Emma discovered she was pregnant again in February, and was upset that I didn’t get as excited as she was. Again, it’s something that afflicts expectant fathers in every walk of life, but I didn’t see it. I was thinking, I’ve got into the Regiment, I’m doing what I want – now how do I deal with this? I’d worked so hard to get to this point. But neither did I want to let her down. Things were tense, then they were good, and then tense again.
By April, we just needed a circuit-breaker to take the stress out of things. We cancelled the wedding. It was disappointing to have to do that, but with the wedding taken out of the equation, things settled down again between us. We could look forward to the baby’s birth later in the year. But first, I had to get through my initial full-scale deployment to Afghanistan.
SEVENTEEN
Even though it was May, the heat was like a punch in the face as we stepped off the ramp of the C-130 Herc in Tarin Kowt. This would be a different Afghanistan from the one I’d experienced on the PSD. The first night, I could hear the sounds of the town: tooting horns, the whine of motorbikes, and the ever-present rumble of buses and lorries. Someone was yelling and someone else was whistling; now and then a policeman’s whistle blew and a siren went off. It never went quiet.
Our brief was pretty simple. We had to drive out in our LRPVs (long-range patrol vehicles, or basically tooled-up armoured Land Rovers) and find someone to fight. That sounds a bit flippant, but the intelligence was that in 2006 the Taliban were reorganising after a couple of quiet years. More than 4000 people were reported to have died in the conflict in that year, ninety of them from NATO forces, the most since 2001. The estimated number of armed attacks had trebled, from 1500 to 4500. The squadron that handed over to us told us plenty of stories about fights they’d got into, and how they’d handled them.
We got our vehicles sorted, a big job for me because I was the driver and signaller for my patrol. We had two LRPVs per patrol, with three operators in each, plus whatever interpreters, signallers or other support we needed. I was by far the least experienced of our patrol. The PC had done fifteen years in the Regiment, and the 2IC was a soldier from a British unit. The sniper had been to Afghanistan before with 3 Squadron, up in the north. Even among the three of us who were there for the first time, the other two had been to Iraq and had spent a lot of time in the army. I was by a long way the most junior.
Our orders for our first task were non-specific: just to drive into a certain area out of Tarin Kowt and see what we could find. I packed what would become my routine gear for a patrol of twenty-four hours or less. I had six or seven mags of thirty rounds each, so that was 210 M4 rifle rounds in my webbing. I had a pistol with two mags, and enough food for twenty-four hours – two tuna sachets and a Mars bar, or a couple of muesli bars. The ration packs might have beef stroganoff in a little sealed bag. That was enough for me. Among the other mandatory gear was two litres of water, a basic medical kit to patch up wounds, and some fluid bags to deal with a bigger trauma wound. I had a tourniquet that had to be accessible using either arm, a radio, a spare battery, and specialist gear such as rubber latex gloves, plastic bags to collect pocket litter and other evidence, handcuffs and at least two blindfolds for possible detainees, and an explosive charge.
We left in the middle of the night, wearing our NVGs; soon the moon made it bright enough not to need them, which was a relief to me, because driving in NVGs gave me headaches. The guys were on edge, having been told that there was a good chance we’d get into a fight.
The bulldust on the roads, which had a kind of goat-shit-and-fur animal smell, kicked up in massive plumes. We had to steer away from the dust from the vehicle in front, to avoid being engulfed. The desert roads were rutted and rocky, with plenty of offshoots where drivers had avoided mud holes or a rock scratching the diff. When we got into the hills we were driving on goat tracks, scraping the sides of the cars, doing three point turns, trying not to roll down hills or flipping the cars – it was very hairy. One squadron in the Char China area had taken seven hours to go one kilometre, in a flat fertile area on top of a plateau in winter. It was so soft and boggy, they had to winch each other forward all the time.
