Soldiers Without Borders Page 2

  The tall, dark Australian SAS soldier was infuriated at having to stand by as these savages murdered and maimed defenceless men, women and children. He was itching for a blue.

  ‘We could hear gunfire going off on the other side,’ he recalls. ‘So they were probably killing people that they’d rallied up. We were getting pissed off.’

  George, a newly trained medic, was on his first operational deployment with the SAS and he and his mate Dominic were stuck at the checkpoint with the ambulance they were driving and a heavily armed infantry section from the 2nd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment.

  The diggers were part of the Australian Defence Force Medical Support Force working for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). It was in April, 1995 when the appalling slaughter took place near a town called Kibeho in southern Rwanda.

  The shooting had started 24 hours earlier and now three vehicles, a command Land Rover, George’s ambulance and a Unimog truck carrying the 2nd Battalion security detail were trying to reach the victims. As an army medical corps officer negotiated with the RPA soldiers blocking their way, George and Dominic, another SAS soldier, moved to the far side of the vehicles and gestured to the African troops to have a go.

  ‘These guys looked pissed and they looked young and they’ve got this vacant, distant look in their eyes,’ George recalls. ‘You can look at a bloke who is 15, 16 years old carrying an AK-47, you look him in the eyes and it is just blank, almost. And you think about what happened in the last year or six months and what part he had to play in it and then it makes you angry. You just look at him and think, “You’re a piece of shit.” And he doesn’t care, he just doesn’t care.’

  George knew that if push came to shove then the hard-core boys from 2RAR would be up the guts with mud and smoke, but the fight never eventuated and the Aussies were allowed to pass.

  Around the next bend, the small convoy motored into an apocalyptic scene. The massive camp that had held some 100,000 displaced people at first appeared deserted.

  ‘We drove past hundreds of those UN blue plastic tarps strung over humpy-style twig huts, all empty,’ George recalls. ‘There were thousands of these things, all empty.’

  They drove to the UN hospital in the centre of the camp that was secured by Zambian troops. Adjacent to it was a compound with a group of buildings and a cleared centre area. That was where anyone who had not fled the carnage was holed up.

  There were about 300 people in the clearing and from within the crowd someone was shooting at the RPA soldiers. Many of these people were hard-core members of the Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, which was fighting against the RPA. For the displaced people caught in the middle it had literally become a choice between the machetes of the Interahamwe, which means ‘those who fight together’, or the bullets of the RPA.

  ‘Through discussions with our translator we found that most of those people didn’t want to be there. They were scared but they had no choice and it’s really sad. Either they stayed because they were hiding the hard-core element that was there, or they would try to leave and be hacked to death. If they weren’t hacked there they’d be hacked somewhere else, through word of mouth. So they had no choice.’

  Born in New Zealand of Samoan parentage, George carries the relaxed air of his islander heritage mixed with the rugged determination and expert training of a special forces soldier. In April 1995 that training, including his skills as a patrol medic, would be put to the test on numerous occasions.

  Prior to the Kibeho job, George and his small team had been driving ambulances in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. In a three-week cycle they manned aid posts at either the hospital or UN headquarters or else they just chilled out and sorted out their gear.

  On 18 April they received orders to move to Kibeho, about a six-hour drive from Kigali.

  They had already listened to the reports of reprisal killings in the wake of earlier mass murders and the UN’s desperate attempts to keep the warring factions apart.

  At the RPA checkpoint, anyone who looked suspicious or who didn’t have the correct papers was simply dragged to the side of the track by the RPA and shot on the spot like a dog. It reminded George of the stories he had read about Hitler, Nazi Germany and the genocide of the Jewish people.

  ‘Obviously the crowd’s getting more and more unsettled about this because they’re sitting there thinking, “Fuck, I’ve got to go through this and whichever way I answer a question is going to determine whether I live or die”,’ he says.

  It was the rainy season in central Africa and the rain and mud simply added to the misery.

