Promotion to Company Commander in 7RAR
After INTERFET we returned back to Australia and I went over and served in the UK and served the British army during that period, deployed to Kosovo, came back to Australia, did a couple of captains' jobs, worked at the combat training centre, which was an excellent experience.
They were the organisation at that time that was training people for operations, so I saw a lot of people deploy, whether that was a sector, OBG or RTF, I and II, was there for. I came out of that.
I was ADC the Chief of Army, which was a brilliant exposure experience going from largely doing tactical jobs in the Army to going and working for the Chief of Army and getting an experience across a far broader look at the Army over a year, and while I was doing that job, I was selected that year and promoted to be a company commander in 7RAR, which is where I went to in my first posting as major. So 2008 was the year I promoted and turned up to Darwin.
A new focus in Afghanistan
I was aide de camp to the chief. About June I had been told that I was going to go to 7RAR as a company commander. And in 2008 7RAR was warned out or warned out for 2008 to go to Iraq and as I was finishing the year in 2007, there was a change of government and there was a decision very late in the year that Australia was no longer going to commit the battle group to Iraq.
And it was quite funny. I sort of had a farewell lunch with the Chief of Army and he grabbed me and sort of said, "You won't be going to Iraq. The government's made a decision, it'll come out in the next week or so. But you won't be going". And so obviously I was a little forewarned compared to others, and I turned up and I just thought, "Well, you know, that's what it is. And I'm sure we'll do some great stuff, some great training anyway".
Moved with the family, arrived in Darwin and one of the rifle companies, which was Alpha Company, was deployed to Iraq as the security detachment that looked after the embassy. But the rest of the battalion quickly sort of refocused to basically conventional war fighting training.
But then there started to be rumours about what the new structure would look like in Afghanistan, the government wanting to move to a mentoring structure away from a reconstruction structure. So as the sort of army works and brigades work, you're sort of hearing snippets that things might change and what the deployment would look like.
At that stage, the engineer regiment was lined up to be RTF, Reconstruction Task Force 5, and it was going to get a company out of 5RAR. So 7RAR, at the start, was looking like nothing else was going to occur.
Anyway, those rumours got stronger and stronger and then a decision was made that an infantry battalion would lead the rotation, no longer would it be the engineers, and it would be the first mentoring and reconstruction task force led by Shane Gabriel, so that meant all of a sudden there was a big shift in the brigade from 7RAR focusing on war fighting 1CR were set to do this operation.
And 5RAR was due to commit to that. And so all of a sudden the whole brigade's sort of yearly plan was thrown out and it ended up with 5RAR ended up committing to Timor as a battle group.
7RAR committed to Afghanistan as a battle group and 1CR effectively sent supporting elements to those two units, but an interesting time, particularly for the leadership of the brigade really at the time managing all those expectations because people obviously were getting ready to deploy or had in their mind what the next two years would be and that rapidly sort of got refocused and that was also against the backdrop of no one really understood what the Mentoring Reconstruction Task Force would do at that stage.
Role of the MRTF
The first four rotations into Afghanistan, which were reconstruction task forces, were commanded by an engineer CO. They had a heavy engineer, both construction and combat engineer footprint and their role and responsibility was to increase infrastructure, build schools and then they did have a, they had an infantry company with a cavalry component in that. But that infantry company was designed to protect the engineers while they did reconstruction tasks in and out.
What changed for MRTF was it introduced what was called the mentoring teams and the mentoring teams became the main effort and their responsibility was to build capacity in the Afghan National Army.
You still kept the engineers who did construction tasks, but also did mobility support for the mentoring. And then the rifle company stayed and supported construction but also supported mentoring as a task as well.
Afghanistan as a completely foreign experience
Because it was a new task, we were afforded two recons into Afghanistan prior to commencing the task and, as I said, it was the first time Australia had looked at mentoring. There was a NATO construct called the OMLT or the Operational Mentor Liaison Teams, so, a small group led by the CO.
We went in, we got to have a look at what at that stage RTF3 were doing and we met their rotation, but we spent a lot of time with the Dutch who were doing that mentoring task at that point in time. But we also went down to RC South or Kandahar and had a look at how the Canadians, because the Canadians were leading that role down there.
They did it as well, because we had to sort of design how Australia would look at this problem. In terms of Afghanistan and going there for the first time. Interesting. And I guess I reflect, as well, noting that I had gone actually the year earlier with the Chief of Army for a very short period, but now when I reflect back on that time of going there, 2007, 2008, and then I went 2012, 2013 and then I also went in 2015, I look over that time and I reflect back on those initial times how Spartan it was to the industry it sort of became, later on towards the end, and particularly down in Kandahar, at that stage the size of Kandahar in 2000 in comparison to the size of Kandahar when I was back there in 2012, just completely different scales of size.
In terms of Afghanistan as a country, just completely foreign to anything I'd been exposed to, I'd say medieval, but I'd probably be closer if I said prehistoric in parts, you know, even Kabul, which is probably the only close to a view of a western city, it was pretty basic at that stage. Then, I would say that it was just a lot of energy everywhere.
And that was both in the coalition space, but also in the societal space, confusion, like nothing seems to work. And you just get a feel that everyone's trying to work towards something, but they're not sure what they're working towards. I once heard a US officer refer to Afghanistan as the Flintstones with RPGs, which I think is probably pretty close.
