‘I was as close as I dared get with not much water underneath me. All I needed was a mechanical breakdown and I was going to drop the anchor in Somalia and that’s the last thing I wanted,’ he says. ‘Every captain in the navy must have half a dozen stories, if they’re honest and open, where they say, “I made a decision on this day, I planned for it, I did everything I could but it could have gone wrong.” In a guided missile frigate, all you need is something to go wrong with the plant and you can’t move and you can’t control that. I cannot control if there’s an immediate breach in a hose or a line or anything like that. It’s only in hindsight, when you pull away you go, “Gee, that went well.” And then you think, “But it could have gone so badly.”’
In the event the prisoners went ashore without incident and an hour later the ship was steaming quickly away from the African coast.
The nine pirates were on board Melbourne for almost four days and during that time Schlegel noticed that some of his sailors on guard duty were beginning to feel sympathy, almost like reverse Stockholm Syndrome, for the high seas bandits. Some provided them with extra ‘treats’ and there were even mumblings about whether sending them back to Somalia was the right thing to do.
‘In the movie, Tom Hanks initially said the pirates were “only fishermen” and that was something we had to manage,’ he says. ‘When they all saw the movie during that visit in Dubai a lot of them came back and subsequently said, “You know what, Sir, I didn’t realise that this is the sort of people they are.”
‘There is some merit to the fact they are only fishermen, but they’re also fishermen who will kill you in a heartbeat and not bat an eyelid and that was lost on some of my crew, not in a negative way, just in an educational way.’
An old-school navy officer, Schlegel joined the service in 1983 as a sixteen-year-old boy with his best mate straight from Scotch College in Melbourne. They went in under the junior recruit scheme at the HMAS Leeuwin campus in Perth, and Schlegel’s initial plan was to eventually become an airline pilot. However, when he began private flying lessons he quickly discovered that he had a fear of heights.
He began his career as a radar plotter and, like many who join the navy, he suffered terribly from seasickness. It took him years to learn how to manage the problem. In 1990 he transferred to the officer stream and worked his way up to reach what many regard as the pinnacle of their navy service – operational command of a warship.
His first command was Darwin and in August 2013 he was ‘crash posted’ to the frigate Melbourne just as she was about to deploy under Operation Slipper. He had been about to hand over command of Darwin to Terry Morrison when he got the call to join Melbourne.
When the father of two young daughters told his wife about the job she burst into tears.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m so proud of you,’ said his wife, who also came from Melbourne.
‘To be CO of HMAS Melbourne and to deploy to an operation in the Middle East, it’s crème de la crème,’ he explains. ‘It’s why I’ve been in the navy for thirty years.’
Schlegel concedes that he had travelled to the Gulf with ‘minimal to zero’ expectation of conducting counter-piracy operations, so he was very pleased when the training kicked in and the crew behaved so professionally. He was also comforted by the fact that wherever he was, there was always another coalition warship within about twelve hours of his position. That confidence was enhanced after he saw Captain Phillips in a Dubai cinema. He had not heard of the movie before it was mentioned in a news report about Melbourne’s successful counter-piracy mission to Somalia.
‘That movie is an incredibly good portrayal of the circumstances of piracy in the Middle East and I’ve done a lot of research since, it’s actually quite factual and follows the story well,’ he says.
As well as the piracy operations, Melbourne seized more than three tonnes of illicit drugs, including in excess of 1000 kilograms of heroin, valued at more than $1 billion.
Commodore Bruce Kafer is another Australian naval officer with an interesting perspective on the real Captain Phillips incident. He was Commanding Officer of Combined Task Forces 158 and 152 in the North Arabian Gulf when Maersk Alabama was hijacked.
Kafer came to national prominence in 2011 when he was Commandant of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) during the infamous Skype sex scandal. He was cleared of any fault but became a convenient scapegoat for then Labor Defence Minister, Stephen Smith. Kafer is held in high esteem across the ADF and wider community. He retired from full-time service and joined the active reserve in December 2013.
