War Dogs Read online

  Ricky had a good nose but, like Ziggy, he could be laid-back, especially when searching open areas and roads, so we put in some extra training on those. In the proficiency training, we used a variety of explosives, including RPG rounds, which I hadn’t had much to do with, and detonation cord from a suicide bomber’s vest that the US military had found. Just looking at these training aids reminded me where Ricky and I would soon be heading.

  ‘Come on, boy, let’s do this,’ I said to him as we began our proficiency test. Ricky performed like a star and any apprehension I’d had soon evaporated. It’s all about trusting your dog. Many handlers fail because they’re trying too hard or trying to second-guess their dog. It’s a team effort, and without that trust you’re in trouble.

  I felt like a huge load had been taken from my shoulders. This wasn’t just about passing the test, but about being back on the job with a dog by my side, with the companionship that brings, and finally putting the tools of my trade to the test in a war zone. Of course I was missing my kids back home in Australia, but I knew that with each passing day, I was few hundred dollars closer to being debt-free and better able to provide for them.

  I lay on my back on my single bed in the partitioned wooden room, my hand under my head, thinking about what it would be like once we were sent out of Kandahar. Mark had told me that I’d most likely be assigned to a US SF team, working out of a remote forward operating base. I’d never worked with the Australian SAS, or any other special forces, but after the days of training around Kandahar, I was feeling confident that I could do the job as well as anyone. I was looking forward to beginning the mission for real.

  A siren started to wail.

  I got up and, when I looked around the partition, the other handlers were all struggling out of bed, barefoot and dressed in a mix of jocks, footy shorts and T-shirts.

  ‘What the fuck’s that?’ one of the other guys said.

  I scratched my head. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do? Is it an attack?’

  Three of us walked outside the tent, without any idea of where to go or what to do. An American soldier was striding past. ‘What’s up?’ I asked him.

  ‘Mortars – incoming!’ he said, without looking back at us civilians.

  The three of us looked at each other. We hadn’t even heard any explosions, so either we’d all been dozing or it had happened in some far corner of the enormous base. We couldn’t hear any more blasts, or the sound of rounds leaving the tube.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ one of the other Aussies asked.

  I pulled out my smokes, offered them around and lit one. ‘Fucked if I know.’

  I finished my cigarette, and we all drifted back inside the tent and back to bed. If somewhere there were bunkers assigned to us to use in case of rocket or mortar attacks, we never found out where they were. The siren went off a couple more times while we were at Kandahar but we just ignored it.

  It’s funny how quickly you get used to the things that would be expected to freak you out the most. Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country in the world, and there are bombs, rockets and grenades lying around that date back 30 years or more. Something, somewhere, was always being set off, either deliberately by the explosive ordnance disposal guys, or by some poor bastard standing on something. I might have flinched the first couple of times I heard a random explosion, but after a while it just became background noise.

  The Russians had sowed the fields and villages of Afghanistan with butterfly mines, small plastic explosive devices that would fit easily into a child’s palm. The mine got its name from its shape, as it looked like it was made from two curved plastic butterfly wings. The mines were delivered via cluster bombs, and, theoretically, the purpose of the design was that when the bombs broke open in midair the butterfly mines would, because of their shape, start spinning and disperse over a wide area. It worked, but the other result of the mine’s appearance, whether deliberately or not, was that curious little kids found them irresistible. While I was there, children were still losing fingers, hands and eyes from these things. Even the older kids, who knew what the mines were, would play games with them. They’d grab one by the tip of a wing, and fling it at a wall or a big rock to set it off deliberately. Like the saying goes, it’s all fun until someone loses a fucking body part.

  After I left Kandahar, I also learned the country was awash with guns; another hangover from the Soviet invasion in 1979, when every man and boy had a weapon and fought the Russians. Afghanis are a tough people, made up of tribes and clans who’ve been fighting each other and various invaders for centuries. It wasn’t unusual for village disputes over land, animals and women – in that order – to be settled with AK-47s or Dooshka heavy machine guns and mortars. Gunfire was part of the daily soundtrack.

