As an officer, it’s your job to look after your soldiers always. Even when you have to discipline them after they break the rules, it has to be fair and in the interests of turning the situation around so that it never happens again. But we all struggled with Soldier 17. Knowing he was going to the inquiry and telling blatant lies about how we operated made us detest him. But we couldn’t show it. Our hope was that his claims would be called into question by the board and he would face disciplinary action for his fabrications. But he was never held to account for what he said, nor for the confusion and doubt he brought to the case. Nor for dragging the name of the entire combat team, all 110 of us, through the mud.
The facts themselves were crazy enough, without Soldier 17 adding his fanciful speculation on what may have occurred. I never understood why this young man – who had the board of inquiry listening to him and who therefore could have helped the situation – instead chose to roll grenades into the room with his stories, lies and ill-conceived speculation.
*
News broke that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed in a fire-fight up in Baqubah, one of the towns we drove through on our way to Kirkush. Not long after the attack in 2004, Zarqawi had claimed responsibility for the bomb that injured me. He had it coming. I didn’t feel anything, except maybe a touch sad that one more person was dead. But if it was he who conducted the televised beheadings, well, you can’t excuse that. Those were the acts of an evil man.
*
During all this, in early July I went on two weeks’ leave with my beautiful wife, riding scooters around Tuscany, drinking wine in picturesque seaside piazzas and just getting to know each other again.
It was such a shift from Baghdad, from having to be alert at all times, having to give the men the impression that you were always confident, ready to manage an emergency, a bomb going off, a rocket siren, a shooting. Italy was a universe away from all that.
We slept in, walked all morning, lunched on enormous bowls of pasta, went on short boat trips along the coast, and had ice-cream in the afternoons.
We hired a scooter and went exploring with no real plan. Outside Sienna, we stumbled on a horse race. It was in a paddock by the roadside and we would not have noticed it had it not been for the crowds of locals sitting on fences and watching as the horses thundered by on the uneven hill track and the race caller chattered in Italian. Nobody noticed or cared when we parked the scooter and found ourselves a patch of grass on which to sit together and watch.
No-one would have guessed that we were a couple who had been separated on other sides of the world, me in a war zone, Crystal nervous back in Australia, trying to live her life but missing me and being frightened every time the phone rang.
We would have just looked like any young couple in love.
*
When I returned, I discovered that one of the senior non-commissioned officers had gone home. It was explained to me on my way in from Kuwait in hushed tones: ‘Oh and Warrant Officer ——’s gone.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Psych.’
He was an older man with a neo-Nazi persona, tattoos and constant deadpan expression. He always made out that he was an old-school soldier – hard living, hard discipline, no compromise. The sort of man I thought had been bred out of the army by the mid-2000s. My belief was that the persona was just a cover to hide his shortcomings. In the end I was proved right. Although it had been effective in gaining the admiration and respect of some of the soldiers, others just found him strange.
Back in Australia during the lead-up training, I had found him wanting in a lot of key areas. I believed he was completely in over his head working with a group like SECDET – a combat team made of a mix of skills and corps. He claimed to be fiercely devoted to the infantry, so much so he was unable to work with other corps.
While many of our non-commissioned officers and warrant officers were extremely hardworking and professional, this NCO struggled with relatively simple administrative tasks, and the more we dug, the more we found that many people had covered for him.
Things became really poisonous when he was chosen by the Boss to go back to Australia after Jake was killed. After a few days, stories came back to us that he had been hinting to everybody he met that the Boss ‘wasn’t handling things well’. He had been saying it was lucky he had been there personally to hold the combat team together.
Then we learnt that in the lead-up to the board of inquiry he had been trying to coerce some of the soldiers into saying certain things: ‘Just change your story a little …’; ‘Just draw some of the attention away from us.’ The Boss got wind of this and quickly stamped it out. There had been enough unfounded accusations of cover-ups without someone getting impressionable young soldiers to give false statements.
Interestingly and worryingly, when these soldiers were asked to write statements about what had been said between them and the warrant officer, they all refused, claiming they couldn’t recall details. So he still had a concerning amount of influence within the combat team.
While I was away on leave, the Boss counselled him again and again. No improvement. The Boss took action to sack him – to show significant evidence that he was unsuitable for the job he was doing, and then send him back to Australia. All the arrangements were made. The Boss told him a determination would be made on him. The day he was going to tell him he was going home – wham … ‘I have dreams of shooting myself … and others,’ he said. The psychs were informed and he was quickly flown out of Iraq and back to Australia.
This was his way of saving face when he had been shown up as not capable of doing the job under pressure. It was the easy way of going home – keeping allowances and medals, and some credibility. He had been involved enough with Jake’s repatriation that no-one could question the authenticity of his mental-health issue. But we knew the truth.
What disgusted me most was that many people have worked so hard over many years to remove the stigma of mental-health issues within Defence, but this individual embodied all the stereotypes about malingering and using mental health as an excuse and an easy way out.
