Saving Private Sarbi

by Sandra Lee

  ‘There was a mate of mine there who actually got shot in the head and he survived,’ Donno said later. ‘Seeing that, and realising he actually got a bullet through his head and he got up and kept fighting for the rest of us—that’s how close it came for us there.’

  The two SAS boys who weren’t injured, including Don-aldson, had bullet holes through their clothes and gear. ‘That’s how lucky we are,’ he said.

  Finally, with the sun settling behind the mountains, the convoy of Humvees raced through the gates at FOB Ana-conda. Between 30 and 90 Taliban and insurgent fighters had been killed in the three-hour-long ambush that had stretched over four kilometres through the valley.

  A medevac chopper arrived soon after, its rotors burning and turning. It was too dangerous to attempt a ‘dust off’ while the ambush was rolling. The crew was ready to pick up the most seriously wounded men and get them to the well-equipped field hospitals at Tarin Kot. The injured were laid out on stretchers for assessment and triage. The three most seriously wounded, including Rob Maylor and the young bloke Sergeant D had kept awake, were further stabilised and loaded on the chopper and flown out first.

  One of the US medics gave D a shot of morphine with an autoinjector, but it had little effect.

  ‘I think they might have put it into my notebook in my trousers,’ he says. An intravenous line was inserted and the pain that had been marshalling force began to subside.

  An hour later, as blackness descended on the district of Khas Uruzgan, the medevac chopper made its second run from Anaconda to Tarin Kot with Sergeant D and two others on board. D was bound for an operating table at the Dutch-run hospital. As he was loaded up, someone clocked him in the forehead with the butt of an M4 rifle, leaving an instant bruise.

  ‘I had to explain that one when I got to the hospital,’ he says with a laugh.

  In total, six of the nine wounded Australians were medevaced. Three were treated at the base and returned to action within days.

  ‘This is the largest number of casualties suffered in a single contact since the Vietnam War,’ the Australian Defence Force spokesman Brigadier Brian Dawson said in Canberra the following day.

  The soldier with life-threatening injuries was flown to the high-tech combat hospital in Germany, where his family joined him. Three of Sergeant D’s fellow wounded had returned to Australia for ongoing medical treatment within days of the ambush. The remaining five stayed in Afghanistan.

  As Dawson said: ‘It is important to note that the incident has not affected the operational tempo of the SOTG, which continues to be extremely effective in its ability to disrupt Taliban extremists’ command and control processes and support structures.’

  He also noted that Uruzgan remained a dangerous place, especially since the ISAF forces were fighting ‘in areas which coalition soldiers have not been [in] before . . . They are moving and contesting [the Taliban] in their heartland areas and I think we can expect more heavy fighting.’

  The following day, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd praised the soldiers and said they were ‘engaged in a vital mission’. ‘It’s the men and women of the Australian Defence Force like those who put themselves in harm’s way last night that are taking the fight to this enemy of us all.’

  Yet nowhere in the official version of the battle was there any mention of EDD Sarbi—not that she’d been in the firefight or that she had gone missing after it was over. But word of the dog’s MIA status spread quickly among the soldiers in Afghanistan and, in no time, was relayed to Australia.

  Back in Sydney, the blokes at the SME were rocked by the news of Sarbi’s disappearance. ‘A lot of the guys did feel it,’ said chief trainer Sergeant Damian Dunne. ‘We class them as our best mates. It was devastating.’

  Chapter 19

  EDD SARBI MIA

  Sarbi was listed as Missing in Action, the first Australian military working dog to be lost during an operation in Afghanistan. Sergeant D was stricken. But he reckoned his devoted mongrel would try to make her way back to the remote firebase. She had a nose trained to track familiar scents and a store of memories of familiar places. And, typically dog-like, she had an inbuilt GPS for direction. Stories abounded of extraordinarily dogged canines that had survived against the odds in the harshest of environments or had been lost for weeks, months and even years and miraculously found their way home—even after their two-legged families had moved.

