Inside the SAS - Jamie Pennell on Fighting the Taliban & Willie Apiata Winning Victoria Cross

Trigger warning.

I flew up to Auckland, sat down for this interview in studio with Serviceman Jay. I want you to know that you're going to be sitting in on a very intimate conversation around the untold story of a New Zealand SAS soldier. Not any soldier, but Jamie Pinnell. He received New Zealand Gallantry star for what he did on the battlefield. You're going to be blown away by what we talk about. Some of what's being told in this interview you will not find anywhere else. I hope you enjoy it. There's a lot of lessons in here about life, about resilience, about commitment, about leadership and about gratitude. Please enjoy the show. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ. Jamie, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I'm so glad to have you. Yes, it's been a wee while. I've been waiting for this. I've heard about you for a long time now. I've got a huge amount of admiration for you.

Recently.

You let me into your world through your book, Serviceman J. Unbelievable. As I said to you earlier, I bought it Monday morning and I finished up by Tuesday, late afternoon. Riveting book. Could not put it down. I felt like I was in your world for a bit and I'm really honored that you're going to let us all into your world over the next hour or so to what your experiences were, how you see the world, things have impacted you and what you're doing now moving forward. So SAS for me, childhood dream, growing up in Northern Ireland, I really held him in very high regard. I read all the books as a kid and, you know, never ended up going there. So I was able to experience that in your book and be a. Be a part of it. But for you, why the sas? What was the journey to getting into the sas?

Interesting, because if we go back to when I left the army, the first thing I did. Well, probably, yeah. One of the first things I did was I wanted to look back in my admin records to see where I'd come from and where I was now. And your admin records, you know, they're all hard copies, some of them E copies, but majority of them hard copy from back in the day. You know, I joined in the 90s when I didn't have computers or maybe we had a Macintosh 64 or something like that. So I looked all the way back to my. Basically my recruiting papers and, you know, you fill out a whole lot of information about yourself and Then the last sort of question is what are your aspirations in the army? Or what are your aspirations in the army? Is was basically what I said and I had just four words to join the SAS. Now I wrote that at 17 and a half I think it was, and I mean we lived out in West Auckland and I knew the SAS were out at Hobsonville and that and I knew there was special unit but that's about all I knew about it. So don't ask me why I put that in there. But clearly I was sort of intrinsically motivated to go into the se. So it was only, it took about two years before the recruiters came back to me and I said it before, you know, I had an hour to decide to go into the army.

So they ring you up and say hey, in an hour you need to have an answer.

Pretty much, yeah. Just what, what had happened was it lost about a platoon worth of, of recruits which is about 30 people off the, the current basic training and they needed to fill that ASAP because they'd been, I think they've been running for a week and a half. So they want to fill that, fill the gaps pretty quick. So he just rang me and said hey, told me all that information and said listen, you've got an hour to decide. That's all I can give you. I'll ring you back in an hour. You're either going to go or you're not. And so, you know, typical 19 year old called Mum, Mum, you know, what do I do? She said it's going to fall back on your shoulders. It's a life decision, you need to make that. So he rang me back in an hour and I said yes, took a couple of days to get out, get the gears together with a gearless that they sent us and then it was on in the van and down to Waru, you know, snowing, middle of winter, getting yelled at by the instructors and then that kind of was the integration like didn't even have time to think about it. You know, there's no slow process where I'm doing my fitness testing, going to recruit evening, recruitment evenings and figuring out what's going on. It was just straight in there, blind and single swim, you know, essentially. So probably, probably set me up for success later on in life. So yeah, finished recruitment, your recruit training. I think the, in 1994, did my core training and completed that around about April 95 and then I did my first selection course in 1996. So it was a year after I'd essentially joined the army because the core training is your last piece of training before you're really, you know, at a basic level, a soldier operating within your unit.

That's quite quick in terms of getting to selection at.

Very quick for a young fellow. Yeah. Straight away now.

I didn't really get that preparation time and as I've said in the book, made the mistake of, you know, going out to town with my mates coming back and continued on drinking in the barracks. And you're not allowed to drink in the barracks in the army and there's a big punishment for that, which I'll go into. But we had the radio up loud. We've got regimental police. They heard that we had the radio up loud because they're not too far away from the barracks. They came down and suddenly there's a bang on the door and the. The orderly sergeant's telling us to. To get out. We turn the radio off, thinking that's what's, you know, that's going to turn him away. Wasn't. Didn't turn him away. He still banged on the door. And I said, I'll go out the window. So I turned around, opened the curtains and the orderly corporal standing there saying, get out, open the door. And so. So, yeah, we opened the door and he just said, right, all of you guys are on charge. You'll be in front of the commanding officer next week. So we all got 28 days CB and that was about, I don't know, probably four weeks or five weeks before selection was starting. So the timing was, you know, not great for me and, you know, I could have basically.

Turned my application around, but I decided that, you know, I'd. I'll make good on it and do as much training as I possibly could past the point of, you know.

Serving out my punishment. Essentially 28 days of, you know, running around and being mucked around by the army between the hours of, I think it's 5 o' clock in the morning to 11 o' clock at night and being yelled at and so on and so forth. So you don't really have any spare time to do anything other than whatever they want you to do. So, yeah, that put a little bit of a spanner in the works in terms of training. And then, yeah, went to selection and got through till halfway. So I got halfway through the jerry cans and, yeah, I just didn't have the. Didn't have the strength, essentially, you know, and I'm surprised I got that far. So went back down to Battalion and then a bit of a fear of failure, a fear of failure is interesting. It'll either sink you or you'll use it as a platform to spring off on. I felt that much shame of going back down to the battalion and, and people saying to me, yeah, I knew you weren't going to pass that. That pushed me into doing the selection course the following year in 1994. 7. Sorry.

And yeah, and then I passed that. And yeah, that's all she wrote.

Incredible. So I want to talk about that fear you went for. The selection, didn't get through. You talked about shame. And for a lot of people, they carry shame and it's not a thing they carry for a minute. Often they carry it for a long time. What made it possible for you to push through in a positive way and going, I'm going to take that feeling and I'm going to get after it.

Yeah. So.

At that point in my life, it was about proving myself to myself and also foolishly, which I found out later, myself to others, you know, but whatever gets you there, you know, you, you, you, you grab on to whatever fire you need to to push past or achieve whatever you need to achieve. And so I use those two things, proving myself to myself and myself to others to go back there and either pass or die, essentially. That was my, that was my mentality going up there.

So, yeah, and pass rate is very, very low. So I've got a few friends have been through Navy SEAL training and again, I look at their pass rate, it's ridiculously low. And I assume sas.

Yeah, really low.

Yeah, yeah, small numbers. So what was training like, what a selection look like? The Navy sales have published so much that we all kind of understand buds, but the SAS training, most of us haven't had an inside look. What are you doing? How intense is it?

Yeah, it's pretty intense. I've had the luxury, or fortunately or unfortunately, I've had the luxury or not, of having done the New Zealand SA selection and the, and part of the British SAE selection as well. So the New Zealand SAE selection in general, what we're trying to do is we're trying to see you at the highest function of an SAE soldier. Carrying heavy weight on your back by day and night, sleep and food deprived, checkpoint to checkpoint, and no positive or negative motivation because essentially we want to see you motivating yourself, you know, that intrinsic motivation, regardless of what's happening out there, any season, weather or terrain, you know, if there's a weather system going across New Zealand while you're doing selection, don't care, you know, you still got to go where we need you to go. So the first day is about basically taking away a lot of the energy that you'd have on day one. Having had a full breakfast on that first day. Past that point, we're managing your food. So we do all the fitness tests, plus one other activity on that first day to really drain you of all your sort of residual or your baseline energy.

Dinner that night is very meager.

Basically you'll get a, you know, a little, maybe a third of a cup of watered down soup and maybe a bread, piece of bread or maybe two pieces of bread. Just depends on how nice the deer staff are for dinner. And we make sure you're isolated so you're not sitting there in a group talking to each other and that kind of thing. Again, we keep you in lines, but spaced apart so you can't talk to anyone. And you're basically isolated by yourself with your thoughts. So you have your food, go up, grab your food, come back, eat it, don't look or talk to anyone and do what you've got to do. So we maintain control at all times. You get a small amount of sleep overnight and then for the next three days you do open country navigation and that the distances vary between 30 and 50k a day.

But you're rocking, you're not just walking, just with shorts and tees.

Yeah. You got to run. Yeah. I mean, you've got to move very, very fast. Yeah, yeah. And if you get to the end of that, then you. The barrier test, which is the jerry can carry, and essentially what that is, is you're broken down into, say if you've got a group of five, you have six jerry cans which weigh 20kgs each, you're full of water. So the guy at the front will carry two for a period of time and everyone else will carry one. And you do that for 20 hours with a pack on your back, your webbing, your rifle, weighing about 35 kgs. And yeah, you just keep going until they say stop. So during the day, not too bad.

I guess, if you can call it that. Really not too bad. Yeah, yeah, it is pretty, pretty heavy going physically. But getting into the night, whoever's left, that's when it starts kicking in because obviously you're starting to get into your circadian rhythms. You know, you want to go to sleep, you're tired anyway. You know, you've just done four days plus 10 hours of, you know, walking with jerry cans. Your body starts getting into hallucination mode and that's when you're really starting to fight your mind, which is always trying to tell you where it would rather be. On the couch, having a cup of tea, watching a movie, eating McDonald's. You know, all those things are nice things, just get us into it, get us get back to the comfort zone. Like, what are you doing? And so as long as you can recognize that you don't worry about it too much. So for me, I just counted down the hours going down into the morning and then when the sun came up, I was like, oh man, I'm still here. You know, and this is off the back of obviously 1996, where I only made it halfway. So. So yeah, get to the end of that and then.

You'Ll line up on the road and you have to stay awake. A truck will come down at a certain point of in time and everyone has to get on it and it's not going to stop, it's just going to slowly roll down the road and you got to get on it. So it's a bit of a team, team exercise, getting everyone on the truck because if you don't make the truck, then that's it, you'll get turned away.

Past that, you'll get into the next activity, which is two days of close country navigation, same distances and then essentially the last activity is a 60 kilometer route march out on the road. No map, no watch, they just tell you which direction to walk. You walk there, you get to a checkpoint, work to the next one. So you, you don't actually know where you are or how far you've got to go. So again, once you get into the night.

Things start happening to you in terms of hallucination and you see silver balls speeding off down the road. I kept on seeing a fluorescent brain in my vision for some reason and you're pretty much sore across your entire body. It's fairly emotional for most people past that point. Your feet are swollen, you've got blisters everywhere. You're just a wreck, basically a wreck yourself. And I don't. Yeah, it's one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that you never want to replicate twice. It's very difficult. Although some people have gone through the process twice fully for whatever reason. And.

Yeah, and then it's a massive achievement to get to the end of that.

Kind of. Only Tier one Special forces have the, have a good understanding of how to really, really break you down and bring the right people into the, into their units. I mean, you know, you don't realize it when you're on selection, doing selection but when you get out and you start getting out on operations and doing training, you realize that it's perfectly aligned to how we operate on the ground because some of the activities we do, you know, you see, occur. And we need to know that, you know, off the back of selection, it's just telling us that you'll just keep going no matter what, achieve the mission. That's all we're doing. We're checking the, checking the resilience. And then we do skill and assimilation on the cycle of training.

