by Sandra Lee
The new rotation was heading back to Afghanistan at the height of the the fighting season. Their task, and the message to the enemy, was clear. As the head of Special Operations in Afghanistan Major General Tim McOwan said: ‘We will find you. We will hunt you down. Your time is limited. Leave now and go back to a normal life without violence.’
Australian newspaper headlines in recent days had painted a picture of an Afghanistan riddled by endemic government corruption amid a failing NATO campaign to win the hearts and minds of the locals. In a story headlined ‘Afghanistan’s deadly double whammy’, Fairfax journalist Tom Hyland wrote that Afghans were caught between a vicious insurgency and a deeply corrupt state. In another, headlined ‘Hearts and minds not won’, Hyland quoted a report by European aid agencies that claimed Afghans believed reconstruction efforts were ‘misplaced and even counterproductive’ until the government was free of corruption and security had been established.
‘It was measurably more dangerous than the first time I was there,’ Sergeant D says now. ‘Our role was totally different to the previous ones. We were doing a lot more compound searches and clearances getting to and from places. We were basically trying to get the local populace to follow the government rather than the Taliban and to do this we were trying to capture Taliban commanders, and have shuras with the local elders to see what they needed from us.’
By then, Australia had suffered four more fatalities in Uruzgan Province and the wounded numbered almost 40. On 27 April 2008, Lance Corporal Jason Marks, a commando with 4RAR and a father of two, died from a single shot to the back of his head. Twenty to 30 insurgent fighters attacked his vehicle-borne force element with small arms and RPGs as the Australians prepared for a targeted assault. Marks, a respected and commended soldier, was leading his platoon when he went down. Four other commandos were wounded in the three-hour pitched battle, one seriously as he heroically tried to help his leader.
On 23 November 2007, Private Luke James Worsley died in a buzz-saw of fire from a PKM heavy machine-gun as he stormed a known Taliban bomb-making compound 30 kilometres away from Camp Russell. His warning to his mates behind him saved their lives. They repaid him by fighting for hours to reclaim his body and carry him back over rugged terrain to their forward operating base. Not a single enemy survived the firefight.
A month earlier, SAS Sergeant Matthew Locke was shot in the heart by a single round from a 7.62-millimetre heavy machine-gun, fired by a Taliban gunman in a cornfield in the Baluchi Valley along the Tiri Rud. Locke had recently been awarded the prestigious Medal for Gallantry for courage under fire in the Chora Valley with fellow SAS trooper Ben Roberts-Smith, a specialist sniper and assaulter who would later win the Victoria Cross for single-handedly wiping out three enemy machine-gun posts, saving his mates’ lives. Locke’s small unit was on a mission to disrupt insurgent forces within a key Taliban line of communication when it was ambushed. It was a clear morning at 0749 hours local time. ‘He was one of these guys who would stand up in the middle of a firefight, in front of a wave of fire and just hook in,’ said Roberts-Smith. Locke’s grieving father Norm said his son ‘absolutely loved the army. He loved what he was doing’.
In October 2007, David Pearce, a member of the 2/14th Cavalry Regiment, died when the ASLAV he was driving ran over a pressure-plate operated improvised explosive device. The ASLAV, call sign V30E, was struck just six kilometres outside Camp Holland, on a road the Aussies dubbed ‘IED Alley’. Pearce, who had only celebrated his forty-first birthday a few days earlier, was killed instantly, the second Australian to die in Afghanistan and the first from a direct contact with the enemy.
The death toll was mounting among civilians, too. On 24 June 2008 the US Commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 101 in Afghanistan, Major General Jeffrey J. Schloesser, turned a televised press briefing into a lament for the loss of civilian lives. He said IED attacks and small arms assaults had increased by 40 per cent on the same time the year before. ‘The enemy . . . [is] aggressively targeting what I will call both development and governance at a local level,’ Schloesser said. ‘They’re burning schools . . . and they are also killing teachers and they are killing students.’ Later, he added: ‘The people that they’re killing, first and foremost, are innocent civilians.’
