‘Name it, son,’ Ben responded.
‘Promise that you’ll come back to us from Afghanistan? Promise that you won’t leave us without both a mum and a dad.’
Caught off guard, Ben had to fight back a sudden surge of emotion. Every day, he tried to make it up to his children for the fact that they no longer had a mother. Every day, he fought with guilt at the thought that serving on army operations took him away from his children. But that was his job – what he was trained to do – and he was very good at it. He told himself that one day, before many more years had passed, he would be too old for war, and then he would be able to spend all the time in the world with his children. Until that day came, he would do the job he was trained to do, as best he could.
‘Yes, Daddy, promise us!’ Maddie urged.
Ben nodded slowly, and said, firmly, ‘I promise that I will come back to you from Afghanistan.’
‘Good,’ said Josh.
‘And Caesar, too, Daddy,’ said Maddie. ‘Promise us that he’ll come back home with you.’
Ben smiled. ‘I promise that Caesar will come back home with me, too,’ he said.
‘Good,’ Maddie returned, satisfied. Slipping down from the sofa she turned to her father. ‘Come on, then. Let’s play ball with Caesar.’
Early Monday morning, dressed in his camouflage field uniform and ready to fly out that night, Ben said goodbye to his family before Nan dropped Josh and Maddie off at school. None of them said much. Nan gave Ben a long cuddle. Maddie gave him an even longer cuddle, but, being deliberately brave, she didn’t cry. Josh, acting grown up, didn’t cry either, and gave his father a handshake, then a cuddle.
Ben then brought Caesar in from the backyard. Caesar went directly to Josh, jumped up at him and licked him on the mouth.
‘Caesar kissed you goodbye, Josh,’ said Maddie with delight, as she reached out to Caesar and gave him a cuddle. Spluttering and laughing, Josh wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘How come Caesar came to me first?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Just like Dodger used to.’
‘Caesar has no favourites in this family, Josh,’ Ben responded. ‘He loves us all equally.’
‘Even though I don’t like him?’
‘You do like him,’ said Maddie. ‘You don’t hate him.’
‘No, I don’t hate him,’ Josh conceded, as Caesar went to Nan for his last goodbye.
‘Of course you don’t hate him,’ said Nan. ‘Caesar will be looking after your father in Afghanistan. How could you not care for a dog like that?’
‘Well, I suppose I care,’ Josh acknowledged. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to him, that’s for sure.’
‘And Caesar senses that you care,’ said Ben.
Josh was impressed. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Ben, as Caesar came back to sit at his side. ‘You’d be amazed what goes on inside this bloke’s head. And in his heart.’
Two days later, Ben and Caesar were in far-off Kuwait in the Middle East. A Royal Australian Air Force Globemaster, a jet transport plane even larger than a Hercules, had brought them across the world from Australia. After ten days at a Kuwaiti airbase, several more flights brought them to Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan. Ben and Caesar were to be based in the southeast of the country at a town called Tarin Kowt, pronounced ‘Tarin Kot’, which sat in a valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. There was a large military camp at Tarin Kowt, occupied by thousands of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops from a number of countries including Australia and America, as well as local soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA) who had been trained by the Australians and other ISAF troops.
Behind high walls and barbed wire, the camp provided living quarters, dining facilities, garages and workshops, a hospital, a long airstrip for military planes, and helicopter landing pads. There were also places where soldiers could relax during their time off. These were equipped with large-screen TVs, table tennis tables and computers, where men like Ben could play games, surf the internet and communicate with their families back home. There were two military kennel complexes where Australian and American war dogs lived while they were in the camp. The dogs even had military veterinary surgeons to look after them if they were sick or injured, with a large US Army war dog hospital in neighbouring Kandahar Province.
Ben and Caesar had been brought to Tarin Kowt to replace an Australian Army dog handler and his dog, after both had been injured by a roadside bomb. After flying into the base, Ben let Caesar have a good sniff around the Australian Army’s kennels to get used to them. He also let Caesar introduce himself to two other Australian Army explosive detection dogs at the base – Zeke, a male kelpie, and Spider, a sandy-coloured female labrador. Both were about a year older than Caesar.
