John Ratcliffe - Biting Through: five years in Afghanistan

Scribe Publications
BITING THROUGH

John Ratcliffe was born in Melbourne in 1962. He began his studies in traditional Chinese medicine in the early 1980s, graduating in 1988, before spending six years in the Australian armys Commando regiment and then leaving to resume his career in Chinese medicine. He opened his first clinic, which he ran for 11 years, in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Richmond, and went on to become one of Victorias first fully qualified Chinese medical practitioners.

Ratcliffe left Melbourne for Afghanistan in 2005 on a three-week private-security assignment that morphed into a five-year journey into hell. After returning home in 2010, he found it difficult to hold down a regular job, and was homeless for a short while. In 2013, he left Australia once again to apply his operational experience and medical knowledge in third-world countries.

To my mother, Anna; to JB and Rob, to whom I owe my life; to the children I met who taught me so much about compassion; and to Daniel

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
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First published by Scribe 2014

Copyright John Ratcliffe 2014

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Ratcliffe, John, author.

Biting Through: five years in Afghanistan / John Ratcliffe.

9781922070999 (Australian edition)
9781922247711 (UK edition)
9781925113181 (e-book)

1. Volunteer workers in medical careAfghanistanBiography. 2. Medical assistanceAfghanistan. 3. AfghanistanSocial conditions21st century. 4. Afghan War, 2001Personal narratives, Australian.

958.1047

scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk

Contents

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Authors Note

This is a work of non-fiction. I have changed the names of some individuals to protect their privacy, and in some cases I have also modified identifying details to help preserve their anonymity. Others appear under their real names. There are no composite characters or composite situations in this book; all of the events are real.

The quotations that accompany each part-opening page come from the I Ching , or Book of Changes , an ancient Chinese book of wisdom. The book was translated into English in 1950 by Cary F. Baynes, from an edition that Richard Wilhelm had translated into German in 1924, interpolated with various Chinese commentaries and Wilhelms own commentaries. The text is available on the Internet.

Unless otherwise stated, all references to currency are expressed in US dollars.

Prologue

I am an Australian. My mother was born in Germany, from a good family, and my father came from the poorest of the British working classes. They met in Germany at the end of World War II. My mother was in her early twenties and my father was a captain in the army, at the time working for the War Crimes Commission in Nuremberg. He had risen through the ranks from a private to become an officer, and at the start of the war had been evacuated from France when Dunkirk fell to the Germans. Back in England, he immediately volunteered for the Commandos, a fledgling organisation that was being raised after Winston Churchill had identified the need for Special Forces soldiers and clandestine operations. My father eventually became part of a group known as No. 1 Special Boat, which later became the Special Boat Service, or SBS. After serving as a frogman in the Adriatic, attacking Italian shipping with limpet mines, he was absorbed into the British Special Air Service in North Africa. Over the course of the war, he survived terrible dangers and was captured three times, and was eventually decorated by King George VI. He was truly a remarkable man.

When the war broke out, my mother was a young girl living with her mother in Edinburgh. Being German citizens, they were detained by the authorities, and spent six months in an English bluestone prison until they were repatriated to Germany. Once back, they were separated and placed in a concentration camp. My mother was eventually released, but my grandmother spent the duration of the war in captivity, unable to make any contact with her daughter.

Both my mother and father had been prisoners during the war, and both had been exposed to one of the most feared arms of the Nazi party the Gestapo. My father, after being captured for the second time, was brutally beaten and tortured.

While a prisoner in England, my mother had met a young Jewish girl who was about to go to the United States to be married. The girl gave my mother a book that recorded the girls familys history and had been handed down from generation to generation. She asked my mother to take the book with her when she returned to Germany, and to give it back to her family. Unbeknownst to the two of them, the Holocaust had already begun. By the time my mother was released from the concentration camp, the girls family along with thousands of others had already disappeared. When my mother tried to return the book, the Gestapo were alerted and later arrested her. They interrogated her and told her she was going to be shot at dawn. A Catholic priest came to her cell that night to hear her last confession. She didnt know what to tell him; she was only eighteen, and had hardly lived at all. She sat up the whole night awaiting the dawn. The next morning, they took her from the cells and walked her into a courtyard, where she found her grandparents waiting for her they had convinced the commandant to release her into their care. The Gestapo spared her life, but, like many events of the war, the ordeal had left its mark through to the present day.

My parents emigrated to Australia after the war to start a new life. I was their third child, but because my two siblings were much older, I felt more like an only child. I had little appreciation for my parents wartime experiences. I just thought they had the most amazing stories. But when I tried to tell my friends about them, no one believed me; they said I was making it up, so I learned not to mention the things I had been told. When I was eight, my father opened up to me and began recounting his wartime experiences in detail. I had imagined that this was something he had shared with my siblings, but I was wrong. I soon became a good listener and, in my childish mind, lived out his stories with my nave imagination.

At the time he met my mother, my father had been given a job by the War Crimes Commission: rounding up Nazi war criminals who had escaped through the underground after the war. He hunted them down all across Europe, and the ones who could not be brought to trial, but whom he knew to be guilty, were liquidated. My father told me of the Nazis he killed, and how he did it. This was a heavy load for a child to take on, but I sat on the edge of my seat with excitement and admiration. He told me many things about his exploits over the next few years, so that I developed a unique insight into the tradecraft of assassination. Of course, like any son, the words of my father were a codex for me to aspire to. What I didnt understand was that he was reaching the end of his life and was unburdening himself in my presence before he passed away. He told me many details that I had to commit to memory and keep from telling others, as there were still people around the world who wanted to know. He needed someone to tell his secrets to, and I was there to listen. It seemed he had found someone to help with his pain.