Multinational bases of Tarin Kowt and Kandahar
Certainly in 2008 when I went there, which was largely a Canadian footprint, the US hadn't come in in any great size in Kandahar, but it was, I think it was 10th Mountain Division, there was a US division there, but it was far more expeditionary in nature.
DFAT, so the food halls hadn't developed to what they were. I mean there was a, there was a Timmy Horton's coffee shop, but there certainly wasn't that level of takeaway that subsequently came in later phases. So more Spartan, I would say. And I guess I highlight that because I didn't see the same level of development in Tarin Kowt over those years.
Tarin Kowt did grow but not to the same, you know, you got new accommodation but not to the same extent that you saw that in Kandahar … so Tarin Kowt was never only Australian but Tarin Kowt, the base there, which Tarin Kowt is the capital of Uruzgan province, which was the province that predominantly the Australians served in, certainly all the Australian battlegroups served in and that base, initially through RTF1, and later all the way through past our time was a Dutch Australian base. By about 2012 it's then a US Australian base, not a, the Dutch had left, but, yeah, at no stage did Australia have that base alone. But equally, Kandahar was a multinational base as well.
Waiting to deploy in Afghanistan
We deployed, as you said, about September and it was quite interesting leading up to that because no one had done this before and we basically had to design the training and the structure. It involved us going to Germany for doing the NATO training serial and there were a bunch of brand-new things for the Australian Army involved in it.
So, when I deployed I actually ended up deploying about a month before the rest of the battle group, again, because there were a bunch of things that they wanted to set up for the mentoring team. So, my deployment was slightly different from the rest of the battle group in that I flew in by myself.
I flew straight in, at that stage to Kabul and I did about a weeklong counterinsurgency, NATO counterinsurgency course that was run in Camp Julien in Kabul, which was a sort of mixed NATO/ Afghan working group about how they would run operations. And so I did that course for about a week.
When I finished that course, I flew down to Kandahar, where I met up with the now General Bilton, who was a colonel at the time, and he set me up to go and look at Canadian mentoring. So I flew out of FOB Wilson outside of Kandahar and spent a couple of days with a Canadian mentoring team.
I went out on patrol with them, saw how they were doing it, how they were engaging with the Afghans. From there, I went back to General Bilton and then flew out to Musa Qala, spent some time with the British mentoring team, saw how they were doing it.
And then I arrived into Tarin Kowt at the same time my team and the rest of the battalion was arriving and as reliefs in place occur, they occur over a period of time because people are flying in as people are flying out. So you hit this period of handovers, equipment stocktakes, takeovers and so forth. And that was an interesting time because we came in and the rest of the taskforce force had someone to hand over to.
We didn't because there was no one that had done our task beforehand. So there was a business around everyone else handing things over and we sort of were just there and, you know, even our accommodation was, you know, no-one had occupied that accommodation.
So over that period we just sort of sat out of the way, try to bring our knowledge up of the area, started engaging with the Dutch because that's who we're going to hand over to. But at that stage, really the focus was the battle group setting, not so much of us setting up and getting ready. So we sort of, as I said, did some stuff with the Dutch, but really were just waiting for the other battle group to depart and then for the CO at the time, Shane Gabriel, to sort of set his concept of operations.
Changing the Australian footprint in Afghanistan
In the initial phases, we waited until effectively the Australian handover was set and then once that occurred we started moving the mentoring call signs out to patrol bases to hand over with the Dutch. The construct that we adopted was to mentor a single kandak, at that stage. Later on, as the commitment grew, other battlegroups did more than one.
A kandak was an Afghan national army battalion, in our terms, and the view was we set up with a headquarters structure and in that headquarters structure was myself, to mentor the CO. I then had an operations capacity to run our own operations, and then I had a S1 mentor. So a PERS mentor, an intelligence mentor an operations mentor, a logistics mentor, a plans mentor, a signals mentor, in the headquarters but those individuals also provided our headquarters and ran those functions for us.
And then against each company of that battalion, we set a team up that was led by a captain, it had a captain who was there to mentor the company commander, a warrant officer there to mentor the CSM; a platoon commander, a platoon sergeant who were there to look across to the rifle platoons and then they had, as well, with them, they had a joint fires team, so people capable of calling fast air or artillery if you needed; a medic and a section of Australian soldiers that were there for security and protection of that team as they moved out.
That was the initial view, effectively what occurred was that small team, everyone became a mentor as they flushed out among the numbers of the Afghans due to the quality and capacity of the Australian soldiers, you ended up really having Australian private soldiers not only mentoring Afghan NCOs, but junior Afghan officers and helping them.
So while the battle group predominantly resided in Tarin Kowt, my team deployed forward into Chora and was co-located with the CO and then the individual companies deployed to other patrol bases within Uruzgan province, predominantly Qudus, Atiq, Chora, as I said, and later Mashal.
And that was a really interesting change from previous operations for Australians in Uruzgan because it was the first time we had a permanent footprint in patrol bases outside of Tarin Kowt. So prior to that in RTFs, people certainly deployed out and lived on patrol bases, you know, Badger McGann or Jim McGann in RTF 4 spent a huge amount of time on Qudus, but there was no permanency. They went out, they did a task and they came back in.