Our procedure was to find a hide spot on top of some hills and watch a village. We had an Afghan interpreter, or terp, with us to listen to the chatter on the local ICOM radios. The terp was routinely with our headquarters element, listening to the radios and passing it on to our boss. The best terps did a literal translation, word for word, while some others tried to interpret what they saw as the meaning and consequences of what they heard. We didn’t want that, and encouraged them just to repeat what they were hearing. Most of the time that was just, ‘Ahmed, are you hearing me?’ ‘Yes, Mustafa, I can hear you. Can you hear me?’ For long periods, they would just keep contact with each other. Then, when they were preparing to fight, there would be a lot of bravado. They gave us codenames such as ‘onions’ or ‘potatoes’, and called their weapons stuff like ‘watermelons’. So when things heated up, they’d say, ‘Go and get the big watermelons, come to Akhtar’s place, and we’ll get rid of the onions.’ They boasted about how they were going to attack and rout us, which put us on edge, but it was usually exaggerated. Then after a while we got complacent, because they were often threatening and doing nothing. Sometimes their preparations would peter out because getting organised was too hard for them. But it was dangerous to get complacent, and we had to take every threat seriously.
We would wait for the ICOM to spike, watch patterns of life, and see if suspicious types were running around with weapons or doing things they normally wouldn’t do. We were also mapping the routes through the valleys and passes, figuring out where we could get vehicles through and where to avoid.
Not much happened until we caught up with American Special Forces at a FOB (forward operating base) near Deh Rawod, west of Tarin Kowt. Deh Rawod was a big open valley, essentially the gateway from Uruzgan province to Kandahar province. The scenery was impressive. On the edge of the town was a huge, battered, sphinx-like formation. It was said to have been a castle built by Alexander the Great. The Americans’ intelligence was that a ferry was moving Taliban across a nearby river during the night. We planned an ambush and got geed up. This was going to be awesome, hiding in the weeds in the water, just like Vietnam. There’s a famous SAS story about a patrol blowing up a vital Viet Cong tractor, known as the ‘Tractor Job’, and everyone was talking about this as the ‘Ferry Job’.
As we got set up, our squadron’s other troop was up in Chora, north of TK, and we’d heard about them getting into fights in which Matthew Locke got a Medal for Gallantry and another Australian got hit in the neck by an RPG. We were spewing to be on the other side of the mountain range, missing out. But we had the Ferry Job all planned. We were like Melbourne Cup horses trained for this day. It was the epitome of what we did: water ops, using all our skills and knowledge to tackle a problem.
And then it was called off. Our OC on that trip was very risk-averse. Headquarters were sending questions on the radio: ‘How do you know they’re going to be Taliban and not just locals with guns?’
Well, the intelligence we’d got was that they were Taliban. If they weren’t, we’d be able to tell. The Taliban had a certain look – the turban, the eye make-up, the way they carried themselves. The Americans working with the local forces were certain they were Taliban.
But the questions betrayed headquarters’ timidity, and they called it off. We were shitty as hell. We didn’t know if the Squadron HQ was having trouble leading two troops, or if they didn’t rate us as a troop. This was what we’d come here for, and to be pulled away from it was extremely frustrating to say the least. To have that chance taken away by anything was bad enough, but to have it taken away by our own people was shattering.
I think it was all down to inexperience. The command element were on their first trip. They had grown up in a peacetime army, and had had a troop in a
couple of contacts. They were scared of risking us. On our side, what angered us was the lack of trust. We weren’t idiots; we weren’t going to blaze away at anyone.
As disheartened as we were, though, we had to be careful not to start blaming everyone else. Morale had to be preserved. So we had to rise above it and push on to the next job.
*
The tantalising near–Ferry Job set a bit of a tone for that 2006 trip. Our patrol was sent up north past FOB Cobra, to mountainous terrain where the Taliban had some important supply routes. We lay up behind a hill for nine days overlooking the villages. When we were out for long periods, we took sleeping bags when it was cold or just silk liners when it wasn’t; some guys had swags, but I preferred just to sleep on the ground with my webbing rolled up as a pillow. I generally fell asleep pretty quickly at night, listening to the pining of jackals in the distance.
