Episode 2: Walking through Hell... without any pants

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Prologue: Bang

Joe Frost

I was face down in the sand. Gunpowder had overwhelmed my senses of taste and smell, like someone had let off a bag of Party Poppers inside my mouth. My ears were not so much ringing from the blast as screaming, the instant tinnitus producing a high-pitched squeal that continues to this day in my right ear – the side the shockwave hit.  

There was no conscious moment of falling down or being knocked over. It was like the movie skipped a few frames. I'd been standing up, holding the back of my chair at the restaurant table. Now, I was horizontal and seemingly in the sand, rather than on it.  

With my face down and my eyes closed, I didn’t get an immediate visual of the situation, but if there had been any lingering doubt as to what the first explosion had been, it was well and truly gone now.  

Bomb. In Bali. Just like the Sari Club three years earlier. Where those hundreds of people had died in flames.  

Flames. What was that searing heat on my legs? I was on fire. Shit. My legs were on fire. 

I scrambled to my feet, dragging my boardshorts down my legs and off, as I sprinted for the safety of the waves, where so many others were seeking refuge.  

In hindsight, there’s little reason we would be any safer in the ocean than on the sand – men wearing backpacks are more than capable of wading into knee-deep water. My frantic logic and, I suspect, that of all those who were around me in the bay, was that bombs need an ignition and a spark wasn't going to flicker in the wet. But it’s not like I had considered my actions. I had simply been standing at the table, then I was in the sand, and now I was in the water; my path set by a series of involuntary actions and instinctive reactions that all took place in a matter of moments.  

Now, in the water, I took a moment to assess the situation. The first thing that was abundantly clear was that I was in no way on fire – and not because the saltwater had done its thing to quell the flames, simply because I had never been on fire.  

Where the bombs of 2002 had been incendiary devices, maximising death and damage by setting a tightly-packed pub and nightclub alight, fire was going to be far less effective in the open-air setting of Jimbaran’s warungs. The explosives used this time around had been packed with shrapnel.  

But the blast from the bomb had also sent sand spraying out at an incredible speed, thousands of grains whipping my legs to give me sandblast, which created a searing hot pain.  

So there were no burns on my legs. But my pasty thighs and calves were on display, from the tips of my toes all the way up to the bottom of my groin-hugging tighty-whities (they were actually coloured black, but not a flattering pair of undies regardless).  

Going back to retrieve my boardshorts from the debris was not an option – what if this, whatever this was, wasn’t over? Had the bomb been planted under our table? There were a lot more tables up on the beach, what if there were more bombs under them?  

After what had just happened, the tables on the sand looked to me like dozens of enormous landmines.  

No, those boardies were gone.  

What’s more, my shirt had been ripped apart by the blast. So all I was wearing was a pair of reg grundies and a tattered rag that had formerly been a button-up shirt from the op-shop. 

What followed was the scariest hour of my life. And I was half naked.  

Cool. 

Act 1: Detonation 

Joe Frost

18 people from Newcastle had come to Jimbaran Beach that night – the plan had been to enjoy the sunset, feast on fresh seafood, then maybe take a stroll on the sand, which stretched a few hundred metres south and maybe 3 or so kilometres north.  

When the first bomb had gone off, 21-year-old Aleta Lederwasch had sprinted away from the table, running towards the southern end of the beach when the second blast erupted.  

Aleta Lederwasch

Very soon after I began running, I received that – a shrapnel piece went through my leg... And I remember looking down and seeing, like a movie, and I think that's what was so surreal about it. It felt like, you know, I just looked down, looked down and saw this red dot and then blood, just, you know, falling down my leg. And my immediate thought was I've been shot. So I didn't think of a bomb being filled with shrapnel. I just thought, ‘Oh my God, there's people behind us with guns.’ 

Joe Frost

Aleta's mother, Julia, chased after her.  

Julia Lederwasch 

Then we heard another explosion and she... 

I didn’t realise that she’d been hit by anything and so she was in pain and she said that and she couldn’t walk.   

And I distinctly remember thinking, this is real fear, this is real terror, because I don’t know what to do and I have to make a decision: whether to run to the water, keep running down the beach, or run into the bushes... 

And we ran into the bushes. And I, I don’t know why, it would seem like maybe there were people in there hiding, but it seemed like some kind of refuge.   

I just remember thinking really clearly, what to do and this is real terror. And I also remember thinking ‘oh my God, people in Baghdad would encounter this everyday but this will be over for us soon’...  

