Afghanistan: the Mad Max war

SPECIAL REPORT: IT'S been a deadly decade in Afghanistan, a windswept landscape that would be at home in a Mad Max movie.  

Afghanistan

BEFORE he joined the army and learned how to kill people, Captain Chris Gilmore was a semi-professional rugby player in Sydney's western suburbs. He's bull-necked, barrel-chested and talks a good fight.

But ask him about soldiering and he stops joking around and points at a mild-looking young Digger called Aaron Sellers.

There, he says in terms too colourful for a family newspaper, is a man who volunteers to search for roadside bombs and booby traps to protect his mates.

"We are supposed to be gunfighters but the sappers are sent out in front of us to look for s--- that will blow us up," Gilmore says.

"Sellers has found stuff the dogs can't find."

Aaron Sellers is 25 but looks younger.

He has a deep tan, dark hair and woolly beard that makes him look nearly as much like an Afghan as a Tasmanian-born Digger.

It hasn't helped. The Taliban still try to kill him.

As his captain talks, Sellers is getting set for his last bomb-searching patrol of this mission, and maybe ever. He and fellow sapper Andrew Burne play table tennis to kill time and tension.

Earlier in the day Sergeant Des Wiese, veteran of a dozen deployments with the Grenadier Guards before switching uniforms, has warned his men they're not safe until they board the plane for home.

"Until then don't give the (expletives) a chance," growled the reformed cockney rebel. Point taken. Not that Sellers and Burne are complacent. For Sellers, any delusion he was bomb or bullet-proof vanished the day a Taliban bomb killed two of his mates in June 2010.

Three months later, he came within a heartbeat of dying the same way doing the same job.

His patrol was heading to check a suspected Taliban hideout when they came to a spot that smelled of danger.

Training and experience mixed with totally rational fear produces an intuition about things that kill or blow legs off.

Aaron Sellers has that intuition and something else, too: the quality that makes outwardly normal young men volunteer to find and defuse the roadside bombs the military call improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

When their patrol halted that day on a stony track in the Mirabad Valley in Uruzgan province, Sellers and his fellow engineer Daniel Delerius cast out in front, waving metal detectors and treading as softly as quail hunters.

They were trying to think like the bomb makers who set their deadly handiwork.

 But this time the bomb setters had been thinking like the sappers.

"They watch us," Sellers says. "They know how we work."

The boy who'd grown up in the Hobart suburb of Lenah Valley had found plenty of "devices" before - but this was different.

 It was personal: a mantrap set beside the road, not under it, specifically to kill bomb searchers like him.

The high electrical whine of his detector changed pitch as he moved it over stones scattered along the verge.

That didn't necessarily mean anything: Afghanistan has plenty of metal scraps lying around from a long history of war.

 On every patrol Sellers found nuts, bolts and bullet shells or other rubbish, false alarms to be eliminated along with old Russian mines, rusting but deadly.

This time, two oval stones among thousands much the same size and shape caught his sharp eye.

 One stone lay on top of another, just high enough above the rest to make him curious.

He picked up the top stone and set it aside.

He put his hand on the second one but sensed something was wrong, and relaxed his grip.

When he brushed the sand away from beside the stone he saw a yellow plastic box, connected by wires to batteries taped together.

If he'd nudged the second stone, it would have released the trigger and detonated the home brew of explosive packed into one of the old cast iron pressure cookers used in every Afghan village.

If that had happened, Sapper Sellers' name would now be on memorials with 39 other Australians who have died in Afghanistan alongside more than 2000 Coalition troops, mostly Americans.

NO one can be sure how they'll react to such a close call, let alone one following a mate's death.

 Some lose enthusiasm or become cynical and bitter.

Sellers wanted to get even.

When he returned to Afghanistan this year for his second deployment, the death of his training mate Snowy Moreland (with dog handler Darren Smith) in 2010 was "in my head", he says.

"Not wanting to be here would be a massive insult to Snowy's memory," he explains in his shared hut.

"I wanted to go out and do my job more and better ... and stick it up the guys who did it."

Sellers was 23 when he started his first tour, the age Andrew Burne is now.

 Burne has been Sellers' partner on this tour, which finished last week.

They seem young to dice with death, but youth is relative.

 They are older than many in a team where 21st birthdays are often celebrated in barracks.

Whatever the army's faults, and Diggers will happily list them, it seems to deliver on the cliche that it turns boys into men.