All three said hello to each other in the usual doggy way – sniffing each other’s behinds – and were friends right away. As Ben watched the three dogs together, Zeke playfully tugged Caesar’s ear. With a quick, low growl, Caesar let Zeke know he didn’t like that sort of treatment, and Zeke promptly let go. Caesar was not letting any other dog mess with him!
Before long, Ben and Caesar would be assigned missions out in the countryside of Uruzgan Province. The landscape in that area varied from green and yellow valleys where famers grew a variety of crops, to rugged mountains and desert-like plateaus where nothing grew. The valley in which Tarin Kowt was located was dry and dusty. In the camp, it was all red earth and gravel underfoot, with no grass to be seen anywhere.
Ben had served here in Uruzgan Province before, with Dodger, so knew all about this place. Out there in the countryside, Taliban fighters came down out of the mountains to move about in small, heavily armed bands, attacking police, troops and government officials, and terrorising farmers. It was the job of the troops in the province to find those Taliban fighters and prevent them from making attacks. This was not easy as the Taliban dressed like local farmers, usually moved about at night, and never came out in the open to fight. Their regular tactic was to lie in wait to ambush police and military vehicles, then melt away into the countryside again.
Many of the Australian troops at the Tarin Kowt base were engineers, here as part of an international construction assistance program for Uruzgan Province. It would be the primary task of Ben and Caesar to help prevent those engineers being killed or wounded by the Taliban. But first, they had to protect the roads the engineers travelled on. The day after Ben and Caesar arrived at Tarin Kowt, they began training in the camp to detect the sort of bomb that the Taliban would have buried in roads throughout the province over the winter.
Explosive detection dogs like Caesar had become so good at detecting freshly made bombs, the Taliban had resorted to a new tactic – leaving IEDs buried for months, with the intention of detonating them later by remote control. Farmers and their animals passed over these buried bombs time and again, laying many different, confusing scents that masked the smell of explosives. To train recently arrived detection dogs to locate explosives hidden in this way, test explosives without detonators were buried near toilets and a waste dump on the Tarin Kowt base, as the soil was naturally impregnated with a variety of odours that could disguise the presence of explosives chemicals. When Caesar and several new American EDDs were given the job of finding them, Caesar not only located the buried explosives every time, he started digging for them.
One morning, an American engineer officer came to watch Caesar training. ‘I’ve got me a mutt just like that back home,’ he told Ben.
‘Bet he can’t do what Caesar does,’ said Ben with a grin.
‘You got that right,’ the American replied with a chuckle, as he watched Caesar begin to use his paws to make a hole where he’d located explosives. ‘Say, I heard that you Aussie soldiers were called “Diggers”, but I didn’t realise that went for your dogs as well. That dog of yours can come dig with my engineers any time he likes.’
At dawn every day, Ben would collect Caesar from the kennels and they would go for a
long run together in the cool of the early morning, before the day heated up. Around and around the camp’s exercise track, man and dog would go, side by side. They soon became a familiar sight in the camp and plenty of soldiers wanted to pat Caesar, who reminded them of their pet dogs back home. Loving the attention, Caesar would greet any friendly soldier with a wagging tail. He would even put a paw up on their leg, asking for a pat. Ben was happy to let Caesar mix with troops in the camp. In the weeks and months ahead, the pair would be spending a lot of time in the field with many of those men, and it was important that dog and Diggers got on well from the start.
Once a week, Afghan farmers would arrive by truck and donkey cart to set up a bazaar outside the military camp, and there the soldiers from the camp could buy local produce for themselves, and souvenirs for their families back home. Ben saw this as a good opportunity for Caesar to mix with Afghan locals and become accustomed to them. So the first time that a bazaar was set up outside the camp walls, he led Caesar out on a tight leash.
