Kiwi SAS hero reveals secret life of special forces in new book

Sunday, 4 August 2024

Jamie Pennell spent 18 years in the SAS, fought terrorists, and won New Zealand’s second-highest bravery medal. His new book lifts the lid on our elite special forces, and how his biggest battle came after he left the army. Mike White reports.

Down the end of the cul de sac.

Where the tarseal turned to patchy summer lawns and backyards blended into bush.

That’s where you’d find Jamie Pennell.

That’s where all the kids from Massey would meet after school, back in the 80s, down at the local reserve.

A place where sticks magically turned into machine guns, pine cones became grenades, and the enemy for the afternoon was your mate who’d biked there to play war.

Pennell was just like the rest of them: mastering the art of making explosion noises; insisting he hadn’t been shot and no way was he dead; coming home for dinner, with muddy knees and scratched arms for war wounds.

But in the end, Pennell was never like the rest of them.

He became special, one of the elite, a one-percenter, as the army calls them.

At 21, he made it in to New Zealand’s SAS.

And suddenly, all the games the boy from west Auckland had played as a kid became real.

Frighteningly, devastatingly real.

‘Who Dares Wins’

Jamie Pennell stood on the stairwell, staring at the padlocked door.

On the other side of it were Taliban terrorists who’d stormed Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, killing staff and guests, and now occupied the roof, firing down on anyone they could pick out in the night.

It was June 2011 and this was Pennell’s fourth stint in Afghanistan with the SAS, where they were helping train local counter-terrorism forces.

Pennell had already made it up the road leading to the hotel, a citadel of Western luxury on Kabul’s flank, and sprinted beyond gunmen strafing him as he reached the lobby.

Inside, were about 70 guests, who’d been in their rooms, at dinner, or attending a wedding, when the insurgents blasted their way in.

Intercepted communications from the terrorists suggested they planned to behead the guests and hurl them from the roof.

As the SAS team climbed to the upper floors, shots rained down from the top of a stairwell, and then a grenade tumbled down, exploding behind Pennell’s lead assaulter, Steve Askin.

Eventually, Askin emerged from dust and debris, concussed, and with shrapnel in his back, legs and arms.

“Yeah, yeah, yep,” Askin replied, when Pennell asked if he was OK.

Meanwhile, guests were jumping from windows, Pennell’s petrified interpreter had fled, a security guard wet himself, and snipers from circling Black Hawks tried to pick off attackers.

Pennell had no idea what waited behind the locked door to the hotel roof, but he did know they had to get past it and stop the remaining gunmen.

“Stand by…Go!” he shouted, and the explosive charge they’d put on the hinges blew the door apart.

They immediately threw in grenades and burst on to the roof.

Within minutes, they’d killed the remaining terrorists, or watched as they blew themselves up with suicide vests.

As fire broke out, they retreated downstairs, only to discover one terrorist was still holed up in a fifth-floor room.

Pennell and Askin inched around the balcony towards the target, but found themselves under fire from below as confused Afghan soldiers and police shot the shit out of the room.

When the fusillade subsided, Pennell checked on everyone.

“I’ve been shot,” Askin answered.

“Where?” Pennell asked.

“Through the head,” Askin replied.

Pennell quickly examined the blood flowing from Askin’s face, and his ear hanging askew.

“It’s gone in and out, man,” Pennell told him. “I think it’s gone through the side of your head.”

Eventually, Pennell and his team made their way down a corridor to room 524, where the lone terrorist was holding out.

But as another SAS soldier kicked in the door, the terrorist blew himself up, badly injuring the Kiwi.

The siege was finally over.

Pennell had been fighting for 10 hours, but reckons it was a heartbeat, always racing to stay a step ahead of the terrorists’ decisions, converting chaos into clarity, knowing the sooner it was over, the more lives would be saved.

Two weeks later, Pennell returned to the hotel and retraced his movements.

When he reached the top floor, where he’d been commanding operations, Pennell was amazed to realise the gunman on the stairwell, would have had a clear shot down at him.

“The back of the wall was pockmarked with bullets.

