After the Blast

by Garth Callender

  The bomber – there was not much left of him to look at. His jaw had been shattered and rearranged so that it almost seemed as if he had teeth coming out of his forehead. His eye sockets and nose were just meaty holes on his battered face.

  Hope he enjoyed his virgins.

  Sometime later, a friend – the company commander from Mirwais and one of the most intelligent and professional officers I have ever worked with – was passing through Tarin Kowt and explained how well known and well liked throughout the area the Afghan Army captain had been, particularly for his outlandish moustache with twisted ends. He recalls, macabrely, seeing his body in the makeshift morgue and thinking what a waste of an amazing moustache.

  My friend also told me how he had disposed of the head and legs of the suicide bomber after we graciously refused to take them. He explained that the soldiers in the patrol base had initially been very excited that they had the head and legs of the bomber for my team. They were a little put out when my guys confirmed we had all the biometric material we needed and had no further use for the remains. I think they expected us to cold pack them and bring them back. The Afghans did not believe the bomber needed a funeral, as he had killed soldiers – they suggested he ‘should be fed to the dogs’. As the Afghan locals and soldiers refused to take the remains of the suicide bomber, and the Coalition forces had nothing in place to backload such remains, the Australians in Mirwais were stuck with the bag of body bits.

  My friend, the commander of the Australians on the patrol base, was faced with only one option – to bury it. So he and one other, the medic sergeant, walked up behind the patrol base to an area used as a rifle range. It was just a patch of desert on the side of a craggy mountain peak. They started to dig a small grave. The dirt was hard, having been baked in the hot Afghan sun for millennia. They chipped and chipped at the soil, but after a considerable period of time they had only been able to cut a small hollow in the hard ground.

  They placed the head and legs in this small hole. They pushed and forced them in so that they could be covered with rocks, but were unable to get them to fit. My friend explained to me how he then swung his shovel at the lumps of flesh in an attempt to beat them flat in the hole. Silhouetted by the afternoon sun, high up on the hill, he swung his shovel, trying to bash the head and legs into the small scrape.

  It didn’t work … so they set fire to them. Once they had burned, he and the sergeant covered them with rocks. Every time they used the range after this, he would move a few rocks to ensure his ‘little friend’ had not been taken by dogs.

  *

  We reached halfway through the deployment. I got on a plane to Kuwait, cleaned my boots, webbing, pistol and rifle, and then took another plane to Paris to see the girls for almost two weeks. I was up all night before I flew out, driven like a crazy man to put together a report of an insurgent group that had been working in Deh Rafshan, north of Tarin Kowt. They were using artillery casings stuffed with ammonium nitrate aluminium. In the base of the device was a knot of detonating cord to set off the charge and in the mouth of the casing were packed ball bearings and other scrap metal – pretty nasty. Luckily no-one had successfully set one off yet.

  When I flew out of Tarin Kowt in the C-130, my head was spinning with visions of Crystal and Eva, cold beer, and insurgent bombs and tactics. I fell asleep somewhere on the way to Kuwait, soothed by the buzz of the C-130.

  The twelve days in France were like a dream. Eva had grown and Crystal was stylishly sporting a six-month pregnant belly. Our first thing to do as a couple was to open an envelope from her obstetrician that she had been carrying for weeks. Together we discovered we were having a little sister for Eva.

  After a day, we fled the bustle of Paris to a sleepy little town near Limoges, about three hours south-west. In a little stone house, we picked up where we had left off. Crystal’s life had been on hold since she’d moved to the Gold Coast to be near her parents. Somehow a lot of our conversation didn’t connect. She wanted to tell me what had been happening in Broadbeach, and I had nothing much to tell her except stories of how Pete was afflicted by gout and I slept in a shipping container.

  I had four more months in Afghanistan, so I couldn’t tell Crystal that I’d been travelling through the province by helicopter and armoured vehicle. In the eight years since we’d first met, I could count the time I had been away in years, and more stress was not something she needed. I could see she was constantly anxious, and I knew not to say anything that might make that worse.

  We spent lazy days driving through the French countryside and passed a night or two in a small seaside town. We had beach picnics with chicken and fresh bread and dinner in small local restaurants, which quite inexplicably always seemed to involve dishes of offal (even though what we ordered in broken French sounded quite innocent).

  In the time I had been in Afghanistan, the world had embraced smart phones. Crystal’s iPhone was the first I had played with, yet, incredibly, Eva at eighteen months delighted in showing me how she could unlock it and open her favourite game. I had been left behind by my toddler.

  I felt physically sick as I left them at the end of the holiday. To this day, I am haunted by the image of them waving goodbye through the hotel window as I drove off to Charles de Gaulle Airport – back to a war zone, a place of suicide bombers and worse. Little Eva with a puzzled look on her face and Crystal trying hard not to cry. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head: this is crazy. Why am I leaving my two favourite people?

  I missed them so much and, as if Afghanistan knew to turn on the right weather to match my mood, it was bitterly cold when I returned to Tarin Kowt. The highest of the craggy peaks that surrounded the town had gained a fine covering of snow.

