Spoken from the Front

by Andy McNab

  21 November 2007

  McNab: The Taliban has a permanent presence in most of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group's hands, according to a report from a Brussels international think tank. The Senlis Council claimed that the insurgents controlled 'vast swathes of unchallenged territory' and were gaining 'more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people'. It said that the Nato force in the country needed to be doubled to 80,000 front-line soldiers who should be allowed to pursue militants into Pakistan. The 110-page report said that its research found the Taliban controlled 54 per cent of Afghanistan. The Ministry of Defence dismissed the report, saying: 'The Taliban does not pose a credible threat to the democratic Afghan government.'

  6 December 2007

  Captain Dave Rigg, MC, The Royal Engineers

  It was a brilliant day. Mum, Dad and Anna – my girlfriend – came to Buckingham Palace with me so I could be presented with the MC [for bravery at Jugroom Fort]. I received it from the Queen. Everyone asks me what we talked about, but I'm ashamed to say that – in the excitement of it all – my recollection of what she said is a little vague. I was surprised at how nerve-racking the presentation was. For a little old lady, she has a huge amount of presence.

  The investiture is a day that I will remember for the rest of my life, but I regret that I was unable to share it with my fellow 'volunteers'. I doubt that I will ever again experience the selfless commitment to one's friends and duty that I saw on that day.

  January 2008

  Flight Sergeant Paul 'Gunny' Phillips, RAF

  I can tell you about my worst day. We were out tasking at about midday. We got a message to go and pick up some walking wounded from a mine strike. This was up towards the east of Musa Qa'leh. We had an empty cab and we spoke to the ops back at [Camp] Bastion and said: 'Right, we have not got any medics on board. How badly are they [the wounded]?'

  They said: 'It's a couple of T3s.'

  So, it was walking wounded, minor injuries. The gen was that it was a patrol that had gone out to the east of Musa Qa'leh and they had had a mine strike. We said: 'Yes, we'll go in and pick the guys up. Just make sure they're all bandaged up and we'll put them in the cab and fly them back to Bastion.' So they gave us the grid and we had an Apache [attack helicopter] with us [as an escort]. So the Apache scooted over, had a quick look around, saw where the guys were. The guys on the ground marked the HLS [helicopter landing site] with green smoke. So we landed on the green smoke: it was on a little ridge. We were facing north and we had Musa Qa'leh on the left-hand side and desert on the right-hand side. I was on the right-hand side, near the door. The patrol had parked their vehicles about 150 metres behind the aircraft. I was standing watching the patrol because there was a lull where nothing was happening. We were saying: 'Where are these guys [the wounded]?'

  One of these little Pinzgauers started driving towards us. And I said: 'Guys. This must be them coming now.' There was a little dip just before the Pinzgauer got to the aircraft, about a hundred metres away. The Pinzgauer started to drive down and suddenly it hit a mine: an anti-tank mine. I watched the front end disintegrate and a corporal was thrown a good fifty or sixty feet in the air. He was that close that I could see his right leg had gone from the hip downwards. He impacted the sand fairly heavily. The front of the Pinzgauer was burning away. I could see the guys who had fallen out of the back. A few of the ground troops started running towards the wagon and then they realized, 'Oh, fuck. It's another mine,' and they stopped.

  The Apache then got a message to us saying: 'It is probably best if you get out of there.' So we lifted and went and sat at FOB Edinburgh and we had this big discussion within the crew whether to go back in and try and help them again or wait until the IRT [incident response team] got there. It was a case of some of the guys wanted to go straight back in but I said: 'Look, these guys have just had a major incident. Let them sort themselves out, patch the guys up, re-org. They're going to have to extract out of a potentially mined area anyway. If we go back in, it's just going to cause noise, confusion, a bit more panic. It's going to put pressure on them to try and get the injured guys back to the aircraft. When they're ready, they'll bell us up [on the radio] and ask us to come back in.' While that was happening, they had already got a message back to Bastion and the IRT aircraft actually went up because they had got medics on board with the right kit. When they went to pick these guys back up again, they said that the corporal [from the Pinzgauer] was still alive on their way back. I found that a bit of a surprise but unfortunately he didn't make it back to Bastion.

  And for two or three days after that I was probably the lowest I've felt in my life. I'd seen a lot of casualties prior to that event, but to actually see the event itself was incredibly shocking. Not something I'm ever likely to forget. We had one killed, and they picked up two T1s and two T2s. We never went back [to the scene] because the casualties were much more serious and we simply didn't have the medical training or the equipment to deal with them.

  If you're feeling low, the option is always there not to fly. Nobody can force you to fly. If you fly when you're not firing on all cylinders, you're more of a liability to the rest of the crew than not being there at all. So, if you're that bad, nobody will think any less of you. It's a very open and honest forum. But then again you don't want to turn around and say, 'I'm unfit to fly,' because it's almost like passing the buck to one of your mates. Because someone else is going to have to fly instead of you. So you don't want to let your mates down. So I carried on then even though I wasn't feeling 100 per cent. All in all, Afghanistan has been a huge culture shock. I tend not to talk about my experiences outside the military environment. My mother certainly doesn't know what I get up to.

