War Dogs Read online

  I found that I preferred working off-lead. Working with the dog on-lead is much more restrictive, for both the dog and the handler. It takes longer to search an area, and if the handler gets tired or lethargic or stands still, the dog will sense it and start sitting down. It would look for an excuse to stop working – just as a lazy human would. The other downside of working on-lead is that if the dog does find a bomb, the handler will be standing virtually on top of it. Even though it was against regulations, sometimes when I was searching a building, and out of the public eye, I’d let Nova off the lead, as I’d developed a good relationship with her and she easily took to working this way.

  The New South Wales Police had ramped up their detection dog capability for the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and when the games were finally happening, we were right in the thick of everything. Nova and I, and another couple of handlers, Dan and Adam, searched the new Olympic Stadium at Homebush Bay prior to the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as the beach volleyball venue at Bondi Beach. Nova worked well and wasn’t nearly as distracted as I was by the female teams who were practising there.

  We also did searches during the Paralympics and I think I enjoyed that even more than doing them for the Olympics. You could really see the joy on the Paralympians’ faces when they were competing. There was no arrogance or carry-on from any of those sportspeople, and you could tell they were really loving just being there. It was inspiring.

  After the Sydney Olympics were over, the police started training dogs in drug detection. While I found this interesting, I also felt like I’d hit a plateau and that I needed a change. Then something else happened to convince me that being a cop wasn’t for me. While I’d been working in general duties at Sutherland, there had been an incident involving a man who’d been arrested and brought to the station to be charged. He was drunk and had beaten up his girlfriend because she wouldn’t do what he told her – which was to sleep with another man.

  He was aggressive, and when I’d put him in the dock to wait to be charged, he tried to get out, so I pushed him down. He was eventually charged and taken to remand. Later, he reported to prison officers that he had a broken jaw. He laid a claim against me, saying that I’d broken it when I was subduing him in the dock. It was bullshit but, as all complaints against police officers are taken seriously, it was investigated. The process was lengthy and I was put through the wringer several times. There was security camera footage from the police station but, as far as the Internal Affairs investigators were concerned, it didn’t show conclusively whether I was innocent of striking the man on the chin. I knew I was innocent, which I continued to assert. It seemed clear to me that something had happened to the guy either in prison or on his way there; perhaps in the van. I mean, if someone’s just broken your jaw, you don’t sit quietly while being taken through the charging process and led off to jail in a truck, which is what he did.

  In the end, the Internal Affairs cops delivered a finding that pissed me off. They found that, on the balance of probability, I had struck the man, but that they didn’t have enough evidence with which to charge me. I’d served the police proudly, and gained a commendation for my work in stopping the madman threatening to burn himself to death from doing so. I respected the rule of law, and prided myself on upholding it in the most professional and dedicated way possible. I didn’t shirk from confrontation, and Poppy’s and my arrest record proved that we weren’t the sort of policemen who looked for an easy ride. We had even received a high achievement award for our diligence in making arrests.

  I hadn’t struck the man in custody – though, God knows, I probably wanted to after what he’d done, but my own people had basically said to me, ‘You’re guilty, but we can’t prove it.’ They had taken the word of a drug user, who was trying to pimp his girlfriend, over mine. It left a bad taste.

  I had issues on the home front, as well. Jane and I had had a third child together in 1999, a beautiful little girl named Demi, but were having problems with our relationship and ended up separating. I worked with a policewoman, Kim, on the dog squad and she was also having relationship difficulties. We began talking to and supporting each other, and ended up getting together.

  After the low point of going through the investigation and a costly divorce, I finally decided that I needed a change of pace and more money. I left the police force in March 2001.

  An ex-police friend got me a job working surveillance for a private investigation company. It paid better than being a police officer, which was why I took the job. I was living in a flat with my brother, shelling out for rent as well as paying maintenance to Jane. I hadn’t yet moved in with Kim because she was in the process of finalising her own break-up.

  The work mainly consisted of checking up on people who’d filed workers’ compensation claims. I soon learned that while surveillance work paid OK, the hours were long, and it could get very tiring and boring sitting outside someone’s house for hours at a time waiting for them do something incriminating. It had its moments, though.

  There was a case involving a guy, who was maybe in his late twenties and who lived in Bondi. I followed him for several days and nights. He was pretty fit, and I spent an afternoon watching, and secretly videoing, him and his lady friend exercising, running up and down the stairs near the Bondi Pavilion, and along the iconic beach.

  After his beach workout, I followed the man across the Harbour Bridge to North Sydney, where he parked his car and entered the Berry Street Tavern. He was carrying a round case, like one of those make-up bags women have in old movies. I had a compact video camera with me, hidden in a laptop bag with a hole cut out for the lens, and, intrigued, I followed him into the pub.

  A band was in the process of setting up, with roadies in black T-shirts hooking up amps and doing the old ‘one-two, one-two, one-two’ on the microphone. I’d lost sight of my target. But when the roadies finished and the lights came on, there was my man, on stage.