So we went into the bushes and I was kind of half carrying her, and it turned out that we were at the back of a resort, the Four Seasons Resort. And so we sort of kept walking up a path and there were people having dinner and hanging out around and we said, ‘something really bad has happened.’ 

Joe Frost

Back at the table, Jenny Pillar had responded to the first explosion by getting out of the line of fire.  

Jenny’s husband, Eric Pillar, tried to coax her back to her seat.  

Jenny Pillar

I was under the table... and then Eric’s like, ‘get up, c’mon we’ll go back and sit down’, he wanted to eat his dinner.

And that was when the bomber stood in the spot that I’d moved away from.

And then as we went to move back to our seat, and he was standing there and he detonated it, it threw us up the beach. Which felt like it was a long way away – I don’t really know whether it was.  

And Eric was completely out, like I thought he was gone. Like he was on his back, flat on his back, and I was bashing on him and like screaming at him. And all of a sudden he just – he came, he woke up... And my legs, one of my legs, was like completely broken, so I couldn’t even – like, the force had broken my bones... 

Then, cos I couldn't walk, Eric and this man picked me up and carried me up onto the road. And I remember him bashing on the front of this car, it was like a little ute, like two seats in the front and then a tray. So they lifted me into the back of the ute and there was another lady in there and she had a baby and the baby was screaming – Indonesian lady – and her whole face was just missing. And the little baby was crying.  

Joe Frost

Kim and Vicky Griffiths initially tried to calm the group, suggesting the first explosion had been a gas bottle. Kim had told Vicky to get her bag, that now was time to leave, but they were still in their seats.  

Vicky Griffiths

When it went off I remember flying through the air and backwards – like towards my back, away from the beach – I remember flying through the air and it being really quiet and I remember thinking ‘I’m going to die’, and I remember thinking ‘who’s going to look after my kids...’  

And that was sort of my thought and I was like – cos my ears were gone, everything was gone – and I remember Kim, you found me didn’t you?  

Kim Griffiths

It was pitch black when it happened.  

Vicki Griffiths

Cos all the electricity went out, it was black as black, and eerily quiet.  

Kim Griffiths

Not a sound.  

Vicki Griffiths

Everything just slow motion.  

Joe Frost

Kim what happened to you in the blast? Were you knocked over as well?  

Kim Griffiths

Well I was standing up at the end of the table... and I can remember bits of table and that flying past my head, all that sort of stuff, and losing my hearing.

I didn’t feel anything, didn’t feel hurt or anything. When I got a glimpse of my wound, I had a piece of glass about that big [gestures distance from thumb to forefinger] sticking out of my arm, lots of bits and pieces off me and that.  

I was bleeding, had blood on my shirt and coming through my shirt. But I was more concerned about Vicki, once I got her in the light I said, ‘Oh my goodness’, and said, ‘it’s not too bad’ [laughing].  

Joe Frost

Having found one another, Kim and Vicki ran towards the water, before a local man came to their aid.  

Kim Griffiths

Vicki said, ‘we don’t know if you’re one of them’.  

Vicki Griffiths

Yeah I was a bit hesitant to go with him and he said, ‘No, no, no, I will help you, I will help you.’ And he took us to his car.  

And he said, ‘I’ll take you to the hospital,’ and we said, ‘no, they’ll blow up the hospital next.’  

We were so terrorised that we thought, ‘oh it’s just going to be another series of bombings – they’ve done this one, they’ve done that one, they’ll do another one and probably hit the hospital.’  

So I was like, ‘no just take us back’ and I wanted to check on the boys too...  

We should have stayed to help, but we – my eyes, I couldn’t see. Both my eyes had  ... 

Kim Griffiths

One of your eyes was hanging out.  

Vicki Griffiths

Yeah and the other one was bleeding, I couldn’t see whatever, didn’t know what was going on. So frightened. 

Vicki Griffiths

And he dropped us back at the hotel. 

Act 2: Shockwaves 

Joe Frost

Aleta Lederwasch is my oldest friend in the world. I have photos of the day we met, she at 11 months old, peering down at me in my hospital crib, just hours after I was born. We grew up together. We are family.  

Standing in the shallows of the Bay, I started to yell her name.  

But with hundreds of terrified people screaming in fear, pain, and in search of their own loved ones, and with the tinnitus still wreaking havoc on my hearing, calling one name and expecting a response was a fool’s errand.  

And yet, among the cacophony, I heard a familiar voice calling that same name.  

“Aleta!”  

I splashed out of the shallows to find Dietmar Lederwasch, frantically calling for his oldest daughter. 

He grabbed me and we hugged.  

