We may as well have targets painted on our backs.
The second I showed my face I saw a bullet ricochet off the earth a couple of metres to my right. If the Taliban were better shots I’d be dead already. A second later I saw the flash of shots fired from our super-sangar. They must have ID’d a shooter. For a couple of seconds at least the firing wasn’t at us.
The CP was 400 metres ahead of us and getting closer. On the west side of the road, on our left-hand side, was the canal. On our right were compounds, fields, trees – all hiding the men trying to kill us.
The next few minutes are like a bad dream. I’m sprinting full pelt, oblivious to the danger of IEDs, and to my tiredness. I’ve got one goal. Get. Us. Home.
Three hundred and fifty metres to go and no casualties.
I’ve done runs like this a hundred times, often carrying more weight. Just never with live ammunition being fired at me.
Three hundred metres.
I never trained for this. None of us did. All the months and years I’ve spent loaded onto this course or that, and we never once imagined a scenario where Royal Marine Commandos would be fleeing for their lives, out of ammo, out of options and out of time.
Two hundred and eighty metres.
The bullets are pinging up stones all around me. The guys in front are still going. I pray the lads behind are as well.
Two hundred and fifty metres.
I’m aware of every step I take. Every thundering shudder vibrating through my boot.
I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.
Two hundred and thirty metres to go. Above the constant click-click-clicks I hear a shout on my comms.
‘Are you all right?’ I call back. But I don’t stop.
‘It’s the medic.’
Of course it is.
I dare to turn and see two lads dragging a limp, crying Navy boy along as fast as they can. My guys are fit, and they’re strong, but even they are being slowed down significantly by the useless dead weight dragging its feet between them.
‘Do you need help?’
‘Just go on,’ they say. ‘We can do it.’
Two hundred metres. The pace is slowing.
A hundred and fifty metres. My heart feels like it’s going to burst. Not with fatigue: with stress. It’s not my fault we’re understaffed and underequipped, but these men are all under my protection. And right now I’m giving them fuck all.
A hundred metres.
Ninety.
Fifty.
I swear a bullet hits Matt in front of me, but he keeps going. We all do. We can smell the compound. We can hear our guys shouting encouragement to us.
Thirty metres.
One man has left the sentry post. He’s at the door. It’s only plywood on a stupid hinge. The Estonians spray-painted ‘Daqhiqh’ on it. It’s amateurish. But it’s open. It’s waiting for us. He’s shouting, ‘Come on, lads, come on, nearly here.’
Twenty.
Not far. Nearly there. The little rickety bridge over the canal into the compound is right there. Right there. Right …
Come on, Rob, ten more metres.
Nine.
Eight.
We pile onto the bridge and then suddenly the enemy fire intensifies. They know it’s their last chance. The other side of the canal is lower, out of sight, and the insurgents know it. Our snipers retaliate. There is now a wall of lead in both directions. I know who my money’s on, but we only need to be unlucky once.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
I’ve never been more pleased to see an ugly mountain of Hesco bastion.
Four.
Three.
Two.
I stop and wait for the lads with the medic. I’m not alone. After the selfless job they’ve just done I don’t want them felled at the final hurdle.
Everyone falls into the compound and collapses against the walls. The sniper fight is still raging.
I stare around the group. Heroes, all but one of them. I can’t believe no one is carrying an injury.
But that’s the thing with adrenalin. You can be hit and not actually feel it. Some serious injuries, life-threatening if untreated, can go undetected for a surprisingly long period when you’re engaged in something as dramatic as what we’d just experienced. In these situations, like almost everything, there’s a protocol.
‘Lads, we need to do a naked injury check.’
Slowly, as we got our breath back, everyone started to unload their kit.
‘Shit, Matt,’ someone said, ‘you’ve got bullet holes in your bergan.’
So he was hit.
Matt wasn’t alone. Several of the boys had sinister little craters in their kit. How none of the rounds had made it through to the fleshier targets remains a mystery to this day. But I am never going to play cards again, because I know we used all our luck up that day.
The naked physical is pretty straightforward. You basically just check yourself over and each other for wounds. A couple of lads had sprained ankles, there was the odd bit of blood from cuts and scratches caused by diving to the ground, but no bullet wounds.
Normally I’d send the lads to the medic but he was already clogging up his own sick bay. Two of the lads he had been enrolled to help were actually nursing him.
‘Is there anything actually wrong with him?’ I asked one of them.
‘I’d say so.’
‘What is it?’
‘He’s out of shape.’ He turned to the patient. ‘Aren’t you, son?’
What the hell were Bastion thinking sending me an unfit medic? His physical condition endangered two of my men. There were only seven of us. If he or one of those had been hit there wouldn’t have been enough bodies to protect them.
I knew I had to evacuate him, and as soon as things quietened down I would. At that moment, however, I was just happy to be alive.
