Sergeant D was not a superstitious man but he was starting to think he and his hound might have nine lives. He and Sarbi had survived a few near misses completely unscathed when those around them hadn’t been so lucky, dogs included. Luck, like life, was measured in margins. It was well known that the Taliban and insurgents were targeting the explosive detection dogs. Canines play little part in Afghanistan culture, unless you include the barbaric practice of organised weekly dog fights on the holy day of prayer.
A year earlier, the high-tech electronic warfare experts had warned Sapper Pete Lawlis that the Doggies were in the enemy’s sights and, in July, a British dog handler and his yellow Labrador retriever, Sasha, were shot dead on a patrol in the Helmand desert. ‘They’re a major asset,’ said Lance Corporal Ken Rowe prior to leaving the British FOB Inkerman in the Upper Sangin Valley, a few days before he was fatally shot. ‘The soldiers love having them on patrol . . . and the Taliban don’t.’
There was no point in asking Ares, the Greek god of war, why Sarbi was so lucky. But it might be time to rethink the dictum that cats are blessed with nine lives and apply that curious feline logic instead to canines, Sarbi especially. It couldn’t hurt and, as it soon turned out, it wouldn’t.
Under the cover of darkness in the very early hours of 11 August 2008, Sergeant D and Sarbi exited Camp Russell in a multi-vehicle mounted patrol to search a suspect compound outside of Tarin Kot. They had received their operation orders at an extensive briefing the night before and each man had precise knowledge of what was expected of him.
At the last minute and for no apparent reason, Sergeant D and Sarbi were redirected to the second Bushmaster in the convoy. D was initially allocated to the lead protected mobility vehicle that carried SAS Corporal Mark Don-aldson, who would be manning a machine-gun and would become famous for his courage under fire three weeks hence in another patrol with Sarbi and Sergeant D. But this was the army; D’s was not to question why.
The troop was heavily tooled up. D was armed with his M4, body armour, helmet, radio, side arm and other fighting equipment. His pack was stuffed with enough rations to keep him and Sarbi going for a couple of days, if need be. He tossed in a couple of chocolate bars, too, for energy— for him, not Sarbi. The journey in was expected to take a couple of hours, but no one could be sure what lay ahead. War is the sum of a thousand moving parts, any of which can go wrong.
The Bushmasters dropped off small SAS patrols at intervals along the route, to conduct surveillance. The clandestine units would ensure the locals were sound asleep and not gearing up for a night fight from well-concealed machine-gun nests or vantage points on higher ground.
As the Bushies got closer to their target, an urgent message came over the radio network.
‘We’ve just been hit by an IED.’
The lead Bushmaster—‘actually the vehicle that I was supposed to be in,’ Sergeant D says—struck a roadside bomb packed with twenty kilograms of homemade explosives. Corporal Donaldson, a 29-year-old lean, muscled-up warrior from New South Wales who’d been in the SAS since 2004, was blown off the back of the vehicle and smashed hard into the ground. A second soldier was also blasted out of the Bushie. No one was killed and neither trooper had life-threatening injuries. Donaldson’s injuries were minor; his mate’s were considered serious. A combat medic treated and stabilised both men.
‘One had a suspected back injury and the other was hurt as well,’ Sergeant D says now. ‘Two of the guys had to be airlifted out.’
The Bushmaster was a melted, twisted wreck but Don-aldson said later: ‘that thing saved my life’. The right rear wheel was blown off and the suspension destroyed. A Dutch recovery convoy was called in to collect the mangled metal. The vehicle was going nowhere under its own steam.
It was past midnight and an SAS commander radioed a nine-liner request for an air medical evacuation (AME). He ordered the patrols into position to provide security for the troops and incoming helicopter—an American Black-hawk that took off from Tarin Kot under Apache escort. The return flight should be about 30 minutes, if all went to plan.
The Australians relied on the American and Dutch helicopters in the absence of their own medevac choppers that, back then, weren’t up to the task. The situation wasn’t ideal and had caused serious angst the previous month when a Dutch doctor at the Tarin Kot hospital criticised the delay of a Dutch-US AME for SAS Signaller Sean McCarthy, who bled to death from major internal injuries sustained when his LRPV hit an IED. The medevac chopper was delayed because the crew refused to fly without an Apache gunship escort and McCarthy was pronounced dead when he reached the hospital, 113 minutes after the attack. The 25-year-old was standing in the middle of the LRPV and had copped the full force of the blast.
‘He [McCarthy] was badly injured on both legs. However, he was alive for an hour. We will never know what might have been or what we could have done,’ Lieutenant Colonel Ed van der Zee said.
An army reservist and trauma surgeon told journalist Jamie Walker it was critical that wounded soldiers reached hospital within the ‘golden hour’ when trauma treatment was most effective. But an official army inquiry later found the medevac procedures were not to blame for McCarthy’s death.
Sergeant D and Sarbi slipped into their preset cadences of war. With D’s weapon in action condition, locked and loaded, they searched the surrounding area and possible landing zone for IEDs, accompanied by the engineers with the mine lab metal detectors.
Sarbi worked well outdoors at night. Her eyes adjusted to the ambient light of the moon and the stars but her nose did all the work. Sergeant D, wearing night vision goggles that turned the landscape a spectral green, quietly urged her on. The team conducted a thorough open area search and Sarbi zig-zagged across the terrain, as sure-footed as a billy goat that danced precipitously up the craggy ledges of the mountains. Good to go. He recalled his trusted hound and gave the patch of rock-strewn dirt the all clear. A secure landing zone was established.
