13
Hell in a Tight Space
I returned from R and R on 22 August. In addition to the loss of Corporal Budd one other significant thing had changed during the period that I had been away. The Danish contingent had decided to pull out of Musa Qaleh. Since taking over the district centre from the Pathfinders on 25 July, the Danes had taken three casualties, including one soldier who had sustained a serious head injury when he had been hit by a sniper on 2 August. The difficulties associated with his helicopter evacuation had had a profound effect on the Danes. I heard of their anguish about getting their wounded comrade out and remember thinking, welcome to the club. As the risks they faced became more apparent, they had increasingly begun to feel that their position had become untenable. The decision was backed by their government in Copenhagen and was presented to the UKTF as a fait accompli.
With no other forces to replace them, and with little more than forty-eight hours’ notice, the task of taking over from the Danes was given to 3 PARA. As I was waiting to board a C-17 transporter to fly back to Kandahar from the UK, Major Adam Jowett was being given a warning order to form an ad hoc company group from anyone who could be spared from the Battle Group. Jowett had been employed in the JOC as a staff officer and relished the sudden, and unexpected, prospect of operational field command. He had two days to cobble his force together. Jowett’s new scratch command was called Easy Company, so called in honour of the Rust US Airborne Second World War company depicted in Band of Brothers. It also fitted the phonetic alphabetical listing of sub-units within 3 PARA. It was based on a small company headquarters consisting of Sergeant Major Scrivener, Sergeant Freddie Kruyer who would act as the intelligence NCO, a signals detachment and a tiny medical team under Captain Mike Stacey who had been offered up by the field hospital in Bastion. Its infantry was made up of the second Royal Irish platoon that had been sent out from the UK and the Irish mortar section and infantry platoon that were already supporting the Danes in Musa Qaleh. Despite losing their platoon Sergeant Ally McKinney, who had also sustained a serious head injury from a sniper’s bullet on 9 August, the remaining Irishmen of Somme Platoon would not be coming out when the Danes withdrew.
Musa Qaleh was a hell of a place. I had visited the town’s district centre during a recce in May when it was being held by the Americans after the Taliban had first tried to take it from the ANP. The buildings still bore the pockmarked signature of the insurgents’ attack where their RPG and AK rounds had struck home. The main administrative building and prison block divided the compound into two parts; the latter was more akin to a twelfth-century Saracen dungeon than a modern-day holding facility. The dilapidated collection of buildings was contained within a 3-metre-high mud-brick wall. A large mosque set in a grove of bushy trees encroached on the confines of the compound on its south-eastern corner. As well as the debris of battle, the place was also strewn with rubbish and human waste. However, it was not the scars of the fighting or filth that attracted my attention. What struck me most about the district centre was its sheer isolation and poor defensive qualities. Unlike Now Zad or Sangin it had no nearby flank or open desert or river line in which reinforcements could be landed or a relief approach could be made. The district centre in Musa Qaleh was situated right in the middle of the town. The compound was abutted by a number of surrounding compounds and narrow alleyways, which provided numerous approaches for an attacker to creep undetected up to the walls. It possessed no natural fields of fire and was too cramped to provide an adequate helicopter landing site within its perimeter. It was also overlooked by several taller buildings which provided elevated platforms from which the insurgents had been able to fire down into the compound.
The town of Musa Qaleh was itself further isolated by a large sprawl of suburban compounds to its north and west and the confluence of two wide wadis to its south and east. The only vehicle access point was from the open desert to the west. But it then ran along a narrow track that was surrounded on either side by orchards and fields; it was ideal ambush country. This green zone had to be traversed before hitting the wadi running north to south along the western edge of the town. Anyone crossing the wadi would then be exposed to the risk of further attack before hitting the edge of the town. Even if it was possible to traverse this route without being attacked, reaching the district centre would still mean running the gauntlet of narrow streets before reaching the front gates. The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck as we drove along the route in three American Humvees that took us back to our helicopter pick-up point out in the desert. None of the inhabitants we passed returned the waves of the US soldiers manning the Humvees’ top-cover machine guns. I mused over the vulnerability of the district centre as we drove out of town, crossed the exposed wadi and then travelled through the close country of the green zone. My only distraction was that we would be sitting ducks if the Taliban decided to hit us on the route out. When asked, the US lieutenant in the front of my Humvee informed me that this would be the eighth time he had driven the same route in the last twenty-four hours. I briefly thought about ‘nine lives’ and hoped for the best. I was relieved to make it back to the LZ in one piece. Although I had only spent a few hours there, Musa Qaleh had a distinctly bad feel to it.