“Those bastards!” he exclaimed. I knew exactly who he meant, even if it would be years before we put names to who “those bastards” were. But they could wait. For Diet, the most important thing was finding his wife and daughter – the last we’d seen, Aleta was running, Julia chasing after her. 

With no phones or any other method of communication, Dietmar and I started to walk the beach, occasionally calling out Julia or Aleta’s name. But we quickly realised we weren’t going to find anyone else from our group on the sand. Hundreds of people had seemingly disappeared. 

Maybe they’d regrouped at the bus? It was as good an idea as any, so we made our way up off the shoreline and towards the carpark.  

There, we discovered a huge crowd of locals, squaring off at one another in an aggressive yelling match. To this day, I have no idea what they were arguing over – while my assumption was that people who backed the attacks were having it out with those who hated this senselessness violence, I have no way of knowing if that’s true.  

But things were getting really heated and as I surveyed the scene, the one thing I did process was that in this crowd of angry people screaming at each other, Diet and I were the only two westerners.  

“I think we should get out of here,” I said quietly to Dietmar.  

We quietly slipped away, back to the beach, to try our luck to the north. 

Eventually we had walked far enough that we were looking at a long stretch of empty sand. Beyond the scrub to the east we could see an upscale hotel and restaurant, seemingly the next place anyone who had come this far would have gone.  

It turned out we had made it to the Intercontinental Hotel.  

As we traipsed up through the bushes towards the complex, Diet took a look at me and said, “Joey, your hair’s all over the place, your shirt’s ripped up and you’re not wearing any pants. People are going to get the wrong idea about what we've been doing.” 

Meanwhile, Julia and Aleta Lederwasch had made it to the safety of the Four Seasons, at the southern end of Jimbaran Beach. 

But their evening was far from over. 

Julia Lederwasch

They must have shown us where to go because it was kind of like a first-aid centre in a big resort and we went up there, and then other people started streaming in from the beach as well.  

They didn’t know what to do with us, no one kind of knew what really had happened, and Aleta was bleeding from the leg and she was panic-stricken.  

And then someone offered to drive us somewhere, like in a 4WD ... She looked at me like, ‘can we trust this?’ and we didn’t know what else to do. We had no phones or anything like that. So we got into this 4WD and just trusted and they took us to Kuta, to a medical centre – forget the name of it.  

When we went into the medical centre there were a lot of people there because, what I found out later, a bomb had also gone off in Kuta so there were all those people coming from the other two venues in there.  

And that was quite surreal.  

They put Aleta on a bed but I was looking around and I think I was in kind of disbelief, I do remember thinking it was like a TV show because from my memory there were white tiles on the floor but there was blood everywhere.   

I went out, left her on that bed and went out to another room and there were dead bodies everywhere lined up... And families coming in and wailing over them.  

And I remember still thinking it’s kind of like a dream that you’re going to wake up from. 

Joe Frost

Aleta also remembered the distraught families, before her attention turned to the seriousness of her own injury – and a troubling rumour that had started to circulate in the hospital. 

Aleta Lederwasch

Walking into that room, I can't ever forget, there were bodies on the floor and I can remember hearing women calling out, “Allah, Allah.”  

And looking at these hospital beds, seeing blood, being incredibly grateful that I was alive and conscious so that I could keep my leg, which had an open wound, you know, above the bloody sheet that I was on. 

And then when there was, you know, rumours going around that shrapnel was poison in arsenic and you're all going to be poisoned, I just wanted my leg off. So I remember calling a Balinese doctor over saying, 'Can you chop my leg off?’  

And my mum thankfully was nearby and heard that and she said, 'No. Don't do that.' Thanks. Thank God. Because the look on their face and that is – what an incredible experience, like, to say to someone, 'Can you chop my leg off’ and for them not to just be like, ‘Don't be silly.’ For them to look at you with, like, ‘OK? Are you sure?’ That's really confronting because you've got to really think, ‘OK, I'm the one making the decision here.’ 

But at the time, knowing that I was alive, it didn't seem like that big a decision. You know, it just kind of like, well, if there's a chance of this poisoning me, then it makes sense just to lose a leg. 

Anyway, the decision was just to try to cut out the shrapnel, which was a much better decision. 

However, in doing that, I remember being wheeled into this room and there was gloves that were covered in blood that they were just washing and then pegging up on a line to dry. And that's, I mean, that was so confronting. And also had a big impact on my thinking afterwards, just the lack of resources, just imagining how much we have back home and then seeing in a hospital where they're having to wash disposable gloves. 