Burne is a blond bull-terrier of a man, with the oversize arms of the dedicated weightlifter and gravity beyond his years.

He is watchful, still and silent.

He has a wife and two children in Brisbane.

Sellers is fidgety, enthusiastic and talks fast, firing words in stuttering machine gun bursts.

They make an odd couple, linked by whatever it takes to face one of the most nerve-racking jobs we ask young men to do.

Sellers says his dead mate Snowy was "a keen dude".

It's a description that applies to him and Burne and other Australians who are targets in a treacherous war.

Some carve reputations beyond their own units.

 Back at Tarin Kot base, teeming with soldiers and contractors, a warrant officer points out Scott Tampelini, just returned to Afghanistan for his fourth tour.

Tampelini is quietly spoken, shy and polite, and one of the best snipers anywhere. He won an international army shooting competition against all comers recently.

But that's not why his peers rate him.

He got a commendation for gallantry for helping wounded mates under fire on his second tour.

And was shot and wounded on his third tour early last year.

After surgery, he told his mum about the lucky escape.

 She said "You can come home now," but he said he had to get back to the base in the Beluchi Valley.

 Two weeks later he did exactly that.

Now, newly married, he's back for his last tour before settling down.

Another keen dude.

"Keen" is about as close as diggers come to talking publicly about courage.

But they'll tell you it's no substitute for luck in a country where people will kill you just for being different.

FROM the air, southern Afghanistan is a forbidding landscape of cruel peaks and high valleys coloured in shades of dried mud.

A Mad Max location, three hours and a couple of centuries from Dubai's modern skyscrapers.

On the ground, it's a desert with altitude inhabited by a people with attitude, bred from generations of mountain bandits, subsistence farmers and warring tribes.

They are united only by their Muslim faith and fondness for AK-47s, the wickedly efficient Soviet assault rifles that infest every Third World trouble spot.

They live in a landscape of dust and stones broken with unlikely oases of green farmland beside rivers that swell with snow melt in spring. The land looks dry but water is plentiful and used cannily.

 Hawk-faced men with shovels manipulate ancient aqueducts to irrigate apricot and almond orchards and crops that include dwarf wheat, hashish and most of the world's illicit opium poppy.

Beyond this "green zone", between mountains that rear into thin air, is the "dasht", bare plains that barely sustain goats, donkeys and the camels of Bedouin nomads who drift past, as they have since Biblical days.

As the northern winter creeps up, the days are bright and windless but snow is on the peaks and the chill bites when the sun dips.

 By early new year, snow will be everywhere and the cold so bitter that the Taliban will mostly stay inside and prepare for the next fighting season.

In the provinces, many Afghans still live in mud-walled compounds they call kualas, much as they have since the Prophet Muhammad was a boy.

The walls are thick enough to resist everything but artillery.

 To roof a room, Afghans put round timber poles side to side, criss-cross them with bamboo sticks, top it with a woven grass mat and a thick layer of mud.

 It works until heavy rain hits.

In Uruzgan and other outlying provinces, little has changed in generations, except the weapons.

The Taliban fights for a medieval way of life with mobile phones, laptops and explosive components smuggled across porous borders.

They still draw on huge weapon caches left by the retreating Russians - and some supplied, ironically, by the US before 9-11 changed the world.

Fortunately, the Coalition forces bring better equipment and training to the fight.

WITHOUT that technological edge, many more Australians (and Americans, British, Dutch and others) would have lost their lives here.

Still, it has been a deadly decade.

 Against the Coalition's elite equipment and trained troops are highly motivated fanatics fighting with a home-ground advantage - surrounded by, hidden among and sometimes supported by a local population linked by blood, marriage or tribal ties.

This is the reality of what strategy boffins call "asymmetric warfare", where terrorist cells bankroll guerilla raiders to create a hostile frontier.

No matter how superior an occupying force, the only permanent victory lies in capturing hearts and minds as well as guns.

Despite all the gains made, Afghanistan is still a dangerous place for Australians and their allies - even now that the 3rd Battalion "mentoring" force has gone home to Townsville and the 7th Battalion has arrived to officially only to help Afghan forces protect Australian officials in an "advisory" role.

The Taliban are unlikely to discriminate between mentors and advisers. Their bomb makers are still at work deep in hideaways both sides of the Pakistan border.

 But the good news is that their grip is weakening in the valleys and villages where Australians have been doing their best work.

For now, anyway.

ON the big bases - which are more like self-contained towns - the saying goes that "your worst day in Afghanistan is better then your best day in Canberra".

