After the Blast

by Garth Callender

‘Scotty, OK.’

  They’d mutter something into their cheap two-way radio and I’d catch ‘Scotty’ being said a few times.

  They were always pleasant, and regularly offered to buy my watch. It usually took about ten minutes to be let through – generally after being offered some chai, their hot sweet tea, decanted into dirty, fingerprint-smeared glasses from the flasks they all carried.

  After three checkpoints, I would reach the inner sanctum where the Special Forces blokes lived. All were massive guys who ate, slept, did weights and sneaked around in the night shooting people. Scotty was their ‘bomb guy’ and our contact. He was a young, stocky little fellow who initially came across as a bit simple. But after we got to know him better, we learnt that he was anything but.

  His technical qualifications for disposing of explosives were dubious. But with his Afghan police counterparts he had recovered many IEDs, which he was always keen to get to us. He had quite a personal arsenal in his bedroom/office. There was an Uzi submachine gun, an M4 assault rifle with a second barrel and receiver with an M203 grenade launcher attachment, and numerous pistols, which sat on his coffee table next to a pile of men’s fitness magazines.

  Above his bed, a couple of detonators dangled from a hook on the wall; they could remove a few fingers if they went off in your hand. When I asked him why he had them in his room, he shrugged and said, ‘Oh, they’ve been there since I got here.’

  Scotty was an ally who understood technical intelligence and how important it was for us to get hold of these IEDs so we could feed our findings back into the intelligence world, and he was always very open with us, freely passing on whatever had been recovered. Once, after he returned from a trip to Kandahar down Route Bear with the Afghan police, he invited us over to take the twenty-one devices they had collected on the trip. Amazingly, the Afghan police seemed to understand exactly where the IEDs were in the road. They would stop the convoy and pull on the wire or detonating cord sticking out of the loose earth and the whole device would come out. This may have had something to do with the US policy of paying for IEDs that were handed in, one of the many friction points between the US and the Dutch, who were staunchly opposed to paying for such things.

  Scotty took us to his shipping container wedged between two dirt mounds. These mounds would provide some blast protection in the event that the explosives detonated for one reason or another. When he opened the doors, we realised that it was a prudent safety measure. The inside of the metal container was lined with shelves that seemed to hold every variety of IED component. There were numerous yellow palm-oil containers filled with ammonium nitrate aluminium, a favourite homemade explosive of the insurgents because it was relatively safe to make and the chemicals were easy to come by, as ammonium nitrate is a common fertiliser and the aluminium could easily be sourced from metallic paint or even by putting chunks of aluminium in coffee grinders.

  Scotty’s yellow palm-oil containers had been sitting in the blistering Afghan sun and many were leaching white slurry from the caps. Besides the containers, there was a variety of explosives, detonators, pressure plates, radio-controlled triggers, and wires and cords. I had a quick look and asked Pete, a qualified EOD technician, to go in first and check if the explosives were safe … I was a good boss. He had a look and stuck his head out of the shipping container, saying that they wouldn’t meet Australian standards but it was unlikely that anything would blow up – just ‘be careful what you touch’, as plenty of detonators were kicking around in there.

  Scotty was more than happy for us to take what we wanted. There were some interesting switches that we hadn’t seen before and a few battery packs and pressure plates that we might be able to pull prints from. We also took a tub of explosives in an unusual large clear plastic tube. It had about 20 kilograms of a white grainy powder in it, not the usual grey ammonium nitrate aluminium. Back at the lab we pulled it apart to find it had a funnel in the middle to make a crudely shaped charge, so that the force of the explosion would be focused in one direction. Similar explosive charges were used to great effect by the insurgents in Iraq for blowing holes in armoured vehicles. The good ones smuggled in from Iran had copper inserts that fired a molten jet that travelled at 2000 metres per second. It would slice through armoured vehicles, walls, limbs, anything that got in its way. This was the reason we were issued with medical tourniquets that could be applied one-handed – so, after losing a limb, you could still use the tourniquet to stop bleeding and maybe save your own life.

