Tunnel Rats vs the Taliban: How Aussie Sappers Led the Way in the War on Terror
Tunnel Rats vs the Taliban: How Aussie Sappers Led the Way in the War on Terror
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Overview
This is the powerful story of the sappers, the Army engineers in Afghanistan whose raw courage and skills were inspired by the original Australian Tunnel Rats of the war in Vietnam. These Tunnel Rats of Afghanistan have rooted out the enemy from deep inside their caves and mountain hideouts, have defused thousands of improvised explosive devices (the booby traps and landmines of this most recent of wars), built bridges and schools to win a war of hearts and minds, and fought side by side with special forces commandos and SAS troops. They, too, lost a disproportionate number of their comrades and many returned home with the devastating baggage of war, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Inspiring and action packed, this is the story of a special breed of soldier operating in a modern war against an enemy with medieval morals . . . and bombs triggered by mobile phones. It is a story that connects the unsung heroes of Vietnam with the modern heroes of Afghanistan.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925266672 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Tunnel Rats vs the Taliban
How Aussie Sappers Led the Way in the War on Terror
By Jimmy Thomson, Sandy MacGregor
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2015 Jimmy Thomson and Sandy MacGregorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925266-67-2
CHAPTER 1
OPERATION SALAAM
Before the Soviet Union quit Afghanistan in 1989, they — like Australian and American troops who followed fifteen years later — tried to train the Afghan army to fight its own battles against rebels and insurgents. They failed. In fact, the only enduring legacy they left behind — apart from radicalised Muslim minorities and battle-hardened Mujaheddin fighters — was between ten and fifteen million landmines.
The Mujaheddin had been waging a guerrilla war of hit and run, so the Russians became highly dependent on secured minefields. Mines were laid not as booby traps, but as a deterrent to prevent enemy troops getting too close to their bases. These were mainly anti-personnel mines and the minefields were clearly marked. Unlike Vietnam's Barrier Minefield, the Russians guarded their minefields fairly effectively so there was little recycling of their mines for use against the people who had planted them.
Later, as the Mujaheddin got their own armoured transports, both sides began to lay anti-tank mines that were intended for use against the unwary. Add to that unexploded bombs, rockets and shells, and post-Russian Afghanistan in the 1990s was a sea of deadly devices that had killed an estimated 25,000 Afghans during the war, and threatened to continue to kill civilians in their tens of thousands if they weren't dealt with. At one point, the Red Cross estimated it would take more than 4000 years to clear all the landmines left in Afghanistan.
In response to this humanitarian crisis, in 1989 the United Nations sent a peacekeeping force to neighbouring Pakistan, which is how the first Australian troops to operate in Afghanistan came to be sappers. The United Nations Mine Clearance Training Team (UNMCTT) arrived just across the border in Peshawar, Pakistan, five months after the last Soviet forces rolled out of Afghanistan.
For the next four and a half years, the UNMCTT conducted Operation Salaam, initially to train Afghan refugees in mine clearance and bomb disposal. Then in 1991, they crossed the border to help plan and supervise mine clearance in Afghanistan itself. In all, almost one hundred Australian sappers took part in the exercise, in groups of between four and nine at a time, alongside soldiers from eight other United Nations countries.
However, just one year later, only Australian and New Zealand troops were left on the ground. Then a young captain, Major Mark Willetts, was posted to Operation Salaam as a detachment commander in 1992.
'I was operations officer for the seventh rotation of sappers there,' Mark recalls. 'The fifth had been based mainly in Pakistan but the sixth had managed to get all their members across the border into Afghanistan at least once. By the time we arrived, it was routine business to go across the border.'
There were about five million Afghan refugees in Pakistan at that time, and even more in Iran. But their refugee camps were like nothing Mark Willetts had ever seen before.
'When we first arrived in Peshawar, we were being driven out to the house and the guys were saying, "Oh, this is all refugee camp here." But I was looking out of the window at classic central Asian mud-brick construction. Just a sea of it, housing tens of thousands of people. The Afghans, and particularly the Pashtuns, wear poverty very well and they don't like living in tents. So they would start with tents but very quickly bang up walls around them, then put the roof over the top and the tent's gone.
