War Dogs

by Shane Bryant

  We practised entering the imaginary buildings, in slow-time at first, before picking up the pace. First, it was two people at a time and everyone, including me, had a go. Then, as skills were refreshed – or, in my case, learned – the numbers of people entering the building were increased to three, four, and five. Everyone had a go in every position, and it was exciting for me, as a civvie, to lead the team in through the pretend doorway, these highly motived, pumped-up dudes rushing in behind me. I never really expected to have to use these newfound skills but, as I was often operating in villages and compounds, it was good at least to know what would be happening around me if the team ever had to bust into a place for real. Then, the team would clear the building first and I’d be expected to come in with Ricky to search afterwards.

  We talked through the use of grenades in clearing buildings – who would throw the grenade, and what the other members of the team would be doing when it exploded. I wasn’t working with Ricky during these exercises, as the aim was more me bringing my military skills closer to the level of the Americans’. As well as being fun, the training was another great chance for me to be accepted by the team, so I put everything I had into it.

  The team didn’t only train in how to kill people. On one exercise, I walked into a building in which there were three American soldiers screaming their lungs out and crying for help. They were covered in blood and I could see a puckered wound in a guy’s chest that was pumping out more blood all over the front of his torn uniform. The SF medics had done a gruesomely effective job of simulating wounds. First aid training was a top priority for this team.

  With the medics watching, we had to check each ‘victim’, bandage him and prepare him for Medevac. We each had a turn at practising CPR on a dummy that, we were told, was a man who had stopped breathing. After treating the wounded, we went outside and called in a Medevac helicopter. The training was at such a high level that we even had access to a real Black Hawk; some of us carried the patients out to the chopper on improvised stretchers, while others fanned out into covering positions. The Black Hawk took off and circled the base a couple of times, before coming back so that we could start the procedure all over again.

  The training was as realistic as possible, right down to us learning how to administer IV drips. We were given real needles and IV lines to practise with, and paired up. I was with a mate of mine, Dave, who was one of the older members of the team. He was also a smoker, so we tended to hang out together at coffee-breaks.

  We sat at a picnic table in the compound, and I gritted my teeth as Dave slid a needle into my arm. I’d never put a needle into another person before. I tied a tourniquet around Dave’s upper arm and checked the line from the saline drip bag, to make sure the fluid was going through. Next, I took an alcohol swab to clean his skin, then rested the needle against his flesh.

  ‘Shit, man. Ouch!’

  I was fucking hopeless at this. ‘Sorry, man,’ I said, trying not to laugh. It took me a couple of attempts to find a vein and each time I was sticking the needle into another part of Dave’s arm. Finally, the needle retracted as the catheter entered a vein. I released the tourniquet to get his blood flowing again, then inserted the line.

  We had another couple of goes on each other until we all got comfortable with starting IVs. Again, it was good to know I could do this, in case I had to treat someone in the heat of battle. As we became more confident, we even practised giving each other IVs at night, using night-vision goggles. The training was more full-on than anything I’d ever done in the Australian Army.

  While the training continued, I also started going on missions with the team. The weather had turned, and it was raining the day we went on a combat reconnaissance mission to the village of Shah Mansur. ‘Combat reconnaissance’ meant that we would go there, have a look, and if someone wanted to pick a fight, we’d get into it.

  Near the village, Ricky and I were tasked with clearing a kilometre of road. A kilometre doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re working a dog in the open, and in the rain, it’s bloody hard work. The dirt road was well defined, flanked by low mudbrick walls and houses here and there. This helped a bit, as it gave Ricky something to focus on. It’s even harder to search empty open spaces.

  I was quartering Ricky – moving him from one side of the road to the other – and, at that stage, I was still working him on-lead. The road was slippery with mud, and I nearly fell on my arse a few times as he and I crossed back and forth. I had to keep him moving and motivated, and make sure he kept his nose close to the ground, because any potential IEDs would have been buried. I had to balance the need of the team to get through there as soon as possible with the need to keep Ricky on his game, which meant I had to allow him brief rest periods. He did a good job and we made it through without incident. So much of a dog handler’s war is like that, hours of effort with no result, but one mistake can be the end of the team.

