The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  It wasn’t that I was particularly gung-ho or anything, but combat can have an almost addictive quality. It’s scary to be shot at, and when we fly out for a mission we don’t necessarily want it to be a two-way range, yet it makes it a lot more interesting. When you have done a few jobs without some gunplay, in a weird way you want to be shot at, or at least hope there’s some action. It can get worse each time too. When I got to a state where I really wanted action I had to keep checking myself and saying ‘Yeah that’s great Mark, but you know the consequences when it goes bad, and it only takes one piece of lead to flip those feelings.’ Still, if we got out of a contact with no scratches or casualties then it was all the more exciting, and your desire for the next time increased. It’s an odd feeling to convey.

  One of the junior guys in the team on a later tour said to me he was enjoying his trip and the jobs we had done but was hoping for closer, two-way action. Without saying those dreaded words, ‘Be careful what you wish for’ I told him: ‘I understand. I’ve been there. But be aware that as fun as it can be, it can change really quick and you could find yourself thinking after it all dies down, maybe that was a bit too much of a close call or, I hope my mate is okay’. But even as I said it to him I’m don’t think I wholly believed it. The strange thing about being in contact is that afterwards you forget about the bad consequences, and that need or hunger to experience it again just rises up. Later, after the day I was shot and some good friends and operators died, he came up to me and said, ‘Remember that stuff we spoke about? I know what you mean now.’

  *

  The tempo was steadily increasing. A few days later, we went after Scalpel again in the Char China Valley, a massive insurgent area where back in 2006 no coalition patrols had dared go. It was the first time we were hitting them in this safe haven. Our tactic was to push them into areas they thought were safe, and make them unsafe. We managed to take out thirteen Taliban on that job, and were very pleased with the result, but from that point the tactical use of SAS patrols took what we thought was a step backwards. The emphasis changed to Castnet operations, or big forces going into large populated areas to ‘clear’ them of insurgents. These bulk-style standard infantry tasks were a blunt weapon. We were folded into them and lost a lot of our autonomy, which was frustrating when we’d been doing well with specific targeting. The ‘good idea’ people, usually bored officers, were restricting our actions. They just loved the idea of an SAS major being in overall command of a Commando unit, Incident Response Regiment engineers, a USA Airborne element, a Dutch SF element, and whatever else, because it satisfied their notion of complex top-down coordination, but the truth was that its successes were rare and it was a poor use of SAS assets.

  I voiced my opinion to my PC, an older man with leathery skin named Daryll, aka Snakeface. He was only in his forties but we liked having fun with him. ‘Hey, Snakeface, was it like this in Vietnam?’ ‘Did they have helicopters when you were in World War II?’ ‘Was it exciting when they invented the steam engine?’ To his credit, he was a good sport and also took our complaints on board and promoted them to the officers above him. But the decision had been made to take tactics back to the pre-2006 era, and we had to comply.

  On one of the bulk clearance operations, we worked with 1RAR, my old battalion. A mate of mine from infantry days, Walshie, was now a section commander. It was good to see him, and on the Chinook flying in, I said, ‘When we hit the deck we’re going to run flat out, moving as fast as we can to break into the safety of the green belt.’ He was excited to be part of it. The Chinooks are such a big, slow target, like flying cows, and the pilots had been ordered to land us further than planned from the green belt, leaving us a 700-metre run to the nearest cover. This was a good example of the clash in tactics. Having been working in this area for a few years, we thought it was safer to land in the green where we would already have cover. But the ‘good idea’ people, who’d never been outside the wire, were worried about the Chinooks getting shot at, and said it was safer for us to run 700 metres without cover.

  We jumped out and ran, feeling very vulnerable. I looked back and saw Daryll running behind me, with his rifle up and his dick out. He was pissing as he ran, trying to get a last one out. The guys behind him said it looked like he was marking a Christmas tree on the ground, as it waved from side to side.

