18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  Sergeants Grippe, Peterson and Healy were showing true leadership in what had indeed turned out to be a sergeant’s fight, showing their younger troops how to fight and survive by their own actions. For Grippe and his fellow non-coms, the concept of ‘do as I do, not as I say’ was a personal and absolute canon.

  ‘There was a lot of times during that fight when I probably should have been down instead of up, but you have just got to go out there,’ Grippe says. ‘It’s not like you are big and heroic and full of bravado. You have got to go out there and do a little inspiring. That’s all it takes. Get up on the line and shoot some rounds, put a couple of rounds down; show the guys where your suspected enemy targets are and advise the commander on tactics, where people should be positioned; go talk to the wounded and keep them motivated and so forth.

  ‘And shoot the breeze with old Digger while he’s putting rounds down the range, go joke around with Clint and Wallace.’

  Grippe’s actions were the stuff of military legend. Jock calls him ‘the ace in the American deck’.

  ‘When it came down to it, Grippe was the one making the calls, Grippe was the one giving the right ideas and he was the one making the plays — basically he had the reins on the day. He was very good. Grippe inspired people just by his presence.

  ‘He was walking past me and I’m shitting myself looking out, and he’s, “Oh Jock, you having a good day?” And he’s just walking past. Bullets landing up and down, all around, and Grippe would walk right through. It keeps your level of morale high, or picks it up again if it’s dropping. Snaps you out of it. Gives you confidence. Everyone was shitting themselves — especially the wounded. They’re feeling defenceless but they are still conscious. They don’t know what the hell is going on.’

  After Jock’s last message to the communications tent, Lieutenant Colonel Tink was getting a stronger feel for how perilous it was in Jock’s immediate vicinity in the Shahi Kot Valley. For 30 minutes from 3.45pm, the coalition commanders met in the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram for what was described as a ‘critical meeting’.

  Major General Hagenbeck and the commanders once again discussed the options as the battle moved forward, including withdrawing the soldiers who were under ambush in Hell’s Halfpipe or leaving them in position to continue fighting. Hagenbeck had a lot to discuss, including the other positions that had been established successfully around the Shahi Kot Valley by the US troops who had been sending back up-to-date sitreps to the TOC.

  When it came to Jock’s position with the 10th Mountain, Rowan Tink noted in his green war diary: ‘Hagenbeck did not make a decision to withdraw or reinforce the 1-87th. He chose to leave his decision till later with a view of implementing a new course of action at 0300 zulu.’

  That was 7.30am the next day — fifteen hours away.

  The men in Hell’s Halfpipe could not wait that long.

  Out in the battle zone, Jock was thinking if they didn’t get out of there fast, they’d be dead and the reinforcements would have the privilege of extracting 82 men in body bags.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘The contingent was a little bit emotional at Christmas time. I did see a few grown men cry talking to their kids.

  No one batted an eyelid.’

  JOCK WALLACE

  JOCK WASN’T ALWAYS A soldier. Exactly seven years after enlisting as a seventeen-year-old he discharged because he got jacked off with the way the brass did things. The digger’s lament. Then for six years from January 1994, he was a regular civilian who went to university, studied for a science degree, moved house, fell in love, had his heart broken and fell out of love. Just like a regular civilian.

  He moved through an assortment of jobs while studying at university, including working as a doorman at a strip joint, as a ranger on Rottnest Island, and unloading boxes from big interstate rigs. Upon graduation, he began growing Pleurotus ostreatus — oyster mushrooms. Even though Jock wanted to experience life in Civvy Street, his connections and mates were mostly Army and he still drank with the boys from the sig squadron, keeping up to date with their antics. It helped, too, that he was in the Army Reserve, ready to be called to action if need be.

  But six years of living vicariously was enough. In October 2000, right after Sydney congratulated itself for putting on the best ever Olympics, which was protected by the SAS Regiment’s counter-terrorism squadron, Jock Wallace rejoined the Australian Army. He headed straight back to the Royal Corps of Signals at the SAS in Swanbourne. East Timor was unravelling, fast, and he wanted to be in on the action. It was what he had trained for.

