My men were gathered at the gate, ready to go the moment we heard the explosion. In my ear I had a running commentary from my ops room and those at Shazaad and Bastion.
‘The target is still there.’
‘Missile is armed.’
‘The target is still there.’
‘Missile is ready.’
‘The target is still there.’
‘Missile is live.’
I couldn’t help grinning. ‘It’s in the air, lads.’
‘The missile is in the air.’
‘The target is still there.’
‘The missile is in the air.’
‘The target is still there.’
Come on, come on, any second now …
The prospect of one fewer insurgent had us all buzzing. Forget lack of sleep: I’d never felt so alert.
‘The missile is in the air.’
‘The target is still there.’
Then:
‘Steer off! Steer off!’
‘What the …?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘No, no, no – not again!’
A second later we heard the explosion.
‘Report?’ asked HQ.
‘In the canal,’ the missile pilot said.
‘Eleven Lima,’ Sunray said, ‘time to move.’
We flew out of that compound. Even as we ran the lads were saying, ‘Rob, what the fuck happened?’
The details were still filtering through over the radio, but I got the gen.
‘The guy was planting the IED on a power line,’ I said, not easy running at full speed. ‘It’s their new trick. They know it makes it harder for the Vallons to pick them up.’
Our usual Vallon man, Robbie, had sat this one out. His replacement was a good lad from Kamiabi sent by H to bolster our numbers, Jolly by name, jolly by nature.
‘Tell me about it,’ Jolly said.
‘So what?’ – Fergie, obviously.
‘Apparently HQ don’t want to be blowing up power lines.’
‘Who gives a fuck?’ Fergie shouted. ‘We’ve got generators.’
Each man of us seconded that opinion.
‘On the bright side,’ I said, ‘if we’re lucky there’s an injured insurgent waiting to be finished off when we get there.’
That put a spring in everyone’s step.
Two hundred metres short of the GPS co-ordinates, I slowed everyone down. The prospect of a wounded Taliban provided a decent fillip for the lads, but he would still be very dangerous. Not only would he be carrying some kind of assault rifle, he’d have grenades and might possibly have planted more IEDs. Time for our A game.
Another 100 metres further and we could make out the crater left by the missile. A good section of the dusty track that provided the main thoroughfare for this part of the region was missing, along with a sizeable chunk of the canal bank. There was no obvious sign of a body. This wasn’t turning out how I’d hoped.
But it could always get worse.
About 10 metres from the bomb site, scanning the whole area as you do, I happened to be looking forwards. In fact, I happened to be looking directly where Jolly was about to tread.
‘Go firm! Now!’
We’d all have won the game of musical statues at one of my little Sam’s birthday parties. Everyone dropped to one knee and froze.
‘Jolly!’ I yelled. ‘In front of you. That mound.’
‘Shit.’
Half a metre ahead of him was a rustic pile of stones. The track was rough and ready, but an obstruction like this was unusual, given the amount of traffic. Gingerly, we lifted the rocks away and, sure enough, there was a cable embedded underneath. We traced it across the canal and discovered a hidey-hole in the bush where the insurgent had been planning to sit until a suitable target passed. Tracing it in the other direction, we discovered the IED itself. At no point in between did we detect a corpse, or even any blood.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Matt said. ‘What a waste!’ He meant the missile.
Damn right. What was the point of being here? Hundreds of thousands of pounds of military hardware had been thrown away rather than take out a man hell-bent on killing us. Maybe not me personally, maybe not my men. But he wasn’t planning to sit in the trees with a bomb at his command for the sake of it.
I couldn’t have felt lower. Or so I thought. Then, one of the lads called out from the canal.
‘Rob,’ he said, ‘check this out.’
I was hoping he’d found a body. I couldn’t wait to see it. What he’d actually discovered was a metre of tubing shredded almost beyond recognition.
‘The power line,’ I said. ‘So much for that great idea.’
