by Shane Bryant
My 20 US dollars bought me a 600-metre drive from the terminal to the front gate of the military base. I was pissed off with the driver, but too knackered to argue with the dodgy bastard. I showed the orders I had with me to an American soldier at the gate, who called the US Air Force police. A guy came and checked my paperwork and let me in.
He directed me to a line of tents, which was the transit accommodation for people coming and going. I found a stretcher and passed out. I was too tired to reflect on what lay ahead, or to care much about the journey of false starts and endless plane trips I’d had.
When I later woke up and started looking around, I asked an American airman where I could get a coffee, and he directed me to a café on base with internet access. I went there, bought a coffee and sat down at a computer. I still didn’t know who I was supposed to meet or report to, or where, but while sitting there, I saw a familiar face.
‘Hey, Mick!’ I couldn’t believe it. Here, just wandering past me in this formerly communist country, was Mick McAuliffe, a bloke I’d been in the army dogs with.
‘Shane! What the fuck are you doing here?’
Mick had been working in the US and, as it turned out, had arrived in Afghanistan only a couple of days earlier. He was now with the same company I was, CAI. Mick and I caught up on what each of us had been up to, and we went back to the tent, collected my gear and took it to where he was staying.
No thanks to them, I started to get my shit together. The resourceful Aussie had scammed a four-bed room in a proper hard-standing building. There was no sign yet, however, of Guy. He showed up a few hours later and catching up with him felt like old times, even though we barely knew each other.
Guy had been screwed around worse than I had. ‘I reported at the gate and they wouldn’t even let me in,’ he said. ‘I had to get a cab into town and find somewhere to make some phone calls.’
From then on, it was a classic hurry-up-and-wait situation. We were stuck on the base at Manus for twelve days. Like all US bases I’ve been on, Manus was massive, and set up like a self-contained chunk of small-town America. As well as the café and the chow hall, there was a Pizza Hut, a tailor, a barber and a PX – the post exchange shop.
As we couldn’t go sightseeing off-base, we had to occupy ourselves as best as we could and, to kill time, I’d walk the aisles of the PX. It was set up like a small, cramped variety store, with different departments. There were television sets, DVD players and ghetto blasters in the electrical section, along with iPods, computers, new-release movies, and CDs, and there was a whole aisle devoted to war-related merchandising. It was bizarre. There were coffee cups, T-shirts, Zippo lighters, ashtrays, and souvenir maps of Afghanistan, all emblazoned with the ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ logo – an American eagle clutching a bomb in his talons. One of the classier souvenirs was the beer stein, with a giant ceramic eagle built into the handle, with his head on the pop-open lid. There was a separate range of ‘Afghanistan Now’ goods – mousepads, embroidered patches and more coffee mugs, featuring an Apache gunship flying across the mountains, with the font and colour the same as in the posters for Apocalypse Now. It seemed you couldn’t go to war without buying the T-shirt, or the mousepad.
The US Air Force allowed its personnel and civilian contractors staying at Manus two beers every 24 hours and while the system was policed electronically – you were issued with an ID card that was swiped when you bought a drink – I got friendly with a couple of the air force bar staff, who’d palm me the odd extra drink without swiping my card.
As well as military people, there were plenty of civilian contractors passing through Kyrgyzstan en route to Afghanistan. They were a mixed bunch of nationalities – Americans, Canadians, Brits, South Africans, a Tanzanian and Aussies – all ex-military or ex-police. By and large, they were a good bunch, but a couple were fucking idiots – try-hards and wannabes.
Contracting attracts very different people. Some are ex-military, who are there for the money and, maybe, because they want to see some action, and so put themselves and their training to the ultimate test. Some have been on operations and some haven’t. There’s also the lunatic fringe – would-be Rambos and gun nuts, who have seen too many Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies and want to shoot someone. Of course, I’d rather work alongside someone who’s there because they can do the job and need the money than alongside a psycho who wants to find out what it’s like to shoot someone, but, unfortunately, the job attracts both types.