  We were concerned that this unusual charge was the first using a new technique for targeting armoured vehicles. We did some testing and later blew it up on the range against the hull of a written-off Bushmaster armoured vehicle. Thankfully it didn’t have any ability to punch a hole in the armour, nor did we see any others like it that could herald a new trend for targeting armoured vehicles in the province.

  Two days after Scotty’s patrol went down Route Bear, the Dutch battle-group tried it. They were not so good at identifying the bombs and got badly hit several times. They lost a couple of men and were constantly fired on from the hills as they tried to recover their vehicles. Eventually they left one of their vehicles behind and called in attack helicopters to put a couple of Hellfires into it to make sure there was nothing left for the Taliban.

  It was a difficult situation with the Dutch and the US hating and distrusting each other, and the US working closely with a local warlord and police chief who most likely had a hand in attacking the Dutch convoy. In some ways I understood how the US thought: while the warlord may not have been a good guy, at least he wasn’t the worst, and supporting his police brought some stability to the province. It was Afghanistan; it would never be like the US or the Netherlands or Australia. The best you could hope for was that the police and army would keep the province peaceful, even if they did it through intimidation and extortion. But the Dutch refused to accept that.

  20

  A DEATH – AND SOME NEAR MISSES

  19 JULY 2009 : YESTERDAY MORNING, PRIVATE Warren shifted his weight while positioned behind the machine gun and triggered an anti-personnel mine that almost instantly severed his leg. The mine started an explosive chain that initiated a detonating cord leading to three 82-mm mortars that detonated under his friend, Private ‘Benny’ Ranaudo, killing him instantly.

  They had been in the same location for two and a half hours, providing a cordon about halfway up the Baluchi Valley, while the remainder of the company conducted a search of qalas a few hundred metres south. All the while, locals had been moving through the area, within centimetres or even millimetres of the device. A young local boy lost three toes and two other men received superficial wounds from fragmentation.

  I was in Kandahar when it happened. A lieutenant colonel gave me the news: one Australian killed, one Australian ‘priority one’ and three local nationals wounded. I asked for his thoughts and he gave me the answer I was after: ‘You should go’. Somehow the planets aligned and I was on an empty C-17 out to Tarin Kowt within the hour and back at the lab within two.

  Pete and I got to the site by helicopter. We were dropped off in a cloud of dirt, and when the helicopter finally lifted off with three detainees, we found ourselves once more in an eerily quiet field with a small group of soldiers dotted in security positions in the surrounding trees and among banks and aqueduct walls. They were all very calm and at first it was difficult to imagine how that very morning this had been the site of an explosion, of shouting, panic, severed limbs and death.

  Members of the section that sustained the casualties had asked to remain on task. I interviewed a few while Pete spoke to the EOD guys, who showed him where they had found Private Warren’s foot. At first, speaking to the young corporal, the section commander in charge of Warren and Ranaudo, I didn’t quite understand how it had occurred, how they had been in the same location for hours and how the device had been triggered by chance. The young corporal calmly talked me through the details several times. He exp
lained that they had stepped out early that morning for a cordon-and-search operation. They had put in their security positions before sunrise so as not to alert the locals. His section had been part of the outer cordon while the Afghan soldiers searched specific qalas. Locals were moving through the area not long after they arrived, and Private Warren had been behind the machine gun with Ranaudo standing behind him when the bomb went off. He told me how they had looked at Benny and realised there was no way he was going to be revived. It was likely he knew nothing of the blast.

  I spent a few minutes sitting with the company commander, a man for whom I had a lot of respect. He answered all my questions, but I had the feeling he really needed a few minutes for quiet contemplation. To have soldiers under your command killed is something that can haunt a man for the rest of his life.

