Painting the Sand

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Painting the Sand Page 19

by Kim Hughes GC


  A gentle, warm wind blew through the reeds while songbirds began celebrating the start of a new day. Summer mornings in Helmand were always stunning and began with the promise of something fresh and uplifting. But it was difficult to imagine anything good coming from this day.

  I turned to the sergeant major and the company commander and asked whether the operation was going ahead or being aborted.

  ‘Sir, what do we want to achieve here? Are we going to press on?’

  The company commander, a major, his eyes filled with sadness and fatigue, said, ‘We’re binning it. We’ve just learned that Lance Corporal Fullarton didn’t make it. He died on the helicopter. Keep it to yourself for the moment. I don’t want the rest of the company to know until we are back in Jackson.’

  The suddenness with which death came in Afghan was always shocking. An hour ago the dead soldiers had been vibrant and carefree, full of life, smiles and fun. Now those same sons, husbands and brothers were dead and everything they were and everything they were going to be was gone. But now was not the time to be angry or sad, these emotions would have to be stored for another time. There was still work to be done.

  I gathered my team together. ‘Right the op’s been shit-canned. We’re heading back to Jackson but I’m going to smack the main charges in situ before we head back. Everyone stay focused and don’t move beyond the cleared areas. No more dead soldiers today. Everyone happy with that? Good. Right, give me all the bang you’ve got.’

  I turned to the platoon sergeant: ‘You need to get all of your blokes out of the area. Once I fire these I will no longer have control over what happens and three minutes later there will be a huge explosion.’

  Lewis and David began emptying out their day sacks, gathering sticks of PE, detonators, det-cord and anything else I might need. The plan was to destroy all the main charges in one big explosion with a ring-main composed of det-cord, linking as many of the main charges as possible but there was only enough for four charges. The remaining three would have to be blown individually. Small amounts of PE were positioned close to the remaining three main charges with individual detonators and burning fuses.

  Seven IEDs had been found and two had exploded. The Taliban knew that the area was used by soldiers as a transit route into the main town from the FOB – the wadi was vast and the routes taken by the soldiers were chosen at random and never repeated. But to counter this the Taliban simply laid more bombs.

  Chidders began pointing them out: ‘Look there’s another, and another – this is ridiculous. I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  There were at least another six, possibly more buried in an arc across the wadi. Part of me wanted to stay and defuse them all but I also recognised that the soldiers needed to get back to the safety of the base and besides the Taliban weren’t going anywhere – there were always going to be more IEDs. After lighting the fuses, Chidders and I headed back to where the rest of the company had gathered.

  ‘Everyone get your heads down, there’s going to be some big explosions!’ I shouted, ensuring that everyone followed the command.

  The first explosion was massive. Four main charges detonated at the same time. The shockwave passed over us and a cloud of smoke, dust and debris mushroomed into the sky. A few seconds later the remaining three main charges detonated one after the other in a series of equally spaced explosions. Usually there was a cheer from the soldiers when an IED was destroyed, but not that day; there was nothing to celebrate.

  The company returned to Jackson on the same route as we had come, the front man searching the ground with his metal detector, ensuring that the Taliban hadn’t returned to bury more bombs. The men moved solemnly in single file, following the footsteps of the man in front, many with their heads bowed and lost in thought.

  One by one we filtered back through the gates. Just ninety minutes earlier we had gathered in the same place, excited about the day ahead. But in the time it takes to play a game of football three soldiers had been killed, another three injured, one seriously, and God only knows how many traumatised.

  Weapons were unloaded in silence and exhausted soldiers dragged themselves back to their sleeping quarters with some facing the daunting task of packing away their dead mate’s kit. After unloading our weapons, I called my team together, away from the comrades of the dead.

  ‘Is everyone all right? I know none of you were injured but it’s been a shit morning and we’ve all seen some pretty messed-up stuff.’ The soldiers nodded and mumbled. ‘But we can’t afford to dwell. Let’s talk later. Anyone who has any issues or concerns, come and see me. We’re a team and it’s at times like this that we need to look out for one another.’

  Everyone was probably traumatised by the morning’s events but we just had to suck it up. If we were pulled out someone else would have to come in and cover for us.

  I threw my body armour and weapon on my bed and sat on one end. I was physically and mentally drained. It had been a long difficult day, probably harder than anything we had imagined but the team’s professionalism had shone through. The months of training in the cold and wet, the endless lessons, getting things wrong before we got them right, had all paid off. Probably for the first time in my career I understood why the British Army is so good at what it does. I don’t think any of us had realised how far we had come as professional soldiers until that day.

  Just a few years ago, I was a kid going nowhere, knocking around with wasters whose only goal in life was to get pissed and smoke weed. I could have easily gone the same way. But I chose to join the Army and was given a chance. The Army offered me a choice, gave me a sense of direction and purpose and now I was leading a team doing some of the most dangerous and demanding work that can be done in a war zone. If I’m honest, I almost felt elated. I had come face to face with a situation so unique that had someone suggested it at Bomb School they would have been laughed at. But the ambush had also shown how adaptable and versatile the Taliban had become. I took a few gulps of water and then realised I needed to give Bastion a full brief on the situation.

