One man's story of courage under fire

As incoming enemy fire thumped into the nearby trees, peppering his face with splinters, Private Phillip Cheater inched towards where his mate lay.

Private Cheater and Private Leonard Manning had been leading a New Zealand patrol scouring the border between East and West Timor in July 2000 when their group came under heavy fire and Private Manning fell to the ground.

"I crawled up as close as I could get to Manning without getting shot because there was quite a lot of firing coming down," Private Cheater recalls.

"I moved up to where I could see his head, shoulder and gun and called out to him and I could tell by the way there was no response that he was dead. There was too much fire going down ... so I had to pull back."

Private Cheater (now holding the rank of Trooper) had risked his own life for his comrade, an act for which he was yesterday awarded the New Zealand Gallantry Decoration.

The recognition has been a long time coming.

"This is an award long overdue for a gallant act in the face of the enemy," the Chief of the Defence Force, Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson, said yesterday.

"Trooper Cheater acted in the finest traditions of the Service and servicemen in going to see if he could assist Private Manning.

"The word 'gallant' recognises the significance of the award. The level of the award would have equated to the old Military Cross, so it's well deserved in the circumstances."

Trooper Cheater's actions were only revealed publicly in September 2002 following a Weekend Herald investigation into the circumstances surrounding Private Manning's death, the first time a New Zealand soldier had been killed in an enemy firefight since Vietnam. Militia member Yacobus Bere was later sentenced to jail for the attack.

Military commanders attempted to prevent staff from talking about the incident, and blocked interviews with his patrol members.

Today, the Weekend Herald can reveal the stories of the patrol members - including Trooper Cheater - for the first time. Transcripts of interviews conducted with the men by a military historian and obtained under the Official Information Act reveal how much danger they were in and how close they came to being shot themselves.

The night before the attack, the patrol was told by an East Timorese man that pro-Indonesian militiamen were active in the area.

The soldiers immediately drew up a mission to protect the locals and track the militia.

"We actioned our weapons, put 40 mil ammunition up the chamber and legged it down the road," said one patrol member. "We were all sort of pretty keen at that stage, it was almost a jog down the road."

When darkness fell, the group holed up in the bush. It rained for the first time in days, and they could actually hear the enemy near them. They would discover in the morning that they were only about 50m apart.

"It was just like a mass of trees and they were just on the other side," said a patrol member.

In the morning, they resumed the hunt. Intelligence reports told them they should not expect heavy fire.

"[It had been] ground into us that if we come across militia we just had to say the magic words and they'd put their weapon down and hands up, that's sort of what we expected," said one soldier.

"We thought we were quite safe. The ridge line was on our right hand shoulder, we were just cresting below it and then, bang, the first shot went down.

"I think everyone was a bit stunned - my first impression was that it was a UD [unauthorised discharge] because there was no way we expected that sort of carry on.

"But it seems probably only a split second and then it was like, yeah, contact, and then we all took cover. At that stage there was still one guy firing. He was firing quite regularly."

The rest of the patrol began the retreat downhill with the militia in hot pursuit, lobbing grenades.

"They weren't close enough to make us dive for cover or anything but, it still put the shits up us a bit," said the patrol's corporal.

"They were still coming down the hill towards us and then we hit this bloody wire weed, which was about head high or over head high.

"It really slowed us down and they were catching up, getting closer and closer and closer."

By this stage, Private Cheater had retreated downhill too, suffering an ankle injury in the rough terrain. He and the corporal fired three rounds from their grenade launcher.

"We were firing at the sound and we couldn't actually see them," said Private Cheater.

The corporal said he heard the grenades land and explode. "I can't recall hearing any other shots after that and that was our sort of saving grace," said the corporal. "We managed to muscle our way through the wire weed, make our way to the road and we legged it."

The party joined up with other members of the New Zealand company and a mission was launched to retrieve Private Manning's body.

The company's command sergeant major said that the discovery that Private Manning's body was mutilated had made the New Zealand contingent angry.

"I think possibly a good thing was that the anger was channelled," he said.

"People would go all for nothing, they were very angry, quite deeply hurt.

"It came home to people that, you know, people could kill and Private Manning was now gone."