During the day, on the ICOM we heard the Taliban spotters telling their bosses they knew we were up there, but they never came looking for us. The scenery was quite dramatic, with burnt-out vehicles lying alongside high twisting mountain passes. The eerie thing was, no matter how empty it seemed, there was always someone there. At night, we could see Taliban spotters flashing their lights to each other. They were sent out with a radio, a hundred batteries, some water and naan bread to live like dogs for as long as their bosses paid them. If they saw a coalition convoy or helicopters, they passed the word up the valleys. It was hard to get in there by car without them seeing us coming. At night they would give themselves away by flashing signals with their lights. On occasion we would observe them for a while and when we were happy that it was indeed a spotter and he was alone, we would pump a few rounds up towards them, but not much happened.
We did see some Taliban coming together for a shura, or meeting, in a village. Some commandos, who we’d had attached to us for their mortar capability, came up and fired a few rounds, and a JTAC (joint terminal attack controller) called in some fast air to drop some bombs. There was one suspicious-looking man who squirted from the site on a motorbike. He was being chased with mortars. On the Taliban radio network we could hear the motorbike whining in the background, and we saw him weaving up the side of the river. He got away. It was a brief moment of excitement.
The frustration was mounting. We wanted to achieve military objectives, and for the most part weren’t able to. I might sound gung-ho about our desire for contact, and it’s a characteristic of the untested soldier to want that first challenge. Among your peers, it’s a way of earning your stripes, and we felt that we came out of that trip with a name for being the troop that hadn’t been in the main fights. It’s our professional mindset: this is what we’re trained to do, and we want it to happen.
Further up that valley, we received information that a MVI (medium-value individual) was in a village. To get ‘eyes on’, we took an extra sniper from another patrol and started what turned into a very hot five-kilometre walk up a hill. As soon as the sun came over the peak, it was on us all day. Once we were up there, we stayed for three days and nothing happened. We were organised in two groups: an LUP and an OP (observation post). The LUP was for food and water, admin, recording any observations in logbooks, and signals. I was constantly working, passing back photos, information and other details, including a sketch on the computer of the layout of the houses. When it was time, we would crawl the few yards between the LUP and the OP to do our jobs.
To rest, we lay in the dirt behind a little wall, but it was almost impossible to sleep in the heat. Now and then we would hear dogs barking or the jingle of a bell on herds of what we called ‘Beyoncé sheep’, for their particularly prominent rumps. We had some parachutes we cut up to use as a sunshade. We got them after a resupply in the field; god bless the Americans, because the pallets had a few Playboy magazines in them. We were on only two litres of water a day, lying there and getting fried. We would drink the water to keep hydrated, but it was like turning on the hot-water tap at home and trying to drink from it. You wanted to spit it straight out. It wasn’t refreshing in the slightest. They were long days. We had to do everything on our backs or stomachs, crawling or shimmying from place to place. Before or since, I’ve never known such heat. Then, at night, a welcome breeze whipped through the valley. If I was on piquet I would drop my pants, lift my shirt up and let the wind cool me.
Boredom was a problem, and we would sit and let our minds travel back home. I thought a lot about modifications I’d like to do to the house or garden. Or, with some others, we’d whisper about places we’d like to go on holidays, and places we had been, or just make up games. For me, it being my first trip, I was too busy and mentally active to get too bored. I was constantly occupied with trying to get the communications to the main base up and maintained, and to support other patrols and the rest of the troop. Every time the PC wanted to send something back I had to be ready. Or if something came in, I always had to check it in case he needed to know something. If I missed an urgent message, it could jeopardise the patrol’s position. The PC would have to wear it if the sig had been lazy and not watching the radio.
After three days of inactivity, we were packing up to leave in the morning. Just then, two suspects came out of the house we were watching. We were about 1800 metres away, and watched them through our binoculars. They got a phone out, and were holding it up to the sky, walking around trying to get reception. Finally, after all that waiting, we confirmed that they were the two targets. We scrambled into position and called the snipers in. The JTAC got an A-10 Thunderbolt overhead – an awesome piece of machinery that carried GBUs (guided bomb units), and a 30-millimetre cannon. Because it was an old style of plane, it had to be talked onto the target in a detailed way. It had one big limitation: when it came for the run-in, if the 30-millimetre cannon fired for too long, the strength of its recoil would force the plane back and stall the engine. So they could only come for shortish sweeps.
