The seatbelts were important in a strike, to stop you flying around the inside of the vehicle. The force of a blast was enough to kill a man by smashing his head into the roof of the vehicle. When you were in the cupola, a blast was likely to throw you out of the vehicle, but unlikely to kill you. Lower limb injuries were common for crew commanders whose vehicles were hit by IEDs while they were standing in the cupola.
The force of an explosion is something that humans don’t generally experience and can’t really comprehend – what gases moving at thousands of metres per second will do to an armoured vehicle and its occupants. It was still something that I didn’t fully understand myself. Yes, I had been injured by a blast, but my experience of it was limited by my loss of consciousness. I had seen grisly images from US post-mortems of soldiers killed in strikes: photographs and X-rays of crushed necks and heads; spines compressed and driven into brains; soldiers having been pulled from vehicles following a blast appearing almost untouched but stone-cold dead from the acceleration of the vehicle into the air and the inertia that threw them into the roof of the vehicle, breaking their necks and fracturing their skulls.
The blokes in the back showed little sympathy for my contortions as I struggled from the seat to the cupola. On a couple of occasions I was asked if I could stop jumping up and down and just close the cupola hatch so the aircon would work better. Thanks, fuckers.
We stopped when one of the Australian mentors working with the Afghan soldiers spotted two suspicious locals. The Afghan soldiers shot at them and they ran off towards a qala. They vanished in the maze of aqueducts and low walls. A corporal was standing next to the same qala when one of the Afghan soldiers spotted something on the low roof just next to his head. It turned out to be three 82-milimetre mortars, old Russian ones, rigged up with detonating cord and a Russian grenade fuse. It was all ready to go except for a wire to trigger it. By pulling the wire, a small hammer would strike the detonator, which would start the explosive train. The detonating cord would ignite and feed into the noses of the mortars where the explosive fill would be set off, sending the fragmentation from the mortars flying into the air at thousands of metres per second. An ear-splitting crack would shock the air for kilometres around, probably killing anyone standing within 5 metres, and wounding anyone within 100 metres.
Further south, where the valley opened out again into the Tarin Kowt bowl, devices like this were regularly left with the wire tied across a path, or in abandoned buildings. An unsuspecting soldier was likely to trip the device with his foot.
We walked from our vehicles down a steep hillside to the qala where the mortars were found. I packed them in a plastic bag, wearing gloves so as not to contaminate the device with my fingerprints, and we trudged back up the hill to the vehicles.
Those hills were harder to climb than they looked. We were working in an area considerably higher than most places in Australia: 1400 metres or more. With the weight of the mortars in my pack, I was exhausted after the few-hundred-metre climb back to the vehicles, even though I considered myself pretty fit.
We drove back through the dasht the way we came so that we could refuel at Chora, then headed back down to Tarin Kowt. These four days had given me a first glimpse of the countryside and its inhabitants. I had got a taste of the harsh environment the Afghan people lived in. I had seen a young family inexplicably saved from death or maiming. I had started to gain an understanding of what local Afghans endured every day, when a simple trip down one of the dirt tracks linking the population centres could have life-changing – even life-ending – results.
The long hours I spent trundling through the dasht in one of the rear vehicles in the convoy on the return to Tarin Kowt gave me a lot of time to think. I used it to develop a strategy to tackle the challenges I faced in the province. I now had a fair understanding of the environment I was working in, and I was even more convinced that my team had a significant role to play and that we could save lives.
*
Journal entry: Eva is 1 year and 3 months. I spoke to her and Crystal today. I had the feeling that Eva didn’t quite understand who I was – well, what did I expect?
As I travelled through the Afghan countryside, I was taken by how cute the local children were. We were constantly passing them as our patrol trundled through the built-up areas. It made me miss little Eva even more.
Like I did last time, I had told Crystal I would be spending my time working in a large base behind a desk and not doing anything dangerous. She was pissed at me when I finally called her after getting back – both because I hadn’t called her for almost a week and, more importantly, because my cover of a safe desk job had been blown.
But she also had some news to pass on. She was pregnant. Somehow we had timed it perfectly: I had knocked her up in the month before I left. Her due date meant that I should be back in time for the birth. Should be … it would be close.
More than ever, I felt I had to achieve something in this job: I had to make a difference, have a strategic impact, write reports for everyone from corporals to generals – help save lives. I was buggering up being a husband – leaving Crystal to go through the whole pregnancy alone. So I had to do something right.
18
THE LAB
WORK HAD ALREADY PILED UP BY THE time I got back to the lab. IED components were brought in to us from all over the province by explosives ordnance teams, Dutch, Australian and US patrols, the Afghan army, the Afghan police and various Special Forces units. I was amazed at how inventive the insurgents were in turning junk into deadly devices. We received complete bombs that EOD teams had managed to separate with ropes and hooks: bags full of scraps of yellow plastic, crushed batteries and old Iranian audio wires from bombs that had gone off under vehicles; ingenious anti-tamper switches that had failed to operate; rockets; bullets; RPG rounds; mines; and directional charges designed to explode and shoot forth scrap metal, bullets, nuts and bolts.