Buck Dikes was one American I warmed to immediately. He was a former US Marine and had worked as dog handler with the American police. He was larger than life in every way; a big guy with a good sense of humour, who liked a beer and was an excellent communicator. You couldn’t help but like him. He was a bit older than the rest of us – in his late forties – and, naturally, Guy and I immediately christened him Uncle Buck, after John Candy’s character in the movie of the same name.
In the background was the constant hum and roar of C-130s and C-17s coming and going to Afghanistan. The other dog handlers and I were travelling on what the Americans called Space-A – space available transport. I was starting to learn a whole new language and Space-A, translated, meant low-priority. Uniformed American personnel got top billing, arranged by rank, and coalition soldiers and airmen were next. At the bottom of the heap were the civilian contractors like me. We’d show up at the Pax terminal at a predetermined ‘show time’, to see if our names would be called for a flight. When they weren’t, we’d filter back to the coffee shop or the PX, or watch DVDs in our rooms. I was used to waiting, thanks to my days in the Australian Army, but it never got any easier.
‘Bryant, Shane,’ the US Air Force sergeant said, looking around the terminal. I looked up and replied.
Next, he called Buck’s name, then Guy’s and then Mick’s.
‘You’re on,’ said the sergeant.
We dropped our big bags on a pallet, and airmen started covering them with a cargo net and lashing them down. I picked up my daypack, and we filed out of the building and onto the runway. It was May and, while the days were getting warmer, there was still a knife’s edge of chill in the black night as we walked across the tarmac to the squat grey bulk of the C-17 transport aircraft.
The temperature momentarily increased a couple of degrees as we passed through the kerosene-smelling wash of the hot exhaust of the two jet engines, which were already turning and burning. A loadmaster wearing a desert-tan flight suit, with a nine-millimetre in a shoulder holster, directed us towards the rear ramp and up into the aircraft’s cavernous empty belly. There was only another couple of people on the aircraft, which could seat more than 100. After all this waiting, it seemed they’d found a plane just for us lowly civilian dog handlers. An American flag hung from the ceiling, stretching out proudly by the forward bulkhead. The crewman got inside and raised the ramp, and the stars disappeared from the night sky. The engines began to whine as the pilot increased the throttle, and we rumbled down the runway.
With a noisy clunk the C-17 swallowed its wheels. I was in the air at last, on my way to someone else’s war.
FIVE
Welcome to Afghanistan
May 2006
Once the overhead lights went to white, we were able to get out of our seats and walk around the vast hold of the cargo aircraft. You could have played a cricket match in there. I could sometimes make out in the moonlight the shapes of mountains below, capped with snow and bigger than anything I’d ever seen.
The countryside seemed harsh. Cold. Hot. Hostile. How hard must a people be, I wondered, to survive in a place like that? Noone was talking much; I guess we all felt pretty much the same. Brewing away in my gut was a mix of excitement, anticipation and nerves. It wasn’t a fear of war, or of getting shot at or dying, it was just a fear of the unknown, and I hoped that when I was put to the test as an operational dog handler, I’d come through all right. Most of us were too keyed up to get much sleep, but Buck, who’d already done ti
me in Iraq as a handler, was snoozing, his head lolling to one side.
As if to emphasise that things were about to change dramatically for all of us, the air force loadmaster retrieved his body armour from a forward seat and Velcro-ed it on.
The red lights went on overhead, and the loadmaster motioned for us to go back to our seats and buckle in. I couldn’t see much from inside the C-17, as I was facing inwards and wasn’t close to a window. The pilot came in steep and fast, no doubt practising some sort of evasive manoeuvre in case of surface-to-air missiles. I’d read that the CIA had sold Osama and co a shit-load of Stingers when they were all on the same side, fighting the Russians. There were still plenty in circulation, and I’d heard that the same American spooks were offering a million US dollars a pop to buy back any of the shoulder-launched missiles left over from the old days.
When the rear ramp of the C-17 opened, I had to screw my eyes shut, because of the sudden flood of light and the wind-blown dust that swirled in the idling engines’ exhausts. As we filed out and across the tarmac, I could feel so much grit on my exposed skin that it was like I was being sandblasted. A forklift raced across to the aircraft, its driver wearing goggles, and a scarf over his mouth. The first thing I smelled was shit. Later, I learned that this was from the badly sited sewage farm at the western end of Kandahar’s airstrip.