* * *
I’d like to say things quietened down after that. I’d really love to say that. But it would be a lie. We were attacked almost every day that we set foot outside the compound. We were attacked almost every day inside the compound. We were attacked so often that sometimes we didn’t realise we had been. Because Daqhiqh was a big piece of real estate, it was crucial to maintain sentries and check the monitors in the ops room. At least once a day we’d receive incoming rounds, but either the shooters were interrupted or their aim was poor. The only time it was interesting was when grenades came over. The sentries would normally be able to pick off an insurgent before he got close enough to lob something over the wall. It was harder when the enemy fired grenades from a UGL (underslung grenade launcher, fitted beneath the barrel of a rifle) from a distance. More often than not these would land outside the mud walls. Even so, we still had to stand to each time, flinging on the body armour as if it didn’t weigh half our own weight.
That was another problem. The heat, the stress, the workload, the total craving for sleep – they were all taking their toll physically. By mid-July I had lost two stone (over twelve and a half kilograms). Others, like Robbie, had dropped from thirteen stone (eighty-two and a half kilograms) to below ten (sixty-three and a half). You could see it in our bodies when we took those precious moments to unwind in the dammed oasis. There hadn’t been an ounce of fat on us before, you’d think – we were that fit. But the weight had gone from somewhere. And, while our body weight went down, the weight of the loads we had to carry did not.
The guys never complained about tiredness. I couldn’t have blamed them if they had, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t side effects. I took a tour of every sentry duty. More than once I found guys – my guys, well drilled by me, who’d experienced the horrors of the Green Zone – wearing shorts and a vest in the super-sangar.
‘For fuck’s sake, where’s your armour?’
‘It’s too hot.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s too hot – a grenade at your feet. Now get your gear on!’
Tiredness leads to all sorts of
issues. I became so drained that my alarm clock wasn’t enough to wake me up – although it had no trouble rousing Fergie or Mac, the men sleeping closest to me. Most nights I’d be shaken awake by one of them. ‘I don’t know how you sleep through it,’ Fergie said. ‘They can hear this fucking clock in Shazaad.’
Exhaustion causes tempers to fray. That’s a fact. Fights erupted every now and again – serious ones, sometimes – although they were always ended with a firm handshake and a commitment to ‘move on’. Whatever else was being eroded, our camaraderie was still intact.
Apart from in one area.
The medic was still a concern. After our second day’s patrol, when he’d cracked, he asked me to conduct a ‘trim’ on him. A trim is a medical procedure, a form of risk-assessment, to establish mental well-being. Usually this will be conducted by a medic, so, there was no one among us who knew its ins and outs better than him.
The outcome? He was so traumatised by killing a man that there was no way he could be included in the sentry rota. Even bearing in mind that he absolutely could not have killed anyone – he couldn’t aim a rifle within ten feet of his target – I agreed to let him into the radio room – unheard of given his lowly rank.
He radioed the senior doctor at Bastion and reported he’d been trimmed. ‘What for?’
‘I killed a man in defence of the troops.’
Bang – a citation for bravery, just like that. I can’t recall another case in which the original actor has cited himself.
I couldn’t do anything about that – other than beg Shazaad every day for a replacement. What I could do, though, was put him on a course of immediate physical-fitness training. He moaned, he swore, he shouted. But he bloody did it – or else.
A few days after the big firefight we were out again and, this time, under no pressure from enemy fire, the medic just passed out and needed to be carried back to the CP. We had to carry him 1,500 metres back to camp. When we got there he came to.
I had to stand him down. He was too unfit to patrol with us. We’d be safer without a medic than having to literally physically carry one.
I thought things couldn’t get any worse when one day, just before my R&R was due to kick in, I added him to the personnel for the day’s patrol. We were all standing inside the gate. As usual the lads got their weapons ready to fire – we never knew what was on the other side once we went out. That means having a full magazine in and cocking the weapon, ready to take the safety catch off. To his credit, the medic did some of this.
Then he pulled the trigger.
A single round shot from his rifle and into the back of the man in front of him. By sheer good fortune it went through the bergan, skimmed off the armour and embedded itself in the wall. The medic just stared, his mouth wide open. The lads soon filled it.
With their fists.
Part of me wanted to let them continue. By God, he deserved it. He’d nearly killed a man. Begrudgingly, I had to intervene and separate the wanker from the heroes. That night he refused to sleep in the normal quarters for fear of his own life. Against my better judgement I agreed to let him move.
‘Why don’t you just burn him?’ Fergie said.
‘What can I do? We’re so light on the ground.’
By rights I had the power to report the medic for an illegal and dangerous discharge, which would see him at worst expelled from his position and at best penalised his operational bonus of £3,000. I knew he had earmarked that money for his forthcoming wedding.
I said, ‘If you take extra training I will overlook this issue.’
Reluctantly, he agreed – even if it meant training conducted by the guy he’d nearly murdered. Obviously the pace was fast. He was physically thrashed every day. He moaned constantly. That wasn’t new. And then he stopped moaning. One day I came back from patrol and Mac said, ‘The helicopter will be here in an hour.’
‘What helicopter?’
‘For the medic. His evac. Didn’t you order it?’
I had not, but he’d got himself evacuated.
But as July progressed were any of us any better? I remember a lad – a good lad, one of my best – coming up to me.