And this idea like when I look at that is there's a lot of psychological challenges here. Physical, yes, you've got to be physically tough, strong, lots of stamina. But it sounds like the difference that kind of separates the good from the great is the ability to psychologically sustain this training. Can you prepare for that or are there certain people that just have psychological buildup or a psychological kind of framework that allows them to get through?

Yeah, I've thought about this. I don't think you can. You can be the fittest person in the world and you'll still fail. And we see it all the time. You get the smallest guys, you know, they might be five foot three, they're carrying half their body weight in the back or you know, know and they, you know, cream it, just absolutely smash it out of the park. And then you get guys that are built, they're strong, high perform, high performing soldiers. All the reports show that they're amazing squared away fit, all the rest of it. So you throw them in there two days gone. So yeah, hard to, hard to really determine who will, who will get in there and who won't.

But again it's, yeah, it's, you know, again we go back to what, what is driving you? What's your motivation? For me, I wasn't looking. Although I was ticking off the activities day by day in my mind, my visualization was.

The march out parade with my bell and beret. That was my focus. So I had, my vision was all the way out there. So this was just, this was really just a stepping stone to get to there. So I had to get this done first. I knew I could get halfway and then, you know, once I'd done the training the next year I knew I could pass it. So I was pretty confident myself. And again, as I said in the book, the only way I was going to come off is either be pulled off by the staff, seriously injured or dead. Unreal.

The commitment to the vision, I guess, starting with the end in mind. So how did it Feel when you realized, I've done it, I've passed second time through. I got it.

Yeah, it was amazing. Although it's hard to feel that way when you're totally destroyed.

But, but the driver, the driver that took us back, they had a 24 hour McDonald's at Hobsonville, I think it was, and he, he was, he was a good guy and he basically had all our wallets and so he said, here you go boys, if you want to grab some maccas, I'll, I'll go buy it for you. So that was, that was our celebratory meal. I love it. But you know, you go to sleep and you get you X amount of hours of sleep before you have to front the commanding officer who ultimately will tell you if you're passed or failed, depending on what's going on. Because you do your site testing, profiling, get interviewed, all that kind of stuff. And so while you're on selection, doing the physical part, they're deciding whether or not you are psychologically fit.

So you could literally get through the physical part.

Yep. And I've seen it numerous times where they'll get all the way through, like really strong guys get to the end and then you'll just, they'll just say, hey, you're not really ready Now. I saw one person on the selection course.

That, this was before I did selection that actually came back to the battalion and.

And I thought to myself, how, how does that work, you know, because this guy's fully squared away and all the rest of it. And it wasn't until I'd seen him on operations that I realized that psychological profiling and making sure that that's part of the selection process was absolutely necessary. Yep.

Because it's dangerous for the individual and for the team.

100. Yeah, yeah, it just, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's warranted and required and I'm sure they're doing it in other special forces units around the world. I'm too sure the seal's doing it or not.

But yeah, I think the Brits, the Brits weren't doing it for a period of time. And we're not too sure what the Australians do, but I'm sure they've sort of lined themselves up. But I definitely think it's essential in the environment that we're expected to operate in behind enemy lines, long periods of time, indefinite, definite period of time, to be honest, and been able to maintain that sort of mental clarity and stability. Yeah, crucial.

Life or death.

100%. Yeah. Yeah, regardless of what you're seeing or doing, you know. Yeah, of course.

And you get in and you graduate and then it's. You're. You're here in New Zealand. How long is it before you get deployed?

So I, Yeah, so I did cycle in 98, the end of 98, we were badged. And then in 1999, East Timor kicked off. So unfortunately we were holding the response for. I think it was Chogham. Chogham was happening in Auckland. It was either Chogham or apec. One of those two might have been apec. So we were. The counter terrorist team at the time, were maintaining that response and a squadron were doing. Were holding the global response. And so as soon as the balloon went up for East Timor, a squadron deployed and they were deploying for nine months and their families didn't have time to say goodbye to their families, so basically just grabbed their gears and left. And we told their families retrospectively, they. They're away for an indefinite period, which wasn't great. And so I joined the regiment to go on operations and that's what my focus was, to go on operations and really prove myself. And as a young fella, you know, I thought, well, this is what I came here to do. And now a squadron is going to East Timor and so if I can't get operations here, when I'm going to, where am I going to go get operations? And the British was where I was going to go get operations. So we ended up leaving.

How did that go down with your New Zealand SAs, say officers and people?

You were not great. Yeah, not great. And again, I was a young fella and, you know, didn't have that maturity to see the bigger picture and how things sort of worked. And I knocked heads with my OC going out the door for a number of different reasons, but. But, yeah, it didn't really bode well with them. So I left anyway. I was fully committed to passing, so I went over there, joined 21 SAECL detachment and just started preparing for the.

Summer selection, I think it was. We were going for British summer and yeah, went through that process. There's. The selection course is similar, but. Similar, but different. They move a lot quicker than we do and that and. But essentially the same thing. You know, they're looking at. Looking at you at the highest function again. And yeah, it's. Yeah, it's just interesting. There's some interesting differences here. Pass through endurance, which was the Hills phase, that was. Feels pretty good. I sort of felt a little bit better at the end But I was still wrecked, you know, as I was. I felt the same way. I did at the back end of New Zealand City selection and then went and did the jungle phase, did a whole lot of. Trained up some skill sets and then went to Brunei, did the jungle phase, got to the end of that and then I decided to come home. I had some issues back home, personal issues, so I came back and then one of the things I was told when I came back to New Zealand was don't. If you're going to ring anyone.

If you're not going to ring it, just don't ring your oc.

Ring anyone, ring anyone but your oc. And. And I said, okay, yeah, I'll try and do that. No one else answered their phone. He probably, yeah, he probably sent it for them not to answer the phone. So I was going to ring him and I rang him. He said, oh, Jamie, and what can I do for you? He knew, he knew, he knew I was back. And I said, I was just wondering, was wondering what the deal is about coming back to regimen. He said, it's all right, I'll pass you on to. To see him at the time. So I had to go back in for an interview and essentially, firstly, they're going to make me do another selection course. Wow. Yeah. To see what, the full course? Yeah, yeah, firstly. And then said, well, we're not going to do that because you've just done a selection course and you've done New Zealand selection course. So it's doesn't really make any sense. So they said you'd have to go down to Battalion free if you want to come back. You're going to go down to Battalion for a year, sort of prove to us that you really want to be here again. So keep your nose clean and then you can go down there and. And then come back in 2000 and end of 2001, I think it was. So I was pretty deflated.

Went back home and then thought, you know what, I might as well give it a miss and maybe I'll join the police or do something like that. Got a phone call from a senior member and I. And I don't name names, his name's Peter in the book. But he said for me to come around to his house and.

Just have a quick chat about things. And this was in the weekend and he didn't have to do this, you know what I mean? I was just a young trooper at the time. And so I went around and he said, hey, what are you going to do? I said, I'm probably going to get out. He said, why is that? I said, well, because I don't want to go back down to Battalion free. I'm just going to sort of, you know, I'll see if I can get into the police and, and see what happens past that point, maybe, you know, join the STG or whatever. And he said, have you. Do you know what the battalion's doing next year? And I said no. And he said, well, they're going to East Timor for six months, so why don't you go down there, the tempo will be lower, go have some fun, get the operational bug out of your system and then come back and just keep your nose clean. And again, he didn't have to do this and I'm glad he did because literally he caught me.

As things happen. Yeah, that's right, if you're listening. So he caught me and I started driving back and then I said to my partner at the time, what do you reckon? I mean, I'm going to be away for 12 months. She said, you know, you do what you got to do. So I went back down there and yeah, I actually had a great time. The beauty about going back down to Your, down to 1st Battalion in particular is that.

The boys just remain the same. Like when you come back, it's just like you never left, you know what I mean? And so we just got back into the same rhythm. Started pre deployment training for East Timor and deployed. Pretty benign operation. Just doing, doing a lot of patrolling in that, but it was just good to get out on the ground, see how that, that sort of, you know, coalition type environment works under the UN, UN umbrella. And yeah, that was, yeah, 2001, got to the end of 2001, they said, yep, you can come back. And then at that time, obviously, you know, when I was in East Team, I remember sitting at lunch and watching the planes going into the World Trade center, which obviously kicked everything off. And then, you know, as while we're in Timor, I knew that the unit had deployed and so when I got back we had the second rotation going in and there was a third rotation that would be the last rotation that we'd put through. And so they brought everyone into the, into the meeting room and hobby there and called out everyone's names who were going on the trip and, and I thought, yeah, I'm definitely going to go on this trip. And they decided, well, they called Iran's name but mine. And so I was, that day was a bit of a kick to the stomach. So I walked back down to the battalion. Back down to the. Back down to battalion. Yeah, that's probably where I was going to go. Yeah, I walked back down to the barracks and I sat on my room. I was like, oh, man, the writing's on the wall. You know, I. Obviously, a year in battalion hasn't really. Doesn't really mean anything anyway, you know what I mean? I've done my penance. You know, why I've been left on the list any. So he sent Sam, who actually called out the name. So it was a guy I had the interview with coming back. He told me I had to go back down to battalion. Sent a guy down. He said, oh, Sam wants to talk to you. I said, oh, are you okay? So I went back up there, and he said, where were you? And I said, I was down the barracks. And he said, why are you down there? And I said, oh, because he didn't call my name to go on this trip. So I'm just wondering what I'm going to do by this point. And he went, oh, yeah, it's pretty obvious by the trench that you dug in the ground with your bottom lip. And, yeah, and so, yeah, he said, you're going. And. And he looked at me and he said, human humility. And that's one of our tenants. And so he's just wording me up and just keeping me humble. I went, yep, okay, fair enough. So I just basically zipped up a mouth deployed. And I had a lot to prove, I think, on that particular tour in front of everyone, you know, and seeing how it's going to go. And so we had a pretty good tour. And, yeah, started from there.

Humor and humility.

I love that. Yeah, that's the.

The two values that you guys really carry through thick and thin.

100%. Yeah, it's. I mean, it. It's every. And I mean, we'll get into it. I mean, even in the intercon when, you know, I was talking to Steve and Teller and sort of brought that up. Yeah, it just. It. It takes the edge off things. You know what I mean? It's. It means that in that particular context, it also means something when we're, you know, sitting, you know, huddled together at night, wet and cold, you know, know, in the middle of worry, doing training and stuff like that. You know, we just. We always have a bit of a laugh and. And look at each other about how tired we are, you know, and sort of eating each other on. So it's. I mean, these tenants were, you know, developed in 1942. They just stand the test of time.

You know, so it's interesting when I think of professional athletes, so sometimes I work with athletes that are the best at what they do and I think, okay, they've got mental fortitude, they've got resilience. And I go, I wonder how similar that is to elite forces, special forces. I personally think it's very different in terms of context, environment. So, yeah, they're very high performers. Yes, they've got a lot of resilience, they've got mental fortitude. But what do you think separates professional, amazing elite athletes from special forces?

The biggest, clearest difference between special forces soldiers around the world and high performance athletes is essentially.