  He was behind a set of bongo drums and laying down a rapid beat to the first track. He was smiling and so was I, because, as I laid the laptop bag on the table and pressed the switch that started the video camera recording, I knew my long days and nights of following him were finally over. Pretty strange, I reckoned, to be moonlighting as a bongo player when, because of a supposedly injured wrist, you’d lodged a worker’s compensation claim and been given money by your employer.

  After eighteen months of following people, I was sick of the waiting, the watching and the boredom. I’ve always had an interest in property – buying, selling and developing it – so I thought I’d give being a real estate agent a try. Kim and I had moved in together, to a house at Regentville in western Sydney, and I landed a job with a real estate agency at nearby Erskine Park. I’d read a few books about making money in the property market and, at the time, my mum was studying for her real estate agent’s licence.

  Real estate was a change of pace from surveillance – getting up at the same time each morning, shaving, putting on a shirt and tie, and going to an office, instead of pulling on grungy old jeans and T-shirts, and looking forward to a day of sitting in a car. I liked the work, but my timing was shithouse.

  The market was peaking; people were asking ridiculous prices for houses and flats, and no-one was buying. It was the worst time to be on the selling side of the property game. At showing after showing, sometimes only one or two people – or, worse, no-one – would show up for an inspection. I stuck with selling real estate for twoand-a-half years, but it just wasn’t working out, and neither was my relationship with Kim, even though we had two great little sons, Kyron and Jaylen, born in 2002 and 2005. She and I separated.

  Over the years, I’d stayed in contact with Mark Wilczynski, the corporal instructor on my army dog handler’s course. Having left the army, he was working as a contract explosive detection dog handler in Iraq. Mark emailed to say that he wanted me to go and work for him over there, but the company he worked for started losing contracts soon after he sou
nded me out. However, Mark told me he would keep me posted, as it looked as though there might be opportunities in Afghanistan.

  After calling it quits with Kim, I moved closer to where I’d grown up, to Wollongong. Unemployed, I did an underground mining course, as I thought that work in the mines might be something I could be interested in – especially now that I had two ex-partners and five children to help support. The mines weren’t hiring at the time so, for a little while, it looked like I was well and truly up shit creek without a paddle.

  Fortunately, Mark emailed me again to tell me there was a job going in Afghanistan. I contacted his company, Canine Associates International, and emailed my CV to the human resources people. I met their criteria for an overseas job and they emailed me a contract, which I signed and sent back. I hadn’t had a job interview in person with anyone, but I knew that Mark had been pushing behind the scenes for me to be recruited.

  Ten years after leaving the Australian Army, I was going to war.

  FOUR

  Hurry up and wait

  2006

  Six weeks later, I was in a car with my mum, my sister and my girlfriend at the time, driving along the F5 freeway from Wollongong to Sydney airport.

  Things had happened fast. One minute, I’d been out of work, with a mounting tide of debts, including two lots of child maintenance payments, and little hope of finding a well-paid job; the next, I was going to war.

  Driving past the Royal National Park, I wondered how different things would be for me in Afghanistan. On television, it looked like it was all dirt and desert. It had been five years since the al-Qaeda terrorists had flown their hijacked jets into the Twin Towers and, while I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the news, it seemed that things were hotting up again in Afghanistan, after some initial successes of the coalition forces.

  I knew about as much about Afghanistan as would the average Australian – fuck all. After September 11, Australia had sent to Afghanistan a task force based around an SAS squadron and, by all accounts, they – and the Americans – had done a good job of routing the Taliban and helping the Afghanis elect a new government, under Hamid Karzai. A year later, Australia pulled its troops out of their base at Bagram, near Kabul, and the boys were home for Christmas. The SAS, however, wasn’t out of the fray for long, as they were back in action in March 2003, spearheading the advance into Baghdad. After the initial invasion of Iraq, the SAS came back to Australia and the government held welcome-home parades in Sydney and Perth. It was John Howard’s equivalent of George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier and declaring ‘Mission accomplished’.

  But now, as we drove to the airport, there was a story on the radio of yet another car bomb going off somewhere in Iraq and killing dozens of people – most of them innocent Muslim civilians.

  ‘At least you’re not going there,’ my mum said.

  It was the same with my dad, who I’d moved in with after splitting up with Kim. He wasn’t happy about me taking a job in Afghanistan but, like Mum, he seemed to think it was safer than Baghdad. I couldn’t care less. All I knew was that I was going to war, and the reality of this was finally starting to hit home.

  The money the new job paid was important to me, as I needed to get on top of my debts, and would have a financial commitment to my five kids for years to come. During the car ride, I didn’t think about the morality of going to war for money, or whether some people would class me as a mercenary, or maybe see something wrong in the fact that the coalition was using paid civilian contractors in a war zone.

  I’d been over the moon when I’d got the email from CAI confirming my contract. I’d been directionless after leaving the army and police, and had way more than the two years’ experience the CAI required of its handlers. I’d been well trained by the army and the police as a dog handler, but there were few opportunities for me to work as one in Australia, outside of those that government agencies offered. But now, everything appeared to be coming together. It seemed like something, or someone, was telling me that my future was in working with dogs, and that it was what I was meant to do. In Afghanistan, I’d have the chance to put into practice, in a truly operational environment, everything I’d learned from my training and experience while in uniform in Australia.

