Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Maybe it’s the movies. We inexplicably expect life to be clean, tidy, and clear-cut. It just isn’t. It is so much easier to process the world around us when we fractionate people into all good or all bad. However, reality bears little similarity to this fantasy.
Table of contents
In war people need heroes. That has been the case since the very dawn of time. During World War 2, guys would do something awesome on the battlefield and then get snatched up and sent home to date starlets and sell war bonds. Considering these were just kids and that the experience that earned them their fame was often drenched in human blood, that seldom turned out well. Alcoholism, violence, and sundry self-destructive behaviors often followed.
The Need For A Hero
Today we focus on Australia. I can tell you from personal experience that it is a different sort of world Down Under. I got my taste back in 1997 during Operation Tandem Thrust.
Tandem Thrust was a massive joint multinational military hootenanny involving troops from a variety of countries all banded together to vanquish evil or some such. I honestly forget the details. I do recall that the Aussie Diggers with whom I worked both trained hard and played hard. They were friendly and cool—good mates to a man. However, they were cut from rugged stock. Rural Australia is a long way from everything, and it produces some exceptionally rugged individualists. One of those particularly rugged individuals was Ben Roberts-Smith.
Ben Roberts-Smith Origin Story
Ben Roberts-Smith went by Robbo to his mates. Born 1 November 1978 to Sue and Len Roberts-Smith in Perth in Western Australia, young Ben was the eldest of two sons. His younger brother became an opera singer.
Roberts-Smith enlisted as a grunt in 1996 at age 18. After assignment to a rifle company with the 3d Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, in Holsworthy, New South Wales, he deployed to East Timor twice as part of the international peacekeeping force. Upon his return, Roberts-Smith volunteered for and completed the SASR (Special Air Service Regiment) selection course. After undergoing the rigorous SAS training program he deployed to Fiji in 2004. In 2006 he deployed to Iraq for his first serious combat.
Background Experience
Roberts-Smith did two combat tours in Iraq and six in Afghanistan. Now think about that. This highly-trained Australian special operator successfully survived eight trips downrange. During that time he no doubt experienced loss, dealt death, and lived in legitimate fear of being killed or maimed on countless occasions. I have not personally done what he has done. I am really not in a position to judge the man.
Roberts-Smith earned the Medal for Gallantry in 2006 during his first tour to Afghanistan as a patrol scout sniper. On his fifth tour, Roberts-Smith and his mates were hunting a senior Taliban commander. On 11 June 2010, Robbo and his buddies conducted a helicopter assault into Tizak, Kandahar Province. They were subsequently pinned down by heavy automatic weapons fire from three separate machineguns. Realizing that the situation was dire, Roberts-Smith intentionally exposed himself to enemy fire so as to draw the hostile gunners’ attention away from his buddies.
Roberts-Smith Received A Victoria Cross
Once he regained the initiative, Robbo leapt to his feet and singlehandedly stormed a pair of enemy machinegun positions, terminating the gunners at close range with small arms fire. At one point he came upon a Taliban fighter prepping grenades. Roberts-Smith immediately killed the grenadier with his rifle.
Roberts-Smith, along with a buddy, then proceeded to wrap up the enemy fighting positions in depth. Together, these two SAS operators killed several more Taliban fighters at extremely close range. Their selfless actions and disregard for personal danger tipped the tide of the fight, relieved the pressure on the rest of his patrol, and helped the Aussie SAS seize the village of Tizak. After having received such a trouncing, the local Taliban fighters retreated from the Shah Wali Kot district. For the time being at least, this allowed the local population to live in peace.
In recognition of his selfless actions, Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross, Australia’s highest decoration for valor. This award, in addition to others he had earned in his previous years of service, made Ben Roberts-Smith the most highly-decorated living Australian soldier. At the time he earned his Victoria Cross, Ben Roberts-Smith was thirty-two years old.
It would indeed be nice had the story just ended there. Ben Roberts-Smith could have retired to a well-deserved respite that involved the adoration of a grateful public, the love of a good woman, and gobs of money from the release of his memoirs. However, that’s not really the way the world works. It always seems to be a bit messier than we would like it to be.
Things Go South
War is the ugliest of human undertakings. Real war is not glory and shaving cream ads. Genuine war is horrible gore and young men dying as they scream for their mothers. Above all, however, war is simply waste. It is the squandering of money and industrial production, to be sure, but the real tragedy is the utter frivolity with which war gobbles up human beings. Folks on both sides fight and die so that general officers well to the rear came move little pieces across their tactical map displays. Over time, protracted exposure to such horrors will invariably change a man. In the case of Ben Roberts-Smith, he got very comfortable taking human life.
