The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

‘How you doing, Rabbit?’

  ‘I’m fucken freezing my arse off !’

  We were only about 400 metres into the infiltration, and he had a long, cold night ahead of him climbing over walls, pushing through scrub, while trying to stay stealthy. We eventually got to the house and climbed onto the roof with the ladder. It was empty. The intelligence was wrong, or our target had skipped out.

  We went up some muddy terraced paddocks and through a village. The air was thick with pollen from the maize. The crops were mature, and it tended to get into my nose and make me sneeze. Which isn’t always ideal at night. When we were pushing through the fields themselves, I found it hard to breathe.

  They call the SAS ‘phantoms of war’, and I felt like a ghost as we drifted through these people’s paddocks and houses, their personal property, without them knowing. As we walked past a house, fifteen to twenty of us looked through the window to see a whole family sleeping inside. Next house, there was a man sleeping on his porch, none the wiser to this large group walking through his life. It was surreal.

  On the way back, poor old Taylor kept walking through the other patrols looking for us. I was saying, ‘Come back, come back,’ but he couldn’t hear me. He said later, ‘Fuck, I was so embarrassed. I walked up to the head of the line and they said, “What the fuck are you doing here?” ’

  If I’d been outside the wire within a month of completing my Reo cycle, I would have been no better. He was a good soldier, and it was a testament to his ability that he’d been sent so early. He was about to have that ability tested to its limit.

  TWENTY-ONE

  We went back to Anaconda. As there were no choppers to take us back to Tarin Kowt, we asked the Americans what we could do to help them out. They told us of some trouble areas and it was planned that we could slip out of the FOB at night to set up some ambush positions. The Americans would go out as bait in their cars the next morning, the enemy would set up to ambush them on their way back, and we would be waiting for them.

  We walked out at night and set up. The Americans drove up in convoy; the ICOM talk told us the Talibs were being ordered to move into their positions in the green belt and ambush the American convoy on its return. Hidden in the higher ground, we saw three enemy fighters walking down the road with AK-47s and other weapons. Our guys shot them. The ICOM was crackling and our terp heard that they were going to send a car down to have a look. Five minutes later, a grey HiLux came down the road. We were thinking, hopefully, Stop, stop! We thought it would drive past, but it pulled up. It was full of Taliban fighters, and as they cracked the doors open we could see their weapons. The patrols in close proximity opened fire and ended up killing them all.

  Their ICOM sparked again. They were going to send another car and sure enough, a van soon came along the road. It pulled up when they saw the dead fighters from the HiLux. Three men jumped out to have a look, and we could see another cache of weapons inside. So our snipers began shooting them too, until one of the snipers saw a woman inside the van. Our rules of engagement (ROEs) were clear on women and children; we stopped shooting. But the Talibs were also aware of our ROEs, and one of them was hiding behind the van, using it and its occupants as a shield. Eventually, our snipers did well to shoot him and not anyone inside.

  Another fighter squirted to a half-built hut near the intersection and tried to do a runner to a place with more cover. He didn’t make it. We ended up with about thirteen enemy fighters lying near this intersection and two cars full of holes. The woman got out of the van, and a man on a motorbike came in from the north, picked her up and took off.

  That was it for that particular job, which had gone off like clockwork. The Americans came in to do a BDA, cleaning everything up and taking what information and equipment they could for intelligence-gathering purposes. We walked back towards Anaconda and linked up with our other patrols. We heard some fighting to the east. The patrols that had hitched a ride with the Americans were in contact. It lasted about twenty minutes before some fast air came in with bombs to put an end to things. An advantage of fighting alongside Americans was that the fast air came in pretty fast!

  We had left thirteen dead men behind us, but I had no sympathy. They had more than thirteen weapons, and any one of them might have had a round with my name on it. Whether it was this contact or any other, the feeling is always the same. I viewed these tasks, once we’d achieved them, with a mixture of relief and satisfaction. To put it very basically, I’d got through another day without being seriously hurt or killed, and we’d eliminated thirteen men who were hell-bent on doing that to us.

