Kane Te Tai (right) pictured with Kiwi fighter Dominic Abelen, who was killed in Ukraine in August last year. Photo / Supplied
To begin at the end, Kane Te Tai watched through drone footage, the body of his friend and fellow soldier Dominic Abelen lying still in the place he had died.
Te Tai had last seen Abelen before dawn as they assaulted the fortified Russian lines in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. It was a raid planned the day before, with drone surveillance across the target area.
The plan, according to messages from Te Tai, was to push into the Russian positions fiercely enough that the Ukrainians could follow through to “mine and booby trap the holes, then extract”.
They were doing so on a battlefield, the like of which Europe has not seen since World War 2, using skills only rarely put to practice during their service with the NZ Army, from which Abelen was on leave and Te Tai had resigned.
Those with whom they had served at home were a ready audience. One of those in communication with Te Tai told him he was “living the life most grunts dream of”.
Te Tai replied: “To be fair, that’s what we all wanted and I was having a great time until Dom died.
“We f***ed a lot of them up and they killed 2 of us. We won in the numbers game but they’ve got so many more than we do.”
From the other side of the world, Te Tai sought to explain it to a man he called “brother”.
The military is a fraternity with those who served - and didn’t break the unwritten warrior code - bonded for life.
And then Te Tai promised to write - as NZDF trained him to do - an “after action report”.
The purpose of such a report is to analyse incidents, to identify strengths and weaknesses.
In the context of Te Tai’s messages, the report seems intent on explaining to those at home how their friend had died.
He knew the report would be distributed among those close to Abelen. As he said in a message: “I know what it’s like to want to know about a brother’s last moments and not hearing the truth of it for months or years”.
That account of the mission which saw Abelen killed, stayed with that tight circle, aware that the tactics it described could increase the risk faced by Te Tai.
“There’s elements in his report that would have jeopardised how he was running their team,” said a soldier with whom Te Tai directly shared his account of Abelen’s death.
With Te Tai’s death, that risk was less. “Every section commander will run their teams differently.”
It’s time for the story to be told, the soldier said, because it wasn’t just Abelen’s untold story of how he exposed himself to risk, covering the withdrawal of those he fought alongside.
It was also Te Tai’s story, of how he lived and how he fought. Ultimately, it was also how he died - just in a different place and at a different time to the friend he lost that early August morning.
Kane Te Tai reckoned it was about 5am that August morning when he and one other were led by Abelen to the position from which he was to provide fire support for the morning mission.
“He hastily left once he realised that the sun was coming up,” Te Tai wrote. For the outnumbered Ukrainian troops, there was a need to exploit any tactical advantage.
Abelen’s job that morning was with the assault team while Te Tai, with one other, was to provide covering fire from behind the main assault.
As the assault team prepared, Te Tai jockeyed for position. According to his report, as darkness lifted, he moved and moved again until they were 50 metres ahead of the Ukrainian position with a good eyeline on the intended area of engagement and the Russian defensive positions in the tree line ahead.
A map drawn by Te Tai shows the Ukrainian position along what appears to be a line of trees and the Russians at a 90 degree angle, secure in another row of trees with separation of about 200 metres.
The map shows the fire support position ahead of the Ukrainian line with a long view across the entire Russian position. The assault team, in contrast, is at the closest point to the Russian line with the sharpest angle, presumably to reduce the degree of fire that could be brought against the attackers.
As Te Tai and his fellow soldier set up their firing position, they unsuccessfully attempted to raise communications with the assault team by radio. Through thermal imaging binoculars, Te Tai wrote of seeing the heat signatures of the soldiers as they began their assault.
Confrontation with the enemy is called a “contact” in military jargon. In this case, Te Tai was alerted by the sound of “small arms fire” - which includes automatic rifles - and grenade blasts.
Te Tai’s report switches at that point to Abelen’s perspective at the enemy treeline.
The Kiwi soldier led the assault force, shooting three enemy before quickly arming two grenades which were thrown one after the other into the bunker they were assaulting.
It is believed he killed three others in the bunker.
At that point, wrote Te Tai, the assault team realised the Russian defenses had shifted since the previous day’s drone reconnaissance with two soldiers dug into an unexpected, flanking position.
“And now they were being engaged from the rear as well,” he wrote.
The assault team formed up to meet the new attack, shifting position to fire in both directions. It was at this point the attack began to shift left, with Abelen holding position “so the guys could withdraw”.
Abelen switched his rifle to fire on automatic - at which point his weapon jammed. Throwing grenades, he fell only 20 metres from the bunker under assault.
“He was shot in the head or chest and died immediately,” wrote Te Tai. “The same fire struck Jesus (the codename for an American fighter) and he began to bleed out from his high inner thigh.”
In Te Tai’s later messages, he recounted a dark joke made an hour earlier - the sort of humour common among those who deal in death with such frequency it becomes a part of life’s fabric.
“I told Jesus, ‘now I know why they call you Jesus - because you’ll see him first’.”
Friends later told Newsweek that Joshua Alan Jones, 24, was nicknamed “Jesus” for the fresh, bearded face, that lent him the appearance of the biblical figure.
