The Royal Welch had just gone through a challenging winter, but the pace of operations was clearly changing as the season started to warm. TiCs were a twice or thrice daily occurrence, and with this uptick came the inevitable casualty list.
Set on a piece of land commandeered from the local population, the patrol base was essentially a modern fort built using blocks of HESCO bastion, or HESCO for short. A HESCO block is a wire cage lined with a brown felt bag that in turn is filled with sand and rocks. These blocks can be fixed together vertically and horizontally to create a perimeter wall around a base. They can also be stacked up into watchtowers and sentry positions. They are an ingenious invention that allowed ISAF forces to build a PB in the best tactical location, rather than making do with a prebuilt structure.
PB Khaamar had separate areas for accommodation, cooking and washing. Toilet seats were cut out of plywood, below which one could hang a bag. The bag was then thrown into the nearby ‘burns pit’, which was subsequently burnt once a day. The shower block was a 9 x 9 military tent into which you took a bag of water, hung it over a strut and then stood under it. It was important to have clear lines of delineation between these various activities to stave off the very clear threat of diarrhoea and vomiting, which could wipe out a company quite easily. While there were no central cooking facilities to speak of, it was good practice to ensure we ate together in the cooking area, to avoid the risk of both fire to the tents and decomposing food lying around. All very basic stuff that ensured good personal hygiene – and by extension operational effectiveness – could be maintained for long periods of time in an austere environment.
Baz, Mark and I started our familiarization patrols, and over the course of a week we accompanied the company commander to every corner of our area of operations (AO) to get a feel for the place. Our AO was almost triangular in shape and surrounded 31 West, with the main feature being the Nahr-e Bughra (NEB) Canal running along the northern edge. Built in the sixties by the Americans, the NEB Canal irrigated large parts of the Nad-e Ali district. There were three main roads dominating the three outer edges of the triangle, and it was along each of these three main routes that we had a patrol base, the main one (Khaamar) being on the western edge. The further one moved from these routes, the more dangerous things got. Indeed, despite Op Moshtarak, UK forces were yet to penetrate the centre of the triangle and reach the heart of 31 West. It was so riddled with enemy that it was known as the Jungle.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to commanding a fire support team. Some like to remain in the operations room, where they can fully assess the big picture and make decisions on weapon-to-target matches, de-confliction between the various air spaces and conduct the battle on the radio in a relatively calm environment. Some prefer to go out in the field. My primary role was to save coalition life and – if required – to kill the enemy with overwhelming firepower as quickly as possible. Being closest to the violence that I was imposing also meant I did not take any silly risks with weapon effects, and it gave me a quick eye-to-eye with the enemy to check my weapon-to-target match without relying on other people. I felt this could be best achieved by being on every patrol that might come into contact with the enemy.
This meant being on every single patrol from PB Khaamar.
There was a nasty air around theatre at the time concerning the use of joint fires. It was shit on the ground trying to coordinate fires – bloody scary too at times – while armchair Ops room staff down the other end of the radio were telling you what you could and could not do. I wanted the soldiers around me to have confidence in what they were doing, know we would never lose an engagement, could stay out longer, be bolder and fight harder while someone else (me) took care of all those awkward questions from the higher-ups.
The most enormous pressure was being put on our young field commanders and soldiers. Their actions were subject to an almost constant overwatch and second guessing – usually by someone who had yet to experience their first proper gun-fight. The rules of engagement were there to protect our troops as much as anything else, but commanders became obsessed with analysing secondary and tertiary effects of almost every engagement. This had the effect of both paralysing ground troops and commanders, and bringing some friction to the relationship between those of us on the ground and those commanding from PBs. In close contact with the enemy, this could prove fatal.
I did not want a situation to materialize where British soldiers in my area of operations were not giving themselves the best chance of success because they were perplexed by the rules of engagement, or restricted their use of joint fires for fear of getting it wrong. By now, I knew both of these two subjects inside out, and I was pleased to be able to deploy my knowledge on the ground. It was unfair to place this overwhelming strategic pressure on our Junior NCOs just to please the Americans and atone for previous tours by painting ourselves as whiter than white.
A degree of constraint was understandable. As ever though, it went too far. There had been escalating civilian casualties in the war, and admittedly some erroneous use of firepower from some. As a result, from 2009 onwards there were significant efforts to address the British Army’s use of heavier firepower. General Stanley McChrystal – a legend of the Iraq campaign – took over ISAF in-country and introduced the term ‘courageous restraint’. The concept was good – should I, could I, must I engage this target, with the emphasis on the last one. This, however, is a very easy process while sat in a headquarters watching the action unfold on TV; it is a great deal harder to assess what ‘must’ be done if it is you that is involved in the mortal combat.
But given General Stan’s stature and reputation, British commanders – seemingly unable to think for themselves and now heavily deferent to the Americans after our early exit from Iraq – were falling over themselves to be the one who instigated his directive to the strictest degree. If I could use my knowledge and skill to ensure my NCOs could act unconstrained by a chain of command with one eye on promotion, and one eye on the General, then I would.
