Moving on to Richard, I took a quick look at his battered and bruised arm. He was in a fair bit of pain, but conscious and alert. ‘Finish your primary survey. Run with a suspected fractured humerus. Immobilise it with a sling or collar-and-cuff. Do a GCS and pupil reaction. Let us know how it goes. If he’s sweet, we might be able to give him methoxy or morph.’
Then I moved on to Harry. He was the most serious casualty, and where I’d allocate my attention. He had severe pain in his lower back and was still a bit dazed. I took the lead from the first-aider and went into my own assessment, from the beginning. After a quick pat-down and a confused chat, I determined there were enough indicators to suspect spinal injury. I sized up a spinal collar and fitted it around his neck to keep the head still and prevent further damage.
The other first-aiders fed me updates from their casualties; they were in fairly good shape and the first-aiders were doing a shit-hot job, so I didn’t need to give any direction, just listen out for changes in status.
The boss had called a CASEVAC at this point, which was due in fifteen minutes. The rest of the lads had pushed out and started pepper-potting up the steep sides of the valley for overwatch protection. A few exchanges of gunfire rang out as they moved.
Tom was improving rapidly, so he sat next to the headquarters group where they could keep an eye on him. Richard was helped into the passenger seat of an LRPV for extraction, and Harry was loaded onto a stretcher and laid across the back of the car. I swiftly prepped a methoxyflurane whistle for the painful trip. I couldn’t give him IV morphine because it would mess with his neuro status; he needed to be alert for assessment back at the surgery. I knelt on the back of the LRPV, holding him in place as the car started the long, slow journey back up the mountain to the CASEVAC landing zone.
It was a well-known tactic of the Taliban to initiate an ambush with IEDs, and the lads were still racing to regain the initiative and take the higher ground. We were in a very fucking precarious position. Gunfire reverberated around the enclosed valley. The echoes made it sound like we were in a fight to the death. I had my back to the action, so couldn’t tell where the fire was coming from. I flinched with every gunshot.
I was shitting myself. I was so petrified that I should have been pissing my pants, but even my urethra was too scared to unclench. My sweet, perfectly sculpted ass was literally pointing up in the air as I knelt over to keep Harry steady. I was certain that I was going to be shot square in the money maker. My mind raced; I’d seen the devastation that a 7.62-calibre AK47 round can cause. I imagined the bullet entering my butt cheek and exiting through the front.
Fuck! My wedding tackle! I don’t want my dick to get shot off. I might need it one day!
I had absolutely zero control and even less influence over my fate. I wrestled with my options, but there were none. It seems weird now, but I grabbed Harry’s body armour and laid it over his groin. After a few moments of panic and coming to terms with my plight, I leant over his upper body as a tremendous calm washed over me.
I’m already shot, or dead. The only thing left to do is be Harry’s human shield.
As I bent over him, I caught a glimpse of the look in his eyes. He was spent. He’d tapped out. ‘I’m over this shit, man. Just get me the fuck outta here, Tezz,’ Harry said.
‘I got you, brother. Hang on for a few more minutes. We’re nearly there,’ I replied.
I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye. The lads were defying physics and physiology, monstering up the steep mountainside to secure our safe passage to the LZ in the higher mountains. One of the blokes’ powerful, loping gait was hard to miss. Ben Roberts-Smith was chewing up the mountainside as he pushed upwards. At the time, he’d already earned a Medal for Gallantry for exploits in the previous year’s trip to Afghan. Later, in 2011, he was awarded the Victoria Cross for charging enemy machine-gun positions, Albert Jacka style, during an in-fucking-tense stoush.
We slowly drove up the winding path. The driver had to keep the car slow and steady to minimise bumps that could damage Harry’s spine further. ‘How’s the speed, Tezz?’ the driver shouted.
Step on the fucking gas; just get us the fuck outta here.
That’s what I was thinking, but this is what I said: ‘This is a good speed; keep this pace up.’