Born in Newcastle NSW in 1959, Kafer spent his younger days messing around in boats on Lake Macquarie. He was keen on joining the navy all through high school and became a cadet midshipman at HMAS Creswell in Jervis Bay in 1977.
‘I keep saying to people now it was like going to Mars back then. I had no idea,’ he says. ‘These days I think the recruiting processes are so good, where you can get interactive videos and you can attend the base. You have open days and you can try before you buy.’
Kafer had always had an interest in geography so he trained as a hydrographic surveyor.
‘You’re actually mapping the seabed. You’re mapping the depths of the ocean but you’re also gathering a huge amount of oceanographic information as well,’ he says. ‘Part of my role in the Middle East was gathering what’s called military “geospatial information” which is information about the depths of the ocean. We determine ocean currents, so we made tide gauges or current meters [to measure] the nature of the seabed. About ninety per cent of the world’s oceans are still uncharted and so every now and then you’ll hear about a merchant ship striking a sea mount.’
The work of the hydrographic service is often unsung, but during World War II it was among the most highly decorated of all navy units.
‘They were in under the guns of the Japanese surveying the approaches to beaches and so forth for amphibious landings in New Guinea and Borneo,’ Kafer says. ‘Some of our folk were deployed into the Royal Navy [and] doing clandestine surveys of the Normandy beaches before D-Day.’
In 1988 Kafer went on exchange to the Royal Navy survey vessel HMS Herald, which was conducting mine clearance and hydrographic survey work in the eastern Arabian Gulf. Iraq was a British ally in those days, and many of the sea mines in the Gulf had been sown by the Iranians, who were targeting Iraq’s vital oil exports.
‘It was a mix of hydrographic surveys in support of military operations so for example surveying what we call replenishment at sea corridors where the tankers and the warships could come in and safely undertake RAS [replenishment at sea] operations,’ he explains.
The ship also carried the Royal Navy’s mine counter-measures command team and deployed with the western European Union mine counter-measures force, comprising the Royal (British), Belgian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian and French navies. Floating mines in the Gulf had taken out numerous tankers and even a US frigate, USS Samuel B. Roberts.
‘We were deployed into mine danger areas where mines were sighted or believed to exist and at the same time we were escorting convoys in and out of the Gulf as well,’ Kafer says. The convoys consisted of several super tankers steaming to and from Iraq’s two vital offshore oil terminals, ‘KAAOT’ and ‘ABOT’, fifty kilometres southeast of the Al Faw Peninsula.
In 1988, the twenty-nine-year-old Bruce Kafer had, of course, no idea that two decades later he would be back and actually living out in the shallow waters of the Gulf on board the KAAOT facility as the commander of two coalition task forces. During the Captain Phillips drama, Kafer was in his headquarters on the oil platform and watched the entire incident play out while his American boss in Bahrain witnessed it in real time and high definition. Because it was a US Navy mission and not a coalition operation parts of it were restricted to ‘US eyes’ only.
He said the experience was ‘memorable’ as he observed the might of the US Navy in action with the America
n admiral able to call on the Navy SEALS and any number of warships to resolve the impasse.
‘What I learnt, though, is that our processes and procedures and doctrines are as good as the US Navy,’ he says. ‘But in the end it was only the US Navy that could cobble something together like that to make that happen. The [American] admiral was under an incredible amount of pressure right through that process even though he had the benefit of those resources.’
Kafer felt privileged to have witnessed the incident first-hand. ‘I was like a kid in a candy store because it was just an incredible learning experience. It was just fascinating even though we were doing real world stuff.’
HASH HIGHWAY TO SMACK TRACK
8
Seizing hash and saving lives
Commander Terry Morrison was the skipper of HMAS Darwin for her previous foray into the troubled region in late 2013 and the first half of 2014. It was an eventful tour that culminated in the biggest single haul of hashish made to date by an Australian ship on the hash highway: a massive 6248 kilograms – more than six tonnes – of the oily brown drug, found on a dhow during a gruelling twelve-hour boarding on the evening of 29 June 2014.
