Bram Connolly: Commando recounts hand-to-hand brawl for survival in Somali streets

I felt what I thought was a punch in the stomach. Hard, blunt, sudden. Then a second impact, identical to the first.

I looked down. It wasn’t his fist. It was the barrel of a British Sten gun—a World War II-era submachine gun, crude by modern standards but perfectly capable of killing a nineteen-year-old Australian private in an African street at two in the morning. The first impact had been the thrust of the weapon into my abdomen. The second was the bolt slamming forward as he fired it.

The Sten had misfired.

My grip on my Steyr tightened reflexively, but the barrel was jammed up under his armpit and pointed into the night sky, rendering it useless as a weapon, at least at this angle. We were chest to chest, struggling, each of us trying to bring his weapon to bear on some part of the other man’s body. He was clawing at the Sten’s cocking handle, trying to clear whatever had caused the misfire and get the bolt to cycle again. I was trying to pivot and angle my Steyr down or sideways, or anywhere that would allow me to fire a shot and end the fight.

Neither of us was succeeding. And every second that passed was a second in which he might clear that jam.

He was strong in the concentrated way of a man running on stimulants and fury, a man who had spent years doing hard, physical work in a hard country. And I was nineteen years old, weighing under 60 kilograms, loaded down with ammunition and rockets and water and a helmet that was too big for my bobbly head. The odds were not in my favour.

Desperately, I glanced over at Rade. He had already flashed past me and was dealing with the other two men, who had made the catastrophically poor decision to try to fight him hand-to-hand.

He was methodically beating them into submission, but that meant he wasn’t coming for me. Not yet.

I tried to call out for help, but what came out was something between a yell and a shriek—the sound, I imagine, of a man realising that no help is at hand and the situation is deteriorating. The Somali heard it and redoubled his efforts, raising his leg and pressing his foot above my knee, using me as a brace to gain leverage on his weapon’s cocking handle. He pulled it again, and again, and again. Each attempt only tightened the deadlock between us. A thought flashed through my mind that his weapon’s failure to fire was the only thing keeping me alive.

Five more attempts, six. My world had contracted to this man’s face, to the smell of him — sweat and urine and the sourness of someone who hadn’t cleaned their teeth in weeks — and to the sound of his Sten’s cocking handle cycling and failing, cycling and failing.

Then I noticed his stance. One foot planted on the ground. The other pressed against my leg, above the knee. His weight was distributed in the most convenient possible way.

When I was a kid, I had trained in judo after my best mate at the time, Sam, had spent Saturdays casually choking me out for fun. I hadn’t done it extensively, and certainly not to any high level of competition, like Sam, but I did enough over a couple of years to have the movement in my muscle memory. I had never performed it against someone with a firearm pressed into my stomach. But instinct doesn’t wait for ideal conditions.

I swept his grounded leg out hard, much harder than in any training session, using my inside leg in a classic ko uchi gari throw, catching him below the ankle and driving through. His foot left the earth. His centre of gravity vanished. And I followed him down, trying to use the momentum of the fall to drive his head into the packed dirt of the Baidoa street.

We both hit the ground hard. I pivoted to avoid the barrel of the Sten as we landed. He was still fighting. Even on the ground, he was still trying to clear the jam, still trying to get the weapon working, and now he was rolling, using his strength to push me onto my back, trying to reverse the position and put himself on top.

I let go of my Steyr and let it fall. It was no use to me in this position, tangled with him on the ground. I focused everything on keeping him close, keeping him tight against me, because at this range even a jammed Sten was lethal if he managed to clear its obstruction. I held on like a man who understood, in a very concrete way, that loosening his grip would be the last thing he ever did.

The first kick arrived with the force of a controlled explosion. A size fourteen boot, driven with the full power of a large man who had found his range, connected with the Somali and lifted us both off the ground with the impact. I remember thinking, with the absurd clarity that extreme danger sometimes produces, that Rade had arrived.

The second kick was harder. Rade had recalibrated. I heard the sharp crack of ribs breaking and felt the man’s breathing change, becoming raspy, laboured. It was the sound of a body that was now fighting pain as well as an opponent.

The third kick was final. The Somali yelped — not a shout, not a war cry, but the involuntary sound of a body that had simply had enough. The Sten fell from his hands. He rolled off me and curled into the foetal position, knees drawn up, hands moving instinctively to his broken ribs.

Rade reached down and lifted him into the air, then slammed him against the wall of the building with a force that rattled the shutters. Plastic handcuffs followed, snapping tight around his wrists.

I lay on my back on the dirt of the Baidoa street for a moment. Staring up at the stars. African stars, impossibly bright, impossibly indifferent. My lungs were pumping. My hands were shaking from the adrenaline that had done its job; my body was now trying to come back to something resembling normal. I rolled over and picked up my Steyr.

The section commander had joined us by now. I loved this guy, big Wayne Prosser, a country boy at heart and a rugby legend in the unit. Massive in stature and someone who would often call out bullying before it was either mandated or trendy to do so. He and my platoon commander were both great guys and I had the utmost trust in them. I was glad to see his face.

Wayne took the magazine off the Sten and cleared the chamber. A round fell out and landed in the dirt at our feet. He crouched and picked it up, rolling it between his fingers, examining it in the dim light.

The fault had been a “soft” strike or light prime - a round that hadn’t detonated when the firing pin hit it. A manufacturing defect in a piece of ammunition that was, most likely, decades old, scavenged from some colonial-era stockpile or black-market cache probably sold next to the severed neck of a camel. The Sten bolt had picked up a round but the round had failed to detonate. Once, twice - who knew how many times. This fault often occurs when the recoil spring is old and fatigued.

We searched the ground and picked up seven soft-struck rounds. Maybe as many as seven times the weapon had tried to kill me and failed, because of a flaw in a gun that had no business being used in this war that should never have been fought.

I thought about this a lot. Not right then — in that moment I was running on fumes and the aftermath of terror. But later, in the quiet, I contemplated the absurdity of it. The chain of contingency that had kept me alive: a faulty round in an antique weapon, wielded by a man who was too high to fight effectively, in a war that the world had mostly decided to ignore until the images of it became too awful to bear. Years later, when I was bigger and stronger, I would have been able to dispatch this guy, but not then, when I was younger and lighter and had no idea what was going on.

I thanked Rade. He shrugged his shoulders in a way that said: This changes nothing, do not read too much into it. Our relationship hadn’t changed. It would remain strained and complicated, but I knew I owed him my life. Years later, we would become closer; not best friends closer, but he left me alone and I had his back.

As dawn broke, the sounds of Baidoa resumed where they had left off. It was Anzac Day and we were a long way from home.

This is an excerpt from 100 Ways I Almost Died by Bram Connolly which will be published on August 4 by Allen & Unwin