The first Afghan farmer that Caesar saw was quite a shock to him. The big brown dog had never seen anything like this before, and froze on the spot with his front legs planted in front of him to prevent Ben from leading him forward. Tilting his head quizzically to one side, Caesar stared at the man. The bearded farmer had a traditional Afghan turban on his head. Over a long, loose white shirt that fell over his trousers to his knees, he wore a sleeveless waistcoat. Ben didn’t drag on the leash to force Caesar forward. He waited, knowing from his experience with Dodger that a military dog took a little time to familiarise itself with new surroundings and all the new scents that came with them.
The farmer, busy setting out melons on a makeshift table, ignored the corporal’s dog. Afghans don’t have the same affection for dogs that Australians and other Westerners do. While some Afghan farmers keep guard dogs, none have dogs as pets. As far as most Afghan men are concerned, a dog is just another mouth to feed. In a country where feeding your family every day is often a struggle, a dog is a luxury. So, as cute as a dog like Caesar was to Australians, none of the farmers here showed the slightest interest in Caesar. Unlike the soldiers, not one local would give him a friendly pat.
Caesar, meanwhile, was sizing up the Afghan farmer’s scent. To dogs, every human and animal gives off a distinct odour. Just as we humans can identify each other by the sound of our individual voices, dogs identify each of us by our scent, which is based on what we eat. This Afghan farmer ate a very different diet to the Australian soldiers, and because of that, he gave off a whole new scent to Caesar.
Once he had taken in the man’s scent, Caesar let Ben lead him through the bazaar. Ben smiled to himself as he watched his dog walk past the stalls and the chattering, laughing farmers, taking in and analysing their scents with a slightly puzzled look on his face.
This was another reason why Ben and Caesar had not been sent out on operations right away. Australian military commanders knew that their explosive detection dogs took time to familiarise themselves with the locals, and couldn’t be rushed into service. Earlier experience had shown that when a dog was sent out into a strange environment without time for familiarisation, if faced with people or situations it was unfamiliar with, that dog could disobey its handler’s orders. Worse, it could even become so unsettled that it would refuse to do its job, or run off.
The other Australian dogs, Zeke and Spider, were regularly going out of camp with their handlers on day-long patrols, but they had been working here for months and were accustomed to Uruzgan. For now, Caesar, the new dog, was confined to the daily grind of training in camp and mixing with locals at the weekly bazaars. But after more than two weeks of this, Ben was becoming frustrated, feeling sure that Caesar had gotten over his initial culture shock and was as good as, or better than, any other dog on the base when it came to detection work. But Ben was a soldier, so he waited for orders. To get rid of his frustration, he began to take Caesar for late afternoon runs as well as morning runs. It meant that both were at the peak of their fitness, and Caesar always enjoyed physical activities.
Late one afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to set behind the mountains, two dust-covered Australian SAS long-range patrol vehicles roared into base and pulled up close by the exercise track where Ben was taking Caesar for a run. Six SAS operators clambered down from the open, six-wheeled vehicles, then helped two blindfolded Afghan prisoners down. Both prisoners wore flat turbans. One had a bushy white beard. The other, a little younger, had a jet-black beard streaked with grey.
All six SAS men wore desert-patterned camouflage uniforms, sandy-coloured turbans and face coverings, and sunglasses. The fact they were Westerners was only revealed when they removed the face cloths. Australian soldiers in Afghanistan were expected to shave every day, but SAS men were different. Frequently going into enemy territory for long periods, wearing beards allowed them to more easily mix in with the bearded locals. Despite the beards, Ben now recognised one of those SAS men – the sergeant in charge – as soon as he removed his face covering.
‘Charlie!’ Ben called.
Charlie Grover turned, and on seeing Ben and Caesar, broke into a smile and ambled over to them. Caesar had recognised Charlie too, and was clearly pleased to see his master’s best mate again. With fond remembrances of Charlie from his visit to the Fulton home at Holsworthy, Caesar wagged his tail so vigorously that his entire rear end was wiggling and waggling.
