The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  Having joined the vessel two hours earlier, this landlubber author is greeted by the Commanding Officer (CO), Commander Phill Henry, who says, ‘Welcome aboard. The WEEO [Weapons Electrical Engineering Officer Lieutenant Commander Jason O’Gorman] will be your escort for the first day or so and then you’ll have the run of the ship.’

  This is music to the ears of someone who is used to the strict media controls often imposed during Australian military embeds in covering the prolonged conflicts of the Middle East.

  Crossing from the dock onto the ship is like venturing into another dimension where time and space become more finite and the norms of a life on land are left behind as the routine of the mariner takes over. Once the gangway is secured and the mooring lines stowed, the warship becomes a fully self-contained space. This new world is a mere 138 metres long and 13.8 metres wide. The trials and tribulations of the planet are distilled into this steel box and the lives of the 228 people who inhabit it.

  As the warship glides past dozens of beached vessels and other boats crisscrossing the entrance to the harbour, every craft that passes by near the ship is regarded as a potential threat. No one wants a repeat of the USS Cole incident that took place in October 2000 when an explosives-laden terrorist skiff left seventeen sailors dead and the American destroyer badly damaged in the port of Aden in Yemen.

  Nothing escapes the attention of the watchful security detail as I move close to them high up on the ship’s gun direction platform. Even a local lad who floats by in what looks like an upturned car bonnet powered by nothing but a clear sheet of plastic mounted on a stick comes under close scrutiny.

  Dar es Salaam is a rapidly changing city, and the harbourside central business district – dominated by new mini-skyscrapers – is being transformed by a gaggle of cranes that are erecting office and apartment towers to service an emerging middle class. It is clear that some of the glittering prosperity on display in the megacities that have sprouted from the desert sands of the oil-rich Gulf states has finally trickled down the east African coast, at least as far as the once-destitute Tanzanian capital. China’s growing interest in Africa is also having an impact, along with the growing trade in oil, tourism, telecommunications and banking. Still, Tanzania’s per capita income is just $1813 per annum or $34.80 per week. Its forty-five million population is divided between Christian (sixty-one per cent) and Muslim (thirty-five per cent).

  Commander Henry has overall responsibility for the warship and is supported by a command team of seven officers for the deployment. In addition to O’Gorman and Schulz, they are the Executive Officer (XO), Lieutenant Commander Tina Brown; the Operations Officer, Lieutenant Commander Dale Axford; the Marine Engineering Officer, Lieutenant Commander Trevor Henderson; the Supply Officer, Lieutenant Commander Chris Duke; the Navigator, Lieutenant Scott Benstead; and the Flight Commander, Lieutenant Commander Kye Hayman. Each will be on duty virtually around the clock during the fourteen-day patrol.

  Brown is Henry’s second in command and takes over when the captain requires a break. A professional and well-regarded officer, she is also the conduit between the crew and the CO and spends a lot of time meeting with the senior sailor on board, Ship’s Warrant Officer Tim Brading. She also chairs many of the vessel’s planning meetings.

  Axford is a senior Principal Warfare Officer and most of his time is spent in the ops room planning and running the ship’s program. That includes positioning Darwin where and when it is supposed to be and with all relevant permissions signed off. He also coordinates all of the ship’s activities, brings the program together and juggles the demands of the various departments.

  The bookish Schulz manages the fighting aspects of the ship from his glowing consoles, and that includes boarding operations. He is the link between the ship and the boarding officer and controls everything the boarding party requires from the ship.

  Henderson keeps the ship operating and is responsible for all mechanical equipment, from the twin gas turbine engines to the soft serve ice cream machine in the galley. His knockabout personality makes the former sailor popular with all ranks.

  O’Gorman is responsible for the ship’s complex weapons and command and control systems, while Duke ensures that the warship has all that it needs to complete its mission, from fresh vegetables to toilet paper. Benstead plots the vessel’s course and is responsible for its safe passage anywhere in the world. Hayman manages the ‘birdies’, who operate and maintain the ship’s single Seahawk helicopter, designated ‘Orko’.

