Saving Private Sarbi

  SAVING PRIVATE

  SARBI

  Sandra Lee is an Australian author and journalist with 25 years of experience in the daily newspaper and magazine publishing industry in Australia and the United States. She is the author of three non-fiction books including the best-selling 18 Hours, The True Story of an SAS War Hero, which a former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove (RET) called a ‘thrilling, fast-paced account of Australian soldiers in a real war against a real terrorist enemy’.

  She also wrote the best-selling true crime book Beyond Bad: The Life And Crimes Of Katherine Knight, Australia’s Hannibal and The Promise: An Iraqi Mother’s Desperate Flight to Freedom.

  Her books have been published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.

  Sandra lived in New York City for almost four years where she worked as a foreign correspondent for News Limited’s Australian newspapers. She is a former assistant editor and opinion columnist of The Daily Telegraph, editor-at-large at Australia’s biggest selling women’s magazine, marie claire, and was the last back-page columnist of The Sunday Telegraph.

  She now writes regularly for Madison and Vogue fashion magazines as well as Sunday magazine.

  For more information or to contact the author, visit

  www.sandralee.com.au

  SAVING PRIVATE

  SARBI

  SANDRA LEE

  First published in 2011

  Copyright © Sandra Lee 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are

  available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 557 1

  Internal design by Darian Causby

  Set in 12/16 pt Goudy by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my husband, JP Clemence

  And for the doggies, brave and loyal warriors who have

  given us their absolute all, yet ask for nought in return

  Also, for their handlers, past, present and future

  ‘There is no faith which has never yet been broken,

  except that of a truly faithful dog.’

  Konrad Lorenz

  In Dogs We Trust

  Unofficial motto of the soldiers in the Explosive

  Detection Dog Section

  To Protect

  Motto of the Australian Army’s Incident

  Response Regiment

  Ubique (Everywhere)

  Motto of the Royal Australian Engineers Corps

  Contents

  PROLOGUE • A high-ranking mutt

  PART ONE: SARBI THE CIVILIAN

  CHAPTER 1 • Litter of disappointment

  CHAPTER 2 • The Newfoundland: a brief history

  CHAPTER 3 • Twice as nice

  CHAPTER 4 • What’s in a name?

  CHAPTER 5 • It’s a dog’s life

  CHAPTER 6 • Recruitment day

  PART TWO: SARBI THE SOLDIER

  CHAPTER 7 • Bomb school

  CHAPTER 8 • A nose for war

  CHAPTER 9 • Teaching old dogs new tricks

  CHAPTER 10 • Sarbi, go seek

  CHAPTER 11 • Welcome to Afghanistan

  CHAPTER 12 • Camp Holland

  CHAPTER 13 • Outside the wire

  CHAPTER 14 • RIP Merlin and Razz

  CHAPTER 15 • Once more unto the breach

  CHAPTER 16 • Blackhawk down

  CHAPTER 17 • Ambushed

  CHAPTER 18 • Saving Private Sarbi

  CHAPTER 19 • EDD Sarbi MIA

  CHAPTER 20 • Mutt morale

  CHAPTER 21 • Pupstar

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  A HIGH-RANKING MUTT

  Early on 11 November in 2009 Kevin Rudd hunkered over a wooden trestle table in the mess tent of the Australian Army’s elite Special Air Service Regiment at Camp Russell, deep in the war-torn province of Uruzgan in southern Afghanistan. Across the table from the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia sat General Stanley Allen McChrystal, a strikingly lean figure decked out in United States Army standard-issue combat fatigues. Rudd enthusiastically smeared Vegemite over a slice of buttered toast as McChrystal looked on, sipping a mug of instant black coffee, his usual brew. An outspoken and controversial career officer, he had earned his fourth star five months earlier but won a reputation as a ‘snake-eating rebel’ long before. McChrystal was the top-ranking officer in Afghanistan with a direct pipeline to the recently installed President of the United States, Barack Obama.

  The prime minister and general could not have been more unalike. Rudd’s pixie-like countenance and moon-shaped face was topped by a flop of greying blond hair that blew when in a moderate wind. He wore R.M. Williams boots and a blue open-necked shirt tucked into dark trousers. At fifty-two, his body had softened with age and resembled the physique of a man not inclined to the disciplines of athletic pursuit. In the company of soldiers his bookishness was replaced by a manufactured matey-ness and his clipped, almost passionless vowels became riddled with the ockerisms and occasional profanities for which he was known.

  McChrystal, by contrast, was wiry and muscular, the result of the eleven-to-twelve kilometres he ran daily regardless of location. A hawkish nose and close-set gimlet eyes punctuated a chiselled face road-mapped with crevasses from a life lived hard. The general was a disciplined man, a perfectionist who slept a maximum of five hours a night and limited his food intake to one ‘big-ass meal’ a day, usually in the evening. If hungry, he snacked on salted Bavarian pretzels. Coffee kept him alert.

