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IT’S 9pm in the Persian Gulf. The year is 2002. Australian troops based in Kuwait, the small Arab nation nestled at the tip of the Gulf, are engaged in Operation Southern Watch.
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The sky is quiet and washed out in night-vision goggle green.
A United States aircraft carrier is in the Gulf. Just after 9pm, two F-18 Hornets take off from its deck and fly fast toward Iranian airspace.
Southern Watch is the operation monitoring the southern Iraqi sky after bombing against Shi'ite Muslims indicates then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will not comply with a United Nations order for peace.
The operation is almost over. Soldiers have been in the region for almost a decade since Desert Storm.
Pat McMahon, an air refuelling officer, is flying home after hours in the combat zone. His crew spots an unidentified fighter jet coming up on their tail.
"He wouldn’t talk to us," Mr McMahon said. "He came up alongside our aircraft, right by the flight deck."
The jet is Iranian. And Mr McMahon and his crew have drifted into Iranian airspace.
"We thought we were going to get taken out."
Under sniper fire
Mr McMahon joined the RAAF in 1980 after three years with the 12/16 Hunter River Lancers. The Lancers are the New England's local Army regiment – the modern concatenation of the 16th and 12th Light Horse, who participated in the historic charge at Beersheeba in 1917.
"I always wanted to fly," he said. After his time with the 12/16, driving armoured personnel carriers, Mr McMahon joined the Air Force as a diesel fitter and attended night school to finish his HSC - a qualification he needed to become a pilot.
In his 28-year career, he flew Squirrel, Iroquois, Gunship and Blackhawk helicopters and completed several combat air-to-air refuelling missions. He participated in three major conflicts in Africa, East Timor and the Middle East and flew the world's most powerful leaders during his time with the Australian VIP Squadron.
"I got to fly the Queen around,” Mr McMahon said. “And Paul Keating all over the world. And John Howard.”
In 1993, he deployed to Somalia as part of Operation Solace, a peacekeeping mission protecting humanitarian operations in the area. Allied forces oversaw food distribution during famine and violent civil unrest.
"We were constantly under sniper fire anywhere around the airfield at Mogadishu," he said. "It was a terrible place to be."
In 1998, Mr McMahon deployed to Iraq during Operation Pollard where he began flying air-to-air refuelling missions.
"You don’t want your assets sitting in an air combat area," Mr McMahon said. "You don’t want your fighters and your bombers there. You want them a long way away."
He said his crew would take off 30 minutes before the fighter jets. The fully-armed jets would use almost all their fuel to reach the flying tanker.
"When they get to the battlefield, they would refuel off us, and then they would go and do their missions all day. On the way home they would come and get fuel off us to (get home)," Mr McMahon said. "Just our deployment refuelled 800 fighters and offloaded more than six million pounds of fuel."
Australia has five refuelling aircraft, Mr McMahon said. The US has 690. Without the tankers, jets would never make it into combat. Or make it back.
"I can remember one village in Afghanistan,” he said. “There were vehicles moving around and everything. And about 10 minutes later, there was nothing. It was all gone.”
‘I’ve just got to get home. I’ve just got to get home’
“(The Iranian fighter) let us go,” Mr McMahon said. “We turned the aircraft back to Iraq and got out of there as quick as we could.
“Everyone went quiet on the way home. No one spoke much." It was one of a countless times he might not have made it home.
"At the time, you are just doing your job. You are concentrating on getting home and hope that nothing goes wrong," he said.
"You come back to camp, and you are pretty hyped up. You talk about it, and carry on, and try to play it down a little bit, so it didn’t get to you.
In 2002, Mr McMahon was deployed to Afghanistan. "We had some of the blokes in Afghanistan who just froze. They couldn’t stand it,” he said. “We had to send a couple of them home.”
The base never stopped. Fighter and bombing missions flew around the clock. The noise was incredible. "I remember my last mission coming out of Afghanistan," he said.
"It was a night mission, and I remember seeing the sun coming up over the Himalayas as we were flying back towards Ghan. A week later, I was coming back to Australia. I was thinking 'I’ve just got to get home. I’ve just got to get home.’.”
There was no escaping that every combat mission could have been his last, but he said he and the soldiers around him "had a job to do".
"Honestly, you have the blinkers on. You have a job to do. You are trained to do it. And you go out on mission after mission. And you know that you might not come back," he said.
Boys with guns
After September 11, Mr McMahon deployed with the first contingent of Special Air Services soldiers based in Kyrgyzstan. He flew 32 combat missions into Afghanistan.
He remembered the base of 2000 aircrew living in an area about the size of two football fields. "That was the only way they could protect us,” he said.
The greatest terror was that of suicide bombers.
"That was probably one thing that rattled people the most because you didn’t know who was the enemy and who wasn’t," he said.
"It was nothing to see a 14 year-old boy carrying an automatic weapon down the street."
He said he hopes commemorators today spare a thought for the "invisible wounds" or war as much as the physical ones. "We don’t have conscription, so the regulars just keep going over and over. You can see that it has taken its toll.”
The rate of suicide in Australia is around 12 in every 100,000 people - more than double the national road toll. But statistics on the rate of veteran suicides are still largely unclear.
“War is not a good thing at all, but we have to look after the ones who come home who have mental issues and post-traumatic stress.”
Pat McMahon’s military career
- 1977: Mr McMahon joins the 12/16 Hunter River Lancers where he undertook weapons training and drove armoured personnel carriers.
- 1988: Mr McMahon joins the Royal Australian Air Force as a diesel fitter and attends night school to gain his Higher School Certificate.
- 1990: He lands an Iroquois Helicopter on Anzac Cove as part of that year’s World War I veteran pilgrimage to Gallipoli.
- 1992-1993: Operation Solace is Australia’s primary contribution to the Unified Task Force led by the United States and sanctioned by the United Nations in the Republic of Somalia. The mission is to create a protected space for humanitarian operations in the area.
- 1993: Mr McMahon deploys to Somalia and flies missions into the capital at Mogadishu.
- February, 1998: Operation Pollard commences – a military operation toward the end of the US operation Desert Storm at Kuwait. 1812 soldiers participate in Pollard. The operation continues until October, 2001.
- September, 1999: Mr McMahon is deployed to East Timor as a flight advisor to General Peter Cosgrove, who was then leading Operation Warden – one of three phases of an international peacekeeping mission as East Timor achieved independence from Indonesia. The operation continues until February 18, 2000.
- 2002: Mr McMahon flies air-to-air refuelling missions in Iraq as part of Operation Southern Watch (1993 – 2003), monitoring Southern Iraqi airspace after Desert Storm.
- September 11, 2001: The World Trade Centre and the Pentagon are attacked in Washington. Mr McMahon is in Singapore.
- September 12, 2001: Then Prime Minister John Howard is flown from Washington to Hawaii by US aircraft, Air Force Two. Commercial flights into and out of the US are cancelled.
- November, 2001: The first contingent of Australian Special Air Services troops deploy to Afghanistan as part of Operation Slipper. Mr McMahon is deployed in the first phase of the operation.
- 2005: At the end of a 28 year career, Mr McMahon has flown Squirrel, Iroquois, Gunship and Blackhawk helicopters, as well as air-to-air refuelling missions of combat zones.