  The command team is supported by fourteen chief petty officers – the senior sailors who make the ship work.

  I can feel a tension in the air as the crew snaps back into its sea patrol routines and the African coast slowly fades from view. It is 17 May 2016 and HMAS Darwin has remained in port for just thirty-six hours. Not only has a much-anticipated shore leave been cut short by a precious twenty-four hours, but the crew was also denied permission to spend a night ashore enjoying the luxury of a hotel room, a proper bathroom and eating at a restaurant table. Instead, they were ordered to be back on board by 9 p.m., in response to an Australian government travel warning about the dangers of the Tanzanian capital following attacks against Westerners and potential political unrest.

  Little happens in the military outside of the chain of command. During operations, Henry answers to two direct bosses – the three-star commander of Headquarters Joint Operations Command at Bungendore near Canberra, and the two-star commander of Combined Task Force 633 at Al Minhad airbase near Dubai. All are guided by travel advice issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra and by intelligence gathered from other sources. RAN ships deployed to the Middle East work for Joint Operations Command (JOC) from the moment they arrive or ‘in chop’ into the area of operations until they depart or ‘out chop’ when they leave the operational area and revert to navy command under the fleet commander. In May 2016, Dar es Salaam was simply deemed too risky for Australian sailors to stay ashore.

  Tanzania has a troubled history and low-level terrorist attacks targeting Christians and tourists, especially in Zanzibar, have increased during the past two decades. In August 1998, hundreds died – including eleven in Tanzania – and thousands were injured when Al Qaeda terrorists simultaneously bombed the United States embassies in Dar es Salaam and in neighbouring Kenya. Parts of the country have also become havens for the Somali-based Al Qaeda affiliate group Al Shabaab. Tanzania has long suffered from grinding poverty and corruption. Many areas remain dirt poor despite the growing wealth on display in the capital and in tourist areas such as Stone Town in Zanzibar and the northern safari town of Arusha. Visitors to the capital are advised to exercise caution and to travel in groups after dark.

  The ship sails safely into open waters after passing several merchant ships in the Dar channel, including a huge Korean car carrier, and the local pilot departs, proudly carrying a new HMAS Darwin baseball cap. Darwin’s two gas turbine engines are cranked up to propel the vessel eastwards into her ‘patrol box’ at twenty-six knots, burning almost a litre of fuel per second.

  At 9 a.m. – precisely an hour after leaving the wharf – Commander Henry starts the day’s drills by ordering ‘action stations’. The ship’s company has six minutes, and not a second more, to be prepared for war. Response times can be a little tardy immediately following a port visit, but on this day the crew performs well and the ship gets to ‘action’ in five minutes and twenty-three seconds. Next comes ‘leaving ship stations’ where the crew musters at their designated location to prepare to abandon ship. I am assigned to Warrant Officer Tim Brading at the centre of the flight deck, where some smiling sailors complain loudly about having to share rations with such a large civilian should they need to take to the lifeboats.

  ‘How are we going to feed him?’ they ask the Ship’s Warrant Officer, whose nervous laugh says he really hopes it doesn’t come to that.

  HMAS Darwin is an Adelaide Class guided missile frigate built by the
Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, Washington, and commissioned into the RAN in July 1984. She is one of four American-built versions, with two more (HMA Ships Melbourne and Newcastle) built later at Williamstown dockyard in Melbourne.

  It takes a newcomer some time to find his way around the ship even with the help of the ‘Swaino’, Naval Police Coxswain Denis McKenna. Judging where the bow and stern are can be tricky from inside the vessel’s narrow passageways surrounded by noisy pipes and 228 other people. There are no portholes and the motion of the ship provides few cues as to which way is front and which way is back. Then there are the numerous steep ladders and tight hatches designed for young, slim and fit people such as most of Darwin’s crew, who must wait patiently for an older and less fit interloper to struggle up or down as he tries to find the wardroom, hangar or even the bridge without suffering a concussion or a fracture. It takes several days to unravel the mystery of which ladder, hatch and passageway leads to where.

