Chris May - Afghanistan veteran

Joining up

I grew up in Berwick and Melbourne, southeast suburbs and, before I joined the army, I was actually a student. I left school at the end of year 10, made the decision that I was going to go to the army anyway, my dad offered me an apprenticeship, he's a carpenter, and I knocked that back and laboured for him for about eight, nine months until the dotted line could be signed and I got mum and dad to sign me up. 

It's actually, ironically, I wanted to be a pilot in the air force going through school and I actually got to this point where I did year 10 maths and I was horrible at it. I really struggled with the mathematics side of it and I know that to be a pilot you had to do maths and science and I really struggled. 

I got put in a V Cal class, where I ended up with people that were in a class of a people, essentially told "You will go be tradesmen. You won't be in and around year 12 and degrees and in university," and I actually did work experience and the work experience I did was with an army reserve unit down in Dandenong and I remember jumping in the truck one day and we drove to Puckapunyal and at Puckapunyal we saw the APCs and the ASLAVs and I thought "what is that?" 

Well , the ASLAV is the Australian Standard Light Armoured Vehicle. So it's a 30-ton light armoured vehicle. It's got eight wheels. The way I explain it to civilians is, essentially, it's a tank, it's got eight wheels and instead of having a big gun, it's got a smaller one, but it was widely used in Afghanistan and Iraq and even in East Timor as well. Well , we have two variants. So, we have one that has a gun car and then we have the other one, which is a personnel carrier, or a PC, and we also have recovery fitters variants.

So, essentially, in a unit they work independently without transport stuff. So, they're an armoured asset and when I saw it I've gone "What is that and how do I get into that for a job?" And being from a family of four-wheel drivers I was like "Yeah, that's what I'm going to do."

So, went home, researched it, found what an armoured crewman was and walked into mum and dad's living room and I was like "This is what I want to do," and I signed up and it was actually very weird too because my brother, at the time, he was a plumber and he didn't know if he wanted to keep plumbing and whatnot and he asked me one day, he said "What are you going to do when you leave school?" and I said "I'm going to join the army and be an armoured crewman" and I showed him the picture of it all and two weeks later he was in the army.

Family strain

I was too young, I didn't really care, to be honest, about what my parents thought. It wasn't until probably 2000 and, I'll say, 15. So, that was probably four years after I'd come back from my second trip to Afghanistan, and I was going through a bit of a rough patch, and I actually, really started to empathise with what my mum and dad would have felt, and my other brothers as well, and my sister-in-laws and the extended family, with both of us being over there and kind of high-fiving each other as we cross going in and out of countries.

So, it was a few years we put mum and dad through hell and, I think later in life, I realised that it took a lot out of mum and dad as well, but at the time I was just like, sign the dotted line. I want a job.

Training

So, we went to Kapooka, which is the army recruit training centre, which is renamed the 1RTB, and they are the only recruit establishment for our army. So, it's just outside Wagga Wagga and you rock up there, you drive through the front gates and there's a big plaque on a sign that says, "soldiering starts here," and that's when your heart kind of goes "Oh, it's going to be pretty cool adventure," and then you pull up and then someone gets on the bus and yells at you and says, "You got 45 seconds to get all your luggage and everyone off the bus," and that's when the real challenges start.

So, then you do a hundred days at Kapooka and then you March out as a recruit, essentially a private, and then you go to your employment training. So, for me, I was an armoured crewman. I went to The School of Armour, which is in Puckapunyal, but infantry go to Singleton and Newcastle and so on. Yeah, there are a few extra hoops you have to do. 

So, for different jobs, they expect different standards as well. So, for Infantry, the recruitment standard at the time was year nine maths and English. For Armoured Corps it was year 10 maths and English and two other subjects and science as well, you had to do that as well, and I think that's just because they match your aptitude, on what you achieve on your aptitude tests, to jobs that have that level of skill and difficulty.

