The swing in temperature from middle of the night to middle of the day was like opening a fridge, then an oven. We all started the fatigues with a warm jacket. By eight there were layers coming off. By nine we were pretty much naked. Of sixty tents I’d say that fifty plus were put up by men wearing little more than pants and a rifle. It was hard, hard work but at least we were only working with canvas and tent pegs. Around our field there was a team of engineers constructing a wall out of ‘Hesco bastion’ – 3-foot-square wire-mesh and hessian cages built up like a Lego wall, which are then filled with aggregate as protection against explosions and small-arms fire. The Americans had already established a quarry just off site. All day long a convoy of trucks went to and fro, filling the Hesco cubes with earth and rocks. By the time the lads were finished our tents were no longer inside a field. We were in a fortress with bombproof walls 12 foot high and 3 foot thick. In the neighbouring fields the Americans had built the same.
Occupying a foreign country, you really do start from scratch. While we were building our little slice of Britain there were engineers constructing a hospital, offices, shops – anything you would find in an average town. In a few days the masses would descend. Bagram needed to be ready to cope with anything.
Punishing and monotonous as the work was, I enjoyed being in a small group, rather than just one of the hordes gearing up to arrive. I liked seeing the nuts and bolts of the operation. Watching this incredible place being built from the ground up was eye-opening. By contrast, being kept out of the loop in Oman had nearly driven me mad.
The main runway ran along one side of the fortress and on the other side was a road that had been named Disney Drive, which linked everything up. You didn’t veer off the road if you could help it, for nother relic of the Russian invasion was the huge number of landmines all around the area. Our field had supposedly been cleared before we’d set up the tents, but that didn’t stop me finding something suspicious on day 1.
‘Er, guys,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a situation here.’
I had been hammering a peg into the ground when it hit something metallic just under the surface. Everyone dropped what they were doing and ran over. They all said the same thing.
‘Don’t move.’
The good thing about being in the advance party is that there’s always a bomb squad around. Two guys came running over, boxes of tools and blast suits with them. They cleared the earth from the device next to my hand, then had a poke around. I’m kneeling there in my Y-fronts thinking, This is not how I want to go.
‘It’s okay,’ one of them said. ‘It’s dormant. It’s been there too long.’
We found a good dozen more before we’d finished, all of them equally dud. But, as the bomb squad guy said, ‘We’ve cleared hundreds of live ones. This area’s riddled with them. You can’t take any chances.’
Every country has its own way of doing things. The Norwegian approach to clearing a minefield was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I watched one morning as a soldier pulled on a bomb suit and then was helped into what looked like weird clown shoes. They were made of plastic, and huge. That wasn’t the weird part. While he stood there another soldier inflated his shoes with an air pump and sent him out with his mine detector into a known minefield. It’s ingenious, really. Fully inflated his shoes were so wide and flat, like airbeds, that his weight, and thus the pressure from each steps, was spread over a large area. A landmines is usually detonated by pressure when a person steps on it or a vehicle drives over it, although there are other trigger mechanisms. When the Norwegian team did find something, they would detonate it from a safe distance and move on. As bizarre as this method looked it was incredibly efficient. Compared to the British, who are trained to inch along with metal detectors, the Norwegian soldiers cleared that field in record time.
As I said, all cultures have their own ways of clearing explosives, as I was to find out. When we weren’t building at Bagram, my little advance party took our turn on guard duty. I remember one of the first of these stints, when. I was in the tower looking out over the airfield. The Norwegians were clearing a field which no one from the coalition forces had been in before. On the other side of the field there was a farmer ploughing his land with a donkey. Suddenly there’s this big explosion. My radio crackles into life. Alarms start going off. The whole camp thinks we’re under attack. All around me I can see men and women scrambling to stand to, weapons ready. I’m the only one who can see that not only are we not under attack, but that all the Norwegians are fine – which can’t be said for the three-legged donkey over in the farmer’s field.
I managed to get the message across to HQ and then I watched, mesmerised, as the farmer, who had been at the plough being drawn by the donkey, brushed himself down then pulled out a pistol and shot the badly injured animal. Then he walked over to another field, got hold of another donkey, hitched it to the plough and continued to work as though nothing had happened. I guess it’s what you’re used to.
The farmer’s laissez-faire approach was understandable, heroic even. He’d lived among landmines for most his life. His kids’ behaviour, on the other hand, was a bit harder to swallow.
On my first night-time watch I was back in the same tower. I could see over the same farm plus two or three others further away. Even with the camp’s generators we kept electric light to a minimum at night. It didn’t matter. My night-vision goggles (NVGs) allowed me to see as far and as clearly in pitch black as I would be able to at midday. It was clear that the locals didn’t know this.
I was scanning the area and I noticed activity at the first farm. I saw a teenage boy, aged about sixteen or seventeen, and watched as he walked round to the field where the sheep and goats were kept. He went in, selected a goat, then walked it back the way he had come, towards the farmhouse. Then he tied it to a tree, pulled his trousers down and started having his way with the creature.
