Expatriates Page 24

  “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians; and this country being much covered with wood, and hilly, is very advantageous for their method of fighting.”

  —Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland, from a letter written April 20, 1775

  Site G, Near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia—February, the Third Year

  Three days after he had first engaged the Indos, Chuck Nolan stumbled back into Site G. In a close call, he was nearly shot by anxious perimeter sentries for his failure to know the day’s password.

  Chuck reported to Caleb’s truck-mounted shelter, which served as both his office and sleeping quarters. Caleb took one look at his haggard face and his filthy, bloodstained shirt before declaring, “Good Lord, Nolan! You look like a box of blowflies, and you smell like a big two-day-old Bondi. What happened out there?”

  Caleb chewed an Anzac chocolate bar from a CR1M ration as he answered. “I was running and gunning with them for a day and a half. I kept moving and fired anywhere from two to six rounds every hour or so, leading them on a merry chase. Most of those shots were just to make noise. I was about twenty miles northeast of here when I fired the last few shots. Then I went and found myself the most gosh-awful dense patch of jungle to crawl into and slept for about ten hours. After that, I very quietly made my way back here, using a circuitous route.”

  Caleb watched Chuck practically inhale the ration and immediately open a second one. “What did you eat for the past three days?” Caleb asked.

  “Other than a few candy bars I had in my hydration backpack, just a few bush bananas and a couple of snakes. One of them was a big mulga and the other was some variety I didn’t recognize. But I assumed it was poisonous, too. I pinned their heads down with the muzzle of my Enfield and then cut their heads off with my Leatherman. I ate them raw.”

  “Crikey.”

  “Well, like they say, ‘protein is protein.’ Anyway, I was moving too fast to do any serious foraging, so here I am with one heckuva appetite.”

  After taking a sip from his Camelbak, Chuck asked, “Did you have any enemy contact here?”

  “No, it’s been quiet. The Indos seem pretty clueless. No systematic patrolling despite our proximity to where you first started shooting. That was fantastic of you, playing offsider for us. It was like seeing a Spur-winged Plover faking a broken wing. You fooled the Indos, so you’re going to be the camp celebrity for sure, mate.”

  “I just want to clean my rifle, get a shower, get some more to eat, and some rack time. I also need to scrounge for some .303 ammo since I shot up almost sixty rounds.”

  “No worries, Chuck. Your low ammo supply justifies me issuing you an SLR and a pile of ammo and magazines.”

  “An L1A1? Really? That would be great.”

  Caleb shook his head. “Don’t mention it. That’s just fair dinkum.”

  As Nolan pulled off his boonie hat to show Caleb the scabbed-over wound, he said, “Oh, one more thing. I’d like the medic to look at this little bullet graze.”

  Caleb chortled. “Ooh, that was close. An inch lower and that round would have emptied your skull out like shooting a melon.”

  Chuck let out a grim laugh. “Yeah. I’ve thought about that. A lot.”

  “Oh, but Ava is going to love it, after it heals. It’ll make quite the dashing Mensur or Studentische Fechten scar for her to admire,” Caleb said. He ran the tip of his forefinger across his own cheek in a slashing motion to emphasize his point.

  “Yeah, right. Some fencing scar. Schön und hässlich, gleichzeitig. She’ll probably tease me about it, endlessly.”

  The wound had already filled with pus, which the medic said was typical in the Northern Territory, even with well-treated wounds. After his initial assessment, the medic painfully cleaned out the wound, rebandaged it, and counted out a bottle of flucloxacillin. He also issued a stern warning to use up all of the pills in his prescription even if any signs of infection had disappeared.

  All in all, Chuck considered himself lucky to have made it back to the FLB in one piece.