  The threat didn’t materialise, which meant we had to round up entire compounds, detaining and screening people. We found some IED-making equipment, but basically the job was very broad, very officer-driven. The idea was to move several hundred local males within a certain age bracket into a ‘reception area’ and screen them. It took more than a day and a night, and rarely achieved more than picking up two or three suspects on whom we didn’t have much evidence.

  At one point, a target named Quarterstaff, accompanied by fifty fighters, had been pinpointed in a certain area. We had two and a half hours to clear a valley that was about a kilometre by 300 metres wide, with seventeen to twenty compounds. The whole area turned out to be friendly. About two kilometres away, a camp was found where Quarterstaff and his men had been, but we’d been sent out to chase the area rather than the individual. The intelligence, driven from the top, had only approximated the nearest settlement to where he was, and ordered us to clear it in the hope we’d find him. We were pushing the point that we needed to be more surgical, and to be allowed to drive the intelligence. We had to chase the man, not the infrastructure, a lesson we’d learnt from 2008. This required the higher-ups to trust a sergeant or a corporal to take ownership of that intelligence, which they weren’t then prepared to do.

  Both sides were unhappy, us and the Afghan civilians. We’d lost our essential advantages: our speed and ability to surprise the enemy. We spent days going in and out of houses, dragging everybody out. Afghan houses have narrow, low doors, even though the people are the same size as us, and we had some tall blokes who were getting the shits with yet another low door to squeeze in and out of, in order to herd out an innocent group of locals. At the end of the day we would move out into the desert to find them straggling back into the village from a reception area where they’d been held for hours. We were cheerfully saying hello, and they were responding with dirty looks. There wasn’t much hearts-and-minds benefit in dragging them out of their houses during the middle of the day to screen them in the desert.

  The entire operation was very timetable-driven, even down to the helicopters clocking off at specific hours so they could have the scheduled amount of rest. Funnily enough, the hierarchy thought the Castnets were so successful – Canberra heads loved the idea of lots of units working together – that they did it again further up the valley. I was growing disillusioned. What we’d done in 2008 wasn’t perfect, but it was much more effective than what we were doing now.

  *

  The clearance operations ran until August. Meanwhile, I got news that the New South Wales coroner was reopening Mum’s case, to revisit the open finding from the 1998 coronial inquest. The cold case police had reassessed the evidence, and this would lead to a new finding, that Mum was deceased and had probably been murdered. The only suspect was Chris Watt. It was good to get a form of closure – especially for Brent, Kenny and Margaret, who were at home and close to the proceedings – but until Mum’s remains are found, I guess there’s no ultimate resolution. And even then . . .

  Once we were able to resume our targeting-style jobs, we were relieved to have our autonomy back. We went into Paygolkar one night, searching for codename Longbow. We went onto the roof of the same compound we’d been up the previous year, and found nine RPG warheads and a landmine. We didn’t get Longbow, but three Talibs squirted from the target building just before we were due to take it down. They ran straight into our cordon teams and were killed. One had a very nice chrome-plated, clean AK-47. He turned out to be Javelin, the target we’d gone after a year earlier in the same area. Further evidence established that he had a
job helping high-value individuals coming in from Pakistan. The Taliban leaders, who we suspected were based in Quetta, would come across to run religious ‘commissions’, basically recruiting exercises where they held shuras and whipped up support or coerced local men and boys into fighting. Javelin housed and fed the leaders as they ran their commissions, so taking him out was removing yet another nuisance.

  A year to the day after the big ambush, I was itching to mark the anniversary by going out there and giving a bit to the Talibs, but nothing eventuated, despite my best efforts at hanging around the operations centre and making a pest of myself. We did a few small jobs, often taking Rex, one of our two combat assault dogs on this trip, who we called the ‘land shark’. Rex was aggressive, going about like he had a rocket on his back. He caused a bit of havoc on our side. On one job, we were clearing a cornfield when he must have picked up my scent. I heard him barrelling through the corn and could see it getting smashed over as he charged towards me – it was like a scene from Jaws. He saw me, leapt, and was mid-flight, mid-bite on my arm when I yelled out, ‘NO!!!’ I was shitting myself. At the last instant he must have realised I was on his side. He closed his mouth and bumped into my shoulder. It was a close-run thing.

