The Australian Special Air Service Regiment had the insurgents on the run. On the night of June 10 2010 as the Taliban shifted its defence west in the Shah Wali Kot Valley of southern Afghanistan Special Operations Command at Multi National Base Tarin Kot sixty-three kilometres north gathered intelligence. Next morning Blackhawk helicopters of the US 101st “No Mercy” Aviation Regiment dropped an assault force of roughly twenty elite SAS operators in three patrols from 2 Squadron outside the village of Tizak. They were to “kill or capture” the Taliban leaders there.

Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith served in a patrol of six operators acting as 2 Squadron’s reserve. At 9.30 am a Blackhawk landed them four kilometres from Tizak where they soon received orders to reinforce the assault patrols who were pinned down by Taliban machine guns. Roberts-Smiths’ patrol, of which he was second-in-command, located a Taliban position and called in a missile-laden 101st Apache helicopter to eliminate it. In the lull the SAS evacuated two wounded before the Taliban forced their heads down again. Four light machine guns concealed in a nearby farm were still in action but curiously the No Mercy were not hailed again. Thus began the story of Tizak that blurred fact and fiction.

Dr Peter Pedersen wrote an official record of the battle in Issue 57 of the Australian War Memorial’s Wartime Magazine called The Falling Leaves of Tizak. He based it on an interview with Roberts-Smith. Eyewitnesses gave an alternative narrative in a federal court exhibit labelled A142.

All agree that after the evacuation of the wounded, Roberts-Smith’s patrol manoeuvred to outflank the farm to silence the machine guns. All agree that the idea came from his patrol commander. Under fire Roberts-Smith identified a shack that he considered central to the Taliban defence. Eyewitnesses said it was all but empty. He killed an enemy holding a grenade launcher there. Eyewitnesses said the man was unarmed. He then drew fire on himself allowing his patrol commander to eliminate one machine gun with a fragmentation grenade. Eyewitnesses said Roberts-Smith kept his cover while another trooper took out the machine gun. Roberts-Smith then killed two other machine gunners with rifle fire. Eyewitnesses said that by that time the guns posed little danger. All agreed that the fourth machine gun had long been silenced.

As recorded Roberts-Smith’s actions were reckless and brave. Yet for a Tier 1 special forces operator, the elite of the elite, it was another day at war. He, however, won the Victoria Cross of Australia for his actions, the military’s highest award for gallantry and therefore rare. Almost a third of Australia’s Victoria Crosses were posthumous such was the calibre of the valour they required. Eyewitnesses said that “the government” had acted on a political whim.

Gillard Labor government defence minister Stephen Smith recommended Roberts-Smith’s medal. Labor, Liberal, and Greens parliamentarians gushed in Hansard calling the corporal a “person of exceptional character”. In 2012 Roberts-Smith earned a leadership Commendation for Distinguished Service as a patrol commander. In 2013 he entered the talk circuit. In 2015 billionaire media owner Kerry Stokes hired him as a network general manager. At some point word reached the Australian Defence Force high command that the myth and the man did not add up.

In the litany of Exhibit A142 SAS members testified that Roberts-Smith’s official Tizak actions were falsified and “embellished”. They accused him of glory-seeking and medal hunting. Importantly they said that his general demeanour as a leader rendered him “not fit and proper” for the Victoria Cross.

On June 8 2018 mainstream news publications including the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times ran a series of accounts against Roberts-Smith accusing him of war crimes in Afghanistan covering up murder and torture, and of bullying and sadism in the leadership of his men. In August and September 2018 Roberts-Smith, financed by his billionaire employer, sued those mastheads and their journalists Nick McKenzie, David Wroe, and Chris Masters for defamation.

On June 1 2023 Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko dismissed his case ruling that on the balance of probabilities the journalists were vindicated. Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC was now in the civil law’s view a war criminal, and as a non-commissioned officer of the Australian Defence Force he was unexemplary.

Guardian Australia journalist Paul Daley published a unique opinion piece that day. In it Daley believed that Roberts-Smith had not only disgraced Australia’s Anzac Spirit but had killed it—a good thing Daley argued for in the national self-image it was long overdue.

Daley said that Australians worshiped their “diggers”, the colloquial equivalent of the American grunt, in a “secular religion”. Diggers had for over a century committed atrocities in war, Daley said, and the time had come to stop “tying national celebration … to the battlefield”.

This analysis missed the point.

Australians did not celebrate the digger’s battlefield. They celebrated a mixture of the digger’s stoicism and humility under adversity there called mateship. In times of trouble the ghosts of Gallipoli came to an Australian’s aid. To an Australian, mateship was glory.