The Australians with SOTG7 knew what they were heading into. After ripping in, Sergeant D received a series of intelligence briefings and a couple of weeks’ worth of practical updates from the departing Doggies.
He was based in Camp Russell, the central nervous system of the Australian Special Operations Task Group. The SOTG area was a significant improvement on Camp Holland, even though it was within it and located just a couple of hundred metres away. For one, the special ops blokes had better food than the stodge provided in the Dutch mess tent and enjoyed a traditional Australian Sunday roast and weekly barbeque and seafood spread. The recreation and eating area was well equipped with books, huge television screens, computers, and pool and ping-pong tables. The sleeping quarters were five-star by comparison, too. D bunked in a reinforced concrete dormitory that slept five or six men. Overcrowding and privacy issues were sorted with the utilitarian resourcefulness typical of the sappers.
‘Engineers being engineers, we scrounged around for timber and whatever we could get hold of to partition the large room into individual little rooms,’ he recalls. ‘Some of the more skilled guys managed to do some excellent work to make their bed spaces as comfortable as possible.’ But not all were equal in size.
‘There were some real estate discussions,’ Sergeant D concedes. ‘Eventually it was all sorted out and everyone was happy with the end result.’
Sarbi had settled in effortlessly. Her needs were far simpler than her handler’s and she placed no demands on anyone other than a daily run, a spot of grooming and ongoing training when not on patrol.
Sergeant D and Sarbi were initially attached to the commandos, before switching to the SAS patrols when one of the SOTG dogs went on leave to give its injured paws time to recover.
The Australian Special Operations Task Group was for-midable. The troopers were the hardest, fittest, and among the most thoroughly trained and tattooed soldiers in the Australian military. They were extraordinarily agile and highly manoeuvrable; adaptable, self-sufficient and trained to survive any conditions. They were as physically tough as they were psychologically strong. In a word, fearsome, and that gave them a distinct psychological advantage over the anti-coalition militia.
The task group used the classic hammer and anvil approach to warfare. The commandos had superior combat power and launched ground assaults to destroy the enemy threat with the aid of coalition air support. They fought hard and up close and were also equipped to act as a rapid reaction force to support the SAS when needed, or help extract patrols and other Coalition elements under fire.
The combination of artillery and aerial bombardment, or ‘arty and air’, was fearsome. The British, Americans and Dutch provided Harrier GR7A jets, Apache gunships and the lethally effective AC-130 Spectre gunships, which the enemy called ‘spitting witches’ due to its formidable firepower.
The soldiers were self-reliant. Everything needed was stowed in their vehicles and backpacks and attached to their Molle system webbing. They hauled water, single-ration combat food known as MREs, radio and communications gear, sleeping gear, weapons, night observation devices (NODs), emergency medical equipment and more. Their entire loads weighed between 30 kilograms and 80 kilograms, depending on the equipment required for the operation and the personal weapons the soldiers brought along for the show, the 7.62-millimetre SR-25 sniper rifles, 9-millimetre Browning pistols, 9-millimetre USPs, hand grenades and M4 automatic rifles.
Most of their work was done on foot at night, in response to actionable tactical field intelligence and highly advanced surveillance. They relied on a complex web of human sources and intercepted enemy radio ‘chatter’, rendered intelligible by local interpreters who spoke Pashto or Dari, two of
the main languages in Afghanistan. The ACM spoke in code but it was easy to break. In the notorious Korengal Valley in the north-eastern province of Kunar, insurgents called the ISAF soldiers ‘potatoes’ and their own weaponry ‘sugar’. As in, ‘I’ll wait for your nine potatoes and give them some sugar’. When they added ‘but I only have a few lumps left’ the interpreters knew they were running out of ammunition.
The SOTG missions lasted days to weeks. Scouts tore through the countryside on quad bikes to gather intelligence. The patrols exited Camp Russell by Bushmaster or LRPV and drove to a lay-up point where operators and engineers infiltrated by foot, walking several kilometres under the cover of darkness to pre-determined mission sites.