They perform in the best conditions. You know, they have all the hydration, drinks, the food, the preparation, the massages, the recovery. We have to operate in the worst conditions, you know, I mean, food is sleep deprived always. It's always like that, you know, on operations, if you think it isn't, it's exactly what it's like all the time. Need to get up in the middle of night, you got to perform and you know, you're talking about, you know, when you're sleeping, food deprived, you know.

IDing friend from foe, you know what I mean? Precision shooting, information, correct information going left rather than going right, you know what I mean? And leading your teams as well. So that's the biggest thing. And again, this is why selection is perfectly designed for that. And that's the person we're getting, the person that is completely destroyed but can still retain information, still do the job, can, you know, navigate from point to point, high visibility, you know, high visibility areas, low visibility areas and just keep going, you know what I mean? That's performance, that's resilience, you know what I mean? That's you with your own thoughts. You don't need to be positively motivated by someone. Come on, keep going. That's the difference as well. With high performance athletes or, you know, being yelled at, just. Yeah, we don't give any of that, you know, you either do it or you don't because, you know, when we're, when those small teams, we again, we need to be able to operate indefinitely behind enemy lines and that's high stress and high stakes.

Yeah, so there's a. Yeah, there's some significant differences here. These are very different human beings. And we'll only know whether or not you can exist in the environment when you pass through the gates. Yeah, yep.

The chosen few.

Right, that's it. Yep.

Denal Now 9, 11 kicks off, things start to unfold after that, geopolitically, you end up in Afghanistan. So we all know our little stories and what the media tells us and maybe what we've read. But you lived it. So what was it like when you arrived there? What was the, the job? Because a lot of people said to me, James, SAS are born killers, they're there to kill. But the more I read and the more I have read a different thought and I, I picked it up in your book as well. You're there to save lives, you're there to help others. Your mission is not to kill. Yeah, it's to save and help. So when you get to Afghanistan, what was the mission?

How did you feel? So initially for Special Forces, the mission was around find, fix and finish. So finding the enemy, fixing them down in a particular position and where they're located and then finishing them. And different forces did different things, but the.

The biggest one for Special Forces was around the find. So it was finding them, but then there was secondary primarily. Obviously you're out there to look for the Taliban and destroy them, but also, you know, we're out there looking for, you know, areas that you can put in airfields, you know, forward operating bases, you know, giving them ground truth, connecting with the local population as well. And this is where that kind of hearts and minds mentality that we've had since Malaya came to the fore.

And that and just gleaning information to get a better understanding of areas out there. We call it surfaces and gaps. You know what I mean? Gaps where you can move through and surfaces where you're getting a little bit of resistance. And then we sort of deal with that because obviously the Taliban were the biggest, you know, the biggest threat to us at that particular point in time. Although there's other terrorist groups that are operating Afghanistan as well. So yeah, was just down there doing that. So initially it was sort of foot mounted observation posts that the, that the unit were.

Employed for, but then it went to, so you'd be at a fixed point watching, watching an area. We did some work in Tora Bora, so we played a significant part in that. And then that went from, from doing that to mounting on vehicles. And now you can move and you can really get out, out into the countryside. Amazing countryside. You know, if Afghanistan ever sort of opens its borders and it's a safe place for people to travel, it's a phenomenal playground for rock climbers, base jumpers, extreme sports, you know, motocross, you know, the, whatever you want to do, racing, even losing yourself if you're that type of person. You probably just walk into Afghanistan and never come out. You know, you'll start integrating with, with the local population. The people in general are amazing. You know, the tribes that we connected with were pretty good. Not all the time, some of them are hostile, but that's what you're there to find out, you know, to just in case other forces come in, they're aware of it.

And that. And yeah, amazing place. So, yeah, we'd just go out there and do what we had to do. Would be out there anywhere between two to four weeks out on patrols getting that ground truth. And yeah, it was phenomenal. Phenomenal.

You're helping equip the local forces as well. So whenever you withdraw and allied forces withdraw, you're going to leave people in there that have skill sets that they can actually manage their own country. So how difficult was that to equip them, work with them, train them, trust them?

Yeah, it was quite difficult. So we had those two parts to our history. So we had, we did a number of tours. We were doing that long range patrolling, finding and you know, going out there and look and doing ground truth and basically, you know, giving our higher commanders more clarity on, on the, on the battlefield. And then the, we went away from that and so did all the other special forces. So once we understood the country and, and we had other forces establishing forces, forward operating bases and then maintaining that ground truth in their particular areas, then Special Forces were used for training and enabling foreign, the Afghan forces to do what you, what you're talking about, which is basically take over the security aspect of.

In Afghanistan. So yeah, it was difficult.

The money, we had a little bit of money. But New Zealand, you know, we're only a small country where.

Bound by how many taxpayers we have essentially, you know, about how much money and that we can sort of pour into it. So we only had a little bit of money to play with. Essentially the weapons and equipment came from the US they and maybe some other countries fit into that pool as well. But yeah, it was, it was very difficult. Initially we were mentoring the crisis response unit at the time and Kabul, and they were responsible for responding to spectacular attacks inside the city and also just, you know, high risk arrests within Kabul and the outlying provinces. We took over from the Norwegians. The Norwegians had been training them for a couple of years, two, three years, I think. And so basically we got a handover from them and then we sort of watched them for a good two to three weeks and started creating our training programs for them. So we're Just making sure we knew what we were looking at. And we're there basically conducting a needs assessment, you know, looking at what they could do, looking at what they couldn't do, and then developing the training programs to suit.

Quite bespoke, not a vanilla framework. Hey, this is what we do in New Zealand. This is how you're going to do it here. Opposite of that.

No, no, I mean, we knew what they needed, but it was just, we made sure we tailored it to them the way we got it.

Wrong.

Not wrong, but.

You know, our expectations were quite high. And so when we run a course, our baseline, our basic level was too high, you know what I mean? We had to lower our expectations. So that was probably the biggest learning point. And I ran myself into the ground within about four months trying to get them up to a basic standard. It's like, just relax, you know, Relax, man. We're in their country, it'll take as long as it takes. So, yeah, that was interesting. But yeah, they got up to speed. We had a pretty good cycle of training there for them. Every squadron got this, got the same training, nothing more, nothing less. So they, the CRU had three strike squadrons and then they had one covert surveillance squadron which was out there doing recon, essentially surveillance on the street or wherever in the rural areas. And then we had mentors across those four squadrons. So I was the mentor for D Squadron, the COVID Surveillance squadron. So I was there to develop their capability. And then we had, you know, three other badge members who were looking after the other three other strike squadrons. And we're basically, our training team was spread out between Camp Olympus, which was in the, just in the center of Kabul by the Green Zone there. And then we had Sarobi, which was a, a sort of a remote training camp out to the, out to the east, northeast, I think of the city, can't remember. And we had a bunch of guys down there that were basically just stayed down there and maintained the consistency of training rather than putting different people out there and changing it, you know, so we don't want any disparity between the train state of our squadrons. And we just started training them and we were there for seven months training them, and at the same time we're training them, we're also going out on operations. So we either know about the operation about to occur so we could prepare for it, but nine times out of ten they just gear up and leave. And we'd have to make sure we're ready to go. So it could be 3 o' clock in the morning and suddenly hear vehicles rolling out the gate. You get outside, talk to the operations officer and he said, oh yeah, they're going to a job, you know, in PD Police District 7 or whatever. And then you'd have to try and catch up after them. And why would they do that? Oh, because initially we went, this was initially they, they kind of, they weren't telling us anything because we hadn't formed that relationship.

Trust.

So we had to build trust. Yes, we had to build that trust. And that meant that, you know, we had to go out there and be the first person through the door as well, you know what I mean, to help them understand what it is they had to do. So we're essentially confirming what we did in training on operations, you know, and showing them how to do it. And that was very interesting, I bet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what engagement in terms of engaging with the enemy, when was your first major engagement in Kabul or in Afghanistan?

In Afghanistan it was the first tour we did on that first tour that I went into Afghanistan when we're doing long range patrols, mobility patrols. So we ended up doing a four week patrol, which was the longest patrol any.

Coalition force had done in theater up until that point. And it wasn't an area that they hadn't seen yet. So it was to the south of Herat. So we had, I think we had eight vehicles and we mounted on four or five Telums, which are like souped up J series Hercs, essentially. They've got all the, the Gucci kit on, on board. So we mounted on those. At the time I was the outrider commander, which meant that, you know, alongside the vehicles we had a couple of motorbikes out front which basically were there for route finding. So the convoy just kept driving. We just looked for the route where they needed to go. So you didn't want any, any stoppages or the, the, the convoy slowing down because it meant it take longer to get to where you needed to go. Of course, obviously any early warning and you know, triggering any enemy up ahead so you're kind of catching bullets before they do so they can do something about it.

Slightly high risk activity.

Slightly, yeah. But I enjoyed it because you get out, some people didn't really enjoy it. I mean, you're in the saddle. Long, long, long days, you know, 12 hour plus days and really cold and really hot weather. Really hot. Really cold and you know, pretty gnarly terrain. But you get really good at.

You know, that off road motorcycling pretty quick. You know, it's Kind of like a Enduro riders dream to be doing this. But you know, essentially right at the beginning we're, you know, on 250cc Kawasaki farm bikes is all we had at the time. That's all we had, you know, at the time. And you know, you just work with what you got. So in the second tour we, we had KTM 525s which completely different beats to you could do anything on those. Anyway, so we, we flew in on these talons. From Kandahar into Herat. We met by US Special forces and their partner force. They secured the airfield, got off the aircraft and then basically we moved inside there. We're sort of in the middle of their convoy. They started driving back up to Hirat on the main road and we sort of followed them behind them. Then we turned our lights off on command and then moved off into the night and they just kept going. And then we headed into our, started heading into our ao which is about two days out. It's a two day south.

And Phil for us and it was about, I don't know, a couple of hundred kilometers from the Iranian border. So it's quite close to the Iranian border. And they picked us up actually moving down there. We, they thought we're a larger force just because of our speed of movement. So one of the nights that we're down there, I think it might have been on the second night. We had to generally we'll just try and you know, stay out of, you know, stay away from populated areas. But you know, the ground dictated that we had to move past a village and so we just took the risk. As we approach a village, they started firing tracer up in the air which is essentially a bullet that lights up as you fire it out of the, out of the AK47s. A bunch of tracer went up into the. And all they're doing is just indicating to other sentries around the place that where that an enemy, someone's coming into the, into the, into their location to the area. And then another tracer went up and then one went over there. So they sort of triangulating our position.

How are you feeling at this point by the way? Sorry to interject.

Oh, good. Yeah, not too much.

No stress.

Nah, no worries here. I mean you kind of, you're just stress out when it's starting to come come at you, you know. So we, we knew we'd been pinged but it's not uncommon for them to have security on villages and, and to do that. We already knew how they operated you know, and that's why we didn't react because we're like, oh yeah, they're just letting everyone know we're in the area and they don't know who we are. So we rode past the village and then we sort of went out into like an open piece of ground and it was sort of a little bit sloping. And then we sort of stopped about 500 meters from where the village was and we just watched the convoy come in and we're all under NVG and all of our lights are all on IR so you can't see anything. It was quite dark. And then as the convoy was coming out the other side of the village, I just said, boom, boom, boom, boom. I had this heavy machine gun start firing and it was, would have been about 800 meters away. It was quite far out in the distance. And I said, oh yeah, shots fired. And then we're just sitting there and then all of a sudden these rounds just went straight over top of our head. And they're quite big rounds. And what we didn't know at the time was that we're actually being fired at by an anti aircraft gun. And they actually had two mounted on a wall. And you know, anti aircraft guns will sit flat, you know, and, and then the, the barrel will be able to move like that. So they had to, when they put it on the wall, they had to pitch it down so they could get a little bit of.

