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    Short Black 5 The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999
    Short Black 5 The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999
    Short Black 5 The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999
    Ebook50 pages40 minutes

    Short Black 5 The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

    By John Birmingham

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    As the convoy growled and squeaked to a halt in the dark, angry militiamen and soldiers began to shout and wave at the Australians, demanding they move aside. The Brave Ones' vanguard presented as a B-movie vision of some pirate biker gang from Hell, a rat bastard outfit in black tee-shirts, camouflage pants, long hair and bandanas, with axes in their eyes and guns at the ready.

    The Brave Ones follows the Indonesian Army's Battalion 745 as it withdrew from East Timor after the 1999 independence vote, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Birmingham's unflinching account reveals the scorched-earth tactics of the retreating troops, and shows just how close Australia came to armed conflict with Indonesia.

    Short Blacks are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

    John Birmingham is the author of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, three popular fiction series and two Quarterly Essays.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 23, 2015
    ISBN9781925203516
    Short Black 5 The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999
    Author

    John Birmingham

    John Birmingham was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, but grew up in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. Between writing books he contributes to a wide range of newspapers and magazines on topics as diverse as biotechnology and national security. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.

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      Book preview

      Short Black 5 The Brave Ones - John Birmingham

      SHORT BLACKS are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

      SHORT BLACKS

      1 Richard Flanagan The Australian Disease: On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom

      2 Karen Hitchcock Fat City

      3 Noel Pearson The War of the Worlds

      4 Helen Garner Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

      5 John Birmingham The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

      6 Anna Krien Booze Territory

      7 David Malouf The One Day

      8 Simon Leys Prosper: A voyage at sea

      9 Robert Manne Cypherpunk Revolutionary: On Julian Assange

      10 Les Murray Killing the Black Dog

      11 Robyn Davidson No Fixed Address

      12 Galarrwuy Yunupingu Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow

      Published by Black Inc.,

      an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

      37–39 Langridge Street

      Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

      enquiries@blackincbooks.com

      www.blackincbooks.com

      Copyright © John Birmingham 2001

      John Birmingham asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

      First published in Quarterly Essay 2, Appeasing Jakarta: Australia’s complicity in the East Timor tragedy, Black Inc., 2001.

      This edition published 2015.

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

      Birmingham, John, 1964– author.

      The brave ones : East Timor, 1999 / John Birmingham.

      9781863957670 (paperback) 9781925203516 (ebook)

      Short blacks ; no.5.

      Political atrocities–Timor-Leste. Australia–Foreign relations–

      Indonesia. Indonesia–Foreign relations–Australia. Timor-Leste–

      History. Indonesia–History.

      327.940598

      Cover and text design by Peter Long.

      JOHN BIRMINGHAM is the author of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, three popular fiction series and two Quarterly Essays.

      THE DOGS OF LOS PALOS

      The Battalion’s nickname was strictly and bitterly ironic. ‘The Brave Ones’. A fighting unit with a proud history of child murder, rape, plunder and riot. You could tell when Battalion 745 had passed through because of their signature legacy of shallow graves, burnt buildings and drinking wells crammed with the mutilated remains of the dead peasants they were pledged to protect. In September 1999, they were quartered at the eastern end of Timor, at a barracks complex just north of Los Palos, a forlorn sort of place which had never really recovered from the fighting of 1975.

      The town, a market centre, sat on a wide plain, a plateau really, the remnant of a huge primordial lagoon which had been pushed up out of the sea with the rest of the island millions of years ago. The ground rose slowly to hills in the south and lay within the confluence of two

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