‘Lying on your back, looking ten kilometres up in the air, you can see the B-52s overhead and see the bombs drop, and you hope you’ve got more than a few seconds to live.’
JOCK WALLACE
JOCK GRABBED THE SLEEPING bag from his pack and did a monkey-run over to the casualty collection point, placing it over one of the more serious casualties from Sergeant Pete’s mortar platoon while medics attended to other wounded soldiers. They could use the bag more than Jock could. It could ultimately mean the difference between life and death for those with limbs torn open, and would stave off hypothermia for the soldiers in danger of going into shock.
‘One guy had shrapnel up the side of his body, cut straight across the eye, shrapnel chopped his eye in half. He was about nineteen, a young American kid,’ Jock recalls. ‘They were just kids. They were lacking skills and lacking tools but they were not lacking courage, they certainly were not — they did their best, the poor little bastards.’
He thought back to last night — a time that seemed so long ago now — when Colonel Frank Wiercinski had revved up his troops. Standing next to Wiercinski on the Humvee had been a chaplain with the US Army, who had led the troops in prayers. The Ballad of the Green Beret played over the speakers, as did the anthems for the Rakkasans and the 10th Mountain Division. Once the final amens were said, the young men and women of Anaconda who chose to, dispersed to their multi-denominational padres for blessings and last rites.
Those without religion in their lives headed straight to the chow line at the back of the hangar for a feast of crayfish and other delicacies rarely found in an army mess. Battles came with a different menu, Jock had noted wryly. It was a repast fit for the Last Supper but the soldiers heading out in the morning didn’t think of that then. They were thinking of their stomachs, which had become accustomed to the challenging and mysterious flavours of MREs, otherwise known as Meals Ready to Eat, single-ration combat food. And they were thinking of victory ahead. Jock didn’t treat himself because he had had to recode his radio equipment. Plenty of time for a feed later.
By ten o’clock the next morning, after five hours under ambush in the Shahi Kot Valley, Jock wished he’d hoed right in. He rummaged through his all-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment pack — his ALICE pack. Cold-weather gear, H2O, equipment to protect his comms gear, and nothing to eat but three lousy cut-down MREs. This was going to be a long day.
Jock was joined by two US Air Force troops whose job was to call in close air support for Charlie Company.
Senior Airman Stephen Achey had been separated from his unit within minutes of alighting from the Chinook and had come under direct fire from al Qaeda. He crouched behind his rucksack, but the rounds found their target. Three bullets tore into his PRC-117F multi-band tactical radio, knocking it out of action. But Achey was determined to live and somehow managed to get out of the open valley floor and into Hell’s Halfpipe with another airman, Technical Sergeant Vick McCabe. Armed with his AR-15 rifle, he also braved running into the line of fire to retrieve another radio that had been left in the open. They hooked up with Jock, whose radio was alive. Major bonus.
The men introduced themselves as if they were at a back-yard barbecue at Swannie, not under fire in Afghanistan.
Achey and Vick were members of the Tactical Air Control Party, and were tasked with calling in every asset flying in the sky above, regardless of whether the aircraft were on reconnaissance missions or flying in a holding pattern waiting for a bombing raid. They worked by directly calling the Bossman in the Air Force’s E-3 airborne warning-and-control system (AWACS) aircraft who coordinated the joint air power and deployed fighter planes on their individual missions. And on some occasions they were able to call the pilots without the assistance of the Bossman.
Even though they had joined the US Air Force, they spent all their time on the ground with the Army, working side by side with the grunts in the most dangerous of conditions. Achey, who was a bit younger than Jock, and Vick were right at home with their new Aussie mates.
They began radioing in to the Bossman but came up against a hurdle. The frequency bandwidth for the satellite-based communications system used by the Americans had been largely dedicated to the Special Forces who had arrived in-country within days of the September 11 attacks, leaving only a single frequency — or channel — for the forward air controllers to coordinate target bombings close to friendly forces.
‘It’s like being in an AOL chat room with 36 other people and you’re trying to have a conversation with one person,’ an air officer would later tell Elaine Grossman of InsideDefense.com.
‘Can you get us CAS, any way you can?’ Achey asked Jock, who started to call the Bossman on a different frequency.
No joy. But Jock didn’t give up. Failure under fire was not a fuckin’ option, he thought.
Jock could see that al Qaeda had pinpointed the casualty collection point and begun walking fire in on Hell’s Halfpipe. Things were not looking good. The bastards, he thought.
Jock tried a different tactic and radioed the Regimental Headquarters. Clear as a bell.