And, said one, he was a “tactical Jesus” when it came to close quarters battle.
Jesus struggled to put a tourniquet on. When one of his fellows attempted to help, intense fire pushed him back. As the assault team withdrew, wrote Te Tai, two others were hit - one in the elbow and foot and another in the rear.
Despite the incoming fusillade, the assault team was able to withdraw under covering fire from Te Tai and his partner.
Through the binoculars, Te Tai wrote how he couldn’t separate the thermal signatures of enemy and friendly fighters. Despite the earlier difficulty with communications, Te Tai used the radio to tell the assault team they would direct their fire towards the middle of the tree line and work toward them until they could gauge how effective it was.
Urging the assault team to take cover, Te Tai and partner used their concentrated fire in a bid to block Russian reinforcements.
“We started to take small arms fire in our primary position but we continued to hold it. We jockeyed around between us and alternated firing with our weapons as each moved,” he wrote.
As incoming fire increased, Te Tai ordered his fellow soldier to fall back to their secondary position. Te Tai started shifting gear under covering fire from his mate on the belt-fed PKM machine gun.
In the rush of battle, Te Tai’s pack came open and the PKM’s spare barrel fell out - they need switching as heat builds from the number of bullets discharged.
“I quickly had to run back to search for the barrel as I knew the other one was heating up.” Having found it, Te Tai ordered the gunner to swap barrels, maintaining the weapon’s viability.
And that’s when the mortar rounds started falling - the first 150 metres away and the second into the field immediately behind the new fire support position. They kept up fire on the Russians, creeping their fire closer to those at the point of engagement.
Back at the tree line, the assault team attempted to push back to Abelen and wounded Jesus.
“They had to keep withdrawing back,” Te Tai wrote. They called for support from the Ukrainian lines but received no reply.
Two of the assault team peeled away, heading for the fire support position.
Amidst the noise, Te Tai “could hear the crackling of someone trying to talk over the radio”. It was one of those heading his way - the commander of the mission whose voice could be heard through the radio but also loud enough to carry across the battlefield.
Te Tai and his partner were running low on machine gun ammunition when ordered to withdraw.
By then, accurate sniper fire was striking their position as mortar shells continued to fall, one landing directly in front of where they were set up.
Te Tai handed his rifle to his partner, picked up the PKM and went back to the firing position to unload the remaining ammunition on the tree line “hoping to be of some help”.
With the machine gun out of ammunition, Te Tai ran back to his partner and collected his rifle, turning to see if he could link up with the assault team.
As he moved towards the tree line, the lack of sound had him thinking “they had all been killed”. It was a thought that grew more pressing as he started to call out, with silence again the result.
That was when he saw the first of the assault team. There were casualties, Te Tai was told, with Abelen dead and Jesus “f***ed” up and still alive”. That started talk about finding a way “to push in and get the boys out”.
They regrouped where the morning had begun.
Orders were given to find a vehicle to start evacuations - the two injured men who had survived the withdrawal were put in one vehicle with another member of the assault team.
It was an evacuation that complicated the unit’s next steps - the uninjured team member had left with the drone needed to scope the area where Abelen had fallen and Jesus lay injured.
The aftermath was an account of the frustrating mundanity of war.
They needed the drone so went to fetch it. The vehicle in which they travelled burst a tyre.
The tyre iron didn’t fit and the vehicle was abandoned.
They took shelter and waited for a friendly vehicle. It’s a sequence of events that carries exhaustion and frustration, ending with Te Tai and two others making it to a central organising area where they collected sniper rifles and the man with the drone.
With weapons and drone, they drove back to the area and parked a kilometre from where they had set out hours earlier. The four men split into two teams and tried to find a way to get closer, now contending with full daylight and Russian drones which were seeking targets for artillery.
It was hopeless so they returned to base. From there, a drone mission was organised to see if the Russians had come for the fallen and wounded.
Te Tai saw for himself. They had not.
Abelen and Jesus lay where they had fallen.
“The bro went out swinging, no fear, no hesitation,” wrote Te Tai in a message a few days later.
“He moved through the place like water. The order to break contact was given and he started to move dudes back and cover them and he died doing that.”
It was a hard morning in a hard war that was fascinating Te Tai’s mates in New Zealand.
Abelen was a serving corporal on leave when he was killed.
His body is still to be recovered. Te Tai had left some years earlier, arriving in Ukraine in April and dying this week. His body has been recovered.
Among those who had served, or were serving, the conflict in Ukraine whispered a promise that service in New Zealand had struggled to fulfill, particularly after two years of guarding Covid-19 quarantine hotels.
In that world, the death of Abelen and now Te Tai struggles to be an effective argument against that seductive whisper. Soldiers go to war and sometimes soldiers die.
“Stay safe out there,” Te Tai was told by his mate. “Cheers again for sharing.”
And then they signed off in the way soldiers from the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment do. Its single-word motto is almost a mantra for life.
Te Tai’s mate wrote: “Onward.” Half-a-world away in Ukraine, Te Tai marked the message with a heart and replied: “Onward.” And then he went back to war.
There was a fragile truce after weeks of gang warfare. The violence almost re-ignited.