Break Point

by Matthew Ollerton

  Because I was still on a temporary visa, I thought I was going to lose my house. I needed a wife. An Australian one. So I proposed to Kelly and she said yes. We got married in a chapel on top of a mountain in Las Vegas and the plan was for her to leave San Francisco and return to Australia to live with me. But I knew deep inside that what I was doing was very, very wrong.

  I was having brutal anxiety attacks. My whole body would be numb and shaking uncontrollably and my head would feel like it was going to explode. I actually thought I was going mad, which was terrifying. I seriously thought I was either going to die or end up in a mental hospital. The only way to nullify the anxiety was by drinking, so I was drinking all the time. Anyone with any sense would have said, ‘Jesus, this bloke’s not right. He’s just split up with his girlfriend, he’s drinking like a fish and a mental wreck. Maybe I should let him sort himself out before even thinking about marrying him.’ Then again, as long as I had a drink, I always managed to do a decent job of seeming happy. So I have to take a lot of the blame. I’d fucked up big time.

  Kelly gave up everything to be with me in Australia and all I wanted to do was get out of the relationship. That’s when I started thinking a lot about ending it all. One day, I called Nat and told her I’d done something really stupid, that I had nowhere to turn, and that my life was fucked. She told me there was a way out of everything and what I needed to do. Nat had no reason to help me, but she did, and I’ll never forget it. She was such an important figure in my life.

  Kelly was understandably distraught when I told her it had all been a mistake. She thought she was in this movie romance, but I wasn’t the least bit interested. I got myself a Vegas lawyer and got the marriage annulled, à la Britney Spears. And that’s when I decided I really needed to leave Iraq.

  But there was one last gig, as there always is. At least in the movies. And it was very nearly the end of me. I took another job working as a personal security detail, part of a four-man ex-pat security team, and we’d taken a VIP to a villa for a meeting. And while the VIP was inside and we were resting up, the compound came under attack. We were used to the sound of gunfire but when the rounds started coming through the gate and a couple of local security guards got shot, we realised the villa, and perhaps the VIP, was the focus. We took cover and when I looked up, I could see that a group of enemy soldiers had taken up positions behind our vehicles, while others were in nearby buildings. We were in danger of getting trapped at the back of the compound and I could feel the situation spiralling out of control. We were already outnumbered, and I knew that we had to act very quickly before reinforcements arrived, which they surely would.

  Rounds were fizzing past my head and hitting the wall behind us, but I managed to scramble to my feet, open fire and hit one guy, who went down in a heap. And once the enemy started going down, they stopped coming forward. That gave us the breathing space we needed to be able to do what we needed to do. Amid the mayhem, I somehow managed to formulate a short-term Immediate Action. The first thing you do when you enter a compound is check the floor plan and ascertain your exit routes, besides the main one. That main one was taken by the enemy, but I knew there was one at the rear, if we could trick our attackers. Shaping to move towards the exit on the left-hand side would encourage them to focus their fire on that one spot, allowing us to escape by the other route. So I sent one of our guys over to the false exit and told him to fire sporadically, to give the impression that we were all heading that way.

  The enemy fell for the ruse almost immediately. They changed formation in an attempt to dominate that position, and as soon as they did so, another path to our vehicles opened up. We were then able to get into the villa, bundle the VIP into a car and make our escape, while there were still bullets whistling past the windows. It all happened in about 15 minutes, none of our guys was hit and we did the job we were hired to do, which was keep the VIP safe.

  I think I was the only ex-Special Forces soldier in our team but the company I was working for only employed ex-military. That being the case, I knew everyone I was working with knew the necessary drills and that when bullets started coming down, they’d follow orders to the letter. When my colleague was sent to the other side of the compound to draw fire, he did it without asking any questions, because he understood its importance. Can you imagine asking someone with no military experience to do that? ‘Mate, do you think you could possibly run over there, so that they all start shooting at you?’

  You can’t plan or practise stuff like that. But when you’re as highly trained as I was, solutions come naturally, even in moments of intense pressure. It was because we were all professionals that it all went so smoothly and we were able to achieve our aim. One wrong action by any single person could have led to us all being killed, or having our heads chopped off.

  I’m sometimes asked, ‘How many people have you killed?’ It’s a question a lot of soldiers get asked and one we all hate. I prefer to look at it a different way. I don’t know if the person I hit in the compound died or not. But if he did, how many people did I save by killing that one person? How many people did I save by opening fire on that car in Fallujah? Had I not, 14 people might have died, including me. I didn’t squeeze the trigger because I found it fun. I didn’t score the possible kills on the butt of my gun. They could have killed us, so I had to take action. It was the same as being attacked by the chimp. I was close to death in both cases, a small squeeze of a trigger away in the case of the attack in Fallujah, one more bite away in the case of the chimp attack. They were both break points. And the attack on the compound was another one. But I’d had enough of dicing with death by that point. That was the universe saying, ‘Fucking hell, is this dickhead still there? GET OUT!’