'It was a refugee camp but they turned it into a suburb. It looked just like another suburb; another domicile suburb of Peshawar complete with its own bazaar where you could buy anything.'
Among the things the Aussie sappers bought at the Peshawar bazaar were the same clothes that the locals wore, all the better to blend in and make their hosts realise they were all on the same side. The engineers were also able to ignore the rule that soldiers must shave every day when they have access to hot water — a small fact that would have significance later when the war in Afghanistan was in full swing. 'The exciting thing was that we were allowed to wear coveralls and grow beards before we left,' says Mark. 'We got pulled up all the time by RSMs [regimental sergeant majors] and sergeants when we were in barracks. The purpose of wearing beards was so that we could integrate as much as possible with the population we were working with. We wore a Pakistani army safari suit when we were on the Pakistan side and then traditional Afghan clothes — the long baggy shirt and pants — on the other side. Partly it was to blend in better but also because the Australian Army camouflage gear was very similar to Russian camo gear and the locals were quite willing to take pot shots from a distance before they asked any questions.
'We lived in houses in a nice suburb in Peshawar in a walled compound with locals. The previous contingents, because the 1991 Gulf War had just started, weren't allowed out. They had to stay in for their protection. The sixth contingent started going out again and we just continued that.
'We could go out at night. The United States government had a consular office and an employees' club run by Australians so that was where we could go for a drink. We'd go running through the suburbs and, if I got the time, my Pakistani driver would take me to the old city in Peshawar. It was the classic Arabian Nights bazaar type of thing, like [the film] The Thief of Bagdad. I would wander through that at night and talk with the locals and have cups of tea and play cricket with the kids.'
The original United Nations mission had been to train some of the Afghan refugees in general mine awareness and to show them how to clear areas of mines and unexploded ordnance and bombs. The previous rotation had changed from training individuals to teaching trainers so that the process could be sustained after the United Nations had pulled out.
Mark's unit took that a stage further and crossed the border to make sure the trainers in Afghanistan were working effectively, that they were being managed properly and to investigate any incidents where mines or bombs had gone off. They checked the working, living and sleeping conditions of the mine clearers, right down to food and hygiene. They also checked that United Nations funds were being properly allocated and spent and observed the mine clearers working to make sure they were doing everything by the book.
'We discovered early on that they would put on a bit of a show when we turned up. At training, everybody would be lined up in neat rows, lines would be painted in the dirt and they would look very impressive. Out in the minefield they would do everything exactly as they'd been told.
'But when they thought they weren't being watched they would take short cuts, so we started hiding on hillsides with binoculars and loudhailers. We had a translator with us, we'd hand him the bullhorn and he would yell abuse across the dasht and then all these heads would pop up.
'The Afghans didn't like getting their hands or their clothes dirty, so they would kneel down over the mines, rather than lying flat on the ground. Think about it. When they're kneeling they're more likely to have their head right over a device. If it goes off, it takes their head. But if they're lying down, particularly working at full arm's length, they won't even scratch a fingernail if the blast goes off. They'll get a ringing in their ears but no other injuries so the injuries we got were from inappropriate technique or occasionally just fatigue mishaps.
'It's a very boring tedious job. Nine hundred and ninety-five times out of a thousand the signal on the metal detector will be from a piece of shrapnel or ammunition cartridge. It won't be a mine. This was the first humanitarian de-mining operation the United Nations had run so we learned a lot.
'I recall one investigation where the fellow had prodded, found a device, put the marker in place but as he stood up he stepped forward straight onto the mine. He had one-rupee notes in his pockets and it was a blast mine. It turned his pockets inside out so there was a lovely big ring of one-rupee notes in a circle around the place where he died. Unfortunately, he bled out.'
