In the lead-up to the report’s release, the very notion that Australian soldiers might have committed war crimes was greeted with disbelief, if not disdain. In August 2018, then Director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Brendan Nelson, affirmed that accusations of war crimes only served to ‘diminish the respect’ that Australians had for their military. War, he observed from the safety of Canberra, is ‘a messy business’ and ‘as far as I am concerned, unless there have been the most egregious breaches of laws of armed conflict, we should leave it all alone’. Careful what you wish for. The Brereton Report uncovered ‘credible information’ of twenty-three incidents in which thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants or persons hors de combat had been unlawfully killed. Twenty-five Australian soldiers, the vast majority from the SAS, were implicated in these killings, either as perpetrators or accessories, some on a single occasion, a few on multiple occasions. Compounding their crimes, the alleged perpetrators ran a boiler-plate cover-up operation to conceal their offences, planting weapons (‘throwdowns’) or communications equipment on innocent victims and then lying in unison to official inquiry teams – only too ready to accept their falsehoods – that the dead men were legitimate targets. It got worse. There was also ‘credible information’ that some ‘junior soldiers had been required by their patrol commanders to shoot prisoners, in order to achieve their first kill, in a practice known as “blooding”’. As Campbell put it in his briefing to the press: ‘Rules were broken, stories concocted, lies told, prisoners killed. Once that rule was broken, so too was further restraint.’

For obvious reasons, the report was heavily censored. Indeed, its second part, ‘Incidents and Issues of Interest’, which apparently detailed each of the thirty-nine incidents and the specific allegations against the Australian personnel, constituting six of the eight volumes, was redacted in its entirety. Cue Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces, which fills in some of the redactions, providing graphic accounts of who killed whom, how, when, where, and why nothing was done about it for almost a decade.

In the wake of the ADF’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2013, as rumours about SAS war crimes swirled, Willacy, a respected ABC reporter, filed more than twenty separate stories detailing allegations of deviant behaviour in the SAS, building up a larger picture of it as ‘the worst governed unit in the Army’. His big scoop came in late 2019. A combat engineer who had served with the SAS in Afghanistan, disgusted by the crimes he had witnessed and the continued failure to hold anybody to account for them, handed Willacy a cache of previously unseen helmet-cam images. Among the stock shots of helicopters swooping into isolated settlements, doors being kicked in, fiery explosions, and intense firefights, Willacy discovered footage of an SAS operator, ‘Soldier C’, executing an unarmed Afghan civilian cowering in a wheat field. His report for Four Corners highlighting this incident created international headlines, won him a Gold Walkley Award, and definitively demonstrated that allegations of SAS war crimes were more than rumours.

In Rogue Forces, Willacy tells the story of what went wrong in Afghanistan by focusing on the experiences of one SAS Squadron (No. 3 – ‘The Third Herd’) on one six-month deployment in 2012. It is a neat device that enables a tight focus on a small and emblematic cast of characters who fall into four groups: the victims, the good soldiers, the rogue warriors, and their absent commanders.

One of the book’s principal achievements is to humanise the SAS’s Afghan victims and remind Australians of the real casualties of this war. By restoring the victims’ names – Dad Mohammad, Haji Sardar, Mohammad Zaher Shah – Willacy restores them to their familial and social contexts as sons, fathers, husbands, carers. In doing so, he illustrates how the coalition’s indifference to the local people’s suffering, its refusal to accept their common humanity, sowed the seeds of their failure in Afghanistan. Instead of winning hearts and minds, the coalition drove a steady stream of recruits into the arms of the Taliban.

The book’s central focus is on the good soldiers who struggled to help the Afghans and uphold a basic moral code but who were broken by their unwonted complicity in war crimes. Each is eventually driven to speak out by a traumatic experience. Dusty, the dedicated combat medic who cared passionately for his patients, could not forgive himself when, during one raid, the Afghan he had treated was taken away and executed by one of the rogue warriors. Christina, who reviewed all video and photos captured on SAS operations, could not live with herself when the same rogue warrior instructed her to delete images implicating him in the death of Dusty’s patient. Braden, the signals intelligence operator who tracked enemy communications on the battlefield, was reluctantly drawn into covering up the cold-blooded killing of a handicapped Afghan villager. Haunted by this execution and his failure to speak up, Braden hands over the trove of images to Willacy.

The rogue soldiers who rampage through Afghanistan, killing as they please, are charismatic patrol commanders with years of experience. Their rule is sustained by terror. Their subordinates are unwilling to speak out for fear of violent retribution on base, if not ‘accidental’ death in the kinetic chaos of the battlefield. Through these tattooed psychopaths the SAS emerges as less a warrior élite than a tooled-up bikie gang – or, as Dusty reflected, something far worse: ‘we were no different to fucking Nazis really. Going into a country and then just killing innocent people.’

The extraordinary freedoms that the patrol commanders enjoyed and exploited reflect the bottom-up operation of the SAS, where power and real authority reside not with the chain of command but with the experienced leaders on the ground. To some degree, their excesses can be sheeted home to the complete absence of accountability and the breakdown in command authority this bespeaks. From murder in Afghanistan through violence and drunkenness on base abroad and at home, the operators revelled in their continued ability to get away with it. Everybody knew what was going on, but nobody did anything about it. Why? Were the military, as drunk on Anzac mythology as the public has long been, convinced that Australians were incapable of the sort of atrocities their US, British, New Zealand, and Canadian comrades committed in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Looking back on their work, the men and women who compiled the Brereton Report ruefully reflected that ‘We embarked on this inquiry with the hope that we would be able to report that the rumours of war crimes were without substance. None of us desired the outcome to which we have come. We are all diminished by it.’ Aren’t we just?