They set up hidden observation points (OPs) on harsh and ragged hilltops at nose-bleed heights, feeding information to other force elements. They used magnified spotting scopes and sophisticated ground-to-air radio comms to call in offensive air support to take out identified enemy targets. If the OPs were compromised, they moved.
They searched suspect compounds for material and insurgent fighters, using specialised night fighting equipment and Ninox night vision goggles, named after a powerful and aggressive native Australian owl.
Prudent planning meant the drivers, vehicle crew and support staff remained with the harboured vehicles, monitoring radio networks for enemy chatter, ready to move when needed, which was almost always. As McOwan would later say, ‘once outside the wire, our troops are in harm’s way’ and in ‘some form of contact or firefight’ on almost every patrol.
On 15 July 2008, Sergeant D and Sarbi and a large commando contingent had completed a compound clearance mission in a village nestled in the green belt several kilometres out of Tarin Kot. The patrol had been working for days, on heightened alert after the death the previous week of SAS signaller Sean McCarthy, who died from wounds sustained when his vehicle struck an IED elsewhere in Uruzgan.
The commandos were divided into two platoons spread out over a couple of hundred metres, moving through the green zone, away from the compounds. Sergeant D and Sarbi were in the middle with the headquarters element. There are no hard and fast rules when fighting the Taliban but the soldiers generally considered the open desert safer than the green belt with its soft cover of vegetation and fields. The enemy couldn’t fight the coalition troops with their superior weapons systems as effectively in the exposed terrain of the dasht but, as D had previously discovered, it is never safe to assume.
The first platoon had moved ahead, followed by the headquarters element. There was no evidence of roadside bombs and no suspect movement from locals. Sergeant D and Sarbi were next. The Afghan interpreter and a soldier from the Afghan National Army trailed them by 40 metres. They were shohna ba shohna—shoulder to shoulder—with the Australians.
Suddenly an unexpected shock wave ripped across the ground. Boom!
The interpreter and ANA soldier behind D and Sarbi had just been blown up, killed instantly.
‘I was lucky,’ D says now.
A motorbike was spotted racing away in the distance but it was too late to intercept it. ‘We worked out it was remote detonated. It was just lucky they weren’t targeting Doggies that day,’ D says.
The platoons immediately dispersed into flanking positions and took cover, combat-ready to counter an enemy assault. The troop commander placed his men in position and assigned tasks.
‘Initially, it’s just common sense,’ D says.
The explosion and rushed movement from the troops slamming themselves into the ground to lower their profile didn’t rattle Sarbi.
She had a job to do.
Sarbi’s job was to find any other unexploded IEDs. The enemy often buried a second bomb to take out the reaction force that went to the aid of the fallen soldiers.
Sergeant D unclipped the leash from his hip and told Sarbi to seek on.
‘We searched a path back towards the terp [interpreter] and ANA soldier so the guys could get to them if they needed first aid, but they were already dead. We still had to recover them, so Sarbi and I searched a route for the guys to go in and pick them up,’ he recalls. ‘It was frightening, you’d be lying if you said it wasn’t.’
Sergeant D and Sarbi treaded gently, searching for signs of roadside bombs. They established a path over which the soldiers would walk. The engineers followed with metal detectors to make sure Sarbi hadn’t missed anything, hoping they didn’t trigger another IED.
They followed strict track discipline. Veering off the identified and cleared path could be deadly.
Sarbi and D moved to search where the soldiers had taken fire positions, making sure IEDs had not been planted where they were laying up.
Forty-five minutes later, the commandos were on the move, back to base.
Back in Australia, the chief of the defence force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, announced the incident via a press release.
‘These deaths, on the same day we welcomed Signaller Sean McCarthy home, reinforce the danger faced by Australian, Afghan and International Security Assistance Force troops, and the local population in Afghanistan every day,’ he said.
Sergeant D used the incident as a learning experience. Keep a better eye out.