Which is not what it's designed for. It's designed for going up rather.

But they made it, they made it look like, you know, they made it do that so they could cover that piece of ground but they just didn't, they couldn't get the, the horizontal. So they're on for line. Like if they're on, if they're on for elevation. They would have knocked us off our bikes in that first volley. Like that's all I had to do. Like they were that obviously it appeared like they'd already.

You know, got the range for that particular piece of ground. Like they're good, you know. And so it went straight over. Whoa. And then I wasn't too sure what, you know, this is my first contact. I was supposed to say contact left, you know, but I was sitting, I think, oh, I think they're firing at us, you know, young fella, you know, sort it out. Yeah, yeah. And then we just got on our bikes and then they filed another one over top of us and I said let's get back to their firing at us. And, and we in Our bikes and just went full tilt back to the convoy. But as we're, as we're riding back, they basically upped the rate and they're firing the rounds straight over top of us. No, they still went on but they were, they were on for line. Like even when we're riding, they were on for line, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, they'd been, they'd use those weapons, you know, and they'd done some, they'd done some training I just couldn't believe, you know, because they just would have been winding it and firing. So they had a good lead on us. But it would have been interesting to be in the convoy watching the two motorbikes racing back with these rounds coming around here. They're probably like, stay where you are, you know. Yeah. So yeah, as we came back, the whole, the whole convoy swung around and they just got straight into it and it was a massive way to fire. So there was a bit of toing and froing in the initial contact but eventually we silenced those two weapon systems and then.

We, it appeared that we're being mortared, so you don't want to be mucking around when that happens. So we ended up breaking out to the right and, and moved away from the village and, and just sort of got in a position where we could sit in over overwatch but out of range and just, and just sat there and sort of re issued out our ammunition to bring everyone up to an even level. And then we disappeared into the night. So they didn't know who we were. They thought we were.

The opposing warlords men coming into their territory. There's like a demarcation line. And then they found out that we're coalition forces and so they wanted to come out and speak to us. And so the Americans said if you pass this line on the map then we're basically going to on you, so stay where you are. And so we, we were happy with that of course.

And we just carried on moving into our ao. But what we didn't realize is that they, what they did was they ended up sending some people after us anyway. They just seen a couple of cars, some Toyota Corollas to track us up just loosely so they couldn't see it because obviously the Americans were still keeping watch over that area to protect us. But you know, two Toyota Corollas is a general sort of panel life down there. So they sent a couple of those out there and yeah, basically tracked us up. So they were roughly about eight hours behind us. And yeah, we ended up Luping in a low point in this mountain range and we're looking out into the desert, it's a big desert plain. And we saw this Toyota Corolla come out in front of us and a couple of them been there but then it stopped and then there's another one sort of out further and that stopped and they were basically triangulating our tire marks and then they found out where we were, you know, up in the mountain range and they, they were pointing and then sort of came up. A couple of guys got out of the vehicle, walked up, they had weapons and then they sat in the dead ground or a piece of ground where you can't see them, like a dip in the ground and just sat there and they didn't come out. So, and then they sort of waved out like come over here. And so our commander went out there with, with a bunch of the boys and went down there and they had a meeting and they said that their commander's going to be here or the commander was out there I think in his little jeep and he wants to talk to us.

So our commander came back, made a plan and then essentially we just broke our sales and two had a fire support team and then we had another group that went down to hold the meeting space. So initially there was I think three vehicles down there. There was the jeep with the commander standing on top of it with his peak cap, looked like a Russian general standing there staunching us out and another couple of Toyota crawlers that was sort of either side of him. And we're sort of sitting there and our troop commander was giving us a bit of a battle brief about what was going to happen if things went down. And then I turned around and looked back in the direction that they've cut they'd come and I started seeing dust plumes on the, on the horizon. And it started with, you know, 1, then 2, 3 and then it went all the way up to about twice lost, counted about 25, 26 interesting dust plumes. And then these vehicles started turning up from behind us and they went around and they were technicals which are basically 4x4 vehicles with 12.7 heavy machine guns, like a 50 cal variant. And then they had a couple of big flatbed trucks with anti aircraft guns and they had about, I don't know how many men they had maybe 100, 150 AK47s and RPGs like they're well armed and they sort of sat on the other side of where we were. There's probably maybe like a 50 meter distance. And so our troop commander gave us basically our fire control orders if things kicked off, like who was going to take out what. And yeah, that's when things started ramping up a little bit.

Did your heart rate ramp up a little bit this day?

Ah, yeah, I thought, you know, I was wondering how we're going to get ourselves out of this because I was on my motorbike and I put it, I put it on an angle and I was looking at it and I thought my engine casing is not going to take that many 7.62 rounds coming into that. But that's the only cover I had. You know, we're out in the desert. So I was just thinking about how I was going to, how I was going to do that. So but they got off and they were just sort of smoking and started making chai and was sort of relaxed and just chatting and so, you know, the heart rate kind of went down. But we're sort of ready, ready for anything that was going to happen. Anyway. Our fire support team decided to come down a little bit further at the same time that was, that was happening. And then the two commanders met into the middle, met in the middle. And so the Afghan commander was sort of bumping chests with our commander and he was quite aggressive and he said, what are you guys doing here? You were, you killed two, two of our men. What were you doing coming past our village? And Sam was like, hey, calm down, calm down. You know.

You know, we don't want to be getting aggressive. We want to be talking here, not getting too agitated in the middle. When he just kept doing it, said Sam said, look, if you keep being aggressive then I'm going to call a big bird. I would over the top of us and he's going to, on your head. So basically talking about a, you know, like a plane's going to come over top and, and bomb you around. About that same time.

The fire support team, the lead vehicle, hit a landmine and that basically nearly pretty much removed half of one of the driver's legs. The gunner popped out the top went flying in the, the vehicle commander went flying as well. It was only an anti personnel mine, but it was, you know, 2 kgs is enough to rip that vehicle apart. So we looked around and I remember looking around at the vehicle and the strike and then in a split second I thought to myself, they've placed an IED on the, on the, on the road for us. When we're coming down, the guys that we've met with and we've triggered it, we've hit it. And that's the trigger for these guys to start opening up on us. So as I saw that, I just, you know, took up the pressure on the trigger, as I've said before, and sort of spun around ready to get into it. And they're all as confused as we were. At the same time that happened, an AC spec, the gunship had been called by our American.

Fat guy, Ford air controller, he could call an aircraft, came in from behind and basically with a 105 barrel pointing at them, did a low pass and then went around and they just said, and then the commander just said, oh, hey, I think you guys have got a lot on your plate. We're going to get out of here. And so they just got on the vehicles and, and disappeared. So yeah, that was, that was my intro to to Afghan.

Yeah, the guy that lost half his leg, he survived, which was very, very lucky. We had to basically sustain life for two hours because we're so far south and our medics did a really good job doing that. But he was very lucky to escape that one. But yeah, a bit of an eye opening experience and I mean that was within three, four days. My God, that occurred. And we did, we did other stuff as well. So it was a long four weeks.

And then when you say a tour like so you head over there, head to Afghanistan, you do your thing, you're in amongst it like it's full noise, but of a hellfire. And then you come back to New Zealand in between tours.

Yep.

Okay, so New Zealand. I arrived here from Northern Ireland in 2005. I thought this is paradise. This is a beautiful, idyllic, peaceful place. Now, coming from where you came from and coming back home, New Zealand, how was that? How did you feel? What's going on in your head?

Yeah, so.

Yeah, the biggest thing is that when you come back, you come back quite quickly. The integration into New Zealand, back into New Zealand is within a week. So within a week you're back. So you go on from being in standby and having these experiences and then coming straight back to New Zealand and you know, we're not coming in to a parade or anything like that. We leave under the COVID of darkness and we usually arrive under the COVID of darkness and it's not told to the public about when we're coming and when we're going. And so you get on the buses, there's no fanfare or anything. You go back to camp, get picked up by families and you leave. Now it's a bit of a dream for a long period of time because you're still trying to remove yourself from that. That particular experience. And then. And then, you know, shifting your focus from needing to have security around you, a weapon on you, you know, watching your arcs and all the stuff that survival on the battlefield skills that you've been taught to now, not having to really worry about that. It's not an easy thing to shake off. And. Yeah, so one of the things I found, the first thing I. First thing that happened to me was I was woken up one night, might have been the first week I was here and back in New Zealand, and it sounded like someone had cracked a shot off straight outside my window. Like, literally right outside my window. And I got up and I looked outside my window is nothing. And I thought, it's a bit weird, you know, it was in my head, basically. And then I found myself checking around my house, like, making sure the doors and windows were locked. And the reason why I was doing that is because I had no one on Century watching me overnight, which is what we're doing out of mobility operations. There's always someone on and that. And. And so I had to do it myself. And I found it hard to go to sleep. And I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll buy a shotgun and put it under my bed. You know, good idea. Because that's what you do on operations. You know, you always got your weapon there. You always got your weapon there. You've always got your, your, your webbing. So I'll have a shotgun there that'll have, you know, five and one up the spout, and I'll, you know, get a bandolier and that'll give me 30, and then I'm good to go for a major contact. What are you talking about here in Oxford? I mean, I was in South Auckland, to be honest, so it probably, you know, sort of. Sort of fit where I was. I mean, I was two. Two doors down from a gang pad, you know what I mean? So I was kind of. There was a little bit of a thread around, but it was just crazy. But you can see where things go wrong. Like, if you don't question the reason why things are happening, things will go downhill really, really quickly. And. And I recognize that the reason why these things were happening. And so I didn't buy the shotgun or the bandolier. I made sure that I took the hard road out of that. And. And just get your head back in the space of, you know, you're back in New Zealand and These things are going to happen to you very lightly. It was enough, it was enough just to keep me from doing stupid things, you know.

So, yeah, hard to integrate and then there's a bit of distance starts getting created with your family. At the time I was single, but you know, I still have my family there and they couldn't really understand.

The experience because they hadn't been there. And so the only people that really knew what I was talking about, that have felt it were the boys that have been on operations with and even the guys that have been before me didn't really have to be on that particular operation, but they knew what I was talking about. Although you always have a deeper connection to the people that you've had a critical experience with at that particular point in time. So, yeah, it was kind of, things started falling away there because I didn't feel like I could actually connect with my family because I'd talk about what had happened and then they didn't know how to talk to me. And then they would sort of talk about other stuff. And so that was big stuff that had happened overseas. But, you know, they hadn't been there and seen it and felt it like I had. So you couldn't debrief it?

You couldn't?

No, it was, I mean, I, I, I talked about it, but they, they still, really, still didn't really understand it. And they probably, there was probably, you know, like, well, you know, it's pretty full on. Like, how do they, how do they connect with me? You know, they didn't know how to do it either. So it's a little bit of a lose, lose situation.

