To McCloughlan it felt like the whole 2 Platoon contact had lasted no more than five minutes; in fact it had been two hours since he first came under fire in the alleyway. Darkness was falling and the search had been completed. Will Pike ordered 2 Platoon to withdraw back to the compound for the extraction, but the fire fight was still raging across the open field. The Apaches had been firing in support, but a heavier weight of fire was required to break the contact and allow the platoon to disengage. Corporal of Horse Fry was the JTAC with Fehley; he talked one of the circling A-10s on to the Taliban in the orchard. We had American close-air-support aircraft overhead all day, including a large black B-i bomber, but the close proximity of civilians had prevented us from asking them to drop bombs. Fry called for cannon fire, marked his target and popped smoke. I heard the rattling fire of the GE and Hughes Chain Gun mounted in the nose of the A-10 before I saw the aircraft. Initially I thought it was a Taliban heavy machine gun; then I heard the after-whirr of the rotating barrels as the tank-buster aircraft banked and turned away. It is a terrible modern-day equivalent of an aerial-mounted Gatling gun. Firing 30mm tungsten-tipped cannon shells at 100 rounds per second, it brassed up the orchard with a devastating weight of lethal fire. One minute there had been trees there and the next they had disappeared in spouting eruptions of earth and sparks along with the Taliban. It was danger close fire delivered at less than 75 metres from the forward line of 2 Platoon’s own positions in the full knowledge that its proximity to our own troops meant that there was a real and accepted risk that it might hit them. But the American pilots were good and it provided Fehley’s men with a vital breathing space to disengage and withdraw back to the compound.
The extraction phase was uneventful. I had expected the Taliban to follow us up as we crossed the shallow wadi bed to our east and struck out into some open high ground in the desert to secure a pick-up LZ. I had also expected them to try to shoot down the four CH-47s as the helicopters flew low along the treeline of the wadi that we had left 700 metres behind us. They were a welcome sight but my heart missed a beat as I saw how close they flew to the line of thick vegetation. We covered it with our machine guns, but the Taliban stayed quiet. Perhaps they had had enough and were pleased to see us go and be left in peace to lick their wounds.
The plan was that I would lift off with Tac in the last aircraft, but my chalk of waiting men was the closest to the first cab that landed. I wanted the helicopters to spend no more than twenty seconds on the ground; any longer would significantly increase their exposure to taking fire. Consequently, I wasn’t going to change the load order at the last minute. Lifting off as part of the first pair, we circled overhead as the other two aircraft came in to make their pick-up. It took less than a couple of minutes, but it seemed like an agonizing age. I wanted to know that we had got every man into the helicopters; the prospect of finding that we had left someone behind once we got back to Bastion was too much of an unimaginable horror. I asked my pilot to get the aircrew of the other aircraft to do a head check. He came back to me quickly:
`All complete, Colonel.’ Do it once more, please, and tell them to take their time to double-check,’ I said. The second answer came back as an affirmative and I acknowledged the pilot’s request to head back to Bastion. I stripped off my webbing and body armour and flopped down into one of the nylon web-strapped seats; I was absolutely knackered.
There was a perceptible buzz about the place when we got back to Bastion. I asked Will Pike to gather the company briefly on the side of the landing site; they wouldn’t want a long speech from me, but I wanted to tell them that they had done well. Major Stu Russell, the quartermaster, came out of the JOC and pumped my hand as I drew up in a Pinzgauer truck. Stu had fought through the gorse line at the Battle of Goose Green with 2 PARA in 1982; he had also survived the IRA’s bloody bombing at Warren Point which had killed eighteen of his company: he knew what combat was like. The atmosphere in the JOC was electric. My second-in-command, Huw Williams, had also been fretting about getting us out. The relief on his face was obvious and he broke out into a broad grin. The blokes who had done the actual fighting felt it too. All through the evening people came up to them, slapped them on the back and asked them what it was like, a tinge of jealousy in their voices. I felt the onset of the fatigue and drain of emotional energy that follow a post-combat experience, but the day wasn’t yet over and I wanted to maintain the momentum. I asked Huw to get all the commanders together once they had eaten for an After Action Review (AAR). We needed to capture the lessons from all the corporals up while it was still fresh in their minds.