We were the first to actually live and reside on Afghan patrol bases for the entirety of our tours and that developed a bunch of interesting stuff. So for instance, all of a sudden we had to be resupplied and so they started an operation called Op Shoju (?), which meant brave, I think, in Afghan, which every six weeks they had to basically move a supply line out, which would restock ammunition, food, etcetera, out to the patrol bases.
Security threats from the Afghans
With hindsight we, because we existed in the period before green on blues so that wasn't the, whereas that now is the historical norm and the view of how some Afghan Australian interaction has occurred. That certainly wasn't the case when we were there, that idea wasn't even really there. And I found it interesting, you know, I lived on tour for a huge amount of time and I basically slept two rooms down from the Afghan CO.
It was a different building, but the building was within, sort of, I would say five metres of each other, if that. And we always predominantly were armed, but we interacted regularly and then when I went back in 2012 and I went up to Chora, and because of green on blue, that they had completely locked down the Australian side of the base and every interaction they had to have by then was very deliberate with security if they went into the Afghan camp, whereas in 2008, if I wanted to see the CO, I mean, there was no deliberateness around it.
I just grabbed an interpreter went and knocked on his door and spoke to him. So that, in hindsight, that was very different. But you're right, for security on the bases, it was interesting because we didn't have enough mass to provide our own security. So we had to rely on Afghan security on the bases because we didn't have enough men to do the guarding.
The Afghans would guard the base and we would have an individual, generally an officer or an NCO on a radio and that would be our maintain comms for the base. And then you would have a picket which would be generally just an individual because of the numbers. And that individual would spend their time on picket just walking around to the four or five guard posts, making sure the Afghans were awake, reminding them to scan their arcs, making sure their equipment was serviceable.
And so to just be literally go to one, talk to them, remind them to be looking out, walk across, do that to the next one and that continuous loop throughout the night, making sure the Afghans were alive to the threat. In hindsight, a fair bit of risk involved in that structure. And, you know, it was not uncommon to find Afghans sleeping on picket and, you know, they clearly had a different view of the threat.
So green on blue occurs later on across the theatre but it's effectively when an Afghan army soldier attacks coalition forces. And so when it first started to occur, it was very difficult to combat or stop because you, these soldiers are armed, you're on patrol with them and then they just turn around and shoot at the Australians.
And so there was some, later on in Australia's time in Afghanistan, there were some significant incidents on patrol bases when Afghan National Army soldiers turned on Australians and killed Australians in patrol bases. So, in army or defence mapping and organisation enemies red, coalition's blue, and green is generally neutral actors. So blue on blue would be Australian on an Australian. Green on blue was an Afghan.
Once we got set on the patrol bases and got into a routine, and the patrol bases were Spartan, some more Spartan than others, some had high level of running water others had no running water and we then met with the Afghans, formed a team and generally, so what occurred was, we generated what we called a patrol program at battalion level and tried to coach the Afghans through this process.
And that patrol plan would then be disseminated to all the bases which would say, you need to patrol for this period of time, this location, this is the enemy threat, etcetera. And so, then what would happen was, that would go out to all the patrol bases. The captain would get that, he would sit down with his Afghan and he would sort of try and mentor coach him through how he should plan for that patrol.
The Australians would mentor coach the Afghans through and try to get a set of orders and a patrol plan out. And then once that work had been done with the Afghans, then the Australians would come away and then the Australian captain would then issue his own patrol orders, which was basically how they were going to manage themselves through that patrol and, you know, focused on also their own protection, the cas evac plan, any fires coordination that might be required, then they would step off with the Afghans.
So, generally, you're talking, you know, 6 to 10 Australians, sometimes down to four Australians, but generally hoping to get about six Australians, ten Australians out on a patrol because you have to leave some Australians back on the patrol base and they would step off with a group of, you know, somewhere maybe between at the lowest point, 20 Afghans, at the highest point, maybe 120 Afghans.
And that's that step off on a patrol and do those set objectives that have been given to them, whether that was to go and patrol to a village and talk at a village or clear an area or buildings and then go out and do that task. And on average, it would be one of those two tasks per patrol base per day, except for Friday, which was, which is Afghan day off. What you would see was that the Afghans would have a rotational model.
They would largely rotate and patrol every couple of days but provide enough Afghans each day to patrol. The Australian teams would patrol every day. Those patrols, sort of, probably normally walked around 12Ks in a patrol but could walk up to 25 Ks in a foot patrol for the day, as I said, doing a range of tasks as they did it. As we started doing those patrols and inevitably it occurred that we ran in to Taliban forces and had what's called troops in contact or contact with them.
And they often ranged in size and intensity from, you know, a couple of bursts and then as you follow up, it quickly seeps away to prolonged contacts that went for 6 hours that involved multiple other components of support, such as Apache gunships or artillery fired in support of the Australian call signs.
Australians doing the heavy lifting
There was a monthly report that was provided, because the whole intent was that we would transition by mentoring and placing the Afghans in the lead, we would transition ourselves to be the supporting partner and eventually be no longer required for them to conduct their own security and there was, I would say, a level of pressure to, and it was a traffic light system to move them towards green.