So, when you apply you do a test and they pretty much say "These are the jobs we're going to offer you," and then of that you can pick three as your top preferences and then when you actually enlist, on the day, they will offer you a position and say, "We are going to offer you a spot as an armoured crewman." It's all done by a recruitment agency, essentially, but the day you march into Kapooka anything can change. The army can say, "Well, yeah, that's what they told you, but you're going  somewhere else," and they did do that in the past, people were in there and they decide that they didn't want to go be a Catering Corps or anything, and they went to infantry instead.

Instructors

It was 2007, so Iraq had kind of kicked off. East Timor kind of had its heyday in the 90s, and there were a few people that did the late Timor missions in early 2000, but, as far as my recruit instructors go, my initial recruit instructor was a 3RAR East Timor veteran, so he'd served in East Timor.

I had a Pay Corps corporal. I had a Bombardier, who served in East Timor, I had a Band Corps corporal as well. Our platoon sergeant was Transport and he'd actually been to East Timor and Iraq. So, it was one of those things of, yes, there was a varied core, as instructors, but the level of experience was broad.

So, they all brought something to the table individually and I don't think you see it at the time at Kapooka, but later, when you really think about it, they all brought something to the table, but they did have a pretty broad level of experience.

Ready for deployment

So my first unit that I marched into was the Second 14th Light Horse in Brisbane and I was in the same squadron as my brother. So, it was end of 2007 that I marched in and he was just on his way back from Iraq and that unit in particular was also doing AMTGs, which is the Al Muthanna Task Group in Southern Iraq. They were very busy. They had a squadron in Afghanistan as well, at the same time in 2007, with RTF two and three. That was when we saw Trooper Pierce get killed, which was from that unit. So, our Second 14th Light Horse was heavily involved in the campaign, both in Iraq and Afghanistan and they were training hard. So, it was you marched into the unit and it was straight into getting your crewman grade two smashing out all your hours, getting your courses up ready to go because at the drop of a hat, they'd turn around and say, "We need X amount of people for deployment," and I'd marched into the unit. We were really hammering our training, as well, and one day they turned around and said, "Oh, we're sending guys to Afghanistan," and, well I thought my name was on the list, but it was actually my brother, he'd just come back from Iraq and he'd taken his leave and then he's come back to work, and they said "Trooper May," it wasn't me, it was my brother, because he had more experience than me and it was just the after that, they kind of said, "After we're done on this trip, we're giving it to Two Cav, which was the other cavalry regiment, and they're going to have a turn too while we rest. So, they asked for volunteers to go to Townsville, to B squadron 3rd, 4th Cavalry Regiment and I put my hand up because I was like, "Well, I didn't join the army to sit around and do nothing." So, essentially, I put my hand up because they needed volunteers to go out there and fill the numbers up. So, I put my hand up and then in January of 2009 I marched into B Squadron 3rd, 4th Cavalry. It was our first day of sitting down as a new squadron. We were in the lecture room and we're about to start our mandatory training for the year. You know, all the don't drink too much, to look out for heat injury, all that sort of stuff. And the officer walks in and says, "Righto, government’s signed off on sending more troops to Afghanistan. The following people report down to 1RAR. You guys are going over on Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force Two" and pretty much read out most of the people in the room and from there we were, pretty much, attached to the first battalion, getting ready to deploy and conducting all the mission rehearsal exercises and then we're over. That was a really quick turnaround, it wasn't slow at all.

Driving a Bushmaster

So, B squadron 3rd, 4th Cavalry was a unit that was born out of Vietnam. The Hat Badge was a Southeast Asian scorpion and the battle honours are Hat Dich, Long Tan of Binh Ba and so their role has always been lift. So, as part of the third brigade, their role has to be to pick up infantry battalion, move them in the battle space. With the evolution of combat vehicles they went from the APCs, they went to the Bushmasters, which is the Thales' personnel carrier designed for empty explosion injuries, that sort of stuff. So, when we got to Townsville it was a case of we're not in an ASLAV, we're still in an armoured vehicle, we're still providing the same capability that we have traditionally, but in a different concept. So, my role, in my first tour to Afghanistan, was as a driver of a Bushmaster as part of Bravo Company, 1RAR. So I was attached. We had a section platoon that we were attached to and then I had a section that was attached to my vehicle and all we were was, as the boys called us, we were just their battle taxi, but we were there to provide that capability for them to move them throughout the battle space.

