SAS in Afghanistan: Pawns in a deadly game
SAS psychologists reveal the horror of ‘moral injury’ suffered in the line of duty amid growing disquiet in the ranks over the darkest stain on Australia’s military in living memory.
An elite group of Australian Army officers wear the nickel-silver Distinguished Service Cross on their full dress uniforms, with its ribbon of ochre and silver-blue.
Dozens of senior officers in Afghanistan were awarded the career-making DSC for “distinguished command and leadership in warlike operations”.
But for some, the decoration hangs heavily as they await the report of NSW Supreme Court judge Major General Paul Brereton into alleged war crimes committed — perhaps on their watch — during Australia’s longest war.
There is also growing disquiet in ranks of the nation’s special forces regiments, particularly the Special Air Service, that the “higher ups” will avoid punishment for the darkest stain on the country’s military in living memory.
Justice Brereton, whose report for the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force is expected to be released next month, is examining up to 55 possible war crimes by Australian forces in Afghanistan, including the alleged murders of prisoners and civilians.
He is not focusing on “heat of battle” decisions, but crimes against those who “were clearly non-combatants or who were no longer combatants”.
Prosecutors are already preparing cases against at least two special forces soldiers — Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, who vehemently denies committing any crimes, and another SAS operator known as “Soldier C”, who was videoed killing an apparently unarmed man in footage screened on the ABC.
Others will almost certainly be prosecuted over alleged crimes covered-up at the time and only whispered about back at base.
There is a grim acknowledgement now in government and the special forces community that a relatively small number of soldiers committed shocking crimes while waging war in Australia’s name.
But what of the leadership failures that allowed a culture of impunity and inter-unit rivalry where kill counts became a measure of success?
Will anyone be held accountable for keeping a core group of Australian soldiers on an almost constant cycle of deployment and redeployment — some for the better part of a decade — with little real rest in between?
“You had guys doing six or seven tours. Think about what that does — six or seven tours with heavy combat,” former SAS captain Mark Wales says.
Wales was on patrol with Sergeant Matthew Locke in 2007 when Locke was killed by Taliban gunfire. His loss — the third Australian death in the war — hit everyone hard, and especially his troop leader.
“I got very bad post-traumatic stress and depression from that tour,” Wales says.
“And I kept deploying, carrying that mental illness for the rest of the time I was there.”
According to two former SAS psychologists interviewed by The Weekend Australian, there was ample evidence that special forces operators were being pushed to their limit — and beyond — even relatively early in the war.
That evidence, they say, was regularly conveyed to commanders in reports on the psychological health of soldiers at the conclusion of each deployment.
But whether there was a reluctance of individual commanders to deliver the bad news up the chain of command, or whether the defence hierarchy failed to heed the warnings, little was done to address the issues that impaired soldiers’ judgment and unmoored some even from the moral code of trained but professional killers.
Mark Mathieson, a former SAS regimental psychologist who deployed to Afghanistan six times, says the mental strain of repeated deployments started to show only a few years into Australia’s renewed commitment to the war, which began in August 2005.
“We knew fairly early on — by 2007 and 2008 — that fatigue was a big issue within SOCOMD (Special Operations Command), and by that we don’t just mean physical fatigue but also psychological fatigue,” Mathieson says.
“There were certainly a lot of conversations in the mental health space across the command about the multiple deployments.”
At the time, there was little data to support the warnings, other than “good practice” and observation, he says.
But as the campaign became bloodier, and operators returned for more and more tours — against official policy but with the support of the ADF hierarchy — the signs became clearer.
Mathieson, who now runs horseriding expeditions for combat veterans through his Mounted Missions charity, says some operators carried on over repeated deployments while suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, which is considered a mental illness.
More often, though, the trauma of the battlefield compounded as a deep psychological distress known as “moral injury”, he says.
As the government leaned heavily on the SAS and Commando regiments to meet the nation’s commitment to the War on Terror, individual soldiers faced a perfect storm of risk factors for developing the condition. The carnage was up close and personal, and seemingly relentless.
“People had their values and morals effectively broken by chronic deployment to a basket case of a country and seeing good friends do bad things and good friends die,” Mathieson says.
“And they were getting that persistently occurring. Guys were on their fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth deployment in a similar number of years.”
Life within the special forces community meant the usually protective process of reconnecting with normal life was not an option, he says. “They live the vast majority of their lives compartmentalised inside SOCOMD.
“So guys would come back from a four or five-month deployment, and pretty much be expecting to be sent on a series or training courses or promotion courses, while being warned they’re probably going to go on the second or third next rotation.
“So they never ‘came home’, so to speak,” Mathieson adds.
Operators sought to hide their distress, assisted by a culture of secrecy and an unwillingness to be seen as a liability to the unit.
But Mathieson says commanders were aware of the psychological injuries that the conflict was inflicting on these elite soldiers.