  I was booked to fly with Emirates and thought to myself that if you had to go to war, this wasn’t a bad way to travel. I was looking forward to getting through the awkward farewells, boarding the plane, and ordering my first bourbon and Coke. Was I nervous? Maybe. I was excited at the prospect of a new challenge, and also, like any soldier, at finally putting into practice everything I’d learned and trained for over the years.

  In one sense, an explosive detection dog handler in the police or the army, when they’re working in support of the civil authorities, is in an operational situation when searching for bombs or weapons. If some nutjob sets off a bomb in Sydney and you get caught in the blast, you’re just as dead as if the same thing happens elsewhere, but the risk of it happening is obviously far greater in somewhere like Afghanistan.

  As I didn’t want everyone hanging around for too long when saying their goodbyes, I tried to get them over with before I checked in. However, Mum, my sister and my girlfriend all insisted on staying until the flight was called. It was just as well they did.

  I’d arranged to meet another dog handler, who was also going to Afghanistan to work for the same mob as I was, at the airport. His name was Guy, and he was an Australian of Filipino descent, who had been working for the Australian Protective Service. Australian Protective Service provides security for Parliament House, various federal government and defence department properties, and our embassies abroad. It’s also responsible for the initial response to terrorist incidents at Australia’s major airports and for providing ‘sky marshals’ on civilian flights. Guy had flown from Brisbane to Sydney and was booked on the same flight that I was. Once we found each other, we hit it off immediately. We queued together to check in. After I was called forward, I dragged my kitbag and backpack up to the scales.

  I gave the Emirates check-in woman my name and produced my passport, and she started tapping away on her keyboard. Then she frowned. ‘Um, I can’t seem to find a booking here for you, Mr Bryant.’

  I resisted the urge to swear. ‘What do you mean? It’s been booked by the company I’m going to work for – Canine Associates International. Sydney to Heathrow, and from there on to Manus, in Kyrgyzstan.’

  ‘Just let me try something else.’ She tapped away some more, then shook her head. ‘I’m very sorry, but I don’t have you booked on any flights.’

  ‘What the . . . Guy?’ I called to my new colleague.

  He came up to the counter, gave his full name and produced his passport. The woman shook her head, apologised and told us that Guy didn’t have a booking either. We knew it wasn’t her fault, but Guy and I were seriously pissed off. We left the queue and started making calls. As it turned out, the company hadn’t ever confirmed our bookings and paid for our tickets. Everyone we talked to was very apologetic, but that didn’t stop this whole thing being a fucking joke. Guy called some friends in Sydney and arranged to stay with them until things were sorted out, while I went back to the people who’d come to see me off and told them the news.

  My mood fluctuated on the drive back home. At first, I was angry that I’d said my goodbyes and psyched myself up as best as I could to fly off to Afghanistan and the war. Man, CAI was worse than the army, which usually sets the benchmark when it comes to fucking people around.

  As we drove in the fast-flowing freeway traffic through the darkened bush back towards Wollongong, I started to mellow. I would have been happier being on the plane, but at the same time I felt a bit like a condemned man who’d been granted a couple of days’ stay of execution. I realised I’d have a little longer to enjoy life in Australia, and resolved to make good use of the time. I’d still be getting stuck into the bourbon, but not at 30,000 feet over some desert.

 
When I returned to the airport a few days later, it was a relief to find the ticket had now been booked and paid for. I said my goodbyes, and waved as I went through into the departure lounge.

  This was it; I was really going overseas. When a smiling flight attendant served me my first bourbon, I settled back into my seat and switched on the in-flight entertainment. This, I thought, this is the way to go to war.

  The flight, however, seemed to go on forever. We stopped somewhere in the middle of the night – I was so disorientated that I can’t remember where – before landing again at Heathrow. I had to wait for a connection and by the time I touched down at Manus airport, in Kyrgyzstan, I was tired, dirty, and probably a little hung-over. Guy had travelled on a different flight from Sydney, so I arrived in this strange former outpost of the Soviet Union alone.

  Kyrgyzstan had aligned itself with the United States early in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and Manus had become an important support base for the war in Afghanistan. Australian Air Force refuelling aircraft had been kept here in the early days of the fighting, and the air base near the civilian airport was still a major hub for a number of different forces flying their people into and out of Afghanistan.

  The uniformed bureaucrats at Immigration looked like extras from some old Cold War spy movie and the whole terminal – a drab, ’60s Russian-inspired building – was looking pretty tired. When I finally cleared Customs, I was mobbed in the arrivals hall by a swarm of taxi drivers, but no-one from the company was there to meet me and I had to work out how to get to the Manus air force base.

  ‘Mister, mister, mister . . . you come with me,’ they were all yelling in my face. I was tired and jet-lagged, and had no idea how far the base was from the terminal. I picked a guy at random and asked him if he could take me there. ‘Yes, yes, mister. Twenty dollars, mister.’

  This sounded like a lot, but I didn’t have much alternative but to agree. The air outside was chilly, but at least I wasn’t inside an aeroplane. I loaded my bags into the back of the driver’s crappy old sedan and got in. ‘I take you, Mister. No problem.’