It didn’t help that these theories were fuelled by widespread media speculation.
I felt drained. I missed Crystal. There wasn’t the opportunity to call her anywhere near as much as I should. I wished I could hold her as she played her ukulele, clumsily strumming away and singing some barely recognisable song. She would tell me stories and make me laugh, as only she could.
*
Through this time, there was so much discussion and consternation about the investigations that were occurring and going to occur. Whenever I spoke to anyone at the Australian headquarters, I was told a new group of investigators was coming out. I lost track of them all. First, there was an initial assessment by some idiot major, then the military police conducted an investigation, then there was a plan to fly in civilian police. Not to mention the planned board of inquiry.
It had been weeks, but besides the investigator and the soldiers retrieving their essential equipment, no-one entered the room after 21 April. We were later to be accused of hampering investigations by allowing Jake’s roommates to retrieve their equipment on the day of the death. But this only showed how little some people understood about working in Baghdad. The alternative was to leave these soldiers without their weapons and body armour, and be negligent in not allowing them to protect themselves.
The room was like a dark cloud hanging over the soldiers at the embassy. They had to walk past the taped-off room many times a day, knowing that it was in the state it had been left in on the afternoon of the shooting: personal equipment everywhere, blood soaked into the carpet, the bullet hole in the ceiling. It made us sick just thinking about it.
I offered to clean it. The Boss had been too close to Jake and had enough to deal with. Eventually the go-ahead came through.
I went to the embassy, where I was met by Jake’s platoon commander. He had been smoking a lot since the incident, but seemed OK. The Boss had told me not to let him help as it would be too rough on him emotionally, but he had insisted that he needed to be part of it. I gave in. The Boss would have to trust my judgment on this one. Maybe helping to clean the room would help cleanse him of any (unfounded) guilt he felt. Maybe he thought he could have done something to prevent the incident.
Entering the room, I found nothing I hadn’t expected. We worked for about an hour with soapy water and sponges. The room would never be suitable for accommodation. There was the hole in the ceiling for one thing, and the carpet would have to be replaced. But the job was done.
I always felt that Jake dying as he did, by his own hand, but seemingly without reason, played on the boys’ nerves. I always felt that there would have been less impact on the group if four, even more, soldiers had died by an insurgent bomb or rocket blast. At least they would have had someone to point a finger at. The deaths would have fitted, been legitimate casualties. Jake’s death didn’t fit.
No-one knew exactly how Jake shot himself, the actual mechanics of how he achieved it. The bullet had entered behind his ear and exited through the top of his head. It could not be suicide, not at that angle, and not with two other blokes in the room. Not when they had just been singing and arsing around. I am resigned to the fact that I will never understand exactly how Jake did it.
*
As the days wore on, things gradually calmed down. The military investigators and civilian police had all the evidence they came for, and had interviewed enough people.
But then, on 18 May, we were told that a disk containing the draft report into the events and the systemic failure that led to Jake’s body being lost had been left in a computer in the Qantas Club lounge at Melbourne. For a long time I accepted this as a ‘lapse of judgment’ or ‘terrible mistake’, but the more I considered it, the more I came to see it as pure negligence. Defence has many rules pertaining to the handling of classified information. Sure, some of these rules are ambiguous, some are obsolete, some are even a little weird, but to put a disk with a highly sensitive report in a publicly accessible computer and then to leave it there is plainly negligent.
The loss of the report coincided with another visit by the Minister of Defence, Dr Brendan Nelson. In the mess at the Cove, the brigadier introduced me to him: ‘This is Captain Callender. It’s his second tour in Baghdad and he was injured the first time here.’ The minister asked me what had happened, but then did not listen to the response – one of his staffers was rabbiting something in his ear. I was sure he didn’t mean anything by it – he was a busy man and the staffers were constantly in his ear about who knows what – but I confess it irked me a little.
We sat down to lunch on one of the long benches in the mess hall and the minister asked me how the men were going. I had a think and replied that they were ‘going OK’.
Considering that a fellow soldier had accidentally shot himself with his own pistol, that we were in the midst of a media melee, with conspiracy theories and accusations calling into question the character of everyone in the combat team, that the wrong body had been sent back to Australia, and that now the investigating brigadier had left the draft report in the Qantas Club for Derryn Hinch to get hold of, ‘going OK’ was probably a bit weak and unlikely to have provided Nelson with much insight.
Why didn’t I give a better response? Truthfully, I don’t know. Maybe things would have played out differently if I’d said, ‘The boys are pissed off; I am pissed off. Where is the top-cover from the defence hierarchy? Why doesn’t Air Chief Marshal Houston stand up for us and keep the media at bay? Why doesn’t he give the Kovcos the truth and stop letting them believe that there was some kind of conspiracy? Why isn’t he being a leader?’
But I didn’t – I told him the boys were ‘going OK’.
We organised for the minister to speak to the soldiers, who would then have the opportunity to ask questions. Following lunch, a warrant officer pointed out a group of soldiers huddled together in conversation. They were looking anxious and guilty, but I didn’t think much of it – maybe they were surly about being a rent-a-crowd for the minister, I said. The warrant officer, who was more on the ball, replied, ‘Nah, those blokes are up to something.’