  Headquarters, ADF Special Operation Command, Near Bungendore, Australia—February, the Third Year

  Just hours after emplacing the Claymore mines in the headquarters building at Robertson Barracks, Samantha Kyle had packed her SUV and joined the stream of refugees heading south. She got to Canberra as quickly as she could and then drove twenty miles east to Bungendore. After spending just eight hours in a motel, she drove seven miles south to Headquarters Joint Operations Command (HQJOC), the ADF’s top operational headquarters. Arriving at seven thirty A.M., she found that her ADF Disabled ID card and a warm smile got her past the main gate of the General John Baker Complex to the HQJOC building. The one-story glass-fronted building looked more like a modern college classroom building than it did a military headquarters. She was directed to the desk of a secretary in the office of the deputy commander. After explaining why she was there, Samantha was immediately referred to the Special Operations Command (SOCOMD), which was also headquartered in the same base complex. “They’re the ones who handle all of the Stay Behind issues,” she was told. Samantha looked displeased until the secretary said, “No worries. I’ll give you directions and I’ll phone ahead.”

  Once at the SOCOMD headquarters, an armed SAS trooper escorted Samantha to the commander’s office. There, she was met by the commanding general’s aide-de-camp. A first lieutenant with deep-red hair, he sat at a surprisingly Spartan steel desk. His beige SAS beret was tucked into the left epaulet of his MultiCam shirt. The doorway behind him had a doorplate stenciled SOCAUST, which she knew stood for Special Operations Commander, Australia. Samantha explained that she had been involved with the Darwin Stay Behinds and that she needed to brief the commanding officer. The lieutenant explained, “The general will be in late today. On Wednesday mornings he does his longest run of the week. He should be here at 0815.” He gestured to a nearby chair for her to wait.

  The lieutenant did his best to pry some more information out of her, but Samantha clammed up, saying, “I’m not certain you have a need to know.” The lieutenant seemed nonplussed and quickly transitioned to chatting up Samantha. Most of their conversation was about crocodiles and beaches.

  The commander arrived at 0814 wearing MultiCams and a beret. He immediately went into his office, with his aide following close behind. Three minutes later the lieutenant emerged from the inner office and gave Samantha a thumbs-up, holding the door open for her.

  The aide shut the door from the outside to give them privacy. Samantha was nervous. This was the first time she’d ever spoken to a general officer. Major General Rex Raymond was near sixty years old but still lean and fit. He had a pencil-thin mustache, short-cropped gray hair, and a deep tan. The walls of his office were lined with photos and memorabilia.

  After brief introductions, Samantha haltingly described the preparations being made with the Darwin area Stay Behinds. Then she explained her civilian work in home remote-control systems and how she had just wired the headquarters at Robertson Barracks.

  General Raymond laughed. “That’s simply brilliant. I’ll give you full marks for that.”

  Emboldened by the general’s response, Samantha pressed on. “So now I want to wire some more Claymores in the control tower at the Amberly Air Force Base.”

  The general laughed again, and said, “You don’t bandy about, do you?”

  Without giving Samantha a chance to respond, he said, “I don’t think the Indos will ever advance down the east coast far enough to threaten Amberly. Our ASIO liaison and all the top planners and analysts agree with that. The Indos have delusions of adequacy. Granted, they’ve got superior numbers, but they don’t have the nakas for a big stand-up fight, and that is what they’ll get if they t
ry to advance south of Townsville.”

  He hesitated for a moment and then said, “I do like your idea, but it is far more likely to be put to good use if you emplace Claymores in the control tower at Townsville. I can send you up there with a couple of my troopers and a few Claymores, but you’ll have to convince the civil air authorities that stray RF from their radios or radars isn’t going to set off your blasting caps prematurely. That would be most unpleasant.”

  41

  DENIAL

  “The more I learn about people and society the more I love guns and explosives. Guns and explosives are more understandable, more predictable, and less hazardous.”

  —Joe Huffman, in his blog The View from North Central Idaho

  Darwin, Northern Australia—March, the Third Year

  Four days after Chuck Nolan returned to Site G, an Indonesian patrol discovered Site M, the McKenzie farm.