You beauty. Jock’s radio was a lifeline. He had a direct link back to his HQ and it rarely went down. The information was subsequently filtered and calls for CAS were radioed to US pilots in the region who flew in to send a rain of fire down onto enemy targets.
‘One Oscar this is Niner Charlie,’ Jock said. ‘Over.’
Clint was beside him, writing up a sitrep in his notebook.
‘One Oscar, over,’ came the reply from one of Jock’s fellow chooks back at the HQ.
‘We are getting smashed by mortars. We need CAS. Over.’
It was tough getting messages out over the radio because the battlefield was loud and soldiers were running around, yelling and answering calls for fire, helping their brothers in arms.
‘There was a lot of noise and tension, pandemonium — not pandemonium as in people freaking out — but people trying to do the right thing, people trying to see something that needed to be done, screaming it out,’ Jock says now.
His fellow chooks at HQ could hear the gunfire. Al Qaeda were ripping mortars along the front and sides of Hell’s Halfpipe where the men were huddled. Shells exploded all around. For those on the ground the noise was earsplitting, and explosions reverberated through the troopers’ bodies.
‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie, over,’ Jock said again, as calm as ever. ‘We are being bracketed. We need CAS urgently.
‘We have just taken multiple casualties. We can’t move from our position. We need it now or you won’t be speaking to us in a minute. Over.’
The next voice Jock heard was that of the squadron’s commander, Major Dan McDaniel.
‘What kind of CAS? Over.’
‘Any kind. Over,’ Jock said.
Jock says now: ‘I don’t want a tick in the box for calls for fire, I want an aeroplane that drops bombs. But we got the plane eventually. That was a pretty hairy moment.’
Senior Airman Achey was on the radio and in the middle of attempting to call a B-52 when his signal went down. He looked at Jock who instantly opened a line of communication. Achey jumped on Jock’s radio, giving the location of the al Qaeda targets on the eastern ridgeline for another run. Pure synchronicity.
But the wrong grid references were being read back. Clint, with eyes like a hawk and ears like a bat, abruptly and with authority cut into the transmission.
‘Wrong coordinates,’ he bellowed quickly and clearly, correcting the references.
Clint asked for a read-back to make absolutely sure they were right the second time around. They were.
‘Roger. Out.’
Clint had averted a potentially fatal error. Given the circumstances of the full-blown battle, it was nothing short of a miracle, not to mention a sterling example of soldiering. Had Clint not been as alert as he was, a bomb could have taken out the entire company in Hell’s Halfpipe.
You can always rely on Clint to get it right, Jock thought, well pleased that he wasn’t the lone Aussie out there.
Jock and Achey were putting in call after call for CAS when they got the alert that CAS was inbound. The American AWACS radioed Achey telling him they had a B-52 in the air. It was manna from heaven, loaded as it was with Mark 82 bombs and JDAMs — the joint direct attack munitions bombs that could wipe out a small village in one fell swoop.
The B-52 was twenty minutes away. Jock hoped it was on course. He was looking through his binoculars, searching the sky for the plane when it came into view.
‘Lying on your back, looking ten kilometres up in the air, you can see the B-52s overhead and see the bombs drop, and you hope you’ve got more than a few seconds to live,’ he says now.
Jock was looking up and watched as the bomb bay doors of the B-52 opened. Bombs away, he thought, knowing it wouldn’t be long before he found out if the deadly delivery would find its mark on the eastern ridge about 400 metres away.
‘Everyone was holding their breath. It’s a very tense moment from bombs away to explosion,’ Jock says now.
Jock put his head down in the dirt and covered his ears, waiting for the bomb.
Boom.
A sonic boom reverberated throughout the valley sending shockwaves through the soldiers’ bodies as the ordnance found its target and obliterated al Qaeda bunkers and weaponry.
You bloody little beauty, Jock thought. That’ll teach you to fuck with us.
‘You are feeling shockwaves from the RPGs and mortars, and from your own air strikes going in — the big shockwaves from when the B-52s drop their guts. Every molecule of your body moves, every single atom is hit by the shockwaves — the sound. First you see the light, the vision, then the shockwaves, the sounds, and then the shrapnel snivels in overhead.’
Jock kept his head down as shrapnel tore through the air just centimetres away — another potentially fatal moment. About ten seconds later, he looked up and saw that a shard of hot metal had landed about half a metre away from him over the lip of the halfpipe. He reached out and grabbed it, burning his hand in the process. He wanted it as a souvenir, a reminder of the awesome power of the B-52 and the accuracy of the pilots and bombers overhead.
‘I thought, “You’re mine.” I keep it with my medals,’ Jock says now.
