At certain times of the day, Afghanistan has a special beauty about it. Just before the sunrise, and just before the sun sets, it appears like no other place on earth. I don’t know if it was the contrast between the beauty and the vicious and brutal nature of close combat that drew me in; I don’t know if it was the family of soldiers and marines that I was with, engaged in a primal struggle for civilization in a very uncivilized part of the world; I don’t know if it was the contrast of high-tech military equipment in a land where electricity and running water were far from common. The blend of all of it got me, and still does. Even now, some years later, I have never seen sunsets like the ones that sink behind the mountains of southern Afghanistan.
The daytime is brutal. The dust gets everywhere – fine, caster-sugar like dust has a permanent place in your ears, on the back of your neck and in your eyes. The heat is oppressive, destructive and draining – usually in the forties, but it can reach the fifties. In those temperatures it requires real effort to just complete the basics, like going to the toilet in the ‘sweat box’. At the time, it was not a problem for me; looking back now I do not know how I survived, let alone thrived, in that environment. And yet, come sunset, for a brief moment the place looked almost serene. The sun takes on hues of amber for the last hour of daylight, bathing the mountains, the water and the faces of the people in a warm glow. It was without doubt my favourite time of day. I would often pause in whatever I was doing to take it in. If I could, I would pull out a cigarette and think about how a stunningly beautiful country had been universally devastated by man’s inhumanity to man.
The native smells of Afghanistan are unique. A Brit will smell like a Brit. No matter how long he has been on a patrol, when you come to ripping off his body armour to deal with a wound, he will still smell faintly familiar. An Afghan is like something you haven’t smelt before. It was not that they were dirty – they rigorously washed their hands before food, and their accommodation was usually very neat and tidy – but I think it would be fair to say that everything below the belt line was disregarded. Toilet roll is not an ‘in demand’ product in Afghanistan. We gave the ANA part of Camp Shorabak a toilet block to help with their sanitation, sometime in mid-September of 2006. When I went to use it on a rare occasion in October, they had destroyed it. There was shit everywhere. Imagine Trainspotting’s ‘worst toilet in Scotland’ then multiply it a hundred times. There was even shit in the apex of the roof. It was impressive, if a little rank.
So there is, I’m afraid, a bit of an enduring smell of poor sanitation that hangs over the urban areas of Afghanistan. This was sometimes masked by the delicious aromas of the local bread – similar to Indian naan – baking in clay ovens. On later tours I’d find it almost overwhelming, after eating ‘Menu A’ from a British ration pack for six months, to get my hands on some of this bread. In some compounds, usually where women were present, there was a distinct effort to make the place smell better, and oils and incense were burned which could linger in the structure for days.
All these ingredients led to a heady mix of smells in Afghanistan, which were completely alien to me before I went there. The first time the aircraft doors opened in Kabul and the air and the smell hit me, I found it a little discomforting. On return visits, though, these smells became enticing, framing good memories and bad, and were an integral part of any Afghanistan experience.
The accommodation in the British half of Camp Shorabak was a purpose-built, pre-fabricated Nissen-type hut that housed about thirty of us. I was on a top bunk, and the previous incumbent had kindly left some pictures of semi-clad females on the walls for me. The accommodation had a hard PVC floor that seemed to absorb some of the sand that we brought in every day. There was no air-conditioning; during the day it became like an oven, but at night-time we could open the windows and get some fresh air into the place. This almost – but not quite – helped mask the odours of some of my comrades who, struggling in the heat, let their personal administration slide somewhat.
Life could be very chaotic on that first tour. One evening, minding my own business and taking in the sunset as I strolled across the camp in my flip-flops and towel, I was surprised by a commotion coming from over the wall in the ANA compound. There was much shouting and starting of vehicles; it appeared that there were competing voices, some urging restraint and some encouraging others into some sort of action. My interpreter came running over to me and told me that there was an attack on a nearby town by some Taliban. For some reason, this rather ordinary occurrence had hit a nerve with one of the kandak commanders (not mine) and he was ordering the entire battalion to line up their vehicles behind his, ready to lead a charge to the village and fight back.
This all sounded fine, except that the idea of heavily armed ANA soldiers roaming around the desert looking for a town (they could not map-read) without talking to any of the NATO forces in the area (they had no tactical radios, and didn’t believe they were useful anyway) meant that the potential for carnage was great. I went into the Ops room and told my CO what was happening. He frantically tried to get his counterpart to intervene, but it was too late, and the vehicles were already leaving the camp gates with soldiers hanging on to the sides and the backs, high on vengeance.
The battalion returned that night. How they found their way back in the dark I’ll never know. They had lost ‘a few’, but felt theirs had been a worthy cause. I wondered how many of my own kandak would be on parade in the morning. The Afghan National Army had no concept of war-fighting beyond gang violence. Teaching them how to look after each other, about fire and movement and about command and control, was futile; they were a group that had diminishing respect for life, whether their own or the enemy’s. The size of the strategic task – building up an army that was capable of bringing some degree of security to Afghanistan for the next fifty years – was beyond most of our comprehension, even at this early stage.
