On a Saturday morning in late 2019, in a barracks on the outskirts of Darwin, Maddi van Sitter woke up with an aching hangover. He had spent the night in bars with a handful of junior New Zealand soldiers, knocking back beers to ward off the Northern Territory’s stifling heat.
It had been a double celebration. Van Sitter – tall, with tousled brown hair and a sleeve of tattooed ships – had just turned 21 and in a few days’ time would deploy to Iraq in the final rotation of New Zealand troops to join the fight against Isis. It would be his first deployment. He saw it as his first chance to actually serve.
Van Sitter joined the Army in 2015, six months after leaving Rotorua Lakes High School at age 17 – by his own description, a “lost” kid in search of a purpose. He went on patrols through the tussocky desert of Rangipo, did first-aid training in Waiouru classrooms, stood through stiff-backed inspections on the Burnham parade ground.
When the opportunity came in 2019 to be considered for Iraq, where New Zealand Defence Force troops had spent years training the country’s soldiers, van Sitter was ready.
Along with several dozen others, he travelled to Darwin for pre-deployment training with Australian partners, learning how to spot improvised explosive devices, how to respond if their vehicle got hit, how to extract a casualty under fire.
Days after that Darwin bar crawl, van Sitter flew into a war zone. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Some soldiers had returned from previous deployments muscle-bound from months of idly lifting weights.
He didn’t yet know his rotation would involve an assassination, a missile attack, brutal injuries and dead bodies, all of which brought Iran, Iraq’s neighbour, and the United States to the brink of war and meant van Sitter’s deployment ended in a rage of rockets and trauma, making it one of the most dangerous in the recent history of New Zealand’s regular forces.
Until now, there has been little knowledge outside Defence circles of what Kiwis encountered as Iran and the US faced off. With their return from Iraq coinciding with Aotearoa’s lockdowns and Covid travel restrictions, van Sitter and his fellow soldiers came home mostly to silence. They flew home, they isolated, they went back to work.
A lot of PlayStation
Iraq’s broiling heat enveloped van Sitter as he stepped off the creaking Hercules aircraft. An expanse of beige dirt banks, sand-yellow concrete walls and corrugated iron sprawled over 13km around him: Camp Taji, on the outskirts of Baghdad. Once a major Iraqi base, the Americans had taken it over after they invaded in 2003 and ended the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Once Isis arrived in Iraq, thousands of American, British and other coalition soldiers were stationed there. Hussein’s ruined ambitions remained visible: hundreds of rusting and graffitied Iraqi tanks and vehicles fringed the camp’s edges. As van Sitter wove through the dusty paths that cut between the camp’s hulking fortifications, he wondered, “What the hell have I got myself into?”
After memorising the route to the gym and the mess hall, van Sitter and the commander of his 10-man section, Charlie Munns, began their new routine. Their section was responsible for security, which meant hours-long patrols around the camp’s borders, escorting vehicles into the unsecured “amber zone” beyond its boundaries or manning the radio in a long wait for a crisis.
“A lot of gym, a lot of PlayStation, a lot of radio pickets [waiting by the radio in case someone buzzed in with a message], a lot of bloody escort tasks,” recalls van Sitter. “Life was easy. Life was good. It was the mission we were all expecting.”
For decades, the US and Iran have fought a shadow war. Iran sees the US as the “Great Satan” which spent decades backing a murderous secular dictatorship in the country. The US fears the nuclear ambitions of Iran’s authoritarian Islamic government, which it worries could annihilate millions.
Much of that battle has centred on Iraq, where Iran sponsors militias who routinely threaten American soldiers. By 2019, much of that was akin to shadowboxing: the militias fired rockets at American bases only when they knew they weren’t likely to hit anything, to avoid unmanageable escalations.
Around Christmas that year, however, an Iranian-backed militia fired a rocket that did kill someone. It seemed to be a miscalculation. But then-president Donald Trump had long fumed about Iranian aggression in the region. The killing provided an excuse. American missiles hit sites throughout Iraq and Syria, killing at least 25 people.
Protesters took to the streets. A crowd of Iraqis broke into the US Embassy in Baghdad. Observing the growing violence from his Mar-a-Lago retreat, Trump grew “agitated”, according to the New York Times.
Then his advisers told him Iran was working on a wider attack designed to drive US forces out of the Middle East. His national security adviser gave him a top-secret memo listing a range of increasingly aggressive responses. At the top of the list was an option that would inflame tensions dramatically: a targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general second in influence only to the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and who, in a fortuitous twist, was on his way to Iraq.
