Saving Private Sarbi

by Sandra Lee

  The anti-coalition militia (ACM) was an implacable enemy. Hindmarsh had a list of adjectives to describe them. Tough. Resolute. Agile. Determined. ‘And more dangerous than anything Australian Special Forces have encountered at least since the Vietnam War.’

  The ACM was the sum of many parts—splinter groups, tribal warlords, religious fundamentalists, criminals and foreign fighters, with diverse commands and motivations. The Taliban drew primarily from the Pashtun tribe but, as Bing West writes in his authoritative book The Wrong War, ‘it is a distortion to use the word Taliban as synonymous with the insurgency . . . [though] the true Taliban advocates comprise the centre of the rebellion.’

  Moreover, they were close, danger close, just fifteen kilometres north of Camp Holland. The Taliban ‘wanted to make life difficult’ for the ISAF troops. ‘The threat is ever-present; it could be missiles or rockets and there are tonnes of unclaimed ammunition lying around this country. We are fighting a counterinsurgency and for the people we are up against, almost nothing is taboo and they will keep coming up with new ways to achieve their objectives,’ an Australian officer said.

  Decades of fighting had armed the enemy with every conceivable weapon, including the ubiquitous rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), mortars, heavy machine-guns, recoilless rifles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles, although those were used much less in 2005 than against the SFTG in 2001–2002. Local bazaars did a brisk trade in small arms and a variety of Russian-made weapons. The insurgents had Dragunov sniper rifles, DShK machine-guns (Dishka), RPK light machine-guns, RKM Kalashnikov machine-guns and the common AK47. They were also increasingly using new and deadly tactics picked up from their counterparts in Iraq: improvised explosive devices. ‘A cheap and effective way of fighting an insurgency campaign,’ Hind-marsh said.

  There were about 80 IED incidents per month throughout the country, which accounted for a large proportion of coalition and civilian casualties. They were unpredictable and ‘becoming more technical and constantly updated to defeat known coalition protection and detection systems’, Hindmarsh said.

  All soldiers deploying to the Middle East area of operations were trained to mitigate the threat of IEDs. Every EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) operator underwent rigorous pre-deployment mission rehearsal exercises, specific to the theatre in which they would operate. In March 2006, the Australian Defence Force established the Counter IED Task Force in Canberra to reduce the dangers of IEDs. ‘The work of the Counter IED Task Force includes the acquisition of equipment, scientific research, intelligence, discussion with allies, development of doctrine and the delivery of training,’ the defence force said in a statement.

  The army had humans trained to defuse and disassemble the IEDs where possible, to study their provenance and identify the bomb-maker through his signature methods. And it had heavy and light remote positioning vehicles (RPVs), or robots, to detonate or defuse the IEDs. It also had another asset in reserve.

  The Doggies.

  Explosive detection dogs and handlers had not been deployed to Afghanistan but their successes in other areas of operation gave them an edge. The army command decided to exploit the four-legged advantage and called for a two-man, two-hound contingent to test the section’s capabilities in Uruzgan.

  D and Sarbi were at work at the Incident Response Regiment at Holsworthy when word came that EDDs Jasmine and Sam were to be deployed with handlers Corporal John Cannon and Corporal Phil Grazier. Between them, the soldiers had at least 25 years of service in the regular army and Cannon had racked up time as a paratrooper, mortars man and physical training instructor. The mutts were getting on in age, about eight years old, but they were extraordinarily competent and viable operators.

  ‘The SAS and Commandos recognised the need to have engineers there to provide engineer support to search the routes and compounds,’ D says now. ‘The EDDs have always worked with the engineers so it was a given they would be deployed. They were the forerunners and set us all up. They were the pioneers.’

  Cannon and Grazier got their gear together in seven days and flew to Camp Holland with their respective dogs, Sam and Jasmine. Once in the country, they went straight outside the wire with the Special Forces soldiers, searching routes and compounds for IEDs, caches and ammunition. A lot rested on those eight paws—not only the lives of their handlers and fellow two-legged soldiers but the future role of the section in Afghanistan.