  ‘The sigs are obviously more intelligent than a grunt, that’s how they ended up in the Sig School — they had more ticks on their green sheet in the aptitude testing,’ Jock says now, with a laugh at the inter-unit rivalry in the Army.

  When he transferred to the elite Special Forces unit in 1989, the signal squadron used old radios that his predecessors had plugged away on in the Korean conflict and the Vietnam War, punching out Morse code on valve sets as base and patrol radios. When he rejoined in 2000, the highly trained signallers had become digital natives working with new deployable and secure multi-band data and other advanced networks. Morse code was out and Jock Wallace was, officially, a communications dinosaur. Jock, being Jock, easily adapted; after all, he was a quick student who had a natural feel for comms.

  The first year back in uniform went by in a blur of activity. After several years out of the regular Army, Jock was getting back into the swing of Army life. His first mission took him to South East Asia for six weeks. The time out of Australia was just the ticket and Jock loved being back in the Army — loved the camaraderie, the tall stories, the profanity, the ribbing, the excitement and the achievement. Those six weeks and the following counter-terrorism Olympics in Darwin, reminded him of what he’d missed and how much he’d missed it.

  Then on 29 August 2001 Jock found himself involved in the take-down of the Norwegian container ship MV Tampa in one of Australia’s greatest political and diplomatic crises of the year. The Tampa had rescued 438 people from a sinking people-smugglers’ boat in Indonesian waters about 140 kilometres away from Australia’s Christmas Island. The unauthorised boat arrivals (UBAs), as the Australian Government called the people, had nearly drowned when the wooden boat named KM Palapa 1 sank. They asked the captain of the Tampa, Arne Rinnan, to take them to Christmas Island but Prime Minister John Howard refused the ship permission to land on Australian territory.

  Rinnan steamed ahead nonetheless. A diplomatic stalemate ensued as the Tampa approached the island. An elite team of SAS troopers had set up there in a local gymnasium. As Rinnan steamed toward the island, the SAS team were called in to board the ship. They had to stop the Tampa reaching Australian territorial waters.

  Jock was with the signal troop attached to a fighting squadron specialising in counter-terrorism and established the comms link back to Australia.

  The mission was an atypical SAS assignment and, for five days, the troops on board the Tampa gave much needed medical aid and cooked and cleaned for the mostly Afghan asylum seekers. It wasn’t all pleasant; some of the troops contracted scabies from the illegal immigrants and others fell sick from diarrhoea after an outbreak spread through the wretched human cargo. After days of political negotiations and front-page headlines around Australia, the fate of the Tampa and its unconventional cargo was decided. Had they landed in Australian territorial waters, they would have been able to apply for asylum. Instead, at the end of the standoff, the illegal boat arrivals were transferred to Nauru and New Zealand for processing. Many, ultimately, would be granted asylum in Australia.

  Jock didn’t buy into the politics of the situation but was proud of the work his SAS colleagues performed during the Tampa crisis. And he was mightily pissed off at the swell of public criticism from the bleeding hearts who had no idea of what the SAS men had done or how they provided urgent medical attention to the UBAs. Or how they’d cleaned up the latrine when they
boarded the Tampa rather than let the desperate people — including four pregnant women — wallow in their own excrement every time they used the makeshift toilet facility the Tampa crew had set up in an empty sea container.

  You got a beef, talk to your local politician. Don’t blame us, he thought.

  Jock hadn’t been back at base for more than a week when the murderous attacks of September 11 occurred, and the SAS were back in action once more.

  Leaving home was easy. The boys were fired up and Jock was a single bloke, which helped. He knew this from experience. Years earlier when he was part of a 45-man contingent of radio operators and drivers deployed to the Western Sahara with a United Nations force in Operation Minurso, Jock had been involved in a long-term relationship. The troops were sent to provide logistical support to the UN mission whose job was to monitor the fragile ceasefire between Moroccan forces, the Polisario and Western Sahara independence fighters while they implemented a referendum on their political future.