But while carelessness came at a high cost, what Mark Willetts saw in a town called Khost, and as other sappers would observe when the reconstruction phase of the Afghanistan war was under way, was that peace and security were soon followed by prosperity. 'I have very fond memories of Khost. When we first went in there, there was nothing. The main street and the side streets were empty. But you could tell that Khost had been a lovely provincial town — you could tell that from the castle on the hill — but there was nobody living there. We stayed in an old bombed-out schoolhouse out on the edge of town.
'But as soon as we could clear arable land — and I don't know how they knew — we had refugees coming back across the border and ploughing the land as quickly as we could clear it. We had some friction when they didn't seem to understand that they had to stay a certain distance away from where we were working for safety reasons.'
When Mark and his team came back to Khost a couple of weeks later, there were old Russian army shipping containers, three metre by three metre dark green crates, set up in the main street and operating as shops. When the team came back a couple of months after that, the bazaar was back in action, with dozens of stalls now trading. 'This was a direct consequence of us clearing the land so that people could get back onto it and farm it. And it was almost immediate. As soon as they thought it was safe, they were back farming the land.'
The landmines and unexploded missiles and shells that Mark and his team discovered came from a wide variety of sources. 'Initially we found only Soviet ordnance that was used by the Russians and their puppet government in Kabul against the Mujaheddin. But later on we found all sorts of ordnance, particularly Chinese, Czechoslovakian and Italian, that had been bought on the open market by the Mujaheddin to be used against the Russian and the Afghan army.'
Among these discoveries was that the Russians were not above targeting civilians — even children — with their deadly devices: 'The thing that affected me most were the kids. The Russians have a particular mine commonly called the butterfly mine. It's quite small and is a nice bright limey green. It's quite attractive to kids but it's a mine with a small fuse that requires a liquid to be moved from a flexible container like a little balloon or a sac through a very small hole before it will activate.
'What would happen is that the kids would find these things that had been dropped from the air and they would be in a little group looking at it. You can hold it and play with it for quite a long time if you are not applying pressure to the sac. So kids would pick them up and play with them — and then bang!
'I used to visit the hospitals in Kabul and you'd get half a dozen kids brought into the hospital all with blast injuries to their faces and then the one little boy or girl would have their fingers missing. They were the ones that were holding it when it went off.'
Mark had already discovered on his initial mission that locals were content to put their lives on the line if it meant they could scrape a little more out of their subsistence living. 'Back in 1991 we would see kids along the Afghanistan — Pakistan border sitting there pulling apart ordnance. There were just huge piles of scrap. People had collected it, sold it to merchants from Pakistan and it would go somewhere to be recycled. But we are talking unexploded 2000-pound bombs with fuses in. All sorts of shit. But their attitude was, "If it went off, it went off". That's inshallah, "God willing". But they'd get it on the truck and they'd get it across to a merchant and sell it.
'Anything that could have value was stolen. We couldn't mark minefields with anything other than painted rocks. Because, if you used wood, that was cooking fuel so that was picked. Wire, or metal stakes, that's metal that's sold for scrap. So a little clumsy mine — which is just a wooden stake [with] a pineapple-like grenade on top and then a hole where the fuse went in and the trip wires would run out from it — was a goldmine. I've got one in my office. The wooden stake was used as firewood. The metal in the fragmentation case was sold as scrap. The fuse, if you could get it out, was sold to the Mujaheddin. It was kids who were sent into the minefields to go and scavenge all this stuff and anything that could be sold as scrap would be.'
One of the major differences between this mission and those that would follow, was that the Australian sappers were welcomed into the country.
'We were most definitely the good guys,' recalls Mark. 'Part of the problem we had was that they were treating us too well. They treated us like royalty everywhere we went. But we had to refuse their gifts. They were very poor but part of their culture would be to try and get us things even when they and their families couldn't afford it. We should have been giving stuff to them.'
Fortunately, the Australians were recognised for doing good work for the community at the very highest levels, including by the local Mujaheddin warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, despite his well-known, virulently anti-West views.
'Hekmatyar was a very, very brutal man. You crossed him, you died very slowly and very painfully,' recalls Mark. 'Fortunately for us we had been identified as being on a jihad because we were going into the minefields for the Afghans. That was seen as a great thing.