This is an exaggeration, careless of the memories of the dead and the feelings of the wounded.

 But it reflects some diggers' perception there are more people "in theatre" than there needs to be.

A few cynics in uniform grumble that service medals and tax-free pay are similar for those driving desks in the Dubai support base or "behind the wire" in Tarin Kot, Kabul and Kandahar as for "gunslingers" who have faced bombs and bullets out in hostile territory.

They also hint that the mission is top-heavy with officers because everyone wants a slice of the "action" - promotion, money and medals - before the withdrawal next year.

Of course, diggers have slandered their superiors since Gallipoli, not always fairly, and rivalry between arms of the forces is a tradition.

At the last Australian forward base in Uruzgan, at Mirwais in the Chora Valley, Mentoring Team Delta have been too busy for office politics.

Roughly 100 infantry and specialist soldiers  including engineers and snipers  arrived at the outpost in June.

 They left last week after handing over the base to US and Afghan forces.

The intervening five months were hectic.

But whereas lives and limbs were lost in 2010, no Australians were harmed patrolling Mirwais this time around.

 Everyone in the camp says that's proof of gains made in the last two years.

The insurgents have lost "fighting age males" in firefights with Delta patrols, and special forces have captured or killed known Taliban agents in covert operations.

 The result: the district is safer than it was two years ago.

The Mirwais base is a fort, a throwback to when the British Empire ran half the world but couldn't quite tame Afghanistan.

It's a patchwork of portable units, tarpaulins, timber and "tin" huts all behind ubiquitous Hesco barriers: huge steel mesh baskets filled with tonnes of rubble, stacked high and topped with razor wire to make an instant fortress, complete with sentry towers.

Outside the wire, the old town dozes in the sun under a cloudless sky, traditional mud-walled compounds nosing into the "green zone" of orchards and fields on the Rud River flats.

OVERLOADED donkeys and skinny goats plod stony roads, followed by turbaned Pashtuns and dusty children in sparkly caps.

A tiny unmanned surveillance plane drones like a lawnmower and circles like a hawk, so convincing that a flock of pigeons scatters in alarm.

The "hawk" is watching bigger game for nearby special forces.

Apache helicopters beat across the valley from Tarin Kot, on the way to ruin someone's day.

No one goes outside the wire without body armour and helmet.

Even going the few steps to the firing range means wearing more heavy metal than Ned Kelly.

With full battle kit, diggers sometimes lug more than half their bodyweight.

Everyone except interpreters carries guns  service pistols strapped to hip or thigh, assault rifles slung as casually as commuters carry handbags and briefcases in Australia.

They even take them to meals and to the shower huts and toilets.

This is Frontierland, where the Wild West meets the Middle East. 

THREE hours after dark, the Mirwais mullah is calling the faithful to pray.

The ancient chant echoes across the valley as it has since before the Crusades and as it does five times a day, starting with the roosters at dawn.

Stars blaze in a clear sky above and fires blaze below, in improvised chimney devices rigged up by engineers with rocks, scrap iron and time on their hands.

In the mess hut, bored Australians watch NFL football with US soldiers and pretend they like it, drinking Gatorade and wishing it were beer.

The entire theatre is "dry", which is probably a good thing.

Other soldiers knot around televisions in their huts or gaze at laptops on their bunks.

The most dedicated "muscle heads" in a camp of noticeably fit men are sweating in the gym shed.

The soldiers have heard the mullah so often they no longer notice.

At 8pm on their final night at the outpost, the last Australians posted for picket duty climb the rough steps into Tower 7, the camp's highest point.

One is Tom Brown, known even among this lot as "a fit dude".

He has worked out earlier in the "Chora Valley Fight Club", a tiny makeshift ring behind the mess, and reckons he might try a boxing debut when he gets home.

The other sentry is Mark Flay.

The diggers love any excuse to sledge each other and if it is up to his mates, Flay will never live down the curious incident of the donkey in the laneway.

There is even a donkey cartoon in the tower tagged with insults.

The background story is that the Taliban once packed a donkey with explosive, herded it towards a target and exploded the charge  and the donkey  by remote control.

Weeks later, while on sentry duty, Flay saw a loaded donkey walking towards the fort.

He shot it. This came as a surprise to its owner, who had been taking a nap out of sight when the animal had wandered off.

Pinning the donkey tale on Flay delighted his mates, but he's not alone.

They are an equal opportunity outfit: everyone cops it, regardless of race, religion or rank.