Easy Company flew into Musa Qaleh at the cusp of dawn on 23 August in two Chinooks which were packed to capacity with men and equipment. Every spare space on the two cabs was filled with bundles of sandbags, extra ammunition and medical kit. Jowett knew that he would be operating at the end of a very thin casualty evacuation line and begged, borrowed and stole every additional IV fluid bag, drug and field dressing he could get his hands on. The Taliban saw the aircraft come in and an RPG sailed up to meet them, its projectile bursting in mid-air like flak. There was a crackle of small arms, but the fire was ineffective. Lacking an internal LZ, the helicopters landed outside the district centre on a small adjacent field beyond the walls of the compound. The Danes were exceptionally relieved to see Jowett’s men, as the arrival of Easy Company meant that they could leave the hellhole of Musa Qaleh behind them. Including Somme Platoon, made up of the Royal Irish soldiers who had been supporting the Danes, Jowett had eighty-six men to hold the compound. It was a stark comparison to the 140 Danish soldiers and 40-plus armoured vehicles equipped with .50 Cal heavy machine guns that would quit the district centre the next day. Jowett could call on just three unarmoured vehicles and had only two .50 Cal machine guns compared to the eight that the Danes had been able to set up in the sangars. They also had a medical team of twelve people equipped with armoured ambulances; Easy Company had one doctor, two medics and a quad bike.
The operation to extract the Danish squadron was a re-run of the mission 3 PARA had used to get the Pathfinders out of Musa Qaleh. B and C companies once again cleared and held the green zone, while the Household Cavalry secured the wadi and Jowett used his men to picket the narrow streets that led to the dry riverbed. As the Danes drove out, sixty Afghan Standby Police (ASP) drove into the district centre in Hilux trucks. Their arrival was the result of pressure brought by Ed Butler and General David Richards, the new ISAF commander, to persuade the Afghan government to make a greater investment in securing the district centres. It also reflected Richards’s concern that the British were becoming dangerously fixed in the isolated northern towns of Helmand, and the beginnings of an initiative to find an Afghan solution to their own security. Regardless of the politics surrounding the arrival of the police they were a welcome addition to the limited forces that Jowett had at his disposal. Coming from Kabul, they were made up of Hazaras and Tajiks. Untainted by local Pashtun tribal affiliations, they were to prove a vast improvement on the local ANP in the other locations held by 3 PARA.
I oversaw the operation from the JOC. Having just stepped off a C-130 at Bastion, it made sense that the mission was led by Huw Williams who had planned it in my absence. Huw was a capable officer and logic dictated that he should command it on the ground, but I spent several anxiou
s hours listening to it unfold on the radios around the bird table, as I sat like an anxious parent waiting for the Battle Group to return. As progress reports crackled over the net, I looked at the brightly coloured pins placed on the map of Helmand Province spread out before me. Each one denoted a fixed location held by 3 PARA and a shiny new pin had been pushed into the grid squares over Musa Qaleh. We were now even more overstretched than when I had left to go on R and R. We had scraped the barrel of our resources to form Easy Company and Musa Qaleh was the last place I would have wanted to put them.