  28 February 2008

  McNab: Prince Harry flew back to Britain after completing ten weeks of an intended fourteen-week tour of Afghanistan. He had been deployed there secretly to avoid him – and his comrades – becoming Taliban targets. But his cover was blown by the Drudge Report, the US-based website, after the British media had agreed to keep his deployment a secret until after he had returned to the UK. The prince, then twenty-three, described his posting as 'all my dreams come true' and vowed to return to front-line duties. The third in line to the throne said he had revelled in being 'just one of the boys'. Brigadier Andrew Mackay, the commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan, said Prince Harry – known to his comrades as Second Lieutenant Wales – had 'acquitted himself with distinction'. The Queen said her grandson had done 'a good job in a very difficult climate'. I was impressed by his attitude and disappointed for him that he had not been able to complete his tour.

  March 2008

  Sergeant Hughie Benson, The Royal Irish Regiment

  Sergeant Hughie Benson, 1 Battalion The Royal Irish Regiment, is twenty-nine. He was born and largely brought up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has three brothers, two of whom are also serving with the Royal Irish. Their father, also Hugh, is with The Royal Irish too. Benson left school at sixteen in 1996 and joined the Army the following year. He hadn't intended to follow in his father's footsteps until his final year at school, but he eventually concluded that a military career was the 'best option' for him. All four military members of the family served during the battalion's tour to Afghanistan in 2008. Hughie Benson acted as a team commander for OMLT [Operational Mentor Liaison Team] 1, A Company, training the Afghan National Army (ANA). Before Afghanistan, he toured Macedonia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland and Iraq. He is married, with two children, and is based at the Royal Irish's barracks in Tern Hill, Shropshire.

  There were four of us from my family on the tour, all serving with 1 Battalion The Royal Irish. My father is a QM [quarter master], and my younger brothers are Sam, twenty-three, and Steven, twenty. You do worry about them but the best thing is not to think about it. It's quite fortunate because my brother Steven is in A Company with me. When I was in Sangin, he was in Sangin. When I was in Musa Qa'le
h, he was in Musa Qa'leh. My other brother was attached to C Company. And he was part of Ranger Company. So when we were in Sangin it was all right because we were all in the same place. But when I moved to Musa Qa'leh, whenever I heard that someone had been injured in Sangin, it was a bit of a worry: the fact that it might have been him. We definitely are close as a family.

  This was my seventh tour – I've done two in Iraq but this was as platoon sergeant acting as team commander for OMLT 1, A Company. It was my first tour in Afghanistan. I had to work closely to the ANA – I had to co-ordinate patrols and operations with them. When I arrived, I thought Helmand province had a lot less infrastructure than Iraq. There were a lot of mud huts, and a lot of people working the land and fields. I thought it must be a harder life for them than for people living in Iraq.

  I was [pleasantly] surprised at what the ANA could do. Prior to leaving, we were led to believe we were going over there and they were people running about with guns. They do have an idea, more than a bit. If you have a strong company commander then that company will know what they're doing. The structure relies heavily on the company commander. If you've got a bit of an idiot as a company commander, then the blokes won't care. There are around a hundred ANA in a company. You will have six in your [British Army] team: so six mentors to a hundred ANA. I was lucky. Throughout the seven months, I had the same company commander so I had the same troops all the way through. You have to trust them. If you don't trust them, you can't go out with them, especially up in Musa Qa'leh. That was the most kinetic fighting that we did. If I asked them to do something they would go and do it. If we were in contact and I asked them to do something, there was trust that they would go and do it. But there are different kinds of trust. Would you go out and leave your iPod sitting on your bed? The answer would be no. But when it comes to trusting them out on the ground, I would.

  The co-ordination, the fire-power, and the planning that the Taliban put into their attacks is unbelievable. I don't think they've got the resources to waste them. And they're very good fighters. It's the commanders who know what they're doing; the blokes just do as they're told. And the insurgency, with their IEDs, are getting better every day, which is a scary thing. I would never go out on the ground without an exact plan of what I was going to do because when they do hit you, they hit you hard. And they know exactly what they're doing; there's no rushing them. If it means them waiting for you to move to where they want you – to the ground of their choosing – then they'll wait. That's the way they are – and then they'll hit you as hard and as fast as they can until their ammunition or their IEDs are expended.

  7 March 2008

  McNab: It is revealed that Captain Simon Cupples, who returned to the battle zone three times under enemy fire to rescue three wounded comrades, will receive the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross – an award just below the Victoria Cross. Cupples, twenty-five, led a handful of men five times to recover casualties after almost a third of his platoon from the Mercian Regiment had been shot when a force of some thirty Taliban ambushed them from a distance of only twenty metres. Sergeant Craig Brelsford, twenty-five, was awarded a posthumous Military Cross for trying to retrieve the body of Private Johan Botha in the same incident. Furthermore, Corporal Michael Lockett and Private Luke Cole, who was seriously injured, were both awarded the Military Cross (MC) for their conspicuous bravery. The Mercian Regiment, who lost nine men in their six-month tour, were awarded thirteen bravery medals.