We finally reached the secured LZ a few protracted minutes later. The CASEVAC was very close now. A team laid the stretcher on the ground and I rifled through my kit like the Tasmanian Devil for my IV gear. I practically stabbed an IV into Harry’s arm; there was no time to set up a bag of fluids before extraction. Just as the CASEVAC chopper hovered to the ground, I managed to draw up a vial of prochlorperazine into a syringe and jam it into the IV. This drug was an anti-emetic, to stop Harry vomiting during the flight; violent vomiting could further damage his spine.
Richard was already loaded into the chopper as we moved Harry forwards on a stretcher. He said something to me and shook my hand, man-thumb style, as the stretcher was loaded in, but I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the chopper blades. I stepped back and handed over all the information to the CASEVAC crew before retreating as the chopper lifted off in a whirlwind of dust and disappeared into the distance.
There was a feeling of relief and elation as we packed up the LZ, trading fist bumps and excited stories about our version of events.
‘You must have been shitting yourself on the back of that car, Tezz,’ one of the lads said.
‘Dude! I thought my ass was grass with all that gunfire! I was nearly Little Miss Pissy Pants on that one,’ I replied, laughing.
There was a surprise in store – the gunfire was actually friendly. The lads had been pumping rounds into caves just in case there were Taliban hiding inside. We all shared a nervous laugh at my expense, even though the threat of Talib fire had been very real.
We later learnt that Richard, with the suspected fractured arm, had only suffered severe bruising and didn’t need to return to Oz. Harry’s suspected spinal injury had been fairly serious, so he was evacuated back to Australia, but he made a decent recovery after a few hard months of physio.
After the LZ was cleared, we rejoined the rest of the convoy down in the valley. The radio chatter hinted that the Taliban had laid more IEDs, so the going was painfully slow. Jake, the explosive-detection guy, had to sweep and clear the road, metre by metre, before the cars could safely move forwards. Razz, the loveable explosive-detection Labrador, had his sniffer working overtime to clear the path.
A puff of dust erupted into the sky, just around the bend from my view, followed by a deceptively benign boom.
‘Kilo, Kilo! Get the Kilo up the front of the convoy right fucking now!’ the radio screamed.
Again.
I was only a few cars behind the front of the convoy this time, so I grabbed the med kit and sprinted towards the scene for everything I was worth.
Razz had sniffed out another pressure-plate IED, again lying in a shallow creek bed that crossed the road. He’d raced back to Jake, his handler, who was only ten metres away. Razz was excited because he was such a good boy for finding the bomb, but then raced back to the creek and started scratching, tail wagging. The pressure from his scratching paws detonated the IED.
This scene was one that the movies did get right. There wasn’t much left of poor Razz. The explosion sent rocks and Razz’s fur flying everywhere, showering the nearby cars. Jake had been blown off his feet and temporarily knocked unconscious on the ground. A first-aider was tending to him as he began to stir.
That’s when I arrived.
Jake was in shock, screaming out for Razz as he tried to fight off the first-aider. I quickly took over and moved between him and the gruesome pool of blood and mashed globs of flesh to block his view. He didn’t need to see that. He clawed at my body armour, trying to see what had happened to his beloved best mate. It hadn’t registered yet. He tried a few more times to fight me off, but his attempts grew weaker and weaker as grief settled in. I pulled
Jake’s head into my shoulder to block the view, as tears streamed down his face and blood trickled out of his nose onto my armour.
‘Razz, what happened to Razz? Where’s Razz?’ he sobbed.
‘He’s gone, brother. Don’t look over there. Don’t torture yourself,’ I said.
If I’m honest, I didn’t want to look either.
‘Oh, fuck . . . No! You’re lying – he was just there,’ he pleaded.
He lay back on the ground, utterly distraught. I let it soak in for a moment. ‘Razz did a great job, brother, but right now I need you to just think about you. Are you hurt anywhere?’ I asked.