The search of the compound had yielded little of real value: the Engineers found a few AK magazines, a bag of bullets and an old grenade. They also found several kilograms of sticky black opium resin. Official policy dictated that we should have seized it, but we weren’t there to deprive a family of their livelihood and I made a point of having it handed back to the headman. Although we found little in the compound, we learned many important lessons from the ‘Battle of Mutay’. Key points came out in the AAR, although as young officers, planning staff, junior NCOs and aircrew gave their analysis of events, I noted how different accounts of the same action varied. After the strain of combat an individual’s memory is random and selective. People tend to focus on fragmentary images and the overall context and precise sequence of events are often lost. However, allowing each man to talk in turn provided a collective synthesis of accuracy. It was probably also an inadvertent form of stress decompression.
The professional skills and drills of the junior commanders and Toms had carried the day, but the vulnerability of vehicles operating without infantry support in close country was highlighted, as was the need to dominate the high ground and have our mortar support with us. The speed at which the enemy organized against us also demonstrated just how impressive their dicking system was. Although 100 kilometres away, they were likely to have picked up the movement of the helicopters from Bastion; four CH-47s lifting off at once and heading in one direction was probably an indicator that something was afoot. The message could have crossed the desert by mobile phone and then been relayed across the valleys to every Taliban stronghold to our north.
But the key lesson was our own lack of timely passage of intelligence. Available information that could have alerted us to the greater presence of Taliban fighters was not passed to the Battle Group. Although we had secure telephones in the JOC they didn’t have the right official security classification, so the information sat at Lashkar Gah. I saw it for myself when I flew down the next day. The image of the scale of assessed enemy activity took my breath away when I saw it laid out in front of me. But I didn’t see the point of getting angry about it when I spoke to an apologetic intelligence staff at UKTF. ‘Next time, sod the regulations about the phones. If it’s urgent please just pass the information on to us,’ I said.
After Mutay everything changed. Any preconceived wishful thinking about conducting a peace support operation fell away. The penny was finally beginning to drop in Whitehall and PJHQ that we were engaged in countering a full-blown insurgency, against a ruthless and determined enemy. Our assessment that we had killed about twenty of them during Mutay was confirmed when we received a report that twenty-one Taliban fighters had been buried in a cemetery in the Sangin Valley the next day. Given the weight of fire that was exchanged, I was amazed that we hadn’t lost anyone. The Toms’ superior field-craft played its part, as did the relatively poor marksmanship of the insurgents. But I thought of Private Bash Ali being saved by his magazines and numerous other accounts of close calls; Lady Luck had also been on our side. I suppressed a naive thought that ‘maybe, just maybe’, we might be able to complete the tour without suffering any casualties. But from then on I knew that every time we went out we would have to be prepared to expect the same reception. Losing some people was likely to be an unpalatable inevitability of the business we were in. I received a handwritten letter from a retired Parachute Regimen
t general a few days later. He praised the bravery of my soldiers, but warned me to steel myself against the inevitable. Sadly, both he and I were to be proved right in the days ahead.
6
Reaction and Proaction
I was at KAF when initial reports of the first UK casualty came in. I had been attending a meeting with David Fraser and was in the process of back-briefing our discussion to Ed Butler who was down from Kabul. The first reports indicated that a number of personnel had been wounded. Then news came that Captain Jim Philippson had been killed. Jim was twenty-nine and was a 7 RHA officer serving with the team mentoring the ANA Kandak at FOB Robinson. Unbeknown to anyone in the JOC at Bastion, the commander at the FOB had sent out a patrol to recover a Desert Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that had crashed on the far bank of the Helmand River. The small, remotely piloted UAV belonged to 18 Battery Royal Artillery that provided surveillance support to all elements of the UKTF. It carried a camera that beamed back live video images of the ground to a control station in the FOB. The patrol set out a couple of hours before last light. They used the local makeshift ferry to cross the river on the outskirts of Sangin. They had probably been dicked from the minute they left the FOB. Having failed to find the UAV, they used the ferry to cross back to the home bank. As they started to return along the same route they were ambushed on a high-banked levee track. Lance Bombardier Mason from I Battery was hit in the chest. As darkness fell, the patrol’s medic fired off the first six magazines from his SA80 rifle to protect him, as the stricken troops waited for help.