And each month you would have to report against a range of metrics to say that they were progressing in the right direction. The reality on the ground was it was often two steps forward, one step back, sometimes it was two steps forward, six steps back you would see, oh, you think you've had a great deal of success in mentoring and coaching an Afghan officer to do a certain thing and then you'd think that was set, and then you'd see it regress quite quickly.
And I think it would be fair to say that as the tour went on, there was a significant level of frustration and it got greater and greater that there was a lot of heavy lifting being done by Australians and all too often that was not reciprocated with the Afghans. And, as I said, an example was that the Australians patrolled every day.
The Afghans. It was very hard, let's say they had 120 people on a base, they would have said, "Right, well let's break it down to groups of 20 or 30 and we'll only get 30 out each day". So everyone's only having to patrol once every four days or three days, whereas we're saying, "Well, we need to increase the footprint, we need to saturate the area with patrolling. So we need more people on patrol". So, that's just one example of the difficulties.
Cultural differences in patrolling and intelligence gathering
I lived in Chora and worked with the CO and I guess my sort of daily rhythm was, I would get up, we'd have sort of an in ops brief at the start. We'd confirm what patrols were going out from what patrol base. We'd confirm what else was occurring across in coming days and what we needed to get ready for, confirm what meetings were involved, because we'd have security meetings with the police and the CO and then I would go over, generally, and meet up with the CO and confirm his view of what was going on, then talk to him about planning.
And that was always a difficult thing. That was a culturally difficult thing. They did not have the same view of a time horizon in terms of planning. So we were trying to get them on a sort of weekly plan of how many patrols we're going to conduct and sort of try and talk to them through how the week would work.
That was, culturally, they just didn't do that. "Hey, we were patrolling today. Let's talk about tomorrow's patrol tomorrow morning before we do it" and so you spend a bit of time doing that, spend a bit of time talking to the captains and how they were going. And then, as I said, there was a reporting mechanism and then we'd also do a level of individual training on bases.
So, you know, they might have a patrol in the morning, in the afternoon we would try and run some level of training on weapons or training on navigation. And the same for the CO and his staff. We would try and train them on how to plan, how to use intelligence. And they had a very different view of intelligence. They had a, you know, they had a very what I would say, human intelligence network. There was no view of any type of collecting other than you talk to someone and they tell you something. So that was interesting as well.
Interactions with local Afghans
The patrol bases varied as to where they were. So if you were on Qudus, there was very little civilian interaction to the patrol base because that patrol base was set a couple of hundred metres out of town on a hill. So the interaction of people, if you were patrolling there, occurred where you went into town. Chora was a bit different because Chora was set inside the township.
To see people, you'd you'd see them just walking around just the outside of patrol base and immediately when you left the patrol base, you would run into people. But generally patrolling, I mean, the soldiers had a huge amount of interaction with people because you go out, you patrol into a village.
We would try and get the Afghans to take the lead on in engaging with people, but you would turn up to a house, like just say it was a house of interest, you'd get the Afghans to knock and then you'd say, "Right, the house needs to be searched". That would be interaction with men. The men would then get all the females of the family.
They would then put them in a particular room. Then the team would go in and search the house and then they'd move the females from that room to another room, and then you'd search that room that the females had been in, you know, we'd do big operations where we basically conducted biometrics. I took the biometrics of every male that entered the Chora market on a Saturday morning and that sort of stuff, so there was plenty of engagement with people.
Defining the Taliban
You have to define what the Taliban was. And that's hard to do, because, you know, was the Taliban the hardcore fighters, was it the farmers that got paid a couple of hundred dollars to take pot shots at the coalition? Was it the people encouraging people to support them?
So I think that line is blurred. So when you talk to people, it was very difficult to define. Yeah, the Taliban's been here. Well what part of the Taliban's been here? And I think it's incredibly difficult for those villages that they had to show, they couldn't show a level of allegiance to the coalition or the Afghan National Army because there were people that would have reported on them.
And, you know, the Taliban had a very effective system of night letters, you know, they would drop letters at night on houses, threatening people and so forth but you certainly turn up and people would always say the Taliban's been here or they were here or they weren't here, or we don't support them.
We knew effectively where Taliban lines of control existed and, obviously, post that, sympathies were stronger. But there were clear lines on a map that we knew once you crossed that line, you were in an area where there was Taliban sympathies and you were likely to end up in contact with Taliban forces.
Spartan conditions and food intake
We lived on patrol bases and I think it was quite interesting because I'd been on INTERFET and we started INTERFET like that. Myself and a couple of the warrant officers weren't as surprised, a couple of sergeants as well. Adam West, Matt Lyons they'd all served on INTERFET.
So we all understood sort of Spartan Patrol bases because that's what INTERFET was in 1999. But since then, operations in Iraq, Afghanistan had been very different. They'd been on FOBs, you'd had meals, you sort of, you went, you only ate rations when you went outside the wire.
And all of a sudden we were on patrol bases and so we were on hard rations for at least the first six weeks, I'm gonna say, and then we moved to a model where initially we then went to one fresh meal a week and then we went to a model that we had one fresh meal a day, but that was what we ended up with and we still supplemented with rations and we started with no support.