Just when you think you’ve seen everything … That is not something they teach you in PDT. It was gross, but I couldn’t stop watching. I thought at first the boy might be an exhibitionist, but I could tell that he had no idea we were watching. He couldn’t see us, why should we be able to see him? I’d like to report that was a one-off. In truth, every time I stood on night duty I’d see at least one young man and one (arguably) lucky animal.
When I wasn’t playing Peeping Tom on the locals there was training to be done. I’d try to get my run out of the way in the early morning, because by midday the heat would begin to takes its toll. We would go for firing practice on the range the Americans had built at the end of Disney Drive, and there was a certain amount of interaction with local Afghans, most of who seemed to be trying to sell us ancient military kit, including weapons, that the Russians had left behind when they pulled out in 1989.
‘Fun’ was a good word for those early days at Bagram. The real work started when the manpower began to arrive. The air defence troops sent their advance party who made up the majority of the guard force. Then the Brigade Reconnaissance Force (BRF) started to arrive, the troop in charge of surveillance and reconnaissance – the troop I wanted to join. The motor transport people flew in, then many of the signallers. They all had a lot of equipment, but the one thing they all had in common was that they needed more – and that meant returning to my day job with George 1. Instead of handing out blankets, however, we were supplying body armour and weapons, but knowing you won’t be using any of it yourself is a bit soul-destroying.
But I had a plan. Half a plan, at least. One of the last groups to arrive was 45 Commando, but it was them I most looked forward to seeing. They had their own camp near to ours, and because I still knew a lot of the Arbroath lads I started hanging out there as much as possible. Part of the reason was socialising. The rest was tactical: if there was any chance of networking my way out of the store room to do anything in the field, anything at all, then I needed to take it.
It had worked in Kosovo. Why not here?
As it turned out
, it was a few mates I had in the BRF who proved the most helpful. One of their sub-units, the Tactical Air Control Parties, were light on manpower. It’s a specialist job, like most from HQ & Sigs, and highly prestigious. The TACPs are the people who go into theatre, establish where an enemy threat is located, then direct an air assault to that precise spot. A TAC Party comprises an officer – the main man, whose job is close air support (CAS) – and two signallers. It’s quite a sexy job and, depending on the scenario, can be very dangerous. In this case, given where they were being sent, it was decided the TACPs needed protection, so each three-man team was bolstered by another two bodies. We didn’t need to be specialist, we didn’t need to know about signals. Our basic requirement was to be able to protect the talent and carry extra supplies and ammunition (although the fact that I did have a signals background didn’t hurt).
Each mission was to last for ten to twelve days, so getting George 1 to sign off on me disappearing for nearly a fortnight was my biggest hurdle. But he knew that I was desperate to get out in the field, to see real action, and he wasn’t going to be the one to hold me back.
‘Cheers, George,’ I said, ‘I owe you.’
‘Yes, you do.’
The irony wasn’t lost on me that of all the crap decisions I’d made, the best opportunity looked like being the one decision that I hadn’t taken.
* * *
I was genuinely excited at being involved. Even the thought of the journey was getting the adrenalin going. All the helicopter training in the world cannot prepare you for the thrill of actually boarding a CH-47 Chinook for the first time in anger. It’s such an iconic military symbol. Its huge size, the twin rotors, the way the tailgate just drops down so you walk up the wide ramp at the back, the fact that it’s been around since the 1960s, its incredible top speed of 170 knots (nearly 200 mph/320 kph) – it’s the stuff of legend.
I wasn’t the only one excited. In the run-up to the mission the ground crew started ripping everything out of the Chinooks. It looked like they were searching for something. In reality, they were cutting out all excess weight. Because Bagram itself was already 1,500 metres above sea level, by the time we got into the mountains we’d be so high and the air so thin that the choppers would have to work harder to maintain lift. Hence stripping out anything that wasn’t mission critical. Who needs seats anyway?
I thought I’d be flying with just my group, led by a CAS officer called Phil Guy. The more planning that went into these Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols (LRRPs, pronounced ‘lurps’) the more those plans started to change. Our revised mission orders were to fly out, dominate an area, comb it for Taliban and, if successful, take them down. You can’t dominate with five people. In fact, given the hostility of the enemy and the terrain, it had been decided to send larger groups – or ‘multiples’ – into each site. We’d have snipers, surveillance experts, mountain leaders, you name it, the full works. Each Chinook would carry a dozen men. On occasion five multiples would mobilise together. If this mob couldn’t locate and destroy a group of enemy fighters, then nobody could.
When the Chinook took off for the first time I was smiling like a kid. One of the usual TACP guys caught me.
‘I wouldn’t look so happy if I were you.’
‘Why?’
He gestured to the cockpit.
‘Female pilot.’
Then he pulled a worried face and went back to talking to his mate.
I wasn’t the only person who heard him and, men being men, we shared a moment of joking about the pilot’s handbag getting caught on the clutch, whether she’d be able to park, that sort of crap. Totally out of order. In one respect, though, it turned out we weren’t far wrong. The female pilot couldn’t park. But then, no one would have been able to.
We’d been flying for a couple of hours when the Chinook slowed and came into the hover, and Phil Guy said, ‘It’s too steep to land. We’re blade-sailing in.’