Making a martyr
At 12.36am on January 3, 2020, Soleimani’s plane landed at Baghdad International Airport. He disembarked and transferred to one of a convoy of vehicles with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a top Iraqi official who oversaw Iran-affiliated militias. Eleven minutes later, missiles streaked from Reaper drones hovering overhead. The explosions reduced the vehicles to molten metal. Soleimani, al-Muhandis and eight aides were killed.
At 6am, Iain Hill, the senior New Zealand officer in Taji, woke for work. In addition to his command of New Zealand’s troops, Hill was the chief of staff for the coalition’s Taji headquarters. As he got dressed in the repurposed shipping container that served as his bedroom, he saw a text from his wife: “Are you watching Al Jazeera?”
Hill turned on the television, then, after a few moments, ran to the container in which his Australian boss slept. They turned on his television as well, then let the news wash over them. “Finding out that the second most powerful man in Iran, and one of the most powerful men in Iraq, had been killed about 15km down the road from where we were living? We realised that this was going to be huge. There was undoubtedly going to be retaliation,” recalls Hill.
The backlash was immediate. The Iranian government was outraged by what it saw as an act of war and threatened “shattering revenge” at “places and times when the US doesn’t expect it”.
As a junior soldier, van Sitter was not briefed on the geopolitical forces buffeting the coalition. But he could see the turmoil on the news. On his Facebook and Instagram, memes joking about World War III or Trump’s big red button began to appear. Around the camp, every soldier wore body armour and carried their weapons with them. In addition to their normal tasks, his section spent each night patrolling the edges of the camp, taking turns to sit behind the machine gun mounted on their vehicle.
For a week, the New Zealanders watched the tensions grow. In Baghdad, thousands of Iraqis gathered for a mourning procession, during which they chanted, “Death to America, death to Israel.” In Iran, millions gathered as Soleimani’s remains were taken from city to city.
Then, early on January 8, Hill’s phone rang with a message from higher headquarters. “There’s a salvo of missiles heading for Camp Taji,” he remembers the caller saying. “You’ve got 10 minutes. Good luck.” Hill dispatched half of the staff to their bunkers, while half kept working.
For 10 minutes, they waited. Then 10 missiles tore past, leaving a glowing streak across the night-goggled eyes of the security teams outside. Minutes later, they began to slam into Al-Asad Airbase, 160km to the west. More than 110 American soldiers stationed there were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries from the impacts.
Back in Taji, as he realised they weren’t the target, Hill ran out the door. He stood in the growing darkness and could still smell the acrid stench of rocket fuel.
Waiting game
The Iranian code name for the attack was “Martyr Soleimani”. Through Swiss back channels, Iran assured the US government that it would not escalate further. After coming close to an all-out war, the crisis, it seemed, was over.
Taji, however, was not the same. The training mission effectively ended. The New Zealand soldiers remained on high alert.
Van Sitter and Munns’ nightly security tasks continued, scrambling their sleep. Munns lost count of the number of times he went to bed at 6am, only to be woken at 9am with a request for another patrol. Back in Christchurch, his wife was six months’ pregnant. He had so little time that he could call only every four days or so. Even then, they were only “short, sharp conversations”.
On March 11, they spent the day training at the shooting range. When they finished, their officers told them there’d be no patrol that night. After speeding back to camp, Munns collapsed into bed in his underwear, waving away the section driver who poked his nose in to tell him he was going to the gym. Van Sitter was similarly enthusiastic about sleep: his roommate was on leave in Canada and he was determined to get a proper rest.
Then, van Sitter heard what sounded like the warping wobble of someone flexing corrugated iron. The ground began to vibrate, rattling with impact after impact. His neighbour began banging on their wall, shouting, “Incoming, incoming!” Books and photos started to fall off his shelf. Van Sitter dropped to the floor, where his clothes and body armour were laid out, and got dressed as rockets slammed into the camp.
Nearby, Hill was doing the same. A career soldier and a Scot who had been in the British Army, Hill knew to count the explosions so he could report the number of detonations back to headquarters. One or two was normal. Lying on the floor, Hill lost count at 17. As he listened to the impacts continuing, he realised they would be lucky if they escaped unscathed.
Eventually, the explosions paused. Hill ran from his container to that of his deputy to ensure the rest of the New Zealanders went to the bunkers. Then he got into his vehicle and careened towards headquarters to co-ordinate Taji’s response. As he drove, he wound down the windows to listen for more explosions. Through the openings, he began to hear shouts and screams. Through the dust and gloom, he could see soldiers covered in blood and mud, or walking in a daze. On either side of the road, flames began to bloom.