By the time we finished, there was a cook on each base that cooked that sort of meal a day. And to be honest, those cooks stretched that, and you'd sort of get a breakfast and a dinner and we would source locally. So we had cash. So we would give the Afghans money and the Afghans would go into town and buy fruit and veg and bread for us that we would supplement our rations with.
And that was an interesting cycle because the Afghan army and the locals were price gouging us, you'd see their cost of tomatoes continually rise and bread to a point in time and we'd say, "Right, that's it. We're not buying any more". And then there'd be a reassessment of prices or a new supplier, and you'd start again and it'd go again.
In terms of other conditions, they were so Qudus and Chora had running water and basic showers, but because of the lack of water, showers were restricted on those bases. If you went to Atiq or Mashal, there was no water, so there were no showers, there were no toilets that the soldiers, you know, use long drops effective like, the only water they had was drinking water and that's pretty precious.
And communications wise, we had a Sat phone and we had very limited time to talk to families. I think it was 20 minutes a week. You got on the Sat phone and, as I said, that was, for me it looked very similar to Timor. We washed our own clothes, you're washing your clothes in buckets.
To the younger generation it was an anomaly. It was, because, you know, if you're in Tarin Kowt, you put your uniforms in a bag, you throw it in, a washing guy'd come and get it the next day. It's all washed and pressed, you know, it's a daily fact that serving food there's unrestricted internet access. So none of those things existed.
My view, to be honest, was I think the food became an issue. We had issues around calorie intake when people are patrolling 14 to 20 something Ks a day, wearing body armour, carrying a huge amount of ammunition. And if they were to get in contact that day, they're burning a huge amount of energy. And that became difficult to keep that up.
But the lack of Internet, the sort of Spartan surroundings, I think was quite good for the team, particularly at the start, it fused the team. It gave the team real focus, where the mission was and what they were here to do and I think, as well, those interactions with family I think probably become more meaningful because you've only got that 20 minutes to get messages across and so forth. But it was definitely a different exposure to what was occurring in Tarin Kowt and what had occurred on previous rotations.
Rations and Afghan cooks
We didn't get our cooks until quite late, I would think, last two months of the rotation. But in terms of how food worked on the base, we had Australian rations, we tried to mix it up. You'd get a range of Dutch rations and American rations because, you know, you get to a point and you'd be like, "I can't eat meal B again" sort of thing.
So having that mix was good and you know, when the, when at the six-week mark and your unloading the ration boxes and the blokes would be like "Oh more boxes of Ds" but, yeah, the Afghans had their own cook and they would cook daily and I would think on average, I probably, I ate at least one meal every two days with the Afghans.
I would probably even say probably one meal a day with a lunch or dinner, you'd end up eating with your Afghan host and have dinner with him. But again, that gets to a level of, that's a different thing, that it does get to a level of monotony around having the same food all the time. But it also, it gets to a point where it's like, "I'd love to socialize but I've burnt so much capital on you today that I'd actually rather just have some time to download or some time just with Australians" and so, that again, was a funny dynamic in terms of food.
Loss of confidence in the Afghans' commitment
We arrived, there is a mystique and view around the Afghan fighter, that Afghans are traditionally great fighters and we leant into that myth or that belief and I guess over the period of the rotation that ebbs away and your feelings change and, I guess, for us, or certainly for me, the defining moment for the start of that is one of the mentoring teams has a big contact with the enemies on a hill called Cemetery Hill West.
It's a team led by Captain Paul Graham and they go out on patrol with the Afghans and they get into contact as they're about to clear through a bunch of buildings and they have their overwatch gets effectively overrun by Taliban and they have to withdraw back and consolidate the call sign and before they can go forward back into the fight, and you've got Paul Graham there and he's coordinating all of this and the Afghans just decide that they're not interested in the fight and he's in this contact and all of a sudden he's burning energy trying to sort their own selves out, but also coerce the Afghans that they need to fight.
And this, that work goes on for sort of 4 hours, 5 hours and throughout it, it's led constantly by Australians and they're sort of dragging Afghans into the fight … throughout that whole period you then sort of like, "Well hang on, aren't these guys meant to be the great fighters?" and you start to see that that's not quite the case and that becomes quite a regular occurrence, that you get into contact, and the Afghans don't want to fight or don't put in the same level of effort as the Australians. And that's against the backdrop of you getting a fair bit of pressure to say they're ready.
Another example I'd use is there was a big contact in a place called Kakarak led by a platoon commander by the name of Ben Gooley and his platoon sergeant Matt Lines and Matt Lines is forward with the lead section of the Afghans where they effectively get into an ambush. And one of the Afghans is critically wounded and the rest of the Afghans just leave and it leaves Matt Lines with a wounded Afghan and no one else.
And Ben Gooley is in the background trying to coerce the Afghans to get back into the fight to help them recover their own individual. And in the end, Matt Lines, effectively, through force of character and a huge amount of gallantry, recovers that individual while Ben Gooley does amazing work getting that call sign together and subsequently, Matt Lines is awarded the Medal for Gallantry for that activity or that that contact.