Nelson spoke for a few minutes on the usual themes: ‘You are all doing a good job under tough circumstances’, ‘Glad you are here looking after the security of the embassy staff’, ‘Keep up the good work’.
Then, when he asked if there were any questions, a few nervous looks were exchanged and in a shaky voice one of the lance corporals opened with, ‘Yes, sir, I think Private —— has a few questions for you.’
These soldiers were after blood. Emotive questions were asked, such as ‘What will happen to the brigadier who lost the report?’ and ‘Will disciplinary action be taken against her?’ Dr Nelson struggled to give honest-sounding answers and the men started to grow red-faced and fire questions at the minister as he floundered on.
Then came a classic moment of a sergeant understanding when the boys needed to be put back in their box. He politely excused himself to the minister, then said directly to the soldiers that everyone makes mistakes, that he himself made them every day, and that they shouldn’t dwell on the mistake made by the brigadier.
This particular sergeant was much respected by the soldiers, as a mentor and leader, but also a disciplinarian. They all took his point that it was time for them to shut their mouths, because they were achieving nothing. It was inspiring to watch.
I walked Nelson out of the mess.
Years later, I was privileged to have a private conversation with Brendan Nelson, and we exchanged our views of the event. It was only then I truly saw the situation from his perspective. It seemed that the upper echelons of Defence, and the lower, were both having the same discussions – should the senior officer who left the disk in the Qantas Club be disciplined?
I learnt that Dr Nelson’s hesitation in answering the soldiers’ questions was due to the fact that he was yet to receive a satisfactory answer from the Chief of the Defence Force. He felt, as we did, that disciplinary action sho
uld be taken, or, at the very least, be seen to be taken.
In November 2007 the brigadier was promoted to major general. Were political agendas more important to the top brass than fundamental military values and discipline? That is what the soldiers thought.
*
At the start of the tour, the signals corps IT blokes, the ‘geeks’, had shown me how to use Skype. They set up a wireless network around the Cove so everyone could call home when they had some spare time. Crystal and I would talk every few days.
She would regularly send me video messages. I would go to bed at night watching the little 30-second video clips she had emailed me that day. She would tell me little stories about what she had done that day, or play me something she was learning on the guitar, or just let me know she was on her way out to dinner with friends and that she loved me and missed me.
The military had a policy that if you deployed for six months or more, they would try to rotate you out for ten days’ leave. They would either fly you back to Australia or pay for a flight to Rome. Some men were keen to get home for a break, while others wanted a European adventure. Crystal had chosen Rome, so a lot of our conversation revolved around the holiday plans she was making.
She later confided to me that one afternoon she had received a phone call. She answered the phone and was stunned when a male voice asked ‘Mrs Callender?’ in an official-sounding voice. She instantly assumed she was about to be told that I had been injured, or worse. But the man on the phone turned out to be a travel agent calling to confirm details of our upcoming trip. When she hung up, she was almost sick.
That was how she lived for six months – in a constant state of fear and anticipation. Some couples are different: some are happy to be apart, and some spouses are just glad to have the large deployment allowances that lob fortnightly into their bank account. Crystal and I were never like that. We loved each other’s company and it hurt every time we said goodbye.
*
The Boss had been working extremely long hours and I often wondered how he kept it all together. He’d had so much pressure on him from headquarters, and from Australia. Like all of us, he read the online media and he knew what was being said: it was a conspiracy, someone had killed Jake because he discovered a government plot. How had we had allowed it to occur? What were we hiding? What had really happened? He took it all very personally. And there was the guilt, unjustified though it was: I know he felt guilty for Jake’s death.
But the tragedy of the matter was there was only one bloke responsible for Jake’s death, and that was Jake himself. All the rules were in place that should have stopped him from returning to his room with a loaded pistol. But for some reason he had chosen to ignore them or forgotten the numerous checks designed to ensure that fatigued soldiers didn’t walk back to their accommodation with a pistol ready to fire.
The board of inquiry was planned for May and by now the counsel assisting the board had arrived and settled in. There were five of them, all military lawyers, from a range of backgrounds. Together they reviewed our standard operating procedures, spending most of their time tapping away on their laptops in the room out the back of headquarters where we had a bank of computers. After about a week, they were done and we planned their drive back to Camp Victory.
The boys decided to play a practical joke – as soldiers do, jokes and pranks being a way of life. They drove them by ASLAV from the International Zone to Camp Victory. Once they had turned off Route Irish, the practical joke began. The lawyers were inside the base and they were safe, but in the back of a vehicle they had no way of knowing this. As far as they knew, they were still on Route Irish. So the boys started yelling and, out of view of the lawyers, hitting the side of the vehicle with a ball-peen hammer so that it sounded like bullets hitting the side of the vehicle.