  We moved back to Patrol Base Mashal, where we spent the night completing and submitting our report. Then we were driven back to Tarin Kowt where I briefed the battle-group headquarters. General Kelly was in attendance again, along with the deputy commander for Afghanistan. There were lots of questions. I also learnt that Warren had survived and was on his way to Germany.

  That evening I turned in early. I’d had a broken night’s sleep the night before, sleeping in the dust with dogs howling around me. I wasn’t sure about the vigilance of the security piquet or how far away those fucking feral dogs were.

  *

  I didn’t go to the ramp ceremony, the ceremony for loading coffins onto outgoing aircraft. In fact, I never went to a ramp ceremony. I thought the best way to remember the fallen was to keep working to try to stop losing soldiers. The death of Private Ranaudo gave a real urgency to what we were doing.

  I had started to get obsessed by biometrics, the unique characteristics of each person that could be recorded, analysed and matched – fingerprints, iris patterns, facial geometry, DNA. One of the hardest things about a counterinsurgency fight, such as in Afghanistan, was identifying the insurgents. Most were farmers by day and occasionally set IEDs or shot at us when the conditions were in their favour. Very rarely did they show themselves. They did, however, leave clues: fingerprints on the electrical tape and other components. These could be matched with the individuals when the equipment and resources were available.

  Small handheld units with cameras and fingerprint and iris scanners were what we needed, and about halfway through the tour my investigator managed to get us twenty-three such ‘biometric enrolment units’. It presented a great opportunity. Widespread enrolment of the province’s population would break new ground. Some in the government back home raised privacy concerns when we began enrolling local nationals, although I thought they were confused about where we were and what we were doing. With a widespread IED threat that in many circumstances was indiscriminately killing children, I said fuck privacy and sort this situation out any way you can.

  The US saw it as a homeland security issue. They felt that the insurgents building bombs in Afghanistan now would be the same people building bombs in America in ten to twenty years’ time.

  *

  As well as the ever-increasing IED incidents, there were other challenges. A Kiowa Warrior helicopter troop fired on a group of people on the southern side of Chora with Hellfire missiles. They were about a kilometre into the dasht. They fired two Hellfires, one a thermobaric. This killed two people outright and badly injured two others. One died shortly afterwards.

  The US claimed that the Kiowas fired on the group as they were emplacing an IED. It got messy when the Dutch claimed that the locals were innocent. My team was told to deploy to the site. The commanding officer of the Australian battle-group called me in to express concern about the task: he felt it was a witch-hunt and the Dutch were playing politics. I said that all an investigation from my team could do was give him straight answers, but considering that the site was a day old there might not be many facts to find. He seemed happy with this and my team was stood down.

  The following day, we had a call out to a site where a patrol had hit a device in Baluchi. We returned with a road convoy and I spent another night in the dirt – I couldn’t sleep because of those dogs again. But I was roused at 2330 to receive an order from Regional Command, the higher headquarters in Kandahar. They wanted my team to do the exploitation of the US attack site, after all. The Dutch had been pushing for it.

  We went there the following day, as it coincided with the patrol route back to Tarin Kowt, but found very little. There were obvious bloodstains and craters. It looked like one person had been melted onto his motorbike. My report said nothing but what we found: two missile impact craters, and a third crater that may have been dug by insurgents attempting to emplace an IED. We didn’t help anyone with our report … but we didn’t condemn anyone either. I resented my team being used to try to implicate other soldiers and make political statements. Particularly when the lines between right and wrong, and who was an insurgent and who wasn’t, were so blurry.

  *

  For a week or so in August, it seemed we were losing a vehicle a day to IED strikes in the Baluchi Valley. And there were other incidents elsewhere. The Dutch had an IED strike out near Patrol Base Tabar. The device didn’t function properly, which was lucky as the soldier was only 3 metres away.