*
The board of inquiry continued through August. It was frustrating. Rather than listening to the facts, people were listening to the lies of a disgruntled digger, who, for the first and hopefully last time in his life, had a captive audience. I was very disenchanted with the Defence hierarchy and angry with the media.
Soldier 17 told the board that we all regularly failed to clear our pistols, we swung them on our fingers ‘Wild West’ style, it was 54 degrees every day, and we were shot at every day. He was telling lies, but the real tragedy was that he was getting away with it, and, worse still, people were listening to him.
The media was having a field day and we were feeling forgotten. There seemed to be no acknowledgment that we were in Baghdad and doing a dangerous, difficult job. The biggest problem was what the stories – including the claim that we had somehow conspired to kill Jake – bouncing around the media did to morale. Jake’s mum, like any good mother, could not see how her son might have been at fault. Soldier 17’s lies added fuel to her theories.
There was DNA on Jake’s pistol that wasn’t his. To us in SECDET, that was completely understandable: it was probably the case with every one of our weapons. Handing it in and out of the armoury, assisting a friend to clean their weapon – there were countless reasonable explanations as to how someone’s DNA could get on someone else’s weapon. But this further stoked the conspiracy theories.
We were all asked to give DNA samples. One of the police would do a quick mouth swab and that was that. A handful of soldiers refused – we couldn’t force them. I was puzzled by their attitude. They were all told that the samples could not be used for any other purpose than the investigation, and that following it they would be destroyed. None of those who refused were involved in the investigation, nor were they even in Jake’s platoon. They could not possibly have had anything to do with the inciden
t. We exchanged ideas on why they had refused. For one of the guys who was older than the rest and had led a fairly wild life, we speculated that he feared a DNA sample would confirm he had fathered children he did not want to be associated with. As for the others – I didn’t know. Maybe they were conspiracy theorists themselves, who did not believe that the results would be destroyed at the conclusion of the investigation.
Maybe they felt that these samples were all fed into a ‘Big Brother’ database to keep tabs on us.
Maybe they were just sick of the investigation.
*
Meanwhile, the Australian embassy continued on with its work, and we continued escorting officials to their diplomatic meetings.
Our bodyguards lived in the back pockets of the diplomats, day in, day out. In some ways I felt sorry for the diplomatic staff: while our deployments were six months, they would do eighteen months or even longer depending on their level of seniority. While we got out and saw some of the country, they generally saw only the few square kilometres of the International Zone. When they left it, they travelled in the dark in the back of our vehicles until we could drop them and their bodyguards in the compound or as close to it as possible. Theirs was a siege mentality. The embassy, in the heart of the International Zone, was pretty much their world.
One warm evening, the ambassador invited the SECDET hierarchy to join him for crab gumbo on the embassy lawn. An American friend had offered to make gumbo, and they had decided to make an occasion of it. The seafood was obtained through various means and a huge pot greeted us in the kitchen when we arrived. Several of the embassy staff had been drinking heavily, and they greeted us warmly as we made our way out onto the grass.
The consul general, a DFAT veteran, sat next to me. He was a known drinker, who was constantly picked up from boozy evenings at the UK embassy and other venues. He started to speak in a slurred voice. He asked me about my previous time in Baghdad and the IED incident that had led to my premature return to Australia. After a couple of minutes of chatting, his tone suddenly became aggressive and he accused me of a being a ‘bloody fool’. He said that as I’d almost been killed the first time, I was an idiot to return to Iraq. I gritted my teeth and took the insults. While he might have been right in some respects, it was also a bit rich – I was the second-in-command of the combat team specifically assigned to protect him.
*
In mid-August the Boss came back from another session in front of the board of inquiry. When he returned to the Cove, he was strangely relaxed. They had obviously roasted him. Maybe he had not had enough sleep.
He explained to me some of the ridiculous questions he had been asked, such as ‘Why did you move the body?’ He had to explain that in this circumstance, as Jake had a pulse, he was not considered a ‘body’, but rather a casualty that required hospitalisation.
I tried to take the pressure off him where possible, as so much of his time was consumed by the inquiry and managing the constant flow of questions from Australia and the headquarters at Camp Victory. In some ways it was professionally very rewarding for me, as I got to oversee most aspects of the day-to-day running of the combat team. This was much more responsibility than your average junior Captain ever takes on.
But even so, events must have been taking a colossal personal toll on the Boss. He had a phone in his accommodation that rang all hours of the night during the working day in Australia. None of the calls was urgent; the callers could have sent emails, or stayed late at work until morning in Baghdad and made the call then. But staff officers were filled with a sense of their own importance or the importance of the general they worked for. No-one could wait – they needed an answer now.
So the Boss fended off calls all through the night.
He had his character called into question. The media was accusing him of orchestrating a cover-up. Jake’s mother was accusing him of lying.
He had the combat team’s procedure for weapons-handling called into question, a policy that we had inherited from our predecessors, but which the Boss had insisted we rewrite to ensure it was appropriate and robust. We had spent days reviewing and rewriting this procedure before arriving in Baghdad, then nights when we first arrived ensuring it was current and the soldiers understood it. This seemed to be completely overlooked by the board.