Evolution of armoured vehicles

It’s actually funny. I was talking to, literally, an old Centurion driver from Vietnam and he was telling me about the 60-pound clutch and as part of his 65th birthday, his son bought him a ride in a Centurion, which was down near Phillip Island. So, they went down there and the guy said "Oh, if you've got a license and show me you know how to drive it, I'll let you drive it," and he pulled out his old license and said, "There you go." So, he jumped in and he said he remembers the 60-pound clutch. He remembers how hard it was when he was a young fella, but he said being at the age he is now, and obviously not as fit, he struggled to push it in and he goes, "I forgot how bad it was," but thankfully he goes, "You used to be able to pick an old Centurion driver ‘cause they used to walk around in circles cause one leg would be massive. Fortunately, obviously to eliminate wear and tear on the vehicle, that sort of stuff, all of our vehicles are automatic. So, we didn't have any of that issue anymore. So, Bushmasters are all automatic vehicle and so is the ASLAV. They're all designed for, I suppose, the simplest mechanism of use. So, you can use it in the heat of battle without having to worry about something. Yeah, the mechanisms they use in a lot of them too and I suppose this is the other one too. People seem to forget, the softest part of an armoured vehicle is the human inside of it. Your driving round. Drivers hole for an ASLAV is this wide, it is literally wide enough for me to sit in and if you're a big feller you're hunched over. When you're driving with your head out of the hatch all well and good, but we don't drive like that when we're in the combat situation. So, you're driving heads down, looking through a periscope just the size of your eyes and that's how you're getting your situational awareness as a driver. So, you've got to learn to change your style of driving and everything to become a driver, a change that 15 years beforehand, when they had the sticks, you're controlling each track independently. So, when I actually went to the school of armour, our instructors were old carrier drivers. So, a lot of them had driven carriers in East Timor and they had driven LAVs in early days Iraq or late Timor and their experience was really well developed around how to drive that vehicle. We're talking like the ASLAVs were driving around Iraq at 80, 90ks an hour through Baghdad and you're driving through a tiny little vision block, same for Afghanistan. You're driving through the deserts of Afghanistan and built-up areas in Tarin Kowt through a periscope. Fortunately for us, in B Squadron, we actually had Bushmasters, so we had a big armoured windscreen. So, it was great. Great way to take in the countryside cause you're sitting behind big, thick glass, but it was one of those things of the armoured vehicles, over years, have evolved into something that's simplistic enough for soldiers to use and it is built soldier proof. They say, if it's not built soldier proof, it's not going to last and I think they really hit the nail on the head there with that vehicle to make sure it's simplistic enough to use, but obviously the threat in Afghanistan dictated that we needed a vehicle that had protection from the ground.

Entering a tribal landscape

Well, because, like I said before, because we smashed it out so quickly, it was really hard to go become heavily interested in it and understand it, but what we were pretty much told was "Afghanistan as a whole is a country that's heavily disputed. The fact that it has -istan on the end of it means nothing. It just means "that's the land of" the -istan means land of the Afghans. However, we're looking at tribal warlords. We're stepping back into the fourth century. They don't recognize the president, Hamid Karzai, half of them wouldn't even know who he is. So you're going into a tribal landscape. There are warlords and religious leaders and you've got to figure out who's who in the zoo, by actually going out there engaging with them," and our mission, as the former Reconstruction Task Force now Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force, was to mentor the Afghan national army and the Afghan national security forces in developing their skill sets to essentially provide their own security in the future. Then as part of the reconstruction side of it, we were to finish the developments we'd started in building infrastructure to support the Afghan local population. Then we got kind of a quick brief of where we're going, Uruzgan, this is the TK bowl. This is, over time, the very first deployment for us being RTF one. They only went this far and then RTF two went an extra little bit and an RTF three a little bit further and so it was, essentially, just expanding. Every trip that went over was they took a little bit more of a chunk, of the slice of the pile to continue that mission. And we were told it always has, and always will be, a mission for the people of Afghanistan. We weren't going out there looking for fights and whatnot. It was out there for the people, they were building that infrastructure, protecting the people from the Taliban and the insurgency networks that are in there. So, there was that little bit of briefing, but I suppose being a 19-year-old trooper, I wasn't involved in any of the high-level stuff. So, as far as I was concerned, I was going to Afghanistan. It was going to be awesome. It was that great sense of adventure that the diggers of a hundred years ago felt. So, it was a bit of a shock, realizing that you're going over there, but I think for the whole mission side of things, I didn't really pay attention much to it. I was more focused on what we were going to do over there.