  The tour of duty would last nearly ten months, and having a girlfriend made leaving rough and the time away more difficult. Pining for girlfriends and wives while on active duty was an unavoidable occupational hazard and, while tough, it was just as bad if not worse for the person at home, waiting and worrying. Soldiers had to steel themselves to make phone calls home, knowing how hard it was to hang up on the voice of a loved one thousands of kilometres away. The hours afterward were frequently the darkest.

  ‘It’s very hard for the man on the ground to actually make that call and then accept all the emotional backwash that is going to be there after the phone call; whereas the family is saying, “Oh, thank Christ.” It’s probably more of a relief for them. There were a lot of good family men with their arses on the line,’ Jock says of SAS colleagues.

  Being single was better; it meant there was no personal or emotional baggage attached, no worrying if the girlfriend or wife was straying or the kids misbehaving. That was the upside but, of course, there was a downside. To a single bloke, going home to nothing, no warm welcome, was tougher still.

  It wasn’t always easier for the entangled soldier returning home. For some it was a breeze. Walking off a troop transport plane and away from the stink of dozens of deployment-jaded men into the outstretched arms of the missus had its attractions. Knowing they’d be getting some action was one of them. But for some married soldiers, returning home was just as tough as it was for the single trooper. Some felt irritable and out of place, isolated from their wives and kids after so long away.

  ‘I went away [while I had] a girlfriend I was very keen about,’ Jock says now. ‘I went to Western Sahara; that was a nightmare.’

  When he went to Asia, Afghanistan and later Iraq, Jock was single and unattached which was great while he was away because he didn’t have to worry about a girlfriend at home. But nearing a return home, being single was ‘bang in your face. And everyone else is like, “Great.” They’ve weathered the storm. You are counting your false blessings.’

  Birthdays were hard, but Christmas was worse. Jock spent Christmas of 2001 at the forward operating base at Kandahar International Airport. Some of his chook mates got into the festive spirit and fashioned a metre-high Christmas tree from an antenna and stuck a cardboard star on the top. They placed white boxes tied with red ribbon underneath alongside a couple of MREs as gifts. It was the best they could do but it didn’t alter the fact that some of the men — there are no women in the SAS — were feeling desperately homesick.

  ‘The contingent was a little bit emotional at Christmas time. I did see a few grown men cry talking to their kids,’ Jock says. ‘No one batted an eyelid — just winked at ’em and kept walking, you know. It was mutual support in being allowed to express yourself in a way that I think soldiers aren’t meant to, at least in the perception of the public.’

  Without girlfriends, wives, partners or regular playmates, some soldiers developed a strategy to deal with moments when fellow troopers asked about the loved ones back home. It didn’t take too long before they got sick and tired of having nothing to say or show for themselves.

  Jock had a plan to stave off any such potentially fraught moment with the Americans, who seemed to want to show everyone pictures of their girlfriends. He had ripped a picture of a pretty brunette out of a magazine, folded it neatly, put it in his wallet and tucked it in his backpack with his other stuff. She was something to look at and he often bullshitted to Jeremy, the Semper Fi US Marine at Kandahar with whom he set up a lucrative trading business, that the beautiful babe was his girlfriend. Jock didn’t know if Jeremy ever believed his story of love and romance, but he didn’t care. It helped pass the time in the long, boring stretches that come with war.

  Pictures and letters from girls back home helped take the soldiers’ minds out of the battlefield, however briefly. They could make a combat-weary trooper think he was anywhere other than in some stinking hole in the middle of a desert waiting for angry al Qaeda to cruise by and present themselves as a hostile target.

  Jock Wallace might have been footloose and fancy-free going to Afghanistan but he certainly wasn’t joining the monastery. War didn’t turn virile young men into chaste eunuchs, far from it.

  While at FOB Rhino, Jock spied a good-looking officer whom he thought looked hot. He was also impressed because she could do chin-ups. ‘I thought that was pretty cool,’ he says. The woman was a Marine aged somewhere in her mid-twenties and, in Jock’s thinking, she had a way of making camouflage gear look sexy, especially when working out. The fact that she was an officer meant she’d been to officer school, which meant she had brains. Jock liked smart women.