  The meeting was significant and came at a critical time in President Obama’s strategic plans for the long war in Afghanistan, which he had made a priority over Iraq.

  Public support had waned and the number of American and coalition soldiers being killed was growing at an alarming rate. Two months earlier McChrystal had warned the new president that the war was at risk of failure, a word he repeated several times in the top-secret 66-page report he had been asked to compile. The general outlined the status quo, which amounted to eight years and little progress, as well as his vision that highlighted ‘the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate’.

  Australia, like the United Kingdom, was irrevocably wedded to its alliance with America and had a lot of skin in the game. More than 500 coalition personnel had been killed in 2009 alone, making it the deadliest year since the war began in 2001. Australia had suffered 91 casualties and, at that time, eleven fatalities. Seven Diggers had been killed since Rudd became prime minister. In two years he had made too many heart-wrenching condolence calls to grief-stricken famil
ies, the last on 18 July following the death of Private Benjamin Ranaudo, who was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED). The crudely made bombs were the enemy’s weapon of choice and were lethally effective, placed to cause maximum carnage to the coalition forces and civilians alike.

  Back in April Rudd had increased troop numbers on the ground by 450 servicemen and women, taking the number to 1550. But he signed off on the extra troops with a measure of caution, deliberately limiting the soldiers to roles such as providing security and training and mentoring members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) in the dangerous and violent province of Uruzgan. The prime minister did not hold back on conveying his message either. In September, a day before meeting the president at the international G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, Rudd declared during an interview on CNN that Australia’s current troop numbers were ‘about right’. The unspoken subtext was that there would be no more coming. ‘Our commitment, in partnership with our American allies, is to be there for the long haul,’ he added reassuringly.

  McChrystal already had sent a message to Canberra via Australia’s chief commanders, requesting that restrictions on where the Australian soldiers operated be eased. Known as ‘red cards’, the restrictions were strictly observed by the Army’s commanders in Afghanistan. Yet, under McChrystal’s highly publicised new counter-insurgency program, the general ostensibly wanted the Australian troops to deploy on routine combat missions with their Afghan partners beyond Uruzgan.

  The prime minister had flown in secrecy to Camp Russell to the isolated and heavily fortified joint Dutch-Australian military outpost, travelling in the belly of a C-17 Globe-master III. The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) crew collected the prime minister and his entourage in Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal on the east coast of India, and arrived in Afghan airspace as the sun began its descent over the bone dry and barren landscape. Rudd had a barbeque dinner with the Australian soldiers in Poppy’s Bar, a recreational mess area named in honour of the slain soldier David Pearce who was killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) in Uruzgan Province in 2007. Rudd, affecting a blokish idiom in an attempt to bond with the soldiers, boasted he was happy to ‘yak with youse all’ and was still making good on his promise the next morning.

  Not since Billy Hughes spent a night at an army headquarters in France in 1916 had a prime minister bivouacked in a war zone. Yet, as biographer L.F. Fitzhardinge implies in his two-volume history William Morris Hughes, the prime minister of the Great War was some distance from the front and made only a fleeting visit. Rudd, by contrast, would spend an entire night in an active war zone, constantly under direct threat of enemy attack. He bedded down in accommodations provided by the highly trained and heavily armed troopers of the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), men who live by the credo ‘Who Dares Wins’. His sawn-off bunk bed was located in Camp Russell. It was, arguably, the safest section of the base, if there could be such a thing on a frontline. But even so, the stakes were extraordinarily high. Heads of government are high-value targets to the enemy. Nothing was left to chance.

  This was the prime minister’s third visit to Afghanistan but the first to coincide with a historically significant day for the military, Armistice Day.

  General McChrystal flew in a small military aircraft with his regular entourage of advisers and a security detachment, landing on the former US base as the sun was rising. The two leaders had a tight schedule, micro-managed almost to the minute. They started the day with a casual meet-and-greet with a couple of SAS troopers who joined them for breakfast, witnessed by the small press pack that travelled with the prime minister.

  Next up was a private briefing in which McChrystal would give Rudd, the Australian Defence Minister John Faulkner, and the boss of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, a strategic and tactical overview of the situation in Afghanistan and discuss Australia’s continued contribution.

  At 1100 hours the dignitaries would attend the annual

  Remembrance Day service to commemorate the signing of Armistice in Europe in 1918, which effectively ended the First World War. The service honoured the 330,000 Australians who served and the 60,000 young men whose blood was fatally spilled on foreign soil. McChrystal, aware of the solemnity of the occasion, would lay a wreath during the ceremony.

  After that, a tour of the trades school where Australian soldiers from the Second Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force, or MRTF2, taught Afghan men basic construction and engineering skills.

