Quotes of the Day

Chris Ahmelman went to Iraq to prove himself. Like many others, he was drawn there by the challenge, the danger money and a sense of unfinished business. After eight years in the Australian Army, Ahmelman, 34, seemed equipped to handle just about anything in his new career as a security contractor. But in Baghdad on April 20, Ahmelman became an easy target, his years of training and combat experience wiped out in an instant when terrorists ambushed his security convoy on Route Irish, the notoriously dangerous stretch of highway that leads to Baghdad International Airport. Shot in the leg, Ahmelman had time only to shout, "F___ing hell, I'm hit bad,'' before the round that would fatally wound him struck his head.

Ahmelman's last words, and the frantic actions of his companions, were captured by a video camera mounted on the dashboard of his car. The videotape is now being discreetly shared around by international security firms, but until a few weeks ago Ahmelman's family had no idea it existed. Neither did Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs, or the Australian coroner who carried out the inquest into Ahmelman's death. "Why weren't we told there was footage?'' says Ahmelman's brother Marc. A clue may lie in the video's informal title, How Not to Roll. The images, together with other details uncovered by Time, reveal that from the day Ahmelman arrived in Iraq - one of some 50 to 60 Australians working for private companies there - the odds were stacked against him.

Ahmelman - "Camel" to his friends - had always been drawn to adventure. Growing up in Moree, in outback New South Wales, he would go droving at weekends while he was still at school. In 1988, aged 17, he joined the Army and was posted to the 1st Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR) in Townsville. "It was what he always wanted,'' says his mother, Jan Cashin. At home in the outdoors and an accomplished marksman, Ahmelman fitted neatly into Army life and was soon selected for one of 1RAR's coveted sniper positions. "He could shoot anything out to 600 m and beyond,'' says his former spotter, Jim Cridland. "He had excellent field skills in camouflage, navigation, communications, tenacity, fitness.'' In 1993, Cridland and Ahmelman were posted with 1RAR to Somalia, where they experienced combat for the first time. "Chris loved it," says Cridland. "He loved being able to do things his way.'' The pair would be dropped off in the desert, miles from their base, to spend days at an observation post watching key roads or tracks.

In 1996, Ahmelman sought a discharge from the Army to work for a private security company in Brisbane. It was the start of an unsettled period. A series of short-term jobs followed, including a stint as a miner at Cloncurry, in western Queensland. By 2004, Ahmelman was driving long-haul freight trucks. But he worried about dying in a crash, says Cridland, and thought that given the risk, he might as well be back in the security industry. He chose Iraq in part because of the pay: he hoped it would enable him and Nicole, his partner of 13 years, to buy a farm. Several of his Army mates were already in Iraq and, says his brother Marc, Ahmelman had a few demons he needed to exorcize. He'd always regretted not trying out for the élite Special Air Service regiment. "Chris thought that if he could handle himself over there with the other Special Forces guys, then he would have been able to handle himself with the SAS," says his brother.

By the end of March, Ahmelman was in Baghdad, armed with a pair of automatic rifles, wearing body armor and driving an unarmored BMW escort vehicle for British security company Edinburgh Risk and Security Management (ERSM). An ex-Army friend had put him in touch with ERSM, established in 2003. Ahmelman was part of the company's Apollo 1 team, which guarded officials of the Iraqi Electoral Commission. On April 20, he and seven other Apollo contractors headed out in a three-car convoy to collect an ERSM employee from the airport. In the lead, driving an unarmored BMW sedan, was James Yeager, an American weapons instructor. His passengers were two former British soldiers, Stef Surette and Mark (who did not want his surname used). The middle vehicle was the company's heavily armored Mercedes, used for transporting VIPs. It held two former British soldiers: Simon Merry at the wheel, and Ian Harris riding shotgun. Bringing up the rear of the convoy was Ahmelman, driving a second BMW; with him were James "Jay" Hunt, a former U.S. Army Ranger, and Allan "Johnno" Johnson, the team leader and an ex-British Army medic. Each man had an arc of responsibility to watch and fire into in case of trouble.

After weaving through the Baghdad traffic, the three cars came to a halt in gridlock on Route Irish. It was a few minutes before noon. American troops had blocked the road to clear away the remains of a car damaged by a bomb. Civilian vehicles between the convoy and the roadblock turned off to find alternative routes. The security men, wearing white Arab robes, sat quietly in the line of traffic. Then team leader Johnson climbed out of Ahmelman's car and began firing in the air to warn other vehicles to stay clear - an act which clearly identified the convoy as contractors. "They rang the dinner bell for the bad guys,'' says ERSM staffer Scott Traudt, who was in the company's Baghdad headquarters at the time.

After Johnson's warning shots, the three cars rolled forward some 300 m to put distance between them and the traffic queued behind them. They were still about 1 km short of the U.S. roadblock. There they remained for over 10 minutes, talking nervously on their radios. Suddenly, to their right, a white Chevrolet SUV with blacked-out windows sped along a slip road, made a U turn, and stopped about 200 m away, facing the convoy. From its passenger window, a belt-fed machinegun opened fire. The first bullets announced themselves with a puff of dust beside Yeager's vehicle, then a burst hit Ahmelman in the thigh. The videotape from the dashboard camera recorded the sound of bullets hitting the car, Ahmelman crying out, then a chaos of yells, revving cars and machinegun fire.

