I never found out exactly what happened; I discussed my idea with only one person, but that very same day the brigadier called me in to say that he wanted me to lead the next team. So it was settled.
My first task was to put together a good crew for the third rotation. Technical intelligence is a discipline that requires specialists. First we needed an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technician, someone with a detailed understanding of explosives. On my team this was Pete, a very experienced air-force flight sergeant, a man who had joined the military in his late teens as an apprentice avionic technician and later shifted to EOD. He was highly intelligent, with a very precise view on explosives and a driven curiosity about the electronics behind the emerging IED technologies. His enthusiasm, mixed with his amicable nature, ensured I could always rely on him to get people on side.
Being air force also meant that Pete did not come from the same mould as his army peers, who were generally gruff and harder to work with. Importantly, he shared my views on how the team should run and what we needed to do. Like me, he had a young family whom he didn’t like spending time away from, but he knew this job was important – important enough to leave his wife and young boys for nearly a year. Due to his character and senior non-commissioned rank, he was the obvious choice to be the second-in-command of the team.
Next was the investigator, or ‘scenes of crime officer’, who brought an understanding of forensic recovery, biometrics and evidence preservation. I struggled to find the right bloke for the job. The defence investigative service had put out a request for an ‘expression of interest’ and then just sent the first person who applied. But I found I couldn’t take him to Afghanistan because, even after months of training, he failed to understand the fundamentals of the job. He put uncovered hands over evidence he was supposed to be preserving, broke the chain of custody of evidence, and failed to show any real understanding of how explosives worked. His replacement wasn’t much better and gave me ongoing problems throughout our eight-month tour. But he was a real character, a giant bald fellow with a shiny scalp, and what he lacked in experience and technical know-how, he made up for with enthusiasm. He gave us a lot of good laughs along the way.
My intelligence bloke was exactly the man I needed: a walking database of historic IED events and trends. He could recall the most obscure explosive incident from years earlier. I would take him with me to important meetings so he could back me up with facts while I prattled away. In classic intelligence corps fashion, he didn’t fare well out of the office. He needed to eat regularly and would get dizzy, surly and usually just stop talking unless he got enough to eat at three-hour intervals.
Finally, our team of four needed a tactical adviser, the bloke who should understand what the friendly forces were doing at the time of the incident and be able to assess what the enemy was doing or attempting to do. He should be able to liaise with commanders on the ground and speak their language when it came to discussing tactics.
This was me.
*
I constantly grappled with why I was going to Afghanistan. I had a young daughter, a beautiful wife … what was I doing? Beau put my problems in perspective.
Beau had been one of my junior crew commanders back in 2004 and we met up again during the training in Townsville. This would be his fourth deployment: three to Iraq, and this was his first to Afghanistan. He was going over as a patrol commander in charge of two or three ASLAVs and a key adviser on how armoured vehicles were best employed.
Beau was a larrikin in the extreme. He was of average height and build, with a shaved head. He spoke in a deliberate manner with a very occasional minor stutter – a trait I have seen in many highly intelligent, considered people.
Beau lived on the fringes of social norms, but not in a bad way – at least, not to my mind. His sense of humour was based purely on filth, and he had his quirks. His running joke was to see how much loose change he could stuff into his foreskin, after which he would jump on a table and let go of his penis so the change fell everywhere. I remember seeing him limping one Monday morning. When I asked him what had happened, he replied that he had tried to break his record and must have pushed in too many 50-cent coins.
He loved KFC … but only the chicken skin. He told me he had nearly crashed his car because his hands got so slippery from the grease that he couldn’t hold the wheel properly.
His filthy, irreverent jokes, crass behaviour (which usually involved one of his testacles appearing when it shouldn’t) and infectious laugh would regularly have us all in hysterics. He was always the one to take things too far.
But that was only one side of Beau. The other was always close to the surface. It was the highly professional soldier: intelligent, enthusiastic and loyal. He mentored and disciplined younger soldiers with ease, and advised and supported his superiors with an authority that belied his age and relatively junior rank.
As a young lance corporal, he was widely acknowledged as the best gunnery instructor in the regiment, a title usually only held by senior warrant officers or the regimental sergeant major.
In the compound, he demanded perfection from the junior soldiers. They looked up to him and hoped that when he switched back to being a larrikin they could be in on his jokes and clowning.
In my eyes, Beau was the quintessential soldier – a man who trained hard to do things that no-one but a soldier gets trained to do: to protect lives and take lives.
In Iraq, it hadn’t taken long before Beau had to kill. During the ambush at Tal Afar, after insurgents had sprung the ambush with a salvo of RPGs that somehow missed all the vehicles, Beau cut an insurgent in half with the .50 calibre on the remote weapon station. It was a remote system that had a counterintuitive sighting system, which I thought was damn near impossible to fire accurately on the move. Yet Beau had killed a man with precision while travelling at speed.
We caught up a few times during the Townsville training, although I noticed Beau missed a few days. When he returned, he confided that he and his girlfriend had lost their triplets. In a clinical, yet matter-of-fact way he told me how they had been ‘cut out’ of his partner.