Morrison assumed command of Darwin in August 2013 at the tail end of Operation Slipper and it would prove to be a high point in his distinguished and varied naval career.
Born in Penrith in 1972, he was raised and educated in western Sydney. He, his wife Maridy and their three children still live there, and Maridy is a cardiothoracic intensive care nurse at Westmead Hospital. Morrison describes them as ‘a mad rugby family’. None of his forebears were sailors but his older sister, Jenny Daetz, joined the navy before he did.
‘She’s currently the Deputy Commander at ADFA, as a Captain,’ he says proudly. ‘She outranks me – but she was senior to me anyway in birth, so she seniors me in navy.’ (He was promoted to Captain during 2016.)
In 1988, when Morrison was about sixteen, Jenny managed to get the family tickets to the HMAS Watson base in Sydney for the bicentennial celebrations. While they were there he saw some other teenagers walking around with the Naval Reserve Cadets banner. ‘So I looked into that and then I ended up joining a cadet unit out at Penrith called TS Nepean [Training Ship Nepean].’
His year in the unit gave him weekends on real ships and a realisation that he was interested in joining the navy. He took a break from cadets while he studied for his Higher School Certificate and then enrolled in ADFA in 1991 as a naval officer cadet.
‘When I did my training courses, I thought at one stage I would become a diver and I was in that mindset until I really got my teeth into ship driving and as an officer of the watch,’ he recalls.
It was in HMAS Hobart that he was awarded his Bridge Warfare Certificate in 1995. ‘I really enjoyed the warship mentality and the fight and what we were there to do. I said, “No, I don’t want to become a diver.” It is good in its own sense but it’s a small team type stuff.’
He consolidated his training in the destroyer escort HMAS Swan the next year and, after completing the air intercept controller’s (AIC) course, he returned to the Hobart for three years as AIC.
He and Maridy, his childhood sweetheart, had stayed together throughout the three-year separation of his stint at ADFA in Canberra while she studied nursing at the University of Sydney. ‘When I graduated from ADFA, we were going out at that stage and I thought, “Well, if she can stick by me for three years she’s going to stick by me while we’re separated – I think this relationship is going to keep going.” So I proposed on my grad night at ADFA.’
In December 2002 he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and was given his first command – of the Fremantle Class patrol boat HMAS Geraldton. For this period of his career, based in Darwin on border patrol duties, he went ‘unaccompanied’ for the sake of maintaining family stability back home in Sydney.
‘I think I was fortunate to meet Maridy early because she has known navy all her life so she’s used to it. We do stay here in Sydney. I don’t drag the family around everywhere. When I was up in my patrol boat I left them here and I went unaccompanied, which is hard on the family. But her family is in western Sydney as well and the support is there and her family is very close.’
To him, having both career and family is a balancing act. ‘I got asked to consider going to the States for a course which would have been a great course, but my daughter was doing her Higher School Certificate at the time and I thought, “No, we’re not going to do that, we’re just going to stick with the family stability.”’
In the end it worked out quite well. ‘My wife has put her neck out so much over the years and supported me, whereas a lot of my friends who met their partners after [joining the navy], they’ve all said, “No, I don’t want you to continue at sea, I want you to be home.” They haven’t had the opportunities, whereas I’ve been fortunate enough to have a wife who says, “You go and do what you need to do and I’ll look after the kids.”’
They often joke about an old T-shirt of hers that says, ‘How can I miss you if you don’t go away?’ He says it became so worn out that she turned it into a pillow. ‘So the pillow ends up on the bed.’
After relinquishing command of the Geraldton he experienced his first stint in the Middle East, deploying to Iraq for Operation Slipper in command of the Australian Navy Training Team, based in Umm Qasr. This job was all about rebuilding and training the Iraqi Navy and for this he was awarded the Commendation for Distinguished Service. He had a team of thirteen Australians. It was a four-country operation led by the Royal Navy. In addition to the Australians there were US Marines and the Royal Netherlands Navy.