  16

  FALSE DAWN

  Being in a warzone for six years had almost destroyed my life. By the end, any good memories I might have had of Baghdad had been obliterated. I finally said goodbye to Iraq in 2008. Our contract hadn’t been extended, which forced my hand, but I had already started planning my new life in Australia anyway. I was going to gain some knowledge of the property market, invest in real estate, and that would be my new career. This was the external fix that would make all my problems disappear.

  I got back with Nat for a bit, split with her again, and was in a new relationship in no time, although this time it was two days overdue. If I’d learned to be on my own, it would have saved so much hassle, so much money and so much time. It was as if I was trading my girlfriends in, I thought it was that easy. What I didn’t understand then, but do now, is that Nat was special and not easily replaced.

  Sarah had a young son who was the same age as Luke when I left him, which I took as a sign, just as I always thought things were signs when they not always were. Sarah had a drink problem that was worse than mine and beyond anything I’d seen before. I was trying to create a new life for myself away from warzones, find some stability, and I’d found a walking, talking warzone in Brisbane.

  One night, I was supposed to introduce Sarah to some friends, but before we got to the bar she was so drunk she could barely talk. I told her I didn’t want to be with her and walked away. She didn’t come home that night and the following morning I got a call from the hospital. From what I could make out, she’d got in a taxi, tried to do a runner, got into a scuffle, fallen over and banged her head.

  I believe that everyone comes into your life for a reason. Even if they’re like Sarah and a terrible match, they hopefully direct you to a place where you’re happy and content. But Sarah was a harsh lesson. It hammered it home that just because I had a good girlfriend in Nat, that didn’t mean the next one would be the same. There’s a lot more to relationships than that.

  Life away from a warzone wasn’t enough for me. Again I found myself not being fulfilled, I needed something more. But I was about to make a bizarre connection that would change all that. A mate called Denny who worked with me in Iraq and now lived down the road from me in Brisbane threw a par
ty, where I met a guy called Simon who used to be in the Intelligence Corps and did a lot of work with the Special Forces. It was fancy dress, but I immediately recognised him as one of my interrogators in Selection, not the fat guy eating sweets, but the one who was yapping around me like a Chihuahua when I first got off the vehicle.

  Simon told me about an organisation in Australia he had connections with, called The Grey Man. The Grey Man was set up for the prevention of child prostitution and slavery, primarily in south-east Asia. They would send undercover operatives into brothels, identify child prostitutes and either use local law enforcement to get the kids out or do rescues themselves. Simon thought I could maybe train operatives for them and I was intrigued.

  The Grey Man’s chief was John Curtis, a former Australian Special Forces Commando. John had a team around him that had been operating in south-east Asia for a number of years. It was all self-funded, but I’d saved some money and wanted to be a part of it. I met some people, put together a package and started doing training around Brisbane. It was awesome, I loved it. I wasn’t back on the tools, but I was back in a world that I knew and felt like I was doing something worthwhile.

  They asked me if I wanted to go undercover but pretending to be a paedophile felt too raw for me. Then I split up with Sarah and I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m going overseas to do what I said I’d never do.’ Vice, the media company, wanted to film the story in Thailand and make a documentary, so I signed up for a trip. But before heading out, I returned to the UK and saw Luke for the first time since he was four.

  He was now 11, and it was incredible to see him as a proper grown-up boy. But it was also like seeing one of my best mates again, as if I’d never been away. There was still a lot of work to do in terms of building the relationship into a proper, intimate father and son thing, but it was easier than I thought it would be. For everything I regretted about my relationship with Helen, he was the one bit of goodness that came from it.

  When I got to Thailand, I was in holiday mode. There was always an excuse to drink. I’d meet someone and have a beer with them. I’d meet someone else and have a beer with them. And when I wasn’t drinking, my anxiety would be crippling, my fear and unease verging on panic.

  We were working with the Thai government’s anti-human trafficking department (AHTD) in the tourist resort of Pattaya. The plan was to go into bars, identify kids and hopefully come away with photos and video. We’d then meet with the AHTD and plan a bust. But after attending my first briefing, I knew it was a crock of shit. We’d built an intelligence picture and covered a wall with photos of underage girls sold into the sex trade, and I noticed one of the AHTD agents taking pictures of the photos with his phone. In my world, you wouldn’t be taking pictures. He didn’t need to be taking pictures, so it was a concern to me. I didn’t say anything, because we were trying to build relationships, but I knew at that point that this was going nowhere.

  The following night, we went in to do the bust. But the first club we went into, the whole staff had changed and they all pleaded ignorance. The problem seemed to be so ingrained in the culture and everything was just so corrupt. We had more busts planned, but I knew they’d be worthless.

  One day, we were chilling out on the beach with the crew from Vice. Me and Simon warned them not to go out on the jet skis, because we knew it was a scam run by the local mafia. Tourists would hire a jet ski and when they returned it, the company would claim the clutch was blown or the side had been scratched and keep their deposit. Of course, the Vice team didn’t listen to me. One of them had a collision with a boat, did a bit of damage and the beach erupted.

  We’d been trying to keep a low profile, and now we needed to get these people out of there quickly. Me and Simon told the others to get back to the hotel as quickly as possible and get ready to leave, because they’d handed over their passport details and hotel information along with the deposit. Meanwhile, me and Simon tried to reason with the jet-ski owner. While that was happening, all these nasty-looking mafia dudes started turning up.