Jim Philippson was part of the first relief force which was hastily put together to go to their aid. He was hit by Taliban fire and killed instantly as he moved across a field towards the ambush site. Under the covering fire of artillery from the FOB, his comrades managed to carry his body back to the vehicles that they had dismounted from at the side of the field. A second relief force was quickly dispatched from the FOB, but it too came under contact. Sergeant Major Andy Stockton of 18 Battery had the lower part of his arm severed by an RPG round. With his remaining good arm he continued to return fire with his pistol from his vehicle as they drove along the levee to the ambushed vehicles. As he did so he shouted at his young driver to stop flapping and concentrate on the driving; the last thing he wanted to do was have a crash to add to his problems.
The HRF was dispatched with the casevac helicopter to make a risky landing to pick up the wounded. The Taliban were still concealed somewhere in the blackness and could bring the aircraft under fire at any moment. It spent the minimum time on the ground and the pilot kept the power on so that he could make a rapid lift-off once the injured men were aboard. Mason was stretchered on to the back, but Stockton refused assistance. He walked up the helicopter’s ramp calmly smoking a cigarette with his arm hanging off. B Company had been on standby, but as the attack against the ambush site went quiet it was decided to delay flying them in until first light the next morning. It had been a necessary risk to send the casevac helicopter into an unsecured LZ at night, but sending B Company into a confused situation increased the risk of having a helicopter shot down. With the casualties off the ground, and having been beefed up by Sergeant Major Stockton’s men, the remaining troops would have to wait for relief.
Within minutes of arriving back in Bastion, Sergeant Major Stockton was on an operating table in the field hospital. The skill of the military surgeons undoubtedly saved his life, but his wounds were too serious to save his arm. The next day B Company flew in, married up with the vehicles on the levee and escorted them back to the FOB. The incident had been a sobering lesson in the danger of using vehicles to drive along an obvious route. It also remained questionable whether the risk of searching for the UAV was worth the life of a brave and popular officer. Like the French ambush, it highlighted the need to coordinate the movement of all patrols with the JOC at Bastion. We had been concerned about the danger of other units moving around Helmand without any reference either to us or the UKTF since our arrival. The point had been made to the Canadian multinational headquarters in Kandahar on numerous occasions, but it was a lesson that was not to be learned until two more tragic incidents cost the lives of other soldiers.
The first incident occurred two days later on 13 June. An American logistics convoy was ambushed on a track that passed through a small village on the route between Gereshk and Musa Qaleh. It was meant to be delivering supplies to US troops participating in Operation Mountain Thrust. But the commander had become disorientated; it was a costly error of navigation. Driving backwards and forwards past the village in an attempt to regain its bearings, the convoy inadvertently gave the Taliban time to organize themselves against it and they hit the convoy with a fusillade of RPG and automatic fire. US Apaches were called in and broke up the attack, but not before one American soldier was killed and a logistics truck and a Humvee had been destroyed. The first we heard of the presence of the convoy was when we were tasked to be prepared to respond to the ambush. A Company was placed on fifteen minutes’ notice to move and got the call to fly out at 1600 hours. We had learned the lesson from Mutay and this time they took their section of two 81mm mortar barrels with them.
Landing at an offset LZ far enough away to avoid being fired. on, A Company made their way to the ambush site where the surviving US personnel were still milling around in the contact area. They had been there for over an hour, but were too dazed by their experience to move to a safer place. Their vehicles were drawn up in a line and smoke billowed in dying wisps from the burnt-out Humvee. The Taliban had withdrawn but were still close by. An Apache hovered low overhead to find them and narrowly missed being shot down by an RPG round that sailed past its rear rotor tail. Will Pike had a face-to-face conversation with the US commander and took control of the situation.