“And I don’t know when or at what point those bullets had been fired, but it was just crazy.

“It was a high calibre weapon, that would have just dropped me on my arse and I would have woken up somewhere. I don’t know where.”

The man behind the mask

What happened that day in Kabul eventually made the news back in New Zealand.

And soon, the Government announced two SAS soldiers would receive the country’s second-highest military award, the New Zealand Gallantry Star.

Those two soldiers were Askin and Pennell.

Except, they weren’t named, merely referred to by an initial.

The citation for Pennell, said “Serviceman J demonstrated outstanding gallantry and leadership under heavy fire from a determined enemy.”

Now, Pennell has written a book about his life and military experiences, Serviceman J: The untold story of an NZSAS soldier.

In it, he details the instant decision that led to him joining the army; surviving the physical and mental shadowlands of the brutal nine-day selection course he attempted twice before making it into the SAS; and the extreme training that prepared him for 18 years in the regiment.

Much of the book deals with Pennell’s time in Afghanistan, including being on the 2004 mission that saw colleague Willie Apiata win a Victoria Cross for rescuing a badly injured comrade under fire.

And it was while Pennell was with Apiata on another encounter with Taliban terrorists that his cover almost got blown.

Walking away from a firefight in Kabul that claimed 20 lives in 2010, Apiata and Pennell were snapped by a photographer who’d crept beyond the cordon.

Apiata, by then the country’s most famous soldier, was instantly recognised and the photo sped around the world.

However, the soldier to Apiata’s right still had his helmet on, and only those close to him realised who it was.

The soldier was Pennell.

In total, Pennell spent two years in Afghanistan.

On early trips, Pennell rode motorbikes deep into the country’s badlands on long-range reconnaissance missions searching for Taliban targets.

At times, Kiwi ingenuity had to be employed to get the job done: Swapping a few trays of Lion Red and four bottles of whisky for eight desert Humvees at a US base, which was dry; and raiding local dumps for bed frames to make gun mounts.

Pennell wasn’t in Afghanistan when Operation Burnham took place, an SAS mission that attracted accusations civilians had been killed.

However, Pennell is adamant the SAS were there to save lives, not take them.

It was hearts and minds stuff - until someone started shooting at them.

“We take no shit. We can flex pretty quickly.”

Whatever the price

So many times in Afghanistan, it could have ended so differently for Pennell.

The skittish track of a bullet that flew past him; the IED that someone else tripped; the chance arrival of help.

But that was just part of the deal, he says.

“I’ll be honest - I was willing to die for it.

“I’d already had that conversation with myself.

“Of course I wanted to come home. But if I died - I went over there voluntarily to represent New Zealand and do a job for good.”

So often surrounded by death, exposed to random chaos and killing, there was a chance Pennell would become blasé about it.

But no.

“I definitely appreciate life a lot more, appreciate what we have in New Zealand.

“Unless you’ve been in those situations you won’t really completely understand how fickle life is. It can be taken away in a heartbeat.

“So I make sure I hug my son and kiss him before I leave the house and tell him I love him. Because at any point in time, you could be gone.”

If ever this was brought home to Pennell, it was when Steve Askin was killed.

Not in an ambush in Afghanistan’s desiccated mountains, not by warlords protecting the opium trade, not by zealots with explosives strapped to their chests who welcomed oblivion.

Near his home, on Christchurch’s hills.

Askin was fighting fires on the Port Hills in 2017 when the monsoon bucket dangling from his chopper hit the tail rotor and he crashed.

When Pennell was told about the accident, he didn’t believe it.

“Because, when I saw him overseas and how many brushes with death he had, he was one of those guys you thought would never die.

“He was made of concrete, and it was never going to happen.”

When he arrived in Christchurch for the funeral, Pennell chose not to see Askin’s body. Instead, he wanted to remember his mate the last time they met, over dinner at Lone Star.

“I remember standing on his dad’s deck, and Steve’s two kids were bouncing around on the trampoline and laughing, and I just thought, ‘F..k, what a waste, just such a waste of a human being.’