But yeah, you start to see that, and it gets difficult because the guys are like, "Well, there's no partnership, we're doing all the heavy lifting". And so I think towards the end of the tour you get to a point where the optimism has gone and you're at a point of pragmatism. And you go from lofty heights of believing that you're going to leave them in a functioning state to the pragmatism of, if I can get 20 out on patrol today, that's success for this call sign.
And, you know, I think back in time, it's an interesting journey to watch our call sign as a whole because the call sign becomes tough, battle hardened and along with that, a level of pragmatism comes with that and a view of, "We're gonna get these goals achieved and they're the goals we're going to do."
Feeling of relief at the end of a tour
It was an interesting time, so the 1RAR battle group came in behind us, we were the last part of the battle group to hand over, so, in terms of sequencing we were the last bit and, you know, I just remember thinking in that period, we're doing a bunch of joint patrols, so they would come out and you'd patrol with the 1RAR team and show them how things would go and right towards the sort of end of that period, one of the call signs, in fact, it was Lieutenant Ben Gooley out with a 1RAR team got into contact with the enemy and, you know, I just remember thinking, "Oh, we don't need another person wounded. We're so close. Just come on, we can't. We need to get home in good order" and, you know, I was just thinking, "We're so close. We're so close. Come on, we need to".
And so I think that period, there was a fair bit of stress around, we've got to, we want to finish up in good order and finish on the same way we started, but also very conscious that I don't want to lose anyone this close to getting home. And then we basically get picked up at the patrol bases, Australian Chinooks come and pick us up and we get flown back into TK.
And I always reflect that I felt such an enormous weight of relief when we all landed into TK because I felt like that was it, our tour was over, and I often reflect on the fact that, you know, TK was still in the middle of Afghanistan, but our view of where the threat was, it wasn't in TK and so we got back into TK and I just remember feeling, you know, "It's over. We've done our bit".
A medals ceremony in Tarin Kowt
There was a period of time that we still spent in TK. We did a medals parade. Major General Mark Kelly came out for our medals parade and that was just such a great day because it's the first time the team had been complete for the whole tour. We'd never had a chance to come together.
People would see each other flying in at patrol bases but, as a group, that was the first time we'd been as a group since the day we sort of deployed. And it was such a good afternoon and, you know, first time on rotation that we got two beers as well and Mark Kelly did such a generous job of the way that he awarded the medals.
And he actually gave them to every single soldier and, true to his character, he knew everyone's name. And so he did that. We flew out into the Australian sort of theatre holding area before you get on a civilian aircraft and fly out. And I remember, we landed there on the 4th of July and there was an American party going on.
Adjusting to life back home
You get back to Australia and there is a period of adjustment I think. My wife would say that she was surprised at how much weight we'd all lost just from, as I said earlier, about trying to keep the calories up against patrolling. I go on a bit of a leave period and then I went into becoming the operations officer of the battalion, so we quickly shifted gears and went into that space.
It's interesting in terms of home front, my wife was pregnant and my second son was born in October, early October and I had an elder son who was about two, just on two, two and a bit, when my second son was born and when my wife went into hospital to have my second son, that was like the first time in my first son's life that it was just us two together.
Like we, because he was born and at a period where I was busy and we did a bunch of lead up training, then we deployed, he'd never been home alone with me without his mum and vice versa, so, that when my second son was born at home, or at the hospital, but when I came home with my oldest son, yeah, that was quite a learning journey for both of us as we're navigating Mum not there to sort of help us, but those sort of experiences you reflect back on.
A new position in Kandahar
I come back to Australia, I effectively go to staff college in 2010. 2011 and 12 I go back to Darwin and I'm what they call the brigade major, so responsible for operations for the brigade, but at that stage the brigade's in another iteration or preparation for Afghanistan and so as part of that I promote to Lieutenant Colonel and redeploy back into Afghanistan.
Initially I deploy as part of the combined team, Uruzgan, which is the headquarters that runs Uruzgan province. As that process is occurring, there's a decision made to transfer command of Uruzgan province from the US to the Australians and as they reassign the staff in the headquarters, I go from being the chief of staff of the headquarters to no longer having effectively a position on the headquarters.
So my position gets moved and I move down to Kandahar and operate in the divisional headquarters. So, the divisional headquarters run by a Major-General, and is responsible for all of regional command south. So a couple of provinces in total.
Green on blue, a worsening security situation
My view was, when I was going back, was we've expended a lot of capital into this, you know, people have died, people have been wounded. We need to get this right. We can't not get this right. We can't walk away from this. We need, you know, we need to get this to a workable solution. We need success and then I think it's interesting, you go, and my view of Afghanistan when I arrived was Afghanistan 2008, 2009.
When you arrive, you're dealing with people whose view of Afghanistan is 2012 and it looks and smells the same, but the campaign is very different. And then I think what you feel like, we've got a, not a great institutional memory. So, you're hearing people talk about, "Oh we going to do this or this? We're going to do this for the first time" and sort of thinking, "Hang on, that was tried in 2000, not 2009", but equally from my perspective, you have to quickly learn that it's not 2008, 2009.
The AO has radically changed, you know, as I said, green on blues have become this significant thing. Also after the surge, you feel like there is significant pressure on the senior leadership to fix this, get the Afghans at the front and get this to a place where you can transition out. There's a real immediacy of needing to do that against the back of what I would call a worsening security situation.