Outside the wire

You drive outside the wire and the moment you left the wire it was game on and it wasn't like we're going to drive to the front and it's going to be go from there. It was as soon as you left the FOB, outside the wire, it was all serious. You drive straight through Tarin Kowt and then down to Irish Crossing and then down certain routes that we use, route Waylon and the like, and the locals would come out and they'd stare at you and you never knew if the stare was just checking out the vehicles. You drive a Bushmaster through the streets of Melbourne you'd get the same stares, but you don't know if it was concern. Your training teaches to look out for the guys that are on the phones, on the radios and whatnot, but, again, walk through the streets of Melbourne, tell me who's not on their phone trying to communicate something to someone. So, for us, everything was suspicious. You never really knew who the bad guy was until something happened. The only thing we were ever told beforehand was because of the way that their tribal system works, they don't want the women and children around when the fighting starts. So, a massive combat indicator was, if you're sitting somewhere, and all the women and children start leaving, probably put your helmet on and get behind a vehicle and grab your weapon and make sure you're ready to go, because something's about to start, but that was probably the only real indicator that something was going to happen. Otherwise, it was a rocket whizzing past or bullets flying.

Getting ready

So, we flew out of Townsville, and we had a charter flight plane that flew from Townsville to Darwin, and we refuelled in Darwin and we flew to some islands in the middle of nowhere and refueled again, and then the very next one, we landed in Kuwait. On my first trip, landed in Kuwait, but then they moved that staging area to Al Minhad UAE later on. We flew into Kuwait, we got off and had to have your body armour on, and you got on a minibus and drove to Ali Al Salem air base, which was an American staging area they used for the invasion of Iraq. Then you go in and sign for your weapon, grab your body armour, any extra gear you need to get and then from there you'd probably do a few days of zeroing your rifle. So, you do what they call an RSO&I package where you go in and you do any briefs that are classified to update you as to what's happening in country. You zero your rifle and a few shoots. You'd go to your first aid training and the first aid training they do was, they'd actually have dolls that had blood squirting out of them. Injuries similar to what we would see in country and that would get us certified to go into country. Once you were done with that RSO&I package, they pretty much give you a time and say, "Come down to the rampant," whatever time it was and the C-130 and we're sitting there and you climbed on board and away you went, out of there…They were Australian. It was like a staging unit that did all the training. So, they'd fly ahead of the forces and there were movers, drivers. There'd be a mixture of infantry and people that were trainers, they'd be there specifically for that set of tasks, and then they pretty much sign you off and say, "Yep, you're good to go" and then from there, you'd fly on a C-130 or a C-70, whatever they had available, they'd fly you into Tarin Kowt or fly you through Kandahar into Tarin Kowt, and what you do then was, essentially, you'd get off and there'd be another detachment from that unit that would receive you into country and give you current briefs, update briefs, pretty much an induction to the FOB and then, once you've completed the induction process, then you were straight out to where you had to go to start the Handover/Takeover Process with the rest of them.

City of Tarin Kowt (TK)

So, on my first trip to Afghanistan, we were based out of a Multinational Base, Tarin Kowt, which was in Tarin Kowt. So, that was the joint Dutch, Australian and American foothold in Uruzgan. Then, on my second trip, we were flown into a patrol base about 45 kilometres North of that base and that patrol base was called Mirwize. All of them were named after ANA soldiers that had passed away or been killed in action as a little tribute for them, because that's where we would mentor the Afghan national army from. There's always little combat outposts and FOB. So, the large FOB being TK, that was the one that everyone was based at on the first trip.