  ‘All their worldly goods were in their hands so they are carrying little buckets and sheets of what-have-you. And there’s a mass of people and more and more people, as they are processing through, are getting killed,’ George says. ‘They just start to get more and more edgy and, because if you can imagine it was a very hilly area, after a day or so of this rough justice, people started running over the hills and trying to get away. I don’t know exactly what sparked that off but once the crowd started moving like that the RPA forces…just opened up on them and they let rip.

  ‘They had anti-aircraft guns, light machine guns, heavy machine guns, RPGs and they just tore the hell out of them and I don’t know the numbers because I didn’t see them, but they reckon about 8000 were killed.’

  By the time the medical convoy arrived at Kibeho some 24 hours later, it was confronted with death and injury on a biblical scale. The first people they met were fellow SAS soldiers Paul Jordan and Jon Church. A picture of the tall, fair-haired Church, also born a Kiwi, cradling a small Rwandan child as he carried it to safety had been published around the world. It was one of those defining images that came to symbolise the Kibeho massacre.

  George was close to Church. the two had been on the same reinforcement cycle after passing the selection course for the SAS and had also shared their medic training.

  He recalls that ‘Churchie’ was seriously affected by what he witnessed at Kibeho. ‘When I first laid eyes on him, he had that thousand-yard stare on his face; he just couldn’t believe what he’d seen because he was really a decent, honest, open person. You meet a lot of cynical people in the army, but Churchie so totally wasn’t that, he really cared about people. I mean, I could see someone get hit or smashed or whatever and look at it quite objectively and go, “Fuck, I don’t care!” Whereas Jon would care. He was a very empathetic fellow and, positive or negative, I’m not.’

  George was angry that he had been stuck in Kigali on ambulance detail while Paul and Jon had been in the thick of the action.

  ‘He [Church] was aghast at what he’d seen. I was talking to him about it and he kept saying he couldn’t fucking believe it, “You wouldn’t believe, they’re just mowing—you just wouldn’t believe that people could do that, just kill other people wantonly, absolutely in cold blood.” I couldn’t believe it either.’

  At the Kibeho compound next to the UN hospital, George and Dominic were tasked with collecting the dead bodies from among the traumatised people and their meagre belongings.

  ‘I remember mostly blue plastic basins, that’s the thing that strikes me most—plastic bags and just the detritus of life. All their belongings, all the people’s belongings that were lined up to go through that checkpoint earlier were just there, almost a metre deep on the ground,’ George recalls. ‘And another thing I remember clearly is human shit everywhere. they were living off corn and maize, whatever that stuff is, and just massive turds sitting everywhere with all corn and shit in it and you’re going, “Fuck, what a way to live.” I’ve got a photo of a turd sitting on the ground and a dead woman lying next to it, and it sums up the place, virtually.’

  The team established a casualty clearing post manned by two doctors, a couple of nurses and the SAS medics.

  In addition to their medical duties the SAS men assisted with security to ensure that the medical team was not in danger. they also had ‘issues’ with the Zambian troops securing the compound.

  ‘We had a Red Cross element with us and they wanted to go in and take out anyone who was injured or dead, because [in] all that shit that I’m talking about, there were dead people lying everywhere and obviously it’s not a healthy state,’ he says.

  The problem was that the Red Cross had asked for help, but due to their non-violent ethos, they refused to allow the soldiers to carry their weapons.

  In a highly charged environment dripping with guns, machetes and hidden warriors, there was no way the diggers were going to agree to that.

  ‘We said, “Well, we’re not going to help you then because we’re not going anywhere without weapons.”

  ‘“Oh, but we really need to go and get the bodies”, they said.

  ‘“Yes, we’ll do that”, and we started moving again.

  ‘“Oh, but you can’t take weapons.”

  ‘“Well, fuck. Either we come in with weapons or we’re not going to help you.”They are appallingly naïve in that respect.’