Bloody aftermath
Back at the container units, Munns sprinted to the nearest bunker during a pause in the explosions. Tonight, they were the camp’s quick response force: expected to respond to an incident with just 10 minutes’ notice.
As he waited for his soldiers to gather, Munns’ mind began to race. Finally, the section’s driver burst around the corner. With his section complete, Munns stood. “Sweet, we gotta go.”
Their vehicle had just returned from the mechanic. They’d parked it further from their housing than normal, across a vacant field. They began to sprint across open ground. Leaping into their vehicle, they sped to their unit headquarters for Munns to get his orders. Van Sitter could see the emotions playing across the other soldiers’ faces. Some seemed panicked. Most looked grim. One was excitedly muttering. “We need to fucking get in there, we need to help.”
Munns came back to the vehicle and briefed them as they rattled across the camp’s rough ground. “We have casualties. Two priority ones [nearly dead] and one priority three [light injuries].” Turning to van Sitter and others, he told them they’d be in charge of treating the wounded.
“It was scary as hell,” says van Sitter. “But I’m not gonna lie, there was a little bit of excitement. We’ve done this job for however long, we’ve spent years and years practising to do this. When it finally kicks off and you’re still in a safe environment, you’re frothing at the bit.”
The vehicle juddered to a halt outside a low-slung concrete warren of hairpin turns and sandbags: one of the camp’s larger bunkers. Released from the vehicle’s shell, van Sitter began to hear the screaming and shouts too, as well as the low whooping of the camp’s warning siren.
Munns and van Sitter inched into the bunker’s shadowed opening. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Munns saw a dark squirt across the bunker wall: blood. Below that, he saw two men forcing their palms into the chest of a prone figure. In the far corner, another man lay on the ground with two more soldiers leaning over him. Still more soldiers milled about aimlessly.
Turning on his heel, Munns walked out, with van Sitter close behind him. “I tried to remain calm: I treated it as a drill,” recalled Munns. “But when we saw that and locked eyes, we both were thinking, ‘Holy shit’.”
Behind him, a man walked out of the bunker. His uniform was shredded and stained blackish-red around deep cuts. Small pieces of shrapnel stuck out of his arms. As Munns radioed back to base, he watched the man try to clamber into their vehicle, desperate to escape, while a pair of his soldiers restrained him and bandaged his wounds.
The bunker was so packed that van Sitter could hardly move. After clearing some of the soldiers out, he moved to the injured man at the back. He was face down, his shoulder and much of his upper body had collapsed into a sack of broken bones and unsupported flesh. Turning him over while the torchlight flickered and bounced, van Sitter slung his arm and communicated to the Dutch or German soldiers around him through broken English and hand gestures to get a stretcher. An ambulance took him away.
Van Sitter rushed back to the men performing CPR on another victim. Tears streamed down their faces: the casualty, he guessed, was their friend. Kneeling beside the body, van Sitter took over and began to pump the man’s chest with his hands. With each push, waves of blood oozed out of holes scattered across the man’s body.
Taking a moment, he raked his fingers along the back of the man’s head, searching for injuries. As he did so, he took in the man’s face. Wide brown eyes, one of which seemed caught in a half-squint. The skin around his chin was dark, as if bruised. Van Sitter felt his fingers slip inside the man’s skull, much of which, he realised, was missing. Glancing to one side, he saw one soldier holding the casualty’s helmet, full of black blood. Soldiers yelled incoherently around him.
Pulling away, he gestured for the men to take over again and went to explain the situation to Munns. “I think he’s dead. We can carry on, but what do you want to do?” Munns nodded. It was time to stop. But when they turned around, they saw the men had realised their friend was gone. Drifting outside, most disappeared into the night.
Someone produced a blue blanket and laid it over the soldier. Someone else brought another stretcher in. The man was dead, but a doctor needed to make the final assessment. Van Sitter and another section member pulled down the back door of their vehicle and pushed the stretcher inside.
They clambered in. Their driver looked back, widened his eyes slightly, then focused hurriedly on the ignition. The vehicle lurched towards the medical centre. Nobody spoke.
Outside the medical centre, dozens of soldiers lay in neat rows along the road, moaning, covered with blood. Doctors ran from body to body, patching the wounds as best they could. As van Sitter and the other soldier walked inside with the stretcher, one doctor hurried over and took a few moments to check the body. “He’s deceased. Take him over there.” With a jerk of the thumb, the doctor gestured to the back of the centre, where two other bodies lay.
Laying the stretcher down, van Sitter contemplated the dead. They had been injured so badly they were almost in pieces. The other soldier vomited in the medical centre’s garden. Two minutes later, as they sped back to Munns, van Sitter grabbed a tinfoil emergency blanket and vomited as well.