  *

  My first job back was to send Pete out with one of the Dutch investigators to a strike in East Deh Rafshan on 19 October. A local man had ridden over an IED on his motorbike and been killed.

  The pair inspected the site, then went to Patrol Base Tabar to inspect the body. Clouds were coming over and a cold wind picked up as they unwrapped the stiff, cold corpse under torchlight in a dark shipping container. He was fairly intact. His right arm had been amputated by the blast (they had earlier found his hand at the bomb site). His leg was attached only by flaps of skin, and he had facial injuries from the blast – his eye had been pushed back into his head.

  Under torchlight they stripped him to look for scars, tattoos and additional tell-tale injuries. Finding none, they started to take his fingerprints, first electronically, then with ink. The Dutchman complained as he inadvertently snapped one of the body’s stiff fingers, twisting it as he tried to straighten it to get the fingerprint. In a darkly comical twist, while the two wrestled with the corpse’s arms to take prints, the Dutch investigator bent over, close to the naked, rigormortic body. He took the print, then turned his head to look at the body. He was startled to find himself only a centimetre from the cold penis – he told me it was as though it was looking at him. It was grisly work, and both returned a little shaky. I made a note to keep an eye on them.

  Although it took a while for us to realise it, Pete had made a significant breakthrough. At the site, he systematically searched the blast area. The absence of any obvious IED parts, besides shredded yellow palm-oil container, was not unusual, but this time he found a small piece of timber, a portion of a timber disc about 7 centimetres across, which looked like nothing of interest. Luckily, he decided to keep it. Only later, following a Special Forces raid in the northern end of Helmand province, just near the border with Uruzgan, did its significance become clear.

  In Helmand, near the Kajaki Dam, the Australian Special Forces had fought their way into a village where a known Taliban commander was staying. During the operation they found a cache of components, and among them were several triggers that we had never come across before. They were fabricated from a short section of narrow tree stump or branch. A wooden disc had been cut off the top and holes were bored through the
base, into which a detonator and detonating cord were inserted. Down through the central hole a spike of timber was inserted and connected to the disc of timber, which acted as a pressure plate.

  The device was triggered when a victim trod or drove over the wooden disc, which acted as a pressure plate and would push a small wooden spike into the detonator. The sensitive primary explosive would detonate, which in turn set off a reaction through the detonating cord leading to the main charge. The danger was this: if the main charge didn’t have any metal content, which a lot of the home-made explosives in the yellow palm-oil containers didn’t, there was nothing to find with conventional mine detectors. Most devices had some metal – engineers with basic search equipment can find firing pins in land mines, saw blades that work as contacts in pressure plates, battery packs and even wiring. But not these little fuckers – there was not a scrap of metal, so we had no way to find them with mine detectors.

  For this reason, the fragment from East Deh Rafshan was a big deal and attracted a lot of attention. It was the first time such a device had been found actually emplaced. And the dead man in the shipping container was proof that it worked. We quickly wrote a report on the ‘no-metal’ content triggers and made some assumptions about the supply chain from Helmand to East Deh Rafshan. Not long afterwards we found out that one of the Dutch battalions was planning a cordon and search operation based on our report.

  In a rush, the trigger captured by the Special Forces was sent to a lab in Bagram, near Kabul, for analysis. While examining one of the detonators, an overly enthusiastic scientist, in his haste, punctured the plastic case around the explosive with his metal probe. This instantly detonated the small cylinder, which blew several of his fingers off, and delayed any further analysis of the remaining detonators.

  *

  Well before winter set in, I had decided we needed some fun, and had come up with a plan to pinch a big steel stove made from welded wheel hubs. Nobody seemed too interested in the stove where it sat outside the Australian headquarters, but we figured that it would be highly sought after once the weather cooled down. We had also just been given some hardwood that the chippies – carpenters from the Australian construction engineers – didn’t need.

  So the four of us spent a couple of hours one evening covertly reconnoitring the location of the stove within the inner secure compound, planning how to get it through a gap we had found in the fence, then another hour picking the right time to roll the stove from where it sat, out of the compound and into the back of our old truck.

  With our new stove in the truck, we drove back to the lab and soon had it in place. It had been a successful team-building and stress-relieving activity. With our newly acquired hardwood planks, the stove kept us very warm over the winter and was extremely good for destroying classified documents.

  *

  Journal entry, 9 November 2009: Prime Minister in today. Didn’t see him. Made a nuisance of himself.

  Soon came Eid, a Muslim holiday for the locals. I knocked the blokes off early, as it was the local custom to fire rifles into the air in celebration. It was difficult to explain to them that bullets come down almost as fast as they go up. I was not keen for my blokes to be sitting in our unprotected office all evening while the bullets randomly fell. As we left the dining hall following dinner, snakes of machine-gun tracer streamed through the air overhead.

  After six months in Afghanistan, I could see the team was starting to tire. I was feeling it myself. We were doing long days – fourteen-hour days, seven days a week. But the job kept driving us onwards, and little victories kept us happy.

  22

  SEEING THE BIG PICTURE

  IT TOOK ME ALMOST SIX MONTHS TO UNDERSTAND what it was all about in Afghanistan. Somehow I’d got so wound up about the bombs that I hadn’t taken the time to understand what the soldiers were achieving. It took a four-day stopover in a remote patrol base to open my eyes.