Sometimes the Afghan locals would arrive at the front gates with complete IEDs and try to exchange them for money. There were times when these devices were armed and all it would have taken was for someone to press the pressure plate unwittingly and the thing would have gone off.
Our lab was little more than a large room with a table for reverse-engineering the devices, a photographic copy stand, some simple hand tools, an industrial X-ray machine and explosive identification equipment.
We had rooms for storing evidence before it was ‘back-loaded’ to the more technical labs in Kandahar and Bagram. Another room was our office, where we spent most of our lives, writing reports and trawling through old ones trying to identify trends. Out the back was a shipping container in which we stored any explosives that came back from the field. Every month or so, we would blow up the leftovers on the range at the back of the base. If it was a unique charge, like a shaped charge, or of an unusual chemical make-up, we would send it to Kandahar for testing.
Some days saw a seemingly endless procession of people dropping off remnants of IEDs. A report was written on each one. People were interviewed: where did the IED incident occur? At what time? On what date? Who was involved? Were there casualties? No explosion was an isolated occurrence – there were always links to be made.
The more we understood about the IEDs in the province, the more we could pass on to the people who worked out in the patrol bases: the infantry, artillery forward observers, engineers and armoured corps blokes who spent most of their time ‘outside the wire’. The EOD teams would have a better understanding of what they could expect to find and the best ways of ‘rendering safe’ the devices. Tactics could be developed to minimise the threat.
That all came under the ‘force protection’ banner. But the real value in what we did was the technical intelligence. This involved identifying trends, grouping incidents through commonalities in fabrication or location, identifying the insurgents we were targeting, and, if we were lucky, linking incidents through fingerprints or DNA found on the recovered components. This re
quired detailed reporting and thorough analysis. It was hard, unglamorous work sifting through old reports, writing new ones and photographing and cataloguing evidence. Nothing sexy, just hard work. But slowly we started to see the trends.
My intelligence analyst was the first to spot one: a road in the Mirabad valley. The past three years had seen a series of strikes and bomb recoveries on a particular short length of dirt road. First the insurgents had used command wire devices, then anti-tamper devices, then radio-controlled IEDs. Looking through the reporting, you could see the bombmaker responsible had the same way of wrapping electrical tape around his battery packs and anti-tamper switches. He targeted Afghan police using the route because they would generally attempt to recover devices – hence the anti-tamper switches. He changed his tactics as new techniques filtered up from Kandahar.
Reports of insurgent IED trainers moving through the Mirabad area matched changes in fabrication and emplacement techniques. Reports of five brothers who were emplacing devices for the Taliban matched the number of footprints and triggerman locations found at sites.
Slowly our picture of the province grew more detailed. In Mirabad, anti-personnel devices targeted police. There were large buried bombs up the Baluchi Valley, with the insurgents in the northern end preferring pressure plates with bare copper wire, and the insurgents halfway up the valley using small anti-personnel mines to trigger their devices. In Deh Rafshan, insurgents used directional devices to target dismounted patrols, and these tactics were followed all the way up to the mouth of the Baluchi Valley.
There were small IED cells operating throughout the province. Some were hard-line Taliban; others emplaced the devices for cash or to prevent scrutiny or reprisal; others just wanted to stay onside with the Taliban because they knew the Coalition forces would not be there forever. Very slowly we started to understand them all.
The biggest problem we had was the quality of the reporting. Because we weren’t getting out to sites, we were relying on whoever was on the ground. Through no fault of their own, everyone had a different way of writing a report.
Infantry patrols who were hit in Baluchi reported on tactics – what they were doing; what the insurgents were doing – but they failed to detail anything about the device.
Engineers and EOD guys tended to write very thorough reports about the device but failed to talk much about tactics and regularly just gave us photographs of a hole in the ground and nothing from the surrounding area.
A Dutch public engagement team involved in an attack on a town meeting in Deh Rahwod focused on who was killed and what their affiliations were but failed to talk about either tactics or the device used, even though it was a very unusual motorcycle-borne bomb.
Bushmaster in culvert.
To resolve this problem, we needed to get out to significant incidents. In doing this, we would be breaking new ground. I spent a lot of my time lobbying every commander with a role to play: the person who ran the command post, to ensure we were informed when something happened; the operations officer, to gain permission to go; the aviation liaison officers, to secure seats on helicopters; infantry commanders, so it would not be a surprise when we arrived. I even procured an old truck to get us to the helicopter landing zone in a hurry. For a while I was a man on a mission, and it wasn’t long before my bull-headed stubbornness paid off.
*
Tragically, two Australian soldiers were wounded in an IED strike up in the Baluchi Valley. We got the call that they wanted us out there. On landing, we were met by one of the diggers from the patrol at the fringe of the green zone. A Bushmaster sat in the middle of the dirt track with its nose in a large culvert. Its front wheels had both been blown over 100 metres in opposite directions. The casualties, with broken legs and concussion, had been evacuated by the time we arrived.
