“Poignant” is an unlikely word to use about a battle in which you’ve come perilously close to losing your life.
But that was the word former SAS soldier ‘Person 4’ chose this week, as he sought to explain why the battle of Tizak, as it became known, had bound him and Ben Roberts-Smith together in a way only two people who’d faced extreme peril together could be bound.
It was a hot mid-June day in Afghanistan in 2010 when an Australian SAS unit found itself pinned down in a terraced grove by two Taliban machine-gunners, who were raining fire down on the Australians.
The odds were “overwhelming” against his team, the former special forces soldier told the Federal Court in Sydney this week. The army would normally throw 30 soldiers up against one machine gunner, let alone two machine guns. But on this occasion, only himself, Roberts-Smith and one other comrade had a chance to try storming the enemy stronghold.
Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith outside the Federal Court last week.Credit:Steven Siewert
Together, he and Roberts-Smith managed to silence the Taliban’s guns. “That action was the highlight of my professional career,” he recalled on Wednesday.
“We both supported each other … we overcame overwhelming odds.”
Roberts-Smith would garner the Victoria Cross for Tizak. Two years later, Person 4 would be awarded the lesser honour of the Medal for Gallantry for the same battle – a delay which would sow the seeds of a simmering sense of injustice.
Yet at that time, he said, “I loved him [Roberts-Smith] as a brother”.
All the more startling, then, to hear Person 4 effectively label his former comrade-in-arms a war criminal in the courtroom this week.
What changed? Two years after the Battle of Tizak, in September 2012, Person 4 was serving as second in command to Roberts-Smith, who was by then an SAS patrol commander.
They were on a fateful mission to a village named Darwan, to hunt down a rogue Afghan soldier who had slaughtered three Australian soldiers on a coalition base the previous month.
At Darwan, Person 4 claimed, he saw Roberts-Smith kick an unarmed and handcuffed prisoner down a cliff, the man falling so forcefully that his teeth were knocked out of his mouth on the way down.
After he’d followed Roberts-Smith and another soldier, Person 11, down a path to the river bed below, Roberts-Smith allegedly ordered him to help drag the stunned villager to a nearby tree.
When he heard shots ring out from an M4 rifle (the type carried by the SAS), he says he turned to see the prisoner lying dead, and Roberts-Smith and Person 11 nearby, with Person 11 still holding his rifle in the firing position.
Person 4 added that he believed that the ICOM radio subsequently photographed next to the dead villager had been taken by Roberts-Smith from a different individual killed earlier in the day (though later he conceded he did not know this for a fact).
Person 4’s evidence has been a watershed moment in this most extraordinary of defamation suits.
His description of the events at Darwan tallies, in a number of key respects, with evidence given by three Afghan villagers last year, whose accounts were beamed into the courtroom by audio-visual link.
Person 4’s Darwan evidence also tallies with original reports written by investigative reporters, Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, in June 2018, concerning the death of a villager named Ali Jan, who’d allegedly been kicked down a cliff then shot by the SAS.
Roberts-Smith, suing the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age over these and other reports, has strenuously denied all wrong-doing. His version of events at Darwan is that the dead villager was a Taliban “spotter” – equipped with a radio – whom he and Person 11 surprised in a cornfield as the troop was evacuating.
But Person 4 told the court that Roberts-Smith instructed other members of the patrol that the “spotter” version was the “story” that they all had to stick to.
A few years later Person 4 shared the Darwan story with another soldier, Person 7. This led to the following exchange with Roberts-Smith’s barrister, Arthur Moses, SC: “That story about Darwan you told him [Person 7] was basically saying that Mr Roberts-Smith is a war criminal, correct?”
“That’s correct,” Person 4 agreed. The former soldier however denied that he considered Roberts-Smith was undeserving of the VC for the earlier action at Tizak and that this had prompted him to tell others about the Darwan incident.
Yet he felt his own actions at Tizak had been comparatively undervalued.
”I was upset that something as outstanding as what both Ben and myself did was politicised and they [the military authorities] could have accepted the fact that both of us did as much as the other that day,” he said.
He added that he believed the government wanted a “good news story” out of Afghanistan, and that the Roberts-Smith VC was it. Yet he was also adamant that he was not now trying to bring his former comrade down.
Under intense questioning from Moses, he described two camps among the elite SAS troop, one in support of Roberts-Smith, and another highly critical of the subsequently lionised VC war hero. Person 4 said he was in neither camp but that within the unit, “sharks were circling”.
This part of Person 4’s evidence will almost certainly be seized on by Roberts-Smith’s lawyers who have contended that the war crimes allegations against their client have been fuelled by professional jealousy.
Person 4, medically discharged from the SAS last year, never wanted to be part of this case. He was summoned under subpoena by Nine’s lawyers. His recent mental health struggles have been raked over in the courtroom by Roberts-Smith’s lawyers all week.
Compounding the stress he says he’s been under is that another soldier, Person 41, testified several weeks ago that Person 4 himself had been ordered by Roberts-Smith to shoot an unarmed prisoner on another occasion in 2009, at a compound dubbed Whiskey 108 (again strongly denied by Roberts-Smith).
Person 4 has sought and been granted a degree of protection in the courtroom from answering questions about Whiskey 108, for complex legal reasons.
SAS soldiers on duty in Afghanistan move towards a waiting UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter.
By Friday lunchtime, he’d been released from the court, but only after giving evidence for four-and-a-half gruelling days. Moses repeatedly put to Person 4 that his memory had failed, that his medications were interfering with his recall, that he was hallucinating, or that he was “making things up”.
Person 4 remained adamant throughout: “I know it [Darwan] happened”.
By Friday afternoon, the media outlets had called another critical SAS witness into the box, codenamed Person 18 (none of the SAS personnel can be identified by name).
Person 18 said Person 4 had told him during a drinking session in late 2012 about seeing Roberts-Smith kick a “detainee” off a cliff. He’d asked Person 4 not to tell him any more because he was “sick” of watching friends “break down” over things that had happened in Afghanistan.
In two later meetings with senior officers, attended by Person 18, Person 4 had repeated the story about the detainee being kicked over the precipice, Person 18 told the court.
Person 18 also gave evidence about receiving anonymous threatening letters in mid-2018, shortly after he had given evidence to a secret government inquiry into war crimes allegations. The court has previously heard that Roberts-Smith asked his then friend, John McLeod, to track down addresses and post envelopes for him at around this time. Roberts-Smith has denied sending the letters.
Person 18 described his alarm at receiving the letters, which in at least one case have been handed to the Australian Federal Police after he reported them to superiors.
On Monday, he will continue giving evidence on events at Whiskey 108, where it has been alleged that Roberts-Smith ordered Person 4 to “blood the rookie” by shooting a detainee who had allegedly been pulled from a tunnel. Roberts-Smith has denied giving any such order and has consistently maintained there were no Afghans in the tunnel. At least two SAS witnesses have now said there were.
More soldiers will be called to the stand as the trial continues.
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