I had been missing Crystal and questioning my decision to go on my third deployment. Despite the personal tragedy he’d just suffered, Beau was training to go on his fourth. He put things squarely in perspective for me.
Perhaps he was running away from things. Perhaps he was doing what he thought was right. Either way, Beau’s commitment to his profession could not be questioned. It was blokes like Beau that I was hoping to protect.
17
TARIN KOWT
SOMEHOW I HAD IT IN MY HEAD THAT WE would fly into a ‘superbase’ like the ones I had known in Iraq – Balad and Camp Victory. But Tarin Kowt was different. The Hercules dropped sharply, then throttled up to land on the sloping dirt strip. It didn’t look like much more than a gravel quarry cut out of the hillside. On the eastern side was a low tower and beyond it was the rest of the base.
On the western side, near a few squat buildings, a handful of helicopters were parked: Kiowa Warriors, small recon airframes that had been converted to light attack helicopters with a couple of Hellfire rockets under each stumpy wing; Apaches, the serious attack helicopters; a couple of Chinooks; and about half a dozen Black Hawks, a few used as medivac helicopters, the rest as transports.
I didn’t yet understand how important these helicopters would be for carrying out my job. Neither of the two previous teams had been deployed out to incident sites at short notice. But it wouldn’t be long before we had our first task.
My first impression of the base was that it looked as though it had been bought from Ikea. While there were a few older permanent buildings, most were sandy yellow shipping containers, arranged to make a little city. I had heard of the chalets, the buildings made of armoured shipping containers, but I hadn’t pictured how the place would look.
They were completely modular. Walls could be removed to make larger rooms. The mess was made
of about twenty containers. The accommodation was single containers joined together to make a series of rooms connected by a long hallway. I shared a room with two other officers. We had bunk beds that somehow all jammed into the long narrow space.
I had the bed by the large armoured door that would clunk and groan when anyone came in or out. I got used to it quickly, lucky in that I could sleep through most things, sometimes to my detriment. In Baghdad I had woken some mornings to hear everyone say, ‘Wow, that rocket hit close last night.’ I had blissfully slept through the whole thing.
We spent our spare time reading the most recent IED reports. Uruzgan province: for such a simple place, it seemed so complex. The provincial government was corrupt and vying for power with a ‘shadow’ Taliban government. The chief of police was really an illiterate warlord who would extort a fortune from people using the main road from Tarin Kowt to Kandahar.
Only a day before we arrived, one of the local police chiefs had blown himself and his deputy to pieces while trying to disarm a bomb. His trick of pulling at an IED with a hook on a short pole had failed him. It had worked many times before, but this time he inadvertently triggered the device. The boys told me how they watched locals gather remains from the site of the explosion and carry them up the hill to the local graveyard for burial. One man carried severed legs, while another carried a spinal column from which much of the flesh had been blown off. According to their religion, they must be buried before sundown.
The Australian, Dutch, French and US soldiers here trained and mentored Afghan soldiers, who worked out of the main base and about a dozen smaller patrol bases dotted through the surrounding valleys.
Most of the Afghan soldiers had come from the north of the country. They were brought into the province to fight the Taliban and stop the shadow government from coming to power through violence. Being from the north meant they could not be influenced by tribal affiliations, the issue that affected the local police. As in any culture with a strong tribal influence, Afghan allegiances lay first with their family and tribe, then with their profession – for this reason, the local police could not be trusted. But the soldiers did not have this issue. They came from many different tribal groups. While the Hazara, with their eastern Eurasian features, were most obvious, very few of the soldiers in the Afghan army’s 4th Brigade, the formation operating within the province, were of the local Pashtu tribal affiliation. The brigade even spoke a different language: Dari. The Dari-speaking soldiers regularly needed interpreters to speak with the Pashtu-speaking locals.
*
In my first week in Tarin Kowt, I volunteered to spend four days commanding a Bushmaster vehicle for a patrol up to Chora and back down through the Baluchi Valley. The route stopped at most of the key bases where Australian teams lived with their Afghan army counterparts.
We were up before dawn on the day we departed. The explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) guys needed a crew commander, so it made sense that I should jump in and take charge of their vehicle. But it had a remote weapon station on it, for which, frustratingly, I was not qualified. Commanding a vehicle with a weapon system you are not qualified to operate is a pretty big no-no. I would be driving around with my finger on the trigger of a weapon system with live rounds. I had used a similar system on the ASLAV, so it wasn’t completely foreign, but the only instruction I received, as I sat on the firing point to test-fire the gun before driving out the gate, was, ‘Just press that to charge the gun, flick the safety there and fire … yep, off you go.’ There was no point in making a fuss. I knew enough to be able to shoot when I needed to, and not to loosen off rounds when I didn’t.