  Handsome and charming, Jock had a way with the ladies, something he’d been finessing since his days as a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old digger during basic training at Kapooka. On Valentine’s Day the first year away from home, Jock sent a single red rose each to a handful of teenage girls on the cusp of womanhood back in Tamworth. The girls had gone to school with Jock, and a red rose from a strapping soldier on Valentine’s Day was about as romantic as you could get. In the weeks after Valentine’s Day, Jock’s mother Margaret ran into several of the girls, each of whom exclaimed with girlish delight how touched she was at Jock’s amorous gesture. Margaret laughed to herself and thought, cheeky bugger, how many more?

  Roses and romance were Jock’s signature.

  Just before Christmas, the regiment’s commander, Gus Gilmore, had to make a trip to Kandahar where he was negotiating the SAS’s ongoing role in Operation Enduring Freedom. Being the CO’s signaller, Jock went along as part of the advance party. They flew to Kandahar in a Marine CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter, and as well as taking his signal gear with ‘CO’s Sig’ written across the top, Jock took an empty ammunition box. He’d been to Kandahar a couple of times to scout out a location for the squadron’s eventual move and had noticed the well-tended rose garden near, ironically, the crappers that were cleaned by the local Kandaharis. It was incongruous to see such a thing of beauty at an army headquarters, but such were the ironies of life.

  Jock had decided to exploit the trip in his campaign to woo the Marine officer back at Rhino, whose surname was Perez, first name unknown.

  In the middle of the night, he snuck out of the Kandahar sleeping quarters and walked over to the rose garden, picked about 30 red roses, and laid them in the ammo box. Mission accomplished, ya smooth bastard. The next morning, the US Marines flew the Aussies and Jock’s floral cargo back to the sandblasted outpost of Rhino.

  ‘As soon as I finished what I had to do with the CO, I broke free and went over to where [the woman] was working. She wasn’t around and I said to one of the boys, “Where’s Ma’am Perez?” He said, “I’m sorry, she’s gone back to the ship.” She had left that night. I was spewing — I was left with this box full of roses and no one to give it to.

  ‘I went away, and came back after writing a note with some instructions on the box, and asked them to be forwarded to her on the ship.
I’m not sure if she got them, because I never heard from her.’

  In the meantime, Jock had told some of his fellow diggers about his plan and while they thought it was a good scheme, they took the piss out of him because it didn’t work.

  ‘Ya dickhead, Jock.’

  ‘Just trying to do my bit for the ladies at war,’ he shot back.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jock didn’t want to think ahead, but he knew what would come next. Guerrilla warfare was ugly and its fighters often left their most fearsome assault to the last light of day.

  LATE AFTERNOON IN HELL’S HALFPIPE, Jock’s radio squelched to life.

  ‘Niner Charlie, this is One Oscar. Update on sitrep.’ The voice belonged to another chook at Bagram.

  Jock looked at Clint. ‘They want a sitrep, mate,’ he said with a laugh.

  Clint looked at Jock with a face that said, Are you kidding me?

  ‘No fuckin’ change,’ Clint deadpanned.

  Jock felt like a bit of a dill. ‘It’s obvious to me we haven’t gone anywhere so there’s no change and I didn’t really need to ask him that question,’ he says now.

  ‘This is Niner Charlie, sitrep no change. Digging in, over.’

  ‘Keep up the good work, you’re doing good. Over.’

  Yeah, like I need you to tell me that, Jock thought. Patronising prick.

  ‘Back to digging in. Out.’

  In the Tactical Operations Center, Major General Hagenbeck had two long conversations with Colonel Wiercinski who was still in the valley with his men. Both discussions focused on getting the medevac helicopters into the Shahi Kot to evacuate the wounded. The major general dispatched the choppers but an hour into the flight he turned them around. Sitreps from the battle reported that more al Qaeda and Taliban fighters were infiltrating the valley and it was too dangerous to attempt an evacuation mission. He could hear the gunfire over the radio — the noise was unrelenting — and Hagenbeck was convinced the choppers would be shot down if they went in.