‘We worked there to rebuild and retrain the Iraqis and to take them out on their patrol boats and teach them. We finished that in November 2004,’ he says. ‘We’d achieved our mission. It was nice to achieve that element, where they’d got their boats up and they were working, they were going to sea and they’d started to patrol their borders and stuff like that themselves.’
That job was largely land-based for Morrison. ‘I’d go out on the patrol boats for a day or so but the other times I was doing road convoys up to Basra and down to Kuwait – just for logistics and moving people around and bits and pieces. That was a little hairy because there were people trying to blow us up and take us out but we got through all that. It was a unique naval experience.’
Returning to Australia, he rejoined his family while serving as Principal Warfare Officer at HMAS Watson in Sydney before joining the Sea Training Group with a core role of preparing ships for operations, including for the Middle East.
‘We’d train them first and then we’d go back and become the evaluators and we’d certify them, essentially, that they were fit to go on operation. So I knew all the criteria that I had to go through and it was good, it was good to have that [experience].’
In addition, he was deployed on a number of short-term operations, including the evacuation of Australians from Lebanon in 2006. Then it was back to sea as the XO of the frigate Newcastle and, from there, on to a number of shore-based jobs before taking command of Darwin in August 2013. He took over the command from Brian Schlegel, who had switched to command Melbourne.
All but the last twenty-one days of Darwin’s 2014 deployment came under the ‘war-like’ Operation Slipper; the last twenty-one were the beginning of the ‘non war-like’ Operation Manitou.
The Australian frigates in the Middle East had already started to come across drug smugglers, but until then the focus had largely been on oil security and piracy. Of the earliest drug finds made by ships such as HMAS Parramatta, Morrison says, ‘Yeah well, I think they stumbled into it! It was [a] maritime security operation, so it was looking at the whole gamut of things and they stumbled across the narcotics. Back then they weren’t well hidden so they were just out and about and they came across them. But there are the legal concerns of how you deal with it and the legal framework on how that all works. Back then, [the Australians] were going over j
ust to talk to them to see if they had any information about bits and pieces – and then they stumbled across the narcotics. The Canadians were probably the first to actually really finesse the search and finds. They were getting quite a bit.’
When Brian Schlegel handed over command of Darwin to Morrison, he had provided a great deal of helpful information and ideas about tactics and procedures.
‘But even then, the way we trained and the way we approached it was in a different mindset,’ Morrison says. As for the narcotics smugglers, he says, ‘I guess these guys doing the transportation got to a point where they were getting intercepts so they then had to go and hide [the drugs]. They hide it such that your average boarding [party] that you can send over could last about five or six hours of time of extreme [conditions] and then, that’s it, you’re out. We found on average about eleven hours, ten to eleven hours, we’d get a narcotics seizure. We’d find it.’
Early on he had to develop techniques for how to maintain and to keep going. ‘There were a couple of boardings early that were really easy. When it’s an open skiff you can see it there, it’s easy but it’s when they’re hidden inside these dhows, that’s when it’s more difficult.’
So they developed a method for searching the dhows. They found it was sensible to have two boarding parties that they could rotate 24/7. ‘When we’d go into a boarding, we’d get our on-call boarding team. They’d go in and the off-call team would go to bed, get their heads down, try to get as much rest as they could because they’re going in in six hours. Then we’d just keep rotating every five to six hours depending on the environment, the weather and stuff like that. By doing that we were able to sustain it. The longest boarding I did was twenty-two hours; recently [Australian ships] have had boardings that have gone for three days.’
Under Morrison’s command, Darwin sailed up to Diego Garcia and then into Muscat. From there she went out on patrol just off the Gulf of Oman and then up into the Red Sea. They also went to Kochi in India. On 1 March, ten days into their first patrol, they came across a group of thirteen Iranians – eleven men and two boys – floating in the water.
The Smack Track Page 9