by Sandra Lee
Under the cover of darkness in the very early hours of 11 August 2008, Sergeant D and Sarbi exited Camp Russell in a multi-vehicle mounted patrol to search a suspect compound outside of Tarin Kot. They had received their operation orders at an extensive briefing the night before and each man had precise knowledge of what was expected of him.
At the last minute and for no apparent reason, Sergeant D and Sarbi were redirected to the second Bushmaster in the convoy. D was initially allocated to the lead protected mobility vehicle that carried SAS Corporal Mark Don-aldson, who would be manning a machine-gun and would become famous for his courage under fire three weeks hence in another patrol with Sarbi and Sergeant D. But this was the army; D’s was not to question why.
The troop was heavily tooled up. D was armed with his M4, body armour, helmet, radio, side arm and other fighting equipment. His pack was stuffed with enough rations to keep him and Sarbi going for a couple of days, if need be. He tossed in a couple of chocolate bars, too, for energy— for him, not Sarbi. The journey in was expected to take a couple of hours, but no one could be sure what lay ahead. War is the sum of a thousand moving parts, any of which can go wrong.
The Bushmasters dropped off small SAS patrols at intervals along the route, to conduct surveillance. The clandestine units would ensure the locals were sound asleep and not gearing up for a night fight from well-concealed machine-gun nests or vantage points on higher ground.
As the Bushies got closer to their target, an urgent message came over the radio network.
‘We’ve just been hit by an IED.’
The lead Bushmaster—‘actually the vehicle that I was supposed to be in,’ Sergeant D says—struck a roadside bomb packed with twenty kilograms of homemade explosives. Corporal Donaldson, a 29-year-old lean, muscled-up warrior from New South Wales who’d been in the SAS since 2004, was blown off the back of the vehicle and smashed hard into the ground. A second soldier was also blasted out of the Bushie. No one was killed and neither trooper had life-threatening injuries. Donaldson’s injuries were minor; his mate’s were considered serious. A combat medic treated and stabilised both men.
‘One had a suspected back injury and the other was hurt as well,’ Sergeant D says now. ‘Two of the guys had to be airlifted out.’
The Bushmaster was a melted, twisted wreck but Don-aldson said later: ‘that thing saved my life’. The right rear wheel was blown off and the suspension destroyed. A Dutch recovery convoy was called in to collect the mangled metal. The vehicle was going nowhere under its own steam.
It was past midnight and an SAS commander radioed a nine-liner request for an air medical evacuation (AME). He ordered the patrols into position to provide security for the troops and incoming helicopter—an American Black-hawk that took off from Tarin Kot under Apache escort. The return flight should be about 30 minutes, if all went to plan.
The Australians relied on the American and Dutch helicopters in the absence of their own medevac choppers that, back then, weren’t up to the task. The situation wasn’t ideal and had caused serious angst the previous month when a Dutch doctor at the Tarin Kot hospital criticised the delay of a Dutch-US AME for SAS Signaller Sean McCarthy, who bled to death from major internal injuries sustained when his LRPV hit an IED. The medevac chopper was delayed because the crew refused to fly without an Apache gunship escort and McCarthy was pronounced dead when he reached the hospital, 113 minutes after the attack. The 25-year-old was standing in the middle of the LRPV and had copped the full force of the blast.
‘He [McCarthy] was badly injured on both legs. However, he was alive for an hour. We will never know what might have been or what we could have done,’ Lieutenant Colonel Ed van der Zee said.
An army reservist and trauma surgeon told journalist Jamie Walker it was critical that wounded soldiers reached hospital within the ‘golden hour’ when trauma treatment was most effective. But an official army inquiry later found the medevac procedures were not to blame for McCarthy’s death.
Sergeant D and Sarbi slipped into their preset cadences of war. With D’s weapon in action condition, locked and loaded, they searched the surrounding area and possible landing zone for IEDs, accompanied by the engineers with the mine lab metal detectors.
