The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  One of the others looked at him and said, ‘Fuck, are you for real?’ It was inconsiderate, I guess. I don’t know if it was an example of the SAS humour being taken too far.

  I had a word with Bruce, who was pissed off with me for running out and saving the interpreter. He thought it was a stupid risk. The chances of my getting wounded or killed, and then placing others at risk, were unacceptably high. I didn’t agree or disagree with him. I’d just done what I’d done. It wasn’t simply a case of the training kicking in. We’d trained for a man down, but there’d never been a scenario for ‘What do you do if an interpreter or support staff gets hit and he’s 80 metres out in the open?’

  I just felt it was the right thing to do. There’s no short answer for why I did it. I guess the long answer is everything that’s in this book.

  *

  We tried to sleep as best we could. I couldn’t, at first. I jotted some stuff down in my notebook. One of the older men had said, ‘Write something down so you don’t forget.’ I was reading Scar Tissue, by Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and was near the end of it, so I decided to finish it. I finally slept at about three in the morning.

  We got up pretty early, after three hours’ sleep, and went back to the command centre where the troop sergeant had been up all night.

  I asked, ‘How’s it all going? What are the assessments?’

  The Americans had flown over the ambush area with a Hercules AC-130 gunship, blown up some bunkers and shot some enemy fighters through the green belt as they were reassembling at night. In total, they said there were about seventy EKIA (enemy killed in action). I found that hard to believe, thinking the number might have been closer to fifteen or twenty. It came out later through intelligence channels that my guess was about right, with about the same number again wounded. It’s hard to do a battlefield count in a scenario like that, when we never got close enough to do a proper count.

  Nine of the thirteen Aussies who were in our convoy were wounded. I saw Barry later in Tarin Kowt before he was sent back to Australia. When I saw how fucked up his legs were, that was emotionally tough. Eric was put into an induced coma and didn’t wake up until he was in Germany. A battlefield in Afghanistan one minute, then a hospital in Germany. Of the four of us who were unhurt, two had bullet holes in our gear. One guy had had a round travel up his sleeve and go out the back of his shirt without touching his body.

  I was sitting on the roof of the makeshift Command Centre, and noticed that a mate from one of the other patrols was staring at me a lot.

  ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? Why are you staring at me?’

  He said, ‘When we came in last night, all you guys, your eyes were like pinpricks, it was like you were all on heroin. Now they’re back to normal.’

  I said, ‘You got any dip on you?’

  We had a dip and while we chewed our Skoal I told him all about it. You realise, in that situation, that the reason some soldiers die and others don’t may not be up to you. Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not. Where we’d been, it was like being in a storm and not being hit by a drop of water. There are ridiculous amounts of luck involved. Bruce, Taylor and I might have improved our odds by moving all the time. If we’d stood still on the back of the vehicles, maybe things would have been different. In fact I’m certain that our continual movement had a lot to do with our survival. Everyone was getting a lot of fire, and it only took one round to make the difference. You can what-if until the cows come home. We were well trained. Some of us were fortunate and others just lucky.

  The vehicles we’d been in needed some attention. The thick, bullet-proof glass on the windows had been cracked from multiple strikes of small arms rounds. The armour plating on the body of the vehicles had holes punched through them in some spots. This led us to believe that the enemy were using armour-piercing rounds, which were not very common and showed a good supply chain. We had to wash out the cars. There was blood, bits of brain matter and stuff coming out of the back of the tray Taylor and I had been in. It was a grisly task. I cracked on with it, but was feeling really bad for Rod, thinking his mates should have been doing this, not some bunch of Aussies, strangers washing his gear for him. I thought, If it ever happens to one of us, let’s make sure it’s us who looks after his stuff.

  But the Americans did hold a ceremony for him that day. They put his boots on the ground and stuck in his M4 next to them with a bayonet. They read out his service record. His dog kept circling where his boots were, and then sat down beside them. It was like he was sitting at Rod’s left hand, as he was supposed to. He lay down and put his paw on Rod’s boots. A lot of the personnel were in tears. I felt like I’d been scorched, inside and out.

  TWENTY-THREE

  There was little time for a breather or to really digest what had happened. Later, when the award came, I struggled with telling people outside work about what had happened. I didn’t know if I could do it justice. When you’re in the Regiment, people don’t always need to know what you do and how you go about it. Sometimes I felt they’d be better off not knowing. What we do can be so brutal, it will shock people, and maybe turn them against us, unless they understand the full context. And it takes so long to explain it, you begin to wonder whether only those who were there and were trained for it can understand. It took me a while to figure out that the Victoria Cross overshadows those reservations.

  What would rile me up was when armchair critics said, ‘You’re the SAS, you should never get ambushed.’ That kind of critique might have applied to the old SAS, who were doing reconnaissance, not aggressive targeting as we were. When you’re putting yourselves out there in this way, it’s not up to you whether you get ambushed or not. Success is a matter of how you respond.

  This is what happened to us. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did. Sometimes too much importance is hung on success and failure. What is success anyway? Sometimes it’s going out on a job where everything goes your way and you achieve your objectives. But at other times, it’s when you’re ambushed and escape with fewer fatalities than the odds suggested you would. This is another kind of military success, of which Australians have always been proud. Think of Gallipoli, for example.

