Expatriates (22 page)

“The more I learn about people and society the more I love guns and explosives. Guns and explosives are more understandable, more predictable, and less hazardous.”

—Joe Huffman, in his blog
The View from North Central Idaho

F
our days after Chuck Nolan returned to Site G, an Indonesian patrol discovered Site M, the McKenzie farm.

The patrol consisted of six Indonesian Army (TNI-AD) troopers on green-painted Kawasaki 275-cc off-road motorcycles. They had been tasked with following every road and track in their operational area to search for any signs of resistance, and for any materiel that could be exploited. That day they had already used their bolt cutters to cut the locks on more than twenty gates on the Adelaide River Road.

Although the McKenzie farm was hidden by hills, a pair of the cycle troops found it simply by following the road. The cycle scouts rode up to the farm house with nonchalance. The farm looked abandoned and no vehicles were visible. Their eyes were drawn to the big riding arena building, so it was where they started their search. It was also where it ended.

The younger of the two troopers slid back the big door of the arena and his eyes grew wide as saucers. Inside were enormous piles of supplies on pallets and more than a dozen Australian Army vehicles and civilian trucks parked in a herringbone pattern, nose out. There were eight rifles pointed at him. An Australian sergeant who had combat experience in East Timor shouted, “
Opgeven!
” the Dutch word for surrender. Rather than surrendering, the soldier grabbed the MP5 submachine gun that was slung across his back and spun it around to fire.

He went down in a fusillade of bullets. The Indonesian managed to fire only one short burst into the ground before a hit to his upper spine caused him to lose control of his grip. A few moments later, a second burst of fire killed the other TNI-AD trooper.

One of Site M's outlying sentries reported that other Indo troops had heard the shooting and could be seen radioing in a report. Realizing that Indonesian aircraft might respond in just a few minutes, or ground troops might arrive in less than an hour, the lieutenant commanding Site M wisely ordered an immediate evacuation and destruction of all of the FLB's stored supplies.

In just five minutes all of the fuse igniters had been pulled. The site's entire complement of vehicles headed out individually to a predesignated rally point that was fifty-five miles to the south. From there, they would convoy to Alice Springs.

Within a few minutes of their evacuation, the farmhouse was fully engulfed in flames—accelerated by ten gallons of gasoline. The explosions of the fuel blivets and stacks of mortar ammunition began another eight minutes later. The explosions and resulting smoke could be seen and heard for miles.

The vehicles headed south quickly, each following a preplotted GPS route. This circuitous route used all secondary roads until they were south of Katherine, in the hopes of avoiding contact with Indo-Malaysian forces. For the first fourteen hours, the convoy stopped only to refuel, using their Mack MC3 diesel tanker truck. They jokingly called this camouflage-painted turbocharged diesel nine-ton truck their
Mad Max 2
Tanker.

At near midnight they reached the Ti Tree Airport, which was just inside of friendly lines. Ti Tree was an old cattle station town. A RAAF and RAAAF contingent at the airport were there to greet them and to direct them to a vehicle dispersal area. The airport had already been bombed once and was under sporadic observation by Indonesian drones, so it was not considered safe to leave the vehicles near the airstrip or to park in a regular pattern.

After six hours of sleep, they resumed their convoy to Alice Springs. In all, the drive was eight hundred miles, and they covered most of that in the first day. Once they reached Alice Springs the following day, the officer in charge made inquiries with his brigade commander via the RAAF's satellite phone. Ironically, he was ordered to set up a new FLB in the bush at a water bore three miles east of Ti Tree Airport. This was less than one and a half miles beyond where his unit had bivouacked the night before. They spent the afternoon shifting supplies, refueling all of their vehicles, and refilling the tanker.

By the next evening they were establishing the new Ti Tree FLB on Anmatyerre aboriginal land. His men were exhausted by the time they had the camouflage nets suspended above all of the vehicles. The lieutenant had thought it was important to do so before dawn. Some of the men grumbled about this, but they stopped complaining when they heard the sound of RAAF machine gunners shooting at a Wulung drone as it passed overhead.

The dusty Ti Tree FLB was not nearly as comfortable as Site M, but it would be their home for the next three weeks.

“When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.”

