Saving Private Sarbi

by Sandra Lee

D and Sarbi were on the second Humvee. The Afghan interpreters had been picking up enemy chatter over the radio network all day but as the convoy moved west back to the FOB the traffic was becoming more excitable.

  ‘They were saying they were going to hit us when our boys got to the vehicles but nothing happened and we moved off. Then we got more chatter, “yeah, we are going to hit them on the flat”,’ D recalls. ‘We got a little bit of a pre-warning that something was going to happen.’

  One of the insurgents went to speak but was told three times by his commander to shut up. ‘The translator was translating that. Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ D says. ‘They were going to move when we closed on a compound.’

  The convoy continued picking its way through the valley, avoiding the main route due to the threat of IEDs. More chatter was intercepted.

  The vehicles harboured briefly. Soldiers performed a standard combat readiness check of weapons and gear, and calmly discussed tactics.

  Sergeant D was sweating, but not from nerves. The temperature was in the mid to high 30s and he was fully kitted up. He was decked out in camouflage gear over a t-shirt, full body armour with ballistic plates, and webbing. He also wore protective Nomex gloves and ESS ballistic glasses to protect his eyes from shrapnel. He had a Camelbak filled with two litres of water on the back of his webbing and Peltors over a baseball cap. Sarbi’s leash was attached to his hip with a rock climber’s karabiner, good and secure. His pack in the back of the Humvee had a day’s worth of rations, and dry dog food and four litres of water for Sarbi.

  Sergeant D’s M4 was locked and loaded; ammo pouches velcroed on to his Molle webbing system. He was combat-ready.

  The troop had decided that if the ambush came, they would leap out of the Humvee and take a combat position out of the line of fire on the protected side of the vehicles. Three of the heavily armed trucks had open trays at the back—like big utes—and a couple were enclosed vehicles that resembled armoured four wheel drives on steroids. The Australians rode on the exposed trays and, other than the machine-gunners in the turrets, were the most exposed. Three of the Humvees were crewed by Americans, the other two by ANA soldiers.

  The convoy was westbound, driving into the sun. The air was charged; the soldiers were on alert and prepared.

  Around 1500 hours, all hell broke loose.

  Two of the lead Humvees rounded a raised knoll and were passing through a gully when mortars and RPGs exploded all around. The unmistakable sound of 7.62-millimetre machine-guns rang out as the bullets churned through the air, whizzing past and stitching into the ground, kicking up clouds of dust and dirt. Sergeant D spun around to see a rocket-propelled grenade land to the rear left of his vehicle, about twenty metres away. He flew off the truck with Sarbi as fast as he could. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his mates doing the same.

  ‘Get out. Get out. Get out. Go. Go. Go.’

  The convoy was hit by a wall of metal from weapons fired by the enemy in hidden positions between 100 and 300 metres to the south in the green belt. The enemy was parallel to the row of vehicles. The lead cars copped the worst. They were in the kill zone. Soldiers bolted for cover on the right side of the trucks, away from the green belt, as bullets slammed into the metal on the other side, cracking like a stockman’s whip. It happened so fast that the soldiers had no time to pinpoint the enemy, up to 200 heavily armed insurgents. Fear, if they felt it, would wait. Instinct took over. Training. TTPs. Whatever it takes.

  ‘It was too instantaneous to stop and over-think it. You are just reacting and that all comes back to your training. That’s done instinctively,’ Sergeant D says.

  Men ran for cover and manoeuvred into firing positions on the flanks, zeroing in on the enemy, a choreograph of synchronised teamwork and controlled aggression. Their superior weaponry gave them a significant advantage despite the overwhelming enemy numbers surrounding them. The joint patrol locked on the Taliban locations and opened fire, blasting them with everything they had.

  The Americans identified a compound in the green belt and gave it a blast with the machine-guns.

  The terps intercepted a Taliban commander’s radio message.

  ‘Kill them, kill them all.’

  One of the SAS snipers took up a fire position to the rear of Sergeant D and Sarbi, searching for enemy targets through his scope. D scanned the rear.

  ‘Covering my arse and making sure no one is coming up there,’ he says.