Sarbi worked well outdoors at night. Her eyes adjusted to the ambient light of the moon and the stars but her nose did all the work. Sergeant D, wearing night vision goggles that turned the landscape a spectral green, quietly urged her on. The team conducted a thorough open area search and Sarbi zig-zagged across the terrain, as sure-footed as a billy goat that danced precipitously up the craggy ledges of the mountains. Good to go. He recalled his trusted hound and gave the patch of rock-strewn dirt the all clear. A secure landing zone was established.
The wounded were set up in a safe spot for easy access to the landing zone, so the loadmaster could get them on to the Blackhawk as fast as possible and then give the pilot the signal to get the hell out of Dodge before they became a prized target for the enemy. The soldiers were deep in hostile territory, potentially surrounded by Taliban and insurgents in fortified compounds.
Sergeant D grabbed Sarbi and dropped down beside a Bushmaster close to the landing zone, waiting for the Blackhawk to roar in overhead. Sarbi lay prone next to her handler, alert to her surrounds. Her furry ears stood up in stereo, as flexible an antenna as any of the high-tech systems of war. She could hear the signature pitch of the Black-hawk engine in the distance. Sergeant D sensed she was on to something and soon after he heard rotors thwomping as the chopper drew close, its pitch changing as the pilot cut back power ready to flare in. As the helo descended, the Blackhawk’s powerful rotors kicked up a huge cloud of dust, causing an instant brownout.
‘He couldn’t see so he took off again for another go,’ Sergeant D says of the pilot.
Hound and handler were covered in a layer of the gritty reddish dust that ground its way into everything. D moved to the lee side of the Bushmaster with Sarbi to avoid another blast of Afghan earth.
The helo circled overhead just as they got into position. D knelt down, commanding his mutt to drop, and she sprawled on the ground as close to him as she could get, leaning on him equally for comfort and protection. ‘Sarbi was fully aware something was going on but she reacted well,’ he says now.
The chopper was coming in fast to avoid turning itself into a sitting duck. Smash! A crashing thud rang out as the Blackhawk smacked down with enormous force.
D popped up and saw the helo blades shear off with an unmistakable screeching metallic sound. The rotors tore through the air at breakneck speed, spinning with lethal force at head level.
Bloody hell!
‘I’d only just ducked around the side of the Bushmaster and there’s chopper blades flying everywhere,’ he says.
‘The boys out on sentry were getting them coming past 300 metres away.’
He ordered Sarbi to stay down, worried that the blades would slice her in half.
‘Nine lives, I know,’ he says with a grin.
Donaldson and the other wounded soldier were closer to the landing zone and made a run for it, trying to put some distance between them and the crashed chopper.
One of the crew on the ISAF medevac chopper was hurt. The Blackhawk, like the Bushmaster, was out of action. Sergeant D noted wryly to himself that it had landed flat, but—no rotors, no flying.
The patrol now had extra bodies to protect, one additional wounded, and another piece of damaged military hardware to watch over and keep safe from the enemy. At least the incoming medical crew that remained unhurt would help treat the wounded.
A second nine-liner medical evacuation was requested out of Kandahar, south of Tarin Kot, but it was grounded due to bad weather. The wounded were being treated at the crash scene and the troop was secure.
‘If the injuries had been life-threatening there would have been assets deployed and the commanders on the ground would have taken a greater risk launching that aircraft out of Kandahar,’ Defence spo
kesman Brigadier Brian Dawson said.
Sarbi, Sergeant D and the hard men from the SAS were static as they waited for the medevac and Bushmaster recovery convoy. None of the damaged machinery would be left behind in case the enemy exploited it.
The bright light of a summer’s dawn had cracked the ink black night by the time a third rescue attempt was launched six hours later, using an American CH-47 Chinook helicopter from Kandahar. The weather had cleared and the massive tandem-rotored beast had been retasked to support the ‘hard landing’ incident, an Orwellian neologism used by the military brass to mean a crash.
‘But then it gets even better,’ Sergeant D recalls.
The element of surprise had been lost. Afghan villagers were milling around to check out the action, keeping a safe distance. As Sergeant D says, they weren’t openly hostile, even if some of the troop suspected the locals had planted the IED.