The long convoy trundled out the back gate of the base towards the centre of Tarin Kowt. The locals watched nervously as the Bushmasters, ASLAVs and armoured trucks chugged past, churning up the dust. It was hot, getting into the peak of summer. Locals stared; some in the centre of town looked down from one of the few two-storey buildings. They talked into mobile phones, likely telling family about a convoy coming through town – either to warn them to stay inside or to inform the local Taliban commanders.
From Tarin Kowt we trundled out into the dasht (the local name for the raw, scorched desert). We followed this to the north-east and up to Chora, where we stopped for the night. We took up a position high on the bald hillside looking down onto the Chora crossing, and then further to the township itself, a small regional centre made up of mudbrick houses, or ‘qalas’.
These dwellings sat as they had for many hundreds of years, amid the irrigated greenbelts fed by the river as it wound its way from the higher mountainous country in central Afghanistan. Qalas were compounds surrounded by high walls. They varied in size; some were quite large, with five or six rooms. Many had a main area where the inhabitants cooked over a clay wood-fired stove. Months later, I spent an afternoon in one of these qalas. Besides nearly shooting a dog when it startled us as we attempted to enter a secondary compound, we spent a peaceful few hours during a particularly chaotic time out with a Dutch Marine patrol.
Qalas were designed so that the inhabitants could be almost self-sufficient; they had gardens with small crops, and animals were kept in smaller, adjoining compounds. I was surprised that, even on the hottest days, the mudbrick walls of the houses were cool to touch. They caught the breeze that blew through the valleys and were surprisingly well constructed, many looking like professionally rendered walls you would find back home. I was sure that many in Australia would think these qalas were a little spot of paradise – and would likely pay top dollar for a weekend in such a rustic getaway.
The area was framed by looming, craggy mountain peaks that rose sharply from the river and farming areas. The lush, green, low-lying valleys or ‘green zone’ contrasted sharply with the dry, dusty dasht and the brutal, jutting mountain ranges.
The next day we pushed on, out past Nyazi and down past Cemetery Hill West, where a couple of Australian snipers and forward observers had nearly been killed about twelve months earlier when the local Taliban had caught them in a hide too far from any support.
About halfway through the valley we stopped the vehicles on the high ground in an overwatch position to support the infantry company as it patrolled down through the green zone. As we sat there baking in the sun, we had a view north-east through the valley, framed by sheer cliffs on either side. Every piece of irrigated land was owned and used by locals. Small plots, usually about a quarter of an acre in size, were used to grow crops all year round: a couple of crops of wheat or corn for food, and a couple of crops of poppies for money.
As we sat in our vehicles, binoculars up, turrets humming, trying to keep track of the infantry, suddenly there came a thump from the north. Even from a distance you could feel the air stiffen. About 2 kilometres up the valley on a dirt road, nothing more than a vehicle track, a cloud of dust and smoke appeared. Soon we got the call on the radio that a civilian vehicle had hit an IED. We packed up and drove to the site.
When we arrived, we learnt it was a family: about eight all up. Two adults and a group of children, ranging from teenagers to small children, were walking along the dirt track up to Chora. Their HiLux had hit an IED, which had detonated under its left front wheel. The explosion had destroyed the front half of the vehicle, but, incredibly, the family had been spared any serious injury. Our medics determined that no-one had sustained any life-threatening injuries – perhaps a few broken ribs, some blood noses, and a few cuts and bruises. The father explained that they were not from the area but a few hours’ drive north, so they couldn’t rely on the locals for help. They just picked up and started walking home.
It was sickening to consider what might have been if the vehicle had struck the device with its rear wheel or if the explosives had been offset from the trigger, like so many in the area – designed to blow up under the centre of a vehicle.
After the area was cleared, I went forward and recovered what I could of the device. Lollies and small children’s trinkets were scattered ac
ross the road – the kinds of things Eva would have been playing with. There were also fragments of a yellow palm-oil container used to hold the homemade explosive charge, but not much else.
The road also gave a few tell-tale signs. A line of rocks crossed the track about 10 metres either side of the strike – probably to warn locals. Since the family had been from another part of the province, they had driven past the line, unaware of the bomb waiting in the wheel rut. We will never know for whom it was intended – maybe our convoy, maybe the Afghan police or army.
*
We spent our second night in the dasht out the back of one of the patrol bases – a few huts surrounded by Hesco walls and a few watch-towers where the Afghan soldiers manned machine guns and watched for Taliban attack.
The following day we moved down south towards the Baluchi Pass, where the valley narrows as two mountain ranges converge. The qala walls closed in on either side of the road. A remote weapon station was useless in tight areas like these, so I was constantly up and down from the front seat to the cupola in the centre of the vehicle. When the road got tight, I was up with my rifle on my shoulder, peering over the walls to make sure no-one caught us out by firing an RPG or tossing a grenade from behind a mudbrick wall.
It was hard work. The vehicles were not designed for comfort, and going from the seat to the centre cupola was tricky to do in body armour. I had to reach over and up and heave myself from the seat to a standing position. It was made harder by the need to wear my four-point harness while I was seated, and then untangle myself from it when I stood up.
After the Blast Page 13