Ben Roberts-Smith

[onetrack]

8 hours ago, Admin said:

A person plants an IED yesterday and kills 5 Australians. The next day on his way to pick up some more IEDs to plant along the road meets up with an Australian walking along the road. The Australian says, hello, you are unarmed so on your way, and have a nice day sir.

 

Now turn that around a bit. You are the Australian soldier walking down that street. Those 5 Australians who were killed were your mates. You meet up with that guy walking down the street...how are you going to feel, are you going to be able to hold back your angar, your emotions...or are just going to put a bullet through that bustards head. But wait, he is unarmed!!!

Regardless of how you feel, if you are a professional Australian soldier, you cannot shoot a person under the circumstances Ian describes.

 

1. You must be 100% confident the person you are about to shoot is an "enemy combatant". Just thinking that the bloke you're looking at, is the bloke who did the bombing, and you can shoot him on the spot, goes against all Australian military training.

 

2. The suspected enemy combatant has to either be in military uniform of a known enemy, carrying a firearm, failing to stop when hailed, running away when hailed, or be caught in the process of carrying out an enemy action (arming a bomb, carrying explosives, burying a booby trap, etc).

 

3. If the suspected enemy combatant doesn't engage with you, and fails to stop when hailed, you can fire warning shots to try and prevent them from running away. If you decide that the person is definitely an enemy combatant attempting to escape, you can decide to shoot to kill - but if the person is then later found to be a frightened civilian, you will then face a grilling from your commanding officer and then potential charges of unlawful killing.

You can face military courts that administer Military Law - and in some cases, you can even face civilian investigation for war crimes, if your behaviour is bad enough. Shooting unarmed prisoners is most certainly a war crime - but it's happened before, definitely in WW2, and quite possibly in Korea and Vietnam.

 

When I was in Vietnam, I has two chances to kill people I was certain were enemy combatants. In the first case, six of us were riding in the back of an open-top LWB Landrover through a village when a Tuk-Tuk went in the opposite direction and it stopped, due to traffic congestion. Our Landrover stopped as well at the same time, due to congestion.

In the back of this Tuk-Tuk was a young man dressed in a black pajama outfit, which was the "unofficial uniform" of the Viet Cong - and it was also a fairly common dress style for farm peasants.

 

This young man glared at me with a face that was so twisted and malevolent, and filled with murderous hatred, it actually shocked me. To me, his face appeared virtually black, such was the level of murderous hatred, the likes of which I've never encountered, before or since. As our eyes locked, and my interest in him ratcheted up a level - he flew out of the back of the Tuk-Tuk, running for his life.

 

At that point, I knew I was looking at an enemy combatant, a member of the VC, and he'd probably already killed Australian soldiers. I could have shot him, I had an SLR between my legs with a full magazine (we never went anywhere without our trusty SLR, and it was an offence to put it down, out of reach) - but I chose not to, because - (A), I could not be 100% sure he was an enemy combatant, (B) it was fairly crowded village area, and civilians could have become casualties, and (C) I had not challenged him and called on him to stop.

 

If I had shot him, I would have been interrogated over the shooting and asked to explain the reasons why I chose to shoot. I could more than likely have gotten approval from my CO for shooting him - especially if no family member complained - as would have have been the case, if he was VC.

 

However, I "erred on the side of caution", and don't really regret not initiating any kind of shooting response. Perhaps that bloke got away with murdering Australian troops - or perhaps he was just an angry and bitter supporter of the Viet Cong, with a hatred of the Australian "invaders" of his country. I'll never know.

 

The second time I had the chance to shoot suspected enemy combatants, I was on picket duty in a raised part of a bunker in a fenced compound adjacent to our road base quarry, in the North of Phuoc Tuy Province.

The whole area was a hotbed of VC and NVA activity and the nearby village was known to be under VC control. I was on picket duty at 2:00AM, hunched over an M60 MG, fitted with a Starlight scope.