  Two days after the ambush, Chinooks came to fly us to Tarin Kowt, where senior staff from our headquarters patted us on the back and told us we’d done a good job. We saw Barry and Carl in the hospital, and they were carrying on in good humour. I tried to hide how upset I was feeling to see them knocked about, and went pretty quiet. I might have been feeling a bit of survivor’s guilt, like it was unfair that they’d been wounded while nothing happened to me, but I was also anxious about how much I would miss them for the rest of the trip.

  *

  It was turning into a big trip for me in many ways. I mentioned earlier I had read Scar Tissue, a book that reminded me a lot of my own wayward years. Maybe it was a combination of the feelings stirred up in me by the book, and the closeness of death I’d experienced during the ambush, that made me write an email to Emma saying how sorry I was to all the people I had hurt in that time, how if I had the opportunity I wish I could apologise to them for being so destructive of myself and the relationships around me, especially my family. I also told her how I didn’t want to waste any more time with us putting the wedding off. Life was too short and I knew she was the one I wanted to marry. Looking back, it was as if the very intensity of the trip was also making it a time of change and growth for me as a person.

  To top it off I’d rung Brent to check in with him, and he told me that they were reopening Mum’s cold case and starting to follow some new leads. I felt a small ray of hope, wondering if it was possible to find her after all this time. But then I pushed it out of my mind as it was logically impossible. It left me wondering if I would ever get some closure, some explanation of her final moments – though I wasn’t sure if I really wanted that. It was complicated. Finding her would giv
e us finality, but would also underline that she really was gone forever. The news was a heavy weight and I felt bad that Brent would be shouldering it alone while I was out of the country. As I said, a big trip in many ways.

  *

  We were losing four or five personnel from our troop, and received two replacements, including a new PC. The method of dealing with a big event like this, which I agree with, was to keep us busy and not to dwell on it for too long, so it was only another three or four days before we had our next job, just outside TK. It was a tricky one, with poor communications. We drove out to the vehicle drop-off point and began a five-kilometre walk-in through some houses in the dark. Just as we were getting going, a big beam came down from the sky and two Hellfire missiles screamed through the air. We asked the JTAC what was going on. He was calling back to headquarters asking the same. We got word back that the Predator had had a chance to exploit the targets and had done it without telling us. Potentially we could have been almost there. There were also about three platoons of ANA positioned for an ambush up the road. We hadn’t been told they were there, and could have walked straight into them. After what we’d been through, it was frustrating and almost enraging when we felt we weren’t being taken care of.

  The missile strike didn’t get the target anyway, so two nights later we were doing the same job again. Our PC was sick, so Bruce took over. We got through a creek and over some open ground into a complex maze of small buildings. We saw a sentry on a roof. He wasn’t looking at us but back towards where we’d come from. We snuck past him and let the others know he was there.

  We came to a small road cutting across us. The first patrol element bounced across it, and we were the second: Bruce, Joel and me. Just as Bruce was coming across behind us, a big burst of AK fire erupted from a house down that road. Bruce had to launch behind cover. The rounds only just missed his legs. Joel was in a ditch behind a mound of dirt. I’d got myself behind a building. There was some open ground between us and the green.

  I yelled out to Bruce, ‘Do you want me to come back across? Give me some covering fire and we can get the patrol all in the one place?’

  He didn’t think I should. He was 30-odd metres back. As a patrol, we’d been split up, and there was lots of confused talk coming over the radio. This Talib with the AK kept popping his head up and putting in good fire at us down the road. He must have had a metal plate in front of him, because when our guys were returning fire you could see and hear it pinging off metal, and he was still firing.

  One of our patrols flanked around. I pushed up to the corner of a building. Joel and I were 50 metres apart and he was in an exposed spot, being fired at by the AK up the road. He also had a big set of double doors behind him, which he had to watch to see if anyone came bursting out. He had to lie on his back while feeling all the rounds hitting around him.

  We saw some lights starting to come towards us through the green – it looked like more enemy fighters with guns. I helped the first patrol fire at them, and then they managed to throw some grenades to put an end to the Talib shooting from the building. That gave us the chance to reconsolidate as a patrol. Bruce was passing us some quick instructions. Our mission had been compromised, so we had to get out of there. The target building was still a way off and surprise had been lost. Just as we were about to leave, two RPG explosions went off near us. They didn’t whoosh like the ones in the open valley, but made explosions somewhere to our front.

  We formed a defensive strongpoint in a building before pushing back to the vehicle drop-off point. We had to cut through that urban space, expecting something to happen at any moment, covering each other across alleyways, putting all our training to use. It was all about angles and cover. When the rounds had come down the road, I was calm. After the big ambush, just with that chunk of experience, it was almost as though I was a different person from who I’d been five days earlier. If I could make it through four kilometres of rolling ambush, a couple of shots should be all right.