The wounded were set up in a safe spot for easy access to the landing zone, so the loadmaster could get them on to the Blackhawk as fast as possible and then give the pilot the signal to get the hell out of Dodge before they became a prized target for the enemy. The soldiers were deep in hostile territory, potentially surrounded by Taliban and insurgents in fortified compounds.
Sergeant D grabbed Sarbi and dropped down beside a Bushmaster close to the landing zone, waiting for the Blackhawk to roar in overhead. Sarbi lay prone next to her handler, alert to her surrounds. Her furry ears stood up in stereo, as flexible an antenna as any of the high-tech systems of war. She could hear the signature pitch of the Black-hawk engine in the distance. Sergeant D sensed she was on to something and soon after he heard rotors thwomping as the chopper drew close, its pitch changing as the pilot cut back power ready to flare in. As the helo descended, the Blackhawk’s powerful rotors kicked up a huge cloud of dust, causing an instant brownout.
‘He couldn’t see so he took off again for another go,’ Sergeant D says of the pilot.
Hound and handler were covered in a layer of the gritty reddish dust that ground its way into everything. D moved to the lee side of the Bushmaster with Sarbi to avoid another blast of Afghan earth.
The helo circled overhead just as they got into position. D knelt down, commanding his mutt to drop, and she sprawled on the ground as close to him as she could get, leaning on him equally for comfort and protection. ‘Sarbi was fully aware something was going on but she reacted well,’ he says now.
The chopper was coming in fast to avoid turning itself into a sitting duck. Smash! A crashing thud rang out as the Blackhawk smacked down with enormous force.
D popped up and saw the helo blades shear off with an unmistakable screeching metallic sound. The rotors tore through the air at breakneck speed, spinning with lethal force at head level.
Bloody hell!
‘I’d only just ducked around the side of the Bushmaster and there’s chopper blades flying everywhere,’ he says.
‘The boys out on sentry were getting them coming past 300 metres away.’
He ordered Sarbi to stay down, worried that the blades would slice her in half.
‘Nine lives, I know,’ he says with a grin.
Donaldson and the other wounded soldier were closer to the landing zone and made a run for it, trying to put some distance between them and the crashed chopper.
One of the crew on the ISAF medevac chopper was hurt. The Blackhawk, like the Bushmaster, was out of action. Sergeant D noted wryly to himself that it had landed flat, but—no rotors, no flying.
The patrol now had extra bodies to protect, one additional wounded, and another piece of damaged military hardware to watch over and keep safe from the enemy. At least the incoming medical crew that remained unhurt would help treat the wounded.
A second nine-liner medical evacuation was requested out of Kandahar, south of Tarin Kot, but it was grounded due to bad weather. The wounded were being treated at the crash scene and the troop was secure.
‘If the injuries had been life-threatening there would have been assets deployed and the commanders on the ground would have taken a greater risk launching that aircraft out of Kandahar,’ Defence spokesman Brigadier Brian Dawson said.
Sarbi, Sergeant D and the hard men from the SAS were static as they waited for the medevac and Bushmaster recovery convoy. None of the damaged machinery would be left behind in case the enemy exploited it.
The bright light of a summer’s dawn had cracked the ink black night by the time a third rescue attempt was launched six hours later, using an American CH-47 Chinook helicopter from Kandahar. The weather had cleared and the massive tandem-rotored beast had been retasked to support the ‘hard landing’ incident, an Orwellian neologism used by the military brass to mean a crash.
‘But then it gets even better,’ Sergeant D recalls.
The element of surprise had been lost. Afghan villagers were milling around to check out the action, keeping a safe distance. As Sergeant D says, they weren’t openly hostile, even if some of the troop suspected the locals had planted the IED.
Around 0700 hours, a Chinook roared in to fetch the Blackhawk with an escort of Apache gunships—just in case. All eyes were cast upward. The rotors, powered by the Chinook’s enormous 714 engines, kicked up a sea of dust equal to a sandstorm but the loadmaster and crew finally manoeuvred the bird in place for the extraction. The wounded and Blackhawk crew were loaded on board as the rotors turned and burned. Next up: recover the downed aircraft.
‘They went to pick up the Blackhawk and take it away but they accidentally rolled it on the side,’ Sergeant D recalls with an amused shake of his head. ‘So, not only did it bust off all its blades, but now it’s rolled over as well. Eventually they worked it out and took it away.’
Finally, the Chinook had its payload on board and the wounded Australians and Blackhawk crew were flown to the ISAF medical centre at Tarin Kot. Donaldson was back in action the following day; his mate eventually returned to Australia for further medical treatment.
Back in Australia the incident made the headlines. The Australian newspaper published a story highly critical of the ‘botched helicopter rescue’ under the headline, ‘Push for Diggers to get medivacs (sic) in Afghanistan’. Journalist Mark Dodd wrote ‘three wounded Diggers waited six hours on the battlefield before being taken to hospital . . . in the second botched helicopter rescue of Australian troops in as many months’.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon saying ‘a string of bad luck’ caused the events and the Australian troopers were ‘stuck’ with the allied medevac. ‘One, we are already overstretched. Second, our helicopters would have to be upgraded to deal with the modern-day threats which exist in a theatre like Afghanistan,’ Fitzgibbon said.
The minister told the national broadsheet that the Rudd Labor government would consider sending its own specialised medical helicopters, with 100 specialist defence personnel, to support the Australian troops in Afghanistan the following year.
A year was a long time in a war zone.