Around 0700 hours, a Chinook roared in to fetch the Blackhawk with an escort of Apache gunships—just in case. All eyes were cast upward. The rotors, powered by the Chinook’s enormous 714 engines, kicked up a sea of dust equal to a sandstorm but the loadmaster and crew finally manoeuvred the bird in place for the extraction. The wounded and Blackhawk crew were loaded on board as the rotors turned and burned. Next up: recover the downed aircraft.
‘They went to pick up the Blackhawk and take it away but they accidentally rolled it on the side,’ Sergeant D recalls with an amused shake of his head. ‘So, not only did it bust off all its blades, but now it’s rolled over as well. Eventually they worked it out and took it away.’
Finally, the Chinook had its payload on board and the wounded Australians and Blackhawk crew were flown to the ISAF medical centre at Tarin Kot. Donaldson was back in action the following day; his mate eventually returned to Australia for further medical treatment.
Back in Australia the incident made the headlines. The Australian newspaper published a story highly critical of the ‘botched helicopter rescue’ under the headline, ‘Push for Diggers to get medivacs (sic) in Afghanistan’. Journalist Mark Dodd wrote ‘three wounded Diggers waited six hours on the battlefield before being taken to hospital . . . in the second botched helicopter rescue of Australian troops in as many months’.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon saying ‘a string of bad luck’ caused the events and the Australian troopers were ‘stuck’ with the allied medevac. ‘One, we are already overstretched. Second, our helicopters would have to be upgraded to deal with the modern-day threats which exist in a theatre like Afghanistan,’ Fitzgibbon said.
The minister told the national broadsheet that the Rudd Labor government would consider sending its own specialised medical helicopters, with 100 specialist defence personnel, to support the Australian troops in Afghanistan the following year.
A year was a long time in a war zone.
Chapter 17
AMBUSHED
Soon after the sun came up on 2 September Sergeant D and Sarbi boarded a US Army Humvee at FOB Anaconda in the district of Khas Uruzgan for their next mission into bandit country. They were roughly 100 kilometres north-east of Tarin Kot, operating with two SAS patrols plus an explosive ordnance disposal engineer—twelve Australians in all—and a dozen US Special Forces soldiers and the same number again of Afghan National Army soldiers. They had been airlifted in by Chinooks several days earlier and had been conducting a series of in-and-out strategic patrols, mostly at night, in the region.
The Americans at the remote US firebase were down to skeleton staff and conducting offensive ops with limited numbers was near to impossible. A little help from their Aussie Special Forces counterparts wouldn’t go astray.
The operations orders were to capture or kill key Taliban targets, route the enemy from the area and destroy IED facilitators. They were ‘highly targeted operations against insurgent command infrastructure’. In other words, their task was to chop off the head of the insurgent snake and watch the body wither. The work was split between four patrols, working in pairs with allied partners. The previous night two SAS foot patrols were inserted by vehicle, and snipers and scouts climbed through the blackness to establish overwatch positions in the hills on the north. Nightfall gave them a primary advantage and freedom of movement. The second element of the task group, including Sergeant D and Sarbi, set off in a convoy of five Humvees at daybreak. Their task was to carry out compound searches in the small villages near Ana Kalay in Khas Uruzgan.
Sarbi was up for anything. She was travelling with a fellow four-legged companion, US Army K9 Jacko. The yellow Labrador retriever and his 35-year-old handler, Sergeant First Class Gregory Rodriguez, had arrived for their first tour of Afghanistan three months earlier. They were assigned to the K-9 unit of the 527th Military Police Company, 709th Military Police Battalion, Eighteenth Military Police Brigade in Ansbach, Germany. Like Sergeant D, Rodriguez, or Rod as he liked to be known, grew up with a deep affection for man’s best friend. As a child he had a cocker spaniel that he trained as a hunting dog. One Valentine’s Day, while he was based in Alaska with his first working dog, a narcotics sniffing hound, he presented his wife, Laura, with a red-headed doberman they named Ellie.
Rod had been a handler for seven years and had a reputation for being able to straighten out even the unruliest of mutts. Difficult dogs were his speciality. ‘He would tell everyone, “I have the best job in the US Army”,’ says his wife Laura.