And the doctor, I said to him, ‘No gloves.’ Like, I didn't want to risk being infected. So he didn't use gloves. But I got infected.  

Joe Frost

Jenny and Eric Pillar had made it into the back of a ute, and a local Balinese man was driving them to get medical attention.  

Jenny Pillar

It seemed like a really long drive from there to the hospital – it wasn’t the main hospital, it was like a medical centre – and all the way was horns and people in buses taking photos of us in the back of this. And I kept saying to Eric, ‘I feel like I’m burning’ and it was the blasting of the sand. And everything just felt weird. Blood was just pouring out of everywhere.  

And I looked at Eric’s leg... 

[Jenny gestures to scarring on Eric’s legs] 

I remember looking at that and thinking, ‘oh my God, look at your leg.’ And it was just all, everything was just all hanging out of it. And then when we got to the medical centre, I thought, ‘oh my God we’re going to be safe now’, and that’s when they carried me inside and they were like panicking over Eric, cos he was... I don’t even know how they knew that he was in a worse condition than I was.

And then they took us from that little medical centre to the main hospital and they operated on Eric there and then, that night. And I remember a guy came, he was a journalist, guy from, he was on holidays over there, he’d gone in to make sure he was OK and he came out and had a plastic bag – you know the Ziploc bags – and he gave me the bag and he said, ‘you might want to keep this.’ And it was full, they had to empty all the inside of Eric's stomach out. It was just full of wire and ballbearings and... 

I remember lying in the corridor of that hospital, I wasn’t even in a ward or anything, and my leg was like an ‘s’, it was like this, and this guy came up to me and said, 'I'm an orthopaedic surgeon from New York.’ 

I wasn’t in pain, I didn’t feel any pain at all, I just know I was completely covered in blood and dirt. And he’s like, ‘I can help you’, and he actually set, put my ankle back into shape, without any medication or anything, in the corridor of the hospital. 

And I woke up and Eric was right alongside me, but he was really sick – he was really bad. 

Act 3: False sense of security 

Joe Frost

Back at the hotel, my parents, Adam and Margaret Frost, had been enjoying a quiet evening, maintaining an adult presence around the younger kids, although doing their best to remain inconspicuous.  

Margaret Frost

When I said to Dad, ‘do you mind if we don't go out for dinner?' a lot of the other parents came and said then, ‘well actually our kids, the younger kids don't really want to go. Can you keep an eye on them?’ And we said, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.’   

So that's probably why a lot of the younger kids didn't go.

But the younger kids then went across the road to the Bubba Gump fish restaurant, which was... So what we did, Dad and I, went down, there was a little restaurant at the bottom of the driveway of the hotel, we went down there and had dinner and we could sort of see the kids across the road.

And then all of a sudden this voice is singing out ‘Adam, Adam, Adam!’ And I  thought ‘who are these people?’ had no idea who they were.  

And then when we got closer I could see it was Vicky, and she was just, like, I  thought she was covered in dirt or something like that. Anyway they came into the hotel and ... Adam said, come on, we went up to their room and he was trying to clean them up and just assess them, and she just kept saying, ‘we’re just bleeding, we look worse than we actually are – it's because we're on anticoagulants or blood thinners and we're just bleeding a lot.’ They did, like, there was a lot of blood. 

Vicky Griffiths

They must have got the shock of their lives when they saw me because I couldn’t see – and I said ‘we’ve been in a bomb and we don’t know where anyone is’, she said, ‘what about Joe?’ Was like, ‘sorry, we don’t know where anyone is.’ 

Joe Frost

My father, Dr Adam Frost.

Adam Frost

Vicki was bleeding from her eye - a cut just above her eye. So that was the worst of it for me - was between Kim and Vicki telling me and then going back to the hotel and trying to work out what was happening while you and Dietmar were missing. And you got this thought in the back of your head that, ‘Joe and Diet could be dead’. 

Joe Frost 

My mother, Margaret Frost: 

Margaret Frost

Ok, well I’ll tell you something. You know that little cross I wear around my neck? It's a little Irish cross – and Dad gave it to me when you went to Ireland for that gap year.  

And I just remember, during that period of time when Vicky and Kim were there, I was just holding it and praying, ‘oh my God, please let Joseph be OK.’ [Pause.] And you were. 

I think I was thinking, ‘please let everyone be OK’, but specifically I was hanging on to that little cross and saying, ‘please let Joseph be OK.’  

Joe Frost

Dietmar and I had come to the Intercontinental Hotel, where we told the hotel staff about the bombing – us being the bearers of bad news unfortunately also meant no one else had made their way here.  