  Some qualified trackers with them identified a sandal print in the dirt. They followed the prints to a nearby qala and detained a local with matching sandals. He came up positive to an explosive residue test. The device had plenty of tape to leave fingerprints on. The detainee was fingerprinted that night and the components were flown to Kandahar so the lab could pull the prints. The idea was to match them with the detainee, and hope he would be locked up for a long time. However, the prints came back negative. It was a shame – we had planned a party. But it opened a lot of people’s eyes to what you could do with biometrics.

  By August we were very busy. Our success meant we were never short of work and we were regularly called on at short notice to go to bomb sites. The sad reality was that there were many incidents, some days several across the province. The insurgents developed ingenious new ways to hide their bombs. They were burying them deeper so that our engineers struggled to find them with our standard mine detectors. They were covering them with plastic bowls so that a civilian vehicle wasn’t heavy enough to detonate the device, but the ground pressure from a 15-tonne armoured vehicle would crush the bowl and trigger the switch underneath. Many soldiers had now been involved in numerous incidents over just a short time in Afghanistan.

  One afternoon we flew out to an IED recovery. It involved an anti-handling switch designed to target EOD teams – a weight on a grenade fuse hooked up to two mortar rounds. While we were on our way back to Tarin Kowt by Black Hawk, the same patrol hit another IED as they tried to depart the location. So the next morning we were back there again. I spoke to the young driver of the vehicle that had hit the IED. He explained that the four vehicles in front of his had all turned off a secondary path onto a main track, but he had missed the turn. Not more than 5 metres further, he had hit the bomb. He also confided to me that this was his third IED strike. The blast had torn off the front wheel stations. One of the tyres could be seen about 200 metres away at the base of an almost sheer drop off the side of the spurline.

  *

  Not long after this, we had a night on a hill out in the Mirabad valley. An IED with a pull-string trigger had been positioned on a track to target dismounted patrols moving around the green zone. We found the triggerman’s location only about 30 metres from the impact site – very close but with the corn crops high enough that he remained well concealed.

  When the Australian patrol approached, something caught the lead scout’s eye. He stopped and called the section commander forward. They both looked at the string running across the track. They remained there when they saw it move, and even when the plastic insulator was pulled by the insurgent across the track in front of them. It was only later that they truly understood how close they came
to being blown up.

  We had a good look at the device and tried to work out why it hadn’t detonated. The only thing we could see was that the connections from the battery pack to the main charge and detonator were not tight. Basically, the insurgent hadn’t given the bare wires a good twist to ensure a good connection. The blokes in the patrol had been saved from serious injury by the fact that the insurgent had little understanding of basic electrical theory.

  Only a few days later, we were back in Mirabad with the Dutch quick reaction force. The boys had found another IED with a pull-string. In fact, they had come across four insurgents emplacing the device. But everyone was so surprised when they came face-to-face in the head-high corn that the insurgents had got away – it would have been well within the ‘rules of engagement’ to shoot them on the spot. The patrol did a further search and found a second IED, then a cache of additional components in a tree.

  We’d been there for about an hour and had started on the second site when a 107-mm rocket was fired over our heads. It landed a bit further to the south, closer to where our vehicles were. We didn’t stay for too much longer.

  We were nearing the mid-point of our tour, and the team was starting to achieve what we’d been sent here to do. We were accepted as a group that made a valuable contribution to the overall fight in the province. The units we were supporting were better informed of the IED threat they faced. I was sure that if we kept this up, our work would be of lasting benefit to Coalition forces, the Afghan security forces and the people of Uruzgan province.

  I even heard that several of our reports had made it, unedited, to the desk of the minister for defence – enough to make any staff officer proud.

  21

  A SUICIDE BOMBER, A HOLIDAY AND A NEW COMPONENT

  THERE WAS A SUICIDE BOMBER UP IN CHORA the day before the national election in August 2009. Somehow it felt much more personal than it ever had in Baghdad. An Afghan army captain, a company commander, stopped as he drove through the bazaar. The bomber approached from an alley, shook the captain’s hand, then detonated his device, killing four and badly wounding another seven.