The ebullient father of three was a firm believer in gaining in-depth field knowledge and trained Jacko on the latest explosive finds, polishing processes and enhancing skills. The hours spent together had paid dividends and their mutual devotion was obvious to anyone who saw them. ‘[Jacko] was Greg’s best companion for the past couple of years,’ his wife said. ‘He’d been sleeping with Greg every night since they landed in Afghanistan.’
Sarbi and Jacko had trained together on base and Sergeant D rated Rod highly. ‘Rod and his dog Jacko’s methods and drills were spot on, perfect,’ he says now. ‘Jacko was an awesome dog, as well.’
Sergeant D welcomed the addition of another twin pair of paws to the mission. Not that Sarbi and he weren’t well used to the cauldron intensity of working in Afghanistan and rapid insertion overnight missions. They were. They had their routines mapped out. When D was on piquet, he left Sarbi tied to his pack, beside her canvas-covered foam mattress. One pitch-black night, while D was on watch, a troop commander observed Sarbi through his night vision goggles. She was standing up, staring obsessively into the darkness. He didn’t know who was out there and worried the unit was under attack.
The commander grabbed his rifle and went to inspect.
‘He came out and checked and saw me on piquet,’ recalls Sergeant D. ‘Sarbi was standing there waiting for me to come back. That’s how loyal she is. She also had a habit of stealing people’s beds when they went out on piquet.’
Smart dog, all right.
One captain from the SME said he came back from a routine guard watch to find Sarbi curled up inside his swag. He’d been gone two hours and felt guilty about booting her out of the cocoon she’d so obligingly kept warm. He turned over the scenario in his head, watching Sarbi snoozing for about fifteen minutes before the cold made him shift the hound over. ‘It’s great to have the dogs around; they make a difference,’ he says.
The Special Forces soldiers exited FOB Anaconda feeling confident of the mission ahead. The previous day SAS patrols had successfully wiped out thirteen Taliban fighters who had been causing chaos in the area, including a regional commander. Commandos on a clandestine op two weeks before that had managed to sneak into Taliban leader Ahmad Shah’s compound, in the heart of a safe haven, while he slept. They made a bloodless arrest without firing a single bullet. For good measure, they grabbed a couple of the Shah’s surprised somnolent henchmen, too. All were now on their way to the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Success breeds success.
‘The morning was pretty relax
ed and calm and we had the snipers up in the over-watch positions as we came through [the villages] and did compound searches and checks,’ recalls Sergeant D. ‘Nothing too overt.’
Sarbi performed to her usual gold star standard. But the enemy didn’t welcome their presence in the valley. The patrols had gone in to tease out the Taliban and insurgent fighters—poking an anthill with a stick—and the serial provocation worked.
‘The enemy came in to ambush us but we had guys in other positions that were able to prevent them from coming to get us,’ Sergeant D says now.
Seven Taliban were killed by the SAS boys working clandestinely in the hills. ‘We had clobbered them in the preceding days and also had a very good success against them that morning,’ recalled SAS Corporal Mark Donald-son, who infiltrated that morning and was ready for any show the enemy might put on.
The US-led operation was complete by early afternoon. FOB Anaconda was five kilometres away at the end of a narrow valley. A steep mountain ridge to the north dominated the valley and to the south was the heavily vegetated green belt, where the enemy lived and through which ran the pot-holed track that doubled as a road. The convoy was stretched out over about 300 to 400 metres, driving off the side of the road through the dasht that spread out about 400 metres between the spur and greenbelt.
The interpreter had intel that the roads were laced with IEDs so they went cross country, over terrain strewn with steep creek beds and sharp inclines. There was no cover, no trees, no big boulders, just rocky open ground. It was slower going and more difficult to navigate but as Sergeant D says, there’s no point looking for a roadside bomb if another route exists. ‘It’s easier to avoid [an IED threat], otherwise you can tie yourself up for hours and be exposed to greater risk.’
The Humvees drove to a rendezvous point to collect two SAS patrols and head back to the firebase.