  We managed to extricate ourselves from the situation, drifted back to the hotel, got everyone into the cars and as we were driving out of the hotel, the mafia started arriving. We had arranged an emergency RV, which was another hotel called Cabbages and Condoms. Yes, you read that right. When we arrived later that night, having given the mafia the slip, we walked into this hotel and there were condoms everywhere. There was a Father Christmas made out of condoms, condoms hanging from trees, condoms disguised as flowers. And when we left reception, we stumbled upon this perfectly manicured lawn with a spotlight on it, which was covered in little white bunnies, hopping all over the place. Moments earlier, we were being chased by the Thai mafia. I felt like Alice, having fallen down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Once again, it was a hairy story with a silver lining. And lots of condoms. Exactly where the cabbages came into it, I have no idea.

  We did one more bust that night but before long the operation had fallen apart. It became clear that we weren’t going to find any solid evidence and the Vice crew said they’d had enough and left. But I was hearing stories about kids being sold to fishermen and raped for days on boats, before being killed and thrown overboard. Whether those stories were true or not, there was certainly a thriving trade in child prostitution in Thailand, and I thought there was more that we could do. I couldn’t help thinking that by the time the kids were in the brothels, it was too late. They were earning money, that money was going back home, they had mobile phones and clothes. So the only way to save kids was to find them before they’d reached the brothels.

  A guy called Mickey Choothesa ran the Baan Yuu Suk shelter in Chiang Mai, which provided sanctuary and education to vulnerable girls, as well as a charity, the Children’s Organisation of Southeast Asia (COSA). There were stories of Mickey carrying kids over the Burmese border while being shot at. He seemed like a proper hero, doing miraculous things, so I thought I’d go up to Chiang Mai and see if I could do anything to help.

  I took two guys with me, a former policeman and a former bodyguard, met Mickey and he showed us around the shelter. All the money had been raised through donations and most of it was used to put the kids through school. It was awesome to see all these vulnerable kids getting an education. Mickey told us about the slave camps dotted along the Thai–Burmese border and we decided to try to identify the camps and get some kids out.

  After a couple of days at the shelter, we took off in a pickup. I lay on my back, all the way through Thailand, with my bag as a pillow. It was bliss, just staring at the sky, filled with excitement about our mission. We made some connections on the way up to the border and gathered some information about the likely whereabouts of these slave camps, which were really just villages. Our focus wasn’t to ask why, but just to get the kids out.

  We ventured up into the foothills, which were extremely dangerous. Before we went up, we had to make a decision about whether to take weapons or not. We decided not to, because if we got stopped by a cartel and we had weapons on us, they would assume we were the Drug Enforcement Agency and there could have been all sorts of trouble. It made more sense to pretend to be tourists. All the same, not having a weapon on me made me feel extremely vulnerable. I’d carried weapons on every operation I’d ever done, they were the tools of my trade. The SBS trained us in disarming skills designed specifically for the military and I could have a punch-up, but you don’t take a peashooter to a gunfight. If anyone decided to have a pop, we were fucked.

  The Thai government supplied villages with medical provisions, but everything was so corrupt, so by the time the provisions got to the people, there might be one bottle of Paracetamol left. So we were trading medical provisions in exchange for information all the way. We were told that one guy would be able to tell us about a village where loads of kids were kept, but when we reached him, he wanted his whole village supplied with medicine. We did as he asked, and he told us that the cartels had been up and interviewed the slave traders, and
the plan was for them to return, take the kids away and distribute them to fishing villages and brothels all over the region.

  The following day, we went up to the village and found these 22 kids. It was a very tense moment, because we knew the cartel could turn up at any moment and that we had a very limited amount of time to get the kids processed and evacuated to the shelter. Their ages ranged from eight to fourteen. One girl told us that when she found out she was going to be trafficked, she’d run to the nearest police station, told them what was happening, only to be taken to the cells and raped for three days by the policemen and their mates. Luke was 11 at the time, so it was very harrowing to hear stories like that from kids who were about the same age. It made me extremely angry and very passionate about getting those kids out of that situation.

  Having processed the kids, we arranged for a team to move them to safehouses over the next few days, before quickly evacuating to another village on the Burmese border. I was on an amazing high that night from believing that I’d done something good. I’d possibly changed those kids’ lives, saved them from years of prostitution and an early grave. It gave me a real sense of fulfilment, purpose and belonging. It was like no feeling I’d had before, and I wanted more of it.

  That night, we arrived at another village and exchanged more medical products for a room and some food. We had a debrief and discussed our plans for the next few days, in terms of getting the kids to safety. After a well-deserved meal and a couple of shots of Mekhong, we retired to our bamboo huts and hit the hay. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep for when I shot up like a bolt. It was dark and I was befuddled. At first, I assumed I’d had a nightmare. Then I heard something going on outside. I peered through the slits in the bamboo and could see armed men arguing with and apparently threatening the villagers. I didn’t have to understand Thai to know that the armed men were members of a cartel.