Everyone else knew what this meant. I got a rough idea when the giant back doors started to winch down. The temperature might have been over 300 degrees on the ground but the wind that came howling in was Arctic. When I caught my breath I could see what the plan was. The tail ramp was lowered until it protruded by about 3.5 metres. Once it was fully extended like a drawbridge the pilot inched us towards the ridgeline until she got a touch. Phil gave the ramp a stamp then waved his arm.
‘Move out.’
One by one everyone checked that their equipment was tight on their backs, cocked their weapons in case of a hostile reception the other side, then ran down this temporary airborne ramp onto the waiting mountain edge. No one thought once about the 3000-metre drop on either side of the 3 x 4-metre ramp. In fact, the guy who’d mocked the ‘woman driver’ was first off. He was a total wind-up merchant. He had absolute confidence in his pilot. And by then, so had everyone else.
Phil’s biggest concern was whether Taliban forces were near by. A dozen men scurrying down a ramp, one at a time, would be easy targets, like picking off fish in a barrel. The most irresistible target, though, was the Chinook itself. As soon as the lads hit terra firma they went into full cover mode, scanning everywhere for potential threats. One single shot fired and the helicopter would pull up and away. You had better not be on the ramp when it did.
I admit I had to take a couple of breaths while I waited in the chopper to join them. I could see it in my mind: you’re carrying so much weight, one gust of wind and you could be lifted right off. And that’s if a sniper doesn’t get you. What the hell am I doing? Suddenly it was my turn and the time for doubts was gone. ‘Come on, Rob,’ I said, ‘let’s do this,’ and off I ran into thin air. It was incredible, really. The only thing more impressive was watching it from outside. That Chinook did not budge a millimetre. I’ve driven on bridges less stable than that ramp. The only mistake came from one of the lads, who shot off so quickly he slipped and his bergan went over the side. That was eerie, watching it plummet for seconds before it struck the mountainside hundreds of feet below. Moments earlier it had been attached to his arm.
When we were clear Phil gave the word and the chopper pulled forwards, the ramp still down. Every second counts when you’re a potential target. As the door wound shut the CH-47 gave a little pirouette so the pilot could salute us all. I can assure you now that that is the first and last time I ever doubted the ability of a woman in the Marines. Anywhere, in fact. So I guess some good came out of my time in Afghan.
The area secured, Phil had a word with the guy who’d dropped his bergan and told him to go and fetch it. I was assigned to go with him. To this day I can’t believe we did that. Two men walking and scrambling for a couple of hours on their own in hostile territory would be unheard of today.
It’s a major principle of the Marines that you never leave a trace of where you’ve been. They beat it into you at Lympstone. They’re normally talking about litter, So the idea of abandoning a whole bergan would make their heads spin. Whenever we leave anywhere we burn everything we’re not carrying out. It’s a huge element of fieldcraft.
We got down and up the mountain without incident. Whatever intelligence had led us to this particular rockface, it was out of date. We marched every day and found no trace of Taliban. Returning to Bagram without a shot being fired was anticlimactic for everyone. For me, it was worse because I had to pick up my store duties. George 1 was sympathetic, but he did say, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
I knew he’d had a hard time during the Falklands conflict. He’d told me stories of desperately trying to dig a hole in the mountainside to escape the fire from the Argentinian snipers picking off his friends. It had changed him, he knew that. But he also knew you can’t tell a testosterone-filled young man not to be excited about getting his first real taste of action.
* * *
I thought my next release with the TACP had more potential. The American forces active in Tora Bora – a Taliban stronghold in a complex of caves to the east, close to the border with Pak
istan – had suffered casualties. The men on the ground couldn’t get to them. You never leave a man behind, alive, wounded or dead, so choppers were scrambled to collect the bodies. It’s frightening how quickly it all came together. One minute I was in the store, the next I was suited up and piling into the back of one of seven idling Chinooks. We were in the air before the rear doors were even up. It was that kind of mission.
Near the target area the Chinooks split up. From what I could see from the window and make out from the radio chatter, we were all surveying different points of the danger zone, scanning for Taliban threats. The noise of seven Chinooks is deafening. Anyone on the ground not intimidated into fleeing is either brave or stupid. Or on a suicide mission – a very real possibility in that region. We all put down at vantage points above the stranded Americans and secured the area. Down below the emergency boys – US Special Forces sent in to rescue or recover the casualties – were in and out in minutes. Job done.
Two missions, no shots fired, lethal or otherwise.
Maybe next time …
My enthusiasm levels never dropped. The patrols were all potentially extremely dangerous. I always believed that the next mission would be the one. Five or six sorties in, however, the closest we had come to enemy weapons was by accident.
A patrol had ventured into a village to question the locals through interpreters. The rest of us formed a security cordon around the village.
‘No, no, no one bad here,’ a village elder was saying. ‘The Taliban have never been here.’
While he was talking one of the lads leant against a wall for a breather. There was a crash and the next thing we knew he was on his back in a pile of rubble – surrounded by high-end machine guns. The building was a massive ammunitions cache, and obviously everyone in that village would have known this. Not that the elder was giving anything away.
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