The untold story of CPL Dan Keighran VC

Damien Murphy looks behind the lines to reveal the story of The Battle of Derapet

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/he-used-his-body-as-a-weapon-for-us-20121109-2935d.html#ixzz2Bl44Th2K

GETTING on for four in the afternoon of August 24, 2010, Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott, Bob Katter and Adam Bandt were meeting in Canberra’s house in the hill to choose between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.

In Afghanistan, a man ran up a hill. It was 9.10am in the Tangi Valley and a joint Australian-Afghan patrol was moving through a village.

Derapet was a collection of mudbrick buildings sitting on the edge of the Tiri River flood plain, treeless rocky hills on one side, aqueduct-fed crops on the other. Since dawn, drones, satellites and human eyes had observed women and children filing out of town and large numbers of fighting males moving into the area.

Awarded for valour ... Corporal Daniel Keighran's Victoria Cross.Awarded for valour … Corporal Daniel Keighran’s Victoria Cross. Photo: Andrew Meares

The point man, Sergeant Sean Lanigan, was scoping the tall marijuana crop on the outskirts when semi-automatic fire ripped from the crop. Standing calf-deep in aqueduct water, Lanigan and his No.2, Private Paul Bjorn Langer, started squeezing off rounds into the green head-high plants.

In a dusty street 100 metres back, Corporal Dan Keighran heard the guns erupt and saw the men in front of him hit the dirt.

He went for higher ground. His sprinted ascent was marked by bullets smashing into the rock-strewn hillside behind him. He reached the top unscathed. Below him, the patrol hunkered down. Withering fire poured in as more Taliban moved up the valley to join the battle.

”It was getting pretty full on,” Keighran recalled this week in Sydney. ”I said to my gunner, [Private Shaun] Parker, ‘Mate, just put down 50 rounds rapid fire, I’m gonna stand up.”’

Over the next 180 minutes on the hill, three times he rose and ran – 20 metres, 30 metres and maybe 50 metres.

”The second time was pushing it, the third time I’m lucky, to say the least,” Keighran said. ”I was up there for hours and I hadn’t been shot. I don’t know how at the end of the day, just bloody lucky. Because that’s all it comes down to. I can say it’s the training and all the rest that go with it, but it was just luck.”

Muzzle flashes betrayed the whereabouts of Taliban firing at Keighran. Observers who had joined the then 26-year-old corporal on the ridge line relayed the enemy positions to Australian Light Armoured Vehicles, who rained down death on the insurgents.

The 20-man Australian patrol was part of Mentoring Team Delta of the 1st Mentoring Task Force. That morning they accompanied a patrol of 20 Afghan National Army soldiers. They were looking for trouble. It was a planned fighting patrol. There had been contacts in the area before and more were anticipated.

The operation had started the previous afternoon when Australian engineers cleared an observation post of improvised explosive devices on a hill about two kilometres from the village. In the pre-dawn darkness the 40 men had moved into position outside Derapet.

When the Australians and Afghans pulled out of Derapet about 1pm, maybe 95 insurgents were dead – the army does not confirm enemy deaths – but Keighran hardly fired his rifle during the battle.

”I think Dan had more of an effect on the day without firing his weapon,” fellow platoon member Corporal Lukas Woolley recalled. ”That’s why he’s been awarded the Victoria Cross.

”In my opinion, his actions that I witnessed weren’t for using his weapon. They were thinking beyond the weapon, which is quite a hard thing to do once someone is using a weapon against you.

”So he used his body as a weapon for us rather than his rifle. Instead of laying down fire, he drew it.”

Woolley’s words unconsciously echoed lyrics from Universal Soldier, a ’60s anti-war song by the Canadian folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie: ”He’s the one who gives his body, as a weapon to a war.”

Back at the multinational base at Tarin Kowt that August morning, preparations were under way for a ramp ceremony for two Australians – Private Grant Kirby, 35, and 21-year-old Private Tomas Dale, 21 – killed four days earlier when their Bushmaster vehicle was hit by an explosive device.

Another Australian was to die that day.