The lesson came in handy later on an SAS patrol.
The dog handler and Sarbi were on a mission to search a string of suspected Taliban compounds outside Tarin Kot. The troops came across a mud brick building that looked ‘a bit off’. The building wasn’t on the list of intended targets or compounds but a number of locals ran off as soon as they saw the patrol moving into sight.
That reaction alone was suspicious.
The soldiers did a final weapons check and moved in, blasting the compound door open. They raced through, one at a time, covering each other’s backs. The Afghan compounds—or qualas—are a series of rectangular or square buildings, often with one or two rooms, attached to each other.
Clear. Clear.
They secured the building and conducted an initial search. Once done, the SAS boys turned to Sergeant D and Sarbi.
‘Off you go.’
Sergeant D went in through the door. Sarbi got straight down to business but within a minute, her handler noticed a shift in the dog’s body language, a change so slight it went unnoticed by everyone else.
Sarbi didn’t move into her passive response sit to indicate, but she paid extra attention to a section of the mud wall where some rocks had been moved. She returned to the spot, nostrils twitching. Sergeant D went in for a closer inspection. He scratched at the mud walls and found nothing. His training, however, told him otherwise.
‘If someone places something somewhere it will leave what we call a disturbance—it could just be the scent of a person from being in the area,’ he explains. ‘When the dogs are finding things they will find the disturbance and it is up to us to recognise when it’s an IED, or a weapon or something else. If it’s not natural to the area it will get the dog’s interest, and if there is an explosive with it, that’s when they will indicate.’
D knew every muscle movement in Sarbi’s body and was 100 per cent sure she was on to something. He just didn’t know what. He called over an engineer with a metal detector and asked him to sweep the mine lab over the wall. The detector gave off an electronic signal indicating metal. Sergeant D went in for a better look.
His pulse began to race. He dug a bit deeper into the wall, moving crude mud bricks weathered with age. Finally, he felt something. He pulled out communications equipment and a handful of mobile telephones, all with working SIM cards. The discovery was a major find.
‘Good girl, Sarbs, good girl,’ Sergeant D said, giving her a vigorous pat on her big black head.
The phones contained the phone numbers and names of local mid-level Taliban leaders. Some had text messages in the memory. The phones were passed to the electronic intelligence operators.
‘The bears can do amazing things with those,’ says Sergeant D.
SAS troopers are hard t
o impress. They are the best of the best with a reputation for getting things done on their own terms in their own time by their own methods. Who dares wins.
They are the masters of surveillance and reconnaissance, absolutely second to none. Yet the explosive detection dog had proven herself. She had spotted something they had missed. She had won them over.
‘The SAS guys were really happy,’ D says. ‘They loved Sarbi after that.’
Chapter 16
BLACKHAWK DOWN
Sergeant D was not a superstitious man but he was starting to think he and his hound might have nine lives. He and Sarbi had survived a few near misses completely unscathed when those around them hadn’t been so lucky, dogs included. Luck, like life, was measured in margins. It was well known that the Taliban and insurgents were targeting the explosive detection dogs. Canines play little part in Afghanistan culture, unless you include the barbaric practice of organised weekly dog fights on the holy day of prayer.
A year earlier, the high-tech electronic warfare experts had warned Sapper Pete Lawlis that the Doggies were in the enemy’s sights and, in July, a British dog handler and his yellow Labrador retriever, Sasha, were shot dead on a patrol in the Helmand desert. ‘They’re a major asset,’ said Lance Corporal Ken Rowe prior to leaving the British FOB Inkerman in the Upper Sangin Valley, a few days before he was fatally shot. ‘The soldiers love having them on patrol . . . and the Taliban don’t.’
There was no point in asking Ares, the Greek god of war, why Sarbi was so lucky. But it might be time to rethink the dictum that cats are blessed with nine lives and apply that curious feline logic instead to canines, Sarbi especially. It couldn’t hurt and, as it soon turned out, it wouldn’t.
