Courage Under Fire by Daniel Keighran VC

Author:Daniel Keighran VC
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2020-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Another day, an unexploded IED had been discovered and I was tasked with taking a British Army explosive ordnance disposal team out to make it safe by disarming it or blowing it up in place.

If we had driven the most direct route to where the IED had been found, it would have taken us about half an hour, but that would have also meant driving on the main road, where a vehicle had been blown up and someone killed just a couple of days earlier. Instead, a circuitous cross-country route was plotted that would keep the patrol clear of all main roads.

‘Where the fuck are you guys going?’ the British NCO in charge of the EOD team asked me after we had spent an hour negotiating back streets.

‘The scenic route,’ I told him.

‘How much longer? We need to get there now.’

‘Couple of hours.’

He fumed. I didn’t care. I knew that the IED had been cordoned off so there was no time pressure, and what was three hours of your life if it saved someone else’s? What else were we going to do with our day?

People said we had been lucky in Iraq, not losing an Australian soldier to enemy fire, but to a certain extent we made our own luck, by taking precautions, and no-one wanted to be the first and last Australian to die in combat. Having said that, I didn’t shy away from a fight and was ready to hook in given half the chance.

In Iraq, the enemy played a cat-and-mouse game with us, using IEDs and firing the odd shot at us. It was frustrating. Rather than letting it bother me, I was more of the opinion of, ‘Here I am, take a shot at me and let’s have a go.’ They were too smart, however, to bring on a pitched battle as they knew full well the resources we and the Americans could bring to bear with little notice.

We finally arrived at the IED and the Brits got out to inspect it. The lethal device was three 107-millimetre rockets daisy-chained together. The EOD team was able to defuse it and tossed it in the back of the car.

On the way back to base, we took a different route again – it never paid to drive the same roads twice in close succession. We came across a civilian truck that had been destroyed by an IED. No matter how many precautions you took you could never totally second-guess the enemy. Who knew if this truck had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if there was someone on board the insurgents were targeting?

We got out to have a look. The truck was burning, already down to its wheel rims. There was the oily smell of diesel hanging in the overcooked air and the pungent odour of fertiliser, the main ingredient in roadside bombs.

There was the usual crowd of civilian onlookers beyond a cordon. A little boy gave us the finger and an older man spat in the dirt, a sign of his anger and disrespect.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.