  The courage of several members of 1 Battalion The Royal Anglian was also officially recognized. They included those who had fought on 13 April 2007, when Private Chris Gray, nineteen, lost his life in a fire-fight. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Carver, the commanding officer, was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for the way he led his troops. Major Dom Biddick and Corporal Robert 'Billy' Moore, who was injured during the fire-fight, were both awarded the Military Cross (MC). So, too, was Captain David Hicks, but his award was posthumous. Captain Hicks, twenty-six, was killed on 11 August 2007, during a violent attack on his patrol base north east of Sangin. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Carver later paid tribute to the nine men from the 1st Battalion who died during that single bloody tour. He said of his own DSM: 'Personally I see the award very much as recognition of the whole battalion's efforts. You cannot give a medal to all 700 members of the battalion, but my medal is to recognize them all. I'm immensely proud of them. That feeling hasn't diminished over time. The real test of our work will come this summer [2008]. I look back and see that we made a huge difference to the overall campaign. I'm not saying we won it, but we changed the mindset from being defensive to taking the fight to the Taliban.' Colour Sergeant Simon Panter, who killed three Taliban in a single fire-fight, was Mentioned in Dispatches. He was honoured in this way for his 'heroic actions, outstanding leadership, initiative and aggression that sent a powerful message to the enemy that British forces would attack to reinstate legitimate government whatever the risk'. The gallantry awards were among 183 medals announced for bravery largely in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  7 March 2008

  Warrant Officer Class 2 Keith Nieves, The Royal Anglian Regiment

  Young Private Luke Nadriva, who got me out of the blown-up Viking after it was hit by a mine strike, has been awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal [the QGM is the third highest bravery award for courage not in the face of the enemy]. Luke is a Fijian lad in his twenties. He was my 51 [mortar] man [in 5 Platoon]. He undoubtedly saved my life. My vehicle was engulfed in flames, but he managed to get all the armour [plating, crumpled in the blast] free so he could open the door. He had to prise it open. There is no way I could have got out of that vehicle [but for Nadriva's courage]. I will always be grateful to him.

  5

  Introduction: Operation Herrick 8

  In April 2008, 16 Air Assault Brigade returned to Afghanistan and replaced 52 Infantry Brigade as part of Operation Herrick 8. The entire force totalled around 7,800 servicemen and women. A great deal had changed in 16 Air Assault Brigade's eighteen-month absence. UK forces in Afghanistan now used a large number of forward operating bases all over Helmand, which had been built by the Royal Engineers. These were designed to reinforce the platoon houses and provide launching pads from which troops could patrol the surrounding area.

  The pattern of life in towns such as Sangin and Musa Qa'leh was far more normal than they had previously seen and large-scale construction projects, such as the Kajaki hydroelectric plant, were taking shape. However, the Taliban had not gone away and in places the fighting was as fierce as the Paras had endured in 2006.

  The main combat power of Operation Herrick 8 was provided by 2 Battalion The Parachute Regiment, 3 Battalion The Parachute Regiment, 1 Battalion The Royal Irish, 2 Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, 5 Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland and 7 Parachute Regiment The Royal Horse Artillery. They were supported by the Royal Logistic Corps, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and elements of the Royal Artillery. Helicopter support was provided by the Sea Kings of 845 and 846 Naval Air Squadrons, as well as the Lynxes of 847 Naval Air Squadron and RAF Chinooks from 18 and 27 Squadrons and Army Air Corps Apaches. Harriers of 4 Squadron Royal Air Force gave air support, and Hercules from 30 and 70 Squadrons, and The RAF Regiment were responsible for Force Protection

  April 2008

  Ranger David McKee, The Royal Irish Regiment

  Ranger David McKee, 1 Battalion The Royal Irish Regiment, is twenty. He was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. The son of a steel welder, he has two sisters and a brother. His great -grandfather served with the Royal Irish Engineering Corps and he has an uncle in the RAF. McKee left school at sixteen. He had grown up during the Troubles and had wanted a military career since he was ten, having seen soldiers patrolling the streets and being supported by the local population. He joined the Royal Irish in March 2006. His visit to Afghanistan in 2008 was his first overseas tour and he worked for OMLT [Operational Mentor Liaison Team] 2, B Company. McKee, who is single,
is based at the Royal Irish's barracks at Tern Hill, Shropshire.

  Before we left [the UK], I was looking forward to the tour but, then again, I was a wee bit frightened too. We'd obviously heard the news about boys getting into contacts, roadside bombs and all that. But when it comes down to it, you think: It [trouble] can be dodged. It can be avoided if you go back and do what you're taught to do.