I’d positioned myself near Jake’s head because he kept turning over to look at the guys now placing rocks over what was left of Razz. But as Jake looked down at his body, he could see bloody chunks of Razz’s flesh and fur splattered all over his clothes, which made him even more combative. After a few moments of Jake fighting and trying to push me away, I did a thorough assessment, checking for wounds. Physically, he was fine, which was a miracle given his close proximity to the blast. But as I checked his pupils, I could see that he was shattered. His eyes had that same distant look that I’d seen on Harry earlier that day. He only gave vague, one-word responses to my questions; he was shell-shocked, and didn’t want to play this game anymore.
A few long and sombre hours later, we arrived at our night harbour. The damaged LRPV had been towed to this position for extraction by Chinook helicopter. Tom, the main gunner from the first blast, was fine, apart from damaged eardrums. Jake had damaged eardrums as well but was not in good shape. He’d been blown up twice in one day, and lost his best mate. I gave him some Valium to help calm his nerves.
Later that evening, I sat around in the night harbour thinking about Harry’s injuries and how Razz had died. I had dark, dried splotches of Jake’s blood on my body armour. Patches of Razz’s bloody fur dotted my clothes; I could still smell the iron in his blood amid that pleasant dog aroma and unpleasant waft of burnt fur. I tried to pretend that it didn’t bother me, but it did. My new-found frostiness was prone to melting. I scanned over the shorthand treatment notes that I’d written for Harry in my few spare moments after he’d been evacuated.
What about Harry’s family? What happens if he can’t use his legs anymore?
Fuck, dude, the broken bond between man and his best friend is some heavy shit.
I quickly compartmentalised these thoughts into the ‘deal with it later’ tray. I’d mastered the art of detachment, so instead I just obsessed over how I could’ve treated the casualties better. I wished to fuck I’d had time to rig up that IV bag and write handover notes, before extraction. I was extremely, irrationally, pissed at myself for not getting it done.
The rest of the trip back to base was business as usual: sniper missions, narrowly avoiding ambushes and a short ‘all guns blazing’ contact.
In October 2007, we were only a few weeks from rotating home but an undisclosed situation popped up that a medic had to stay behind to deal with. The situation was due to last an extra few weeks over our planned return date. I volunteered; I didn’t really want to go home just yet – I was enjoying myself way too much – so the decision to stay a little longer was a no-brainer. Besides, it was great catching up with the incoming SAS blokes as we helped with their transition into country.
I went on another SAS nursery patrol to the Chora Valley, and a mission with the commandos in the weeks that followed, but nothing overly dramatic happened. I felt slightly nervous on these last few missions; I was so close to the end of my rotation that I could taste it. It would’ve been both tragic and ironic to get myself injured or killed at this point, so I was more careful than usual.
The regimental sergeant major of Special Operations Command (the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in the Special Forces) made a point of stopping to talk to me. He’d also been a medic back in his younger days, so we had some good yarns. I really liked the bloke, but I wished he’d just leave me alone. I hadn’t had a haircut for the entire deployment, so he was insistent that I get a trim before I went home – something that was not going to happen. I ducked and dodged him a few times before my flight out and managed to make the great escape.
After a few days’ stopover at a Middle Eastern location, I was on a return flight to Australia. I’d walked away from the War on Terror unharmed, and unshorn.
13
IT’S A CELEBRATION, BITCHES
There were no crowds or fanfare to greet us when we got home. I never got a fancy gong ceremony – my war medals came in the mail a year later. Two other Secret Squirrel dudes and I battled the customs bureaucracy at Perth airport. We’d rotated back weeks after the main SAS element left Afghan, so it felt like an anticlimax to such an exciting time. I watched the masses rush around at the airport – girls checked their reflections in the mirror to make sure they were still pretty and tardy punters rushed towards their departure lounge as if missing a flight were more important than finding a peace solution in the Middle East. Senses were assaulted with bright colours, intense smells and loud advertising messages. It was a shock to the system, in contrast to Afghan, where the idea was to remain unseen, un-smelt and unheard. Everyday problems just didn’t seem so important anymore.
