I took the commander’s position in the turret of one of the sergeant’s vehicles, at the rear of the six-vehicle convoy. My job was to maintain the link between the convoy and the headquarters in Baghdad and coordinate any Coalition forces if we got into a fight, or had a breakdown or accident. But with all the radio jammers used by the militaries around the city, it didn’t take long for our radios to drop out. I held on tight to my satellite phone. While there were three radios in the vehicle, I had a feeling the phone was now the only reliable means of communication.
Kirkush was about 20 kilometres from the Iranian border, and it took about three hours to get there. The route was lush and green as we followed the Tigris north out of Baghdad, but then we headed east and green turned to brown. The people changed too. The waves became stares, and the stares became glares. Many turned their backs, and others made indecipherable but obviously unfriendly gestures. There was nowhere more dangerous in Iraq than Baghdad. But these people, even the children, hated us.
The journey led us through Baqubah, a Sunni insurgent stronghold that had seen fierce fighting in 2004, as violent as in Fallujah and Ramadi but not on the same scale. It felt like most of the city’s 500,000 inhabitants were on the main street as we drove through – and they had hate in their eyes.
After hours on the hot road, Kirkush appeared out of the scorched desert: just another Iraq barracks built on a seemingly nondescript patch of dirt. The familiar series of big, rectangular, monolithic buildings was the same as I had seen at Al Kasik on my first trip. The ground was flat and brittle. The weapons range was a patch of desert facing out towards a mountain range on the horizon, which marked the Iranian border.
We met the two gruff old warrant officers; they had been there for months already, with little contact with Australia. Strangely, they didn’t seem all that happy to see us. I think they felt like kings of their little domain and our arrival challenged that; it was a little primal. We headed out to the range, as we didn’t have much time if we were to make it back to Baghdad before dusk. One of the warrant officers started to get funny about us not having a range safety trace, a drawing on a map to indicate the arcs and direction we could fire. This was a safety requirement, showing that you had cleared the area into which you were intending to shoot.
The range had seen decades of use, not to mention the real battle that had been fought there with the Iranians, and there was no way I was sending anyone out to risk being blown up by the scores of unexploded bombs. It was a patch of desert. We could see pretty much all of the area we were firing into and we could see if anyone was moving in the danger zone. I politely explained to the warrant officer that our having a trace would achieve nothing and we were firing anyway. There was some hesitation – ‘But sir, siirrr, I don’t think I can let you fire.’ At which point we ignored him and got on with it.
We fired all the old 25-mm ammunition, about 200 rounds per vehicle, then reloaded for the drive home. We fired some old 66-mm shoulder-fired rockets that had been rattling around in the vehicles for too long, and some of the 40-mm grenades. The snipers ranged the sights on the new rifles that they’d just got in from Australia. We were finished in just under two hours. It felt a little crazy firing off large amounts of ammo in the direction of the Iranian border.
The run home was long and painful and dangerous. I couldn’t help noticing that the attitudes of the civilian drivers on the roads had changed a lot in eighteen months. Where once they had jostled around the vehicles, trying to cut us off, or driven right up behind us, at least until we pointed the 25-mm barrel at them or waved our pistols, now they swerved off the road when they saw us coming. No-one came within 100 metres of the ASLAVs.
The introduction of the US forces’ informal policy of ‘get too close to my vehicle and I’ll shoot you’ was obviously working. It must have made for a very bad day for some.
*
Being an officer was always challenging; it required a fine balance between relating to and interacting with the soldiers, and not getting too close. You had to maintain your credibility as a commander who made life-and-death decisions, while being empathetic to your soldiers’ wants and needs – and also know when to tell them to shut up and get on with the job.
While sometimes it could be a bit lonely, especially when you had to make unpopular decisions, I always relished being the one who called the shots – I hated being a follower.
SECDET’s two platoons of infantry soldiers were from specialist platoons – reconnaissance, assault pioneers, signals and direct first-support weapons (also known as heavy weapons). This meant that they were all senior soldiers, having served three or four years each.
It was great to have more experienced blokes with a range of skills. The assault pioneers were constantly building things; the recon soldiers were very methodical and deliberate and provided very accurate reporting, and many could be paired with snipers. The infantry soldiers would regularly escort Australian civilians around the International Zone – a job that required tact and a level head, not just because of the dynamic and dangerous environment, but also because the civilians could be prickly. The downside was that these experienced guys presented a challenge to the chain of command. Some were jaded and surly, and others would question orders. While it was sometimes good to be challenged by smart soldiers, when they were questioning just for the sake of questioning they became hard to work with. Many felt that with three years’ experience they knew better than their commanders.
While many were excellent, some proved to be a challenge. They were caught imitating American soldiers by cocking their rifles three times to clear them at the unloading bays rather than going through the correct drill of looking in the breach to confirm no rounds were caught in the chamber. They would position empty Coke cans under the concrete footpad leading to the lookout positions so they could hear when someone was coming to check on them. They would listen to music and miss radio checks. They would take off their helmets to pose for photos in areas where they were in range of sniper fire.