To be sledged is be accepted.

The "boss", lanky Queenslander Major Judd Finger ("from cattle country, mate"), bags Des Wiese as a former soccer hooligan and another sergeant, Mick Dowling, for being descended from the mutineers on Norfolk Island.

BUT he's fond of them and of another transplanted "Brit", former Parachute Regiment sergeant Jason Barnsley, who taunts Wiese about his Coldstream Guards "skunkskin cap".

So it goes, right through the ranks.

Intensive training and shared danger welds the diggers into a cohort of equals, each judged only by how he handles the danger of the job and the discipline of living together.

They are like players in a strong amateur football side: they tend to be competitive and physical but more knockabout sportsmen than elite athletes, more ute drivers rather than sports car fanciers.

They start out as a diverse bunch, ranging from city boys on a steep learning curve to "bushies" raised with guns, manual work and machinery.

A surprising number are Queenslanders and Tasmanians.

There are private school boys as well as battlers.

Among the soldiers at Mirwais is a State Minister's son living with the twin handicaps of looking like a male model and once having auditioned for Australian Idol.

One of the would-be idol's best army mates is a Solomon Islander from Mildura.

Two young men from different worlds who might never have met as civilians are going to spend Christmas together at one of Perth's better addresses.

The youngsters cheerfully insult Augusto Silva as an "old man" and a "musclehead Maltese" because he is 34, born of Portuguese parents (in Darwin) and served in the French Foreign Legion in Africa and Kosovo for six years.

Another oldster, a wiry 38-year-old who'd pass in a pub for a shearer, is respected for outworking the young bodybuilders  and because he once survived a parachute malfunction in training.

His reserve chute opened a few seconds before impact.

He's as casual about his brush with death as about the weather.

Nicknames are the norm and mostly based on the surnames on their uniforms.

Men living together for months hardly know each other's first names.

"Willy" is Sean Williams, the islander from Mildura.

He's in a sniper team with "Arnie", known at home in country Queensland as Ben Arnold.

"Arnie", lean and laconic as a young Bryan Brown, could audition for the digger role in any film from the Boer War to Afghanistan.

He learned to hunt pigs as a boy, can shoot a star picket in half with the standard military rifle at 50m and hit elusive targets a kilometre away with the $20,000 sniper rifles in his care.

One chirpy private with a good education and dodgy tattoos has lived down being a brigadier's son.

His mates concede it's an asset that he can borrow dad's car when they get back to Tarin Kot.

Even brigadiers are human when their sons come back in one piece, tatts or not.

Some parents and partners don't even know their boys are in the war zone because the diggers tell white lies.

Tom Miranda insists his cover isn't blown in the media until he gets home because he assured his mother ("a beautiful lady who worries") he's been shuffling paper in Dubai, not manning a machine gun.

Mick Cole admits misleading his wife, too.

He has reasons. On his first tour, he went to step over an irrigation channel when something caught his boot.

It was a "kite string", digger's slang for the thin cord the Taliban use to trigger bombs from a distance.

Cole threw himself backwards. As he did, a miracle happened: the sharp tread of his new boots cut the taut string so it went slack instead of pulling tighter.

One end of the string led to a mud building about 200 metres away, where the bomber had been waiting to jerk it.

THE other was tied to a trigger on 15kg of explosive next to Cole.

It should have killed him and two patrol mates.

"I was just lucky," he muses the night before leaving Afghanistan for the second and probably last time.

He didn't tell his wife about the kite string until much later "because she'd be anxious."

He shouted himself a $15,000 racing bike when he got home to the Gold Coast.

It's worth more than the family car, but his wife didn't mind.

She knew it was to celebrate "getting back with my legs."

Cole is 31, and has a tiny daughter who has missed being with him half her short life.

When his wife plays a DVD of "daddy", the little girl kisses the screen goodnight.

Cole says he and his mates are happy they "got the job done" and survived.

But, more than that, he thinks Australia has done something lasting for Afghanistan.

He says it takes a generation for children to grow up more tolerant than their parents: a 15-year project, at least.

He believes the Australians have made a difference in a slow process that's still playing out, shaping a future for children so they won't be locked into ancient hatreds.

Maybe he's right.  Next day, a convoy of Australian troop carriers rumble through Tarin Kot's outskirts. As the armoured cars pass, the adults in the streets are impassive.

But the little kids grin and wave and give the thumbs up the way they've learned from the soldiers. And the diggers wave back.