The team of lawyers arrived at the Australian headquarters all shaken up. No-one told them it had been a joke. At some stage, the lawyers must have told the operations staff at the headquarters that the patrol had been shot at. The staff would have looked into it, only to find that it was a prank. One of the tasks of the counsel assisting the board of inquiry was to determine if there was any kind of risk-taking subculture within the combat team. After such a practical joke, understandably enough, they believed such a subculture did exist. Their imaginations ran wild.
*
The Boss went on some well-earned leave in June and I commanded SECDET for over three weeks while he was gone. At first I felt like a snotty young first-year captain and expected I was going to struggle. The Boss had faith in me, the headquarters in Camp Victory would keep an eye out, and I had trained to do his job before we left Australia – but there were moments that brought home the burden of responsibility, and the lack of margin for error.
We conducted a Red Zone operation to reconnoitre the German embassy. When we reached the place a local contact had described to us, we discovered that the German embassy had moved a couple of years earlier. This was embarrassing, to say the least, and it was also downright dangerous. There we were: out in the Red Zone with incorrect information. To be fair, this was the reason we did reconnaissance. Far better to get there a week before the meeting to find out the location was wrong than to arrive blind on the day with the ambassador in the back.
I enjoyed running the combat team. It was a rare privilege for a junior captain to be in charge of so many operations. I would have to wait another five years before I was promoted to major and given a squadron of my own.
*
I also decided to buy a goat. The grass was getting long and I thought the blokes could do with a distraction. We organised it through one of the local contractors. It was a cute little thing.
When it first arrived, it took off as soon as we untied it and ran to the back of the Cove to hide among the vehicles. I’d gotten permission from the Boss to get her, but hadn’t told many people that she was arriving. Many of the soldiers were stunned to see a goat skipping around among the parked ASLAVs, and there were mixed feelings about the new acquisition.
The goat (photo courtesy of Jim Culloden).
‘What the fuck have we got a goat for?’
‘That fuckin’ goat shits everywhere.’
I’m sure she got a few surreptitious kicks, but as her place in the Cove was endorsed by the Boss and overseen by me, these were always kept out of sight. More often than not, I would walk out of the headquarters and find a group of soldiers giving her a scratch, or watching her jump from the lower narrow ledges of one T-wall to another.
She took a liking to me and slept outside my door, much to the disgust of the intelligence sergeant I shared the room with.
‘Fuckin’ goat just shat at the door again, sir.’
It turned out that goats are no good at keeping grass short. Who knew? I had in mind that she would keep it nicely trimmed, like on a bowling green. But it seems goats yank grass out by the roots as they eat. So instead she left bald patches in the long grass outside the headquarters building and down behind the accommodation rooms.
There are rules about not keeping animals when you’re deployed. It’s all about not spreading disease and mange, and apparently having an animal regularly shit outside your door is bad. So we were breaking the rules, but it was a calculated decision. The signallers built her a little enclosure near the front gate, but when any rank visited we tied her up near the back fence. Sometimes there were questions about where the bleating was coming from.
Even though feelings towards the goat were mixed, no-one could deny that she had proved an effective distraction from everything else that was going on.
*
The board of inquiry commenced its hearings a day or so after the Boss returned from leave. He had to travel to Camp Victory to front the board via teleconference at 3 a.m. It was being run on Australian time – there was no acknowledgment that we were on the other side of the world, trying to run operations.
The men’s prank had pissed off a lot of people at headq
uarters. The Boss had been grilled on his way through.
Of the board of inquiry I know very little. I was so focused on running the day-to-day activities of SECDET that I didn’t have much time to think about what was happening. The Boss and the infantry lieutenant would go in and front the board. Then some of the soldiers would be called up, then the military police captain, then a few more soldiers, then the Boss again. I was more focused on transport arrangements for getting them into Camp Victory and back.
*
The goat’s tail was getting matted up with poo. It was my responsibility – I couldn’t ask anyone else to take care of a problem like this. So one afternoon, there we both were: me in blue latex gloves with surgical scissors I’d obtained from the medic, and a nervous goat tied to a tree. It was quite a sight: a dodgy captain, who incidentally was running the combat team at the time, trimming the arse hair of a goat at the front of his headquarters.
A couple of days later, one of the smaller infantry soldiers, perhaps with a complex about his height, told me that he killed goats at home as a pastime. Obviously I didn’t sound interested enough, so he then told me that he planned to kill our goat. I was suitably impressed – though in the end he never touched her.
13
SOLDIER 17
LATE JUNE BROUGHT A NEW DEVELOPMENT. The board of inquiry continued to call witnesses, who were allocated numbers in an attempt at anonymity. Soldier 17 was a sleepy-looking, lazy little man, continually being caught doing the wrong thing. He had been one of the two blokes in the room when Jake shot himself. In a twist of fate, neither soldier had been facing Jake. As a result, they could offer nothing but speculation and conjecture on how he had managed to get shot.
Soldier 17, in the limelight of the inquiry, decided it was his obligation to tell the board that our equipment was ‘all fucked’. He also thought it necessary to canvas every wild theory about how Jake had died.
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