This may sound odd, but if you’ve had an upbringing like mine, the reason it is so pervasive and doesn’t let you go is that you have so many moments when you think you might have got it wrong. That perhaps you were bloody naughty and deserved the discipline you endured. That perhaps ‘God’ does have it in for you, and you can do no good. Finally having a mind of my own meant I could accept that while some people – including my parents – felt that way about life, I didn’t have to.
A lot of this had to do with the people I was with. Al became a bit of a brother to me, and it was easy to respect those around me. The friends I made on that tour helped me define myself. Like them, I became obsessed with the gym. I particularly enjoyed a Tuesday night, when the machines were removed, thin gym mats placed on the walls and floor, and ‘fight night’ would begin. For me, this was a chastening experience. Inevitably paired with the bigger man, I would get used to suffering a humiliating defeat. Being an officer and being ‘non-badged’ were both perfectly sound reasons to hand my arse to me on a plate on a weekly basis.
My favourite fights were with Al, when he tried to teach me a thing or two. He would resist my aggression with skill, and then place me in holds from which there was no escape. I would lose my temper, and he would just be talking to me calmly, telling me to control myself. I became strong, fit and resilient, and was committed to doing the six-month course required to be a permanent operator within the United Kingdom Special Forces Group upon my return from the tour.
It didn’t work out quite like that. I got back to the UK in 2009 to discover that the Army had other plans. I was part of a larger regiment that was committed to providing Terminal Controllers for the ongoing field army operations in Afghanistan, and I was to do that course instead, before deploying again for a third time in four summers to Afghanistan.
11
During these years, around my tours in Afghanistan and my stint with the training regiment, my personal life seemed to blend seamlessly into my professional life, and girlfriends took a back seat as a result. Leave was often planned well in advance with old mates, and some epic holidays were enjoyed.
The summer of 2007 was spent with Dave – a long-time close friend of mine, who had returned from a tour in Afghanistan just in time to find out his girlfriend had sought comfort elsewhere while he was away. This coincided roughly with the time our ‘operational bonus’ was being introduced – a financial reward for war-fighting service. I hadn’t spent mine yet, and Dave was on a mission to run through his money as fast as possible and forget the loss of his childhood sweetheart, so we booked tickets to fly to Los Angeles for three weeks. Without any set plans, we hired a convertible Chevrolet and headed off on a round trip that took in San Diego and San Francisco. We went skydiving in Perris. And, of course, we went to Vegas.
We spent more time drunk than sober. We were banned from the Piano Bar on the Strip for insisting that I could play better than the professional musician they’d paid for that evening (demonstration included). We stayed in pricey hotels with infinity swimming pools where it seemed that the mandatory order of dress for females was topless. We met Jenna Jameson’s manager, who invited us to a house party which we were too drunk to attend. (If you don’t know who she is, neither did I. I do now.)
One baking west-coast evening, we were befriended by a group of women in Los Angeles’ famous Sky Bar, as we watched the sun sink down over the city. Some rather large, rather aggressive and very rich Asian men were trying to move in on them; the girls were more interested in us. The Asian chaps were flooding the table with expensive alcohol; Dave and I were helping ourselves. The Asian guys were acting very shady, as if they were part of some crime cartel, and invited the girls to a party with Lindsay Lohan, which the girls refused to attend without us.
Reluctantly, the blokes invited me and Dave, and when I indicated I was not willing to contribute to the $3,000 table price, they ended up paying for us too. They sped off down the strip in two Lamborghinis while Dave, myself and a couple of the girls followed in a taxi.
In the early hours, the man who seemed to be their leader had had enough of us taking the piss.
‘Come on, you two, you’ve been freeloading all night; let’s do some shots!’
‘OK,’ said Dave, before I could intervene.
We followed them to the bar, where I was able to lean over and get the attention of the barmaid.
‘These guys are cocks. Water for us, vodka for them, put it on the table tab, OK?’ I shouted at her over the music.
As they sunk glass after glass, beating their chests and bouncing off each other, Dave and I tucked away our waters, glad for the respite. After a few, I cannot remember how many, one of them clicked, and they were very angry indeed. Dave and I couldn’t match their aggression, and collapsed in fits of giggles. They were ejected from the club and we returned to their $3,000 table without them.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur until Dave, while speaking to the party organizer, asked, ‘Who the fuck is Lindsay Lohan anyway?’ He had a point – I didn’t know who she was either – but from the woman’s expression, it seemed like a good time to leave.
When one is young, without ties and either training for or recovering from an on-going military operation such as Afghanistan, one can be rather fatalistic, and life can become quite chaotic. Looking back, I feel rather embarrassed by my lifestyle back then; but no one got hurt. Sort of.
I was very close to my fiercely loyal friends, who were all experiencing the same process, and found it very difficult to talk to anyone outside that circle. I did not like to think too hard about the war while I was in the UK, but it was difficult not to be moved by the constant churn of news from theatre, and wonder what personal fate lay ahead. The war was not ending any time soon, and I knew that I must endure more of it at some point. I found my answers were usually at the bottom of the glass.