  I raced across to the Jackson Ops Room and dialled the EOD Task Force’s number on a secure line.

  ‘Jim, it’s me – I’m off the ground.’

  ‘Right, tell me everything,’ he responded.

  I talked him through the task, step by step: the casualties, the risks, the layout of the IEDs. The conversation lasted for a good hour and at the end of the call he said he wanted an initial report emailed back to the HQ within the hour. Specifically, he was interested in the nature of the device, and how it could be armed and disarmed to provide freedom of movement for the Taliban and the local people, while targeting ISAF troops. He stressed that the detail in my report would be essential. No one had seen anything like this before and my report needed to be disseminated across ISAF as soon as possible. The Sangin IED was now battle proven, as far as the Taliban were concerned, and very soon it would be appearing across Helmand.

  I commandeered a laptop and began typing, looking at my notes and recalling the incident. Ninety minutes later I hit the send button and the report was on its way to Bastion and the UK. Just forty-eight hours later the Sangin IED was being run as a new scenario at the Felix Centre on the High Threat course back in the UK. The reach-back was amazing, the guys on the course would be told: ‘This is the latest device to come out of Afghan, look and learn.’

  The following morning we were up again before first light on another job as if nothing had happened. Fortunately, there were no casualties and we returned with smiles on our faces. But there would be more casualties, sooner than most of us anticipated.

  17

  Pharmacy Road

  Over the next couple of days patrols were kept to a minimum, while the battalion licked its wounds and said goodbye to the dead. My team filled its time doing admin, sorting out equipment, replenishing our expended stores, hitting the gym and washing away blood from our combats in the Helmand river, the one place on the base where smile
s were still seen.

  The soldiers based in Sangin had seen too much death, too many of their friends blown to pieces. Fear was the dominant emotion in FOB Jackson, fear and wondering who would be the next to be killed. Four months into the tour and the Rifles were exhausted and they still had another two months to push. Six months in Sangin was simply too long. Those who survived would be scarred, probably for the rest of their lives.

  It was mid-August and most of the soldiers had at least another ten weeks to serve before their tour came to an end. Ten weeks equated to somewhere between fifty to seventy patrols and on every one they expected to be attacked and take casualties. Some of those who had been killed and injured in the last couple of weeks had been sent out to replace soldiers who had been killed or injured earlier in the tour – battle-casualty replacements needing battle-casualty replacements.

  For those inside Sangin it felt as though the world was against them. The base was isolated and surrounded by Afghans, who were effectively indistinguishable from the Taliban. They wore the same clothes, spoke the same language and offered the same smiles. We never really knew who our enemy was and rarely saw them.

  I attended the morning briefs in the Ops Room with the various company commanders and other attached units to see what the plan was for the day and whether we would be needed. But the demands upon us were limited to a few hours of Counter-IED training and the rest of the time was spent in a kind of limbo, waiting for the next IED find or explosion. The week rolled on and morale began to climb back to its original level. Soldiers began to return to the river to swim in larger numbers, play and relax and forget about tomorrow for just a few hours.

  Four days had passed since the wadi chaos. It was Thursday 20 August 2009, and the team was enjoying a brew outside our Hesco home when the Ops Room runner appeared. He was breathing heavily and look flustered, ‘Sir, I mean Staff, the CO needs you in the Ops Room now.’

  The team looked at me but no words were spoken. They rose as one and began to gather their equipment.

  Entering the Ops Room it was immediately clear that something was seriously wrong. Heads turned and looked up at me from computer screens; there were no smiles, no welcome. The chief of staff, a major in the Rifles, called me over to his desk.

  ‘Staff – we had an IED strike about fifteen minutes ago. An infantry search team call sign Yankee 31 based at PB Wishtan were supporting engineering call sign Hades 31 Echo in this location, here . . .’ He pointed to an area called the Pharmacy Road. He explained that a soldier had stepped on a suspected pressure-plate IED and was dead. As his team tried to recover his body they identified what they believe was another pressure plate.

  He continued: ‘The QRF was dispatched with a quad bike and trailer. They were intending to use the winch on the quad to drag the body out of the danger area. The winch was attached to the soldier and as the QRF commander moved back to the quad bike he triggered a second IED and was also killed and another soldier seriously injured. Both have been recovered but we need to recover the body of the soldier killed first.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied before being beckoned by Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thomson, the Rifles’ commanding officer. The CO had become used to dealing with death but I immediately sensed this incident had hit him particularly hard.

  ‘You’ve been briefed?’

  ‘Sir,’ I responded.

  ‘Your thoughts?’

  ‘I’m not going to mess about, sir. I’m going in and I’ll get your boy out. We’ll clear the area later, but getting him off the ground’s the priority.’

  ‘Good,’ the CO responded.