I used to joke about Daqhiqh being Groundhog Day because every day was the same. We’d stick our heads above the parapet and be shot at for fun. We’d survive, there were no headlines, HQ carried on ignoring us. Same old, same old.
This was different. This was a carbon copy of the command cock-up, in my opinion, forty-eight hours earlier. Two decisions that could – and almost certainly would – at some point cost ISAF lives to the benefit of the enemy we had been charged to eradicate.
Seriously, what was the point? And for the cherry on top of the icing on the cake? We were then tasked with babysitting an IED until the bomb squad arrived.
‘Let’s just blow it up and go home,’ someone said. The ‘Rob’ in me agreed. The ‘sergeant’ in me almost did. It was a close call. There was no logic. We could have removed a known killer from the board. Instead he was free to roam and maim and destroy. Maybe we’d get lucky and arrest him on a biometric flag later. So what? Based on Mohamed Mohamed and dozens more like him, he’d be back out on the dusty tracks that served as streets within a couple of weeks.
No, I realised, this isn’t working. Whatever Herrick 14 was set up to do is broken. It’s built wrong. Forget hearts and minds. Forget capture or kill. The only way to win this war – if you can still call such a one-sided contest that – is to kill. Kill before you are killed. It’s that simple.
Why the hell the people in charge couldn’t see that, I still cannot tell you.
I just prayed they wouldn’t shaft us any more when we tried to do the job that needed doing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
PASSED ON
Sunray was frustrated. My men were frustrated. The other CP commanders were frustrated. How many more times was the enemy’s safety – their comfort, even – going to be prioritised over ours? H, Al, M’lord and the others all agreed: it wasn’t worth putting our lives on the line if we weren’t getting back-up.
And yet we continued to put our lives on the line. Every day we patrolled and we patrolled and we patrolled. We got in firefights, we discovered IEDs, we returned home shattered and torn, ready to drop. What choice did we have? If we didn’t stay on the offensive we’d look a weaker target. We weren’t doing it to be the Big I Am colonialists, looking to tame this wild terrain.
We were doing it to survive.
When an insurgent managed to get inside Kamiabi I knew we were doing the right thing. It was killing us. Luckily a couple of things began to go in our favour. For a start the weather began to cool noticeably. Instead of patrolling in 55-degree heat with 70 per cent humidity, we had 40 degrees with 50 per cent humidity. Still unbearable but less deadly. The other piece of good fortune was the next phase of the agricultural season. In September the irrigation system in the Green Zone was cranked up, flooding a lot of the fields. I’m no farmer, but apparently this was essential for the crops. What I do know is that it was bloody good for us as well. IEDs can’t function in water so for the next few weeks we just moved, as far as possible, through the watery fields. Of course, water isn’t much protection against Kalashnikovs, but the absence of IEDs meant one thing less to worry about.
It says a lot for our successful hearts-and-minds policy that the Afghan growing season carried on regardless all the time we were there. But, like the lull we had experienced in April while the insurgents were h
arvesting, it says more about our impact on the region that particular dates on the calendar had a greater influence on our safety than anything we could do ourselves.
Which is not to say the trouble stopped. We were lucky enough to have two vehicles with us at Daqhiqh which meant that we weren’t reliant on the supply schedule. It was a mixed blessing. Shazaad quickly used our trips to drop off kit to the other CPs. One day, as one of the vehicles was coming up along Route Devon, it was targeted by an IED. I took as many men as I dared over to the scene – and found Jolly, Sam and Duncs grinning like loons and posing for pictures by the wreckage. But it could have been nasty. Either way it was bad news for the camp because we had lost 50 per cent of our vehicles. But in survival mode you see every narrow escape as a miracle. And miracles need to be celebrated.