  Sam and Jasmine worked at the front of the patrol as nose-driven sniffer scouts. Their handlers walked several metres behind, followed by members of the patrol, who fanned out on the flanks to provide cover. The EDD teams had their skills and drills but Afghanistan was a new environment presenting new challenges. They adapted, using each new patrol as a learning curve. It helped that they spent all their spare time together, strengthening the bond between hound and handler. In theatre, the dogs and handlers are inseparable, which benefits the patrols. The handlers are alive to their dog’s every nuance. The ability to read the dog pays off when the harness goes on.

  ‘He’s your best friend, he’s your best mate and you treat him as such. When you’ve got down time you know you hang out with your dog, you know, you sit around reading a book—he just hangs out with you,’ Cannon said. ‘You need to be able to tell when your dog has found something that is potentially dangerous and to be able to call him away from it before he gets injured or you get injured.’

  Sam and Jasmine detected seven caches, proving the value of the Doggies in the war zone. They were indispensable. Their superior noses and detection skills led to the permanent presence of the Doggies in Uruzgan, as an essential asset in the search for IEDs and deadly explosives.

  ‘They had some decent finds and found caches and weapons and explosives. They made a good impression with the SAS and Commandos and they were happy to keep working with the Doggies and engineers,’ D says now.

  Sam and Jasmine remained in Afghanistan when Cannon and Grazier returned to Australia after an extended deployment. The dogs were too successful to withdraw from service. It was a strategic decision for the commanders, and one that was heartbreaking for Cannon and Grazier. The men had the wrenching task of passing their beloved mates to the sappers who arrived with the next rotation of troops and with whom they would continue patrolling.

  ‘I found this part of the deployment really hard. I knew that Sam had to be re-teamed with his new handler, which meant that I had to ignore him and show him no affection,’ Cannon said. ‘He had been one of my closest mates and had worked so very well in the rough stuff, and now here I was treating him with indifference. Poor Sam didn’t understand this and I felt so bad about it. I found myself weeping with grief for the little bloke. I boarded the C130 for my outward journey without a decent word of goodbye for him.’

  The sad separations were unavoidably commonplace for many of the handlers who followed.

  Sam and Jasmine were honourably retired upon their return to Australia. They were nearing ten, or 70 in dog years—well past the age of human retirement in the Australian Army.

  Operation Slipper, however, was gaining pace. Another rotation of troops was going in. In December the brass handed D an early Christmas present. He and explosive detection dog Sarbi would be released from the Incident Response Regiment and attached to the Second Reconstruction Task Force (RTF) for a seven-month deployment starting in April 2007.

  Next stop, Afghanistan.

  Chapter 11

  WELCOME TO AFGHANISTAN

  Sergeant D and Sarbi spent the first three months of 2007 training for deployment, rehearsing every move the EDD and engineers in the EOD teams would make on route searches and compound clearances in Uruzgan. It was mission-specific training, geared towards real operational threats, with staged scenarios as close as possible to those that had previously occurred in the lawless province. The exercises focused on lessons learned and real-time reports from the areas of operation. Weekly reviews of the latest information and intelligence ensured technical accuracy
and relevance for those about to deploy. No two firefights or battles are ever the same and if enemy tactics changed, so did the training.

  Soldiers prepare. Battles hinge on split second decisions. So does staying alive. Luck is only partially involved, so the Aussies believed in making their own through practice and preparation: finessing TTPs as if lives depended on it because, truth be told, they did. Train hard; fight easy.

  The mission rehearsal exercises were conducted in Queensland with the platoons they would deploy with, in terrain and environment similar to that of Uruzgan. D quickly got acquainted with the Magnificent Bastards of the Second Combat Engineer Regiment, as the blokes are proudly known, and sharpened up some more on the tactics, techniques and procedures. To create a realistic and stressful threat environment they used functioning replica IEDs, landmines, explosive charges, explosive hazards and simulators. They practised search patterns and close-quarter combat drills. Every mission was evaluated and every response by the troops monitored and adjusted where necessary.

  They drilled on their area of operation, the enemy threat and the enemy’s known TTPs. As Sun Tzu wrote in the seminal Art of War, ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles’.