  Rex’s handler was Dute, and they were close. We were always falling into streams and aqueducts as we tried to wade across them, and once Dute had to make it all the way across a river with Rex, first with him hanging on to his leg with his front paws, and then dragging him by the lead. In one house we were clearing, there was a manhole going up into the roof space. Rex didn’t like being picked up, and when another trooper tried to hoist him up there, Rex gave him a nip.

  We suffered from plenty of frustrations. In one location, where we could see Taliban squirters running everywhere as our helicopter approached, the pilot tried to get the landing perfect and ballsed it up. The three minutes’ hesitation had been long enough for several enemy fighters to get away. The next day, we started a two-day special reconnaissance patrol and found a bed-down location for six or seven males who were often coming outside to make phone calls – but nobody acted on the intelligence we’d gathered. We had one job where we went to clear a target house and took the risk of splitting our patrol on some tricky shaley rock; but at the crucial moment the job was called off so that we could go somewhere else to do a massive clearance job. Yet another ridiculous task was going into the Mirabad Valley, where we’d done numerous clearances, to do what was effectively reconnaissance for the infantry’s reconnaissance. They sent us on a hellish walk, 13 kilometres on a stinking-hot day, into an area that we already knew was IED city: there were blast holes, battery packs, bits of wire, sangars the enemy had built for overwatch, power cords from phones with the wires cut, all the IED paraphernalia you could think of. We narrowly avoided stepping on two stacked anti-tank mines. All of this was to take photos in preparation for the infantry’s reconnaissance, in an area that we could already have told them was very sketchy indeed. That trip, the frustrations never ended. Another day, we had an operation set up and ready to go, but it was called off for UN Peace Day. We were pretty sure the Taliban didn’t adhere to UN Peace Day. We’re the better men, I suppose.

  Otherwise, we coped with boredom and frustration in the time-honoured military way. We had a wind-down room called The Fat Lady’s Arms, and set up a slip-and-slide down the hallway, greasing it up with all kinds of fluids and getting a bit rowdy. We had the annual ‘Stirrers’ celebration, the one day of the year when we could speak frankly and take the piss out of each other and the officers. Sometimes, as you’d expect, military attempts at humour would backfire. One day, when we’d picked up some detainees to fly by helicopter to the handling centre where they would be questioned, the pilot thought it would be funny to throw the helicopter around, do some hard turns and weave from side to side for about twenty minutes. These captives, who were blindfolded, were freaking out already at being in helicopters. One of them, near the front, started going green. The door gunner was laughing, and then suddenly the detainee power-vomited all over him. You couldn’t say it wasn’t a kind of justice. The pilot thought it was all very funny until he was ordered to clean the spew out of his helicopter.

  As the summer started to cool down and our trip approached its end, we did see some action. Our patrol went into an area where we knew if we stayed long enough, the insurgents would have a crack. They would normally watch us, and if we stayed for more than two days, they would get pissed off. For some reason, these one-shot attacks took place between nine and eleven o’clock in the morning. Like clockwork, at 10.30 am an RPG burst over us, followed by some PK machine gun and AK fire. It was quite a well-vegetated area so they’d been able to come close and run away. We tried to chase and flank them, but they were too quick. It was over before we could do anything.

  We had intelligence that there was a suicide bomber in this village. He’d been described to us as a young teenager, dressed in white, with mascara around his eyes. We came to a high cornfield with an aqueduct through it. The whole valley was quiet. I heard someone coming through the corn and got ready. A boy popped out 15 metres from me. He was dressed in brown, had make-up on his eyes and was the age of the suicide bomber. I told him to get his hands up. In our best Pashto, we got him to take everything off. He wasn’t the suicide bomber, but that was how edgy things could be. You can be one instant from a serious mistake.