‘Sarge, I’m due home on R&R in two days. Can I give patrol tomorrow a miss?’
My gut reaction was You’re bailing on us? But after a few seconds of reflection I realised, You’ve seen enough. You can smell England and you don’t want to fuck it up getting injured on patrol.
One by one, the other lads offered a variation of the same line. The closer they got to freedom the fewer risks they wanted to take. They were paranoid about tripping up at the last fence. I tried to establish myself above all that, to lead by example, patrol right up to the last second. Then my own R&R crept up on the horizon and I finally understood what the Estonians must have gone through to take the short cuts they did on the eve of shipping out.
On 23 July I was leading a patrol but thinking only of my escape three days later. Yes, it would mean a slow slog to Shazaad, an overnight stay, then a flight to Bastion whenever they could arrange it. But anything was better than what I was going through. Then on the 24th a team of engineers flew in to begin repairs to our HLS (helicopter landing site), which for some reason was where the grenades lobbed over the wall often seemed to land. When they were about to leave the captain asked if I needed anything shipped to Bastion.
I fought the urge, I really did. But I was in a place where I’d been shot at every day since I arrived. I’d lost weight, I’d lost my love of the country I was meant to be protecting.
I just want to go home.
‘Actually, I’m due to head out for my R&R.’
‘Do you want to come with us?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I really do.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THAT WOULD BE ILLEGAL
‘I’m going to the pub.’
I’d been home four days and that’s all I could think of doing. Carly and the boys had met me at the airport and my heart had burst at how much I’d missed them, and how much of their lives I’d missed. Sam, Ollie, Will – I just wanted to hug them and never let go. The journey home passed in a haze. The questions came at me thick and fast and when I didn’t answer Carly filled the silence with stories about their lives. That was when it struck me: I don’t belong here.
I was barely home and I was wishing I’d not come. What made it worse was looking at Sam and Ollie and seeing the faces of Sam Alexander and Ollie Augustin, killed on the same dreadful day. It’s a stupid thing. They just shared names, that’s all. But I couldn’t help thinking, Are you going to follow in my footsteps? Are you going to enlist? Are you going to end up like some of my best mates?
As a father that’s the hardest thing you can imagine.
Crazy thoughts started pervading my brain. I started getting fearful for anyone I knew called Will. Another time we all went into London to visit Dad. We were in a car park and a car backfired. The kids squealed, Dad didn’t bat an eyelid, and I virtually went into full kneel-and-shoot pose. It was ridiculous. I didn’t know how to behave in the normal world.
I was hopeless with Carly, too. When the two of us were together she would tell me about our family, herself, our friends, and most of the time I struggled to tune in. I made the right noises the best I could. But all I was thinking was, What has this crap got to do with anything? I’ve got mates dying in Afghanistan.
I wasn’t angry at her. I felt guilty because I wasn’t with them.
Several times during my fortnight at home Fergie rang me to keep me updated on the problems they were facing in the Green Zone. The area designated Green 13 on our maps was still proving impossible to reach. As far as we knew it was just a junction on a road – no more than a B road in the UK, although only if that B road was built of dirt. It was on Route Devon, about 2 kilometres further out than Taalander. Peripheral, in other words, but important.
However you looked at it, it had been hellish in my absence. Mac was leading the line brilliantly but h
e and the rest of the multiple were facing hardships, no question. That he or Fergie would give up their rare opportunities to phone home to phone me was testament to the bond we all had.
Sam’s birthday came round while I was at home. We all went to Pizza Express with family and friends. I had to pull out all the stops to look as though I wanted to be there. I really tried. It took everything I had.
At another party a few days later I realised that I was spent. I had nothing left to give. We were in a beautiful village in Somerset on a boiling hot summer’s day, and I remember sitting on a kids’ climbing frame watching the boys play with their friends, desperately trying to find some joy in the sight but feeling nothing at all. After ten days our friends knew better than to approach me. One guy, whom I didn’t know, came up. He was dad to one of the other boys. More importantly, he was a Navy pilot.
‘You don’t want to be here, do you?’ he said.
‘Nah.’
‘You think you don’t deserve happiness while your men are suffering?’
‘Spot on.’
‘Well, I’m not going to lie. It never gets any better.’
‘Cheers.’
‘But you’re not alone. There’s plenty of us who’ve been through it. Plenty of us you can talk to.’
Then he added, ‘From what I see on the news you guys are suffering. Do yourself a favour. Take this opportunity to recharge the batteries. You’ll need it when you go back.’
Wise words, the wisest I’d heard in a good while. But I couldn’t do it. The only way I could find any solace was in booze. I’d been starved of alcohol for so long that it had a sledgehammer effect on me, but I liked it. I welcomed it. I drank till I didn’t feel the shame of a deserter any more.
I found myself willing the days away. Then an odd thing happened. The closer my return date came, the more anxious I became. I still struggled to connect with Carly and the boys, but not because I was thinking about my men. I was thinking about my own mortality. In the space of a fortnight I’d gone from desperate to get home, to desperate to get back, to being scared shitless at the prospect of returning.
Lethal Shot Page 26