by Sandra Lee
Rodriguez was the second dog handler killed in Afghanistan and the 501st American soldier to have lost his life fighting the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the base a few days later, the Americans placed Rod’s rifle between his boots, wedged them together with sandbags, and put his helmet on the rifle butt. It was the traditional memorial for a fallen soldier. They hung Jacko’s lead beside a photograph of Rod, crouched down next to his dog with his strong, tanned arm draped protectively over his mutt’s dirt-covered furry shoulder. ‘In loving memory,’ it said.
‘Jacko was running around looking for him,’ Sergeant D recalls. ‘He was running over to the boots and helmet and smelling them, looking for Rod.’
Jacko was retired from the US Army and adopted by the Rodriguez family.
‘Jacko has bonded with our oldest son, Gregory Jr. He sleeps beside his bed, follows Gregory around, and waits by the door for Gregory to get home from school,’ says Laura. ‘We lost Jacko for a couple of days once and Gregory Jr was beside himself. The dog is a big part of our family and means a lot to us. We love being able to see him and take care of him.’
Before Rod left for Afghanistan, Laura asked her husband what he wanted her to do if anything happened to him, where he wanted to be buried. ‘He told me Arlington, as he wanted to be among the best and the brave.’
On Monday, 22 September 2008, the United States flag was flown at half-mast in Rod’s home state of Michigan to honour his sacrifice. The Democratic Governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, issued the order in accordance with federal law under the Army Specialist Joseph P. Micks Federal Flag Code Amendment Act of 2007. Every flag on official government buildings throughout the state and also on Michigan waterways was lowered. The star-spangled banners were raised to full-staff the following day.
Sergeant First Class Gregory Rodriguez is buried in the hallowed ground of Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place of American soldiers killed in the Middle East.
Chapter 18
SAVING PRIVATE SARBI
Sergeant D and Sarbi were being pelted by an enemy machine-gun. They’d been in the valley near Ana Kalay for about an hour, give or take. Time has a way of contracting and expanding in the heat of battle. Men were going down all around, and those who could fought on.
Fire was raining down from four angles. The only way out of the ambushed valley was forward, but the enemy rolled along in tandem from their positions behind cover. The American trucks conducted a series of manoeuvres to protect the soldiers as they returned fire, running to whichever side of the Humvees taking less heat. Sergeant D and a few of the blokes worked out that a narrow V-triangle section at the rear of the truck provided the best cover for a few seconds, giving them time to return fire into the hottest enemy target, before metal started smacking into that side again. It was as if they were being chased around the Humvees by bullets.
Boom!
A rocket-propelled grenade exploded five metres away.
Shrapnel spun through the air and ripped through Sergeant D’s camouflage trousers, slicing into the back of his left knee and calf. There was no pain—‘just a bit of a whack’—and he kept firing his M4.
The metal clip tethering Sarbi to D’s body armour broke off in one clean snap, sliced in half by a piece of flying frag.
‘Crap!’ he yelled.
Sarbi whimpered and bolted from the blast effect, hit by a bit of hot frag. The robust dog headed for the road but didn’t run off, her eyes fixed firmly on Sergeant D who kept her in his peripheral vision as he kept fighting, his finger on the trigger of his M4.
‘A couple of the blokes got some frag in their backs and legs and bum,’ he recalls. Sergeant D helped one to his feet and shepherded him to safety behind a nearby Humvee, providing covering fire as they moved.
Sarbi was now an open target for the Taliban. She was smaller, faster and more agile but she was at a distinct disadvantage—she couldn’t hold a weapon and the Taliban saw value in targeting dogs. Sarbi ran along with the moving vehicles and ducked out of the line of fire when a heavy burst rang out, doing her best to avoid the wall of sound.
There was nothing her handler could do. Sergeant D calculated the risks in a heartbeat. It was pure chaos. He couldn’t take a gamble on racing 50 metres across the open area being raked with weapons fire to grab Sarbi. If he risked his life for Sarbi and got wounded, he knew one of his mates would feel compelled to risk his life to save him. Brothers in arms. The coalition troops couldn’t afford to lose another fighting body. The odds were stacked against Sergeant D—against Sarbi. He was gutted.