This first tour of mine was, on the whole, tedious. I spent endless sweaty days on the range, firstly training the ANA and then staying behind and trying to master the array of weaponry we Brits had suddenly had given to us in theatre, most of which we’d never seen before in the UK. Back then, even Minimi machine guns – now commonplace in the British infantry – were new. Underslung grenade launchers required some practice if you were ever going to be able to employ them effectively in combat. In later years, pre-deployment training for an Afghanistan tour became almost a greater test of endurance than the tour itself. This was probably an over-reaction to these early days, where preparation, cultural understanding and – crucially – equipment were simply woeful.
It’s hard to believe it now, but on that first tour we deployed in Cold War-era stab vests, with a plate inserted over the heart, to conduct high-intensity war-fighting operations. These vests were generally worn because they would keep your body in one piece following an explosion, rather than keep anything out. They also kept you rather warm at night-time, when the temperatures dropped, but were otherwise useless. Another piece of equipment, the Snatch Land Rover, was already considered a coffin on wheels after the Iraq War, yet we were still travelling around in what was effectively a barely armoured Jeep, getting in the back each time thinking this may be our last journey.
That was the general state of affairs, but things were even worse for the OMLTs. We used stripped-down Land Rovers known as WMIKs – short for Weapons Mount Installation Kit. These are barely modernized hangovers from the ‘Desert Rat’ operations in the Second World War – and they were our primary weapons platforms. ‘Stripped down’ not only meant no roof, but no doors either. Consequently, there was little to hide behind, and you had to hope an incoming bullet would hit one of the struts in the vehicle. Great for mobility; did nothing for protection. I remember spending a bizarre afternoon taping and strapping some Kevlar plates we stole from the Americans onto the side of a WMIK for doors, so the crew could at least duck if they got stuck during contact.
This approach contrasted with t
he other nations in theatre. When they talked about ‘up-armouring vehicles’, they meant a complete re-fit by the vehicle’s original manufacturers – a professional job involving upgrades to the original panels with armour plating and, sometimes, explosive reactive armour. We Brits taped misshapen Kevlar plates to the driver’s door. The contrast was a little dispiriting.
The .50 calibre was the most powerful machine gun we had. It was simply devastating – firing a .50 calibre round at roughly 900 metres per second will destroy the engine of a vehicle, or cut through concrete walls. A really relentless pounding from this weapon system is enough to take down buildings and, as such, it is vital for suppressing, outgunning and killing a numerically superior enemy. Unfortunately, we had very little of the ammunition required for it, and were forced to ask convoys from other nations using our base for a night’s stop if they could relinquish any of their stocks to help us out. I remember going to the range one day, cock-a hoop that we had managed to acquire some for practice from some very friendly Estonians. We got to the range, set up three guns and prepared a range practice. I was the Range Controlling Officer, even though I had only recently passed my weapons handling test for this gun.
We then endured a frustrating hour as we tried to figure out why the guns were only firing two or three rounds before stopping. We were pulling them apart, examining firing pins and case extractors, changing gas-settings and everything else, before we realized that the case of the rounds was ever-so-slightly too small to create a seal and thus feed the gun correctly. The ammunition was of a lower quality than it should have been, and now instead of machine guns that could chew up everything in their way, we had very large, very bulky .50 single-shot rifles.
When I reported this to the adjutant, he desperately searched the entire Task Force Helmand for some ammunition for us, but was told that, unfortunately, 3 PARA Battlegroup had fired nearly all of it that summer, and we were to take a crateload off the Estonians for operations as it was ‘better than nothing’.
Yes – the proud British Army of 2006.
We would make significant cross-cultural efforts with our Afghan friends, regularly having dinner with them after a hard day’s training. It was clear from being around them that there were a lot of tribal feuds being silenced to accommodate the new fighting force that was the Afghan National Army. The feuds were always simmering just below the surface, and violence in their ranks was a daily occurrence. I witnessed a particularly brutal attack quite early on in my tour, when there was a disagreement on parade just after we had handed out the weapons for that day’s training. Fortunately, the ammunition was still safely in the shipping container, and so these two Afghans were forced to trade blows with the stocks of their weapons. The beating did not stop when one was knocked unconscious, at which point I decided my respect for ‘cultural disagreements’ had reached its limit. Eventually I persuaded the kandak commander to step in to stop the violence.
It was clear just looking at the soldiers, as I was training them or even just on parade in the morning, that their ranks were festering with the enemy. They looked at me in that way, studied my movements, spoke Pashto under their breath to their friends as I passed them. I could not even fathom how you would ‘vet’ these guys before they came to me, and I had to assume that I was in a little personal danger, and act accordingly. It was not customary to take long-barrelled weapons into tents and meetings with the Afghans – it kind of ruined the atmosphere if you just sat there in your helmet and body armour with your safety catch off. The few pistols the British had were safely strapped to the expanding waistlines of the staff officers in Camp Bastion and elsewhere. When I raised my personal security with my CO, he smiled wryly at me and told me to make sure I had my knife on me at all times when in the Afghan camp.