  It was practical, hard-going, hot and sweaty work, carried out in the middle of an Australian summer, useful because they were going into the Afghanistan fighting season when temperatures reached 50 degrees Celsius. Sarbi didn’t complain. She was having a blast being with D every paw of the way and her devotion to him was getting deeper by the day, if possible. More protective. A loyal guardian.

  D was scheduled to stand piquet—guard duty—midway through a sweltering night. Sarbi slept snuggled beside him, standard operating procedure when on patrol. One of the guys coming off piquet tried to wake the handler but Sarbi jumped up and went into a defensive stance—four legs locked at the elbow, neck craned, ears back as she let out a low-level growl that rumbled down her sturdy chest. D’s mate, too frightened to move closer to the menacing hound, pelted the soldier with rocks to wake him. ‘Yeah, Sarbs was pretty protective. The guys would have to throw rocks at me because she’d jump up and bail them up,’ he says. The handler was proud of her protectiveness but could have done without the rocks. ‘A few hit me in the lower extremities. Deliberately, I think.’

  The Diggers were disciplined, thorough, determined. They weren’t mucking around; they couldn’t afford to. Their unofficial credo was ‘don’t let your mates down’. One soldier had his chest tattooed with the words ‘I will not fail my brothers’.

  Australia had been blessed to date. Only one soldier had been killed in Afghanistan and that was in 2002, but nearly twenty had been injured, some seriously. Seventy per cent of injuries were caused by IEDs. The US Army had lost 103 soldiers to IEDs. The Aussies heading in wanted to maintain the status quo. Nobody wanted a mate’s name added to the statistics.

  The Australian Army has what it calls a layered approach to protecting its troops. The year-old Counter IED Task Force worked closely with the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization and other allies to gather the latest intelligence on the enemy’s IED techniques and tactics, to reduce or neutralise the threat. Incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan were reviewed and analysed CSI-style. Where possible engineers recovered disarmed IEDs and roadside mines and sent them to the Combined Explosives Exploitation Centre in Kandahar, where every feature of the weapon was examined for common traits to identify and track down the bomb-maker, and develop effective countermeasures. In-field intelligence pinpointed bomb-making facilities and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) buzzed over villages on surveillance flights picking up signatures the human eye had missed.

  The army’s commanders and IED specialists considered the IED fight ‘a mini arms race against a fairly agile and fairly smart enemy’. Lieutenant Colonel Russell Maddalena, the operations officer—OpsO in army slang—of the task force admitted ‘there is no one silver bullet’ to defeat the scourge of homemade explosives, but the ADF and its coalition partners had harnessed what he described as some of the best military and scientific brains in the business to protect the troops. Stay ahead of the threat.

  D was a professional. He listened up, trained hard, and put in the hours. He got the inside running on the lay of the land in and around Camp Holland. He studied the Australians’ rules of engagement (ROE) for the RTF2, a strict document that outlines when and under what circumstances the soldiers can return fire and engage the enemy. ‘That’s set out in stone,’ he says now. ‘When you get there if there are any changes to the ROE they let you know.’ The key focus was minimising the loss of civilian lives, protecting coalition forces and completing the mission. He treated with similar respect the first Standard Operating Procedure of the task force—the rules of soldiers’ conduct that prescribed how soldiers should deal with Afghan villagers and their cultural and tribal practices. All deploying troops are given a quick immersion course on local customs— Pashtunwali 101. It was essential.

  Uruzgan is a complicated place and ‘in the conservative south, it was the most isolated and backward province’ of Afghanistan. Ethnically, the population is 91 per cent Pashtun, 8 per cent Hazara and 1 per cent ‘other’. The Pashtun is a tapestry of tribes of whom the Durrani in the south and Ghilzai from the east are the two largest, not to mention historical arch rivals. ‘A Pashtun is never at peace, except when he is at war,’ goes a national proverb.