  Every hour was accounted for yet the prime minister had a surprise for the general—a closely guarded secret that would make headlines around the world when revealed. The brass in Afghanistan had been sitting on the secret for fifteen days. Rudd had been briefed on the subject and, keenly aware of the value of good news in a war zone, was eager to share it with McChrystal. After all, a member of the elite US Special Forces had played an integral role in the unprecedented accomplishment and there was nothing like shared success to cement diplomatic relationships.

  Besides, this story was too irresistible to ignore, especially for a dog-loving prime minister who was currently writing a children’s book about his own adorable pet golden retriever and mischievous cat and their adventures on Australia Day with the help of actor Rhys Muldoon.

  With breakfast done, Rudd, beaming boyishly, directed the American general outside the mess tent. There, sitting obediently beside an Australian soldier, was a big, black dog called Sarbi. She was a highly trained member of the Explosive Detection Dog Section, or Doggies as it is colloquially known, and one of the Army’s secret assets.

  The soldier was armed with an automatic rifle slung over his back, a sidearm strapped to his thigh and a well-chewed tennis ball for the happy-go-lucky mutt. Sarbi bolted after the ball when he tossed it for the waiting cameras.

  ‘Sit.’

  Sarbi dutifully obeyed. The prime minister and the general crouched down next to the dog as Rudd regaled his guest with the remarkable story of the beautiful mutt with a white blaze that ran vertically down her broad chest.

  Sarbi was born on 11 September in 2002, one year to the day after the terrorist attacks on American soil that killed almost 3000 innocent souls, mostly civilians. There was unspoken significance in the coincidence.

  Loyal and smart, Sarbi was like a puppy that never grew up, eager to please and quick to protect. Not even the most world-weary and battle-scarred soldier could remain impervious to the huge hound with beautiful big round eyes the colour of dark chocolate, especially as she tilted her head to the side and crinkled her forehead as if deep in thought whenever an instruction was issued or her name called. The pink tongue lolling out the front of her mouth helped, too. Sarbi did dangerous work and never once failed her masters. In fact, she had protected them from death by using her powerful nose to sniff out IEDs and explosives and cleverly alert her handler to their presence.

  Sarbi had gone missing in action on 2 September 2008, when the Taliban ambushed her patrol. Nine Diggers, including Sarbi’s handler, who for security reasons can only be referred to as D, were injured in the closely fought three-hour battle for life and death. It was the largest number of Australian casualties in one incident since the Vietnam War.

  Shrapnel hit Sarbi, too.

  One of the three Australians to escape unhurt was SAS Corporal Mark Donaldson, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his gallantry under fire that day.

  Sergeant D’s American counterpart, Sergeant First Class Gregory Rodriguez, was killed while trying heroically to protect a wounded colleague. His dog Jacko survived the firefight.

  In the chaos of the ambush Sarbi was separated from the patrol. When it was over she was gone, lost in the Afghanistan terrain. But the miracle mutt defied the odds. She survived the firefight and for thirteen months somehow managed to live through a brutal winter and scorching summer in wild and dangerous countryside.

  The prime minister simply loved the story of the plucky pooch and the day couldn’t have been mo
re appropriate for an unofficial homecoming parade for the explosives detection dog.

  Gallipoli had Simpson and his donkey. Now Afghanistan had another four-legged star—Sarbi. The cameras clicked and reporters took notes. The fiercely loyal and resourceful Sarbi was about to become the nation’s most famous hound.

  General McChrystal couldn’t have known it, but a heroic soldier with four paws had just upstaged his four stars.

  PART ONE

  Sarbi the Civilian

  Chapter 1

  LITTER OF DISAPPOINTMENT

  Sarbi didn’t start life as a heroic explosive detection dog, nor was she bred to join the Australian Army and serve her country on foreign battlefields. In fact, she started life as an abject disappointment. Not to Ric Einstein, though. Disappointment was the last thing on his mind when a customer walked into his pet shop one spring day in 2002, carrying a pair of fluffy, squeaking pups wriggling with wonderment at the newness of life. They were two of a litter of eight.

  The former computer executive knows dogs, loves them, and has done all his life. He quit his fast-paced life and a high-powered job for a tree change in the picturesque town of Mittagong in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales in 1990. Seeking a new business opportunity, he bought a pet shop in a handsome corner building constructed in 1882 on the old Hume Highway, renamed it Animal Magnetism, and hung out his shingle. The shop previously didn’t sell pups, but Einstein changed that and by 2002 had a thriving business selling dogs from reputable breeders.

  Einstein’s customer, the one with the pups, explained that she had a pair of pure-bred black Labrador retrievers that she had wanted to breed. They were show dogs and, as with most hounds that brave the show ring for judgement day, were just magnificent. Show dogs must be as near to the prescribed definition of physical perfection as the breeder is capable of producing. The Australian National Kennel Council (ANKC), one of the overarching bodies that determine all things to do with breeding, nominates seventeen stipulations that, if met, will allow all dogs including the lovable Lab, as they are commonly and affectionately known, to be anointed with the ultimate status of ‘pure-bred’.