  Sporadic bullet rounds began walking in on the sniper to Sergeant D’s rear, getting closer and closer. Ten metres. Seven metres. Five metres.

  They’ve got us nailed, he thought.

  ‘Mate, you better move,’ Sergeant D shouted to the sniper.

  Sarbi let loose with her own barrage and began barking at the gunfire, edging towards it in a stubborn defensive stance, as if to say bring it on. ‘It’s her coping strategy, barking was her release,’ Sergeant D says now.

  Sarbi was on a lead nearly two metres long, giving her handler room to manoeuvre without tripping over or getting tangled. She instinctively knew how to keep out of his way, and better yet, to stay low. Sarbi skipped around as bullets ripped into the hardened ground, turning rocks into razor sharp shards of stone. Sergeant D raced from one side of the Humvee to the other to avoid fire. Sarbi ran with him. He couldn’t leave her sheltered under the truck because the drivers kept manoeuvring the vehicles to provide security and cover.

  Instructions and target indications were bellowed over the radio network. Donaldson grabbed the 84-millimetre anti-armour rocket launcher and ran out to a flank and started pumping rockets into the engagement area. Self-assured and strong, Donno had won prizes for best shot and best at physical training in his platoon during his initial infantry training.

  He had also been hailed as the most outstanding soldier. He shot off seven well-placed rounds from the shoulder-fired weapon but drew return fire for his effort. A colleague bravely ran rockets out to him and Donno ran back to load up as well.

  ‘Some of those were air burst as I was trying to rain the shrapnel down on where the fire seemed to be coming from. I used 66-millimetre rockets as well,’ he said later. ‘It’s combat and it’s war and you know, sometimes you don’t know when someone’s going to shoot at you.’

  Sergeant D felt the swoosh of rockets flying by and the percussive waves of grenades tossed into the green belt.

  About ten minutes into the firefight an American machine-gunner in the vehicle behind D and Sarbi was shot in the hand while standing in the turret. ‘That’s when we realised we were getting engaged from the rear as well,’ Sergeant D says. Bullets were streaking through the air from the higher ground on the right rear flank. They were pincered, caught in a classic ambush. Tracers lit up the sky.

  A non-commissioned SAS sergeant leapt up and took over the .50-calibre machine-gun.

  Tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat.

  Known only as Sergeant H for operational security reasons, he let rip with a burst of fire while the convoy pushed on from the initial ambush position. The enemy’s pre-ranged position was deadly accurate. A bullet exploded through his leg as he stood exposed in the Humvee.

  H kept firing at the entrenched enemy until he was unable to stand any longer. He withdrew from the weapon, but he wasn’t out of the fight. A replacement gunner took over and H continued to feed ammo to his replacement. As the firefight continued, more soldiers were wounded and loaded onto the truck. H helped treat them and keep them alive.

  A Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JATC) called in air support early but there were no aircraft on station and bombers had to be launched from elsewhere in the Middle East.

  ‘The effect of the initiation [was] that the combined patrol suffered numerous casualties, completely lost the initiative and became immediately suppressed,’ an official army citation for Donaldson later stated.

  Sergeant D couldn’t see the enemy. They had prepared well and dug in tight. But he could see the signature dust plumes kic
ked up by the Taliban mortars and RPGs and lasered in on the positions. Muzzle flashes that burst bright through the green also drew fire from the troopers’ M4 rifles and machine-guns. D looked over and saw the Afghan Humvee further up the hill to the right, shooting across the front of the friendlies into the green belt. The ANA were not always known for their accuracy.

  ‘We got them to move forward a bit so they weren’t shooting so close to us,’ he says. ‘We had to maintain that and push them up . . . and get the convoy moving again.’

  Two other American vehicles and the second ANA-manned Humvee were behind them. One roared down to support D’s vehicle. The machine-gunner swept his .50-calibre on to the green and lit it up while the soldiers jockeyed for fire positions on the rear of the Humvee, pouring a wall of lead into the lush area.

  The soldiers worked out that the initial coordinated contacts were launched from four points—two in front and one on each flank. The number of enemy fighters was a guess but it was estimated between 150 and 200. ‘I honestly didn’t think, “shit, there’s a lot of fire coming down”,’ recalled Donno. ‘It was more that we just had to fight back’.