  The Pashtun live by a code of conduct known as pash-tunwali—translated literally ‘the way of the Pashtuns’. It is based on honour, hospitality and a primitive eye-for-an-eye revenge otherwise known as badal. ‘The need to secure revenge for any slight, any insult, has been part of the Afghan’s life through his history. Blood feuds between individuals, between families, and between clans or tribes, are endemic,’ writes Mohammad Yousaf in Afghanistan, The Bear Trap. ‘The Afghan will never turn the other cheek, a killing must be avenged by a killing, and so it goes on from generation to generation. A family will never forget a debt of honour.’

  Another element of the code is hamsaya—‘one who shares the same shadow’. As the Military Review noted, hamsaya is a form of servitude in return for protection from stronger tribes or the provision of goods, which explains, in part, the rise of the Taliban. Afghans historically follow the strongest tribes, or those who have prevailed in battle. ‘Pashtun history is filled with heroes who played both sides for the benefit of tribe, family and honour,’ notes The Christian Science Monitor.

  The anonymous author of the 2005 book Hunting al-Qaeda was more blunt. Pashtun warlords have spent decades ‘betraying each other on a daily basis’.

  Sergeant D also received the standard Operational Deployment Guide issued to all troops, outlining the potential stressors he might encounter in Uruzgan. The soldiers are encouraged to share it with family members, who also feel the stress of their absence, possibly more. Worry is a crippling curse.

  After pre-deployment training, D flew home to Sydney to spend a week with his girlfriend. Seven days for seven months.

  A week out from deployment for the RTF2, the dog mafia moved to the Gallipoli Barracks at Enoggera in Brisbane, from where they would deploy.

  D, of course, wasn’t travelling alone. He had responsibility for an expensive piece of military hardware that ran on four paws and a lot of love, EDD Sarbi. His workload was effectively doubled. There was a lot to do and a lot of paperwork to fill in.

  Sarbi had a complete medical check-up at the veterinary clinic and requisite inoculations to prevent her contracting local diseases. D took the warning about the dangers of rabid Afghan dogs in his stride. Sarbi didn’t seem too worried either. Unlike a lot of dogs she wasn’t vet-shy. To her it was just another social outing and another two-legged to charm for pats. Sarbi was a canine prima donna; she knew how to work a room. The handler filled in the official forms and permits and filed them with the Australian quarantine and customs services, to guarantee Sarbi’s exit and re
-entry with minimal fuss. He prepped the EDD gear, ensured the transport kennel was sound and made an inventory of equipment needed to keep his hound safe. Sarbi might be a dog but she didn’t travel light and she had a combat wardrobe that would make the most pampered poodle green with envy.

  The terrain and climate was as ruthless an enemy as the Taliban. The cold in Afghanistan could freeze the diesel in the Australian Light Armoured Vehicles (ASLAVs) and Long Range Patrol Vehicles (LRPVs) and the summer sun turned the ground into a bed of hot rocks.

  Sarbi wore custom-made dust and fragmentation protection glasses, aptly named Doggles—think Jackie O-sized sunglasses for dogs. She also had four canvas booties to protect her paws from sharp rocks and prickles that could crack and wear down the dogs’ pads. The course bulldust would get between her claws and wear away skin. The booties were a fetching red with circulation holes punched in the fabric. They had canvas soles reinforced by tough rubber grips for added protection. Sarbi had custom-designed earphones to block the sonic boom and over-blast shock waves of explosives and the pop pop pop of rifle fire. The earphones were similar to the reactive hearing protection Peltors that the soldiers wore. Constant exposure to weapons fire could have a deleterious effect on the dogs’ ears and in some cases, their psychological state. For the colder months at the start of spring and winter—when D and Sarbi would be ripping in and ripping out of Uruzgan—Sarbi wore a fitted oilskin jacket known as a Doggie Drizabone. Very Dogue. D also carried a heating pad for her outdoor kennel on base and a thin canvas-covered mattress for sleep-outs on patrol. ‘The dogs appreciate it,’ D says.

  D and Sarbi were part of a three man and three explosive detection dog team joining RTF2. The unit was tight, a brotherhood within the brotherhood. He and his fellow Doggies, Sappers Zeke Smith and Pete Lawlis, looked out for each other. Zeke had a black kelpie named FloJo and Pete took a three-year-old blue heeler called Merlin. The dogs, like their handlers, got on well.