So you're starting to kind of drift from these deep personal familial connections.

Yep.

Even though you're back home, you're not really here.

No. And that's the thing. And then you just get your head back into operating and in training, you know, and that's where you find your most comfortable, is around the boys in the compound down the range training. And then you get into that, that circle of just.

Doing that stuff and you know, you can't tell everyone what you're doing. It's just not the done thing, you know, Like I said, the reason why we don't tell anyone what we're doing is to protect our people. Operational security is a real thing. You know, some people in New Zealand want to know exactly what we're doing all the time and how we're doing it and all that kind of thing. It doesn't bode well if we go on the battlefield and we'll just get wiped, you know, we don't tell everyone what our playbook is. You don't do it in sports, you don't do it in the military. You know what I mean? That's why things need to be kept from people and identities and bits and pieces. So, yeah, you live a sort of a life where you just. People asking, you know, what do you do for a living? You tell them you're a courier driver or real estate agent or whatever and just, you know, I remember when I was single, this girl came up to me and said, oh, you know, what do you do? You know, everyone always asks that, what do you do? And, and I, and, and I said, I'm a lawyer. And she said, no, you're not. And I said, all right, then I'm in the sas. And she just laughed and walked away.

So even when I'm telling the truth, even when they're telling the truth, it doesn't work, you know, so it's just. Yeah, made me laugh.

God, that's brilliant.

I love it.

And you're back in New Zealand. Life is kind of normal. How long is it before you realize that you're heading back?

We had. So the first tour was in 2002, and then the next time I went back was 2004. So the, you know, in 2002 we were the last rotation and then government brought us back for whatever reason, I can't remember why. And then we went back and we were the first group to go back in 2004, essentially doing the same stuff again.

So that was pretty good. And that, that particular tour, the big contact there that we had was the one where Willy up here got his V. So that was another. There was another big night and well deserved.

And yeah, I think we had a couple other minor skirmishes.

Was that the private guest house situation in Kabul or is that another.

That's another one, yeah, that's further on down. And so that year 2004 was sort of. Yeah, the same thing we're doing in, in 2002. Two to three weeks. I think we're. Well, our.

Our operations or our missions lasted on the ground and then we had a long period of time where I think we did another, another tour in 2005 that I wasn't a part of in Afghan, doing the same stuff, long range patrolling. And then we had a break. And then in 2009 we went back into Afghan, Afghan. And then that was when we did training and enabling the crisis response unit. And that's when we started getting exposed to spectacular attacks. A lot of high risk arrests.

Yeah, it was very interesting times.

This is where the book. I just couldn't put it down and I was just, I just, I was fascinated by what went on. I could feel my cortisol running and my blood pressure and tempo, the heart rate going up. So I can only imagine for you. So the, I've wrote down here a couple of things because there's a few things I just didn't want to, to miss. That was the Haqqani. I'm probably not saying it right, but the Hakani attack at the Bhagtar guest house in Kabul. So this is a, a guest house where there was some UN personnel perhaps.

Yep.

A pretty soft target with a couple of security at it.

Yep.

And so what, what unfolded there?

So we're actually tracking them coming in, believe it or not. And we.

Across the border.

Yeah, yeah, we tracked them coming in from Pakistan and we were gonna basically hit them in their bed down location inside the city. But they changed their mo, Their motor Soporandi. They changed it to coming across the border and then comm. Silence and then attacking. So you at that point. No, there's no way. So they just, they. I can't remember where we lost their location, but it was outside the city. And then we're just waiting for them to pop up, but they didn't. And you know, hats off to them because that meant that they would get mission success. So in the early hours of the morning, they attacked that place. Essentially, I think it might have been 6 o' clock in the morning. They shot up the front gate, killed the guards. And then the first guy that went through the, the, the front gate, he had like a, a suicide vest on, but around his, around his stomach. So it was just plastic explosive in a like plastic bag with ball bearings. And so he came in, detonated himself and that cleared the courtyard. And in the courtyard were a couple of UN workers, young. They got killed in the initial attack. Now, ball bearings that are released from the shock wave of an explosion travel at a higher velocity than bullets, I think, which is why we saw the ball bearings going through the B6 armor on the, on the, on the vehicle. I think that's correct because I remember looking at it and thinking, man, how did that ball bearing go through? And I've forgotten about velocity and bits and pieces. So. So yeah, whether or not you're inside those armored vehicles didn't really matter because it was quite close. So yeah, killed a couple of people in there. And then two more guys came in. I think they might have had anywhere between 5 to 10 kgs worth of explosive on them. One went down into the. They obviously had inside information. One went down into the.

Like the dining hall where everyone was down having breakfast. The other one went up top to the first floor and then they both detonated and. And basically that was about it. So I think they had. Yeah, they might have lost a couple of guys outside. I can't remember the exchange with the. The guards initially, but they definitely hit the mark with those explosives. Oh, sorry. No, there was one more guy that, that didnate himself after that first guy in the courtyard. He went around the side and didn't know himself there, but he kind of detonated himself into a dead end. Yeah, I don't even know what he's thinking. Anyway, that was, you know, his, his decision. Wow. So we turned up there. The CRU had taken off because it was early hours in the morning. And, you know, once something goes on like that, the police caught him off the area, which causes a bit of a gridlock in the city. So it took us a bit of time to get in there. Finally got there. I think we're about maybe five, ten minutes behind the cru, and it was me and William turned up there, went in there, figured out what was going on. The building was up in flames.

And.

All the top floors up in flames and the firefighters were trying to put it out. So we walked into the courtyard. I could see the two UN workers dead on the, on the ground. I could see the guy who had detonated the. The vest, the suicide vest that he was wearing around his, his stomach or little pouch that he had, basically his whole stomach was blown apart. And then they started pulling bodies out of the, the dining area and they're in different forms of disfigurement. One person survived and it was a. It was an African lady. And she came out and soon as she saw her mates lined up on the ground because they pulled all the dead bodies out first, she just came out outside and started screaming and then they took her outside. I'm not too sure where she went past that point, but, yeah, she was essentially. I don't know where she was sitting. She might have been sitting by like a big concrete pylon beam that was holding up the building. Yeah, just pure luck. She's sitting in the right, right place. But wouldn't have been great seeing all their mates outside, you know, burnt and, and disfigured and dismembered. So, yeah, it was a bit sad. So yeah, we sat there just waiting for the firefighters to put the fire out on the first floor so we could start clearing just to make sure no one else was in the vicinity. And the CRU were there, was just covering it. And then we got a phone call from someone outside the courtroom where the police. The police were holding that cordon. It was a. It was a brick guy. And he said, oh, hey.

We'Ve got some people inside a safe room inside the building, pointing at the one that. That was up in flames. Can you see if you can get them out? And I said, well, where are they? And he said, oh, I'm not too sure. He just. He just won't tell me. I said, I'll just give me the phone. So I got on the phone to this guy and I said, hey, he's, like, heavily distracted. They're worried about the. They could feel the heat of the fire, they reckon, and the smoke was coming through the door. And I said, listen, where are you? Tell me exactly where you are. We will go right in there now, and we'll come and get you on the bottom floor, first floor, second floor. Like, where are you? Where's this panic room? And he just couldn't tell me where he was. It was very, very strange. So I said, okay, we'll. We'll. We'll see if we can find you. So I handed the phone back. Willie took his team up and started clearing from the first floor up. And then I went down into the bottom floor, and it was completely destroyed. Still a lot of bit of fire going on. A lot of water coming down from the top floor there from the firefighters spraying down the room. And then we went around trying to find this safe room, a panic room, which would. Generally, it would be anywhere. But, you know, I thought, you know, if it was going to be anywhere, it would be in a certain position. So I went and looked at that position. There's nothing there. Couldn't find them. Went out again. Where are you? Couldn't tell me. And then the cru, Once we cleared the building, the CRU.

Started leaving. And when the CIU move, we move. And so I just said, hey, listen, the. You know, the building's clear. Come out. Essentially, it's up to you. Come out. But they're in the building next door. So I'm not too sure why he thought he was in the building. We. We were clearing. So it would have been a. Probably been a good PR thing for the CRU had they pulled them out of the safe room, you know, for the. For the Basically, you know, so.

You know, because we're in that process of building trust with the public that they could do what they were, you know, assigned to do. And so, you know, part of that is. Is making sure. We made sure there's some opportunities where the CRU were, you know, looked. Looked good, you know, and that would have been a good look in front of the media, because the media were all the way around that building. But, yeah, it was a bit strange. So that was. That was my sort of first intro to. I think that was the first one's first speak attack that I went to and Kabul on top of everything else we're doing. So. Yeah, and then we just went back and had breakfast and debriefed.

And this is the interesting part. So, like, as you were saying that, I was just observing, like, your body language, and I could see, like, just your breathing, and you're going through it. You're using your breath to take you through the story. So post the event and the debrief. What's this? The psychological debrief? Or is it. Guys, let's chat about it. Let's move on. Is there anything official that happens psychologically? Not really.

I mean, we don't have psychs on in theater unless there's a requirement and they'll get flown in.

So, yeah, I've said this before, is our training.

Prepares us very well for operations and what you're going to see and do out there. So everything we do is as close as possible to reality, you know, whether it be getting in live enemy and we're doing simulation, or we have casualties that, you know, they have proper makeup on, like, you know, TV makeup and everything else, and you can work on them and it. And it takes away that edge, you know what I mean? And that surprise, I guess, of anything that gets put in front of you. And I guess when we get into intercontinent, that's, you know, that. That didn't surprise me either, to be honest. And I, I had a thought about that with a lot of the stuff that we'd done about that reason why. And, and essentially it does come back to. To the way we train, you know, as close as possible with live rounds, close proximity to each other, explosions all the time happening around you. And I know there's, you know, we've got, you know, veterans that are coming out now with issues around.

You know, blast injuries and bits and pieces, but, yeah, I mean, if you don't do it, it'll be a real surprise in operations when things start kicking off around you because you essentially can't be surprised by that. Curl into a ball and tuck yourself away. You're there at the high end to, you know, take people out and move through that environment, whatever it looks like.

Yeah, that's full on. And I mean, for this regular civilian like myself, it's just that it's hard to fathom if we. If we were to just go to the Intercontinental for a moment. So obviously that made some significant news, but none of us, very few of us, had stepped inside the incident and were a part of it. So you were. And you detail it in the book. An incredible detail, but what actually went down.

So do you want me to take it from the time I was woken up?

Yes, please. Rudely awakened.

Yeah, rudely awakened from my beauty sleep. Yeah, it was about. I think it was 10:30. They take the hotel and yeah, I was woken up by one of the. I think it was one of the signalers and said, hey, you need to come into the tactical operations center because something's happening in the city. So I grabbed my gears, walked in there and sat in the back of the room with the senior national officer at the time. I said, oh, what's going on? And in the front of us was three screens. We had cnn, which essentially is just for optics and giving us a rough understanding of what's going on. And then we had a couple of screens that had ISA footage which is essentially, you know, a predator at 20,000ft above the hotel, giving us thermal imagery of what was happening. So I could see what was happening on cnn. A lot of people running around, fire, chaos. And on the screen with the ISR platform imagery, I could see a whole lot of guys running around on the top of the roof of the hotel, the intercontinental Hotel, which had been attacked and firing off the roof. And they're in exchange of gunfire with the. The inner cordon, which was the Afghan National Police at the time. And so he said, yeah, the Intercon Hotel has been attacked by an unknown number of terrorists. And basically they're just holding their positions, are in a. Up on the roof and in different locations around the hotel. And they're just.