  An Australian cattle dog Sophie Tucker fell off a boat in shark-infested waters in north Queensland and swam five nautical miles to an uninhabited island and survived by hunting wild baby goats for four months before she was found. In 2007, an Iraqi desert dog with cut-off ears famously adopted a group of US Marines, who dubbed him Nubs for his missing lobes. The Marines were banned from keeping stray dogs as pets and left the dog at a remote fort when their fast-moving convoy moved to the Jordanian border 110 kilo-metres away. But Nubs wasn’t one to obey official orders. He tracked down his beloved Marine, Major Brian Dennis, in a two-day odyssey across inhospitable, snowbound terrain. Dennis also defied orders to get rid of Nubs and began a mercy mission to repatriate the mutt back to the United States, where he now lives with the soft-hearted Marine. Nubs is a canine celebrity. He has appeared on American TV chat shows and a book has been written about him.

  Sergeant D remembered a training session a month earlier, when the headstrong Sarbi picked up a scent and got lost in her olfactory world. He called her off, but she was out of hearing range and kept going, determined to find whatever odour the wind was delivering into her nostrils. D let her go, amused at her tenacity. Suddenly, Sarbi stopped. She realised she was on her own, without her trusted handler. She swung around, searching for the soldier, who was now a couple of hundred metres away, out of her line of sight and well beyond hearing range. She swivelled her head around one way—nothing—then the other way. Still nothing.

  D could see Sarbi’s uncertainty. Oh no, where’s my master? He yelled her name at the top of his voice and waved his arms above his head, tossing a tennis ball in the air.

  Sarbi began to retrace her tracks, looking around in circles for Sergeant D. Finally she tracked his voice.

  ‘She came bolting over to me. It was almost as if she was saying, I was busy searching, what happened?’ he says now.

  Sergeant D hoped Sarbi would show the same tenacity now she was out in Khas Uruzgan on her own.

  Before Sergeant D flew out of FOB Anaconda he asked his mates from the SAS and US Special Forces to keep an eye out for the black dog. Many of the soldiers were dog people with their own pets at home, and Sarbi had become a much-loved member of the team.

  ‘Let me know as soon as you hear anything,’ he said.

  ‘No worries, mate.’

  Some went one better. A couple of the guys went through Sergeant D’s gear and left sweaty clothes at strategic points around the perimeter fence and front gates of Anaconda, hoping Sarbi would pick up D’s scent and be lured back to base by her nose. The dog handler knew the Special Forces boys would have Sarbi’s back. That is, if she was alive.

  The next day Sergeant D was under the surgeon’s knife at the Dutch-Australian hospital at Tarin Kot.

  ‘They basically scrubbed me with a wire brush and pulled out all the frag and stitched me up,’ he says now. ‘The padre came around and gave me a medallion for healing. I’m not religious, but I still took it from him because it gave me something to focus on.’

  The commanding officer of the Special Operations Task Group met with the wounded soldiers at Tarin Kot and the story of the battle made headlines back in Australia, though minus the drama of the ambush. The CO reported all nine of the injured men were faring well and ‘morale is high’.

  But Sergeant D was frustrated. He was itching to get back out there to find Sarbi. He’d received intel from the soldiers at Anaconda that his dog had been seen wandering outside the base. ‘The Special Forces boys are awesome that way; they always have someone there to let you know what was going on,’ he says.


  A senior Australian military official said later that Sarbi had returned to the base she’d been calling home but the dog-averse Afghan guards had shooed her away.

  The US Special Forces soldiers had developed a good relationship with the villagers in the Khas Uruzgan district, through a series of food-for-work and cash-for-work projects they’d been conducting with the US Agency for International Development (USAID). They also helped repair the key mosque in the district, and were building an irrigation canal with the locals. Hearts and minds. The goal was to empower the Afghan population and improve their lives while reducing their support for and reliance on the Taliban. The strengthening relationship had tangential benefits: it provided for quid pro quo. We help you, you help us. Pashtunwali.

  Nine days after the ambush, covered in bruises and with a row of neatly stitched sutures holding his wounds together, Sergeant D and another soldier returned to FOB Anaconda on a mission. Recover Sarbi. The operation was strategic and methodical.