Mostly, they were informally disciplined by the platoon staff – given an extra shift or the next crap job that needed to be done. But one night I lost my temper with two soldiers who hadn’t answered a radio check for half an hour. They had been positioned in the overwatch position looking down on the Cove from the corner of the Ba’ath Party headquarters building. A rocket had landed on the other side of the International Zone and I was keen to know where, as we had some Australian civilians working in that part of the city. I knew these soldiers had been sitting up there listening to music on a pocket radio. Many of the soldiers carried these, but they were not allowed to be used on duty. I had to send someone up to get them to answer their radio. Once they finally answered, I ordered them to report to me at the end of their shift.
They both swaggered into my CP, already giving me some ridiculous excuse as to why they had not answered their radio. It was the first time I had yelled in years. Officers generally shouldn’t yell, only when a point really needs to be made. They left with their heads hanging and probably thinking I was an arsehole: I had threatened to charge them and see that they were sent home if they did anything like it again. I would like to think that it had some effect on the attitudes of the soldiers; at the very least, many of them kept out of my way for the next few days.
There was an interesting dynamic within the team as a whole. The military police were all senior soldiers, but the cavalry troop had more junior soldiers and a few who had come across from the reserve army to serve full-time. They brought an interesting mix of skills from their civilian jobs – there was an electrician, a barista and a bricklayer. Among the three females in the combat team were two military policewomen who would deal with local women at the embassy. Then there was the supporting personnel: five signallers, including the third female, who maintained our computer and radio links; a medic; mechanics; armourers; storemen; and a couple of cooks.
The officers and senior non-commissione
d officers worked hard early on to make sure there was no poisonous rivalry between groups. We trained together; everyone learnt how to change ASLAV wheels and how to work the radios; all the teams gave presentations on their capabilities. We also really pushed the sergeants to work together to set an example for the junior soldiers Previous rotations had problems, which, I felt, stemmed from the soldiers seeing the sergeants not getting on – before they knew it, people were spitting in each other’s hats.
And overseeing all this was the Boss. One time he showed his class was during an impromptu boxing match in the Cove. It began with yelling in the compound, and a crowd of people moving out of the new ‘Cav Room’. Only a few days earlier they had voted to turn off the 24-hour porn channel, as they were getting a little strange.
I didn’t think much of the noise at first; there was always something going on in the compound, with the blokes having a laugh or playing a prank. The group was shouting and moving towards the makeshift boxing ring, just a covered area with a few gym mats and a punching bag or two suspended from the girders that held up the roof.
The Boss turned up in the crowd not long after I did. The cavalry guys had been worked into something like a frenzy, spurred on by one of the sergeants, a hard-as-nails non-commissioned officer who had challenged two soldiers having an argument over who had eaten the last piece of pizza to ‘sort this out in the ring’. With the encouragement of the cavalry troop, enthusiastically joined by many of the infantry platoon, the pair were corralled in the boxing ring.
I expected the Boss to be extremely hesitant about the boys having their own boxing match, as the army had all but banned boxing, considering it too dangerous. But he stood back and let the crowd pad the two blokes up. It became obvious that the crowd was far more enthusiastic about the fight than the two participants were. The round started, still with the Boss watching, his calm, quiet demeanour giving nothing away. I was waiting for him to step in any second and break up the fight and chastise the sergeant for provoking the incident. To tell the truth, if the Boss hadn’t been there, I would have stopped the fight. I knew that Defence did not look favourably on people getting injured during organised boxing matches, let alone impromptu ones.
But the Boss had made his own quiet assessment of the situation and allowed the boys to let off some steam. A couple of minutes of wild, clumsy haymakers and the fight was over, due to exhaustion rather than any clear victory. It was only then that the Boss stepped out in front of the crowd. I think many of the soldiers were surprised to realise that he had been there all along.
‘Who’s next?’ he demanded. There was instant quiet among the crowd, particularly from those who had been the most vocal during the fighting. ‘I thought so,’ he shouted. ‘It’s usually the ones who start these things that don’t have the guts to get in the ring themselves.’
With these words, the crowd dispersed, many of the men walking off sheepishly.
I later asked the Boss for his thoughts on the fight and he replied, ‘In the first ten seconds I realised no-one was going to get hurt.’
*
Later, I was to say that six-month deployments were about right. Two months to settle in, three months to do some good work and make significant changes, and a month to plan your handover and get out.
About a month and a half into the tour, I felt things had started to hum. The dust had settled. The boys knew their jobs. I kind of knew mine. We all understood our environment sufficiently to do our job as safely as possible. Our world had stopped spinning.
And for the first time we had some quiet days. There was a day here and there when the embassy staff didn’t have meetings that we needed to make happen, and when high-ranking visitors or random incidents didn’t absorb all our time.
It was on one of these rare quiet days that all hell broke loose. A single gunshot changed our world, and reverberated all the way back to Australia, altering many people’s lives forever.