‘Sarbi, come,’ D yelled when he saw his beloved mongrel. She approached but a burst from the machine-gun on the vehicles repelled her.
Dogs have two responses when under pressure or when frightened—fight or flight. Sarbi was a fighter. The advanced training at the SME had prepared her for the noise of warfare and she was a combat-hardened war veteran. Sarbi had been exposed to gunfire in Afghanistan; she was familiar with the roar of aircraft and the rumble of engines. Some military working dogs had suffered a recognised canine version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but not Sarbi. She rebounded from each deployment with no adverse side effects. She was a hardy hound and rarely frightened.
Sergeant D could see she was coping well, even without his constant instructions and encouragement. She cleverly, instinctively, distanced herself from the source of the explosions to avoid the percussive after-effects of the blasts. Good girl, Sarbi.
The Humvee got moving. Sergeant D was running on the right-hand side of the vehicle behind another SAS trooper. A few more men were on the left flank of the truck, firing into the green. Suddenly, the enemy on higher ground on the right let loose with a burst from the machine-gun. The soldier in front of D took a round in the rear end and calf. A third bullet blasted into the ejection port of his M4 and propelled it out of his hand. Another bullet ricocheted off the round and slammed into Sergeant D’s hip with the force of a Mack truck, but it only left a massive bruise, not a permanent injury.
He thumped to the ground and returned fire. The other Digger who was injured crawled to the rear of the Hum-vee, taking cover under the back of the vehicle. When the bullets died down, Sergeant D crawled back to the Humvee, where he found the injured trooper’s M4 and passed it back to him, but it was damaged and out of action. ‘It can’t work,’ he says. ‘The moving parts can’t go backwards and forwards anymore.’
The trucks began rolling again. The soldier taking cover under the truck grabbed hold of the axle and was dragged along. D jumped up and sprinted after the Humvee, hammering his fist on the vehicle, shouting at the driver to slow down.
The truck jolted to a stop and the wounded soldier hobbled to the front of the Humvee and rode the rest of the way between the bullbar and the grill.
Sergeant D counted himself lucky.
‘I only got the ricochet.’
Later in the hospital at Tarin Kot, medics found the bullet in his trouser pocket but it was too mangled for them to determine the gauge.
‘Yeah, I’ve still got it,’ D says. Blessed or just jammy he doesn’t know. But one thing is for sure. The bullet had his name on it and he survived it. Nine lives.
Ninety minutes had passed. An SAS trooper was down, shot through both legs, out of action. Sergeant D saw another Aussie. D thought he’d taken a hot cartridge from the rifle down his shirt but he’d been shot in the side. The bullet entered under one armpit and exited through the hip. He was lucky to be alive.
‘We had to stop for a short while to patch him up and stabilise him before we could keep moving,’ Sergeant D recalls. An EOD technician was also shot in the leg and took some frag in the hand. It was an armour-piercing round and it punched a neat hole through his thigh bone.
Explosions were booming, instructions were being shouted through the radio network, bullets streaked across the sky. The firefight was spread out over the dasht and casualties were mounting. Every
soldier was fighting his own battle, going through his own unique experience and each has a story to tell of raw frontline action. Sergeant D was amazed he was still alive. Donno saw one Taliban jump up and launch an RPG from 50 metres away.
Machine-gun fire and RPGs were coming in thick and fast.
Four RPGs exploded around a Humvee that was surrounded by four SAS soldiers. Maylor felt the heat of the explosion as he was blasted through the air. ‘I was hesitant to look at the injuries because I didn’t want to know how bad the wounds were. I still wanted to keep on fighting even though I hadn’t fired a shot,’ he writes. ‘As I lay on the deck I could see the bomb dog Sarbi through the dust. She was yelping and limping. Lucky for her I had been between her and the blast.’