‘G’day,’ said Charlie. ‘I heard that you two were here.’ Charlie and Ben exchanged a firm handshake then a brotherly man hug, before Charlie squatted to give Caesar a hefty pat, receiving a lick on the face in return.
‘You’ve been out on an op?’ Ben asked.
Charlie nodded. ‘Been out there for a week,’ he said. ‘Looking for a particular Taliban commander’s father.’
‘You got your man?’
Charlie, straightening, nodded again. ‘Got the Taliban commander’s father and his uncle. We’re hoping they might tell us where we can find the Taliban commander – a bloke called Baradar.’
‘Good luck with that,’ said Ben.
‘Have you and Caesar been out on ops yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Ben replied, sounding impatient for action. ‘But we’re ready to go.’
‘Don’t worry, mate,’ said Charlie, flexing his aching shoulders after hours on the road. ‘There’s plenty of work out there for you. The Taliban are getting sneakier and sneakier. You two will soon be in the thick of it.’
Charlie was right. That night, Ben received orders – he and Caesar were to join an operation the next morning at a village thirty kilometres outside the camp. This would be their first mission in enemy territory.
The sun was beginning to rise as a convoy of military and police vehicles travelled along a narrow yellow dirt road, leaving a trail of choking dust behind it. Most of Uruzgan Province’s roads were unsealed. There were only a few bitumen roads, and many of those had been laid by foreign troops over the last few years.
In the convoy, Ben and Caesar were in the back of a bumping Bushmaster – a four-wheel drive, fully enclosed, armoured Australian Army troop-carrying vehicle. On top of the Bushmaster was a remote-controlled heavy machinegun. Inside rode a driver, a gunner and eight soldiers, sitting four down each side in full combat gear, plus, sitting contentedly between the legs of its master, one brown labrador EDD.
Caesar didn’t mind being locked up inside the Bushmaster for hours at a time – it was air-conditioned, and wherever Ben went, Caesar was happy to go. He didn’t like being separated from Ben for long, and Ben knew it. When Ben put Caesar in the metal dog box for the first stage of the flight to Afghanistan a few weeks back, Ben had deliberately acted as if they would be seeing each other in just a few minutes, not a day or so. Dogs have an uncanny ability of knowing when they are about to be separated from their masters, and Caesar had known. His tail had sagged and his ears had drooped as Ben patted a last goodbye before take-off. Such a strong bond had
formed between dog and handler that Caesar would go anywhere, would put up with just about anything, as long as he was with Ben.
They were heading for a bridge over a small river east of Tarin Kowt. According to reports from locals, it had been damaged when a truck drove off the bridge and into the river. Ben and Caesar had been assigned to a party of engineers sent to clear and repair that bridge. A detachment of protecting infantry was also going along. So engineers and infantrymen were packed into the convoy of Bushmasters that wound along a dusty road through the valleys of southeast Afghanistan.
In the middle of the convoy there was a blue Toyota truck carrying Afghan policemen. As escort, an eight-wheeled ASLAV – an Australian light armoured vehicle – led the column, while another brought up the rear. A cross between an armoured car and an armoured personnel carrier, these formidable vehicles are fitted with swivelling turrets armed with a cannon and machineguns.
The valleys their route took them through were a patchwork of small family farms which grew crops and ran sheep, goats and chickens. These were very different to Australian farms. Each was centred around a kal, a large walled living compound that looked from the outside like a small prison. And every few kilometres along the dusty road there was a ramshackle village.
At each village the convoy slowly drove through, children shyly came out to watch them pass. But the parents of those children rarely took any interest. Some village men were working in the fields, others stood talking in the street, while all the women remained out of sight in their homes. Older houses in the villages were made from mud, more modern ones from concrete blocks. Few had electricity or running water. But on some distant yellow, lifeless hills there were mobile phone towers, powered by solar cells. Numerous families in these villages had mobile phones, and it was a profitable business for the few people whose homes had electric power provided by petrol-driven generators to recharge the batteries of other mobile phone users.
Caesar the War Dog Page 5