  When we got back from the mission, Ricky and I were cold, wet and filthy. I took him into the shower block at Tarin Khowt and held him under the hot water while I scrubbed him clean, then towel-dried him. Like most dogs, Ricky didn’t mind a bath once he was actually under the water but, given half a chance, he’d do a runner.

  After his shower, I took him back to my room and we sat together by the heater. It was good to be warm again, even if the space was full of that awful wet-dog smell.

  Back on the rifle range at Tarin Khowt, we did heaps of live firing drills. I racked my Glock and, under the watchful eye of an SF soldier, moved up to the start line.

  ‘Go!’ he yelled, pushing the button on a stopwatch. As I walked forward, I fired two shots at a paper target – a double tap. It stayed up. Another target was raised, which I somehow managed to hit. I moved through the maze of mine tape we’d set up to represent building walls and snapped off shots, two at a time. My shooting, as usual, was shithouse, but it was all valuable training and more fun than any shooting I’d done back in Australia.

  Unlike the fifteen-minute brief on the M240 I’d had when I first arrived at Cobra, with this team I went out and put a lot of rounds down range through the 240 and the .50 cal. I was also given a lesson on the Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher, which was capable of firing up to 375 explosive projectiles per minute. I fired a heap of 40-millimetre grenades, which was awesome. Watching the bursts erupting at the far end of the range made me think how terrifying coming under fire from this weapon must be. Each grenade had a killing radius of five metres, and was capable of causing wounds up to fifteen metres from the point of detonation. This was useful training, as on a later mission with another team, I was given the job of manning a Mark 19. This weapon didn’t exist when I was in the Australian Army.

  While I was learning new things, I found that the basic training I’d received in the army and police in Australia was standing me in good stead. The Australian Army is big on fire control and being disciplined with your ammunition and, naturally, in the police you’ve got to be dead sure of what you’re doing before you draw your pistol.

  For the first time, I was getting a real feeling of what it meant to be part of a US SF team, and really feeling accepted. As well as joining in with their training, I was expected to attend afternoon prayers, the team sergeant’s daily briefing. As a civilian I didn’t need to be there, and the team could have probably found 100 reasons I shouldn’t have attended, but I was pleased to be invited.

  There was a US Army special search dog handler named John, based at Tarin Khowt. John was the first American military dog handler I’d worked with. The special search dogs were trained the same way Australian explosive detection dogs were; that is, they worked their dogs off-lead. John and I trained together, and even though company policy dictated that I search Ricky on-lead, I was keen to get him off the leash and used to responding to my words of command and body language. Ricky responded well to the training, and it was good for both the dog and me that he be able to work this way if I needed him to do so.

/>   Up the hill from FOB Ripley was Kamp Holland, the Dutch base in the province, which was also home to the Australian Reconstruction Task Force. The Australian engineers were working closely with the Dutch and it turned out that I knew quite a few of the blokes who were based there. I’d get on a four-wheel motorbike and visit them, but I wasn’t allowed to take Ricky with me on my visits.

  The Australian presence was split into two parts. Next door to Kamp Holland was Camp Russell, which housed the Australian Special Operations Task Group, which included the SAS, commandos and specialist engineers from the Incident Response Regiment. Access to Camp Russell, named after the first Australian killed in Afghanistan, Sergeant Andrew Russell, was tightly controlled.

  I knew Andrew Russell in my early days in the Australian Army. Before he passed the gruelling SAS selection course and was accepted into the elite unit, he was an army engineer. We served together in the 1 CER airborne troop and I’d later end up going on a mission into Helmand Province, where Andrew was killed when the six-wheel drive Land Rover long-range patrol vehicle he was in drove over a mine.