  The patrol consisted of six Indonesian Army (TNI-AD) troopers on green-painted Kawasaki 275-cc off-road motorcycles. They had been tasked with following every road and track in their operational area to search for any signs of resistance, and for any materiel that could be exploited. That day they had already used their bolt cutters to cut the locks on more than twenty gates on the Adelaide River Road.

  Although the McKenzie farm was hidden by hills, a pair of the cycle troops found it simply by following the road. The cycle scouts rode up to the farm house with nonchalance. The farm looked abandoned and no vehicles were visible. Their eyes were drawn to the big riding arena building, so it was where they started their search. It was also where it ended.

  The younger of the two troopers slid back the big door of the arena and his eyes grew wide as saucers. Inside were enormous piles of supplies on pallets and more than a dozen Australian Army vehicles and civilian trucks parked in a herringbone pattern, nose out. There were eight rifles pointed at him. An Australian sergeant who had combat experience in East Timor shouted, “Opgeven!” the Dutch word for surrender. Rather than surrendering, the soldier grabbed the MP5 submachine gun that was slung across his back and spun it around to fire.

  He went down in a fusillade of bullets. The Indonesian managed to fire only one short burst into the ground before a hit to his upper spine caused him to lose control of his grip. A few moments later, a second burst of fire killed the other TNI-AD trooper.

  One of Site M’s outlying sentries reported that other Indo troops had heard the shooting and could be seen radioing in a report. Realizing that Indonesian aircraft might respond in just a few minutes, or ground troops might arrive in less than an hour, the lieutenant commanding Site M wisely ordered an immediate evacuation and destruction of all of the FLB’s stored supplies.

  In just five minutes all of the fuse igniters had been pulled. The site’s entire complement of vehicles headed out individually to a predesignated rally point that was fifty-five miles to the south. From there, they would convoy to Alice Springs.

  Within a few minutes of their evacuation, the farmhouse was fully engulfed in flames—accelerated by ten gallons of gasoline. The explosions of the fuel blivets and stacks of mortar ammunition began another eight minutes later. The explosions and resulting smoke could be seen and heard for miles.

  The vehicles headed south quickly, each following a preplotted GPS route. This circuitous route used all secondary roads until they were south of Katherine, in the hopes of avoiding contact with Indo-Malaysian forces. For the first fourteen hours, the convoy stopped only to refuel, using their Mack MC3 diesel tanker truck. They jokingly called this camouflage-painted turbocharged diesel nine-ton truck their Mad Max 2 Tanker.

  At near midnight they reached the Ti Tree Airport, which was just inside of friendly lines. Ti Tree was an old cattle station town. A RAAF and RAAAF contingent at the airport were there to greet them and to direct them to a vehicle dispersal area. The airport had already been bombed once and was under sporadic observation by Indonesian drones, so it was not considered safe to leave the vehicles near the airstrip or to park in a regular pattern.

  After six hours of sleep, they resumed their convoy to Alice Springs. In all, the drive was eight hundred miles, and they covered most of that in the first day. Once they reached Alice Springs the following day, the officer in charge made inquiries with his brigade commander via the RAAF’s satellite phone. Ironically, he was ordered to set up a new FLB in the bush at a water bore three miles east of Ti Tree Airport. This was less than one and a half miles beyond where his unit had bivouacked the night before. They spent the afternoon shifting supplies, refueling all of their vehicles, and refilling the tanker.

  By the next evening they were establishing the new Ti Tree FLB on Anmatyerre aboriginal land. His men were exhausted by the time they had the camouflage nets suspended above all of the vehicles. The lieutenant had thought it was important to do so before dawn. Some of the men grumbled about this, but they stopped complaining when they heard the sound of RAAF machine gunners shooting at a Wulung drone as it passed overhead.

  The dusty Ti Tree FLB was not nearly as comfortable as Site M, but it would be their home for the next three weeks.

  42

  A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE

  “When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.”