Ben Roberts-Smith did indeed pursue his dream. In 2013 he left the Army to go to college. He attended the University of Queensland on scholarship and eventually earned a Masters in Business Administration. Upon graduation, he took a job as deputy regional manager of the regional television network Seven Queensland. A year later he was made general manager after his predecessor left unexpectedly.
Roberts-Smith had a personal life as well. He married a fellow soldier named Emma Groom in 2003 and fathered two daughters. In 2013 he was named Australian Father of the Year by the Shepherd Centre, a local non-profit. In December 2020, he and Emma divorced. Throughout it all, there were persistent allegations of darkness, some of it fairly egregious.
Ben Roberts-Smith Screws Up
In 2017, three years prior to his divorce, Roberts-Smith purportedly had a six-month affair with a woman named “Person 17” in his subsequent defamation trial. The story went that Person 17 became pregnant, and Roberts-Smith hired a private investigator to ensure she kept her appointment at the local abortion clinic. He also supposedly struck her in the face at a dinner at Parliament House in 2018, though he vigorously denied this. What really turned the tables on Ben Roberts-Smith, however, were credible allegations of war crimes.
Most of what subsequently came to light was not the result of an official government inquiry, but rather the efforts of several investigative journalists. The details were exposed during a subsequent defamation lawsuit filed by Roberts-Smith against Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and David Wroe. These three journalists had published a series of scathing articles alleging Robbo’s illegal conduct while serving downrange in Afghanistan.
Sordid Accusations
The accusations orbited around the suspicious deaths of six Afghan nationals. In one case, Roberts-Smith was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan teenager he suspected of being a spotter for local insurgent forces. In another, Roberts-Smith allegedly directed a subordinate to drag an elderly imam suspected of being sympathetic to the enemy out of a local mosque and shoot him dead.
Another sordid episode involved Roberts-Smith machinegunning an Afghan national who had a prosthetic leg. He supposedly later asked his fellow operators to share a drink with him from the liberated limb. Having spent some time around Australian soldiers myself, that honestly sounds pretty plausible.
In one of the most egregious examples, Roberts-Smith purportedly placed a suspected insurgent in handcuffs and marched him to a tall cliff. He then supposedly kicked the helpless man over the cliff to die on the rocks below. His mates purportedly referred to Roberts-Smith as “Leonidas” afterwards. This was an obvious reference to the iconic scene in the movie 300 wherein King Leonidas boots the Persian emissary of King Xerxes into a bottomless pit.
What a Mess
Roberts-Smith was also credibly accused of an illicit relationship with his female defamation lawyer, having been filmed holding hands with the woman as well as sharing time together in his apartment in Brisbane. When the dust settled, Roberts-Smith lost his suit, his family, and his job. As of the summer of 2023, Roberts-Smith said, “I’m devastated… It’s a terrible outcome, and it’s the incorrect outcome…We haven’t done anything wrong, so we won’t be making any apologies.” Soon thereafter he assumed responsibility for the legal costs of his failed suit. It is rumored that this figure now flirts with as much as $30 million.
Ruminations
I honestly have mixed feelings about this story. I have always been opposed to imbedding reporters with combat units operating downrange. Those kids are fighting for their very lives. A moment’s hesitation can result in tragedy. They are young and, in many cases, have experienced powerful loss. This, combined with a ruthless enemy that strikes and then melts into the ether, can lay a foundation for some very bad things. We saw it in Vietnam and Korea. It took place in WW2 as well, though it was simply not so well documented.
READ MORE: Dr Dabbs – When America’s Ace of Aces “Shot Down” a Crocodile
So maybe Ben Roberts-Smith is a real-deal psychopath–this handsome charming guy born without a conscience who revels in killing people. Or perhaps those dudes he smoked were actually funnelling intelligence to a ruthless enemy that bent any societal norm to do the Devil’s dark bidding at a time and place where the conventional rules of due process were grossly impractical. I wasn’t there. I have no idea.
It just doesn’t seem fair for us to pass judgment on how troops comport themselves in that ghastly world from the comfort of our living rooms. We have not earned that right. Modern professional soldiers are rightfully expected to uphold the rules of war and conduct themselves with dignity and honor. The military has systems in place to police such stuff. However, when facing a dishonorable enemy, one might reasonably expect a little breakage from time to time. How a nation deals with those inevitable grey bits is a murky space indeed.