  The initial engagement lasted roughly twenty minutes, before the shooting died down and the vehicles were able to move. Not for long. They had got a few hundred metres when the intensity flared up again.

  Thirty minutes into the battle, an American F-18 fighter roared over and dropped a five hundred pounder on the compound in the green belt where the ambush had been initiated. A massive explosion rumbled through the valley floor and a column of smoke rose through the air before flattening into a mushroom-shaped dust cloud. ‘We didn’t get any more fire from that point,’ says Sergeant D.

  The convoy moved forward in metres and the enemy ambush rolled with it. They were surrounded and outnumbered. Sergeant D, with Sarbi tethered to his hip, fought on the run, manoeuvring around the vehicles for safety. The soldiers were engaged on two levels—individual fights to stay alive and collectively to protect their mates. Controlled chaos.

  D’s heart rate was steady. He was clear-headed and calm, focused on the job, focused on keeping Sarbi safe and alive.

  ‘It wasn’t too bad,’ he says now. ‘I had done a lot of DAs [direct actions] and contacts into compounds. At that stage I’d been in the army twelve years . . . it’s what we are trained for, and we are doing it with the SAS. These are professionals. The dogs react to how their handlers react and we react to the way the SAS react. They’re calm. That feeds down to me.’

  The F-18 fighter dropped a second bomb, which found another target. The JTAC gave grid locations to the electronic warfare officer on the plane and the fighter swooped around for a series of strafing gun runs on the green belt. At some point during the battle British and US helicopters were called in and lit up the hillside, where the enemy were entrenched on the higher ground. But the insurgents kept firing.

  ‘It’s a funny thing, they were pretty staunch fighters. I don’t know whether they were dug in or blasé to the aircraft, but every time the aircraft dropped a bomb or did a gun run . . . it just didn’t seem to stop them firing. Generally, when the aircraft come overhead that slows things down a bit, but it didn’t,’ Donaldson said later.

  An SAS JTAC spotted two Dutch Apache gunships escorting a Chinook into FOB Anaconda. The Apache helicopters are considered the premier attack choppers in the world. They come armed with unguided rockets, laser-guided Hellfire missiles, and a 30-millimetre chain gun under the nose that fires with deadly precision.

  The air controller got on the comms to call in air support.

  ‘We need your assistance as we’re taking casualties,’ the JTAC said.

  The JTAC radioed target indications for the gun-ship pilots to launch their Hellfire rockets at the enemy positions, and marked the targets with bursts from the machine-guns. The Aussies relied on the Dutch for air support and logistical backup throughout the war on terror in southern Afghanistan. The precision-guided munitions could have ended the show in an instant or, at the very least, reduced the recalcitrant enemy force to a rump by taking out mortar positions and machine-gunners.

  But, as Rob Maylor writes in his book, SAS Sniper, ‘they wouldn’t open up on the Taliban for fear they might draw some fire themselves’.

  Sergeant D couldn’t believe it. ‘They stayed too high and said they couldn’t see anything and left. Meantime, we are getting rounds and explosions all around us—but they said they couldn’t see anything,’ he recalls.

  ‘They do have very tight rules of engagement but we needed all the help we could get,’ Maylor said.

  Two years later, after Maylor aired the coalition troops’ frustration at the lack of air support from the Dutch Apaches, the Australian Defence Force contacted its counterpart in the Netherlands. The Dutch launched a review of the Apache response, or lack of it.

  A spokesman for the Dutch minister of defence now says a Dutch Apache was used on three occasions to escort a medevac chopper safely to base. ‘This helicopter was responsible to rush the wounded soldiers to a medical facility,’ Marloes Visser says. ‘In these missions the priority of the Apache helicopter is with the safe retrieval of the wounded, not in the battle on the ground.’

  The Dutch Apache gunships responded to another call for direct air support but found the enemy contact had been broken and coalition forces were spread over a large distance. ‘The Apache used its sensors to search the location for some kind of enemy activity. The activity which was observed was reported to the Forward Air Controller on the ground,’ Visser says. ‘Because the activities were not pointed out as hostile or [a] threat, the Forward Air Controller didn’t ask for weapons to be deployed.’