The next few hours were a blur. Clearing buildings, dampening fires, checking soldiers and manning cordons, the night illuminated by sparking power lines and military-issue glow sticks that they used to mark impact sites. After six hours, van Sitter finally stumbled back to his room. The power was off, but he forced himself to take a cold shower to wash off the blood. Then, finally, he crashed into bed.
Second wave
The attack apparently came from the Iraqi militias: 18 rockets, killing two Americans and a British medic, and wounding 17 others.
Throughout the camp, Munns and van Sitter emphasised, the other New Zealanders in the rotation confronted similarly intense situations. A medic, Jessica Healey-Render, was one of the first responders to multiple casualties throughout the base.
Her officers later wrote in a commendation that her first aid saved the lives of many of them.
For two days, the incident response stretched on, keeping Hill in the camp headquarters with barely a break, trying to identify the number of casualties, if there were any unexploded rockets and whether a ground assault was likely to follow. Sixty hours after the rockets began to land, having had just a few hours of sleep, Hill finally left headquarters and got into his Mitsubishi Pajero.
As he drove towards the gym for a short break, he heard a slow whistle and spotted what seemed to be a plume of smoke. He paused half a second in confusion. Then the road exploded. Hill brought the vehicle to a screeching stop and dived into a nearby drain. Dust shuddered in the air above him, while shrapnel impacts rang off the walls.
As he watched 24 more rockets explode around him, Hill cursed himself for leaving the headquarters. Then he pulled out his phone and began calling people to give orders while he waited to get out of the ditch.
The attack didn’t cause any serious injuries, but typically, rocket attacks hit Taji during the night. This one occurred in broad daylight. “During the daytime, there was always an assumption you could relax slightly,” Hill recalls. “This shattered that illusion.”
Several weeks later, the New Zealanders evacuated. Several months after that, the Americans handed Taji back to the Iraqi military.
Coming home
By the time the New Zealanders arrived home, Covid-19 had forced the country into lockdown. The military’s senior leaders, the country’s politicians and the general public had little thought for anything else. There was no official welcome, no celebration of their return. After a stint of isolation, the soldiers were sent home to decompress.
Munns flew down to Christchurch. At home, he dropped his bags at the bottom of the driveway and walked up to hug his wife, by then eight months pregnant. Turning, he saw his toddler son shrinking in the doorway, uncertain about the man who had returned after seven months away. Munns paused, then said, “Are you not gonna give your daddy a hug?” His son shifted from the doorway, then darted over and gave Munns a quick hug before stepping away.
“That really caught me,” says Munns. “That fuelled my thinking that I needed to leave the service. I’d spent too much time away.”
Soon after, he came across two roles supporting tradies with their mental health. Munns knew that after three years’ dreaming of deployment, van Sitter’s experience in Iraq had taken the shine off, so he called him. They left the Defence Force together.
Two years after returning from Iraq, they were awarded Defence Force medals and citations in recognition of their service. Two years after that, they were still working together in their new roles with the Mates in Construction suicide prevention programme.
In part, that’s because few others understand what they went through. There has been practically no media coverage of their service; even within the NZDF, many people were so focused on Covid-19 that they missed the explosive end to New Zealand’s main contribution to the fight against Isis.
Van Sitter, Munns and other New Zealand soldiers were reluctant to share their experiences, for fear of seeming boastful or breaching an unwritten military code of silence. Van Sitter was concerned about overshadowing other soldiers who he felt did more. “I’d hate for people to look at this piece and think, ‘This guy Maddi, he’s gone to a journalist just to tell this story and seem like a war dog.’”
“I have no clue,” says Munns of why there’s been so little public awareness. “The guys who worked with me did amazing things on that trip. At the end of the day, they saved people’s lives. I find it a little confusing why there’s not much news about it.” He pauses. “It bugs me a little. I think those guys should be recognised for their effort.”
Hill, who remained with the NZDF and is working as New Zealand’s liaison officer with the Australian Army in Canberra, is more emphatic about his confusion over the lack of interest in what he believes was the largest barrage of artillery or missile attacks for New Zealand’s regular forces since Vietnam. But, he shrugs, “Everyone who was there understands the significance of what we witnessed. We had a front-row seat to some of the most significant events in recent history.”
This feature draws on interviews with Maddi van Sitter, Charlie Munns, and Iain Hill, NZDF situation reports obtained under the Official Information Act and international reports on the attacks on Camp Taji.
Pete McKenzie is a freelance journalist. He has served as a New Zealand Army reservist.
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