Ben Roberts-Smith: veteran launches attack on ex-colleagues

Ben Roberts-Smith has told the Federal Court one soldier was more ‘worried about eating noodles’ than helping his comrades.

Ben Roberts-Smith at the Federal Court, Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

Ben Roberts-Smith has launched a pre-emptive strike against his former army colleagues who are ­expected to give evidence for Nine newspapers at his defamation hearing, with the war hero describing one soldier who shot a “stray dog” and another who was more worried about “throwing his noodles away” than helping his comrades escape a Taliban attack.

On the fourth day of the Victoria Cross recipient’s high-stakes defamation case against Nine, he told the Federal Court he had spent his “life fighting for my country” and was left “devastated” after a series of allegedly defamatory articles were published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times in 2018.

In an opening address on Thursday, Nicholas Owens SC, for Nine newspapers, said the media company would be calling 21 special forces soldiers – including one “who would himself ­confess to murder” – as they seek to prove that six alleged murders occurred outside the “heat of ­battle” and were not committed in the “fog of war”.

He rejected a submission put forward by Mr Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Bruce McClintock SC, that the soldiers’ testimony was a product of trauma or fabricated by jealous men who had implicated the decorated veteran in war crimes as part of a “poisonous campaign” aided by “credulous journalists” at Nine.

“None of those six murders ­involve judgment calls about the intentions of a man putting his hand in his pocket, or the difficulty of distinguishing between a civilian and a non-uniformed insurgent, or making a split-second assessment of whether the way a person was moving indicated hostile intent,” Mr Owens said.

Ben Roberts-Smith at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Picture: Ray Strange

The eight-week defamation hearing started on Monday and Mr Roberts-Smith, 42, has begun a lengthy stint in the witness box.

He told judge Anthony Besanko he never “blooded” a junior colleague by ordering him to kill, and when asked what his reaction was to “being called a mass murderer” he said “it breaks my heart actually”.

“I spent my life fighting for my country and I did everything I possibly could to ensure I did it with honour,” Mr Roberts-Smith said. “I really cannot comprehend how people on the basis of ­rumour and innuendo can maintain (war crimes allegations) in a public forum.”

He said he had never joined other soldiers who drank from a prosthetic leg – allegedly taken from a slain Taliban fighter – at the unauthorised Fat Ladies’ Arms at Australia’s military base in Afghanistan.

However, Mr Roberts-Smith said he understood why some ­soldiers indulged in “gallows ­humour” when they were “isolated from the rest of the world” and faced with the prospect that they “may get killed at any moment outside the wire”. “We were out there doing a job you cannot ­explain to people,” he said.

The Victoria Cross recipient choked back tears as he described surviving an “ambush” at a compound “infested with Taliban”.

He said one coalition soldier was gunned down almost “straight off”, while another was on the ground and barely visible “because there was just that many rounds impacting the dirt around his head”.

Ben Roberts-Smith and Arthur Moses SC at the Federal Court, Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

Mr Owens told the court the war hero had constructed a “false narrative” in a bid to conceal that the victims of the alleged murders were PUCs – an acronym for ­persons safely and securely under the control of Australian forces.

He said the people killed were almost “certainly insurgents”, but argued that even “the most brutal, vile member of the Taliban” cannot be killed outside of the rules of engagement that govern the conduct of Australian troops.

The court heard a soldier who had accused Mr Roberts-Smith of bullying, and is expected to give evidence on behalf of Nine, was “removed” from the SAS by a ­patrol commander. Among a litany of issues allegedly linked to “person 1” was the “noodle” incident, Mr Roberts-Smith said. While the soldier was “cooking his lunch” the troops were attacked by insurgents who had fired “mortar rounds” at their ­vehicles. “When you have ordinance in the air, you don’t really want to stuff around worrying about whether your lunch is ready,” he said.

In a separate incident involving another soldier, Mr Roberts-Smith said the SAS member crashed their vehicle near the side of a cliff because he wanted to shoot a “stray dog”. “Person 2 saw a stray dog walking down the road and he pulled his pistol out and started trying to engage the dog,” he said. “He then crashed the ­vehicle into the side wall of the road, which is effectively a cliff.”

He also said he never showed the soldier a picture of a dead insurgent. “We didn’t really get on and we’ve made no secret about that,” he said. “He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him, and I’m sure we’ll find out his reasons.”

Asked by Mr McClintock about his attitude to some of his former colleagues, Mr Roberts-Smith said: “The SAS, like many organisations, doesn’t have an ­infallible process. There are people, in the end, who shouldn’t be in the unit and should move on.”

 As part of Nine’s truth defence, Mr Owens told the court some of the soldiers who would give evidence for Nine had their “lives destroyed over acts” Mr Roberts-Smith had forced them to do in Afghanistan. Others were “honourable” soldiers who could “remain silent no longer”.

He said Mr Roberts-Smith had “threatened” a witness, procured “two burner phones” after he was interviewed by officers investigating war crimes, and had “tainted evidence” he “seeks to rely on”.

Mr Roberts-Smith, 42, is suing the newspapers over reports published in 2018 that he says are ­defamatory because they portray him as a murderous war criminal who “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement”.