"I thought, 'What the f___ is Johnno shooting at now?''' Yeager would later write in a personal account of the incident. As more bullets chew into the cars, another voice can be heard on the tape shouting "Drive, drive, drive!" But no car moved. Yeager recalls hearing "the distinctive supersonic crack of a round pass through our car inches in front of my face ... Stef yelled, 'I'm hit' and he began emptying a 30-round mag out of his window." Yeager "punched the gas to the floor and the engine raced, but the car stayed stationary." The ex-cop had forgotten that the car he was driving had a manual shift, and had failed to engage the clutch or the gears.

Yeager and Mark crawled out of the vehicle on the passenger side and began shooting, while the wounded Surette went on firing out of the side window. "You could see small dots leaving your rifle and rounds pinging off the back of the (attackers') vehicle, and everyone is yelling, 'It's armored, it's armored,'" says Mark, who was shooting across the trunk of the BMW. Surette continued firing until he passed out from loss of blood, while Yeager, unable to see the attackers, blasted away pointlessly at a barricade before running to take cover in a ditch on the opposite side of the road. In the rear car, Ahmelman was slumped against the window. Hunt, bleeding to death from a wound to his femoral artery, lay on the ground beside the vehicle while Johnson tried to treat him. Harris, in the armored Mercedes, tried to drive closer to help Surette, but the vehicle sputtered to a halt after about 3 m, apparently damaged in the attack. At last the machinegun fire stopped; on the tape, Johnson can be heard calling Ahmelman's nickname: "Camel, Camel, Camel!" In the confused aftermath of the firefight, a vehicle headed toward the group from behind. Fearing the worst, Yeager fired into the car, hitting two people. Mark thinks they were civilians, but Yeager is certain they were "a clean-up crew of insurgents, coming to finish us off." American troops arrived and escorted Hunt, Ahmelman and Surette to the nearest military medical center. Hunt and Ahmelman were dead on arrival; Surette was flown to a Baghdad hospital, where he died undergoing treatment. Three months later the state coroner in Ahmelman's home state of Victoria conducted a brief inquest into his death. While he did not examine ERSM's work practices or equipment, he noted "that the vehicle in which Mr. Ahmelman was riding was described as 'soft skinned' - an issue that would need to be examined.'' "Why wasn't my husband in an armored vehicle?" says Jay Hunt's wife Colleen from her home in Kentucky. "I have an eight-year-old and a four-year-old who don't have a father because someone screwed up." ERSM's Dubai-based managing director, Simon Crane, says the front and rear cars were not armored because there was no garage in Baghdad capable of correctly armor-plating a BMW. "Hindsight can be a terrible thing," says Crane, who served as a British Army officer from 1988 to 2003. The men in the convoy applied "exactly the correct fire solutions," he says. "And when the incident was over, they dealt with their comrades and moved on." The existence of the video was kept from Ahmelman's family to spare them further distress, Crane explains. "Sometimes decisions are correct, sometimes incorrect," he says of what happened that day. "I've heard somebody suggest they should have immediately crossed the median strip and headed back to the (fortified) Green Zone. A personal security detail that did that got blown up four days previous to the incident."

But according to company documents and former ERSM employees, doubts persist about the preparedness of the Apollo team. ERSM's "After Action Review" contains a section headed "Lessons Learned." It states that security teams should "immediately evacuate the area" if they are stopped; but the Apollo 1 team remained stationary for a long period. Another "lesson" is that team leaders should not have additional duties; the Apollo leaders also served as medics, which forced them to choose between directing the battle and caring for the wounded. Also raising questions is a warning letter written by then ERSM staffer Scott Traudt, which was hand delivered to company executives about 15 days before the ambush. Traudt cites 11 alleged "repeated failures and dangerously negligent actions" by ERSM and its staff, including drunken all-night partying, inadequate training, poor vehicle maintenance, and the "tactical insanity" of using medics as team leaders.

Crane concedes that Traudt's letter raised some legitimate concerns, but says these had been addressed before the ambush; the three men's deaths, he adds, were not the company's fault. But Mark and fellow security contractor Neroli, who have since left ERSM - Crane claims they were fired - are critical of the firm. Neroli (not her real name), a former Australian Military Police officer, says the convoy's remaining immobile and Johnson's firing into the air were fundamental errors. Mark says ERSM's use of unarmored cars was "always a concern," and that adding protection is not difficult: "You just use glue and Velcro and put plates inside the car."

The Apollo team knew their job was risky. When the survivors returned to their Baghdad house after the firefight, they found laid out on Jay Hunt's bed a farewell letter and gifts for his family. Ahmelman too "knew it could happen," says Cridland, who discussed the dangers with his friend a few days before he left Australia. Ahmelman had prepared for his new job by taking refresher courses in shooting and unarmed combat. "He was a warrior," says Cridland. In war, wrote the Chinese sage Sun Tzu, "he will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared." On that fatal day in Baghdad, things happened the other way around.

• Rory Callinan
• A close-up look at an ambush - and the errors that cost three security guards their lives