Dean Tilley thought he would die in the mud during a firefight in Afghanistan. Instead, he saw another man murdered. Telling his story would bring its own dangers.
On a brisk spring morning in 2018, two special forces veterans of Australia’s war in Afghanistan entered a busy cafe in Canberra and, after pleasantries, began a grim-faced meeting. To the public servants sipping their coffees nearby, the pair would probably have stoked interest because of the identity of one of them.
An aerial photo of Whiskey 108 marked up in court by Ben Roberts-Smith during his Federal Court defamation case. By then, the weather had closed in and the sky was a patchwork of greys, growing darker in the drizzle. This was different. It felt sharper, more vivid. Today, Tilley found himself thinking, may well be the day ...
Blocking out any discomfort, he moved on to a nearby mud-walled alleyway system by the poppy field. He heard a sound and froze. The creak of a door. Tilley counted the seconds – 10 ... 20 ... 30 ... – as the Afghan walked away from him and into the poppy field, oblivious to the shadow of death stalking him.The poppy field, sodden ground and drizzle, mirrored the jungle reconnaissance training Tilley had undergone years before.
Before Tilley could settle his breathing, machinegun fire exploded and he plunged forward into the mud and grass, waiting for the pain.“OK … that is our gun,” he said to himself as he got back to his feet and continued closing in on the suspected enemy stronghold. It was too late. His finger squeezed the trigger and the man fell. Tilley felt his heart pounding as he waited for the body to move, but it lay still.
Before the man could rise, the soldier who had tossed him into the mud had fired into his body. Now it was Tilley who felt winded.The man had been tossed by the large Australian soldier like a rubbish bag, only to have his body ripped apart by bullets. Days earlier, Tilley heard from Roberts-Smith via an encrypted application. His message was anodyne, flagging that Roberts-Smith would be in Canberra, suggesting a coffee.The SAS soldier’s guard was up, though. Unlike others in the SAS, Tilley had received no defamation threats from Roberts-Smith’s lawyers, but he was mates with those who had.
He pulled out a copy of the newspapers’ truth defence like a prosecutor brandishing a murder weapon before a jury. “Well … actually … that’s how I remember it … You were pretty loose at Whiskey 108. You did a lot of things in front of the young guys you shouldn’t have.”“You can’t get in trouble for perjury if you legitimately don’t remember,” he told Tilley.Brereton inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan“I’m not going to lie on the stand. The truth is the only thing that will protect me.”
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