  On 11 November, a strike injured one Australian and three Afghan army soldiers. I was picked up at the back gate of the command post and we drove straight to the landing zone, swearing at people who got in our way. Two medivac helicopters were sitting with their rotors turning when we arrived. After speaking with the loadmaster and convincing him that we needed to be on the flight (and lying a little by telling him we were authorised to be on it), we were directed onto a Black Hawk. It was empty in the back except for three closed stretchers and medical gear in backpacks. In a second we were up and flying over Tarin Kowt towards West Deh Rafshan.

  We touched down in a field and the loadmasters threw open the doors. After the turmoil of loading casualties onto the helicopter, including the injured Australian soldier giving permission for his mates to use his bodybuilding supplements, the helicopter took off in a storm of dust, and we got on with the job.

  The calm after the strike.

  One of the injured Afghans had refused to get on the helicopter and was limping around, and the Afghan patrol commander beat two suspects with a shovel before the young Australian lieutenant could stop him.

  Once we had gathered the evidence we needed and taken enough pictures of the bomb site, we headed over the river towards Patrol Base Buman, which was home for these Afghan and Australian soldiers. The mainly Afghan patrol all moved at a fast pace and, although I was in good shape (and Pete had recovered from his gout), it was not long before we started to hurt. I was wearing heavy body armour and carrying my pack, rifle and helmet for the hour-or-so walk back to the base. The Afghan soldiers skipped along with just a rifle and a few magazines or an RPG and a couple of spare rockets.

  Conditions at Buman were comfortable, but with few luxuries. The boys slept, did weights, went on patrol, or trained the Afghans. The day after we arrived, they were out patrolling the same ground. The Australian lieutenant spent some time convincing his Afghan counterpart that this was the right thing to do. Get out and show the locals and the insurgents that the Afghan army still owned the ground. That it took more than a bomb blast and a few injured to confine them to their base.

  I was in awe of the courage and stoicism of the team. They had taken casualties the day before, but out they went, knowing they had very little to protect themselves from hidden bombers, who waited and watched as they approached. They had to trust that their body armour, helmets, well-practised drills, reliance on each other – and a degree of luck – would protect them.

  That night, after we returned from the patrol, just on dusk, we tramped out to the ‘burn pit’ near the row of concertina wire that marked the boundaries of the base. All rubbish was burned during a Friday-night ritual at the pit. Helped along by 40 litres of diesel, the flames leapt out in bursts that must have been visible all over Deh Rafshan. It was as though we were making a further statement to the locals that we were there. When the flames finally died, we all tramped back behind the Hesco walls.

  For four days I watched this small team of Australians – a young lieutenant and an older warrant officer, a handful of infantry, an artillery forward observer and a medic – train the Afghan soldiers, negotiate patrols, coax and coach them out the gate of the patrol base. There was mutual respect. The Australians understood the reality for the Afghan soldiers – that the countryside was full of Taliban who wanted to kill them. And the Afghan soldiers understood that the Australians were here risking their lives to help them keep the country from falling into the hands of their enemy.

  I was thankful that we had upset the Dutch operations staff by jumping in the medivac helicopter without permission – it gave us a privileged insight into a small part of the lives of these Australian soldiers on the front line.

  But as payback the Dutch operations staff failed to organise a return trip for us.

  *

  Once finally back in Tarin, after our four days at Patrol Base Buman, there was a four-day backlog of work for me and Pete to get stuck into. We were invited to the Afghan army compound to see items recovered on a recent operation. The Australian mentors and
Afghan soldiers had found some large caches in Mirabad, including nearly sixty PG-7 rounds, a B-10 recoilless rifle with four rounds, plus a few IED switches that no-one thought much of.

  We turned up with an Australian captain and an interpreter, and when the trunks of PG-7 rounds were pulled out, all the Afghan soldiers crowded around – there must have been fifty, all up. Most were small, simple-looking men who came up to my shoulder, but one or two fitted the ‘Russian rape-baby’ profile: they were a little taller than the rest, with light-brown hair and blue eyes.

  An Afghan captain was obviously concerned that we were there to take his prize, the B-10 recoilless rifle. Although a clunky old weapon, it was a Taliban status symbol. Pete started examining the rounds to see if they were worth keeping and luckily instantly attracted the attention of most of the Afghan soldiers. The ammunition was old and corroded to the point that you could put your finger through many of the light alloy cones on the nose of the rockets. Pete sorted them into a large pile to be disposed of and a small pile of six to keep. The Afghan soldiers were confused about which pile was which – they wanted to keep most.

  I quietly took off away from the crowd with a small bag of switches I had found at the bottom of one trunk. There was an improvised ‘peg’ switch, two new anti-handling switches and wooden pieces to fabricate more – quite a find.

  The Afghan battalion executive officer came over and made a nuisance of himself but in the end allowed us to take the switches and dispose of the corroded PG-7 rounds. We left after much handshaking and a promise that we would return to give a presentation on how the switches worked. But I knew we would never explain to this crowd of Afghan soldiers exactly how to build an IED.