The row of upside-down egg-shaped arches in front of the terminal might have been the height of modern architecture when the Russians built them, but now they looked like part of the set of a low-budget sci-fi movie set on a waterless, hostile planet.
Kandahar is home to about 300,000 people and is Afghanistan’s third-largest city. It’s the capital of the province of the same name, located in the south of Afghanistan, near the Arghandab River. Kandahar was kind of a spiritual home of the modern Taliban. During the war against the Russians, loose bands of Taliban, which means ‘religious students’ fought as a faction of the Mujahideen, the general name for the Afghan freedom fighters. After the war ended in 1989, the Kandahar Taliban emerged as the dominant group in the faction, and took over their home city in 1994. Their influence and numbers spread, and by 1996 they had invaded and taken Kabul, defeating a string of rival warlords and factions.
The Americans and the Northern Alliance, however, had kicked the Taliban out of Kabul in the operations following September 11, and the coalition forces had rolled on to Kandahar. The Kandahar airport terminal, where I had landed, was known as the Taliban’s Last Stand, as it was here in late 2001 that a number of diehards had fought US forces to the death. Either the Americans hadn’t killed them all or the Taliban had been having a recruitment drive because, from everything I saw around me, we were very definitely still at war.
Mark Wilczynski was there to meet us. He and I shook hands and, as with Mick, it was good to see a familiar face.
‘G’day. Welcome to Afghanistan.’
In contrast to the disorganisation we’d experienced so far, Mark had a ten-day program of training and assessment ready for us, but first we had to get squared away and be allocated our dogs.
Our accommodation was in semi-permanent canvas tents, divided into individual rooms with plywood partitions and air- conditioned. There was building going on throughout the base, as it had been clear for some time that the Americans weren’t going to be leaving Afghanistan any time soon.
The base was enormous, and home to thousands of US and coalition soldiers. There were Americans, British, Canadians, various Eastern European nationals doing their best to be accepted as part of NATO, and even a few Australians. In addition to the men and women in uniform was another army, of civilian contractors from countries as diverse as Thailand, the Philippines, South Africa, India, Nepal, and more Eastern European nations. Contractors dressed like extras from a Rambo movie strutted around carrying M4s and wearing nine mils slung low in leg holsters. Trucks and humvees added to the dust cloud that hung in the air, and choppers, Hercs and C-17s were constantly landing or passing overhead.
In between the scream of jets coming and going were the shrill whine of drills and the pounding of hammers, as the tents progressively gave way to demountables and more permanent buildings. A spider’s web of electricity cables was strung everywhere from concrete and steel poles, and water trucks trundled up and down the streets, waging an ongoing, and largely futile, war against the dust. Work had just finished on a long timber boardwalk lined with shops and fast-food joints. There was Subway, Burger King and a Canadian donut shop called Tim Horton’s. As well as a new PX, there were mobile phone shops; a screen-printing place that did T-shirts; and a tactical shop, where I was able to buy some field gear, although the selection and quality of its stuff was pretty crappy. The shops were mostly run by foreigners, from Kyrgyzstan, although there were a few Afghanis selling carpets and other souvenirs. Once a week there was a bazaar, where locals would sell fake Russian Army belts, old AK-47 bayonets, and green canvas Mujahideen chest webbing, with pouches for AK magazines and grenades. The boardwalk formed a square and in the middle of it was a dirt soccer field, a fenced-in hockey pitch for the Canadians, and a stage on which visiting entertainers performed concerts or stand-up comedy shows. Later, I saw Aussie rock band The Angels there, and the American comedian Robin Williams.
The two mess halls at Kandahar would feed hundreds of soldiers at a time and the food was good, considering the number of people being catered for. There were three hot freshly cooked meals a day, although I usually went for a salad at lunchtime. Breakfast was cooked to order and the servings were always generous. Each mess had two serving lines, one on each side of the building, and the queue at mealtimes would stretch for 20 metres or more. Everyone carried a weapon with them at all times.