These evening meetings were always fairly banal, but crucial to building relationships between us. There had been no serious ANA-on-Brit violence at the time, and much of the evening was spent sharing stories about our different cultures rather than talking about how we would operate in the field. I do remember being asked to celebrate Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan, with our Afghan colleagues. They had somehow come across two goats on the firing range, had killed them and spit-roasted them over a fire. Despite our strong reservations, we joined in and had some of the meat, along with other delicacies. The following day our camp was a sight, with more than sixty soldiers and marines laid out side by side on the ground, each with a drip in them to rehydrate after a particularly violent episode of diarrhoea and vomiting.
Regrettably I became disillusioned with the experience on my first tour of Afghanistan. It should have been a period of real excitement and opportunity, but the chaos and disorganization really affected me. Jim Philippson had been killed in a piece of epic disorganization before I’d even arrived, yet many were treating the war like a game. The truth was that just three years after the Iraq invasion we had wandered into yet another conflict entirely unprepared for what was coming. I wasn’t sure it was worth the sacrifice.
Before my first tour, I was at the stage in my career where I was ‘corps-pissed’, as they say in the US; I was totally committed to the military, to my regiment and to the concept of fighting in foreign fields for a safer homeland for my loved ones. I saw the military as this great institution, constantly evolving after hundreds of years to defend this great nation of ours. I believed that after years in Northern Ireland and experience of other insurgencies, such as Malaya, we were a more intelligent, more effective fighting force than other countries, including the US.
But my experience was turning out to be quite different, and I found that challenging. We were gaffer-taping armour to our Land Rovers; we were asking the Estonians for ammo that did not fit our guns. We had no idea what we were doing and people were dying because of it. My immediate commander, who seemed to think this was some sort of jaunt from the days of the Raj, appeared to be more interested in building a fucking concrete cricket pitch in the base to play cricket with ‘the natives’ than ensuring we had the equipment for our primary role.
The picture of the enemy that had been painted for us was nothing short of fiction; I suspect the author of these government and MI6 assessments now has a successful career writing children’s books. Patrols were getting involved in epic, all-night firefights, like the one in which Jim Philippson had been killed. Training and mentoring my arse; more like hang on until your six months are up and some other poor bugger can ‘stag on’.
A couple of years later, while working with a Special Forces (SF) unit and having high security clearance as a result, I became aware that the CIA felt that the British, in 2006, had set Helmand back thirty years. Initially when I learnt this I was perturbed; friends had been killed or injured in this war, I had seen the sacrifices we had made to secure our mission in that period. But on reflection, the CIA was absolutely right. Commentators the world over have also since examined that period, and sometimes denigrated the British effort.
But the ground truth – and what the CIA was actually saying – was rather simpler. Our intelligence was so poor, and our foresight so woeful, that we were placing our people in desperate situations. No one seemed to think that the hornets’ nest that is southern Afghanistan would react so violently to international interventionism. This, despite the almost constant war that had been going on over the previous thirty years; this, despite the fact we’d been entirely caught out by an under-estimation of the problem in Iraq. It seemed madness to everyone but us to put a handful of soldiers in an isolated, exposed compound, and ask them to hold off the enemy while simultaneously making friends with them. When our troops were inevitably attacked, the only way to avoid a massacre was for them to shoot their way out with small arms and overwhelm the enemy with violence. It was kill or be killed. But the ‘thinkers’ – the strategists, the generals and the politicians – were quick to decry our violence, both then and as the war drew on. The louder they shouted, the more disconnected we felt. The more doc
trinal and idealistic the missives, the more comically out of touch they looked. You can’t bring peace if you are focused purely on survival. We didn’t want to die, and it led to some showdowns.
The scale of the violence served to turn a population against us from a very early stage. The harsh truth is that they came to prefer the Taliban, and they knew that this beautiful country, raped by years of war, was being criminally violated again. The first time British troops went into Sangin, in the summer of 2006, they drove straight up the high street in berets. By the end of the war, Sangin was infamous in living rooms up and down the UK as a result of the number of British soldiers killed there.
I met one individual who provided me with the role model I was looking for as a young officer ready to be formed, but struggling to deal with an organization in disarray over its core business. Joe was a company sergeant major in 45 Commando, and I became very close to him. He was extremely professional, and I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could from him. He taught me how to use a sniper rifle, how to fire the 51mm mortar with great accuracy and drummed into me the importance of the marksmanship principles – all good stuff for a gunner officer who had let his infantry skills diminish somewhat.
One incident summed up the experience of that tour for me. I was in the Ops room one day when a young bombardier came through. He was on a patrol with a friend of mine called Al, and had stopped by to rest for the night before pushing further south. Al was a captain in the Royal Marines, operating as a Fire Support Team Commander, coordinating joint fires. Al was cutting around with a sniper rifle as well as his SA80 assault rifle. Some thought he was mad; I thought it was rather sensible.
The bombardier was someone I still have loose contact with now. That day, in a contact, he had called-in an air strike from a jet which killed some women and children in a compound. He was devastated. He was no macho, wannabe soldier; he was cerebral, dedicated, committed. But at the point of his position being overrun, he had requested the drop from a British Harrier and in doing so had killed some civilians.
We Were Warriors Page 8