Afghan markets

There were civilians that would come in, Afghans that would come in, and they do like a market on Sundays. So, they'd bring them in. It was a two-stage perimeter. To the internal stage perimeter was ISAF forces only. So, you had to be, pretty much, a coalition soldier to be in that ring. The second one was the Afghans. So, we had Czechoslovakian soldiers doing our perimeter guard for that one. Then we had a second stage perimeter, which the Afghan national army were doing as their security. So, it was kind of saying, "We're mentoring you on how to do the security." On Sundays, they would bring Afghan locals inside that perimeter and they have a market. So, you'd actually get to go out there and have a chat to the locals and they'd sell rugs and pashminas. Pashminas was the hot topic over there. People would go buy 30 or 40 for 10 bucks and send them back to Australia. It's actually just a silk scarf. Send it back home to all the women back home, mum and dad, sister-in-laws, everyone just send them back home. So, they had all these nice scarves cause they’re really nice and back here in Australia they're worth a bit. So, you'd send them straight over there. People were selling like really nice, handmade Persian rugs, and they'd sell a lot of stuff, but you'd actually get to speak to the kids and the adults that were out there. Some of them spoke broken English or English enough where you got to talk to them.

Interaction with Dutch troops

So the Dutch were essentially working in Afghanistan and they were wrapping up their mission. And so what we were there to do was to kind of take on what they were doing. So they were kind of finishing up their role in Afghanistan and we were kind of taking over that role at the time, but it wasn't really formally announced. So the Dutch were kind of almost checked out. Their patrolling was pretty lazy and they were pretty uninterested, but there were still some really, really good operators there. They had the Royal Dutch Marines there and they were pretty, pretty intense fellows. And they'd been in some pretty heavy fighting and they'd lost quite a few people in Uruzgan. So I think they were over it. But when we did work with them, they were great. Great to work alongside. They were really kind of enthusiastic about working with us because I think we had a lot more energy and we're always making our jokes and whatnot and getting really heavily into them sometimes. But the interaction, one that I really remember having was a Dutch EOD technician and we found an IED. The engineers found an IED and the Dutch EOD technician walked down there and recovered it and pulled it all out. He walks out and he's like, "This is what you guys need to be looking out for. This is what's caught us out a few times." And he was showing us this little tin and the tin was full of whatever bits of fragments they could find. Whatever they needed to make an explosive device. And he goes, "This here looks benign." But he goes, "That's what's getting a lot of their [our] guys." And he goes, "And they put random stuff in it too. Reo bar, knives, forks, spoons, just any bits of metal shrapnel they put in it. This is what you guys need to be always looking out for. It's one of the predominant IEDs you find around here." So yeah, it was a bit of a learning curve for me. 19-years-old in Afghanistan. And then having this Dutch guy say, "Hey, look out for this particular.

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs)

It had a series of detonation techniques they'd use as well. So they'd have command, which is just the old pull, a bit of rope and it triggers the IED. They weren't as developed IEDs as they were in Iraq. They weren't being using as much as the RC and IR and all that sort of stuff, technology. They were using, command pull, someone watching it. They even did have the old mobile phone call up sort of thing, but they weren't as prevalent in Afghanistan because that technology wasn't as readily available. They were very heavily revolved around the pressure plate. The indiscriminate pressure plate in the ground where they'd tell the locals, "Hey, drive around it." And then we'd come along and we'd miss the signs and we'd drive over and hit it sort of thing. We'd stay off the roads if we could. We'd stay in the desert. And if we drive on the road, we'd be driving along or you might even get the engineers and the engineers would search the area and the likes. So it became one of those things where you had to really be on your toes and follow your training. And my first trip being a driver, wasn't so much in the forefront of my mind. I was at the kind of rear of the call sign. Didn't really bother me. My second trip, I was the commander of the lead vehicle with the engineers. And so I was on my toes all the time. Yeah. And we found so many IEDs up until, obviously I drove over one and was wounded. You still find it, not the right way to find it, but those are the things you had. There were certain signs and symptoms you'd miss if you didn't see the locals that were taking a bypass route.