He gathered the survivors and their working vehicles and moved them off to the relative safety of the higher ground of a doughnut-shaped feature a few hundred metres away from the village. The position Pike selected wasn’t ideal, as it was still exposed to the closer country of vegetation and compounds around them. But with the onset of darkness, it would have to do; he needed to go firm and wait it out until an expected American relief column arrived to recover their people. The company formed a defensive perimeter. The digging was hard and the Toms could make only shallow impressions in the rocky ground. Three of the armoured Humvees with their .50 Cal machine guns were used to bolster the defences. The rest of the American logisticians were too shaken to take an active role and were placed in the central depression of the mount with the remainder of their vehicles. The dead US soldier remained strapped to the outside of one of the Humvees where he had been placed by his comrades for the move up to the feature. WO2 Mick Turner, who was standing in as the company sergeant major, asked the Americans if he could place the dead man in a body bag and put him in one of the vehicles. He doubted the macabre image could be doing much for their morale. Having prepared the position as best they could, the men of A Company then watched and waited for darkness to fall.
Twenty minutes after last light it started. Muzzle flashes lit up the murky shadows around the mound. Tracer fire streaked angrily over the tops of the shallow depressions the soldiers had scraped into the ground to give them a modicum of protection. A heavy Russian DShK machine gun opened up from their twelve o’clock position in a small wood line and a volley of RPGs followed. One of the RPGs passed low over the head of Corporal Mark Keenan and detonated against the radiator grille of one of the Humvees. The jagged metal fragments of its warhead spread along the side of the vehicle and sliced into two Americans who had been standing there. Moments previously one of the soldiers had shown a light. It was either a small torch or a match to light a cigarette, but in the blackness it provided a lethal aiming mark.
Private Pete McKinley had been firing his weapon at the muzzle flashes coming from the wood when he heard the frantic cry of `medic’. Despite the storm of incoming fire, he left his position and sprinted bac
k to the Humvee. One of the Americans had sustained serious wounds to his face, and the other had deep lacerations in his neck. McKinley made an immediate assessment and applied his combat first-aid skills to the more seriously injured man with the facial wounds. Will Pike and Mick Turner arrived with Lance Corporal Paul Roberts, who was the RAMC-qualified Combat Medical Technician attached to A Company. He had been used to working as a small cog in a large medical squadron in Germany staffed by doctors and senior nurses, but he was the most medically qualified individual on the ground that night and he took over command of the incident. Roberts was impressed by McKinley’s work and was convinced his prompt intervention saved the American’s life. A Company set up an LZ and called in a chopper to lift out the casualties.
The chopper also brought in reinforcements in the form of the HRF. This was Lieutenant Ben Harrop’s 7 Platoon from C Company which had been stripped out from Gereshk to make up for manning shortfalls in the troops at Bastion. They brought shovels and sandbags with them to help bolster up the position’s limited defences. A-10s and French Mirage fighter-bomber jets came on station intermittently throughout the night, but the troops’ close proximity to the village meant that they could not drop bombs and the jet pilots were reluctant to fire their cannon. Whenever there was a gap in the air cover the Taliban would launch another attack to rake the position with fire, forcing A Company to press themselves physically and mentally into the dirt. It felt to Corporal Scott McLaughlin as if he were digging in with his eyeballs, as the enemy rounds struck close about them. Apaches were dispatched from Bastion in an attempt to break up the attacks. At one point there was a lull in the fighting. Through night vision sights, ten figures wearing burkas were spotted by 3 Section of 1 Platoon moving between two of the compounds from where the Taliban had fired. But in Afghanistan women do not move around at night and they don’t carry automatic weapons. Corporal Keenan reported the movement and the whole section opened up as 81mm mortar rounds also rained down among the insurgents.
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