The Long Way Home (Marching Song)

Ready for collection

My team and I had finished the interviews and filmed the messages home. After midnight, someone tapped my boot: be ready between 0100 and 0200. We were leaving KAAOT by boat.

The boat that arrived

A small dinghy arrived instead of the Seahawk. Its driver spoke no English and carried us through black water to a garbage barge where four armed Iraqis waited. The crew cleared rubbish from a hidden hatch, handed us sandwiches and water, sent us below and pulled the garbage back over our heads.

Beneath the garbage

The compartment was tight, hot and almost completely dark. For three hours and twenty-two minutes, every engine change, footstep and knock suggested another ending. We did not know whether we were passengers, cargo or prisoners. We stayed calm, trusted one another and remained ready.

You lads lost?

Eventually the engines stopped. An outboard approached, voices crossed the deck and the rubbish shifted. The hatch opened. The first things I saw were two sandy-brown berets. Then came the sweetest Australian accent I had ever heard: ‘You lads lost?’ We laughed because one sentence told us who had found us and that the worst was over.

A Zodiac F470 took us ashore before first light, where three armored Land Cruisers waited. For the first time in two days, I felt completely safe and slept most of the way back to Baghdad.

Back in Baghdad

Back at the mess, each of us retold the trip as though he had been the calm professional while the other two behaved like Muppets. A midnight dinghy, a garbage barge, darkness under rubbish and a familiar voice above a hatch: that was our long way home.