  Increasingly, incidents were drawing administrative attention, with our jobs being routinely followed up by Q&As, which became a touchy subject with us. Our rules of engagement were straightforward. If you fear for your life or your mate’s life, if civilians are threatened, you can engage. If someone has a hostile intent, you can engage. It’s much the same as self-defence law in the civilian world. But judgements of hostile intent have to be made in a split second, and are subjective. What if I’d thought that boy was the suicide bomber? Fifteen metres from me, he could have blown us all up. Would I have been justified in shooting him if I’d seen him make a suspicious movement? I can imagine how, if I had, and had been questioned afterwards, it could look really bad. Sometimes a hostile intent, as you’ve perceived it, doesn’t sound very hostile when you explain it afterwards, under cross-examination from some officer. But from our point of view, we’re trained so highly just so that we can be trusted to make such decisions. Year on year, there was far more reach-down into our actions, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the guys resented having their decision-making taken apart by a process that wasn’t informed by ground-level experience. It was also potentially dangerous. We had to make split-second decisions in situations where the wrong move might mean death or injury, so if we started second-guessing ourselves in combat we were putting our mates, our allies, the people we were protecting and ourselves in peril.

  The enemy knew our ROEs and constantly played on that. The first question they would get asked in the processing centre was ‘Have you been abused in any way by the soldiers?’ It was a licence for them to make up stories, and the result was that our operation was fast becoming a catch-and-release program. We often likened it to game fishing: we bagged them and tagged them, and the ‘good idea’ people would let them go.

  After a couple of Castnet-type jobs, we went to assist Matiullah Khan’s militia on the road between Gizab and Tarin Kowt. MK, as he was known, was a local warlord type who’d been embraced by the coalition, and his militia, the KAU, were incorporated into the Afghan security services. His group was trying to put checkpoints along that road, but had come into a stalemate with the Taliban, who had set up a Dushka heavy machine gun in a high position, stopping the KAU from progressing.

  I felt we could have gone in, gridded the suspected enemy positions and called in air support for pre-bombing. Instead, three SAS patrols went in, set up at night and linked up with the KAU commander to take over the fight with two groups of about fifty of their men. It was a more complicated way of doing it, and more confrontatio
nal, in my opinion.

  We did some initial overwatch and found out that the Dushka was where another SAS patrol was planning to insert. Julian was in that patrol, and I’d made some ill-received jokes about this operation having the potential to repeat Roberts Ridge in Operation Anaconda in 2002, when coalition troops had received some fatalities through flying onto their recce position, cut down out of the sky by Al Qaeda. Julian was understandably unimpressed by my attempts at humour.

  We warned our bosses not to insert near the enemy gun, and moved up to join some KAU fighters, who were quite exposed on the spur of a low bald hill and very happy to see us. They were living on bread and water, operating on very little pay and weaponry – an oily rag, basically. Through a mixture of broken Pashto and English, we understood that there was potential, in that position, to get completely surrounded. There was no vegetation or any built structures, and all they had for cover was a small rock wall they’d constructed themselves; it was so flimsy it would barely survive a minute in a firefight.

  During the night, we moved them into better positions to set up by first light. We were all more spread out than usual, and sure enough, before long the KAU mistook an SAS patrol for enemy and opened up on them. Immediately, the actual enemy joined in. With our mates hunkered down, getting shot at by both friendlies and the enemy, we put suppressive fire on the Talibs and frantically radioed the KAU to stop firing. So there was a loose, three-way fight going on: the KAU shooting at an SAS patrol, the enemy also shooting at that patrol, and us shooting at the enemy. When we finally got the KAU to stop, so did the enemy.

  It was nearly sunrise when we heard we’d got a friendly WIA (wounded in action). The team Julian was in had inserted into a relatively protected part of the ridge line compared to the original HLZ (helo landing zone). Julian was moving up the ridge line within his patrol, and as he stepped between two rocks the Taliban machine gun opened up from a high point of the feature Julian’s patrol was attempting to establish a foothold on. A round hit him through the arm, shattered his ulna, and came out the other side. Luckily for him, it hit the butt stock of his rifle. If he hadn’t been carrying his rifle correctly, the bullet would have gone into his stomach.