There are people with far greater experiences around green on blue than me, I mean, my second rotation was into a headquarters. We did work with the Afghans but we worked at a corps headquarters level. If I was there as a tactical commander at the time, I couldn't imagine the difficulty of operating in that space that you, you've got to be constantly on.
We mitigated it, because it was still a threat whenever we dealt with the Afghans and so, when we, because we would plan probably once every two days with the Afghan equivalent as we were trying to bring them to the fore and whenever you went across to the camp, you had armed guards that were locked and loaded, but that makes it awkward, right, to sort of say, "Hey, we trust you, but, you know, it's not you, but we know that we've got to have these because there might be someone else".
And so you walk around with people fully armed and there are a couple of minor incidents on that base when I'm there. On Kandahar, I believe it was the Slovaks, they have a soldier killed and a bunch wounded and, effectively, they had a bus moving in to do rotation of people off a security detail and an Afghan traverses a machine gun that's meant to be looking out of the base, providing security, turns it in and fires on the bus, when they're all getting on the bus and it's impossible to defend against that sort of sort of thing, but at the same time, a lot of pressure trying to force the success of the Afghans.
Working in Kandahar
I worked in the future operations team. So we did sort of manage the divisional level activities for the next few months and did the negotiations with the Afghans around what operations were going to occur. Effectively, I worked in an office.
I mean, you're in Kandahar, I lived in, I had a room in Camp Baker, the Australian camp there, would start work at about 6:00 in the morning where my boss and I would drive across the camp going. We'd do some work. Generally we'd get like a takeaway breakfast. Come in.
You read an immense amount of intelligence reporting that a coming during the day or overnight and then you just start a range of meetings throughout the day where you're trying to coordinate and bring groups together to generate an effect on the ground or support a brigade.
Usually in the afternoon we'd go out and see the Afghans and then, depending on the day, you'd sort of finish up around 8:00 at night, sometimes a bit later, depending on what was going on. You try and get PT in during the day, but what I noticed there at that time was the intensity of the fight the Americans were having through the Panjwayi Valley. It was pretty serious and taking a lot of casualties as well.
Rocket attacks on Kandahar
Kandahar was targeted and the base was targeted regularly. Rockets were a regular occurrence and quite interesting, I think people were, some people were very nervous about rockets and, you know, it wasn't uncommon that you'd be eating dinner in the DFAC and the alarm would go off for incoming rockets and everyone would jump under the table.
But I find it funny, because on my previous tours we'd been rocketed on patrol bases and they're a far smaller entity. I often felt, because Kandahar Airfield and the base was massive, and I often felt, "Well, you're going to have to be pretty unlucky for that rocket to be the one that finds you".
It was a different feeling I felt to many others that hadn't had that previous experience. I do remember Thanksgiving was quite interesting because the Americans were adamant that their Thanksgiving was going to be uninterrupted by rockets.
So there's a thing called point of origins where, you know, that there are known sites for rocket launches against the base, regularly used. And in the morning of Thanksgiving, the Americans fired a bunch of pre-emptive strikes against points of origin and then they flew capol, close air patrol, over the base constantly for like 9 hours.
So you just had these jets just circling, effectively, warning off the Taliban that, "Not today, right, we're having Thanksgiving", which was, you know, quite a surreal experience and, yeah, so rockets were probably the biggest threat to Kandahar.
Mixed emotions about the outcome in Afghanistan
I would say I've got mixed emotions about Afghanistan and where it finished. It's something that I think we invested a lot of capital in. Not just Australia, but the West as a whole. I think I spent in excess of two years in Afghanistan. I've got friends that didn't return.
I've got friends that are both physically and mentally will never be the same after that conflict. So I think it's quite difficult when you see where it ended up, but equally, I feel that we gave enough. I strongly feel that we couldn't stay, we couldn't have stayed there forever.
We gave Afghanistan every opportunity that we could. And I think that should be our focus, is that what we did there was important and we generated the space. We did generate significant space for Afghanistan to be successful. Whether that's around giving them or supporting them in formulating a level of democracy, whether that's setting the security conditions for women to go to schools, we gave them that opportunity and I just hope in the lifespan of Afghanistan, we've seen Taliban resume control, but I equally feel that, or hope, that there's generations that had that opportunity afforded to them that will find strength through that opportunity to move Afghanistan in the right direction into the future.
And so I think we did enough and my feel is we should feel some level of emotional support towards the Afghans, but our emotional support should go to the families of those who lost people and those soldiers that have been changed by their service there.
7RAR's dual missions to Afghanistan and Iraq
The brigade commander called me and sort of said, "I'm just moving a few things around the brigade and looking at what we're doing and I think I'm going deploy you to Iraq. I think I want your battle group to take the Iraq role, that's important to me, that we get that right" and he said, "And you'll probably take the first rotation in Afghanistan".
And so at that time, there was two parts in that. The Afghan rotation was about company strength and it was providing security to mentors in the Afghan National Academy. So the officer training in Kabul. So it's a very different footprint to when we were in a province and then the Iraq component was to send a training team to Taji, which is an air base north of Baghdad, and to retrain the Iraqi army who was in conflict with ISIS and losing ground against ISIS.