  Eventually the Red Cross gave way and George and his comrades went in armed. they immediately established machine gun positions on vital points on the high ground.

  ‘We moved into the core of the place and that was interesting in itself, because most people were aghast, just sitting there almost inert, wet, unhappy from the trauma that had occurred. But some —and you could see them absolutely clearly, they stuck out like sore thumbs—were standing there saying, “Get out of here, get out of here.”We just pushed in by force, occupied the place and we started moving bodies out of there.’

  Within minutes the soldiers had dug a huge pit and buried the first 50 of what would be many hundreds of bodies.

  ‘The worst ones I think were the kids, little kids you could
just pick up with one hand and move with. I remember clearly—and it is disturbing, I can understand why some people are pretty messed up with it—we wore masks and heavy, heavy plastic gloves,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t understand how someone, either they’re freshly dead or not, you grab someone by the arm and all the skin moves off, you know, sloughs off, and the smell was fuckin’ heinous. the other thing that I remember very clearly was the amount of swelling that a body generates.’

  As the men moved through the putrid mass of humanity searching for dead bodies or survivors, they were struck by the resignation of the victims. they would be cooking their corn over damp, smoky fires and simply point silently to a nearby pile of rubbish. The troops would shift the garbage and uncover yet another corpse.

  ‘You move something and there’s a face, and you pick it up and take it and put it in the pit.’

  One of the most pathetic sights that George saw was in the hospital. It had been run by Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) but the doctors had fled when the orgy of violence began. Several people, probably those judged least likely to survive anyway, had been left behind in the beds.

  Black humour has always helped soldiers cope with the worst aspects of war. In the SAS a good dose of black humour is never far away and as George and Dominic cleared the hospital they took to giving the dead nicknames.

  ‘There was one we called the Donut Eater. I don’t think he was a fat man but he was a fat man by the time we got to him, he’d bloated so heavily and his eyes were bulbous and his lips were enormous so we nicknamed him the Donut Eater,’ George recalls. ‘The other one was the Maggoty Cat and I’ll never forget him for the life of me. We were walking through and Dominic’s going, “Ah yeah, there’s another one.” I say, “Okay, I’ll get the boys.”

  ‘Obviously he must have got out of his bed, fallen on the ground, crawled along a bit—he still had a tube coming out of his arm and he was just face down with an infestation of maggots out of his back, and he had an injury to his head. So there was a big pool of fluid coming, like black tarry slick fluid off his head, and for all purposes he was dead. So I stuck my foot, if you can imagine, he’s lying there, my foot under his shoulder and just kicked to flip him over and have a look at him.

  ‘And when I flipped him over—Dominic was standing on the far side looking into the next room—he went, “Arrgh”, made this horrible noise that scared the absolute shit out of both of us. So we got the infantry, they took him back to the CCP (casualty clearing post) and he ended up in our ambulance, the old Maggoty Cat. He stunk like no tomorrow. We actually encouraged them to throw him in the pit because he was as good as, he was really fucked over, but they took him back to the hospital.’

  For three days solid the men cleared bodies and searched for the living.

  ‘We got to the point where death was no longer an issue, it was fucking commonplace,’ says George.

  They found people hiding in the oddest of places. Some had been almost submerged for days in the contents of a pit toilet or camouflaged under piles of rotting corpses. They would never willingly emerge from their hiding places either, so George and his mates had to coerce them and assure them there were no RPA troops nearby.

  ‘Everything we were doing was shadowed by the RPA who had control of the area still and were watching. Every time we sent a helicopter out or an ambulance left, like with the Maggoty Cat, we would hide in the ambulance people we were trying to get the fuck out of there at the same time—you know, kids or whatever.’

  RPA troops would search the vehicles and remove anyone who was not injured, so the Aussies took to bandaging all passengers to make them look badly hurt.

  George describes the Kibeho experience in two words: ‘wholesale slaughter’.