  In true Australian Army tradition, there were dog handlers and dogs attached to the Reconstruction Task Force and, on the other side of some barbed wire, dogs and handlers attached to the Incident Response Regiment. I got to meet a few of the handlers and, while they’d all completed their training long after I’d left the army, it was good to catch up with them and swap stories.

  The Netherlands has a reputation for breeding and training some of the best sniffer dogs for de-mining operations in the world, so I was surprised to learn that the Dutch military didn’t have an explosive detection dog capability. There were military dogs on the Dutch base, but they were attack dogs, whose job was to provide security, especially for the Apache helicopters. At night, these dogs were let off their leashes to roam free around the helicopters, to deter any Taliban who might have considered sneaking into the base.

  In the ranks of the Incident Response Regiment and the Reconstruction Task Force were several engineers I’d served with when I’d been in the army. It turned out that Greg, the squadron sergeant major of the engineer squadron, was a guy I knew from 1 CER. He’d been a sapper in the airborne troop when I’d joined, and a corporal while I was working as a dog handler. It was interesting talking to him, and wondering how I would have got on if I’d stayed in the Australian Army. I didn’t have many regrets about the career choices I’d made, though, and I knew I had a better life as a civilian contract dog handler than I would have if I’d come to Afghanistan with the army.

  The Reconstruction Task Force guys were working closely with the local Afghani community in Tarin Khowt. Part of their job was rebuilding, or building, civil infrastructure in the province, but they were also running a trade training school for young Afghani men, which taught them the basics of carpentry and electrics. The idea was to give the boys the skills and tools they needed to make a living, and to help support their families. After graduating, the Afghanis would be given a toolkit. The word was that some of the tools from the kits were showing up in the local markets, but the Aussies were confident that enough of the young men were working as tradies to make the program worthwhile.

  The Reconstruction Task Force might have been concentrating on winning hearts and minds, but the Taliban was just as keen to stop them doing their work as it was to stop the SAS or US SF who were out searching for al-Qaeda and Taliban and killing them.

  On board the SF vehicles, we carried a few Carl Gustaf 84-millimetre anti armour weapons. It was a Swedish-made weapon and looked like a stubby bazooka, and I’d trained on it in my early years as a soldier. We in the Australian Army called it the ‘Charlie guts-ache’, as there was a health risk if you fired more than three or four rounds in succession from it: the back-blast was so severe that, apparently, repeated use could shake up your internal organs. It was, however, an effective, easy-to-use weapon, either against vehicles or for busting holes in mudbrick houses or compounds. I learned that the team was short of rounds and I suggested we try to scrounge some from the Australians, as I was sure they were also still using the Carl Gustaf.

  I took one of the team guys with me to visit Greg at the Australian base. I’m sure he thought it was a turn-up for the books, the mighty US military machine begging ammunition from the relatively tiny Australian task force, but he was happy to help us out and we were able to ship a few rounds back to the SF compound.

  I’d been happy to help out, too, and wondered if being a civilian made it easier for me to be a middle man. Contractors sometimes found themselves in a bit of grey area when it came to the rules. On one hand, we were expected to follow the law of the land at whatever FOB we were based; on the other, on some matters we probably weren’t policed as strictly as the soldiers. For example, an American contractor I knew at Tarin Khowt was getting booze shipped to him from the States. His father was decanting spirits and home-brewed wine into peroxide bottles and mailing it to him.

  The A-Team at Tarin Khowt was thoroughly professional and, unlike the guys at Cobra, adhered strictly to the no-alcohol rule. I’m not saying the soldiers at Cobra were less professional but, as they were operating at a remote base without a B-Team looking over their shoulder every minute, they could get away with a bit more. My contractor buddy slipped me some bottles of his dad’s bootleg alcohol, but I didn’t want to jeopardise the acceptance with the team I’d won, so needed to get rid of it.