  As often happens, however, there was a catch. When the BDA had taken place, a dead child was found in the back of the second vehicle. Our medics checked out the situation and confirmed that the child had been dead for some days. The woman might have been the mother, taking the little boy or girl somewhere for burial and catching a ride with the Talib fighters. But when headquarters learnt that a dead child was involved, there was an investigation. To me, it was a reminder of how different life was here in Afghanistan, that a mother could be taking her dead child into a war zone with a group of armed men who were quite likely going to get into a fight. There were always messages like this, telling you that life and death were seen through a different lens in Afghanistan.

  Two days later we would attempt a similar job in the non-permissive Ana Kalay Valley, east of Anaconda. After a few of the patrols had walked into the valley during the night, we loaded up our five-car convoy on the morning of 2 September. Barry was with us after a gastro attack had stopped him walking with his own patrol. Our convoy included a total of thirty-six people: two SAS patrols plus Americans and Afghans. The Americans made the important decision to overload their cars with ammunition. We were silly enough to rag them out for overdoing it.

  It was very quiet on the ICOM as we crawled along beside the dirt road to avoid IEDs, with the Australian and Afghan engineers out minesweeping. We came to a knoll in the valley, north of the green belt. Our patrol dropped in behind it for cover, while the Americans drove towards the green belt. The rest of our patrols had gone up to the north. We wanted to squeeze the Talibs up to that end of the valley, where they could either show their hand and attack the Americans or drop further and further back into the mountains towards our patrols. There was a pass out to the dasht at the top of the valley, and we were happy if they chose to escape through there because they’d have no cover. The Americans did their thing and cleared through a village, essentially spooking the enemy fighters to the north, which allowed the other patrols, who were already in position, to be able to effectively engage them.

  Things still seemed quiet. We collapsed our position on the knoll to link back up with the Americans.

  When the decision was made at around three o’clock to drive back through the valley, we had the discussion with the Americans about staying out versus going back to Anaconda. Adam, our PC, was in favour of staying and using our night advantage, but the Americans were determined to go back, in part because the Afghan soldiers in the convoy did not have the technology to stay out at night. After some discussion about cutting the Americans loose, we stayed with them.

  The return trip started smoothly enough. Driving along, we got word from the terps that the enemy were going to ambush us, but they didn’t. There was just one farmer out there ploughing his field.

  I’ve described how, when we were the last car to come out through the next shallow pass, we got hammered, the rounds raining in on us. I grabbed the 84-millimetre rocket-launcher, bailed off the back of the vehicle and moved off to a flank to fire it. One rocket was in the tube and I stood up, waiting for someone to tell me where to shoot – what we call a target indication. I was given a rocky outcrop about 600 metres away and put a rocket up there. I ran back to the car, got another rocket and ran back. These launchers leave a big dust cloud from the back blast when they fire, so the enemy immediately knew w
here I was. Lots of rounds began kicking up the dust around me. I loaded and fired another one. Taylor grabbed a rocket, ran it out to me, and I put it in the tube and fired it. While I was doing so, he ran to the car to get me another one. More rounds were coming at us all the time.

  The rockets have a tongue-and-groove seating, and in the heat of the moment Taylor misaligned the next one. He was jiggering around with it.

  I yelled, ‘Hurry the fuck up!’

  ‘Yeah, Donno, I’m trying!’

  Later, I felt bad about shouting at him – Taylor was only three weeks out of training, basically, and was already in this big contact – but at the time we were fighting for our lives.

  In that initial period, one of the Americans, Joe, had been hit, a round passing through his arm while he was setting up a 60-millimetre mortar. He was put into a car to be taken care of by a medic. It was far too dangerous for an AME, even if it had been necessary.