—Chief Aupumut, Mohican, 1725

S
oon after their invasion of Australia began, the Indonesians started to shuttle fighter aircraft and fighter-bombers to airfields in northern Australia. Because they lacked aircraft carriers, this necessitated flying with minimal armaments and carrying drop tanks. Ordnance for the planes all had to come to Australia, so the planes had only limited operational capability with a low operational tempo, allowing just two sorties per day.

When war with Indonesia began to look likely, a Civilian Auxiliary Australian Air Force (CAAAF) was created almost spontaneously. Most of the volunteers were retirees who owned their own light planes. The CAAAF—also jokingly known as the Old Farts' Australian Air Force (OFAAF)—had two distinct cadres of members: those who had family obligations, and those without. The latter formed the nucleus of the organization. Many of them were self-designated as “too old or too sick to care” and volunteered for the riskiest missions. These were mostly “teaser” flights aimed at getting the Indonesian Air Force to scramble their fighter planes. The goal was to flush the Indonesian fighters out of their hardened revetments so they could then be shot down by any of the dozens of Stinger Stay Behind teams that were deployed along the northern Australian coast. Since the Indonesians had more operational aircraft than the RAAF, it was essential that they be destroyed either on the ground or as they were taking off or landing. Everyone realized that if their air superiority were allowed to continue, the Indo planes would make it very costly for Australian Army forces to maneuver. Only with freedom of maneuver would they be able to counter the Indo-Malaysian advances.

One much-publicized septuagenarian couple in the CAAAF was Edward and Paula Hadley from Alice Springs. Edward Hadley was a retired banker. Before they left on their final flight, Mr. Hadley told a reporter from
The Australian
, “When you're seventy-three and have been diagnosed with Stage Three pancreatic cancer, you can be a lot more fearless than a healthy twenty-something who has a wife and kids.”

They day before they left, they visited their son, who agreed to take charge of their mixed-breed Bitzer dog, Max. When they left Max and his leash and food bowl, their son realized they weren't coming back.

Mr. Hadley was flying his Turbo Mooney 231, which he had owned and meticulously maintained for twenty-five years. His wife was flying a donated twenty-three-year-old Cessna 172. The Hadleys spent their last night before the fateful mission at an abandoned cattle station near Stapleton. Like many other stations with its own airstrip and AVGAS fuel tanks, the owners had willingly donated their use to the CAAAF.

At just after eight
A.M.
the next morning, the Hadleys came into Darwin at treetop level. Two Indonesian F-16 fighters were scrambled in response, taking off side by side. The Indo pilots foolishly left their flare dispensers turned off. Before the jet fighters could turn toward the two light planes, they were downed in rapid succession by Stinger POST missiles while still less than eight hundred feet off the ground. Five minutes later, after the Hadleys had circled the Darwin Airport several times, they lined up their planes' noses toward the military ramp at the south side of the airfield. Another Indonesian fighter—an F-5—taxied out of its revetment. The Hadleys' two planes dropped their flaps and angled toward it, making a well-calculated approach at ninety miles per hour just off the deck. In rapid succession, they slammed the Mooney and the Cessna into the F-5, spraying wreckage across the taxiway and setting all three planes ablaze.

—

I
n the preceding year and a half, most of the Australian Army had been tied down with quelling civil disturbances in major cities on the southeastern coast. A limited call-up of the Australian Army Standby Reserve had only been partially successful, given the chronic fuel shortages and general chaos in the cities.

Before the Crunch, Indonesia had about 235,000 men under arms, including one armored cavalry brigade and fourteen infantry brigades. These brigades included ninety infantry battalions, one parachute battalion, nine artillery battalions, eleven antiaircraft battalion, nine engineer battalions, one independent tank battalion, seven independent armored cavalry battalions, and four independent para-commando battalions.

After some reshuffling three of Malaysia's four army divisions were put under the operational control of Indonesia, bringing with them the majority of the Malaysian army's one thousand armored vehicles.

After the Crunch, the Indonesians also hastily assembled another eleven reserve infantry brigades. These units were led primarily by retired officers and NCOs who had been recalled to active service. The second-line units were equipped with older-generation equipment, some of which dated back to World War II. These brigades were intended for protection of the home islands, thus freeing up the regular army for the planned invasions.