  The US military intelligence staff recorded messages about Sarbi in Pashto and Dari and broadcast them over the public address system and local radio stations. They asked villagers to pass on any information they might have about the missing dog and gave instructions about how they could give her back. ‘An Afghan version of a lost-and-found notice,’ an Australian Defence spokesman said.

  Conflicting intelligence filtered back. Sarbi had been sighted at one village, then another. Sarbi had been shot dead. But the information was rated as single source intelligence and therefore wasn’t reliable; none of it could be adequately confirmed. The Afghan culture is an oral culture, and stories about Sarbi were passed from villager to villager as if in a game of Chinese whispers.

  ‘It was pretty hard hearing all those things,’ Sergeant D says now. ‘But we couldn’t act on it.’

  Afghan police in the region reported that a local Taliban commander Mullah Hamdullah had Sarbi in his possession. It was a strong lead. Hamdullah, who was in his mid-thirties, was one of two or three Taliban leaders in the region and had been vying for power with another Afghan. Sarbi would be seen as a status symbol, a prize of war. According to a former Dutch diplomat and independent political analyst presently based in Kabul, Hamdullah was proud of his war booty and paraded her around.

  Martine van Bijlert is fluent in Dari and has spent more than eleven years in various roles with government bodies and non-government organisations in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. She meets regularly with Afghan people and has a good and open relationship with them. One of the tribal elders from the area had recently told her that Sarbi had taken refuge in a building after the bombs and rockets had stopped flying and the ambush was over. A local boy ventured out to gather spent cartridges from the firefight as soon as the coalition soldiers had left the bullet-strewn valley and the Taliban retreated from the area around Ana Kalay. The boy was rummaging around the building when he found Sarbi and took her home.

  ‘As soon as Mullah Hamdullah heard about it—it was still the same day—he came and collected the dog,’ van Bijlert says now. ‘He took it and was very proud of it.’

  Hamdullah’s father had been arrested. The coalition forces used the local radio to spread the word that the old man would be released if the son returned Sarbi to the US firebase.

  ‘It was not Hamdullah who tried to trade,’ says van Bijlert.

  But the Taliban commander rejected the dad-for-dog swap. ‘I am not sure why,’ she says. ‘Maybe he wanted to show he was dominant and he didn’t want to cave in.’

  Or perhaps Hamdullah thought the highly trained explosive detection dog was more valuable to him than his father. It is possible he wanted to keep Sarbi to trade her at a later date when the stakes were higher. The Taliban knew that NATO troops did their best to retrieve equipment left on the battlefield or destroy it if that was not possible, not that the latter would befall Sarbi. Hamdullah might also have wanted to use Sarbi as collateral in the internecine world of tribal politics and Taliban power plays. Nothing would surprise in Afghanistan, where alliances shift as quickly as they form.

  Eventually, Hamdullah’s father was released but Sarbi’s whereabouts remained a mystery.

  Sergeant D says the SAS boys were keen to launch a search mission for the dog based on the intelligence, but the risks were too high. There was no telling why a bunch of hardened men, trained to fight wars in foreign lands, were willing to put their lives on the line to find a dog, but they were. Some things you just can’t explain, like the bond between man and his best friend, like protecting your mates, like needing to finish a mission. Problem was, they just couldn’t do it. The troopers were restricted by operation orders and rescuing a missing dog wasn’t on them. It didn’t matter how precious Sarbi was and how well she’d performed her duty. The brass simply would not risk the lives of their elite soldiers to find Sarbi.

  The soldiers accepted the logic of war and understood the rationale behind it. But it still felt like a kick in the guts. So they did what resourceful Special Forces do. They adapted. Whenever they went out on patrol, they kept an eye out for Sarbi. They gathered intel, slowly, day by day, week by week.

  Sergeant D spent ten exasperating days at Anaconda. Because of his injuries he was not permitted to leave the base. He hammered away at the intelligence to pinpoint Sarbi’s location. He walked the boundaries of the firebase repeatedly, scanning the horizon with binoculars, searching to no avail. He bombarded his American mates as soon as they returned from patrols. They returned empty-handed. No news.

  The dog handler returned to Tarin Kot in mid-September.