  Mark kept our days busy with more training, which was good, as we didn’t have time to think too long or hard about where we’d be going and what we’d be doing. We were issued with body armour, and had a choice of either an old-style bulky US Army camouflage flak jacket, with a high and uncomfortable collar, or the slimline blue vest you often seen reporters and politicians wearing for the cameras when they visit a war zone. Neither was particularly practical, but I chose the camo version and wore my plate jacket with my pouches stuck on over the top of the flak jacket. It was a mess. However, I’d passed all the tests, and was ready to go outside the wire and start earning my money.

  It was dark as I waited on the edge of the airfield to board the brown ring Chinook. ‘Brown ring’ was the code name for the regular supply flights that stopped off at each of the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in Uruzgan Province. I was with Jason Bergeron, one of the American handlers, and the pair of us was going to FOB Cobra to relieve two other dog handlers from our company, who were both going on vacation for six weeks.

  Jason was about 30 and an ex-US Air Force dog handler. After leaving the military, he’d worked in Texas for a few years as a police drug dog handler, but had left to work as a contractor in Iraq. He’d been in Iraq for a couple of years before transferring to Afghanistan, so had plenty of experience in an operational environment. He was a good man, who would help me find my feet.

  I hadn’t had a lot to do with Americans before going to Afghanistan, but I already had a few impressions of them. For a start, they were incredibly patriotic and they still, several years on, had a strong sense of having a mission to avenge what had happened on September 11, 2001. They were generally friendly and polite, and I’d already picked up that many were overtly religious compared with Australian soldiers. It wasn’t unusual to see guys saying grace before they ate. They also loved their guns.

  Uruzgan is right in the heart of Afghanistan, north of Kandahar, and FOB Cobra was so remote, and deep inside the strife-plagued province, that the only way into it was by air. The coalition couldn’t risk sending road convoys there because of the level of threat the Taliban posed in the area.

  Jason and I had our dogs with us, in their portable plastic kennels, and we each had a couple of plastic footlockers – trunks carrying all our personal gear. When the loadmaster was ready for us, we carried our stuff, and our animals, out to the Chinook, and lugged everything up the ramp and inside. It was hot in there, and the flight crew unzipped the tops of their flight suits and got to work strapping everything down to the floor. They worked and joked with each other with the ease of men who’d done this every day and night for months. Perched out on the rear of the ramp was an M240 7.62-millimetre machine gun. The Chinook’s design dated from the Vietnam War era, but I guess there are some things you don’t need to change if they’re not broken. In the thin mountain air of Afghanistan, the big twin-engine helicopter was the packhorse of the coalition effort.

  The Chinook smelled of sweat, kerosene, hydraulic fluid, disinfectant and old vomit. The red nylon cargo seats were stained in places, and I didn’t want to think about what had made the mess.

  ‘Shush, boy, it’s OK,’ I said to Rick
y through the metal grille at the end of his travel kennel, as the jet engines started to whine and the rotors slowly began to turn.

  ‘Y’all goin’ to Cobra, right?’ the loadmaster yelled, over the increasing din.

  Jason and I nodded, and gave a thumbs-up. ‘All stops,’ the crew-man yelled. ‘First TK, then DR. Don’t get off until I tell ya.’

  Up in the cockpit, the pilots were checking the glowing red instrument panel and lowering their night-vision goggles. The load-master walked outside and was looking up at the tail rotor, which was cranking up to full speed, as he talked to the pilots over his intercom. The loudness hurt my ears and I could see Ricky whining in his kennel. I put my fingers through the grate, and he sniffed and licked them. ‘It’s OK, boy.’

  The loadmaster walked back inside, looping his intercom radio communications cable as he walked, hung the coil behind a seat strap and closed the tail ramp. I gripped my M4, which was resting barrel down between my legs, as we lifted off into the blackness.