Still determined to find Julia and Aleta, we decided to once again head back to the Jimbaran carpark, but this time to go along the road, covering off what we considered to be all the possible options to find someone. However, by now the road was swarming with military vehicles and a roadblock had been set up to prevent anyone from getting to the site of the attack.  

A solider armed with an enormous assault rifle stood at the roadblock to keep out people on foot – and there were plenty of us, predominantly locals who had come out to see what was going on. Diet and I pleaded to be allowed through, but were met with the stone-faced response of a man who either didn’t understand what we were saying or didn’t care.  

A young Balinese man who spoke English intervened on our part, translating to the soldier that we had been on the beach and now simply wanted to find our group, but the soldier held firm.  

The young Balinese man instead invited us back to his home to offer us a drink of water and to assess our options. There, he broke the news to his wife that there had been a bombing.  

That poor young woman was devastated. She began to cry and I assumed her grief was for the two infant children standing at her feet and what this all meant for them; the physical danger they were growing up in, as well as the long-term havoc this would play on the local economy.  

Instead, this poor woman wept for us.  

“I am so sorry,” she said.  

A radio played in the background, news of the evening’s events flooding the airwaves, which led to our male host asking, “Wait, did you say you were in a bombing in Kuta?”  

“No, on Jimbaran,” I responded.  

“Oh no. There has been another bombing.”  

It narrowed our next steps right down. We needed to get back to the hotel. 

The taxi ride back was an eery, otherworldly experience. I silently gazed out the windscreen, a torrent of cars gushing out of the city as we swam upstream.  

Getting out of the taxi at our hotel was a blur. Lots of hugs, lots of tears.   

I learnt later there were also a few smirks from the teenage boys of the group, as I emerged from the car half naked. Fair enough.

Dad stood at the back and let my Mum and little brothers and sisters hug me first. He hugged me, said, “Thank God you’re all right”, then was straight into our cab, bound for the hospital where many of those who had been on the beach had been taken.  

Diet received word that Julia and Aleta were at a medical centre, rather than the main hospital, but both were OK.  

Diet and I went to see Vicky and Kim in their room. They were both seriously shaken up and Vicky had a nasty cut to her face, so they both soon headed to hospital for further treatment, but I could see their injuries were not life-threatening.  

My own self-assessment was that I was fine. Still, I had just survived a bombing. I probably needed a second opinion. 

Margaret Frost

Dad said to me, 'You need to take Joseph to the hospital to get checked because the others have all got shrapnel wounds and they’ve all got, like, embedded pellets, and some of them have had x-rays and they’re, like, embedded in them.’   

So someone at the hotel then drove you and I down to the clinic... So I think this was like a private clinic... But I know that they gave you an x-ray [laughs], they gave you an x-ray and said, ‘Oh yeah he’s got lots of shrapnel’, but in fact when we got back to Australia the x-ray was just a really crappy x-ray... We’ve still got the x-ray here, but they just said ‘oh no, you didn't.’ And I remember you just commenting on how quiet everything was. I didn’t realise that your ears had been blown out.   

Joe Frost

Both my eardrums were perforated – the left drum popping in a way that would heal by itself in short order, the right destroyed to the point it would require multiple surgeries in the years to come – but otherwise, physically, I was fine.  

I returned to the hotel and spent the remnants of the night sat near the front of the complex, waiting in case anyone else made their way back. TVs in the foyer and bar were tuned to a variety of international news channels and through a mixture of broadcast footage and phone calls, we began accounting for the other members of our group. Most had been taken to hospital, in varying states of distress, but none were in apparent mortal danger.  

I was fine. Dietmar was fine. Vicky and Kim were fine. Julia and Aleta, while still in hospital, were fine.  

Margaret Frost

And then the boys of Zwolinksi kept saying to me, ‘have you heard about my Mum and Dad?’ And I said, ‘No I haven’t, I haven’t heard anything.’ And I said, ‘Look, to be perfectly honest, you have a really unusual surname, maybe the Indonesians haven’t logged that as a surname.’ And that’s honestly what I knew... I hope they didn’t think I was lying about that. 

Joe Frost

Down the road from the hotel was a car with an anti-theft device on the dashboard - a little red light blinking on and off. I stared at that light, waiting for it to inevitably turn solid red then blow up the car and hotel.  

In the early hours of Sunday morning, when the car still hadn’t exploded, I went to bed. 

Everyone was going to be OK. But, to me, everything was a bomb. 

I soon discovered I was wrong. On both counts.