That changed on September 9 2001 when Liberal prime minister Howard threw Australia’s lot into the Global War on Terror a fight with no clear objective, no key territory, nor any measure of victory. In it mateship gave way to confusion. Even in the aftermath of the Bali bombings it brought a miasma of apathy.

In his recent book, Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine author Lawrence Freedman reflected that a nation’s ability to give wartime orders was necessary to ensure that everyday people did what everyday people were not inclined to do: risk their lives to kill others. So, in Australia’s wars diggers killed.

War was “a mere continuation of policy by other means” Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his 19th Century On War. So, when the Howard government said that Islamic extremism imperilled Australia’s pluralism, diggers went to war where diplomacy wouldn’t tread.

That didn’t mean that killing was heroic let alone enjoyed. In his 1996 landmark study On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman observed of World War 2 that “the vast majority of combat veterans … would not kill”. Only in Vietnam with the introduction of a practice called “conditioning”, Grossman said, was “the American soldier … first psychologically enabled to kill to a far greater degree than any other soldier in previous history”. When anti-war protests took away their moment for “the psychologically essential purification ritual that exists in every warrior society”, however, Vietnam veterans were shamed in a manner “unprecedented in Western history”. Indeed, the Anzac Spirit took an apathetic hit in Australia’s anti-Vietnam War movement, but Ben Roberts-Smith poses an even greater danger today.

The corporatisation of war, much like the privatisation of the public service now plaguing PricewaterhouseCoopers, has brought Australian values into question. The unparalleled greed of business lobbies and their politicians that have since 2001 marketed the digger’s sacrifice has diluted the mateship within.

When politicians wage war for interests other than the national defence—which explains the military disasters in both Iraq and Afghanistan after their initial quick subjugations—valour becomes commodified and the Anzac Spirit commercialised.

Left as such those in the field who are pre-disposed to sociopathy, or lacking the professionalism their training should have afforded, will buy into the system and run rogue. Seeing themselves as brands, they find in war a willing fodder to help fabricate their auras and cover up their excesses. They corrupt the diggers’ legacy.

In Ben Roberts-Smith Australians know that their defence force, particularly its Special Operations Command, has a lot to answer in allowing omnipotence to infect their elite killers.

It is the same hubris today that sees the ADF risking a half-a-trillion taxpayer dollars to procure a handful of nuclear submarines. It is the same nod to what Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 warned would today be the military-industrial complex. It is the same negligence that has infected militaries world-wide who have forgotten that “elite” means a soldier’s ability to efficiently kill while exercising restraint. In the myopia of grift the hype-switch has been disabled.

Ultimately, politics has brought this about: the waging of un-winnable wars for vested interests and the declaration of non-existent victories to calm the populace. It is the same politics that labels Covid-19 “unexceptional” while it cripples generations. Politics more than ever is the pursuit of dollars.

Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC is as much the antithesis of the digger as he is a product of Australia at war in the 21st Century. He alone cannot kill the Spirit of Anzac. Whether Australians tolerate the privatisation of the Anzac Spirit will.

So long as Roberts-Smith keeps his Victoria Cross and a presence at the Australian War Memorial, the “Spirit of Anzac Inc.” will erode the digger’s sacrifice until its values die.

In his book The Story of Russia Orlando Figes recalled George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four who wrote “who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”. This is Putin’s current playbook, Figes said, and has been every Russian despot’s prior. Australians must keep hold of their present.

Ben Roberts-Smith has had his day. Now the gallantry and honour that he corrupted to build his brand must be reclaimed. Indeed, in all wars Australians have committed atrocities. “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,” the Duke of Wellington said after Waterloo. “All wars are atrocities,” wrote Aaron Sorkin in The West Wing.

Honour, though, is defined by a nation’s values. Corporate selfishness has declared war on mateship. This cannot be tolerated.

Australia’s Victoria Crosses must be cherished. Ben Roberts-Smith must be erased from glory’s records, and glory must never be bought and sold again.

© 2023 Adam Parker.


Picture credit: “Pistol Grip” © 2023 Australian War Memorial, art modified showing black box under Creative Commons Attribution—NonCommercial 3.0 Australia license.

References:

  • Figes, O. (2022) The Story of Russia. London, Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Freedman, L. (2022) Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. Great Britain, Penguin Random House UK.
  • Grossman, D. Lt. Col. (1995) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston, Little, Brown and Company.
  • von Clausewitz, C. (1993). On War (M. Howard and P. Paret, Trans.). Princeton, Princeton University Press.