On 15 September there was more traditional action. A single moped was causing chaos all around the area, attacking each CP’s patrol. M’lord’s Taalander came under fire to begin with. The first they knew was when this bike with a couple of straggly youths on sailed past, unarmed as usual – and then miraculously produced weapons from the air and began shooting. Before they could be tapped, they hopped back on the moped, again gunless, and sped off towards H and Kamiabi. They were the next targets. And so it continued. Just by using the three main routes plus a few little rat runs, these two blokes managed to create havoc.
Initially I’d taken the patrol west and then we’d crossed back over the canal and, after small-arms contact on Route Cornwall, had disengaged and started heading north, back up towards Daqhiqh. That’s when I heard the big fuss going on to the west of us.
I thought, Sod it. We’ve just had to retreat from there.
I got on the radio and broadcast our position to all the commanders, then said, ‘We’ll march back and join the fray as soon as we can.’
By then all the CPs had decided to work a bit more with each other. We didn’t want any slip-ups during the last few weeks of our tour.
Al Blackman came back to me immediately.
‘Eleven Lima, mate, your boys have been out all morning. You head back, we’ll go over and assist.’
It made practical sense. Not only were the Omar lot fresher and nearer than us, but having two units on the ground in close proximity increased the chances of casualties from friendly fire.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we’ll monitor from inside the CP and be ready to respond if necessary.’
And that was that.
If I’m honest, none of the lads was too keen to go back out again after the three gruelling hours they had already spent on patrol. Not that we weren’t interested. After shedding the armour and most of my weapons – I hung on to my pistol for dear life – I went straight into the ops room to monitor the unfolding situation. I wasn’t alone. We all had a sense that the current operation was going to be another Green 13. HQ had a target, we had multiple patrols on the ground. It was only a matter of time before we got another couple of notches on our dead post.
I can’t say any of us was too bothered not to be involved. There was always the chance it would turn out to be another cock-block performance from HQ and the ‘kill’ order would be overridden. For that reason we weren’t listening that attentively. But we sat up all right when we heard the words: ‘Call sign Ugly.’
The news produced mixed feelings. Number one: something was very likely going to happen in our favour. Number two: we needed to be on standby in case we were called upon to assist in the clear-up. We’d barely been back at Daqhiqh an hour, and now we had to be prepared to go out again.
I began listening intently to the reports coming in over the radio. The two insurgents were coming east. Al, travelling north, would soon be in the perfect location to cut them off. Before he could do anything, though, we heard the distinctive sound of the helicopter’s missile releasing.
‘Ugly has engaged.’
Everyone in the compound heard the explosion, the sound rippling over the wall. As we all assembled by the gate, still pulling on our kit, we could make out the ‘rat-a-tat’ eruption of the Apache’s machine guns. Over the wall we could see the smoke where the missile had hit.
‘Call sign Omar are conducting BDA,’ Shazaad said. ‘You can stand down, Rob.’
Even as we began shrugging off our kit again, I still kept the comms link open. Nothing stood out. It was absolutely normal radio traffic. The kind I would send without hesitation or embarrassment. Al and his men were approaching the BDA site.
‘There is one corpse,’ Al said.
By now I was back in the ops room. The comms were on loudspeaker so everyone could hear. It was like listening to a football match that didn’t involve your team. The commentary wasn’t exactly the centre of our attention but we all wanted to hear the result.
Al gave a description of the state of the corpse and that of the moped. We knew there had been two shooters. Where was the other one?
‘Blown to kingdom come, hopefully,’ someone said.
That turned out not to be the case. There was a fair amount of chat going on in our room when I became aware that Al was talking to his men and to HQ. The voice from Bastion said, ‘Do we need to recover him?’
‘Wait a minute,’ Fergie said. ‘The cunt’s not still alive?’
Suddenly we were all ears. The second insurgent, it appeared, had somehow survived the onslaught. HQ was asking if Al needed a Mastiff party sent out.
‘That’s fucking ridiculous!’ Fergie again.