  On the second day they were heading back to the massacre site when they saw a group of people on the side of the road. These people had been trying to escape and were set upon by bandits who had hacked them up and stolen their meagre possessions.

  ‘They’ve got hack marks from where they’ve been holding their arms up. They’ve been hobbled because they’ve chopped their Achilles tendons so they can’t run. But they wouldn’t kill them,’ George recalls. ‘I couldn’t understand that. these guys were just lying on the side of the road, had been hacked, anything they had was taken, and they were just lying there. We dressed them, treated them, and we took them to Médecins Sans Frontieres. Not much else to do.’

  Once the fields had been cleared of dead and injured, George and the team moved into the hospital to assist wherever they could.

  ‘We had some really good surgeons there. I helped with a couple of orthopaedic surgeons and whatever, they were really good guys, intensive care surgeons, taught us an awful lot of stuff. They’d sit and talk because there wasn’t that much work to do. We’d have a laugh and drink or whatever and the next day you could be in there, scrub up and go and give them a hand.’

  During one operation the anaesthetist was inserting a tube into a patient’s throat. A video camera was set up nearby to record the procedure for training purposes.

  ‘Oh Jesus he smells!’ the anaesthetist exclaimed as he took a close look. ‘My God!’ he added as he started to pull a long worm out of the man’s throat.

  ‘And no shit, it was like four feet long,’ says George. ‘He’s pulling it out and he says, “Did you get that on camera?”And they didn’t get it on the camera. So he stuck it all back in his mouth, just laid it in his mouth and went through it again and then at the end, like, “Oh my God!” and then pulled this fuckin’ worm out. So funny.’

  Thousands of people died in the Kibeho massacre and this small band of Australians saved hundreds of lives as they swam against a deadly tide of tribalism, blood lust and murder.

  Four of them, Corporal Andy Miller, Warrant Officer Rod Scott, Lieutenant Steve Tilbrook and Captain Carol Vaughan-Evans, were awarded the Medal of Gallantry for their extraordinary deeds.

  Chapter two

  BLACK HAWKS DOWN

  There were six Black Hawk helicopters in the air on that fateful winter’s night. two sniper machines were out in front, then came three more flying abreast carrying SAS troops, with the command machine at the rear of the formation. they looked just like wasps as they buzzed towards the target.

  It was the night of 12 June 1996 and the SAS counterterrorist squadron was at the High Range Training Area west of Townsville. The tactical assault group (TAG) was practising the most dangerous activity of them all, one in which there is no margin for error: men simultaneously fast-roping from multiple helicopters and attacking a target at night.

  ‘Normally we’d all fly in a line straight because it’s safer—you’re always next to each other and as you’re jostling around trying to get into position, that’s the best [way to] be until you are almost there and then you fan out,’ George says.

  ‘But for some reason, and I don’t understand it because I wasn’t part of any of that planning, they flew three abreast with the snipers up. Snipers up is not an issue, neither here nor there, because they’re well separated and they’re ahead. But normally these three would be in a line ahead. We’d practised this by day, three in line, coming around onto target and our target was a fire support base, FSB Barbara, which is virtually an artillery gun position on the top of a hill, but we’d put structures on it for us to attack.’

  George, who was a lance corporal in the TAG that night, understood the mission scenario was to simulate the rescue of hostages from a hostile environment similar to the Khmer Rouge stronghold where Australian tourist David Wilson was killed in Cambodia in 1994.

  ‘So that was our aim, to be able to be competent at resolving an issue like that.’

  After practising the mission earlier that day they had paused for a hot lunch.

  ‘Two very good friends of mine were killed there [that night] from my [SAS] selection—Glen Hagan, who was from the same battalion as me, and Jon Church, who I went to Rwanda with. I remember sitting eating—they bring out those army hot boxes, a little aluminium tin with a whole stack of trays of pre-prepared food—and sitting there talking, eating this shit, having a laugh with Glen.’