In gun battles with the inner cordon. There's a number of guests in the hotel. There was a big event in the city. It was a jirga. So they had not only governors from the different provinces, they had international people there as well.

So, yeah, which is the reason why they attacked it. Basically. They. They found an opportunity and they took it. Initially, Fox News, I think I'll CNN Or Fox News was saying that that basically shot their way through the security checkpoints and you know, essentially taken the hardest route possible to get into the hotel and do the attack. And that's not actually what happened. They came in from behind, killed some African national police who were on a sort of a lookout up on the hill silently, and then made their way down behind the hotel where security was fairly weak and started their attack. So there was nine of them went in there. They had CCT footage of them coming down past the hotel, split into two groups. A bunch of them went down underneath the, the hotel where the service area was, where all the workers are, and the others headed up towards the, the car park. And basically they just went in there, killed as many people as they could and then took up positions on the roof and inside the hotel, which is what we're seeing on the, on the, on the imagery. So they killed about 17, could have been more. I think there's over 20 that were killed initially. They had a wedding party around the pool.

And so yeah, that's what we're, what we're up against. The CRU had been triggered at that point and our mentors who were with them went down, went down there as well with their squadrons. They had two squadrons I think that went down. And at the time, you know, I wasn't doing mentoring on this tour. I was, I was the ground commander for the, for the small team that we had of enablers that were there essentially to give them specialized skill sets to do their high risk arrests and, and obviously solve or resolve any spec attacks that we came up with. So explosive method of entry sniping capability and other couple of other capabilities that we had just to make it beneficial for them, give them an advantage, combat advantage. So they were on their way. I was being briefed and the senior national officer said to me, hey, I think you should go down with the team and just back up the cru. And I said, oh, you know, I didn't know at the time. I said, how many squadrons there? He said, two. Two squadrons, Wasida, they'll be over and done by the time we get there. We might as well just wait out. And he said, no, I think you should go down there. And I was actually, I actually thought, there's no requirement, you know, that we should go down there. And he said, no, definitely go down there. Woke everyone up. I said, hey boys, I think we'll go down there and this is what's happening, but we're probably going to get turned away halfway down, you Know, and so we went, all right, then we'll get geared up. Everyone's just slowly getting their gears on, you know, casually. Oh, casually, because, you know, the boys will mop that up real quick and that. And then. So I went back and saw the senior officer and he said, yep, off you go. So got into the. The vehicles, took off down there. Now, Afghan at night and Kabul, the roads are like a racetrack. You know, there's a curfew at 10 o', clock, so not many vehicles are on the road or should be on the road. And it's just, you've got to slow down for the police checkpoints, but basically, and just, you know, show them your id. So we race up to these checkpoints, slow down, show ID and just got down there in pretty good order, stopped short of the hotel, decided we didn't want to drive our vehicles up for fear of getting shot at. Rather just get out of our vehicles and then just sort of move through the shadows, foot mounted and leave a security team on our. On our vehicles, back behind the hotel there. Got up to the incident control point. And at the incident control point, they basically had the commanders and the coordinators of the incident. The CIUCO was there, the Minister of Interior was there, they came out, had a chat to us about what they wanted to do or where we were at. And, you know, they always want resolution quickly, but you can't always guarantee it. So we grabbed 10 of the CRU that we had with us, moved up the road close to where the Afghan National Police had the inner cordon, and then basically waited there. But as we went up there and got right by the cordon, the gun battle started again. So there's a heavy weight of fire coming off the roof and it was going both ways. Now, I wasn't really. We weren't going to focus in on doing that. The Afghan National Police can focus in on that. We just focused on trying to get across the car park. So we got comms with our mentors who were already inside with the two squadrons. And, yeah, just sort of got one of them to flash a light. So we knew we were going to run. So we didn't go into the wrong door. Initially, I was going to go into the wrong door because I've been in that hotel in 2002 when we're doing a close protection task with Phil Goff. But the. The entry point had changed because they're doing renovations. So lucky, lucky we didn't do that. So made a plan. One by one, we sort of crossed the Car park, very fast doing our side, perfect sidestepping into the, into the lobby. All got in there. The lights were outside the hotel. A dead terrorist lay on the floor. He had a suicide vest, he had an AK47 with a 40 mil grenade launcher underneath it. He had energy drinks, he had new shoes, new clothes, food, you know the idea for a fight, grenades.

You know, spare ammunition, all of it, you know, they're ready to go. Water, all that kind of stuff, energy drinks. I think I said, yeah, this paints.

A picture for you that these guys.

Are here to fight. Yeah, they're going to fight, yeah. And, and I had to assume that they were all dressed like him. So they're all rigged up suicide vessel, which was my main concern, you know, because they draw you in, you know, then denate themselves. So I can see straight away that the CRU.

Weren'T really prepared for this. We hadn't done any high rise type training with them. Essentially, you know, maybe two floors, mainly compounds out in the rural areas, some stuff inside the city, but in general compounds. And this is a five story hotel, you know, with the lights out, you know, and, and, and anything like that. And so that was our bread and butter. So I knew straight away I had to put our assault group in the front. So we got ourselves together, put them up the front, we had NVGs and then we had the C behind us. Now the problem was that because the CRU hadn't done this, they were making a lot of noise. So they were, you know, banging about behind us and we're trying to stay silent. So it wasn't even going to bode well for us. Started going down the corridor, we've got a quick handover brief by the mentors and then started going down the corridor. First thing we saw in the Internet room was one of the guests slumped down beside of the computer, had been killed. So went in there, checked pulse, he was gone. Carried on down the corridor.

Turned to the left and we sort of just naturally moved into where the kitchen was. And then behind the kitchen is where the northern fire stairs were located, which was just a stroke of luck really that we found them, which gave us access right to the top of the roof where these guys were. So initially we talked about.

Clearing floor by floor from floor one all the way up to floor five, which is, you know, something I thought would work. So we weren't going to get anyone any surprises coming up behind us.

And so we started doing that, but we just decided that it was just going to take too long clearing the Floors, you know, and there's still a lot of fire coming off the top of the roof. And the biggest thing was with a lot of that fire that was coming off the top of the roof was it was going high off over the top of the Afghan National Police heads into the neighborhood and his family's in there, you know what I mean? And so they're either hunkered down or trying to get out of there. So there's a massive risk of civilian casualties. So we just decided, you know what, let's get straight to the top of the roof, sort these guys out, and then retrospectively come back and clear every floor and move all the guests down into the, into the kitchen, secure them. So started making our way up and my leader Salter, Steve Askin, who we talked about prior to coming on, sure, we'll get into that. He, he started making his way up and we got to the fourth floor and what we didn't realize is because, you know, the CRU are making so much noise going up the stairwell. A couple of the terrorists that were at the top could hear we're coming up, and one of them was sent down, the other one sort of took a covering approach, covering roll at the top of the stairs. So this guy came down and it was a U shaped stairwell, quite open, plenty of angles. Steve came around the corner, the other terrorists came around and they basically were face to face about a meter, you know, kind of from meter you away. Both raised their weapons, both fired. Steve hit the mark, dropped this guy against the wall. But then he just got up and because of the adrenaline, ran up to the top of the stairs, flopped out on the roof. And we saw in the ISR platform footage later that he sort of ran out, flopped on the floor. One of his mates came over and talked to him and they must have talked about how they're gonna, he was gonna detonate himself. So his mate moved away, sort of trying, trying to give him a bit of space, but he didn't give him enough space because he detonated and took them both out. So we're, we're happy with that result, clearly. Yeah. And so, yeah, so took out two and then almost immediately, obviously, once that guy got to the top of the stairwell, he must have tagged his mate into the action because he just started firing down on us and throwing grenades. So we started getting into a gun battle inside the stairwell, followed by grenades. Now, the first grenade that was thrown landed at Steve's feet and he turned around, called grenade and started running out towards the fourth floor, which the fire door was open, luckily didn't have to open it, but it kind of like it was attached to him by a string. It followed him out onto the fourth floor, round to the left and exploded behind him. And semi concussed him on the ground and seen a bit of shrapnel up his back, arms and legs. So gun battle got a guy on an uncleared floor who's wounded. We couldn't get comms with him and we're getting grenades rained down on us as well. So a couple of things, you know, we had to get our. Get sorted out was neutralize a threat above our heads. So we got the boys onto that and I was just calling out to the, to Steve on the, on the fourth floor. Took a while. I don't know how long we're in that and that come battle for. Could have been minutes, could have been a bit longer than that was roughly about four hours from the car park to clearing the roof. So not too sure how long we're in there.

And yeah, eventually Steve came out and eventually the shooter at the top of the stairs stopped shooting at us. And basically we got Steve to come back down towards us and we moved down to the third floor, I think it was, and sort of reorganized ourselves at this stage. I brought the squadron commander in and said to him, hey, I'll get you guys just to hold this floor so no one's coming up behind us. And then just start knocking on the doors and getting guests down and taking them down to the, down to the kitchen and just hold them there. So we're starting to do a couple of things here. And I decided that, you know, to minimize the noise was to take a bunch of trained operators across to the southern stairwell and make our, make our way up that, that, those fire stairs. At this point, when I was talking to the squadron commander, this is where I was in that state of flow that I talk about in the book that was like totally calm. You know, we just come out of a gun battle, but I was totally calm. Like I'm sitting here now, you know, watching a movie on the couch type calm. And I could see everything in three dimensions, like a, kind of like a video game, you know, like everything was. I could see all the floors below me, I could see the car park. I knew what was happening on the roof. I could hear fire coming off the roof from the guys shooting up at the helo sniping platform that had come on station while we're hitting up the, the stairwell. Had a couple of our guys on It. They were shooting back down. I could just see everything. I could see the northern steel. I could see the southern stairwell. I started making contingency plans in my head and. And it just made sort of, you know, by the city of your pants planning very easy. Never had it before. Never had it since. It was very weird. Sort of caught myself in the moment. So what's that? Didn't know anything about it. Oh, maybe. Yeah. It was like on steroids. You know, there's. There's flow state and then there's flow state. On steroids, you can do anything and just. Yeah, that's. Yeah, it was amazing. So I was fortunate enough to have that kind of experience, and then. Yeah, so everything was clear to me at that point. Took that small team across to the southern stairwell. We slowly made our way up there while the CRU were pushing.

Guests down the. Down the northern stairwell and holding that. Those. Those floors. So we had CIU from the fourth floor down now.

Yeah. So made our way up that. That stairwell, got to the top and realized that the. The door was blocked or. Or there was a metal bar across it with a padlock. So we put a charge on there. We had an external wall charge that we used for. For.

Basically breaching into compound walls, but does the same sort of thing for that type of thing. It was a bit of an overkill, but that's all we had. So place the charge on the. On the door. Quietly came back down the flight of stairs to give us. Allow that over pressure to come over the top. And then I basically told the SNO that we were in a position to assault the roof.