  The herringbone of stitches was removed from his wounds. He was cleared to return to active duty. But he was without a dog and there were no free canines with which to work. Sergeant D was reassigned to the Persons Under Control (PUC) unit for the final ten weeks of his deployment. He conducted biometric assessments and processed suspected Taliban and insurgent captives who had been brought in by SOTG soldiers. He fingerprinted them and took iris scans and DNA samples. The PUCs were then either sent elsewhere for interrogation or freed to return to their homes. Sergeant D also did one final mission outside the wire on a combined Australian–British patrol.

  Sergeant D missed Sarbi and his hands-on role as a dog handler. He kept his lines of communication open with the American Special Forces boys. He never lost faith she would be found.

  ‘I was hopeful,’ he says now. ‘I always hoped that she was still out there because nothing definite had been said either way.’

  But he was troubled by a niggling thought.

  ‘It was always in the back of my mind that I would never see Sarbi again.’

  Sarbi went missing in action on the cusp of winter, when sub-zero temperatures, snow and fierce blizzards did cruel things to the landscape and those who inhabited it. She had survived the initial contact and shrapnel wounds, dodged enemy weapons and terrain booby-trapped with lethal land-mines and IEDs. But how would she survive beyond the razor-wire perimeter of the Australian base without the constant care and supervision of her handler? Sergeant D hoped like hell his beloved dog wouldn’t suffer the same tragic fate as the three Australian explosive detection dogs who had been killed in action in Afghanistan. The deaths of those little Diggers, as they were dubbed, had been soul-destroying. He didn’t dare think of what the Afghans might do to her.

  Sergeant D returned to Australia on 13 November 2008. His deployment was complete but it felt hollow. Leaving Sarbi weighed heavily on him. This was the first time he had exited an operation without his four-legged partner. He was like a kid whose puppy had been taken away.

  ‘I was pretty upset leaving Afghanistan,’ he says.

  On 16 January 2009 the ambush in Khas Uruzgan was back in the headlines, dominating the hungry beast of the news cycle.

  SAS Corporal Mark Gregor Strang Donaldson was presented with the Victoria Cross for his courage under fire in Ana Kalay on 2 September 2008, during a dignified ceremony at Canberra�
�s Government House, attended by his wife and young daughter. A retinue of SAS troopers decked out in civilian gear and wearing sunglasses to protect their identities crowded the back of the fancy room, quietly proud of their mate.

  ‘You have cradled life in your arms and opened your heart to its meaning,’ the Governor-General Quentin Bryce told him. ‘By your doing and knowing, you will shoulder more than most. You are the finest example and inspiration.’

  Donno was the first soldier to receive the prestigious medal since the Vietnam War; the ninety-seventh Australian awarded the highest recognition for gallantry under fire the country has to offer.

  ‘I don’t see myself as a hero, honestly,’ he said after the pomp and ceremony was done. ‘I still see myself as a soldier first and foremost. I’m a soldier. I’m trained to fight, that’s what we do. It’s instinct and it’s natural. And you don’t really think about it at the time. I just saw [the interpreter] there; I went over there and got him. That was it.’

  No false modesty, no barely concealed sense of grandiosity. Just an honest bloke doing an honest, heroic job.

  Later, when Donaldson was asked by a journalist how far he had sprinted across enemy ground, he replied with his trademark verbal continence: ‘Oh, look, I don’t know . . . You know, I didn’t have a tape measure there.’

  The newspapers and television stations hailed the modern day hero, who did his genuine best to deflect the attention and share the honour and glory with the mates who had fought with him in Khas Uruzgan. As Donaldson said, there were eleven other heroes on the mission.

  But the media was missing a prized piece of the puzzle, the thirteenth hero.

  Sarbi.

  The military hierarchy still had not released the news of the explosive detection dog’s disappearance. It was as if Sarbi had never existed. Behind the scenes, though, the hound had not been forgotten, especially by the tight-knit Special Forces community in Afghanistan. Always faithful, ever loyal, perpetually playful, Sarbi had gotten under their collective skins. The soldiers lived by the credo of never leaving a fallen comrade behind and their four-legged comrade was no different. If Sarbi was alive, they would find her. No matter how long it took. She might not have been on the official radar, but she was in their collective consciousness.