One of my dearest friends was called Charlie Fisher. Charlie and I had met over tea and toast one afternoon while at 29 Commando in Plymouth. The rain was beating against the window as another storm blew in across the Atlantic, slamming against the Royal Citadel.
‘Good day for a sea-swim,’ he had said to me, with a glint in his eye.
Ten minutes later we were off the Plymouth foreshore and swimming out around a buoy and back, before returning to the mess to finish off our tea and toast. We became friends for life.
Charlie, who left the Army in 2008, had a girlfriend I could not stand. His group of friends all worried that she wasn’t right for him. Halfway through my 2008–09 tour, Charlie wrote to me to say that he and his girlfriend were now engaged, so of course I wrote him some hearty congratulations back. When I returned in early 2009, the wedding was just a couple of months away, planned for April that year.
After months in Afghanistan, I was more than ready to enjoy myself. Charlie and I seemed to spend much of the spring together, as I used up my post-tour leave and operational bonus on the streets of west London. It became apparent that all was not well with his impending wedding, and after some very long, very drunk conversations, the pair of us the last drinkers in the bar, the wedding was called off three weeks before the big day.
Charlie had made the correct decision, but being determined not to miss out on a holiday, he went on the honeymoon by himself, seeing the funny side of it all. When he returned, the bank he was working for asked him, with almost perfect timing, to go to their New York office for a year.
I went out to see Charlie in the summer of 2009. By now I knew I was returning to Afghanistan the following year, and regrettably my fatalistic behaviour had not improved. I was definitely in a challenging place in my mind, still recovering from returning from my last tour, and knowing the risks I’d be taking when I deployed again. Charlie, meanwhile, had a new girlfriend – a friend of his ex-fiancée who was supposed to have been the ‘Maid of Honour’ at their wedding. It would be fair to say that both of us needed a stiff drink or two, and New York seemed as good a
place as any. At the end of one particular evening, for some unknown reason, we tried to swim across the Hudson River.
The current was very strong, and so we turned back and got ourselves out of the water. Inevitably, the NYPD had turned up. One of the cops was cool; I told him I was an idiot and was so sorry. The other was a twat and wanted to taser me. Again for some unknown reason, I wanted to be tasered to ‘know what it felt like’; I reckoned I could ‘take it’, and the twat cop was gearing himself up to do it. At this point more police turned up, Charlie played peacemaker and we promised to return to his apartment.
Standing in my pants on the New York foreshore, I could not find my clothes. I was convinced – in that drunk way where one can never be wrong – that a tramp sleeping on a bench nearby had stolen them. I gently woke him up and asked him if he had my clothes – he didn’t. During this whole charade I had managed to cut the back of my head quite badly, and blood was running down my back. As I started walking back to the apartment through the financial district of New York in just my pants, pissed, wet through and bleeding, I thought it might be time to grow up a bit.
12
Back in England, I tried to get my head into gear as I was officially warned off for operations again. The following March I would deploy on Op Herrick 12 as part of 3 Regiment Royal Horse Artillery (3 RHA), in a ground-holding operation in northern Nad-e Ali.
I met my new unit at their base in Germany. The key individuals within my particular sub-unit – D Battery – made every effort to welcome me. The battery commander, Adam Wilson, was to become a dear friend. This friendship, however, did not start right away. I didn’t want to be there – I wanted to be given a go at passing United Kingdom Special Forces Selection; I was done with all this Regular Army stuff. But the Army, understandably, had other plans. The war in Afghanistan was intensifying; jobs with my skill-set needed to be filled out there, and they wanted another tour out of me as a Fire Support Team Commander.
Adam made it clear to me that I was there to get this group of men ready for war, and that is why I would not be released to go and pursue my own career ambitions. I don’t know if this was just said to make me feel better, but I came to realize that he had no time for my selfish ambitions, and rightly so. He was charged with taking his battery on operations and that was his focus, not me. It took me a few months, but it was a classic case of him killing me with kindness.
The challenge was huge. Germany-based units had a very different composition and ethos to either a commando unit or an SF unit, where physical fitness and discipline were characteristics to be achieved and admired. From day one, I encountered significant resistance as I set up a training programme that would drive the unit towards the kind of professional standards that I knew they would need if they were to be able to perform on operations in Afghanistan.
The soldiers were rough. They smoked a lot, they drank a lot and they fought a lot. I wasn’t really one to judge on this score, but my behaviour was a by-product of hard, professional soldiering, which always came first. It was an escape, a letting-off of steam; I felt their behaviour was their raison d’être, and I had no time for it. They were entirely disinterested in the campaign in Afghanistan, and I felt slightly put-out that while some of us had been involved in this conflict for a few years now, this lot seemed isolated from it.
An artillery battery is the same size as an infantry company – about eighty men when fully manned. The battery is usually split into four composite parts: the gun line, the fire support teams (FSTs), the logistics support group and the command posts. Each one of these composite sub-groups will be commanded, generally by an officer but sometimes by a senior NCO. The gun line was where the soldiers manned the guns; in this case 105mm L118 Light Gun howitzers. The guns will be told where to fire and where to move by a small command post group which is split into two positions, duplicates of each other. The logistics group will generally be commanded by the quartermaster sergeant. The FSTs are commanded by an officer.
