would be informed within the next hour. An hour passed, and no-one called, so Crystal naturally assumed I was OK. She was further reassured that it wasn’t me after checking the Australian Defence website, which had released a media statement saying that the families of the injured had been notified. So she had assumed that I would call her soon. She was anxious to find out more, as she knew everyone in the troop, and was worried about the families back home.

  This was the first of several mistakes that occurred because I was the first Australian casualty in Iraq whose wounds were serious enough to warrant evacuation through Germany. My case tested out many of the processes Defence had put in place for such an event, and in several cases proved them to be inadequate. But the first problem was, in part, my own doing.

  At the time, the military had a policy that next of kin would only be informed with permission from the injured soldier. It was a policy that I don’t think had been well thought through. In Baghdad, as they rushed me into the operating room, I was asked if my next of kin could be informed. At the time, I felt I was thinking straight and could speak, so I figured it would be best if I told Crystal myself. And then they stuck something in my leg and the anaesthetic kicked in.

  So there I was, out cold, in surgery, followed by hours in recovery doped up to the eyeballs on drugs, and I had denied the military permission to inform Crystal or my family of my condition.

  Crystal assumed I was fine after not hearing back from the army; my mother was not so easily reassured. She had attended an information session before my deployment and had my commanding officer’s phone number. I had specifically not put her down to be notified in an event such as this, as I thought Crystal and my sister would be better at dealing with things and keeping Mum informed. But her mother’s intuition went into overdrive when she didn’t get the answers she was after from my CO. She called brigadiers and generals (some of whom still ask after her – ‘Hello Major. How’s your mother?’). She made such a fuss, as mothers do, that I think it was assumed she was my next of kin. Eventually someone made the decision that my family should be informed, so they told Mum I had been injured.

  But they forgot to tell Crystal. She only found out when my sister called her later that day. On answering the phone, Crystal immediately said how relieved she was that the injured Australian soldier was not me. My sister stopped her and said, ‘No, it was him.’

  We were lucky that I had two close friends working at the Australian headquarters in Camp Victory. Both knew Crystal well and soon passed on what they could about my condition and what was going to happen. For want of a better idea, she was told to go to Spain as planned and they would update her from there.

  Crystal spent a cold night in Spain, then flew to Germany the next morning. She was met by the Australian consul general and driven to Landstuhl.

  She later explained to me that she had felt numb through this whole time. When she spoke to my sister and finally understood that I had been injured, she returned to the apartment in London where she had been staying with friends. They were all out and she sat there alone, unable to process what had occurred, knowing only that she needed to get to Germany to see me. She decided that she wasn’t going to take anything about my condition as fact until she saw me. She had the feeling that once we were together, everything would be alright.

  *

  I was in the hall when Crystal arrived. I saw her walking towards me. Crystal’s a small girl, and as she approached down the long, white hospital corridor she looked tiny.

  She seemed to slow down as she approached, a wary look on her face, and I real
ised that she was not sure if it was me. My face was a mess, and my head was still so swollen that I was unrecognisable. I remember trying to smile and say something stupid, then holding her for a long time.

  *

  Crystal had walked the long hallways of the US hospital in Landstuhl before she got to me. Even as a nurse, she was dismayed by the sheer numbers of wounded she saw as she came through the hospital. It was multi-storey and seemed to be kilometres across, with every room filled with casualties from Iraq.

  She was able to stay locally, within the grounds of the hospital, in a house that had been established to accommodate military families while their loved ones were being treated. Crystal’s feelings were mixed about the charity housing. While she was grateful to be able to stay there, she was also overwhelmed by how well equipped the facility was to support injured soldiers’ families. It was an obvious indication of how often the house was used.

  *

  I spent another five days in Landstuhl, where I had another operation. Twice a day I would be dosed up with painkillers and have my face scrubbed with peroxide to get dead skin from the burns off, to prevent scarring.