  And none were.

  At one point an SAS trooper identified as G saw a mate go down in the kill zone, unable to move. Trooper G bolted out in the hail of bullets, grabbed his mate and carried him to a tray-backed Humvee. There was no room inside the cabin. G lifted his comrade onto the tray, using his own body as a shield. He put his mate down and kept him covered while he went back into fighting mode, engaging the enemy as he hovered over his comrade. It was a ballsy move. The enemy fire was intense. ‘On several occasions, enemy bullets and RPG fragmentation struck his clothing and equipment,’ Major General McOwan said later. Trooper G stayed in position. During a lull in the fighting, he applied life-saving first aid.

  ‘This small example illustrated the mettle of the men that I command but we should never forget the quality of our adversary. They should never be underestimated. They are fearless and elusive, there are many of them and they are tough,’ the Special Operations commander added.

  The five Humvees stopped in a safe harbour position and medics treated the wounded but the enemy onslaught continued with deadly accuracy. Bullets and RPGs exploded all around. Donno ran across open kill zone to draw fire away from his fallen mates so they could get to safety. He’d seen them get shot and hit by RPG fragmentation and opened up his weapon.

  ‘If you see them in trouble out there you go and help them out or you go and protect them, you give them covering fire so they can get back to where they need to,’ he said later. ‘It all comes back to the training. We train hard and we train hard for situations when, you know, when it does hit the fan.’

  Donaldson’s doggedness springs from his tragic family background. His father, Greg Donaldson, was a Vietnam War veteran who died of a heart attack in 1995. At the time, Donaldson was fifteen years old and a regular, sporty teenager growing up in the country town of Dorrigo in north-western New South Wales, the second of two sons. Three years later, his widowed mother, Bernadette, disappeared while planning a holiday to the Gold Coast. She has never been found and the NSW Police Service’s Unsolved Homicides Team are still investigating her case. Donaldson, then studying at art school in Sydney, had no real direction in his life. The tragedy made him rethink his future.

  ‘You look back on it now and think, “Well, did I process it?” I wasn’t really sure if I di
d or didn’t at the time,’ Donaldson told radio interviewer Philip Clark. ‘And when you’re at that age and you’re a young male, too, you think you know the world and you know everything and you can handle everything. But I think something like that comes along and I suppose, you know, if it doesn’t kill you it only makes you stronger. I tend to just deal with it as best I could and just cracked on with life. Obviously, it affected me because it changed my whole career direction and my whole view on life. That was when I dropped out of art school and decided to chase what I thought were a bit more important things in life . . . I got interested in the military and wanting to give something back.’

  And so Donaldson joined the Australian Army and has been giving something back ever since, particularly in Khas Uruzgan on 2 September 2008.

  ‘This soldier deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire on several occasions in order to draw fire from those soldiers already wounded in the initial heavy fire,’ Special Forces boss, Major General Tim McOwan, would later say of Donaldson.

  But Donno reckons he was just doing his job, just like every other bloke out there.

  A US Special Forces soldier was shot and lay wounded and exposed in the danger zone. Sergeant First Class Gregory Rodriguez ran out, providing cover, repeatedly putting himself in the line of fire to stop his colleague taking another bullet. Rod was known for his sense of duty and loyalty. His sister Lisa said later, ‘He liked justice. If it wasn’t right, he made it right.’

  Rod was manoeuvring to protect his fellow soldier when an enemy fighter pulled the trigger. A bullet pierced Rodriguez’s helmet. It was a fatal shot, the first and only fatality that day.

  The Americans picked up Rod’s body and put him in the back of a Humvee. Another soldier grabbed Jacko and secured the dog in the vehicle where he was safe. The pitiable dog would have felt lost and stranded, unsure of what had happened to his devoted master from whom he’d been inseparable for the past few months.

  ‘Rod saved my life that day and ensured I would make it home,’ wrote the Special Forces soldier he saved. ‘After I had already been wounded . . . Rod on multiple occasions placed himself in harm’s way to protect me and prevent me from being wounded again. Rod is truly a hero. He saved my life and gave his own protecting me.’