  —Chief Aupumut, Mohican, 1725

  Near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia—March, the Third Year

  Soon after their invasion of Australia began, the Indonesians started to shuttle fighter aircraft and fighter-bombers to airfields in northern Australia. Because they lacked aircraft carriers, this necessitated flying with minimal armaments and carrying drop tanks. Ordnance for the planes all had to come to Australia, so the planes had only limited operational capability with a low operational tempo, allowing just two sorties per day.

  When war with Indonesia began to look likely, a Civilian Auxiliary Australian Air Force (CAAAF) was created almost spontaneously. Most of the volunteers were retirees who owned their own light planes. The CAAAF—also jokingly known as the Old Farts’ Australian Air Force (OFAAF)—had two distinct cadres of members: those who had family obligations, and those without. The latter formed the nucleus of the organization. Many of them were self-designated as “too old or too sick to care” and volunteered for the riskiest missions. These were mostly “teaser” flights aimed at getting the Indonesian Air Force to scramble their fighter planes. The goal was to flush the Indonesian fighters out of their hardened revetments so they could then be shot down by any of the dozens of Stinger Stay Behind teams that were deployed along the northern Australian coast. Since the Indonesians had more operational aircraft than the RAAF, it was essential that they be destroyed either on the ground or as they were taking off or landing. Everyone realized that if their air superiority were allowed to continue, the Indo planes would make it very costly for Australian Army forces to maneuver. Only with freedom of maneuver would they be able to counter the Indo-Malaysian advances.

  One much-publicized septuagenarian couple in the CAAAF was Edward and Paula Hadley from Alice Springs. Edward Hadley was a retired banker. Before they left on their final flight, Mr. Hadley told a reporter from The Australian, “When you’re seventy-three and have been diagnosed with Stage Three pancreatic cancer, you can be a lot more fearless than a healthy twenty-something who has a wife and kids.”

  They day before they left, they visited their son, who agreed to take charge of their mixed-breed Bitzer dog, Max. When they left Max and his leash and food bowl, their son realized they weren’t coming back.

  Mr. Hadley was flying his Turbo Mooney 231, which he had owned and meticulously maintained for twenty-five years. His wife was flying a donated twenty-three-year-old Cessna 172. The Hadleys spent their last night before the
fateful mission at an abandoned cattle station near Stapleton. Like many other stations with its own airstrip and AVGAS fuel tanks, the owners had willingly donated their use to the CAAAF.

  At just after eight A.M. the next morning, the Hadleys came into Darwin at treetop level. Two Indonesian F-16 fighters were scrambled in response, taking off side by side. The Indo pilots foolishly left their flare dispensers turned off. Before the jet fighters could turn toward the two light planes, they were downed in rapid succession by Stinger POST missiles while still less than eight hundred feet off the ground. Five minutes later, after the Hadleys had circled the Darwin Airport several times, they lined up their planes’ noses toward the military ramp at the south side of the airfield. Another Indonesian fighter—an F-5—taxied out of its revetment. The Hadleys’ two planes dropped their flaps and angled toward it, making a well-calculated approach at ninety miles per hour just off the deck. In rapid succession, they slammed the Mooney and the Cessna into the F-5, spraying wreckage across the taxiway and setting all three planes ablaze.

  —

  In the preceding year and a half, most of the Australian Army had been tied down with quelling civil disturbances in major cities on the southeastern coast. A limited call-up of the Australian Army Standby Reserve had only been partially successful, given the chronic fuel shortages and general chaos in the cities.

  Before the Crunch, Indonesia had about 235,000 men under arms, including one armored cavalry brigade and fourteen infantry brigades. These brigades included ninety infantry battalions, one parachute battalion, nine artillery battalions, eleven antiaircraft battalion, nine engineer battalions, one independent tank battalion, seven independent armored cavalry battalions, and four independent para-commando battalions.

  After some reshuffling three of Malaysia’s four army divisions were put under the operational control of Indonesia, bringing with them the majority of the Malaysian army’s one thousand armored vehicles.