‘I know,’ I agreed. What would it entail? Four vehicles, minimum, that’s sixteen men, and half a million pounds’ worth of hardware negotiating a route along a road routinely wired with mines. The risk to our troops was too great. That much was obvious to anyone. ‘They need to finish him off. You can’t be getting Mastiffs out for these murderers. They’ve probably IED’d the road on the way there.’
‘Yeah, damn right,’ murmured everyone else.
The chat from Al’s patrol was only part of what we were hearing. Radio operators from all over the Green Zone were giving co-ordinates for and updates on the various active patrols. Who was doing what and where? There was a lot of intel cascading down the channels. Al’s situation was just one strand.
His, however, was the one that all those of us in the Daqhiqh ops room were interested in. The more we listened the more certain I became that HQ might have been saying all the right things – for example: ‘Do you need this? Do you need that?’ – but to my ears the message was not so clear.
The HQ spokesman was asking whether they needed to send a convoy of Mastiffs, but I picked up an understandable reluctance to actually despatch a convoy.
That’s what I heard. That’s what my men heard. I’m pretty sure Al would say he heard the same thing. Two minutes later the message went out again from HQ.
‘Do we need to send a recovery team? Or is he dead?’
There was some chatter, and then the sound of Al’s voice.
‘I hate to say it, administering first aid to this individual, he’s, er, passed on from this, er, world.’ Followed by the sound of a gunshot.
I can’t say any of us punched the air or hugged or even high-fived. As far as we were concerned the correct procedure had led to the correct result. A great result. HQ had wanted the moped scum obliterated, and that had duly happened. The Apache hadn’t been able to finish the job but Omar CP had. It was no different, no better, no worse, no more spectacular than Smudge’s polishing off of the insurgent at Green 13. Hats off to Al Blackman for firing the lethal shot. Another win – another rare win – for the ISAF team. They’d done what needed to be done. They’d done exactly what I or any of my men would have done in the same situation. They’d done their job.
They’d also, to my mind, possibly offered a stay of execution to the Mastiff boys. Any legitimate casevac would have risked a lot of lives in the air and on the ground. Okay, Mastiffs generally withstood the blast of a roadside bomb, but you needed only one exception to prove that it had been wrong
to take the risk. And this venture was not worth anyone’s risk. We were all agreed on that.
We all sighed with relief when Al announced that he and his men were heading back to Omar. Tom Phillips’s mob moved in to carry out the site exploitation. It was, as far as we were concerned, situation normal.
* * *
The next day we patrolled out and got shot at. The same the day after that. Normally my men would have take it all in their stride. But these weren’t my men.
After seven long months our tour was coming to an end. In the same manner we’d arrived we were leaving. A new company was replacing us – this time from the Army. I can tell you now, there was no way I was going to be as ungracious as the Paras had been when I arrived at Mulladad. I was grateful for the bodies. That is, until I saw them in action. We Marines get accused of having a high opinion of ourselves. And we do. It’s based on the fact that our basic training lasts thirty-two weeks, while the army’s takes only twelve. And it’s not because we’re slow learners. The Royal Marines train harder, run further and faster carrying heavier loads. We are, without wishing to get technical, the dog’s bollocks. Only the Special Forces and – begrudgingly – the Paras come close.
And, boy, did it show.
As my marines began to disappear each was replaced, in theory, by a like-for-like soldier. That could not have been further from the truth. For a start they all looked like kids. They were eighteen, some of them, but would have been asked for ID in any pub in the UK. More importantly, they were small. One fella – a good lad, nice bloke – was given his anti-IED kit to carry and he couldn’t lift it. He literally could not stand up let alone walk or, God forbid, run. An actual thirteen-year-old could not have done worse.
We managed to get around that. As their numbers increased, though, and ours decreased, finding anyone strong enough to do their shift grew more difficult. We got there in the end and managed to muster a patrol. When we came under fire, as I knew we would, I was impressed by how calmly the newbies reacted. I was less impressed by their next steps.
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