  At thirty-two years of age, HMAS Darwin is in very good order and a testament to her builders, the navy’s engineers and maintainers and to a bold new support plan that closely bonds the ship and the civilian maintenance workers who look after her. The ship’s two General Electric LM2500 gas turbine engines – a derivative of the four GE engines used to power some Boeing 747 jumbo jets – can push the sleek fighting vessel through the water at up to thirty knots, and she has a range of 8300 kilometres, steaming at twenty knots. The frigate can be underway from cold in just thirty minutes and can counter simultaneous threats from the air, surface and submarines.

  At sea, the ship’s power plant and machinery are in the capable hands of the marine engineers, Chief Petty Officers Andrew ‘Goonga’ Sims, Robert ‘Turbo’ Pearson and Ty ‘Sparrow’ Davis, who are led by Trevor Henderson. A quick tour of the main machinery space with Sims reveals two sparkling gas turbines and shiny gearboxes and pumps that are so clean you could eat your dinner off them.

  The ship has a double hangar at the stern for two Seahawk helicopters, but for this operation she carries just one chopper from the navy’s 816 Squadron based at HMAS Albatross at Nowra in New South Wales.

  Two of the most vital pieces of equipment on board for operations in the Middle East and Indian Ocean regions are a pair of powerful rigid hull inflatable boats – known as RHIBs – mounted on each side of the ship. They are used for a variety of tasks, including the all-important boarding operations.

  Based on the US Oliver Hazard Perry Class warship, the frigate was designed as an aircraft carrier escort or so-called ‘missile catcher’ for the United States Navy. The six multipurpose ships acquired by the RAN have been the backbone of its fighting force for more than thirty-five years. Three remain in service – HMA Ships Darwin, Melbourne (III) and Newcastle, with Darwin due to be paid off in late 2017. Newcastle became the most capable frigate ever deployed by any navy when she set sail from Sydney for the Middle East in July 2017 following key upgrades that included the first ever deployment at sea of the Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicle and the new ‘Romeo’ model Seahawk helicopter.

  At 10.30 a.m. we are clear of Tanzanian waters and steaming northeast under a ‘reduced defence watch’. The ship is heading away from the African coast and towards her next patrol box to the north and west of the Seychelles as the crew settles into its routine. An introductory chat with Commander Henry fills in several blanks. These include what the patrol area will be and the fact that Darwin will be working closely with the French frigate FNS Nivôse and a French P-3 patrol aircraft flying out of Victoria in the Seychelles.

  Phill Henry is an experienced New Zealand-born former sailor who came up through the ranks of first the Royal New Zealand Navy and then the Royal Australian Navy before taking command of HMAS Darwin in June 2015. After six months of intensive preparation, the ship set sail on 30 December 2016, first going to India for the International Fleet Review before moving into the Middle East Region (MER) to conduct the patrols. The ship was due to hand over to HMAS Perth on 24 June before making her way back to Australia.

  ‘By the time we get home in mid-July it will have been in excess of sixty weeks operating, with nine weeks at home in Sydney,’ Henry says. ‘So the team is very much looking forward to getting home.’

  After a pleasant dinner of spicy pasta and apricot crumble with the skipper in his cabin just below the bridge and forward of the ops room, and a chat about the job, family and rugby (he is a proud All Blacks supporter) it is time for the evening heads of department brief. This is an opportunity for each department head, from the Executive Officer and Chief Engineer to the Flight Commander and the Ship’s Warrant Officer, to raise with the boss any issues affecting the ship and the well-being of those on board.

  Most report that ‘all’s well’ before the ship’s chaplain, Richard Quadrio, raises the sensitive subject of morale, which he says has been negatively affected by the strict stopover conditions imposed during the shortened stay in Dar es Salaam. No one else at the briefing backs the chaplain’s view about the impact of the truncated shore leave, including XO Tina Brown. Instead, she strongly supports the duty of care argument raised by the threat assessments and intelligence reports concerning the potential dangers after dark in downtown Dar.