About half an hour into the firefight, reinforcements arrived when a patrol of 15 Australians moved into Derapet. One of them, Lance Corporal Jared MacKinney, was struck by insurgent small arms while pushing forward with his section’s machinegun while moving to higher ground at the rear. It was 9.45am.

He was dragged from the line of fire and first aid started until the company medic moved into the exposed ground to take charge of treatment. Sapper Joel Toms went up to help with MacKinney. ”When I got up with Jared the whole team was copping it hard,” Toms said.

While the medic worked, Keighran stood up again and, according to the VC citation, ”with complete disregard for his own safety, left his position of cover on the ridge line to deliberately draw fire away from the team treating the casualty. Corporal Keighran remained exposed and under heavy fire while traversing the ridge line, in order to direct suppressing fire and then assist in the clearance of the landing zone to enable evacuation of the casualty.”

A ”nineliner”, a casualty evacuation notice, had been put out. Troops then scrambled to clear a landing zone for an evacuation helicopter.

Woolley said they tried one site. No go. A five-man team ran several hundred metres further back and settled on a courtyard amid mudbrick buildings. Tight, but beggars can’t be choosers.

By then Dutch Apache helicopter gunships had appeared but had to be held off until the evacuation helicopter could take MacKinney out.

At 10.10am, an American Black Hawk medivac helicopter came in. The Taliban opened up big time. The Black Hawk tried two passes but could not touch down. Down on the ground amid swirling dust on the landing zone [LZ] Woolley watched the Americans’ eyes. They said they’d come back.

At 10.20am, they did. ”So LZ , bird comes in, flares, too much dust, the third time he’s come in a lot lower, a lot faster. All of a sudden he went Crack! Down.” Toms said Afghans helped carry MacKinney’s litter to the helicopter: ”Within 45 seconds we had ‘Crash’ [MacKinney] loaded and the bird was gone.”

At 10.33am, a doctor back at Tarin Kowt confirmed MacKinney had been killed in action.

The Apache helicopters then started multiple strafing runs with 30mm cannon while ground troops co-ordinated fire from Australian light armoured vehicles. The battle continued for another 2½ hours.

The following day, Australians observed suspected but unarmed insurgents reviewing the battleground. They placed children in Australian and Afghan positions and mapped out the order of battle.

Keighran, Woolley, Toms and Lanigan told their war story this week for the first time. The story of the battle of Derapet was slow to come out.

On September 10, 2010, the funeral for MacKinney was held in Brisbane. He was the 21st Australian military fatality. His death somehow seemed even more poignant as Australians learnt that, once his funeral finished, his widow Beckie was rushed to hospital for the birth of their second child, Noah Jared MacKinney.

Derapet briefly became a political football a few days later when sections of the media obtained an email from a soldier who had fought in the battle, claiming MacKinney would still be alive if the troops had received adequate fire support and better intelligence. The Derapet controversy was the baptism of fire for the new Defence Minister, Stephen Smith.

Fifteen months ago, Keighran resigned after 10 years of service. With no formal qualifications, he went goldmining with an army mate in Kalgoorlie. He is learning to be a blaster.

Born in Nambour on the Sunshine Coast, Keighran shifted during year 5 to Lowmead, between Bundaberg and Agnes, with his parents Judy and Ian and sister Susan. The family bred horses and he attended Rosedale State School. He eschewed the school cadet corps but three weeks after finishing year 12 in 2000, at 17, he was one of six Rosedale mates to enlist.

Last January four Derapet veterans – Lanigan, Langer, platoon commander Captain James Fanning and Parker – received operational awards in the Australia Day honours list.

On October 13, the Chief of the Army phoned Keighran at the mine to ask him to meet him at Kalgoorlie Airport. ”He gets off the plane and hands me a letter and says, ‘I want you to read that by yourself’,”’ Keighran said. In the letter the Queen said she wished him to receive the Victoria Cross of Australia. ”I’ve read through it … think there was a bit of swearing going on … and I remember [his wife] Kathryn just looked at me and was pretty much speechless. That’s when she said, ‘Now you need to tell me the full story’.”

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/he-used-his-body-as-a-weapon-for-us-20121109-2935d.html#ixzz2Bl3sIQbG

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