‘There were dead all around us’
THEY WERE MAIMED, INJURED AND BURNT AND WE JUST PUT THEM ON MOTORBIKES …
IT has taken 20 years for Glen McEwen to speak about the night he sat in a bar in Bali, heard a bang, then the lights went out.
The then Australian Federal Police acting superintendent was not in Paddy’s Bar or the Sari
Club but another night spot on the Kuta strip. He was the first cop on the scene. Not being in the immediate blast zone of the 2002 Bali terror attack gave him a clear head to deal with the crisis in those first crucial 48 hours.
But it has taken this long for him to speak in detail about events of that night and his diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that partly led to his early retirement.
“There was a massive boom and all the lights went out and we left there (the bar) and saw the flames and glow,” Mr McEwen said.
“We ran down the road but nothing could prepare us for what we then saw.”
With him was then AFP colleague Michael Kelsey. Both were off duty but in Bali on official police business
– in Mr McEwen’s case dealing with a people smuggling case.
On that fateful night of October 12, Mr McEwen immediately rang superiors in Australia and told them of the devastation playing out before him.
He was unsure if it was a gas explosion or something else but he knew there would be mass casualties, including Australians.
“They (Canberra) got on to whatever they had to do and Mick and I rushed back in to try and help people,” Mr McEwen said.
“There were dead all around us, bodies, the injured. I remember a row of cars along Jalan Legian which to this day is still hard to comprehend. They were all fire damaged, totally burnt, but there was still skeletons holding on to the steering wheels with smoke coming off them, many of them taxi drivers. The explosion didn’t blow them away; I couldn’t understand that.
“The place was so packed, cars and taxis, no emergency services could get in. It was chaos. We did what we had to do, to a point, helping people out of the fire and putting them on motorbikes.
“We didn’t know these people. They were maimed, injured and burnt and we just put them on motorbikes and they (locals) were taking them to hospital. There was no co-ordination it was just gut instinct, the whole place was a fireball.” Mr McEwen – who only this month has been able to bring himself to visit the Bali Memorial in Coogee in Sydney’s east – said many of the injured were in such a state of shock they could not talk.
“I quickly realised it had to be bigger than a f--king gas bottle, the spread of devastation was significant,” he said. Mr McEwen came across a mother from Western Australia desperate for a mobile phone to contact her husband and daughter.
“(The mother) grabbed me and asked if she could use my phone because it was her daughter’s 18th birthday and her father had taken her to the Sari Club to celebrate and for some reason the mother didn’t go. She rang and it went to voicemail, and that was one of the first on the missing persons’ list, those two.” Mr McEwen’s final act before reinforcements arrived was to work with local police to secure the scene and morgue before he went back to Jakarta to craft out an agreement for how authorities would work together.
He was awarded an OAM for his service during the Bali bomb and victim identification process known as Operation Alliance. Before retiring Commander McEwen was in charge of the AFP contingent for the Thai boys cave rescue operation.