Sergeant D kept calling for Sarbi to come and she did the best she could. At least he could see her. She didn’t seem too badly wounded. Her tail wasn’t tucked under her hind legs in a show of fear or submission. She wasn’t venturing into the green belt where the enemy were, either. Sarbi was determined to stay with the soldiers whose gear she recognised, whose voices she understood. D called and called, his throat parched from the heat and the fine dust.
The rolling ambush had gone two, two and a half, maybe three hours. The Aussies were taking serious casualties. The enemy swarm was relentless.
The Humvees began to speed up. Sergeant D had been running non-stop, dodging bullets and manoeuvring to whichever side of the truck was taking less fire. He kept shooting, wanting to give back as much and as hard as the coalition troops were copping. No mercy.
D and a couple of boys were trailing the Humvee on the safe side when it sped up to navigate a ditch, opening a gap two metres wide.
Whooosh.
‘Holy shit,’ D yelled in stereo with another bloke.
An RPG flew through the opening, narrowly missing the soldiers and the vehicle. It exploded 40 metres off to their right, sending another percussive wave rumbling through the valley.
‘You can see it coming towards us, just a black blur,’ D says. ‘There was no time to do anything. If anyone had have been in the wrong position they wouldn’t have been able to get out of the way. We were just lucky it went through that gap.’
Both soldiers swung around and returned fire to the point where they thought the RPG had come from.
‘I knew there were about four or five Aussies down. That’s pretty hard but they were all getting stabilised and getting on stretchers and on the vehicles, and we still had a job to do. We’re still fighting for our lives,’ he says.
The M240 heavy machine-gun on the truck was unarmed. Sergeant D began to climb up on the back of the Humvee to man the massive weapon. An Afghan interpreter was on the vehicle.
Two RPGs came in.
One exploded under the Humvee, tossing it up in the air. A second RPG had been set to air burst, and exploded over the vehicle, sending a cone of shrapnel down to the ground.
‘The boys behind me thought we hit an IED because one blew up above the vehicle—an air burst—and one hit just under the vehicle,’ Sergeant D says. ‘That blew me off the truck and the interpreter rolled out seconds later.’
The trucks kept moving, oblivious to the lost human cargo.
The interpreter copped a hammering; half his face had been blown off. He lay exposed on the ground. Enemy rounds were zinging past, pinging up the dirt.
Donaldson was in the vehicle behind and saw the RPG explode. He watched Sergeant D and the terp get blown out. The terp was motionless on the ground.
No one gets left behind.
The wiry fella charged without regard for his own life into the line of fire, to certain death. He sprinted 80 metres through open ground raked by machine-guns and small arms, dodging bullets and RPGs to reach the wounded interpreter, who’d been working closely with the SAS boys for the last five days. Sergeant D was knocked around. He saw someone run out to the Afghan soldier but didn’t know who it was.
The enemy bombardment ‘was pretty heavy and pretty accurate. It was kicking all around us,’ Donno said. ‘I suppose it was like looking at a puddle of water in a heavy rainstorm and seeing all the droplets landing in the puddle of water. Imagine that, but being in the dirt and the dust— that’s what it looks like.’
The interpreter was lying facedown in a pool of blood. Donaldson started by dragging him but the ground was too rocky. After fifteen metres, Donno scooped his arm under the terp and carried the wounded man back to safety. He gently put him on the back of a Humvee and began emergency medical treatment. Donaldson was a signaller, not a medic, but he knew enough to keep the man alive.
Adrenalin surged through Sergeant D’s body. ‘Just the right amount,’ he says.
He forced himself up and chased the Humvee, from which he’d been blown off, but couldn’t catch it. He was badly winded by the RPG blast. The dog handler ducked down towards the road and took cover in a culvert, trying to catch his breath. He was cut up and bleeding but, strangely, feeling no pain. At least, none to worry about.
Shrapnel frag had ripped into his left arm and shoulder, across his chest and on the inside of his right forearm, creating a latticework of injuries that would form permanent scars and leave frag in his body. Both legs were sliced from shrapnel. Bruises began to break out on his arms and burn marks from the red-hot metal seared his skin. The G-SHOCK watch he wore religiously on his left wrist had a few nicks in it but it had survived. Shrapnel had torn halfway into his Blackhawk webbing belt before coming to a stop.
