taken an age to arrive in comparison. A local driver running a red light. No time for Simi to react. Just him and her, car and bike, and the squeal of tangled metal as they collided.
Fighting in Afghanistan is a seasonal affair. It eases off in the winter when the mountain passes are snowbound and ramps up again in the spring and summer. The latter, of course, brings its own problems to troops on the ground. The intense heat, well into three figures Fahrenheit, means soldiers have to carry vast amounts of water with them, and it can also play havoc with electronic equipment such as radios and microwave radar. Even tyre pressures have to be adjusted downwards to prevent blowouts.
By the time October 2008 came around, Mike Goody had been in the country for six months, watching the danger and the action rise with the heat and now begin to fall away slightly. He was deployed on Herrick VIII with the RAF Regiment’s 1 Squadron. Despite its name, the regiment comprises ground troops rather than pilots: it’s a specialist airfield defence corps whose members are known as ‘rock apes’ after a 1952 incident in Aden when one officer accidentally shot another after mistaking him for a hamadryas baboon, known locally as a ‘rock ape’.
The military ran in Mike’s blood. His father had served in Northern Ireland, and his godfather, Stanley Duff, who was so close to the family that Mike simply called him ‘Uncle Stanley’, had been the youngest RAF squadron leader in World War Two – ‘He was a great man in himself, kind to all, but to me he was more than a man could ever be. I owe this man more than I could ever wish or have to give. He was one of the main reasons that I joined the Royal Air Force myself, not as a pilot like he was but as a Regiment Gunner.’
And now here Mike was, on a day which though a few degrees down on the sledgehammer heat of high summer was still pretty hot. He was on patrol around Kandahar, where the airfield served as NATO’s main base in southern Afghanistan. Sometimes it seemed less a military installation and more a small town: the perimeter fence was 30km long, and inside it were almost 20,000 soldiers and civilians from a dozen different NATO countries.
The rock apes liked to go out in soft hats rather than hard helmets whenever they could, knowing that hearts and minds were easier to win over if you weren’t dressed too much like RoboCop. It was a fine line, and they knew that even with the best will in the world they would never be able to fully convince the locals that their presence here was welcome. Whenever a patrol left the airfield they would see a sudden rash of kites in the sky: the local children signalling to the Taliban that the infidel were on the move.
Warfare starts young in Afghanistan.
And always the gnawing danger of the IED. It was a constant game of cat and mouse. Every time the Western soldiers found a way to detect or disable the devices, the Taliban changed their tactics: from pressure pads to phone signals, from phone signals to laser beams. You never left the base without thinking about them, without scanning the road for them, without doing everything you could to find them before they found you. Signs of digging, suspicious debris, a mound in the dirt that looked too exact to be natural … You never stopped looking for those things.
And sometimes you could take every precaution imaginable and still find it wasn’t enough.
Mike’s patrol were a kilometre from camp, just far enough for anyone planting an IED to have been missed by the watchtowers standing sentinel on the airfield’s perimeter. The patrol knew – because they always tried to think like the enemy – that if they were going to bury an IED somewhere, this was exactly the kind of place they’d have chosen. So they stopped and scanned the ground with metal detectors.
But when an IED is right up close to a vehicle, a metal detector won’t work on it – it’ll be too busy detecting the 4.5 tons of armoured vehicle nearby.
They put away their detectors, climbed back in the vehicles and set off again, with Mike driving the lead vehicle.
Mike was driving the lead vehicle right over the bomb.
A Skype connection across 10,000 miles, 11 hours’ time difference and about three times that in temperature, and Darlene Brown from Brisbane laughs so readily and easily it feels as though she’s in the same room as me. She’s one of those people you can never imagine not liking.
Her dad had fought in Vietnam, a veteran of the famous Battle of Long Tan in 1966, when barely 100 Aussie soldiers holed up in a monsoon-lashed rubber plantation had defeated 1,500 Viet Cong. Darlene wanted to follow in his footsteps and sign up for the Army at 16, the earliest she was allowed, but he put his foot down: the Army, he said, was ‘no place for a lady’.
Two years later, by now old enough to do what she wanted whether or not he agreed, Darlene joined the Navy. It was 1999, and right from the start she loved Navy life – loved it so much, in fact, that she volunteered for extra sea deployments in place of shore service, an attitude greatly appreciated by her senior officers.
It wasn’t until much later that the effect of such a relentless schedule would become clear.
Darlene was assigned to the frigate HMAS Adelaide as a Communications and Information Systems Officer. In the aftermath of 9/11, when all eyes were on Afghanistan, the Adelaide’s concerns were closer to home. In October 2001, 100 nautical miles north of Christmas Island, it intercepted a vessel carrying more than 200 asylum seekers.
This wasn’t the first time a Navy ship had been called into action this way, and the illegal immigrant issue was controversial, especially with a federal election only a month away. ‘We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come,’ said Prime Minister John Howard, and it seemed most Aussies agreed with him.
Politics or not, the Adelaide’s orders were clear: they were to ‘deter and deny’ the vessel entry to Australian territorial waters. A party from the Adelaide boarded the vessel and set it on a course back towards Indonesian waters. The situation grew tense. Some asylum seekers began sabotaging the vessel: 14 men either jumped or were thrown overboard.
In the confusion, there were rumours that the asylum seekers were also deliberately throwing children into the water in order to force the Adelaide to rescue them. The 14 men in the sea were fished out and put back on board the vessel; the ‘children overboard’ rumour turned out to be false. As it was, the vessel subsequently sank while under tow by the Adelaide, and all the asylum seekers ended up on board the frigate anyway.
It was only through a combination of chance and the professionalism of the Adelaide’s crew that no one had been killed. But the incident affected Darlene badly. It wasn’t the only one to do so, nor was it a game-changer in itself, but little by little she was feeling her reserves ebbing away. Every time she came across a life-threatening situation – and there were some, of course there were, this was the Navy – her resistance was stretched thinner and thinner.
By 2004 she had been at sea almost constantly for three years, and she was changing – ‘I was in the Gulf and I was starting to get angry. I wasn’t the same person I was before. I was screaming my head off at people.’ With the rages came the tears: long periods of uncontrollable sobbing, totally disproportionate to anything which could possibly have triggered them.
She needed help. But if she didn’t know what was wrong with her, how could she know who to ask?
In 2016, when the BBC were looking for new Top Gear presenters, Bart Couprie (with tongue firmly lodged in cheek) put himself forward – ‘I’m tall, balding, un-PC, slightly obnoxious, and I own a suitable wardrobe.’
Top Gear could have done much worse. Bart is funny, articulate and a good talker. But