  Unable, so far, to get rid of the enemy who’d been shooting at our position, I decided to set up the next rocket for airburst. The launchers had a dial on the top, with a timer, so I set it to go off at 500 metres, a distance short of the target. When it does an airburst, it sends a cone of shrapnel towards the ground. As if you were choosing a shotgun over a standard rifle, the difference was a trade-off between the concentration and the spread of the fire. I’d fired six rockets without stopping the enemy fire, and now the airburst rocket seemed to have an effect – the rounds stopped coming at us. I could not say whether it was because of our rockets or just the weight of fire that we sent back at the enemy in those initial stages.

  After that airburst rocket, the shooting went into a bit of a lull. Some of our guys, at 45 degrees to my rear right, were still firing back. I put the rocket-launcher back on the car, which was manoeuvring into formation to get us going again. We pushed back to the rear side of that knoll we’d come down. That first contact had gone for about twenty minutes, with quite a lot of metal flying around. I’d done a mag and a half from my rifle as well as the seven rockets, and passed that information up to Bruce, so the PC could know how much firepower we had left.

  The odd shot was still coming through. Bruce had a Minimi, a light machine gun, and was taking a couple of pings at an enemy fighter who was poking his head around a corner of a building.

  With a moment to breathe again, I was laughing with Taylor. ‘How’s that? Three days outside the wire and you’ve been in a contact, you bastard!’ Some SAS operators had been there for years without anything happening.

  Then Bruce had a stoppage on his Minimi. The casing from spent rounds had expanded and become jammed in the breech, and he couldn’t get it out without cleaning rods. He yelled out to me, and I took my Leatherman multi-tool from my belt and threw it across the 20-odd metres to where he was.

  Suddenly, it was on again. A volley of rounds cut straight through our patrol, four or five bullets coming between me and Taylor. We turned around, realising that this firing was coming from behind us, on the high ground to the north. We were pinned down on three sides.

  We moved around to the south side of the knoll, facing up to the high ground. All the machine gunners in the cars turned and put rounds up there. Bruce was cursing because his Minimi was still stuck, and for the first time I started weighing up how many Taliban there were. There must have been a fair few, considering the amount of fire we were receiving from the three points they were attacking us from. I have to say, we felt exposed. We were going to need a lot of luck to get out of this.

  The American F-18 gave us a break, and we ran back to the vehicle. Another of the Americans had taken a minor hit, and one of the Australians had jumped into their turret to take over the gun. Despite the casualties, the Americans were still insisting on trying to get back to Anaconda. We grabbed a drink of water and I apologised to Taylor for yelling at him. He shrugged it off. ‘Don’t worry, it happens.’ He was good about it.

  The jet came again, and put a 500-pound (225-kilogram) bomb onto the area I’d been firing at with the rocket-launcher. It made a massive boom and the ground erupted, which gave us a really good feeling. A bomb that size, accurately targeted from above, is loud and big and makes you feel like you’ve got the advantage. It’s an awesome thing to see. The pilot then hit another building where they’d been shooting from. We thought that would be it.

  If only! They soon started shooting at us again, and it was heavier now, from the green belt. About a kilometre thick, the green belt had plenty of cornfields, trees and buildings for them to hide in. We piled off the back of the vehicle again and tried to find out where they were. I thought, This vehicle is my cover – but it’s also their target.

  Some machine gun fire came in again from the ridge line to our north. Those gunners on the ridge line were closer to us now, about 200–300 metres away, closer than when they first hit us from the rear, back at the start of the ambush. The green belt was, in parts, a lot closer. Rounds started hitting the car we were supposedly hiding behind, except now we were on the exposed side. We ran around to the south side to take cover, but got more fire from the green belt. There were five of us huddling in, copping it from both sides but trying to give some back.

  Bruce ditched his jammed Minimi and picked up an American SAW (section assault weapon), the same type of gun. We were all shooting back into what we thought were likely positions, but with no real chance to assess it we couldn’t get an accurate fix on them.