So had a couple of discussions, and he effectively formally warned me that that's what the battalion would do. And I always love it, that this, you know, this is the quintessential nature of Australian soldiers and battalions and so forth, that, so on a Thursday afternoon we sort of had the whole battalion in the boozer which in 7RAR is called the pig pen because the mascot's a pig.
And I had the whole battalion in the pig pen and, you know, a couple of hundred soldiers. And I said to them, "I've spoken to the brigade commander and the brigade commander has directed that 7RAR will deploy" and there's silence, which surprised me because, you know, soldiers want to deploy, that's what they join for.
And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting". Anyway, I then said, "Which means that 5RAR, our sister battalion, won't get to deploy". And this massive loud cheer went up, almost lifted the roof off. And I always reflect that they were excited to deploy, but they were most excited about the fact they got one over the other battalion and then, so we then went into sort of focusing on training for those two roles.
The role in Iraq was a training mission, but it was very, very different from the training missions that I'd experienced in Afghanistan Effectively, Iraqis were getting retrained to go back into the Iraqi army that had been trained previously in the insurgency and so forth. Where our rotation was different was there was a structure for Taji 1 and 2 of moving brigades through on a set time period. We arrived at a point in time where the battle for Mosul was about to occur.
And so the intensity of needing to train Iraqis just went through the roof. And so for a long period of time Taji 3 had trained more Iraqis in that six-month period than all the other Taji rotations combined.
Training at Taji
It's an Iraqi camp where the coalition have come in and set a camp within the camp. It's an airbase, it's north of Baghdad and there's a couple of lodging units. So there's the Baghdad Fighting School, which I would equate to, similar to our school of infantry, a bit like our recruit training battalion. They do basic training.
Then there was a division that was on the base with a couple of brigades and then there was a couple of other sustainment units and so forth. And so there's a mixture of training requirements. There's a very formalized brigades coming in through a cycle, there's the Baghdad Fighting School, which is running individual training and then you have the division that's fighting, that's bringing brigades back in and then sending them straight out.
And so sometimes we get people that would be there for five weeks and you'd run them through a program of training, sometimes you get people, the brigade commander or the divisional commander would say, "I've got a week. Can you give me something in a week that will make us better?" And then, also, we would run a sniper course for a longer period of time or a junior NCO development course for a longer period of time.
And then, in that as well, sometimes those people that were there for five weeks would come and see you and say, "We're going in two days. Can you just give us the most important training in the next two days?" So it was a quite interesting … I found Iraqis far easier.
The senior leadership had an understanding of the military so that when you're talking to generals, they'd been generals in the Iraq-Iran war, they understood how you train, probably slightly different to us, but still they had a level of, you need to structure a way to train, you need to structure an army a certain way. So I found that far easier, and I think that they were, you know, they were more of a professional military by a long shot.
The intensity of the heat in Iraq
The other thing about Iraq was it was just so hot, like, not comparable in heat terms to Afghanistan. It's just a whole different level of intensity. And while the threat was different, there was certainly, we're on a camp, we're in a confined space. Generally, the Iraqis, like there was little to no external threat, certainly in comparison to Afghanistan.
The Iraqis, there was no green on blue or intelligence reporting of a chance of green on blue. But at the same time, the quality of the Australian soldiers and their perseverance in that mission was exceptional because they're on, they'd be out on the range with body armour, helmets, their gear, and I can only equate the heat to what I imagine it would be like if you put the oven on as hot as you could and you stuck your head in it for as long as you could.
That's the sort of intensity of the heat that these guys worked in and particularly in that run to Mosul. Just so impressed from private, junior officers, just so mission focused and so keen to get it right and work so hard to try and give something to the Iraqis before they left.
The ingenuity of Australian trainers in Iraq
To give you an idea of the training we were doing, it was, we'd go and speak to the Iraqis and say, "What do you need?" And they identified that they had this critical deficiency in snipers. And so I said, "That's fine, I've got snipers here. Tell us what you need". And they said, "Well, we're not really sure. We don't know ourselves.
We just need to be snipers". And so I just turned to my team and I said, "You got to train them and you are short period. So work out how you're going to train them. But they need to be qualified to shoot when they go into Mosul" and they go, "Got it, boss. We'll look at it". And I ran into them sort of next day and they're all on tablets and they've got this rifle in front of them. And I was, "What are you doing?"
And they said, "Oh, this is the rifle they've got and we've never seen it before. We've worked out that it's a counterfeit Iranian copy of the Austrian sniper rifle and we've identified that it's almost the same, except the muzzle blast is not set properly and we've worked out the sight is this type of sight, but we can't find any training online".
So, they were trawling YouTube and trying to find training. And so within a 12-hour window, they designed a complete training package for a weapons system that was a counterfeit weapons system in the first instance, that they had no knowledge of, and then they took it and they just pumped through Iraqi snipers. And I couldn't have an Iraqi general come and visit and not talk about the quality of the sniper training.
And to me, just such a great story of the quality of Australian soldiers, that a bunch of privates, lance corporals, corporals get given this problem, get given very little resources, and then within a short period of time turn around this amazing training system or style that delivered this huge capability to the Iraqis that helped them be successful in Taji.