  The Chinook cruised low and fast over the barren countryside of Uruzgan Province. Through the big round windows, I could make out the mountain ranges off to one side and, occasionally, the weak light of a lamp glowing in a hut, or a room in a mud-brick compound. The compounds, which I later learned each housed an extended family, looked like little forts. Somewhere behind us an Apache followed, swooping from side to side, its sensors searching out the heat signatures of people who shouldn’t have been out and about on the ground.

  We were flying at night to lessen the chance of the Taliban shooting down the helicopter. On board were US soldiers who were either going back into the fight or, like us, arriving for the first time. With my mishmash of gear and the uncertain look on my face, I must have stood out as the new guy.

  The stops at Deh Rawood and Tarin Khowt were fast and chaotic. The crew wanted to be on the ground for the minimum time possible, in case of mortar or rocket attack. As soon as the rear wheels touched the ground, the loadmaster was lowering the ramp. The guys who were leaving us grabbed their gear and weapons, and stepped over and around us and our dogs to beat it out of the Chinook.

  With the rotors still turning, the inside of the helicopter filled with choking dust. Other soldiers came on board and, directed by the crew’s hand signals and shouts, undid the ratchets and lashings holding down cargo that had to be offloaded. Boxes were slid down the ramp or carried off, and halfway through the unloading, a few other guys got on and took the seats along the side walls that had been vacated. They were grinning and laughing, obviously happy to be getting out of the firebase, for however long it might be. I wondered if any of them were going home for good. Home seemed a long way away to me; too far off even to think about.

  The loadmaster was still re-securing cargo as we lifted off. It seemed like we’d only been on the ground a minute or two. As what passed for calm returned to the screaming, vibrating interior of the big helo, the sweating crewman slumped down on the ramp and, one arm resting on the 240 on its pintle mount, gazed out over the empty plains of dirt below.

  As at the other two stops, there were no lights to greet us when we landed at FOB Cobra.

  ‘OK, this is you!’ the loadmaster called to Jason and me. I was glad someone knew where we were. From the window, this firebase looked exactly like the previous two. Jason and I struggled through the dust and dark without the benefit of night-vision goggles, fumbling around looking for our gear and our dogs, and making sure we never let go of our weapons while we helped the soldier from the ground unload our stuff.

  I grabbed the handle on top of Ricky’s kennel and lugged it and him down the ramp into the dust storm. Behind me, the CH-47 lifted off, and a few seconds later my ears were ringing from the silence.

  Voices among the dark and the settling grit sought us out. ‘C’mon, this way. We’ll show you to your hooch; get your shit squared away.’

  We loaded our gear into the back of a Toyota Hilux ute and a four-wheel Gator all-terrain vehicle, and were driven the short distance from the landing zone to the gates of the US living area inside the FOB. Our new home looked like some of the Afghani compounds we’d been flying over: a medieval mudbrick fortress with a guard tower. Once inside, we parked in a bare earth square and started unloading the truck. Around the walls were rooms – hooches, the Americans called them. Jason and I were assigned the room normally used by the dog handlers we were relieving.

  ‘Oh, shit, man,’ Jason said, as we checked the gear that had come off the vehicle. ‘Where are my trunks? We didn’t leave them on board, did we?’

  I shook my head. ‘The loadie said that was the last of it.’ Next it was my turn to swear, because I suddenly realised I only had one of my two trunks. Jason had no gear at all, other than his rifle and his dog, and I had half my stuff. The stops at the two previous fire-bases really had been as chaotic as they’d appeared. There was no calm professionalism operating behind the cloud of dust, just a mad panic to get stuff off and on the chopper and get back to Kandahar as quickly as possible.

  ‘Shit,’ Jason said. I saw that this time he was talking about the real thing. His dog – a big, black, psycho motherfucker of a Mali-nois called Nero – had crapped in his kennel and there was mess everywhere, which was already stinking out our small room. ‘I’ll have to go clean it out. Man, how much more fucked up can this night get?’

