AFTER THE BLAST
In 2004 Garth Callender, a junior cavalry officer, was deployed to Iraq. He quickly found his feet leading convoys of armoured vehicles through the streets of Baghdad and into the desert beyond. But one morning his crew was targeted in a roadside bomb attack. Garth became Australia’s first serious casualty in the war.
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After recovering from his injuries, Garth returned to Iraq in 2006 as second-in-command of the Australian Army’s security detachment in Baghdad. He found a city in the grip of a rising insurgency. His unit had to contend with missile attacks, suicide bombers and the death by misadventure of one of their own, Private Jake Kovco.
Determined to prevent the kinds of bomb attacks that left him scarred, Garth volunteered once more in 2009 – to lead a weapons intelligence team in Afghanistan. He was helicoptered to blast zones in the aftermath of attacks, and worked to identify the insurgent bomb-makers responsible.
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Revealing, moving, funny and full of drama, Garth Callender’s story is one of a kind.
Awards for After the Blast
Winner, Military History Prize at the 2016 Waverley Library Awards
Praise for After the Blast
‘I urge you to read this important, engaging book. There are so few firsthand accounts from our frontline soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
Leigh Sales
‘After the Blast takes its place among the very best.’
The Age
‘Drawing on his ground-level experience in Iraq and later Afghanistan, After the Blast provides a rare and valuable insight into the work of a mid-level officer in the field. Callender’s ability to write cogently and easily about these events – a skill no doubt honed by his war service – is one of the real strengths of this account of three extraordinary tours of duty … After the Blast shows us that military service can be a true calling. It serves as a reminder that Australia’s servicemen and women do indeed save lives and help to make the world a safer place.’
Paul Cleary, the Australian
'A brilliantly told tale’
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