  Allegedly it was an off-duty Afghan policeman who mistook us for Taliban that had initiated the contact on us. I found it hard to believe that a lone policeman would open up on a large group of armed personnel at night. Regardless of whether they were Aussie or Talib. We’d only been back at the barracks for ten minutes when we were told that some Afghans had been shot in the exchange, among them Rozi Khan, a good guy apparently. We were pretty miserable, saying, ‘Fuck, we’ll be shut down for the rest of the trip.’ His death got into the news. A friendly fire incident was a big deal, but the way we saw it, they shot at us, so they were enemy. You have to defend yourself. As I hope my account of the incident shows, you can’t necessarily tell who they are when they’re shooting at you. You just fire back and try to survive. Your training kicks in and you have to act fast. I thought that in the circumstances we reacted in the proper way. It happened too quickly to do otherwise. As I said, though, we knew it would bounce back hard against us, and the last thing we wanted was to knock out one of the Afghans who could be relied upon. Without a doubt, the Taliban would pounce on this and use it for propaganda, telling the people that we, not they, were their enemies. We certainly felt bad and apologised for the outcome, but we couldn’t apologise for having been placed in that situation.

  *

  We did a couple more small jobs to round out the eventful trip. We had learnt a lot of lessons. For me, I suppose the tactical lesson was that movement in a gunfight, whether it’s quick or slow, keeps you alive. We became masters at working at night. Instead of being loud and blasting holes in walls to make entry, instead of yelling and crashing through assaults, we used suppressors and silent assaults to keep noise down where possible, and caught the enemy off guard. Psychologically, I felt I’d come through the hottest kind of challenge and my thought processes had held up. The success we enjoyed on that trip was proof that the training worked.

  There was talk that some people might get medals, but there always is, and they always do, even if it’s officers getting their obligatory DSMs (Distinguished Service Medals) and DSCs (Distinguished Service Crosses). We had spoken about the ambush in the first couple of days or so, but once we were doing jobs again, our minds were on the next mission, not on what had taken place before. It’s the way things are. You have to focus on the next job.

  As we cleaned up on the last day, we had a couple of drinks in our room in the base at Tarin Kowt. Each SAS squadron has its own emblem, and ours was a bull. Back in Australia, while I was out shopping with Emma one day, we’d gone past Bras N Things and I’d seen a G-string with a bull’s head on it. I’d thought, That may come in handy one day.

  I’d wanted to crack it out earlier in the trip for morale, but the right moment didn’t arrive until the end. I got a bit overconfident, wearing the G-string and shaking it in front of everyone. I pushed my way into every room to show them up close and personal how good it was. I got the feeling it was well received! I busted in on Deano, the troop sergeant, while he was asleep. He says he’s still disturbed by the memory of waking up and having this bull’s head shaking around in his face. It’s been over in Tarin Kowt until the end, up on the wall, the 3 Squadron G-string. Every trip, someone has got it on. It became a tradition.

  I can’t put into words how much I was looking forward to getting home. I was emailing Emma how much I’d missed her. I just wanted to hang out with her and Kaylee. I couldn’t tell her yet about what had happened, but the excitement of seeing her soon was overwhelming.

  The army is still the army, though, and we had to go back through Kuwait to get dicked around by military morons obsessed with ticking boxes. It was frustrating being told you had to have your hat on a certain way walking to the mess, or to take your thongs off and put your boots on. Coming out of country, living in the field, having been in war fighting, you have a gutful of the fact that these people will get the same campaign medal you’re getting. They can get McDonald’s and Green Beans coffee wh
enever they want, and you can’t help resenting that. Those few days were frustrating, but in the end I realised it wasn’t worth worrying about. Besides, one of our replacements had decided to get a facial at a salon on the US base. When he came out he looked like a Russian doll! His eyebrows were plucked and waxed so slim he looked ridiculous, and his face was red raw, which gave the rest of us endless hours of fun.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I wish Dad had told us more about his days in Vietnam. It feels like a big silence. He didn’t even tell Mum very much about it, and whatever Brent and I eventually found out was through relatives, or his mates, or even through my schoolfriend Murray.

  His silence about Vietnam has made me determined to share as much as I can of my experiences with Emma – and eventually, when they’re older, with my kids. When we’re going on a deployment, we’re told that we can’t tell anyone where we’re going. But afterwards, I didn’t think it was fair not to tell Emma what had happened. She might as well know what I do. I wanted her to understand what the trip was like. She had had the military come over to the house telling her I’d been in the IED explosion, a helicopter crash and an ambush. It definitely wasn’t fair that she should know this much and not the full story.

  So when I got home, I sat her down and explained what had happened that day in the ambush. When I’d been longing to see her again, I’d been missing a person I wanted to share this stuff with; I hadn’t been missing someone I was to keep secrets from. My mates who were there with me, I could share it with them, but I wasn’t going home to them. They were my military family. Emma was my real family.

  She was upset to hear about it, and funnily apologetic – she said she felt bad that while I was doing that, she was at home spending my money. We laughed about that and started planning to get married. We got it done quickly this time, without letting the stress of preparations get the better of us. We had a celebrant do it in a park in Perth with a small number of friends. We didn’t even have family there. Brent wanted to fly over, but it would be one-in, all-in with the family, and I said it would keep things simpler if it remained low-key.