  I was in a room with two others. They were both young marines who had been injured at the same time as each other. In fact, there were about a dozen in the hospital all from the same incident – in which one marine had been killed.

  They had been in a small forward operating base near Samarra, playing a game of football in the compound during some downtime. Insurgents had fired a mortar that landed in the middle of the game, injuring most of the players. Lance Corporal Gomez, a hyperactive, skinny little bloke, had been the section medic and had run several hundred metres back to their barracks to get the med kit. It was only as he was returning to his injured mates that he realised his foot was flapping around as he ran. He had copped a fair-sized mortar fragment that had broken his ankle. His mate in the room, Private McLaughlin, had got a piece in his thigh – he was not taking it as well as Gomez, who had requisitioned a wheelchair so that he could make his way down the corridor and out the exit to smoke cigarettes. They both talked constantly about when their Purple Hearts would be presented. Although they were joking, it was inevitable that they would receive the medal for being ‘injured in combat’, and it was common for US soldiers to be awarded these medals while still in hospital.

  My father, an ever-travelling professor, had been at a conference in Austria. On hearing of my injuries, he got on a train and met me at the hospital within a couple of days of my arrival. Both Crystal and Dad spent a lot of time with me. They were amazing.

  Crystal, as a theatre nurse, could interpret the high-speed delivery of my prognosis and planned treatment from the overworked US doctors. I had second-degree burns to face and neck, multiple fragmentation wounds to face and neck, a haematoma to the right side of my neck that had required emergency surgery in Baghdad to ensure blood supply to my brain, and puncture wounds to my sinuses, caused by fragmentation. One of these fragments had also fractured the bone between the sinus and the cerebral cavity, so the doctors were concerned about infections in my brain.

  During the explanation of the planned treatment, we were told that they were looking to operate again. They explained that as the bone between my sinus cavity and my brain was fractured, they intended to remove this bone and ‘re-seat’ my brain.

  Neither Crystal nor my father was happy with this.

  The American staff treated me like any other casualty – and rightfully so. But they thought the best place for me to undergo further treatment would be mainland USA. Crystal spoke up, saying that anything they planned do in the US could be done back in Australia – therefore I should be sent home.

  Crystal called friends in Australia to get names of hospitals and neurosurgeons back in Australia to further her case for getting me home, and Dad also stepped in. As I was the guinea pig for the casualty evacuation process, and this scenario – an Australian casualty in Germany needing ongoing surgery and treatment that could not be done in Germany – had not been anticipated, the Defence hierarchy was slow to act. Dad spoke to both military and embassy staff. He accused one high-ranking diplomat of being ‘the man without a plan’ and, using his own credit card, bought two business-class tickets back to Australia, one for Crystal and one for me. He informed the embassy staff and Defence about what he had done and told them we would be on the plane.

  During this time Crystal smoked cigarettes from Gomez, and she and Dad walked a fair distance to get off the ‘dry’ base so they could get a six-pack of beer. Both were anxious and shaky, and in need of their own ‘medication’.

  Thankfully, Dad’s course of action was politely agreed to by all, and Defence picked up the €30,000 bill for the tickets, much to his relief.

  *

  I travelled back home with Crystal and an Australian nurse, who had been sent to oversee my care. She carried an ample supply of sedatives and painkillers, which would allow me to sleep for much of the flight to Sydney.

  A black SUV took us to the Frankfurt airport, where we were shuffled into a private waiting room. At Sydney airport, we cleared customs on the plane, then were escorted out to a waiting car. With all this special treatment, Crystal said she was starting to feel like Posh and Becks.

  I had a final operation at Liverpool Hospital in Sydney, where thankfully they chose not to ‘re-seat’ my brain. I had some very competent surgeons, with experience in similar injuries, usually from car accidents where drivers hit their head and face on the steering wheel.

  My recovery was surprisingly fast. The stiffness in my body, particularly in my neck, both from having been thrown around in the blast and from the surgery, eased after a couple of weeks. The swelling in my face subsided, but I was left with what the surgeons described as trauma tattooing – blue-grey marks across my forehead and eyebrows from the fine bits of dust and muck that were embedded in my skin in the blast.