The two Talibs started walking towards the house. The jet came in, dropped a bomb, and fired its cannon. They missed, and the pair began running. Our snipers took a shot and only just missed. The targets got to the house, and then the jet came around again and blew out the whole side of the building. That was a great sight for us. Of course we had a technological advantage; we happily took it. Always bring friends with guns to a gunfight.
Another Talib was running back and forth, trying to get away from the snipers, who were pinning him in. The plane came to do a gun run. The noise was incredible – it’s one of the best sounds you hear over there, a loud throaty groan as it lets rip.
At that point a group of women and children came out of the other houses and started waving. We called a ceasefire. A suspect had slipped in among the women and had picked up a kid as a shield. He had that many women around him that our PC decided not to engage him. He ended up walking off with them: the price of our rules of engagement, which the Taliban already knew how to exploit.
We packed up, and wanted to do a BDA (battle damage assessment), but our HQ thought it was too risky to go into the village. This was frustrating again, but it turned out that the three targets we’d ended up getting were significant Taliban fighters. As a first real contact, it was invigorating and exciting, and it was good to know that we’d achieved a result.
Back at FOB Cobra, we debriefed with the Americans, who had some fresh food for us. After being out for a couple of weeks, we were pretty dirty. I’d started chewing my 2IC’s mint-flavoured Skoal tobacco, and my cams were filthy. Driving along, I had to spit the stuff out, and my whole shoulder soon wore a disgusting dark brown stain, as did the side of the car. When I was on piquet, I spat into a water bottle. I would always be leaving bottles filled with spit on my mate’s gun turret, because it drove him crazy but entertained me. Unsurprisingly, I was looking and feeling like a complete grub.
There were a couple of uneventful patrols north and east of Tarin Kowt before we went to the Baluchi Pass ar
ea for a couple of days. We picked off a Taliban spotter with a .50-calibre round, and his comrades left him to be chewed up by a dog. They had very different customs from us when it came to looking after their dead and wounded. If I was beginning to get the idea that life in Afghanistan was cheap, the main people I put that down to were the Taliban themselves. They had a recklessness about their own lives, and those of their comrades, that shocked me at first. Soon, though, I got used to it, and wary of it. If they didn’t care whether they lived or died, that made them all the more dangerous.
On one hill, they were trying to mortar us but were falling well short. We had the advantage, being able to see them and having superior range. They were actually firing from inside their village. They seemed to lack all understanding of the advantage they’d given us. But once again, our commanders wouldn’t let us go into the village, fearing that we’d either hurt some innocent people or get hurt ourselves. Again, we felt that the trust wasn’t there.
Out of FOB Anaconda, named after the famous battle between the Americans and Al Qaeda in 2002 – I’d read Sean Naylor’s book about it, Not a Good Day to Die, in Kuwait the previous year – we went up the valley of Ana Kalay. We drove two cars to an Afghan National Army (ANA) compound, and although we heard some ICOM chatter from enemy fighters threatening to come and hit us, nothing happened. I would get to know that valley very well two years later. In 2006, it seemed a bit sketchy but was more or less in friendly hands.
By the end of the trip, we were getting very frustrated, especially knowing that our squadron’s other troop was still getting much more action. We went to conduct another OP in support of friendly call signs. It required us to use one hill for a helicopter insertion, but at the last second the Chinook’s crew wouldn’t land or let us jump. The helicopter itself was making straining sounds like it was about to crash. It was kind of heavy because if it had crashed, the steep nature of the terrain would have made it difficult to recover us and the helicopter. We had to walk the hill instead. I weighed 73 kilos and my pack and rifle weighed 79 kilos. I had three radios and batteries, seven days’ worth of food, 20 litres of water, and extra machine gun rounds. I don’t mind that, but it’s tough to carry when you’ve been expecting to come by helicopter and still think you could have. And in the end, when we came to an impossible place to get through without ropes, the PC called the whole thing off and we walked out. The next night, another helicopter insertion was aborted when the pilots said they’d seen people moving around near the HLZ (helicopter landing zone). That was just the way it was.
The Crossroad Page 20