  It was about ten o’clock, and we were exhausted from the anticipation of getting there and the blow of finding that we were missing our stuff. I opened my remaining locker and found it was the one with all my military kit, so I was able to give Jason one of my US Army uniforms and some bits and pieces. Fortunately, all I was missing was my personal gear – toiletries, civilian clothes, physical training gear and the like. As I’ve said, I was used to being dicked around in the Australian Army, but in Manus and Afghanistan, it was beginning to seem like a miracle if anything at all went according to plan. Maybe there was no plan?

  The room that would be my home, and Jason’s, for the next six weeks had two pairs of bunk beds, two locally made wooden desks, and a couple of chairs. The handlers who had gone on vacation had loaded all their shit onto the two top bunks, and there was little space left for Jason and me to store our gear – not that we had much of it. When Jason came back with Nero in his clean kennel, we put the dogs on the floor between the bunk beds and climbed into bed.

  The next morning, I had a chance to look around while Jason and I took the dogs for a walk. Outside the living compound was a larger perimeter, which enclosed the landing zone where we’d landed in the night, and, separate from the US compound, another mini fort where the interpreters and local Afghan National Army soldiers lived. The outer wall of the FOB was made of earth-filled hescos, capable of stopping bullets and RPG rounds. No-one in particular was assigned to show us around or brief us, but Jason had been in Afghanistan for a while and had worked with US SF guys in other FOBs, so he pretty well knew the lay of the land

  We shared our part of the compound with the Embedded Training Teams, or ETTs. The ETTs were American soldiers who were attached to Afghan National Army units as trainers and advisers, but lived separately from their Afghanis. We also shared with a Psyops, or psychological operations, team. Psyops had the job of telling the Afghanis we were here to help, not harm, the ordinary people. They’d produce leaflets, and sometimes use interpreters talking into sound systems on the backs of trucks to blast out reassuring messages via huge speakers when we were working around a village. The SF guys, the detachment of US Army Green Berets who made up the Operational Detachment Alpha – the ODA, or ‘A-Team’ – lived in a separate part of the mini fort.

  Looking out over the line of hescos, I could see that the surrounding countryside was every bit as barren, dry and inhospitable as it had appeared from the Chinook at night. I wondered how anyone could survive in this country; how anything could grow here. In the distance beyond low, rolling bare dirt hills was an irregular barrier of white-capped mountains, knifing th
eir way into the empty sky. From the start, though, I found a kind of attraction – beauty, even – in the starkness of the landscape. I’d grown up on the coast, with the Pacific Ocean on one side and rolling green hills on the other. Afghanistan could not have been more different, but there was something about those mountains and the hard rock, and parched earth between me and the peaks. I breathed in the dry air and stared out at the mountains. After spending seven-and-a-half years in the Australian Army, and going on one bullshit exercise after another, I had finally arrived in a combat zone. I was excited.

  The SF guys didn’t interact with us a great deal at first. The team was from the 7th Special Forces Group, headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and they were coming to the end of their six-month tour. They’d nod and say hello, but I got the sense that they were such a tight-knit bunch of blokes, who had obviously been through so much together, that they didn’t have the need, or the time, to welcome strangers into the fold with open arms. Talking to the Psyops guys, I learned that the SF men had lost some of their mates during their tour.

  Jason and I took the dogs out of the compound, and down the hill to the small rifle range the team had set up. We zeroed our M4s, firing enough rounds at a target to ensure the sights were correctly set. Afterwards, we did some training with the dogs, in the area where the Chinook resupply helicopters came into land. It was open country, and we could mark out simulated roads. Jason would bury some explosives while I wasn’t watching, and Ricky and I would go find them, and then we’d reverse the roles. The training aids we used could be detonation cord, ammunition, mortar rounds, RPGs, or C4 explosive.