The extraction of the Danes and the insertion of Easy Company were completed without incident. Sporadic contact was made with the Taliban, but they were convincingly overmatched by the presence of the Battle Group and no friendly casualties were taken. Intelligence reports confirmed that the insurgents had mistakenly interpreted seeing so much combat power leave Musa Qaleh as a complete withdrawal of all NATO troops from the district centre. Believing that it was now held solely by Afghan government forces, the Taliban assessed that it would be easily taken and prepared to make a series of concerted efforts to overrun the compound. It was estimated that over 200 Taliban fighters had been brought into the town to make the attempt. However, they reckoned without the presence of the small band of determined men that made up Easy Company.
The first attack began shortly after darkness on 24 August. Jowett’s men could see the insurgents darting between the streets less than 100 metres away from their sangar positions as the Taliban manoeuvred into position to bring the base under fire. They attempted to fight their way through the grounds of the mosque. It had been destroyed by a bombing mission called down by the Danes and the heaped mass of rubble and broken masonry provided excellent cover for them to get up close to the compound wall and the front gate. They were beaten back by a combination of the defenders’ fire and an F-16 ground-attack jet. One of the insurgents’ senior commanders was wounded in the assault and he ordered his men to break off the attack. They withdrew to lick their wounds, leaving some of their dead at the foot of the buckled metal gates at the front of the compound.
The attacks resumed again the next morning as the insurgents fired rockets and RPGs at the district centre. The enemy fire teams were suppressed by an RAF Harrier that strafed them with a ripple of rockets, but one of the Taliban’s own I o7mm rockets had hit home. It punched its way through three walls before coming to rest under the north-eastern sangar where it failed to detonate. The outpost was temporarily evacuated and the unexploded rocket was given a thirty-minute soak period before the position was reoccupied. Sandbags were piled gingerly around the projectile while the troops who repositioned themselves a few metres from it hoped for the best. The unexploded rocket would remain where it landed for weeks, as Jowett had more pressing issues to deal with. Having sandbagged the projectile, Jowett began to receive reports that the Taliban were massing in eleven pick-up trucks in the wadi a kilometre to the south of the district centre. A Harrier confirmed their presence but the pilot had difficulty discerning whether the men and vehicles he was seeing were Taliban, as he flashed over them at high-speed altitude. Jowett was convinced that they were and directed the pilot to engage them with two 500 pound bombs. Easy Company’s own mortars and a troop of artillery stationed out in the desert joined in the bombardment. Eight of the vehicles were destroyed in a maelstrom of fire and the remaining three were seen fleeing along the wadi. Local reports later vindicated Jowett’s decision when they confirmed that many Taliban had been killed in the engagement and another commander had been injured.
The next day the attacks against the district centre dropped off as the insurgents reorganized and brought in reinforcements to replace the losses they had taken in the wadi. The attacks resumed with a vengeance at first light the following day and continued into the evening. It started with a volley of seven RPG rounds from multiple directions, as the Taliban formed up to attack in the streets around the district centre. Cries of ‘incoming’ and ‘stand to, stand to!’ sent the men of Easy Company rushing to man their positions and trade fire with the insurgents as they pushed home their assault. At times the enemy were close enough to force the defenders to lean out of their sangars to fire down on them and toss grenades on to them as they dashed along the alleyways below. Jowett requested air support, but was being attacked from so many different directions that he had to prioritize where to call in the A-105 first. The ground-attack jets would line up on coordinates given to them by the JTACs before screaming in to release their lethal loads of bombs and cannon shells along the outsides of the walls of the compound. They blasted down 30mm rounds within 30 metres of the men in the sangars and dropped JDAMs as close as 140 metres away. Having released their ordnance, the pilots would then pull up into a steep climb to circle into position to repeat the cycle and attack the next target they had been given. When they ran low on fuel they would hand over to another pair of aircraft and then ascend to high altitude to suck gas from an air tanker before returning to the fray.