And to call the. The helo off, because what was happening is we had our two helo snipers, but because we're working in concert with the Black Hawk crew, they had their gunner involved as well, and he had an automatic weapon. And we don't operate like that. And so our coordination, we didn't have total control about whether or not he's going to start firing once we were on the roof. And so I just said, hey, just call the helicopter off if I need you guys to come. And I'll. I'll say, but we're. We're just about ready to rock and roll.

We got a last sort of count of how many terrorists were on the roof, because as I watch in the ISR footage, a number of them would come out and then, you know, some of them would explode. A couple of the helo. The helo sniping platform actually took out a couple of the terrorists. As well, while they were flying around, but people were still coming out of buildings. And so you didn't really know, didn't really have a different of number. I just said, we'll just go for what we got. So essentially, we could have been overmatched in terms of numbers. But, you know, SAE soldiers are kind of combat force multipliers, if you like. So because of their skill sets and experience.

They can do a lot more, you know what I mean, with small numbers and that. That obviously has been demonstrated throughout history, and that's just how we are. So we had the small group of operators and we sat down there, called the helicopter off, and I just said, yep. He said, you're cleared to go. And I just said to the boys, hey, listen, usually you do like a battle brief and just talk about sectors of fire and stuff like that. The boys know what they're doing. I say, hey, listen, when we get up there, everyone up there is armed. You know, we don't know what the numbers are. Just get up there. Who is in front of us, just tip them over. That's it. And I'll see you on the other side. So everyone was good. Gave the standby, standby, Go on, go. Blew the door off its hinges. And then we started to make our way out onto the roof. So we got ourselves into extended lines, started orientating ourselves to the. To the north, towards the northern stairwell. In front of us, we could see satellite dishes that were mounted on these concrete platforms. And, you know, the concrete platforms provide cover, essentially, so you can't shoot through cover. It's not concealment, but yeah, so that was the first problem. And then there was a number of them sort of arranged all behind each other. So there's a lot of. A lot of blind spots for us. And then behind that was like a big total span shed that was providing shelter for the mechanism that allowed the. The elevator to go up and down the side building. And then past that point was the entry to the northern stairwell out onto the roof. So we started making our way across. There was a guy under the satellite dish. He was quickly engaged. I had a. I could see a lead coming out from behind one of the satellite dishes. So I started engaging that. We started dominating, maintaining dominance across the roof, and momentum got my way up to where the leg was, and it was just a leg. And then I realized, because these guys had started detonating themselves, and we didn't know. We didn't know any of this had happened. Like, we just heard explosions, but we didn't Know we're going to walk into basically a roof full of head, arms, legs and guts had just revealed itself as we started moving closer and closer to where the elevator mechanism was. So we kept moving through the satellite dishes cleared that, got around to where the elevator mechanism room was. Our left pair started getting into an engagement with one of the remaining terrorists on the left hand side. We came around the right and he must have, he must have got into engagement there and must have peeked around the other side and saw us coming because as we're coming around he basically just stepped back and just detonated himself in front of us. So that was good. Thanks for doing our job. And then we kept moving, got to the northern stairwell, made sure the guy at the top of that stairwell was dead.

And he was, and he was well armed as well. And then we sort of reorientated around and started doing a quick video. EOD guys with us and they started clearing some of the terrace on the roof that still had live suicide vests. So they took the, the debts out of their, their, the plastic explosive that they had and we cleared their weapons. And then I got a call on the radio that there was a fire directly below us in the fifth floor function room. And then all, you know, and then because I was so focused on what we were doing, I realized there was fire lapping up over the top of the parapet of the roof. And then basically I just said, hey listen, let's do a little hasty back. We'll hit the fire alarm, get all the guests out, get them, get them down into the restaurant and away from this fire. So the boys went down, started going down the floors and trying to hit the fire alarm. Health and safety manager needs needed to be sacked that day. None of the fire, none of the fire alarms are working. Yeah, just one of those things you have to deal with. So yeah, the cru, while the boys were going down and starting to clear the floors and banging the fire alarms, the one of the squadron commander came up to me and he said we have to stay on the roof. And I said why do we have to stay on the roof? And he said because the minister on teal wants to come up here and have a medals parade.

And I said no, you can have the metals parade and burn. I'm going to go down and we've still got work to do, you know. What are you talking about? He said no, no, you've got to stay. And I said no, we're not staying, we're not staying, you stay, I'm out. So we yeah, we started getting into clearing the rooms. Interestingly though, it was very difficult for the CRU to get people out of the rooms because they spoke the local language, but when they heard the English speaking ISAF soldiers, they came out straight away. Interesting. Yeah, so that was. Yeah, very interesting. Everyone started moving quite quickly out of there. Now we're able to clear the fourth down to the first floor, but the fifth floor because it was on fire. There was a fire raging on the fifth floor function room. That whole corridor was just decked out with smoke. We're not firefighters, we don't have oxygen equipment or anything like that. So we're tried to make entry a couple of times. It just, there was no point. So we made sure we got as many people as we could out, knowing, you know, that we're going to have to clear the fifth floor as well. And yeah, basically went down below, gave all the guests a quick brief about who we were and what was going to happen, which was essentially that they would. I needed them to stay inside the restaurant until we left because we still potentially had shooters on the fifth floor that would shoot them if they went out into the car park. But yeah, later on in the morning they ended up just walking out anyway, not too sure why. So, yeah, so we searched everyone, got them down there.

Made sure the Afghan National Police were in there as well, just looking after them. We decided to go back up to the top of the roof to do a battle damage assessment, which is basically as best we could.

Count the bodies and we had to count the bodies based on heads and arms and legs and sort of make a. Having a toing and froing with what they'd seen back in the tactical operations center and what we could see on the ground.

Made sure weapons were clear, made sure the suicide vests were made safe, gathered some information, got that information back quickly just in case we had to act on it.

And that. And then.

Yeah, basically just had a bit of a debrief with the boys. So what we didn't know was there was one more terrorist in the building and he was sitting in the fifth floor. At the same time we were clearing the top of the roof, the Afghan firefighters had turned up and they had AK47. So they started putting out the fifth floor function room. So we stood on the roof and at some point that.

That, that terrorist came out of a room and he must have found a gap in the, in the smoke. And then went outside where the elevators were, there's like a little balcony on the western side. And started Shooting at the, the inner corner. And then he sort of came back inside again, and we heard that like, oh, what's that? And then all of a sudden we started taking away the fire on the roof because we're standing up. Initially I thought that it was.

Like a secondary phase two attack. And, and, and I thought, oh, well played, you know, they'd got. Got us on the roof, you know, and then, then they were shooting at us from the hills. So I was sort of looking up and around the hills, and I was, I was yelling out to the boys to see if they could locate the shooters so we could start getting some rounds on them, but nothing was happening on the. Up in the hills, you know, and that. And so we realized it was the inner cordon firing on us. So what had happened was, is they'd kind of just. They must have just been sitting around thinking that the, the battle was over, maybe having chai, having a few smokes, and this guy came out, started shooting, saw our heads, and just started firing at us straight away. So we're lucky. We're lucky. You know, none of them are marksmen.

So.

Yeah, that was the first sort of blue on green. Yeah, it was the first blue, blue on green.

Situation. And then.

And then, yeah, so it was. I said, oh, where's the cru? And. And the interpreter said, oh, they went home and I went back to the Camp Olympus. I said, why did they do that? He said, oh, because they've been, they've been ordered to. So they're reorganizing themselves just in case there's another attack in the city and we're all right, fair enough. Oh, well, it's up to us to sort this out then. So we put fresh magazines on our weapons, went down to where the fifth floor function was. The firefighters had just put the fire out. And then we're sort of looking across the fifth wall function room, just figuring out how we're going to skim the cat. And these Russian pilots came out, three of them with their wheelie cases and they had white shirts and little peak caps. And they sort of walked their way through the fifth floor function room. And I said, are you guys all right? And they went, yeah, we're good. And then just sort of, you know, walk down the stairs is weird.

That's the weirdest thing I've ever. In that situation.

What the hell? Yeah, across. Across a whole lot of. Yeah, just carnage. They're just heading out to the airport like there's another day. And the shoots were all pressed and wow, they're good to go. So it was, it was very strange. And yeah, so we ended up not going all the way through the function room. We just. Because it wasn't much cover. So we decided to come around the side and start from where the shooting had occurred, which was out on this balcony. So went around the balcony in front of us we could see air conditioning ducting which we didn't know at the time actually had a improvised explosive device in it with a trip wire which would be a real rudimentary one. Grenade to the tripwire. And then past that there was some expended rounds, AK47 rounds that were sitting on the, on the deck of the, of this, of this balcony. So we know you're there, that's where he is, he was shooting from. So we started making our way towards where the aircon ducting was and then we just stopped short. Don't ask me why, we just did. And then we started talking about whether we're going to throw a grenade in the. Or a flashbang. Decided on the flashbang because we've just seen, you know, three pilots come out. Could be, could be some more people. And so we threw the flashbang that started banging off was a nine banger. And then as soon as it started cracking off we started taking a heavy weight of fire again from the inner cordon. Got ourselves down behind the. Luckily these where the, the railing was for the balcony wasn't made of plastic or wood. It was made of these, of concrete about that thick, maybe an inch thick. And I think it might have been reinforced because we started taking heavy weighted fire from the inner cordon. And we're all just pressed up against these sort of meter wide panels. And I was just sitting there or yeah, pretty much sitting down, trying to make myself as small as possible as was everyone else. And I was looking up on the wall just to see what caliber was, was being shot at us because what I didn't want to see was like massive chunks coming out of the wall from a 12.7 because of 12.7 was firing at us. And they bring it down, it would just go straight through and it'll go straight through us. So this went on for a bit and I looked around and there was an Afghan National Police guy that was up on the balcony. He was just putting his head around the corner looking at us and I was yelling at him to stop them firing. I was like get him to get him to stop firing. And he wasn't getting on his radio or anything, he's just watching us Taking it. And I eventually got on the. On the radio to our guys and got the interpreter stand up on the roof and. And got them to stop. And yeah, we kind of nearly all. All dodged a bullet. But Steve Askin was sitting in front of me and he said. And I said, oh, is everyone right? And Steve goes, no, I've been. I think I've been shot through the side of the head. And I said, hey. And so he turned around and I could see that his ear was sort of hanging off a little bit. And he had taken around through the side of his ear, had gone in and out, and, you know, blood was coming out. And so I looked at him and I said, and I just had a look at his ear and I said, oh, no, it's all right. I think it's gone in and out. It's not gone in your head or anything like that. And then I looked him in the eyes and I said, have you had enough yet? And then just laughed and started laughing because, you know, he'd been grenaded, you know, down there. You know, he'd done the first, you know, been in first contact inside the. Inside the stairwell, and now he'd been shot through the side of the head. And I'd. And you know, he had a bit of shrapnel up his back. Back legs. And I said, you're going home. You're going. You've got to go to hospital now. And he said, no, I'm good. I'll keep going now. You're going to hospital.

Relentless. What a legend, eh?

Yeah, yeah. Said no, your nine lives are gone, Steve. He said, no, no, I'm keep going. This is mentality. No, I'll keep going. Said no. Making a command decision.

Get out of here.