There is generally a divide in the modern artillery battery between the FSTs and the rest of the men. The rest will often act as one sub-unit; fire support teams will be working on their own with whichever forward ground unit they are tasked to support. The general idea is that the small FSTs work in close proximity to the enemy, and bring the guns, which are further back, on to target to achieve the effect required. Modern British FSTs have developed into something like the ANGLICOs (Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Companies) from the US Marine Corps. They are now multi-skilled teams that are designed to be able to control any indirect weapon system, launched from any platform in the air, on land or at sea. It requires a lot of training.
The process of achieving a joint fires effect on the ground – i.e., bringing a bomb, shell or missile into a collision with the target – is more complicated than it first seems. The target can be big (a building) or very small (a person). In an operation like Afghanistan there are multiple ground operations going on at any one time. There may well be Troops in Contact (TiCs) elsewhere who have a first call on air support; there may well be a ‘kill box’ (an area on the ground where a sensitive operation may be taking place) set up, waiting for a trigger, like we used on my 2008–09 Special Forces tour.
You cannot engage a target with a longer distance weapon such as field artillery without ensuring that there are no helicopters or other air assets on the imaginary line between the target and the gun line – for obvious reasons. Separating these assets is called ‘de-confliction’, and you can de-conflict by either space or time.
Once you have decided which method to use, you must work out the precise effect you wish to have on the target. Too small, and the individual might get away; too large and you risk casualties to your own side, or to civilians. Furthermore, if you create more mayhem than you need to, you are inevitably firing up the jihadists and creating more Taliban – which was not in line with the overall mission. This part is called the weapon-to-target match, and is ideally done before you select a platform to use, but inevitably you have to strike a balance between the available resources, the need for speed and the tactical situation.
The responsibility of dealing in extreme violence, while in close proximity to friend and foe, is like little else in life. Inevitably it draws those whose responsibility it is together as a tight team. Some resent this – rank structures become informal, standards of dress may relax – but in my experience, in any unit the joint fires guys are usually the last to bed at night and first up in the morning. They become specialists in all forms of radio and data communication equipment, without which no one leaves camp. They become expert battlespace managers; always aware of their precise location on the ground, listening for other engagements on radio systems, forewarning of any asset shortage. They spend endless hours staring at a TV screen watching for ‘pattern of life’ in a Predator drone feed, while simultaneously submitting requests for support for future operations. And yet the moment the enemy is sighted or attacks the patrol or the patrol base itself, the withdrawal and safety of the group under attack largely depends upon the ability of the joint fires guy to bring down fire and end the engagement.
Within these teams, one soldier might be a Joint Terminal Air Controller (JTAC); another might be a mortar fire control; another might be a specialist with radio equipment. This team should be commanded by a junior officer who is qualified in each of these roles. He is the interface between the ground commander and the joint fires community, and it is his responsibility to produce the required effect on the ground, however he chooses to do it. He ultimately assumes responsibility for both the successes and the failures. Many, many things can go wrong; he manages the risk. While a ground commander gives ultimate authority to engage, when it goes wrong it is clear where culpability lies.
The battery commander’s job is to select his FSTs and manage them. As an FST Commander you do not have control over who you select; soldiers can, however, ask to be in your team. My team in the summer of 2010 was to be
built around three of us; myself, Corporal Shaun Barrowcliff and Lance Bombardier Mark Chandler.
Shaun, known as Baz, was a junior NCO from the Queen’s Royal Lancers who had re-roled as a JTAC. He was the same age as me, northern, and nowhere near as stupid as he would pretend to be. He had a family at home – with a wife and newborn child – and was a veteran of the Iraq War. He was meticulous in his approach to his soldiering, but particularly to his air and aviation control. This was to be his primary role. He was charged with ensuring that every weapon delivered from the air was safe, and that those airframes operating above us were safe as well. He had to seamlessly manage and understand the capabilities of Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, and the array of fast-air jets that were available for coalition operations in Afghanistan at the time. He had to de-conflict by time and space on the move, usually in contact with the enemy, as well as identifying targets and, if required, lighting those targets for the airframes to see using handheld equipment. He had a sense of humour that was drier than an Afghan’s flip-flop, but he was rigidly professional in all that he did and kept me well and truly on my toes.
Mark Chandler – known as Bing – was a junior NCO from my D Battery. I wanted him to be my Ack – my closest assistant, with me every step I took – and it was my luck that he had asked to be in my team. He was older than me and Baz, but was just one of life’s really good blokes. He had courage and resilience in spades, and I had been impressed with him throughout the process of pre-deployment training. He was tough without showing it, he was humble; he was perfect for me. Mark was a trained specialist in the terminal control of artillery fire, and he was also qualified to control attack helicopters in a close-combat role.
We Were Warriors Page 10