I was ecstatic to be home on a week’s leave in Whyalla, but I wanted to keep the rest of my accrued leave for the summer-holiday period. The week was a blur of partying and drinking absinthe – not the fake stuff; the good shit I thought customs might confiscate. But they let me keep it after scrutinising it suspiciously. The label on these bottles of absinthe declared that they contained wormwood, a reputed hallucinogen. Myself, Bodz, Wayno and his two younger brothers ingested the potent concoction. It only took two drinks each to feel the alcoholic effects, but if we did hallucinate, none of us remembered owing to the memory blackouts. From what we can piece together, one of the lads thought he’d been kidnapped and Wayno lost all sensation in his legs. So, maybe the wormwood did its thing after all. Fuck if we can remember seeing green fairies, though.
A vague sense of discontent had been brewing within for the last few years. I’d worked with enough experienced soldiers to realise that every soldier has a shelf life. And there were only three outcomes if you exceeded your expiry date: you’d sacrifice your marriage and personal life for the job; you’d be killed in the line of duty; or you’d become an old dog who couldn’t learn new tricks in civilian life.
I looked at my military career like an athlete: it’s better to retire on top. So I put in my discharge a few weeks later. There was a six-month cooling-off period between submitting the paperwork and ‘pulling the pin’, so I requested a new posting somewhere else for my last few months at the start of 2008. I didn’t want to leave the SAS, but the medical troop were so short-staffed there that if I’d stayed until my last day, they’d have been short a medic for the rest of the posting period. I didn’t want to fuck my mates over, so I took the hit.
Wayno and I planned an American holiday for January 2008. Wayno had joined the army as a combat engineer and was deployed to East Timor while I was in Afghan, so we both had coin burning holes in our pockets and a taste for some R&R. We braved the cattle-class flight to Los Angeles and found ourselves paralytic in a Los Angeles nightclub. The club loved our Aussie drunken shenanigans, but when closing time was called we faced the long pilgrimage back to the hotel at 2 a.m. Downtown LA was seething with crack-heads and gang-bangers as we stumbled through the dangerous streets. The riff-raff poked their heads out of the dark alleys, eyeing us off like we were Happy Meals.
As we walked, I glared at Wayno like he’d eaten my last French fry. He uncomfortably glanced at me a few times, but I held my gaze.
‘What?’ he finally asked, annoyed.
‘What the fuck are you staring at?’ I replied dryly.
He got the joke. A wry grin spread across his face as he spear-tackled me onto the pavement. We jostled around, getting each other in headlocks, arm-bars and t
ittie twisters, sneaking in a few cheeky rib punches when the solar plexus was exposed.
The druggies and gang-bangers receded into the darkness.
We called a momentary truce and continued down the sidewalk. But then Wayno kicked my leg, so I tackled that fucker into a bush. More wrestling moves and play-fight face-punching ensued.
The druggies must have thought we were crazy!
We somehow made it back to the hotel, full of wallet and un-intruded of anus. The next day, we realised that our lunacy was the only thing that saved us from being another statistic.
The next night, we stayed at the Hollywood Holiday Inn and hit the ethanol, hard, at the Saddle Ranch on Sunset Boulevard. Fair warning, I’m about to shamelessly name-drop here. We partied with Maurice Greene (the Olympic sprinter) and Neal McDonough (the dude from Walking Tall, Desperate Housewives and Band of Brothers). We mercilessly gave Shannon Noll shit for losing his licence while driving his Big Black Shiny Car and narrowly escaped a bar brawl when the band Unwritten Law befriended us, incited a riot and then invited us back to Chateau Marmont for one of their famous all-night benders. We couldn’t join them, though; we had to catch a plane to Mexico a few hours later.
Wayno was violated at the airport. Mexican customs went through his luggage with a fine-toothed comb. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about – we were in Cancún, Mexico. The cab driver from the airport greeted us with: ‘Hey, mayn, ju wan some weed, ju wan some blow?’ We politely declined.
The next night, we kicked off at the Cancún Hard Rock Cafe. The Hard Rock was miles away from the next club, so we started to walk. The trek was long and arduous, and nature called halfway through the slog. We both stopped on the shoulder of Cancún’s main highway to take a slash.
Mid-piss, Wayno joked, ‘All we need now is the Policía to bust our ass.’
Bad Medicine Page 14