‘It’s a comforting feeling, once you know that they can drop a bomb from that height. You know those guys are backing you up. It was pleasing that they were that accurate. It was a helluva bang. There was nothing else all day that was as big as that.’
It was all over in a couple of minutes.
Soldier on, Jock thought.
The bombing was unequivocal, but it didn’t stop the hail of ordnance from other enemy positions in the valley and more AQ would filter in.
Doc Byrne was trying to get round to the back of the halfpipe where the most seriously wounded had been taken. The medics had done all they could for the kid with the shrapnel chest wound who now needed more specialised treatment. The Doc was trying to navigate a steep gradient about five metres high to reach him.
Referring to the Doc, Jock says with a laugh: ‘He’s not in the best shape physically, he’s a little bit older, with thick glasses and a big mouth that I’d previously encountered. He just grabbed his bag and started running up the hill with his escort who had come to get him, and the ground just started dancing all around him.’
‘Get down, Doc,’ the soldiers yelled at him.
Jock watched as the Doc made another three attempts to get over the rise but he kept getting shot at and had to scramble down.
Grippe was watching, full of awe and respect, for the Doc was as brave as any of the war-scarred grunts in the halfpipe.
Grippe stood up, typically ignoring the lethal rain of ordnance, and began walking down the bowl again.
‘Give me suppressive fire up on the hill,’ he hollered at his troops.
Jock recalls: ‘Everyone just jumped up and started shooting shit out of the eastern ridge, which was great. Got the doctor over, saved that guy’s life, but chewed up a hell of a lot of ammo at the same time.’
Twenty-year-old Private First Class Jason Ashline from the 120mm mortar platoon was lying prone on the dirt providing security when the order to shoot reached him. As he lifted himself up on his left knee, he got hammered by a hail of bullets and was knocked flat on his back.
‘I really wasn’t thinking at that point,’ Ashline recalls. ‘I thought I was injured, but it didn’t hurt. It just felt like someone smacked me really hard in the chest with a baseball bat. I remember feeling a lot of pressure and that kind of threw me off balance. I didn’t really feel anything and everything went really quiet and I remember lying there and I looked at the sky and snapped back to it.’
Ashline was lucky. His bulletproof vest had saved him and while mortar rounds had injured some of the Americans, the al Qaeda bullets didn’t have the power to puncture the Kevlar lining provided by Uncle Sam. Two bullets lodged in the front of Ashline’s vest, about three centimetres from the edge. Ashline said a quick prayer of thanks to his Lord and then got back to work.
After the battle, he claimed the vest as a lucky charm and keeps it on his dresser alongside pictures of his two children. But Uncle Sam made him pay the cost of it!
Jock and Clint continued calling in sitreps to the SAS HQ, and the information was passed through the chain of command to Lieutenant Colonel Tink in the TOC at Bagram and ultimately on to Anaconda’s overall boss, Major General Hagenbeck.
Jock had detailed at least two Priority One casualties, meaning that unless the wounded were evacuated as soon as possible, they could die. Battle statistics paint a grim picture of wounded in combat. On average, one out of every four soldiers injured in the line of duty will die. Combat commanders know the statistics and those at HQ knew that the all-important so-called ‘magic hour’ had long passed. The magic hour is the first hour after a soldier has been hit. If a seriously injured casualty makes it from the battlefield to the operating table in those crucial 60 minutes, his or her chances of survival are exponentially higher than if they don’t. But the men in the Shahi Kot had already been bleeding for more than an hour, and they would be lying out there all day.
Jock’s sitrep also included several Priority Two and Three casualties which, while less severe than the Priority Ones, were serious.
Jock’s stoicism on the radio was noted in the ops tent and his and Clint’s actions would be commented on by the Commander of Special Operations, Brigadier Duncan Lewis, days later in Australia.
Out in the field, Jock distinguished himself with his ingenuity.
He had a Special Operations Group Babyseal knife, about 30 centimetres long, and began digging a trench in the clay in which to lie, out of the line of fire. Unfortunately, Clint had left his small hand shovel back at base and started to dig in with his bare hands, promising himself never to forget his entrenching tool again. Eventually, Clint’s hole would be big enough to fit three men. It was backbreaking work because they had to dig where they were lying. If they stood up, they’d get shot. It’s fucking hard to dig a hole you’re lying in, Jock thought to himself.
Some of the Americans were surprised, but the Aussies’ SAS training was superior to that of the grunts in the US infantry and they understood that a soldier in a battlefield stood a better chance of survival if below ground level. So they dug. They didn’t get the name ‘diggers’ for nothing.
Known as diggers’ graves or shell scrapes, the trenches would be life-savers later in the day.