  ‘There is always give and take particularly on operations when the operation has to win out,’ Brown says. ‘They are tough calls and we have a responsibility to the government to make those calls.’

  Phill Henry is well aware of the negative impact of the port visit on his crew and he has a plan in mind to make it up when the ship reaches the Seychelles.

  Following the introductory guided tour by WEEO O’Gorman it is time for me to scramble back down to the chiefs’ mess, which will be my home away from home for the next fortnight. After some brief introductions and a rundown on the facilities from ‘Swaino’ McKenna, it is time to transfer my worldly goods from a duffel bag into a small but perfectly formed metal locker and to settle in for the evening movie – Sisters, with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

  It is amazing how quickly a non-sailor can learn to unpack, undress and dress one-handed in a passageway without bashing into a bulkhead as the ship pitches and rolls in the rising swell. Unlike in prison, where the newest inmate is apparently confined to the bottom bunk, the newbie on board a RAN vessel is traditionally assigned the top rack. In the chiefs’ mess that means sleeping three high and two metres up, above two senior sailors in a compact six-rack cabin.

  ‘I wish I could have taken a picture of your face when you saw that rack,’ one of the chiefs says.

  When you are ten years old, the top bunk is a prized berth and scrambling in and out of it is never a problem, ladder or no ladder. Here there is no ladder so hoisting my hundred-plus kilogram bulk two metres off the floor with only a narrow steel rack frame for a foothold is not so easy. The bed is called a ‘rack’ for a reason – there is less than fifty centimetres of headroom, a steel wall down one side and the abyss on the other. There is a roll bar to prevent serious injury or death in heavy seas, and the only privacy is provided by a curtain.

  The roll of frigate and the constant hum of the ship’s machinery soon lull me into a sound sleep, but waking up for the first time in the top rack presents a whole new set of challenges.

  If defying gravity to get into bed isn’t tricky enough, then working with gravity to reach the floor in one piece and without disturbing my shipmates is downright scary. Because it is not possible to sit upright, the best method is to lie flat on one side and swing out into space while seeking a foothold, without disturbing the chief who is fast asleep below. After twenty minutes of weighing up the pros and cons of the exit strategy, and with a screaming bladder, it is time for me to give it a go. Once the initial foothold is secure it is then a matter of finding the edge of the bottom rack or a stool strategically placed at the end of the cabin for the other foot before landing safely and happily onto the deck and finally racing for the bathroom, known as the ‘head’.

 
After a couple of nights’ practice the bedding-down routine advances from comical awkwardness to what feels almost like gymnastic grace as this portly landlubber scuttles in and out of his rack with ape-like agility.

  The chiefs’ mess is located amidships, one deck below the officers’ mess or wardroom and adjacent to the ship’s galley. Unlike the rest of the crew who queue up and are served their meals by galley staff or the chaplain, RAN officers enjoy table service from a team of stewards, all of whom have other jobs, including as boarding party members.

  It is often said that the guided missile frigate must have been designed by an ex-chief because the chiefs’ mess is in the best location on the ship with the finest amenities. Even with fourteen chiefs on board the recreation area is more spacious and user-friendly than any other mess, including the wardroom. The chiefs’ facilities include a small combined galley area and dining room and a separate lounge area with a large flat-screen TV carrying numerous satellite channels. The head has two showers, two toilets, four sinks, a washing machine and a dryer. Internet is available via Wi-Fi, and a satellite phone enables direct contact with home and the outside world. This is a far cry from earlier days at sea when sailors could not talk with their loved ones for weeks or months on end and the only communication with home was via an unreliable snail mail service.

  From the chiefs’ mess it is one ladder up (maintaining three points of contact at all times) and through a circular hatch to the officers’ wardroom, which is located aft and one deck below the CO’s cabin and the ops room – the nerve centre of a warship. From the CO’s cabin it is just a short climb up to the bridge.