Paul Warren - The Fighter

First published in 2015

Main text copyright Paul Warren 2015

The story behind Dust of Uruzgan Fred Smith 2015

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 (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Australia

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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

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ISBN 978 1 74343 992 0

eISBN 978 1 92526 801 0

Internal design by Kate Frances Design

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE DEE AND MY CHILDREN KIAHNI AND JAX, WHO BROUGHT LOVE INTO MY LIFE WHEN I NEEDED IT THE MOST, AND TO ALL THOSE WHO SERVE OUTSIDE THE WIRE.

CONTENTS

On the beach at Wollongong. A warning to all parents: buy your kids some board shorts.

In my early teens, when my life pretty much revolved around karate.

My first Muay Thai fight with Brad Dodge Hull, which I lost.

With Trent Barnes in 2002, having beaten him by TKO, retaining my Queensland title.

Just one of the wounds inflicted on me by Trent Barnes during one of our three fights.

In 2006, I went toe to toe with Shannon Shaggy King, a Muay Thai fighting machine. COURTESY OF SCOTTYA

Shaun and me in the week before my deployment, June 2009.

In 2009, just after meeting Dee, who helped me through the darkest days of my life.

Me in front of the Bushmaster, Afghanistan, July 2009.

In surgery in Tarin Kowt, July 2009. Not only did I lose much of my right leg, but I had extensive wounds to my upper leg, too.

Bens body on its way back to Australia for burial, July 2009.

Back in Oz, finally, August 2009.

Taking my first tentative steps, late 2009.

On holidays with Kiahni, 2011.

Like father, like sonmaybe. With Jax at home in Kirwan, 2014.

We made sure the wedding was a chilled-out affair.

Beneath a concrete blast shelter in the last light of the day, a pale, intense man settles a guitar on his knee. As I find a perch on the rocks nearby, combat cameraman Chris Campey positions his equipment and nods.

The place is Camp Holland, southern Afghanistan, late 2010. The guitarist is Fred Smith, an Australian diplomat assigned to Uruzgan province. Hes a field man, happiest when spending endless hours in a flak jacket observing first-hand Afghan life, Australias military effort and its aid programs and the yawning gap between hope and reality. His outlet is writing songs.

As Fred makes final adjustments to his tuning, I dont know exactly what to expect. Privately, I am hoping I wont have to disguise an embarrassed reaction if hes hopeless.

Whatever you do, dont let Fred sing, an aid worker has warned me.

But at another base in southern Afghanistan, an American sergeant had been excited to meet a countryman of his hero.

Youre Australian? I love Fred Smith, hes amazing, he enthused. If anyone is telling the truth about this place, its him.

So Fred beginsan urgent restless ballad about a soldiers story amid the fine grey dust of Uruzgan.

In the ring they called me Warlord, my mother called me Paul

You can call me Private Warren when youre filing your report

As to how I came to be here, this is what I understand

In this hospital in Germany from the Dust of Uruzgan...

It is the tale of a man who signs up with the army at the comparatively advanced age of 27. From Townsville to Tarin Kowt, he is plunged into a landscape and a social system that has changed little in a thousand years. And he finds, as everyone does, that whether outsiders motivations are helpful or malign, they will confront a people with peerless instincts for insurgency.

And so Fred sings of a moment when fate meets two men in the stark and beautiful Baluchi Valley.

It was a quiet Saturday morning when the 2 Shop made a call

On a compound of interest to the east of COP Mashal...

I was on the west flank picket, propped there with Ben

There to keep a watchful eye out while the other blokes went in...

Wed been static there for hours when I shifted slightly back

My foot tripped an AP mine and everything went black

Woke up on a gurney flat out on my back

Had to ask them seven times just to get the facts

That I lived to tell this story through a simple twist of fate

The main charge lay ten feet away from the pressure plate

You see the mine was linked by det-cord to a big charge laid by hand

Hidden under Benny by the Dust of Uruzgan...

I was a Queensland champ Thai Boxer now I look south of my knee

And all I see is bed sheets where my right foot used to be

Bennys dead and buried underneath Australian sand

But his spirits out their wandering through the Dust, the Dust of Uruzgan...

FROM DUST OF URUZGAN BY FRED SMITH

Fred ends with a howl over a furious six-string cadenza. As the last notes echo off the blast walls and a distant chopper drifts away, silence falls. Fred reverts to the quiet thoughtful man I know. Chris keeps his eye to the lens.

Play it again, I say.

Benjamin Ranaudo was one of 41 Australians who died during operations in Afghanistan. I knew his face from the official photograph, a good-looking young man with liquid brown eyes. Some diggers look like hard bastards. Ben Ranaudo didnt. Just a fit young man with an eager face and a non-military issue smile.

But hidden from view, until Fred Smith put it to music, was the torment of Private Paul Warren, close to death himself and stricken with unwarranted guilt for the loss of his mate. In Paul Warrens story the agonies of the Afghan war appear distilled.

In the months afterwards, I stayed in touch with Fred Smith. He began touring his Afghanistan songs around Australia, often playing to crowds thick with veterans and their families. With information from the war zone heavily controlled, many people found Freds songs the best insight available into how things were.

Over time, I made contact with Paul as well. He was struggling: watchful, wounded and wary. In 2013, the TEN Network launched Revealed, a long-form current affairs show. The first story to go to air was Paul Warrens. I am grateful to him for giving us that trust.

Paul Warrens story is one of hell survived. It tells of service, of courage, of the bleak wasteland of post-traumatic stress, of a man who was a national champion athlete facing life with just one remaining leg.

It is also a love story. Dearne Warren stands for all the partners of soldiers, sailors and airmen sent into harms way, who endure so much and who are understood by so few outside the service community. Knowing Dee, I have often wondered how many others would be so strong. My own answer to the same question frightens me. But strong she stayed, and their family is a tribute to two ordinary but entirely extraordinary human beings.