'Operation Salaam originally had thirteen nations involved but after the Iraq war in 1991, only Australia and New Zealand remained. Because we had stayed after the other eleven nations left, and then we started going in the minefields and working with the Afghans, that was a really big tick in the good box and the word was put out that the Australian and New Zealand de-miners were under Gulbuddin's protection.
'So the message was, fuck with the Aussies and the Kiwis, and you were fucking with him and he was sending his boys around to collect you so he could have a very brutal play with you and your family. If a petty criminal or somebody wanted to mess with us then they didn't have to fear the police, they had to fear Hekmatyar. We were very well looked after, even during the 1991 Gulf War.'
Each rotation, or tour of duty, in the mine clearance training mission was six months, but at the end of his, Mark was seconded from the Australian contingent and sent to finish setting up a regional de-mining office in Kabul. 'Previously the United Nations had been excluded from government-controlled areas but we were able to set up now. I became the acting regional manager until the Northern Alliance invaded Kabul later in 1992.'
The invasion of Kabul by the Northern Alliance — a loose coalition of Mujaheddin tribal forces that had previously formed the resistance to the Russians and their puppet government — marked the beginning of the Afghan civil war and a sequence of events that would lead to the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and, ultimately, the Allies' invasion of Afghanistan.
In the ever-shifting political and military landscape of Afghanistan, former foes would become allies and former friends would turn their guns on the very people who armed them. The push to replace a corrupt government installed by the USSR was hijacked by extreme forces, some of whom, though not all, wanted Afghanistan to be an Islamic state.
The extremists would prevail for a while and before they were ousted, the world would be set on a path to war into which Australian forces would inexorably be drawn.
CHAPTER 2THE RISE OF THE TALIBAN
To understand what happened next in Afghanistan, you have to go back to the Russian invasion. As the country swung from tentative attempts at social reform to often brutal repression, there was a clear divide between the city dwellers who tended to be progressive and the country people who were anything but. However, there was a balance of sorts, even if political leaders were despatching each other with the gusto of a Game of Thrones episode. But when Russia invaded in 1979 they not only crushed Afghanistan's traditions, they created a common enemy against whom the Afghanis could do something that simply wasn't in their nature — unite.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tunnel Rats vs the Taliban by Jimmy Thomson, Sandy MacGregor. Copyright © 2015 Jimmy Thomson and Sandy MacGregor. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Maps of Afghanistan and Uruzgan province,List of abbreviations and acronyms,
Foreword by Major General John Cantwell AO, DSC (Ret'd),
Prologue: The Tunnel Rat legacy,
Introduction: Sappers in Afghanistan,
Chapter 1: Operation Salaam,
Chapter 2: The rise of the Taliban,
Chapter 3: Hunting bin Laden,
Chapter 4: Follow the sapper,
Chapter 5: Live ... move ... fight,
Chapter 6: Backyard Blitz,
Chapter 7: Moving on,
Chapter 8: Special ops and local cops,
Chapter 9: On patrol with special forces,
Chapter 10: Under fire,
Chapter 11: Holding ground,
Chapter 12: Taking on a tech killer,
Chapter 13: The horror of war,
Chapter 14: Clear, hold, build,
Chapter 15: All change,
Chapter 16: Front-line females,
Chapter 17: Heavy duties,
Chapter 18: The dogs of war,
Chapter 19: The 'good' war,
Chapter 20: Hard yards and Hescos,
Chapter 21: Life and death with special forces,
Chapter 22: Moving targets,
Chapter 23: Into Helmand,
Chapter 24: Building relationships,
Chapter 25: The Day of the Well,
Chapter 26: 21st-century Tunnel Rats,
Chapter 27: Fatal attraction,
Chapter 28: Trainers and turncoats,
Chapter 29: Wounded warriors,
Chapter 30: Was it worth it?,
Afterword: Beating the retreat,
Picture section,
Glossary,
Acknowledgements,
Further reading,