  Pharmacy Road had gained a well-deserved notoriety in Sangin. It was if you like the most dangerous area of the most dangerous town in Afghanistan. It wasn’t so much a road but more like a thirty-foot wide, winding, 800-metre-long minefield, linking two patrol bases called Wishtan and Tangiers. On either side of the road were twenty-foot-high mud walls, occasionally opening up into other streets or alleyways, almost like rat runs. The ground favoured the Taliban and gave them almost complete freedom of movement. They could move into the area under the cover of darkness and at times during the day and plant IEDs with impunity, and thereby turn the road into a long continuous nightmare.

  In an attempt to restrict the Taliban’s movement it was decided to block off the side roads and alleyways with huge Hesco blocks. The strategy was sensible enough but would only work if every side road or alleyway was closed, and there were dozens of them. A so-called super-sangar, a fortified rocket-proof lookout post, had also been built to provide additional cover in the immediate area and was manned 24/7. The sangar worked to a certain extent and provided a sort of visual link between the two PBs. But the Taliban were clever. They knew every inch of the terrain and careful use of the dead ground often allowed them to get to within twenty metres of the sangar.

  The whole area had a no-man’s-land feel to it. Sangin was once a thriving community but in the three years since the British had arrived hundreds of compounds and houses had been turned into rubble after almost a thousand days of continuous war. Now only dogs, cats and rats occupied the ruins.

  PB Wishtan was just a few kilometres from Jackson but travelling by road was simply too dangerous and the only option was to fly in by chopper. By 0950 hrs we were in the air on board a Chinook, heading for Wishtan. The Sangin Taliban would often take potshots with RPGs at the critical moment when helicopters are slowly landing or taking off. The flight lasted just a few tense minutes and everyone was relieved when we landed in Wishtan. At the edge of the HLS were four soldiers carrying a body draped in a Union Jack flag and containing the remains of one of their comrades. All were ashen-faced and looked totally crushed.

  Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, the Rifles, had just lost two soldiers: 18-year-old Private Johnathon Young, who had only been in Afghanistan for eighteen days and Serjeant Paul McAleese, who up until the moment he died was a living legend within the regiment and the son of one of the SAS soldiers who stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. We later learned that it was Sergeant McAleese’s body we had seen being loaded onto the Chinook.

  The company Operations Officer, a captain, who knew both the dead men, briefed Lee and me on recovering the body. Brimstone 42 would be escorted to the target by another platoon who would provide us with additional close protection while we got to work.

  Events moved quickly and by 10.30 a.m. the area where the two soldiers had been killed was reached. Chidders quickly organised an isolation of the target area while Dave and I began developing a plan to extract Private Young’s body.

  To achieve a thorough search of the area the search team had to blast holes through various compound walls, a process known as Explosive Method of Entry (EMOE), using half a bar mine containing 4kg of high explosive. The bar mine was essentially a massive lump of explosive designed during the Cold War to stop a 40-ton Russian tank. Although tanks weren’t a threat in Afghan, the bar mine was ideal for blowing holes in two-foot-thick walls.

  Once the isolation was complete I established the Incident Control Point (ICP) thirty metres around the corner from the dead soldier. The search team, their job complete, rested against a wall while Dave and I prepared for the next phase of the operation.

  ‘Ready?’ I said to Dave.

  ‘Roger,’ he replied and I set off, searching my way around the corner and up to the site of the explosion, leaving a yellow spray-painted path in my wake. The place had taken on a ghostly appearance as if Private Young had been lying there, untouched, for months. Although tragic there was also something curiously peaceful about the scene and I almost felt like an intruder. Remnants of first-aid equipment, bandages, first field dressings and tourniquets littered the area along with pieces of military equipment that had belonged to the two soldiers – all of it was covered in the same dust.

  The blast had left his light support weapon bent and mangled. An army-issue boot containing the remains of a foot had come to rest by a wall. E
verything was photographed in situ before being recovered.

  I attempted to visualise the last few seconds of Private Young’s life, where he was standing, where the bomb had been positioned, what he was doing prior to stepping on the pressure plate. Then I slowly moved forward sweeping my metal detector and almost immediately began to get hits from fragments of metal and equipment damaged in the blast.

  Dave positioned himself in a cleared safe area by a small stone wall while I continued moving slowly forward to where Private Young had died. I stared at his body, battered and torn by the violence of the blast. Another day, another dead soldier. I felt almost nothing apart from a deep sense of waste and wondered how many more dead soldiers I would see by the time my tour was over.

  18

  The Fallen

  The dead soldier lay on his back with his arms outstretched at 90 degrees in the shape of a cross. Most of his body armour had been destroyed apart from a flap of fabric that covered his face like a veil, possibly sparing me from seeing the injuries to his head and face. Beneath him the ground had been stained dark-brown with blood that had been absorbed into the dirt.

  I paused and took some comfort from knowing that his death must have been instantaneous, and carefully continued searching up to where he was lying. As I got closer I could see a pressure plate lying by the side of the body. It was immediately clear that the plate was from the first explosion and not an additional device as Serjeant McAleese had initially suspected. It had probably been blown out of the ground by the explosion. After searching around Private Young’s body I spray-painted the secure area’s perimeter, knelt down and fingertip-searched around the pressure plate, confirming that it was unconnected, before placing it in a forensic bag.

 

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