The Boss confided in me that the brigadier had told him that his career would likely suffer, even if the board found no systemic issues or leadership problems. The Boss was then a senior major and waiting for confirmation that he had been selected for Command and Staff College the following year, which was the next career milestone. The brigadier had implied there was a good chance he would not be panelled on the course and his career would stall.
There seemed little acknowledgment that he had a combat team to run in the most dangerous city on the planet. Somehow, commanding 110 soldiers and officers played second fiddle to fronting the board of inquiry.
And that bloody phone kept on ringing through the night, ensuring the Boss never got more than a couple of hours’ sleep and that his mind was always buzzing. I could hear it ringing from my room. One day I went and unplugged it when he was out. It took him a couple of days to realise. He questioned me and I was immediately up-front. Yes, I had unplugged it; if they really wanted him, they could call the command post phone. He gave me a smirk that could have meant anything, and we never spoke of it again.
*
We hadn’t had another weapons incident since Jake was killed, not until the very day the board of inquiry asked the Boss whether these were repeated events. Then one of the boys had a ‘negligent discharge’ with his pistol – a classic case of someone fucking up and not thinking when he was going through his drills. He had accidentally left the magazine on when he went to clear the pistol, and when he released the working parts and fired the action, he fired off a round – straight into the unload bay, an open drum full of sand, specifically designed and placed to catch bullets if such mistakes are made.
It was another mishap – a mistake that seemed to coincide with and exacerbate other problems. This almost seemed to be a theme of our time in Baghdad.
14
ESCALATION OF FORCE
KAYS JUMA, AN IRAQI-BORN AUSTRALIAN, was a professor of agriculture who spent half his life in Adelaide and the other half in Baghdad. He worked at the university and lived only a few hundred metres down the road, on the Karadah Peninsula. In his seventies, he travelled with his elderly Australian wife, Barbara. He was planning on retiring in a few weeks and returning to Adelaide permanently.
One afternoon, he told his wife that he was going to the shops to get some milk and eggs. No-one knows why, but on approaching the 14 July checkpoint at the bridge over the Tigris, he didn’t stop for the banked-up traffic. In a city where everyone lived in fear of suicide vehicles, he continued to drive towards the private security vehicles. He didn’t stop. The security contractors claimed they flashed headlights, shouted, fired flares, and pointed weapons, but he only stopped when they shot him. It was a classic ‘escalation of force’ incident.
He died on the way to the Coalition hospital in the International Zone, the same hospital they had taken me to. Our blokes saw him being brought in in a civilian van. Nothing could be done.
By all accounts, it was an Australian security contractor who shot him. The company denied it, but they were probably protecting their own.
Another surreal and awful event: an elderly man, who had dual Australian and Iraqi citizenship and an Australian wife, shot dead in Baghdad, by an Australian.
Barbara Juma was left widowed in Baghdad; her three sons were back in Australia. ‘He was only going to get milk and eggs,’ she said when, three days later, we went to pick her up to take her to the airport.
That morning, three ASLAVS rolled out down to the end of the peninsula, where they stopped at a modest house with an elderly woman standing out the front with her suitcases. She had been told to expect army vehicles, but maybe she hadn’t
expected ASLAVs.
A small, frail lady, Barbara Juma was helped into the back of one of the vehicles with her suitcases before we drove her out to Bagdad International for the flight back to Australia.
‘He was only going to get milk and eggs,’ she kept saying.
*
A few days after this, one of our patrols shot up a car, killing a man and badly injuring three others. They did exactly what they should have, but it was all over the Iraqi press.
It was getting late in the afternoon, and a reconnaissance of the Iraqi Ministry of Trade was complete and our vehicles were leaving to return to the International Zone. Traffic was banked up at the ministry checkpoints as the ASLAV patrol rolled out of the main gates onto the main road.
As the ASLAV patrol passed through the gates of the ministry, a white four-wheel drive broke from a checkpoint. It accelerated towards the patrol, then swerved between the ASLAVs, and the boys opened fire, assuming it was a suicide vehicle.
They got back all geed up with adrenaline. I sat them down to put together the incident report. As we drew up a diagram of the ministry and the surrounding streets on the large conference table, they excitedly talked me through what they recalled.
Some thought they had been shot at from the car; others weren’t sure. Either way, it was clear that they had taken the correct steps before they engaged a vehicle that showed every sign of being a suicide IED. Even so, something about the incident didn’t smell right – they told me that there was more than one person in the car and that there was no detonation, although it had come close enough to do real damage.
In the compound, they showed me the ASLAVs. One soldier pointed out some bullet holes in the sandbag around one of the hatches. He thought it was confirmation that they had been shot at from the car. It took only a glance to see something was wrong. The bullets had torn through the sandbags from the wrong side – they were bullet strikes from the ASLAV operator’s side.
After the Blast Page 11