Bing, Baz and I would operate as a bolt-on to every patrol that went out in the 31 West AO. We worked as a three – reluctant to go out without one part of the team. If we were operating from one of the other satellite patrol bases, we would always work with our team member there. The actual rank of the patrol commander I was supporting varied according to the size of the unit that I was accompanying. Sometimes it would be a corporal, sometimes a sergeant and sometimes the company commander himself.
The end of our familiarization of the area of operations also marked the end of the tour for the Royal Welch, who were replaced in Nad-e Ali by 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, or 1 LANCS.
Following the troop changeover, Mark, Baz and I dropped into some semblance of a routine as we accompanied all of the changeover patrols, themselves getting familiar with the area. The alarm would go off at 2.30 a.m. and I would stumble in my pants to the end of the tent and get the stove fired up for some coffee. I would sit there and have a cigarette in the pitch dark.
The cigarettes were bloody awful. Just before we left Camp Bastion, the public health team flew over from the UK and for some unfathomable reason, decided that the local cigarettes that were being sold to UK soldiers inside the camp were not fit for our consumption. The rumour was that they contained human faeces. My team ran down to the bazaar and bought enough to get us through the first few months before they were collectively burned.
After years of early starts, my body had developed a routine of going for a shit first thing. The cigarette helped in this process and ensured that when I was at the gate going out on patrol in about an hour’s time and I needed the loo, I could be sure it was nerves and not a genuine need. All good personal admin that had to be squared away.
Mark would come and join me as I sat there in the darkness, watching the flames lick around the pot we used to boil water. Baz was always last up, and usually in a bad mood. We would say nothing as we drank coff
ee and tried to waken from another very short night’s sleep, before eventually giving in and getting dressed in our battle fatigues. We had to wash our clothes by hand so we wore them for a three-day period, unless they had too much mud or blood on them. After a patrol they would be hung over the guy ropes on the tent so as not to create a hygiene problem inside, and putting them on for the second and third days sometimes felt like trying to get into a crisp packet.
All the preparation was done the night before. My webbing and my helmet were stowed at the end of my camp cot; my rifle within arm’s reach, loaded but not made ready. I would then sit around before bed with Bing and Baz, and brief them on the patrol commander’s orders; I usually attended his briefing on my own. A set of orders is essentially a speech given by the patrol commander to tell his men what is going on, or at least what he plans to go on, during his patrol the following day. From inexperienced commanders, ‘orders’ can be a truly painful process. I always went to make sure I didn’t miss anything vital, but I was not prepared to put Baz and Bing through them on a regular basis.
After having fired up the lungs with a cigarette and the brains with a coffee, I emptied the bowels and made sure our radio was working with a quick comms check to some sleepy radio operator in Camp Bastion. We would then make our way over to the back gate as a threesome, where we would meet the particular patrol we were supporting that morning. It was always still dark. And miserable.
This routine was the same almost every single day during the tour. For seven months.
15
General, ground-dominating patrolling was a twice-daily activity. Longer, more adventurous, more complex and larger patrols as a two-platoon or company group were conducted perhaps twice weekly. Our first one of these was about one week into 1 LANCS’s deployment, some time in early May 2010. This time it was a ‘company sweep’ into the Jungle, which local intelligence had told us was not just riddled with Taliban but also provided shelter for some of their key commanders, who were coordinating the laying of IEDs on the main route in and out of our PB Khaamar. The Taliban often surged out of this area as well; to intimidate and harass the local population, to spread fear and to collect money for so-called protection. There was evidence they were trying to impose sharia law on the locals. They also made a practice of hiding their weapons in various innocent civilians’ compounds, so that if we were ever to do a helicopter assault into the Jungle it would be difficult to find the evidence required to arrest them. The idea that some people back home seemed to hold – that the Taliban were a rag-tag bunch of misunderstood freedom fighters – was bullshit.
Our job as a ground-holding unit was to spread Afghan government control into these civilian areas, in order to give time and space for some sort of peace or political agreement to take place. It would be fair to say that we never expected to hold the terrain we ventured into, but merely to create an opportunity for the Afghan National Army – who accompanied us on every patrol – to engage with the local population. The hope was that some kind of intelligence or assistance would be given to the ANA if, and it was a big if, the locals wanted to stop being controlled by the Taliban.
There was another reason we went into the Jungle daily, rather than stay in the PB and let the ANA go out alone and hope for the best. The truth was that at PB Khaamar, the enemy really were at the gates, and if we did not make the effort to keep them from our door with regular patrolling, we would be setting ourselves up for disaster.
On that dark May morning, on our first serious company-level patrol, we pushed south and east of our PB, leaving it manned by the doctor, the company 2IC and a handful of men in the watchtowers.
We were on foot, moving in a standard formation: two platoons forward, one back and the company command group in the centre. The ground was a series of fields separated by irrigation ditches and dirt tracks. The area had been irrigated by the Americans in the late seventies as part of a huge infrastructure project in the region – another external attempt to get the country on its feet. The American engineers had laid tracks out in blocks about 350m apart and criss-crossed at ninety degrees by tracks running the other way, which neatly divided the area into rectangles. This layout provided convenient pause-points as patrols progressed across the fields, giving us a chance to draw breath, and consider our next move.