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Excellent article and a point well made. I’m a vet who went to work as a private security contractor for the DOD after I got out. I spent over two years in Iraq and had three shorter assignments in Afghanistan. I saw friends and teammates maimed and killed by small arms and IEDs. They were dirty guerilla wars where it was difficult to tell the enemy from a local making a run to the store until they were right on top of you. Trust was in short supply. We couldn’t trust armed Iraqis, so we only used Kurdish Peshmerga and Nepali Ghurkas as static guards or with us on our teams. At one point in Afghanistan, there had been so many green-on-blue attacks we would pair up the Afghan guards randomly so they could help us keep an eye on each other. An Afghan posing as a cook set one of our compounds up for a truck bomb that killed 5 people. Journalists think they are hot stuff because they are “up front” with the troops, but they’re just observers who will never have to make the decision to shoot or not. Then they go back to their offices and pass judgment on the troops who do have to make those decisions. If you want to read a good account of being a contractor in Iraq, look for MERCENARIES, GUNSLINGERS, AND OUTLAWS when it comes out in Spring 2025.
Dr Dabbs, your column is the only reason I look forward to Monday’s. Thank you for interesting and heartfelt perspectives on the world.
This reminds me of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, (he earned not 1 but 2 Medal of Honor) war hero and outspoken critic of America’s corrupt wars who likened his military service to being a “high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and bankers. “I was a racketeer and a gangster for capitalism…I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
What the reporters dug up on CPL Ben Roberts-Smith sounds like the same type of “evil deeds” other warriors have been scapgoated with throughout history and since I wasn’t there as they happen, in my mind, all started after he stepped on somebody’s toes, probably around the time of his divorce.
After watching/reading the “mainstream media” verses watching Donald J Trump speak and reading the transcripts afterwards the last several years, I am convinced that Donald J Trump has an evil twin brother that the media follows because what I see reporters saying verses what I see and hear Donald J Trump say, could not possibly come from the same source. So I’m pretty sure the same modus operandi applys.
Truth, Brother.
Always enjoy your ruminations Dr. Dabbs. You absolutely have a way with words.
Thank you Dr. Dabbs for always being levelheaded and well thought in your pieces.
War sucks. Been to Iraq twice. Tried to go back but “career planners” at the time were only doing 4 yr re-ups. I had no place back home and was definitely not a high speed operator but it all gets to you. The devil dogs pissing on the dead comes to mind. Those brothers were going through weeks of hell and dealing with high casualties and expecting them to not lash out is quite frankly unreasonable if one hasn’t been there. I won’t condemn the man for making the calls he made in theater. My only judgement would come focused around the treatment of the women. I can judge on that because I was a POS that made that mistake as well. Served my time in country then behind bars. Truly a waste.
Considering the “rules of engagement” and outcomes for the young people we prep and send to war, there is little wonder there is anybody who wants to sign up. The incredible debacles and waste in Iraq and Afghanistan bear witness. “Fighting for your country” . . what utter BS. You are fighting for the M.I.C. the Rothschilds, and the “elites” who couldn’t care less about you. The AZ Cardinals football player, Pat Tillman is just one example of many others whose life was WASTED on a piece of worthless ground and absurd political policy. So . . here we are letting our insane Ukraine policy drive us deeper in debt, though they are not even an ally. At least our young people are not over there dying. The M.I.C. Is HAPPY though, honestly folks thats what all of this is about. NOBODY IS ATTACKING US, NOBODY IS THREATENING US . . we are a nation that is literally committing suicide, destroying its self just as Roberts-Smith did. The words of Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Patriot’s Dream” are so true. The advice of our greatest American, George Washington are true . . “avoid foreign entanglements and serve your OWN country”.
It’s quite more than ironic that we expect warriors to be “civilized”… it’s moronic. The act of war and war actions are antithetical to civilization. The “civilized” fools we call politicians, start wars for geopolitical, religious, or economic reasons, then expect the soldier on the ground to adhere to some ambiguous standards
of morality, when they themselves started the killing to begin with. War should be terrible, it should be so horrific, and the associated costs so steep, that it never be considered lightly. Robert E. Lee stated as much when viewing the indescribable carnage of humans killing one another with near industrial efficiency.
If a situation does indeed require going to war like the response to the unprecedented slaughter of innocents on October 7th, the objective should be nothing short of the absolute elimination of ALL the enemy. In response to such barbarism, the dogs of war should be fully unleashed and allow to achieve that objective by whatever means necessary. Victory should be total and absolute, with no chance of the enemy ever again becoming a threat.
Thanks for another great story Dr. Dabbs… His case was not helped by the woke mind disease that has had a strangle hold on his country for many years.
Will.
Always value your insight and wisdom that is shared in your writings. Straight, honest, and to the point. No theatrics!
Off topic….I’ve read many of your suggested books ( Low Level Hell, Seven Men At Daybreak, The Unexpected Spy, Panzer Commander and One Day too Long, ) through the years. Do you have a link or possibly a post somewhere that I may continue to do so and expand my knowledge with different offerings?
Thanks!