12
DEATH BY MISADVENTURE
JOURNAL ENTRY, 0409 HOURS, 22 APRIL 2006: Somehow, in a room with two of his mates, in the demountable accommodation in the embassy, Private Jacob Kovco was shot. The bullet entered one side of his head and exited the other, leaving a much larger hole coming out than it did going in. He died there on the floor of his room with two shocked mates beside him. Another soldier revived him not long after. He was moved a few hundred metres to the hospital, where his mind could just keep him alive and nothing else. After his platoon of comrades, friends and brothers had stood by his bed and said their goodbyes, the machines were turned off and Jacob Kovco died again, in a room full of paratroopers tall and strong – all suddenly crippled.
The call came through on the radio from the embassy: ‘Friendly priority one casualty. Gunshot wound.’
I asked them to say it again. I don’t know why: I had understood the message.
I recognised the platoon sergeant’s voice on the radio: ‘Yes, friendly, pri one casualty, gunshot wound to the head.’
A couple of other people were in the command post, and they all froze when the call came in. I don’t know about them, but the back of my neck and scalp burned hot, as has only happened to me a handful of times in my life – times when I realise something terrible is occurring.
The Boss was in the conference room, talking to the two infantry lieutenants. I paused at the door, and they all looked up.
‘Friendly Priority One. From the embassy platoon.’
The Boss left quickly to organise a car to the embassy, while the lieutenant in charge of the platoon there followed me back to the command post.
Radio updates were coming in again. ‘Evacuating casualty to the CSH, conducting CPR.’
The young lieutenant looked at me and asked, ‘Who is it?’
It is against all protocol to send the names of casualties over the radio, but at that moment the rule seemed unimportant. I grabbed the handset: ‘Send name, send name of casualty.’ I could hear the sergeant on the other end key the handset for a second before answering – ‘Kovco.’
*
The first few days after the shooting had an air of unreality about them. Events that seemed impossible, but which we knew were true, cascaded and left us feeling all the more numb.
First, Jake died. He accidentally shot himself in the head while two other men were in the room. Back home, the media went into overdrive when Brendan Nelson made one statement, then appeared to contradict himself. One day Australia was told Jake had been cleaning his pistol, then a few days later it was confirmed that, rather, he had died while ‘handling’ his pistol. A ‘senior military source’ added to the confusion with further speculation on how the incident had transpired. Throughout this time, there was background chatter from those who believed Kovco had purposely shot himself. Finally Nelson called for a stop to the speculation, clearly as upset with his own advisors as he was with the media. His call had the opposite effect and seemed to fuel further conspiracy theories and claims of cover-ups.
Second, there was talk of a letter Jake had left for his wife – one of those ‘just in case’ letters. It was found in the pages of his journal. The plan had been to copy the journal and send it to his wife; the original would be required for the investigation that we knew would be coming. But the Boss felt that he should read through the journal to make sure there was nothing inappropriate before he sent it back. What he found was an entry dated exactly one month before Jake died. It was a premonition of Jake’s death. He called it a bad dream, but we know now that he saw into the future … and he saw his own death.
He told of seeing himself putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger; he described the bullet entering his skull and the numbness. But he stated emphatically that this was a bad dream and he did not want to harm himself. He then went on in the manner not of a suicidal or depressed man, but of a happy man, yearning for his wife and children, and talked of the future with them.
In the time after his death, only four of us knew of th
is journal entry.
Then came the third big event. I was in the command post at the Cove when the phone from headquarters rang. It was for the Boss. He came to the phone, listened quietly for a few seconds, and then let out a ‘Fuck’, just as he had when I reported Jake’s head injury from a gunshot wound.
He hung up and walked out front. I followed.
‘They’ve taken the wrong body back,’ he said. Private Kovco had remained in Kuwait in the morgue, while the body of a Bosnian contractor was flown back to Australia in his place.
I would never say that the Boss’s demeanour faltered, but there were times when this series of seemingly unbelievable occurrences, the burden of command in such situations and a lack of sleep from answering the phone throughout the night left him raw and tense.
Jake, a good-natured bloke with a mischievous sense of humour, helped us even though he was dead: we all knew he would have seen the funny side of this appalling mistake.
Jake had been a last-minute addition to the combat team. A reserve for the deployment, he had been called up at late notice when one of the other soldiers dislocated his shoulder surfing during pre-deployment leave. Jake had been ‘lucky’ to get the deployment.
I felt so sorry for Jake’s wife, Shelley. His parents were looking for answers; unfortunately, the truth was right there in front of them. There was no cover-up, no conspiracy. Jake died accidentally, and somebody fucked up with the bodies at the airport. But his family’s response was entirely understandable. They had been fed a mixture of fact and misinformation. They had been given information before it had been thoroughly checked. Given this and the mix-up of the repatriation of Jake’s body, it was entirely understandable that they distrusted the information they were given. But this inevitably led them to make up their own theories about what had occurred.
After the Blast Page 9