  I only got wobbly once – when the surgeon in Sydney pulled out the packing in my sinuses without warning or anaesthetic, then gave me a mirror to gaze into my own sinus cavities.

  I stopped smoking – nothing like a couple of weeks on morphine to kick a nicotine habit. One afternoon in hospital, I caught myself thinking, ‘Didn’t I used to smoke?’

  One event from my recovery stays with me in particular, and it was the start of my understanding that, after a bomb blast, the human body is always going to have some quirks. At the time it was absolutely humiliating, but I have come to see the funny side of it. It occurred after I was released from hospital on convalescent leave. Crystal and I went to stay with my sister at her unit in Queenscliff, Sydney, which looked down over Manly Beach. It was the perfect place to recover and start to feel like a normal person again.

  I had travelled back from Germany in a cream tracksuit two sizes too big and ill-fitting slip-on shoes – donated clothes from a US charity. I must have looked appalling walking through Singapore airport with my swollen, battered head and dragging my feet to keep my shoes on, all the while in an oversized tracksuit.

  In Sydney, I was issued with an army tracksuit and runners, and Mum and my sisters bought me a couple of t-shirts. So all up I had two bad tracksuits, a pair of running shorts, a set of army runners, a couple of pairs of socks and a pair of slippers. I did not have any underwear.

  On one of my regular visits to my doctor, I had asked if I could resume some kind of fitness routine. He said yes, just nothing that had the potential to injure my face or neck. So the next morning Crystal and I decided that we would go for a run along the Esplanade at Manly. It was a beautiful November day, a little bit chilly first thing, but the morning warmed quickly, and soon the Esplanade was full of people out enjoying the sunshine.

  I didn’t want to push myself, as I was still pretty sore, so we did a brisk walk down the stairs from Queenscliff to the footpath that follows the beach. Here we broke into a light jog and I felt the relief that follows escape from being cramped inside for weeks on end. Cr
ystal trotted alongside, and we quickly made it down to South Steyne.

  When we reached the end of the beach, I started to feel a mild need to go to the toilet. We turned and headed back to Queenscliff. We passed the South Steyne toilets and I contemplated popping in for a quick toilet stop. But at the time it was merely a mild pressure and I had no cause for alarm. So we continued to run north, back up the beach.

  It wasn’t long before things became urgent. In hindsight, I should have turned and run back to the South Steyne Beach Clubhouse and gone to the toilet there. At the very least I could have run into the surf. But no, I left Crystal, muttering that I needed to go to the toilet, and picked up my pace to a sprint in the hope that I would make it to the facilities at the Manly Beach clubhouse. The pressure rapidly became more intense.

  On this beautiful, sunny morning, with the beach and the Esplanade full of people, I must have been quite a sight – in ill-fitting clothes, a raw scarred face, sweating profusely and running through the crowds, desperately trying to make it to the clubhouse. To my right, they were doing work on the beach volleyball area on the sand and a large section was fenced off. Even if I wanted to run into the water to relieve myself, I couldn’t get to the beach anyway.

  Finally, as I stumbled and lurched past the holiday-makers and people out enjoying the sun, the American ration-pack dinner, tinned fruit and one slice of pizza I had been holding for three weeks (the last time I had properly been to the toilet) forced their appearance. At this point, the lack of underwear became critical. About 100 metres from the Manly Beach clubhouse toilets, the poo slid down my leg, as I desperately lumbered my way along the Esplanade. The most unfortunate result was that the sticky poo slid down to my ankle and as I ran through the crowd I kicked it and it whizzed through the air just in front of a female jogger coming the other way. She gave me a quizzical look mixed with astonishment and a touch of disgust: the look of a person who has just grasped that the person running past them in the opposite direction has shat himself and kicked a piece of poo in her direction.