There were also twenty-seven new Pembebasan Kerombakan Komando (PKK) battalions formed. These 140-member units were a separate organization from the 786 Heroes. The PKKs trained to infiltrate enemy territory to mine roads and to blow up bridges, trestles, communications facilities, port facilities, and other key infrastructure
south
of the 24th parallel. Given the strategic goal of the invasion, oil fields, fuel pipelines, and terminals in the northern half of the country were intentionally ruled out as potential targets. But fuel refineries and related infrastructure south of the 24th parallel were on the target list.

The Indonesian general staff set the following targeting priority for the PKKs:

1. All surviving RAAF aircraft

2. Civilian communications infrastructure

3. Military communications infrastructure

4. Civilian and military air defense and ATC radars

5. Power generation and distribution infrastructure

6. Intelligence gathering and analysis centers

Facing the 350,000 Indonesian and Malaysian invaders, the Australian Army had just 25,000 Regulars in the country, and between 55,000 and 170,000 Reserves—depending on whether or not the Standby Reserves were counted. Many of these men had not had any military duty for twenty-five years. As the Crunch set in, the Australian soldiers deployed for Operation Slipper became stranded in Afghanistan. And since the deployment had gone “up-tempo,” its numbers had surged from 1,500 to 5,000 men just before the Crunch.

The original Indonesian invasion plan had included seizing the huge Kwinana refinery near Perth. But that part of the plan was later discarded after the manpower required to depopulate and control the Perth region was studied in detail. The final plan—Plan Capricorn—sought to control all of the territory and oil assets
north
of the 24th parallel, and carry out a “depopulation and denial” terror campaign south of the 24th parallel. The long-term goal of the invasion was to terrorize Australia into permanently ceding all of the land north of the 24th parallel to Indonesia. They reasoned that since the vast majority of the Australian population already lived south of the 24th parallel, the Australians could be bullied into submission.

For more than a decade, Indonesia had been developing its own drone aircraft. The main UAV program was development of the Wulung, a 264-pound drone with a twenty-foot wingspan and a T-tail. It had a four-hour flight endurance and a cruising speed of sixty-nine miles per hour. The data link limited it to operating only within forty-five miles of its ground controller. Crude by the standards of developed nations, the Wulung had a very noisy engine and simple avionics, but it still provided fairly useful tactical imagery. The Wulung had gone into mass production in 2014, but most of them were destined to service in foreign militaries.

The Wulung UAVs were difficult to spot and shoot down. Only one was downed by ground fire, but two of them were downed by CAAAF pilots, who discovered that the unarmed UAVs could be approached from behind by a light plane that slowed to near stall speed. Closing on the UAVs slowly, their fragile tails could be quickly chewed off by just a touch of an airplane propeller. Tailless, the UAVs were sent spinning out of control.

The Australian Army had its own UAVs, the larger and slower but more sophisticated RQ-7B Shadow 200 drones. Since the Wulung had a single tail boom and a T-tail, and the Shadow had a twin tail boom and an inverted V-tail, there was little risk of misidentification. The Aerial Threat Briefings given to all ADF units and even the ABC television news shows about the invasion emphasized this key difference in their designs.

The American-made Shadow UAVs weighed 458 pounds and had a sixteen-foot wingspan. They had up to nine-hour flight endurance. The Australian Army, however, had only seventeen of them at the onset of the Crunch, and nine of those were deployed in Afghanistan, and hence left out of the equation. Then, on the night of the synchronized Indonesian attacks, four of their Shadow UAVs were destroyed on the ground by thermite charges. The four remaining Shadows were used quite effectively and none of them were lost to ground fire or Indonesian fighter planes. The problem was that there were simply
too few
Shadows available. The expansive distances of the Northern Territory also limited their effectiveness. The Shadows worked well in Papua New Guinea and in Afghanistan, but in Australia's Top End, the flying distances were so great that the UAVs were either completely out of range or so close to their maximum range that they had hardly any loiter time before they had to return to their airfields.

The drone war was just one small piece of the parrying that took place between the Indos and the Australians. Both sides, like chess players, were waiting for their enemy to make a decisive move.