This was the first time I experienced what I would later realise was one of the strange characteristics of a bomb site. It was as if a hush had fallen over the whole valley. The place was silent except for the subdued sounds of the soldiers as they got on with the administrative tasks that needed to be done to get their patrol moving again. Many settled down quietly in security positions away from the strike site. If it wasn’t for the armoured vehicle with its nose in a crater and the two wheel stations with broken and twisted suspension struts sitting 100 metres away on either side of the road, you might not have realised anything was going on.
Pete got the job of looking through the crater. I went and interviewed some of the soldiers involved. Within an hour we were done. We had all the information from the site we needed and the helicopter was inbound. We said our farewells and moved back out of the green and into the hard, baked desert, about 200 metres up a hill behind a small qala to a relatively flat spot where the helicopter could land.
Back at the base in Tarin Kowt, I attended the battle-group nightly brief with General Kelly, commander of all Australian troops in the Middle East, in attendance. I talked through how the incident had occurred and the casualties were sustained. I discussed the device: the size of the charge, and what the trigger was. I gave my assessment of what I thought the insurgents were trying to achieve with the bomb. I detailed all historic incidents that had occurred in the area and on that specific piece of road. Finally, I gave recommendations on how future patrols could minimise the chance of similar attacks.
There were many questions, including several from the general. I would like to think that this was information both he and the battalion commanding officer needed if they were to understand what had happened and inform the command group on how such incidents could be averted in the future.
I also sat in on the ‘After Action Review’. When my team’s deployment to the site was mentioned, the decision was unanimous – this should be automatic. For incidents where security was in place, we would deploy. I caught a conversation afterwards: ‘Why didn’t the last battle-group deploy the Weapons Intelligence Team?’ to which the reply came, ‘Oh, they didn’t understand the capability.’
After this we went out to bomb sites regularly. I carried a pager that beeped at me at all times of the day or night. I’d get called in to give advice on what to do with a discovery of explosives or rockets, or to discuss what to do about the Afghan police finding a rocket cache, or to hear how a Dutch patrol had had a bomb go off just near their patrol. Many times we’d reach the battalion command post, a short walk from my lab, and they’d brief me quickly on an incident and tell me a Black Hawk or Chinook was waiting for us. We’d bundle into our clapped-out old truck and be down at the flight line and in the air in minutes, thundering across the rooftops of Tarin Kowt, then out in the dasht before circling over a paddock next to a platoon that had had a strike, or a dirt track where a disabled vehicle sat astride a bomb crater.
Regularly we went out with either Dutch or Australian EOD teams. They would disarm or ‘render safe’ the IED and we would go in to do the ‘exploitation’ of the site. Getting helicopters was sometimes difficult. To get around this, we often went out to sites with the Dutch quick reaction force (QRF), a Dutch vehicle patrol that was always waiting to help when another patrol got into trouble – if they’d had a breakdown or hit an IED. It was a running joke that they were really the ‘slow reaction force’ because nothing happened quickly when you were driving around the province. Often they waited overnight before heading out, because driving the Afghan roads at night was extremely dangerous.
Even so, we organised to have two seats allocated for us with the Dutch QRF. While the Dutch used Australian-built Bushmaster vehicles, they set them up very differently to us. Ours were full of equipment that was strapped down. This was, except for some porn magazines, generally only ‘mission essential’ equipment: cases of bottled water, spare machine-gun barrels and night-vision equipment. The Dutch, on the other hand, had their carpenters build cabinets into any unused space. My seat was opposite the ‘coffee’ cabinet. Inside was a full suite of coffee equipment: an espresso machine that they powered b
y an inverter from the vehicle power, a small fridge for their milk, and an array of different types of coffee. To the Dutch this was all ‘mission essential’ equipment.
Bushmaster in secondary track.
The Dutch EOD blokes used to laugh when I travelled in their vehicle. While they jumped in and pulled off their body armour and helmets, and rarely wore seatbelts, I would get into my seat in body armour, helmet, ballistic goggles, fire retardant gloves and anti-flash hood. Once in my seat I would strap myself in as tight as I could and generally fall promptly to sleep. I have always been lucky to be able to sleep anywhere – even with the threat of having a chipboard cabinet of coffee apparatus flung at me if we hit an IED.
19
WORKING WITH COALITION FORCES
TWICE DAILY I WOULD VISIT THE AUSTRALIAN headquarters, first for the morning intelligence briefing and later for the operations brief. I would regularly brief them in turn on new insurgent trends.
When I wasn’t working in the lab or writing reports, I was out visiting different groups: the Dutch brigade headquarters, which directed conventional operations in the province; the Dutch staff officers, who were, on one level, my direct superiors, but who had little interest in or influence on what my team did; and the US aviation battalion that ran the Black Hawks, Kiowas and Chinooks from the far side of the airfield.
Some of my favourite visits were to the US Special Forces guys who lived and worked nearby. I would drive to the gate of their compound in our clapped-out truck, then begin the task of getting through the multiple checkpoints manned by Afghan police. All I could do was try to explain that I was there to see Scotty, my contact among the detachment.
‘Scotty?’ they’d ask.
‘Yes, Scotty’, I’d say.
‘Scotty?’
‘Yes, Scotty.’
After the Blast Page 14