He was alive. Sergeant D’s body armour had saved him.
‘I didn’t really feel any pain but I knew I’d been hit in the face as well because I could feel all the blood on my lips,’ he says. ‘I ran my tongue around my teeth to see if they were still there and they were. I was happy about that.’
His pain threshold registered a four out of ten. ‘It still wasn’t too bad. I would have been working on adrenalin the whole time. My broken leg from the bike crash was much more painful.’
Sergeant D was still in the fight. He could feel bullets sluicing the ground around him. He popped off a few rounds towards the enemy and scanned the horizon for Sarbi. He has no idea how, but she was still in the vicinity. Sarbi was shadowing him, keeping track with the Humvees and tracing her handler’s footsteps as he ran around the trucks, firing and taking cover. The tenacious mongrel hadn’t given up. For all her handler knew she might have been thinking, so what’s happened to our search patterns? Dogs love routines.
‘Sarbi, come, come on girl, get over here,’ D yelled, trying to coax her closer.
The courageous canine was running towards her handler, her body profile low to the ground, her senses heightened by the surround sound of war. She got to within five metres of D.
‘C’mon, girl, c’mon Sarbs.’
One of the machine-gunners on a Humvee let rip with a blast from the 50-calibre and the percussion startled Sarbi. She turned and fled out of reach.
‘It was the last time I saw Sarbi,’ Sergeant D says now.
He was crushed. She was so close.
The last American Humvee in the convoy was driving past and he had no choice but to run after it and jump on the open tray at the rear. The next vehicle was the Afghan unit and it was full and didn’t have a rear tray. The US truck was his only way out of the valley. He legged it, sprinting as fast as he could.
What injuries?
D leapt up. The trooper who’d been shot through the legs was lying across-ways on a stretcher. He was in a bad way. Another injured bloke was laid up, too. Sergeant D faced out towards the back, still desperately searching for Sarbi. Another SAS trooper bolted up and jumped on but there was nowhere for him to sit. He landed with a thud on D’s knee.
‘Hey mate, you better not be enjoying this,’ Sergeant D joked.
The wounded dog handler had an Araldite grip on the SAS bloke’s webbing, so that he could lean out the truck and keep firing and fighting.
‘He was sitting on my knee and I was holding
him in the truck, gripping him by his webbing. He had my rifle and was shooting. That was when I first noticed my injuries—they started throbbing. The adrenalin was starting to wear off.’
Sergeant D distracted himself from his pain by focusing on the worst-injured Aussie, whose eyes were starting to close. Not a good sign.
‘Mate, look at me. What’s going on?’ D said whenever his eyes closed. Sergeant D wanted to keep him awake to prevent him going into shock. Later, back in the hospital, the injured soldier told Sergeant D that he wasn’t slipping into unconsciousness when he closed his eyes.
‘He just didn’t want to look at me because my face was cut up and looked pretty horrible. I didn’t know how bad it was,’ D says now.
The convoy was picking up speed, bouncing across the terrain, heading for Anaconda. They were about 600 metres from the gates when one of the soldiers spotted Sarbi chasing the vehicles, following her handler. Sergeant D couldn’t see her, but he yelled her name at the top of his voice, hoping she’d follow.
The convoy was roaring across the country. The men were firing out both sides of the truck and the rear trays of the trucks, Wild West-style, letting loose with their dwindling ammunition. They wouldn’t have survived much longer without an ammo drop. No point worrying about that now.
The enemy maintained their offensive until the convoy was about 300 metres from the perimeter of the firebase, where soldiers were on full alert, manning every position to repel the encroaching insurgents.
The vehicles couldn’t stop to get Sarbi, though every man wanted to. She was a soldier just like them, never to be left behind, but they had too many injured soldiers, some of them with life-threatening wounds. The wounded were the priority.
One American was dead and several were injured. The Afghan interpreter was fighting for his life. Nine of the twelve Australians on the operation were hit—one of them was also fighting for his life and five were seriously wounded.