There were little groups of dwellings spaced 500–1,000m apart along these paths. One could easily use these as ‘hand-off’ points for navigation, and also head for them if no other cover presented itself. Inevitably the IED risk was high, so it was best to avoid obvious crossing points on tracks and between fields. Generally, the irrigation ditches were good paths of navigation – unlikely to be mined and providing a bit of cover if the patrol came under fire.
The first two platoons had pushed east over a north–south running track, and the company commander’s group – which included me, Mark and Baz – were pausing. I’d just looked down to see where I was going to place my knee when we came under sustained and close small-arms fire.
The first thing you notice is the sound, as bullets split the air around your ears. What you hear is not a ‘bang’ as such, but a ‘crack’. The bangs come when you and your men start firing back.
This was my first experience of close-quarter combat. I grew disturbingly familiar with it after a while, but I was certainly not at that point yet.
I immediately returned fire at the property where the shots had come from, directly into the window.
‘Fucking hell, Johnny, careful, we have troops over there,’ the company commander said in a panicky voice.
I saw the flash of a muzzle.
‘That’s the fucking firing point!’ I shouted back at him. ‘Just there. Baz, that window on the far right of that compound.’
‘Roger, boss,’ said Baz. ‘I’ll send a contact report and request air.’
Baz and I ducked into the ditch and started on our respective jobs. I gave a ‘Contact. Wait-out’ on my radio too, so that I had first shout on any joint fires asset in the area (assuming there were other patrols out who might be competing with me for assets). I could see Bing on the other side of Baz, emptying his rifle into the window that had engaged us. The enemy position stopped firing. Either one of us had killed the firer in that particular window, or the enemy’s attention had switched from our position to one of the forward platoons.
We were in a very shallow irrigation ditch. The company commander started talking into his radio, asking for a situational report (SITREP) from one of his forward platoon commanders. This always annoyed me. The blokes would send a SITREP as soon as they could; first they had to win the firefight. Best let them get on with it. I didn’t say anything.
We moved location only slightly, to get into cover from the compound that had engaged us. By now I had stopped firing my weapon and was talking on the radio handset to the gun line.
The company commander asked me for some 105mm smoke shells to screen our withdrawal. Mark retreated into the ditch with us, and we independently ascertained our own position before identifying exactly where we wanted the smoke to fall. We took account of the wind, the spread of the guns that we would be using some 12km away, and the nature of the ground into which these rounds would fall (wooded, in this case). This process took about fifteen seconds.
Mark and I breathed in relief as the shells landed, but the effect was not what we were hoping for. The wind was almost non-existent, and a good smoke screen between the enemy and our forward platoon did not build up. I wanted to switch to high explosive (HE) and shift the point of impact closer to the compound from where the fire continued to pour. We had still not been allocated any air support, and I wanted to end this firefight as quickly as possible before someone got shot.
Finally, I could hear Baz chatting away to an American B-1 bomber that we had been allocated, giving the pilot our current SITREP. I informed the company commander that I now had a jet on station as well. The company commander paused for a moment, and then decided that
he wanted to show that he was doing what he had been taught in his extensive pre-deployment lessons, and ‘escalating force correctly’, before letting me loose with some HE. He wanted a ‘show of force’ from the B-1 bomber, which was now two minutes from our location.
A ‘show of force’ is essentially an effort to frighten the enemy into submission with a low, loud and fast fly-by from a jet directly over their position. In some cases, this had proved to be successful, but by now the Taliban were beginning to get the hang of it. The jet did not drop during this process, but it was seen as a good ‘non kinetic’ effect to use. I was at pains to explain to the company commander that a B-1 was not the optimum airframe to make a show of force with. It was, generally speaking, a slow flying, high altitude stealth bomber that was unlikely to have the effect we wanted. He insisted that he wanted the B-1.
Almost simultaneously, an Apache crackled into my secondary handset, which was listening in to a different radio frequency. The pilot requested an update and informed me he was available for work. Bing was next to me by now, and I gave him the handset for the gun line and started speaking to the Apache pilot to confirm his position. At the same time, I told my company commander that I had an Apache available for use. Baz was delivering a 9-liner to the B-1 Bomber.
(Commands are given in force-wide conventions, usually in lines to ensure information does not get missed, and in conformity between nations. Combat attack helicopters can be controlled using a five-line brief; fast-air jets by a nine-line brief. Guns are given fire control orders in a broadly similar way. Each line contains vital information, such as the position of the observer, the position of the enemy, a weapons-to-target match and other details.)
The company commander still wanted to hold off the Apache and use a show of force by the B-1 bomber. I told him that my formal advice was that this was the wrong option and as soon as the Apache was overhead, the enemy fire would most probably stop before it engaged. He overruled me.
We Were Warriors Page 12