The Commando The Life And Death Of Cameron Baird, VC, MG

On June 22, 2013, during an engagement with insurgents in the Khod Valley in southern Afghanistan, Corporal Cameron Baird, a 2nd Commando Regiment Special Forces soldier, was mortally wounded while leading his platoon into a known Taliban stronghold to back-up another Australian unit under heavy fire. In 2014, Cam’s courage saw him posthumously awarded the 100th Victoria Cross — our highest award possible for bravery in the presence of the enemy. He died how he lived — at the front, giving it his all. However, as the following extract from a new book by Ben Mckelvey reveals, this was only one of many heroic missions Cam led while serving his country in Afghanistan…

In mid-2007 Cam Baird and the men of Bravo Company were put on buses and taken to Sydney airport. With relaxed grooming protocols in effect, many of the guys were already growing the beards that are almost a prerequisite for special forces soldiers on deployment. Most were wearing Merrell Moab boots, commonly used in place of the Army’s standard-issue boots. Cam was an exception: he rarely wore anything that wasn’t Army-issue.

Although the commandos were supposed to be incognito at the airport, one only had to look at them to know, as Eddie Robertson says, they were “obviously not a footy team”. They boarded a ‘Strategic Airlines’ Airbus in Sydney, and, after a quick stopover at a base in the Indian Ocean, landed in the Middle East. They were ferried quickly from the airport to Camp Buehring, an American facility which one US Army public affairs officer described as being ‘like Las Vegas’. For a few days the men of Bravo Company watched movies and played video games in the huge ‘Morale, Welfare and Recreation’ hall, chowed down on the vast array of American fast food available in ‘Fat Alley’, stocked up on weapons and armaments, and waited for their turn on the ‘brown route’ — the nonstop flight to Tarin Kowt (commonly known as TK).

Finally, they loaded up into C-130 transports and were away. When Cam Baird arrived in Tarin Kowt, he found it to be a place of contrasts. Camp Russell was all plywood, HESCO bastions and temporary containers, while the adjacent town was filled with the simple and unpleasant man-made structures typical of a small third world provincial capital. Dust covered everything, fine like talcum powder. Beyond the town, though, craggy mountains jutted out of the horizon. Dusted white in winter and brown, red and yellow in summer, they suggested something beguiling, and mysterious.