  Over at the Australian base, they were following the US lead, so the task force there was also ‘dry’. There are some funny double standards in the Australian Defence Force. For the last fifteen years or so, there has been no alcohol allowed on Australian Army exercises, or for fighting troops serving overseas on operations. The navy and air force, however, have in similar situations had limited access to booze.

  I didn’t want to get caught with the alcohol in my room, but it seemed a crying shame to tip it down the sink after my buddy’s dad had sent it halfway around the world. I smuggled it into the Aussie base and gave it to some diggers I knew there. I thought of this as doing my bit to strengthen further the bonds between the coalition partners in Afghanistan.

  I stopped and looked at a bloke in civilian clothes, who stared back at me. ‘Don’t I know you?’

  This was happening to me on a regular basis at Tarin Khowt. As well as the presence of Australian military people in Afghanistan, Aussie civilians were working myriad roles that in past wars would have been done by people in uniform. I said hello to the man, who turned out to be John ‘Robbo’ Roberts, who had been a troop commander in 1 Field Squadron when I’d been a sapper. Robbo had left the Royal Australian Engineers after becoming a major. He was a good bloke and, having met again, we’d talk for hours. I found out he had married a Mozambican woman he’d met while serving with the Australian detachment to the United Nations de-mining operation there.

  Like me, Robbo had come to Afghanistan for the money, as he was supporting kids from his first and second marriages. He was based in a compound beside FOB Ripley, the SF base. He worked for a company called DynCorp, and his job was to maintain the airstrip at Tarin Khowt and run a contract helicopter. The chopper, crewed by Russians who had served in Afghanistan during their war in the 1980s, was used to move cargo around the province, and to and from Kandahar airfield.

  When I wasn’t out on missions, I’d often drop in on Robbo, who lived and worked out of two shipping containers. As well as running an airfield and a helicopter, he was the local sly-grog wholesaler. He would buy to order for thirsty soldiers on the base and, thanks to the volumes he was trading in, the price of a bottle of contraband Indian whisky dropped from 100 US dollars to 40. Prior to his contact in Kabul being busted and sacked, Robbo had been able to bring in by road half a shipping container of VB, and keep it under wraps while selling it.

  Also in the DynCorp compound were civilian counter- narcotics advisers from the Poppy Elimination Force, a US State Department-funded operation. The Popp
y Elimination Force had started life as the Afghani Eradication Force, but its name was changed when it was realised that it wasn’t politically correct to be talking about eradicating Afghanis.

  Robbo and I would watch the sun set over the mountains while we had a beer or two. We talked about our time in the engineers, and he reminded me that he’d been the troop commander in charge of the infamous search of George Bush Senior’s hotel room. He also reminded me of another search of a public building, during a visit by Queen Elizabeth, in which our guys found a loaded pistol and a black dildo in a prominent public official’s desk drawer.

  One evening, we were sitting up on the shipping container and watching multiple rockets being launched from the back of a truck in the FOB, out in support of a TIC in the valley somewhere to the north.

  ‘We’re going to have to be here for years to win this thing,’ Robbo said.

  I shook my head. ‘Not me.’

  We sat in silence for a while, listening to the whiz and whoosh of the rockets, and watching their high-arcing comet trails scribing white lines across the red-gold sky.

  ‘Did you hear what happened to the backyard blitz boys?’ Robbo asked.

  ‘Backyard blitz’ was our term for the efforts of the Australian Reconstruction Task Force engineers, many of whom we’d served with in the past. ‘What happened?’

  ‘They went out to a village, and worked their guts out to put in a water supply system but didn’t get it finished. When they came back the next day to commission it, they found all the plumbing had been nicked.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘We’re not going to win hearts and minds by imposing development and infrastructure on these people,’ Robbo said. ‘The Afghanis have to own the whole process of rebuilding and the outcome. As long as we keep acting like westerners and delivering what we think they need, instead of what it is they say they need, we’re going to keep missing the mark.’