Ian McPhedran - The Amazing SAS : the Inside Story of Australias Special Forces

My first close encounter with the men of the SAS was in 1996, when fifteen perished, along with three Army aviators, after two Black Hawk helicopters crashed during a night training exercise.

Reporting on the story, I came to admire these mysterious soldiers and the dangerous work they do. The fuse for this book was lit.

Late in 1999, photographer John Feder and I were in Bobonaro in the mountains of East Timor, close to the West Timor border, on patrol with an Infantry section. We found ourselves in what looked like an office in the main street of the town. Inside, two Australian soldiers were armed with unusual, nonstandard-issue weapons and we guessed they were SAS men, but they disappeared out a back door without a word.

Some time later at SAS headquarters at Campbell Barracks in Swanbourne, Perth, I met one of the soldiers and, recognising him, reminded him of the encounter. He gave me a knowing grin, but didnt want to talk about it. We would meet again in 2002 on a charter jet carrying SAS reinforcements and gear to the war in Afghanistan. Again, conversation was minimal.

During that same Afghanistan trip, John and I were eating in a huge United States mess hall at Bagram air base, north of Kabul. At another table sat a bunch of bearded, long-haired men, some dressed in shorts, chatting and laughing. They were Australian SAS troops enjoying some time off in between patrols in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

It was the shorts that gave the game away again, this time in Iraq in April 2003, when the vehicle I was sharing with an ABC TV crew approached an SAS checkpoint on Highway One to the west of the Euphrates River. The Aussie accents were a welcome break on the hazardous road trip from Jordan to Baghdad. We tried to talk to them, but they refused and sent us packing.

I discovered later that concealed SAS troops had, eleven days earlier, watched my car speed down the same highway in the opposite direction, after another journalist and I were expelled from Iraq by the dying regime of Saddam Hussein.

The theme running through these encounters was the mystery of these men. What were they up to in these obscure corners of the world?

Some of the soldiers I have encountered in faraway places are featured in this book. Every quote is genuine, chosen from dozens of interviews conducted during 2004. The soldiers and commanders of the SAS Regiment have made it clear to me that they do not consider themselves heroes, nor do they think of their actions as particularly outstanding or amazing.

Their humour, intelligence and professionalism shone through in all our conversations and, I hope, also shine through these pages, which span the regiments operations from East Timor to Iraq, 1999 to 2003.

This is their story.

Nerves were taut as two American helicopters descended through pale moonlight into the ancient city of Kandahar for a historic council of war.

Australias top special forces soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Gus Gilmore, the commanding officer of the Special Air Service Regiment, was one of a select group of men on board. For an hour they had flown low and fast across the barren landscape of southern Afghanistan, away from the coalition forces forward operating base, Rhino, towards Kandahar, the countrys second biggest city.

The modified Chinook special-operations helicopters had just reached the outskirts of the city when Gilmore heard a loud bang and saw sparks spewing from the back of the machine. He thought they had been hit by ground fire.

It took me a couple of seconds to realise we were still flying, so of course we werent hit, Gilmore says now.

It was only a backfire, but it frightened the living daylights out of him and the others on board the blacked-out chopper. Machine gunners at the rear ramp and side doors anxiously scanned the eerie, softly lit land below.

United States Marine commander Brigadier General James Mattisthe commanding officer of Task Force 58, the task group formed to secure southern Afghanistanhad invited Gilmore along for his first meeting with anti-Taliban leader Hamid Karzai.

Im going to go up tonight to speak with Hamid Karzai in Kandahar about how we will prosecute the plan that weve been putting in place, Mattis had said to Gilmore. And Id like you to come with me.

The general had been contemplating how he would occupy Kandahar when a message came through from a US special forces team accompanying Karzai, saying that he would be in town on this night. Earlier in the campaign the same American team had narrowly escaped annihilation when a misdirected bomb had landed. A number of Americans had been killed and the commander, a lieutenant colonel, was still deaf in both ears when he met the generals delegation.

He had seen his sergeant, five feet in front of him, just disappear in a puff of smoke because the bomb had literally landed 20 metres in front and theyd lost half the team, just like that, says Gilmore.

Mattis, a straight-talking officer in the Marine Corps tradition, had already decided he wanted to enter Kandahar peacefully and be welcomed by the long-suffering locals, rather than going in all guns blazing and risking further civilian losses.

He knew that they would have to live there and therefore that how you occupy would be critical to the ongoing success of the forward operating base, and, in turn, operations in the south.

The helicopters touched down at one oclock in the morning in what appeared to be a park on the outskirts of town.

It was early December 2001, not quite three months since Osama bin Ladens al Qaeda terrorist group had flown two planes into the World Trade Center in New York and a third into the Pentagon, while a fourth, probably on its way to the White House, had crashed in Pennsylvania. More than 3000 people died in the worst terrorist attack in history on that day, 11 September 2001.

On 20 September, US President George W Bush addressed both houses of Congress and declared the so-called War on Terror. America then unleashed her military might against the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, which was harbouring bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters.

As the helicopters flew into Kandahar, a city which had been in the hands of allied Northern Alliance forces for just 36 hours, the area around the international airport was still being contested by pockets of Taliban resistance. Two four-wheel-drive vehicles manned by the special forces operators waited to take the Marine commander and his Australian offsider into the city.

Kandahar, Afghanistans major trading centre, was founded by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The Pashtun city has been fought over every few centuries ever since. It fell to the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban in 1992.

As the vehicles drove quietly through the citys narrow and deserted streets towards the former palace of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Gilmore thought it was like a scene from a movie. But this was not a Hollywood production, and he knew that down any one of the narrow alleys could be someone willing to kill him.

Gus Gilmore had been commanding officer of the SAS since January 2001. An intense and quite formal officer, the father of three is regarded as one of the finest strategic thinkers ever to have worn the sand-coloured beret and winged-dagger badge of the SAS Regiment.

For this mission he was heavily armed, clad in body armour and ready to fight. There were shady figures in the middle of the night, wearing their black garb, standing around street corners and down little alleys. Youre always conscious of the fact that theres a vulnerability, but you get on with it, he says.

Once they reached the palace compound, Gilmore, General Mattis and the other American officer on the trip, a US special forces commander, were given a guided tour by a member of Karzais staff. In the moonlight the bomb damage was obvious.