  The fire was too heavy on the south. Three RPGs had just slammed into the ground 15 metres in front of the vehicle so I decided to move to its north side. While moving to that side of the vehicle, I picked up what looked like the enemy’s location on the ridge line to the north. I jumped onto the back of the tray and talked the machine gunner on to its location. I remember saying to him while he was shooting, ‘Left a bit . . . Left a bit . . . ON TARGET!’ and he sent a 50–70-round burst into that position. During that time there were bullets pinging and skimming off the car and the tray we were on. We could hear and feel them snapping just over our heads and we were constantly bobbing and weaving. Directly after, we swung back around to the south again due to the weight of fire from the north. The PC yelled out a target indication, so me and the gunner engaged from the back of the vehicle. The fighter managed to snap off an RPG and it whooshed over the top of the vehicle.

  Just after that our PC was shot through the wrist. I had at this stage jumped back off the car to join Bruce and Taylor. The PC dropped his weapon, repeating, ‘I’m hit! I’m hit!’ It was hard to tell how badly he was hurt, but there was blood around his wrist. We pushed him into the back of the Humvee. He stuck his arm out the window and asked Rob, one of our SAS snipers, to patch it up.

  The cars were moving slowly, desperate to get out of there but also giving cover to those of us who were running around them and getting chased by bullets kicking in from both sides. One of the guys doing the same as me for the car ahead of us was Barry. I heard him yell that he was hit and saw him hobbling, trying to catch up with his car. He’d taken a bullet in his leg. Then, as he scrambled to get to his car, he got hit in the other leg and went down. He was crying out to his car to pick him up. Dinger, the Australian engineer, jumped off to help Barry and came close to getting hit himself. He started to apply tourniquets to Barry’s legs. Eric was on the radio talking to the aircraft and scanning the ridge line with his binoculars.

  We were immediately behind them, so we pulled up alongside to provide cover and pick them both up. Barry was the medic, but one of our scouts, who was trained as a medic, jumped off to help Dinger with Barry. A few of us who were uninjured pushed away from our car and lay in the ditch.

  As 2IC, Bruce took control. He and I were lying in the shallow ditch, covered by those two football-sized rocks. We were completely exposed to the southern side. From the ditch, some of the guys were getting fleeting glimpses of the enemy as they changed position. They were movi
ng a lot. It was difficult seeing them in the green, but our boys were firing off a few shots.

  Air support was crucial, and in the distance we could see some Chinooks, heavy transport helicopters, doing a resupply to the FOB, which was about three kilometres away. Chinooks can’t look after themselves, so they had a couple of AH-64 Apache gunships escorting them. The Apache is a pretty fearsome weapon, and generally the Talibs would get down and stop fighting if those helicopters were anywhere nearby. So our JTACs were straight onto them. ‘Come over here, we’re troops in contact! We need you to put in some fire.’

  The Apaches were manned by Dutch crews, who had more passive ROEs than we did. But still, their ROEs didn’t exclude giving protection to troops in contact, so we expected them to come in and place pressure on the Talibs in the green belt or on the ridge line at the very least. They flew over us very high, at about 5000 feet (1500 metres). The enemy kept firing at us, and the JTACs passed this up to the Dutch crews. I remember yelling, ‘What the fuck? We’ve got to get these helos down to put some fire onto them!’ But the pilots kept replying to the JTAC that they couldn’t see anyone shooting at us. The JTAC said, ‘Come lower, just a flyover, to get them to keep their heads down.’ We put a massive burst of small arms rounds, grenades and a rocket into the ridge line to mark the position for the helicopters, but they just wouldn’t acknowledge that the enemy were there.

  To make matters worse, Eric our JTAC was shot under his left arm, the bullet cutting through his chest and organs and coming out just above his right hip. He went down as well. Lying in that ditch, with our mates around us getting hurt if not worse, I saw the Apaches fly back to the FOB. I worried we might not get out of this alive. I thought, Fuck, well, we’re on our own here. Bunch of useless pricks. We are going to have to get out of this ourselves. We were all angry, but it had happened now, and it didn’t matter one bit what we thought.