soldiers inc.

When Brandon came to, about ten seconds later, plumes of dust were rising from the sand, he could see the desert floor through the holes in the truck, the front windscreen was blown out and the soldier in the front passenger seat was unconscious.

He felt as if someone had jammed a hot poker up his spine. He screamed in agony, then remembered he had a client in the back seat and checked he was alive. The front-seat passenger regained consciousness, and with both legs broken, was dragged screaming from the truck. Brandon still couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel anything in his right leg, couldn’t lift it.

As his comrades took him from the vehicle, a fellow soldier assured him he would be fine. Later, he would tell Brandon he’d seen shattered bones protruding through his skin.

Brandon, like most of the private contractors in Iraq in 2006, was there to provide close protection services to overseas officials, corporate warriors and key workers in the nation’s reconstruction.

Iraq was the hot ticket for those on the Circuit. It paid better than Afghanistan and promised more excitement, but it arguably came with much more risk.

Monty Gurnick Jr, a former soldier, prison guard and policeman, was on his first trip along Route Irish after arriving in Iraq to work for ArmorGroup when his convoy was hit. During his stint in Iraq, convoys he was travelling in were hit three times on the route.

Gurnick describes seeing huge, smoking craters and burned out vehicles, and admits he would get nervous before setting out. “You would get guys who would complain - why are we doing so many missions today? Why are we going back there?

Gurnick talks calmly about his ‘contacts’.

He was in the middle vehicle in a convoy hit by an IED which exploded beneath the engine. Two utes of insurgents drove across the sand towards them, firing. He fired back until they retreated, while his colleagues destroyed their damaged vehicle, so it couldn’t be used by the enemy.

On another occasion, his vehicle was hit on the left-front tyre, shredding the rubber. They were able to continue on ‘run flats’, a harder plastic inner tyre. A crowd had been preparing to attack them.

Gary Brandon had served a ten-year stint in the army from 1986, where he learned to parachute, and left to become a professional tandem skydive instructor in Taupō. 

Eight years after that, in March 2004, he joined the exodus to Afghanistan. A friend was working for a PMC called Global Strategies Group, which had a security contract for the upcoming parliamentary elections, and gave Brandon a reference.

He found himself in Chaghcharan in the central province of Ghor, 8500ft above sea level, working in a two-man team inspecting security plans for polling stations. The locals, he says, were “awesome, really friendly”. The main issue was a bit of local banditry.

At the end of the contract, he went home wanting more. He was back less than three weeks before he was gone again - waiting until his first wife was away for the weekend before signing up to a contract working security on the main checkpoint into Baghdad International Airport.

Again, he says, there was very little action: A suicide bomber who blew himself up but fortunately nobody else; a sniper who fired from a row of abandoned houses, who Brandon responded to with a half-magazine of bullets.

Their camp was frequently targeted. In seven weeks, they had six near-misses, one on Christmas Day when an IED exploded just to the side of their vehicle. It was the seventh that got Brandon.

He says now that they must have been under surveillance by the insurgents, who would have remotely triggered the device by cellphone, aiming to kill the ‘client’, knowing he was a passenger in Brandon’s vehicle. Maybe, he says, the command came slightly too early: a fraction of a second later, it would have exploded beneath the cab and they would “have all been jelly”.

The website icasualty.org tracks PMC deaths. It records 4897 deaths in Iraq, and 3892 in Afghanistan. The majority were Americans. It says 11 New Zealanders died in Afghanistan, but doesn’t log any of the deaths in Iraq.

“If you think about it too much,” Gary Brandon says, “you won’t get out of bed in the morning. So it’s just ‘let’s do it boys’. ... That’s why they are paying us the big bucks.”

It’s when he’s asked if he considers himself lucky that Brandon proffers the detail about the cramp in his left foot. While the client in the back seat suffered with terrible nightmares and was soon evacuated home, for Brandon, there was no post-traumatic stress.

While the regular military provide compulsory counselling after major incidents, the private military world does not. Monty Gurnick says only once was he offered a psychologist after a contact. Instead, he’d return, alone, to his room, and think about what had happened.

“The hardest thing for me was being in my room,” he says, with emotion.

“Thinking about my kids. And although I came home safe, it still weighs on the mind. I could have left them. That could have been me that day, and they would’ve been without a dad. Yeah.”

Or as Monty Gurnick puts it:

De Terte says the counter is that you need to be able to switch off when home. American military personnel, for example, drive extremely fast for safety in combat zones, then come home and drive the same way on regular roads.

“You’ve got to take some responsibility for your own mental health ... these contractors are pretty much on their own. It’s not like the police or the military when they go overseas: they’ve got psychologists with them, and they have to check up when they get home.”

De Terte says the fact contractors can sign up for another tour almost immediately would also have an impact. A period to re-adjust to regular life is helpful. 

De Terte says some people will get PTSD and some won’t. Research suggests 90 per cent of us will experience some sort of traumatic event in our lives, but we don’t all get PTSD.

“And some people can encounter a lot of traumatic events, and these people are probably more de-sensitised to these incidents. I would suggest you always want to stay sensitised to things, but it is hard to do.”

Gary Brandon’s right heel had been blown apart inside his boot. It left a big hole where his calcaneous bone ought to have been. So they cut a section of his instep, and rotated it, reattaching his heel, then grafting skin from his groin to the sole of his foot.

He says a side-effect was pubic hair growing on his sole. The damage to his heel meant he had nothing to balance his weight on in the back of his foot.

After ten days in Germany, he was flown home to New Zealand, where he spent a further month at Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland. 

When they decided to amputate, the conversation with the surgeon was brief. He remembers the date his leg was lost: November 6, 2006. It was his decision, he says, but he really had little option. There were still gaping holes in his tibia. 

Within four weeks, Brandon had his first prosthesis. Remarkably, he returned to professional tandem parachuting, and did another 300 jumps with his prosthetic limb. That’s even more remarkable given he had undiagnosed breaks in two vertebrae (his second wife, Bex, is a doctor, and discovered those injuries herself).

But then he went back for more.

At the end of the course, Tuki offered him a job in Saudi Arabia, on the Kuwaiti border, working inland escorting clients back and forth from oil tankers. He ended up as the project manager.

It was fairly uneventful, but it got him back on the Circuit. From there, he got a security gig in Afghanistan, working alongside trainees for President Hamid Karzai’s security team. He left after six months, following a disagreement with his boss. But the company agreed to honour his ticket home, set for two months ahead, so he found work in Kandahar, negotiating with local Afghan companies to supply gravel and road barriers.

“I wanted to spend more time back here,” he says. Then he admits: “But, yeah, you do miss it.”