“That has been put in reports and passed up the chain of command, disappearing into the black hole of endless reports being fed into Canberra. It was like nobody wanted to know,” he says.
“It was like, ‘We have to keep doing this because the politicians want us to keep doing this, and if we say no it’ll be my arse and my career that’s destroyed — the guys all seem pretty happy doing it, so let’s just keep doing it’.”
Another former SAS psychologist, Nick Doran, deployed to Afghanistan at the end of 2009, and twice in 2010. His 2010 rotation was a “particularly bloody” one, with the loss of 2nd Commando Regiment operators Scott Palmer, Timothy Alpin and Benjamin Chuck in a US Black Hawk helicopter crash, and the deaths of sappers Jacob Moerland and Darren Smith, both from the 2nd Combat Engineer Regiment, in an IED explosion.
That year also saw the deaths of SAS trooper Jason Brown and privates Nathan Bewes, Grant Kirby and Tomas Dale, and lance corporal Jared MacKinney from 6th Royal Australian Regiment.
The psychological impact of the mounting death toll and repeated deployments was “really starting to show” by the 2010 and 2011 fighting seasons, Doran says.
“Obviously, the more fatigued you are the less clarity you are going to have in your decision-making,” he says.
“The hope in the military context is that your training and the structure of the military system will limit the impact of that to some extent. But I still think that fatigue and exposure to life-threatening situations is 100 per cent going to negatively affect your capacity to fully process all the information you’re presented with, and make the decision that you need to make.”
The former army captain who now helps leading companies get the best out of their people says he and other unit psychologists passed their concerns up the chain of command in detailed post-deployment reports.
“In my conversations with the SAS leadership, they were well aware of this. It was a major concern,” he says.
“But they were under orders from Special Operations Command to do the job. SOCOMD is the instrument of the broader political and governmental decision at the time. So where does that failure of leadership happen?”
It was Defence Department policy for special forces soldiers to stay out of the war zone for a year between deployments. But due to the demands of the conflict and the small pool of qualified operators, a waiver system was developed to get around the policy.
Certain ranks, particularly corporal, lance corporal and sergeant, were crucial in the field, but there were too few available for the one-year rule to apply to them.
“In order to make the unit operational in any kind of functional way, you have to have this waiver system in place to allow these critical positions and roles to be able to violate that rule and deploy again,” Doran says.
“So as soon as you have that waiver system in place — and it makes sense for certain roles — then you can apply it to almost all situations.”
Defence says the waivers were issued “from time to time”, and only “after an exhaustive process of assessing alternative options, confirming each individual’s voluntary commitment, and final authorisation from the Special Operations Commander”.
But Doran says that in his experience, the one-year rule “was considered not applicable to a large extent in the context of SAS”.
In the context of multiple alleged war crimes, and potential civil suits against the commonwealth by alleged perpetrators, those waivers could become a significant legal issue for the commonwealth government.
After completing a rotation, soldiers had to complete a Return to Australia Psychological Screening, and a Post-Operational Psychological Screening three months later.
But sometimes, the waiver system meant unit psychologists had to compress the usual post-deployment psychological screening processes.
“In order to make a waiver happen, we had to bring that in a little bit earlier, or do whatever we could to get those critical factors signed off for the operational capability to be made available,” Doran says.
The psychologists had to tread a fine line. They needed to protect soldiers and the unit. But the operators wanted to go, and SOCOMD needed an operational force.
“The culture of the SAS is, ‘We are an operational unit and we go on operations’,” he says.
“The pressure to go over there and play your important role with the lads and do your job is immense. That esprit de corp is what makes the SAS the SAS. But it has some negative factors. People push themselves to the limit or perhaps beyond.”
Doran says he was never told in his sessions with operators that Australian soldiers had committed war crimes. However, he says he can understand how unspeakable acts could have occurred, given the years of mental strain and the pressure of life-and-death, split-second decisions.
“Can wrong decisions be made? Yes, that’s the nature of operating in this very murky and grey environment,” Doran says.
The five-year Brereton inquiry, which is expected to report as soon as next month, has not been focused on decisions made in the “heat of battle” but on “the treatment of persons who were clearly non-combatants or … no longer combatants”, according to the IGADF’s latest annual report.
Under the Commonwealth Criminal Code, commanders can be charged over the crimes of their subordinates, but the legal bar for a successful prosecution is set high.
A commander must have either known an offence was being committed, or been reckless in failing to prevent such offences.
Associate Professor Douglas Guilfoyle, an expert in international criminal law at UNSW Canberra, says prosecutors often prefer to focus on the commission of crimes than the conditions that potentially brought them about.
“It sends a much stronger message to convict someone for what they did, rather than what they failed to prevent,” Guilfoyle says.
But for the brigadiers and generals with coveted DSC medals, the question remains — how can a command be considered “distinguished” if it was marred by one or more war crimes?