“And I look around at other people in the street, criminals and stuff like that, and think, ‘I wonder why they haven’t been taken?’

“But you can’t think like that. Everyone has a set amount of life, and you’ve got to do what you can with it.

“Try everything. Do everything. Get past your comfort line and just get out and do it.”

Askin remains present in Pennell’s life.

“He sits on my shoulder. I can hear him, spurring me on when I’m getting low on energy: ‘What are you doing? Get your shit together. I’m waiting.’”

Far from the frontline

It’s not the done thing to write books about the SAS.

It’s part of an unwritten code among the unit, warned against by army hierarchy, scorned by some he served with, vetted by defence force warriors and worriers with red pens.

But Pennell, 49, came to realise these stories shouldn’t be bottled up, and people needed to know what special forces soldiers went through and did for New Zealand.

“Look, it’s not going to land with everyone,” Pennell admits.

“Sure, there’ll be negative comments, but it’s my journey. But it’s also a ‘we journey’ - about the people I served with.”

And crucially, Pennell’s book is also the story of what happened after he left the army in 2016, rinsed out and ready for something new.

That transition, from 20 years of intense military life, to life outside, life as a civilian, a dad, a husband, came close to crippling him.

Away from a brotherhood of like-minded mates, and a world of freefalling from 25,000 feet, extreme chopper flights, racing from zero to being a hero amid explosions and live fire pouring down on him, things started to unravel.

Despite being calm in battle, Pennell found himself angry, dark, paranoid.

Everything was still a potential threat and he constantly scanned his surrounds for danger and bad dudes.

He thought about carrying a rifle when he mowed the lawns at his rural property.

He wondered about keeping a gun under his bed.

His runs were fuelled by negative thoughts and visions.

Having experienced extraordinary life and death situations, Pennell couldn’t cope with the trivialities obsessing others and would react and let “the dragon” loose.

He took it out on his wife, Alia, a psychologist he’d met when she worked for the army.

“I used to come home, walk in with my bag of shit and just expect everyone to eat it.”

So Pennell consciously rewired his thinking, dwelling on positives, the exciting future, not his life-on-the-edge past.

“If you change the way you think, you change the way you feel.”

He finished a masters degree, renovated his house, worked with high performance sports groups, including the Kiwis and Warriors rugby league teams.

“And I started opening my ears to my wife, and then making the adjustments that took years.”

A lot of people aren’t willing to make those sacrifices or put that amount of effort into changing their character, Pennell says.

“My understanding is that we’re here on earth to learn lessons. And obstacles are put in your way all the time. But it’s how we deal with them.

“You either climb or conquer it, or you go around and avoid it.

“And if you don’t climb and conquer your obstacles, they’re just going to get shifted and put in front of you in a different way.”

Now, Pennell finds himself in situations where he knows his old self would have reacted very differently, and badly, but he stays calm.

“You choose to carry the burden of anger and frustration and darkness, and that’s your decision.

“But what you don’t realise is it’s consuming you, but it’s also having an effect on your family.”

Like father, like son?

There’s another boy now.

Down the end of a driveway, beyond the city, picking up sticks and turning them into imaginary guns.

He’s Pennell’s nine-year-old son, who already talks of being a soldier.

Pennell dedicated Serviceman J to him.

“To my son, who brings out the best in me,” says the first line of the inscription.

Pennell’s parents divorced when he was eight and he was mainly raised by his mum.

He hasn’t spoken to his father for 20 years.

The importance of having good role models for boys isn’t lost on Pennell, who now runs Dilworth School’s outdoor education programme.

So, what if his son wanted to join the army, and ship off to Waiōuru to have his head shaved and put on a uniform, as Pennell did all those years ago?

“Every time he’s says that, I’ve said to him, ‘My wife and I have done enough soldiering for everyone in this family.’

“But whatever he wants to do, we’ll support him.”

No matter what that is, Pennell hopes it fulfils the second part of his dedication to his son.

“May this book inspire you to be your amazing self, and make your mark on the world.”

Serviceman J, by Jamie Pennell (HarperCollins, $39.99), is out now.