 

I was checking the area out front of the bunker through the Starlight scope, looking for enemy movement - when I suddenly spotted several figures, right at the extreme range of the scope, moving about. It was a dark night with little Moon and the Starlight scope vision was lower quality than when there was some light available from the Moon.

I sat and watched these figures moving around for maybe 20 minutes. Were there actually people there, or was I imagining things? Was it enemy combatants trying to test or probe our defences, or preparing to launch an attack?

The wee small hours are the best time for an attack. Or was it just peasants going to work early to avoid the heat (not unknown - but they usually didn't appear until just before sunrise).

 

I did nothing. I wasn't prepared to shoot without a more substantial proof that there was actually people there, and that they were actually enemy. The figures melted away after about 20 mins, and nothing happened. After knowing what I know now, I am pretty well convinced I did see enemy combatants up to no good (possibly planting mines or booby traps) - but they got away unharmed.

I don't really regret not starting shooting - I could probably have nailed several of them in seconds with an M60, they're a deadly piece of weaponry - but there's no knowing whether I could've killed civilians, either. However the area was under curfew and civilians found in curfew areas stood a very good chance of being shot at any time.

 

Of course, if I was an American soldier, I would've let rip with at least a couple of hundred rounds of 7.62 cal ammo, just to make sure that anything even remotely suspect out there was wiped out.

 

Edited June 7, 2023 by onetrack

[Old Koreelah]

OT it sounds like you did a very professional job in an almost impossible situation, so I hope you sleep easy.

[spacesailor]

factunter

" what would we all do if occupied " .

Old England has been occupied by most of the old world , look how they were treated after that  ' war to end all war's '.

If the enemy ' chops the head off their foe ' . WHILE bound & kneeling ,. You can see there is .

NO difference to throwing a ' hand-cuffed then shot prisoner ' off a steep hill .

spacesailor

[octave]

2 minutes ago, spacesailor said:

If the enemy ' chops the head off their foe ' . WHILE bound & kneeling ,. You can see there is .

NO difference to throwing a ' hand-cuffed then shot prisoner ' off a steep hill .

Yes, both of these acts are barbaric.

[facthunter]

They still have public executions and people leave those places in their thousands to go to DESPISED places like Europe. These are oppressive regimes. We have it relatively easy here by comparison and we are soft and whingey and wouldn't really know what doing it tough was. It CAN be better and should be though. Nev

[onetrack]

There's a couple of good ABC articles below about BRS, and the toxic SAS culture in Afghanistan. Hasties comments are worthy, but Mick Ryans article summarises the situation very well.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-14/ben-roberts-smith-andrew-hastie-defamation-finding/102478056

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-06/ben-roberts-smith-adf-military-special-forces-unethical/102439418

[Marty_d]

I wouldn't trust a lot of what Hastie says, he's thrown his lot in with the morons - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/13/tony-abbott-and-john-howard-join-jordan-peterson-led-group-looking-at-meaning-of-life

[facthunter]

IF A Bot is involved , that's all you need to know. Nev

[Marty_d]

3 hours ago, facthunter said:

IF A Bot is involved , that's all you need to know. Nev

There's so much insanity in that particular group. 

[facthunter]

Superiority Complex's and illusions of Grandeur. Their world is formed to justify their existence as they are so gifted  and special as to see it as a "Calling".  You can't believe ONE word that Abbot says.  IF He recommends some thing, don't touch it with a barge pole.   Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

In fact, do the opposite of his recommendation

[facthunter]

HIS opinion is valuable in THAT context.. Nev

[onetrack]

I see where BRS now has to cough up for the defendants costs in his failed lawsuit action against the media. However, I have little doubt he won't have to find anything out of his own pocket, his good mate Kerry Stokes will pick up the tab. There's major loans recorded from KS to BRS, and no doubt those loans will simply be written off, KS won't miss the millions wasted.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-29/ben-roberts-smith-failed-defamation-costs/102539508

[facthunter]

As long as it's his money and not shareholders. He (K Stokes) HAS taken it upon himself to support BRS but there's a media fight in there too.  Nev