An extract from Outside the Wire by Andy White
Start reading Outside the Wire by Andy White.
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PRISONER OF MOTHER ENGLAND
‘Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.’—Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
My name is Andy ‘Chalky’ White and I was a Soor Talib. My entire adult life—and much of what should’ve been my childhood—was spent in the profession of arms, as a soldier and a non-commissioned officer (NCO). I left the Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) in August 2022 after returning from what would be my final deployment, targeting ISIS fighters in Kurdistan, Iraq.
I’ve lost count of exactly how many times I deployed operationally throughout my career—around fifteen, I reckon. My deployments began with peace enforcement operations in Northern Ireland with the British Army in 1996, 1999 and 2000, then in Sierra Leone in 2001. Then came the invasion of Iraq in 2003, followed by two more tours there as the civil war dragged on. After changing countries, armies and war zones, I found myself deep in the fight in Afghanistan with the SASR, at a time when operations were at their most dynamic.
Facing an emboldened insurgency in Uruzgan Province, we were at the coalface of developing and executing a sanctioned kill/capture program from 2010, until the last Australians left Uruzgan at the end of 2013. It was targeted, it was relentless and it was effective. It was also controversial. That controversy has since been twisted, stretched and sold in tabloid headlines and the breathless scripts of television exposés—usually by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
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Friday, 13 August 2010—the events of that day are carved into my memory. Death is a constant shadow for frontline soldiers—something every professional accepts. By then, I’d already had more than my share of close calls.
Truth is, it’s fucking thrilling. But the fear can hit just as hard, especially when you see mates wounded or killed. Or civilians caught in the crossfire—people who had nothing to do with the fight but still paid the price. The thirteenth of August 2010 shaped my career in the Regiment and changed my life in ways I never saw coming.
Two things became clear in the aftermath. First was the extraordinary calibre of the soldiers I had the privilege to serve alongside. They say adversity reveals a person’s true colours, and that day proved it. So many risked their lives to save their mates; as a bloke named John once said, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.’ That sentiment rang true in the countless acts of bravery I saw over my career and the act of valour I witnessed that day.
Unfortunately, the experience also laid bare a far more uncomfortable truth: we were under-resourced and over-relied upon. Australia was trying to fight a war on the cheap, denying us critical combat enablers like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR)—what civilians might call drones—along with close air support, and even Australian troop-carrying helicopters.
Despite Defence leadership publicly rejecting claims that issued equipment was putting combat soldiers at unnecessary risk,1 by mid-2010, at the very moment that denial was made, many of us—Browny included—were wearing body armour and camouflage uniforms we’d bought ourselves, because the issued kit was substandard. We were using US ammunition and grenades because the Australian stuff didn’t perform as advertised.
I later learned from the then commander of Joint Task Force (JTF) 633, Major General John Cantwell, that what he called penny-pinching and disrespect even extended to Canberra’s treatment of our fallen soldiers. They suggested we ask the Canadians if we could use the morgue in their base next door in Dubai. The Canadians rightly pointed out that Australia should look after its own dead.
For these reasons—and plenty more—it became painfully clear to me that we were disposable tools of Australian foreign policy, wielded eagerly and repeatedly by politicians who, in many cases, had little interest in the consequences for those shouldering the load.
That day changed me. Something shifted. The piss-taker in me— the part of me that kept things light—started to fade, replaced by a harder edge.
I also began to feel shame. I started questioning myself. I’d always dismissed ‘mental health problems’ as an excuse—something used by malingerers to dodge work. I kept my distance from anyone who said they were struggling. So when I realised I might not be doing so well myself, it felt like karma.
Still, I didn’t pull back. If anything, I leaned in. For the rest of the rotation, I was drawn to danger like a moth to a flame. Barely six months later, back in Australia preparing for another deployment, I volunteered to become a K9 or combat assault dog handler. It guaranteed me a front-row seat to any firefight. The adrenaline raised my pulse when nothing else did.
Over a decade later, and after many more deployments, I reluctantly recognised I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Even if I had recognised the need for therapy earlier, I wouldn’t have gone. Speaking to the unit psychologist meant a revocation of your ‘man card’, weapons access and security clearance. I wanted to deploy—I loved being in the SAS. Seeing the psych was a career-ender.
What looked like resilience was probably a maladaptive response, driven by a compulsion to prove myself, fuelled by the guilt and shame I refused to acknowledge. Survivor’s guilt really is the gift that keeps on giving. But whatever scars I carried out of Haji Aslam Kelay were nothing compared with what came later—not from the enemy but from the Australian military establishment and its media machine, in their reprehensible treatment of the SASR and its men.
Every soldier who attempts to join Australia’s special forces does so fully aware of the risks. We accept that death or injury is likely—on operations and even in training. These are risks we take willingly. What we didn’t expect were the psychological wounds inflicted by our own leaders—failings later identified by the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide that ran from 2021 until 2024.
Until now, the Australian public has had little understanding of that context, or of the risks men like me took—both directly and inadvertently—on their behalf. Many of those risks left us with physical and mental injuries, which we accepted as part of our service. What we never expected was to be condemned by so many of the public once the wars ended, after being fed a one-sided account shaped by certain parts of the media, at a time when it became politically convenient for our own military and political leadership to blame us amid a societal witch-hunt. Nor did we anticipate the lasting mental toll of that betrayal by those same leaders.
Australia has been fed a carefully crafted narrative that brands a handful of soldiers as criminals, while absolving the political and military elites who planned, sanctioned and profited from the wars those men were sent to fight. That doesn’t sit well with me, or with many of the men I served alongside. The truth Australia has heard does not reflect the reality many of us lived. This book is my attempt to balance the ledger—or, at the very least, to give readers more information so they can judge for themselves.
American writer Flannery O’Connor—who spent her life dissecting the collision of morality and redemption—once wrote, ‘The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.’
The so-called truth that has been pushed on Australia about our special forces’ role in Afghanistan has left us disempowered and voiceless. The accused men—soldiers who deployed time and again to support the broader Australian Defence Force (ADF) mission, to train a coherent force and to rebuild vital infrastructure—were issued termination notices and cast aside without due process or procedural fairness. Men like me, whose only crime was deploying to Afghanistan repeatedly at the behest of the government, were forced out of the Defence Force and subjected to a leadership-endorsed, twelve-year trial by media. A generation of special forces soldiers and their families were betrayed for the sake of political expediency. I might not have been born in Australia, but having served her for fifteen years, even I know that doesn’t constitute a ‘fair go’.
Extracted from Outside the Wire by Andy White, available now from your bookshop of choice.
Outside the Wire
by Andy White
A SAS soldier's journey from trainee to elite warrior fighting Islamic militants in Afghanistan, only to be betrayed by his own senior leaders at home.
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