Meanwhile the mortars under Corporal Groves kept up an incessant rate of fire. His crews would adjust their sights, prime the mortar bombs and then drop them down the barrels. Turning away at the last moment, the mortar men would shield their ears with their hands to protect them from the blast as the bottom of the rounds struck the firing pins and were spat high into the sky. The metal tubes would bite back into their dug-in base plates as the process was repeated again and again. The expenditure of small-arms ammunition was equally prolific. While men fired round after round from their rifles and long bursts from their machine guns, others would frantically charge magazines and re-link loose bullets into spare belts of machine-gun ammo. Jowett kept his sniper pair in reserve by the main headquarters building until launching them where the point of pressure was greatest. He launched them many times that day and Corporal Hugh Keir and Private Jared Cleary accounted for many of the enemy with lethal precision fire as they caught insurgents in their cross-hairs. With the exception of the medical team everyone, including Jowett and Sergeant Major Scrivener, fought from their allocated stand to positions. Mike Stacey and his two medics, corporals French and Roberts, readied their gear as the battle raged outside the mud building they had turned into the RAP. The call for their services was not to be long in coming.
Jowett ducked down behind the parapet on the roof of the main headquarters building to change a magazine on his rifle when he heard the call for a medic. He looked to see Ranger Diamond bending over the prostrate form of Lance Corporal John Hetherington. He had been hit by a single AK round that had entered his side below his armpit. They stripped off his body armour and kit, but could find no pulse. As they did so, Corporal French raced out on a quad bike from the medical centre. Lance Corporal Hetherington’s limp form was lifted off the roof. He had been one of two men from 14 Signals Regiment who had volunteered to fly out and replace Corporal Thorpe and Lance Corporal Hashmi when they had been killed in Sangin. Tragically, he would make the same journey home that they had made. He was the first of Jowett’s men to lose his life in Musa Qaleh and the eleventh member of the Battle Group to die since the beginning of the operation.
Though saddened by the loss of Lance Corporal Hetherington, Adam Jowett was amazed that more of his men hadn’t been hit as he surveyed the aftermath of the battle. It had lasted almost twelve hours and the district centre bore the scars of numerous RPG strikes and sinister black scorched craters where Taliban mortar rounds had landed. The telephone line between the sangars had been cut in several places by shrapnel and every wall was pockmarked with bullet holes. He looked out on to the streets that were littered with Taliban dead. He had ordered that the insurgents were not to be engaged when they collected the wounded and the bodies of their fallen fighters. It was a courtesy of war he doubted would be extended to his men but typified the different conventions of conflict that bound the two sides. However, on this occasion the local dogs had beaten the Taliban to it and began to try to drag the bodies
away. Before shots were fired by the sangar sentries to drive the dogs off, two canines tugged at one dead fighter causing his arm to wave as if in a macabre farewell to the men who had killed him.
After each heavy attack, Easy Company would conduct clearance patrols to sweep the immediate area around the outside of the district centre. Jowett was able to draw on the local knowledge of the Rangers in Somine Platoon who had done the bulk of the patrolling when the Danes had occupied the compound. They knew where the favourite Taliban firing positions were and would reposition trip flares along likely avenues of approach. Most of the immediate buildings had been badly damaged by the fighting and consisted of a mass of bombed-out shells. The defenders had deliberately blown out the back of some of the buildings so that enemy gunmen would be silhouetted against the empty background making them easier to see and hit. But it didn’t stop the Taliban from using them in subsequent attacks and the casualties that resulted were an indication of their desperation to drive Easy Company out of the district centre. The patrols sometimes found sheets that the insurgents had strung across the gaps that had been created in the buildings in an attempt to mask their movements from the sangars. They also found holes between connecting walls that had been made to provide rat runs to allow the attackers to get closer to the compound without being detected. Some buildings were little more than piles of rubbly mud bricks which were often strewn with the body parts of insurgents. Though the Taliban were prepared to continue to pay a high price in attacking the district centre with their fighters, they were also prepared to rethink their tactics and began to place a greater emphasis on standoff attacks with longer-range weapons. The accuracy of their mortars improved throughout the siege and by its end ninety-six 82mm rounds had landed inside the compound.
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