I was issued company T-shirts, cargo pants, US Army desert camouflage uniforms, a Kevlar helmet, boots and a sleeping bag, along with a 5.56-millimetre M4 assault rifle and a Glock nine-millimetre pistol and a leg holster. I took eight magazines for the M4 and three for the Glock. As contractors, we weren’t given any weapons training, or basic military field craft lessons, as CAI had assumed we’d be up to speed with that side of the business, given our past experience. I’d carried an M-16 in the Airborne Troop at 1 CER, and the M4 was basically the same rifle, only shorter, and I’d been issued with a Glock when I was in the New South Wales Police.
We were responsible for organising all our other gear, so Guy and I went shopping at the tactical store and cobbled together some very unsatisfactory load carrying gear. I bought a plate carrier – a bulletproof vest covered with strips of Velcro, but without the armoured plates inside – and some ammunition pouches, which I was able to Velcro to the front of my improvised vest. Later, back home in Australia, I’d end up spending 600 dollars on a purpose-designed combat vest and it was worth every cent.
CAI had a big operation at Kandahar, with nearly 60 dogs in the kennels. Mark gave me two to choose from, called Ricky and Hellboy. Ricky was a German shepherd and Hellboy was a Belgian Malinois. The Malinois, or Belgian shepherd dog, looks a bit like a smaller, squarer German shepherd. They generally have a brownish-yellow coat; black muzzle and cheeks; and alert, pricked-up ears. The Royal Australian Air Force and other military and civil agencies around the world use Mals as guard dogs, as they have a high prey drive, which means they like chasing things. They’re hard working and have high energy levels, so need lots of attention and to be kept active.
We got to work with the dogs for a bit to see how they behaved, get a feel for their personalities, and find out their strengths and weaknesses. The dogs were put in a range of situations, including searching vehicles. I was leaning towards Hellboy, as when it came to searching, he was much more motivated than Ricky. However, one problem was that Hellboy became distracted and agitated around unusual noises. One of the most common sights on any road in Afghanistan is the jingle truck, a standard lorry that the driver has decorated to an outrageous extent, with bells and tassels, paint and flags, and anything else they can find lyi
ng around. Because of the bells, the trucks make a hell of a racket as they move – hence the name – and Hellboy didn’t like it. In fact, when it came time to work on a vehicle checkpoint, Hellboy would freak out at the sound of the first approaching jingle truck. When it came to searching open, quiet spaces, Hellboy was the better dog, but as vehicle checkpoints were part of the job description, and loud noises a daily occurrence in Afghanistan, it soon became clear that he just wasn’t going to cut it out in the field, so I picked Ricky.
The funny thing was that I later learned from Mark that he had been holding Ricky back from other handlers, to give me the option of working with him when I arrived in Afghanistan. It was just like when he was the senior instructor on the dog handler courses at the School of Military Engineering in Australia – he had a knack of pairing the right man with the right dog.
In between briefings and getting our gear sorted out, we started training in earnest. Mark set up searches, using chunks of explosives placed all around the Kandahar military base. We searched long stretches of road through the camp, inside buildings, around bunkers and storage depots, and vehicles at mock vehicle checkpoints. It was a good way to get a feel for the base and, as in any military setting, the soldiers I was meeting all loved seeing the dogs at work.
Summer was well on the way, and during the day it was hot and dusty under empty blue skies. I worked up a sweat trailing Ricky around on the lead and we’d spend hours together in the sun. It was good to be working a job I knew, with a dog by my side. At the end of each day, I was tired but satisfied.
All the handlers needed to be certified to US military standard, and each man-and-dog team needed to score at least 95 per cent on their proficiency test. In practice, this meant you could only miss one hidden explosive out of every 20. Out in the field, the one you missed could kill someone, so I wanted Ricky and me to be the best team possible. At first I was a bit rusty, but Ricky was a seasoned explosive detective dog who’d been doing the job for real, and it wasn’t long before I was feeling really comfortable with him.