Yeah, yeah. So we. I decided that we're all going to leave, to be honest, because we've just been, you know, we'd essentially been shot at twice by the end of cordon. And the reason why that was is because you went there. We didn't have that comms connection. And. But, you know, my mentality was that we still had a job to do, you know, and we'll get it done when it's done, you know, and that's the mentality. So regardless. But you just assume that they're watching you coming around, and that wasn't the case. So two of those was enough. Getting shot through the side of the head next time could be, you know, getting shot through the side of getting shot in the head and possibly losing some people. So decided to go all the way back down to the bottom. I did a handover to the police commander at the bottom, patched up Steve. Then we got into the vehicles and started heading back to camp warehouse. Steve went straight to the. The French hospital.

At the airport. And then I heard on the radio that the CRU were making their way back to deal with this last guy. So we ended up sort of crossing them at a. At an intersection. So we just. Where they get, they go, we go. So we tagged on, got back to the hotel, and I said. I just said, hey, listen, methodically, clear every single floor. Just be aware that, you know, on the fifth floor there's. There's a shooter, so be prepared for that. We're just going to wait down in the lobby. You guys can sort out that last guy. I'm not going to risk getting shot at again. And just let us know when you're finished, essentially. So we sat down there, sort of took stock of what had just happened, and then all of a sudden, there was a massive explosion up the top of. On the fifth floor. They triggered the air conditioning ducting. Yeah, we didn't know.

You know, like you would never know, of course.

No, we didn't. You know what? We scoped it. So they triggered it. I think one. One guy went over it, and then the next guy stood on it and took the full brunt. See it, a big, big chunk out of his arm, and I think he had some strap in his legs, but came running down the set of the explosion. And.

So we went up there.

And the hotel manager was up there with them, behind them, and he said he'd seen the shooter go back into one of the rooms further on down the corridor. So we knew he was in there.

So we got our EOD guys out, pulled the rest of that air conditioning ducting away, the remaining stuff, just to make 100% sure that nothing else was going to get triggered as we went across it and took a couple of CRU guys and lined ourselves up in the corridor. So we got that assault group to start manually making entry onto the doors. We didn't have the explosive to be able to blow into every single door. It was just. We just weren't organized that way. So we. The CRU probably kicked in about 10 doors, and then they ran out of steam. So we took over. Now we lined ourselves up against one door. I think it was room 524. I was covering the corridor. I had a couple of assaulters that were by the door, and they sort of had themselves offset, giving it a Bit of a kick. So they had a bit of COVID behind the. Everything's made of concrete. You know, in Afghanistan all the rooms are like solidly built. So we kicked the door in a couple of times and then as soon as there was a crack, there was a massive explosion that erupted in front of us. And you know, where I was standing, I was standing back from the door. So these guys just disappeared into a ball of dust and everything slowed down into slow motion vision at that point. So, you know, I could see the smoke slowly engulfing the entire corridor. Then all of a sudden, out of the dust and smoke crawled the, a couple of CRU guys and they had looks of, you know, shock and disbelief on their faces. And they crawled past me and grabbed them. And then all of a sudden someone yelled out, man down. And I looked on the opposite side of the wall from where the blast was and I could see one of our guys laying up against the wall. And I, and I've said this before, is that when we train, we always train casualties who are like the heaviest, the heaviest person. And because you've got to be able to do that, anything else after that we know you can do and we make sure that every person demonstrates it. And lo and behold, this guy was 110 kgs, you know, without his body armor, he had another 20. So he's quite heavy. And he was slumped up against the wall. He'd taken the full brunt of the blast basically, and I'm too sure if he was, you know, alive or not. So I went and grabbed him, got my arm underneath him, picked him up, pulled him into the, the room opposite to the, to the side of the room where the, the blast had gone off and asked him if he was okay. He wasn't really responding. So I took him down the other end of the corridor, placed him on the chair and then we started working on him. So he had taken the full brunt and he had a few ball bearings in him. What we didn't know. He had a ball bearing that went in, I think it ricocheted off his collarbone and, and entered his plural space, which means, meant that there was a bit of pressure exchange there, which is not great.

So yeah, started working on him and then I got away from focusing in on that. He was going into shock rapidly. So I ended up yelling in his ear to wake up. And that seemed to work. He sort of shook himself out of it and then I moved away. Let the boys start working on him. Went down the corridor, asked if anyone else was Injured and a couple of the sea. You guys said.

Some injuries. And then I asked how, like, what was it? Was it an IED on the door or was it a suicide vest? And he said, I was a suicide vest. And I said, how do you know that? He said, oh, you can see his head at the door. Because what happens is, you know, when they're wearing suicide vests and it detonates, the head pops off.

Wow.

And it was sitting there right on the door. The whole. The whole room was. Was carnage. So what he had done was basically waited for us. He was in the room, waited for us to kick the door down, walked straight up in front and then just bam. Knocked himself off. Pure evil. Yeah. And you can go on YouTube, there's a. Al Jazeera got the comms of the terrorists inside the building talking to their handlers in Pakistan, Hakani handlers. And yeah, it was interesting listening to the guy that was lying on the bed waiting for us.

When we cracked the door. He said, I'm just lying on the bed waiting for them to arrive. Wow. And when they do, I'm just gonna. Yeah, just, you know, relaxing. So, yeah. Yeah. And that was about it. Past that point. So we'd lost two guys, as in, you know, two guys that need to go to hospital. The second guy, the guy that took the brunt of the blast and the. On the fifth floor there, he went to hospital and went. Flew out to Germany straight away for surgery.

And, yeah, because we are down two and we were a smaller force than the previous tour. Essentially, New Zealand had chopped us in half in terms of numbers because of where the CRU were at their train state a little bit better than what they were when we first arrived. We only had small numbers, and I had to think about the job. Another job we had coming up in a couple of days. And you know, how long it would take if both people were essentially going to be flying to Ramstein, how we're going to get that replaced quickly. So, yeah, it. We left at that point and we left it to the. I think the commandos turned up at that. That time, took over from the CRU and cleared the rest of that floor, and that was about it. Wow. We've pretty much done the job.

But, yeah, we had done pretty well to not get anyone killed.

But it was a big night. I mean, it was 10 hours. 10 hours inside that building. But again, it was like, yeah, like I said, four or five hours, I think, from the car park to clearing the roof, and it still wasn't over. But that time was a heartbeat. You know, it was kind of 30 minutes, an hour.

You were fully present, fully focused.

Yeah, yeah. And that's it. And it just zooms by. Yeah. So very, very strange. And I only figured that out recently, that it was like that. So unreal.

For the person that's just experienced what you've just shared, I'm going to say to them in the show notes right now, they can go and buy your book, Serviceman Jay. Go and get it. It's riveting. It's. And you're not. You're the massive example of humility. You don't promote yourself.

You don't.

You don't tell people, buy the book. I'm here to do that right now because people need to buy the book. It's phenomenal. And I'll certainly be buying a lot of copies for Friends for Christmas and beyond. But that event that unfolded unbeknownst to you would result in you receiving the gallantry star, the right term. And I just wanted to share something that was read out at that readout, at that event where you were awarded a government house, I believe.

Yep.

So Serviceman Jay attended an incident in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2011. Serviceman Jay demonstrated outstanding gallantry and leadership under heavy fire from a determined enemy, contributing to the resolution of the incident and the protection of comrades and civilian life. Serviceman J's performance was of the highest order and in keeping with the finest traditions of New Zealand's military record. Jamie, how did it feel to be awarded that?

Kind of strange. Like, I think it. We. We don't really.

I don't think we accept awards.

Like normal people do. Like, we kind of shy away from that stuff. We don't like to be, you know, stood in front and said, oh, hey, you know what I mean, you deserve this. And again, as I said numerous times. Is that the award? And again, I mean it again, is that, you know, it's. I'm holding that ward for the team. Everyone should have got a medal that night. You know, it doesn't take one person.

So, yeah, I hold that ward for the whole team because I think they all deserve it. They all played their part in that resolution. That was a pretty difficult set of circumstances, a pretty difficult problem to solve. But everyone came together and had input into the end result. And so, yeah, I hold that for them. It's just, unfortunately, not everyone could be recognized.

Yeah, well, I'm glad that you were. And it says a lot about you that the way you speak about your team and others. I want to be Mindful of your time. And there's a thing I wanted to talk about. I know you had a great comrade and friend, Steve, who sadly passed in Christchurch in a tragic helicopter accident. And at his funeral, his mother shared something that you put in the book and I just wanted to read it out. And to me it's beautiful. So it doesn't take going overseas and being an SAS warrior to be a hero. It's to do what's right. Be a hero to your family, your mates, wherever you find yourself, choose to be a hero. Beautiful words. How did those words impact you? Being back here in New Zealand, being done with your SAS life? What did that mean to you?

I think she's hit it on the head. You probably don't know it when you're in there because you're highly distractible as a member of the regiment because you've got a lot going on and, you know, you believe you have a high strategic purpose and you do, but you've got to shelve that highest strategic purpose and, you know, expectations of yourself and others when you come home, you know, I mean, you've got to, it's hard to do, is to shed that skin and be completely in the present moment with your family. And I know a lot of guys, I've been through it, where you're, you're not really being fully present with your family and they, and they see it. I mean, my wife's a psychologist, she sees it all, lets me know about it.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. But it took a while to land because she's my wife, you know, and I was stubborn. But it's true, you know what I mean? And that's the main thing, like your family is the one that's going to be there, you know, when you leave. And so you've got to make sure that, you know, if you are in that particular environment that you don't forget about them and make sure you put in more time, the same amount of time and energy you do being in a high performing environment and that, you know, and that's it. I mean, yeah, it's. Yeah, it does, it does take a lot. I don't have anything but good memories of my time in the regiment and I don't blame anything, I don't blame anything on them, particularly some of the transition stuff and some of the stuff that's happened to me post coming out.

It was the best adventure I ever had, you know what I mean? Being badged and going through it. I took myself there a lot of the time with the burnout and stuff like that. Performance, punishment is a thing, but you can say no at any time. But do you say no? No, you don't. That's the thing. Yeah. If you're going to give it to me, I'll do it. You know what I mean? Because it means you'll performing well and, and you feel. And that ticks a hierarchy of needs for you. And so, yeah, it's a hard. It's a. Yeah, it's an amazing place, highly competitive, will bring out the best of you, bring out the Western you, but when it brings out the west and you just gotta, you gotta be aware, just completely self aware of what's happening around you and put that time in your family because that's gonna give the energy to form. Agree. Yeah.

I hear nothing about great things about you as a partner and as a dad. And you, you talk about that in the book and that that's your focus. So for, just for a moment, one last question. I'd like you to pretend that we fast forward many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your last day here on Earth. Someone very young, maybe it's a grandson or a great grandson, comes into the room, says, jimmy, how do I lead my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Be self aware. That's it. That sort of comes down to it. Now. It's just been completely self. Aware. I think once you train it, because it has to be trained in you, unless you've already something that you've picked up.

That'Ll bode well through life because you'll be a lot more calm, you'll be a lot more patient. You won't let others lead you down the garden path with their own emotions. You'll be completely in control. You'll be the driver, not the passenger of the bus. And I think that's where everyone should be striving to get themselves. So, yeah, self awareness, incredible advice.

Jamie, thank you so much for taking us on the journey today and thanks for sharing your book with the world and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.

Thank you very much. It's been amazing.

Thank you. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ.