Ten days after the IED incident Baz returned to PB Khaamar after his R&R. He had been rested, but I could tell something in him had changed, and he had not wanted to come back.
On his first full day back we recommenced patrolling together, with a company operation pushing south and east to secure the eastern side of Shawaal, only a couple of kilometres from PB Khaamar, and seemingly for the umpteenth time. It had to be an ongoing operation, as we were never going to hold the ground and insurgents would simply melt back into Shawaal, and continue to harass us in PB Khaamar.
The patrol itself was uneventful – as usual when there were lots of us out the enemy didn’t really fancy it – until we were returning up the main road, a large track beside a river. Suddenly the company commander’s tactical group (of which I was a part) were ambushed. We dropped to the ground.
‘Baz! Can you see where the fire is coming from?’ I shouted in a mild panic. It seemed a little close for comfort.
‘It’s that fucking compound right there, boss. This one right here!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want to do?’
I looked over, seeing a compound about 25m away across the river which seemed to be firing at our southern call sign. I thought that if the enemy just popped their heads over the other wall of the house, which was facing us, they would have seen me, Baz, the medic, the company signaller and company commander in the prone position in the middle of the track without any cover between us and them. Easy targets.
Suddenly I felt someone backing into me, like the wife does when she is cold in bed. It was the company commander.
I quietly asked him what the fuck he was doing. I don’t think he heard me. I told him that I thought the fire might be coming from the compound just in front of us, and that if the enemy looked over the wall we would all be dead.
There were two or three other soldiers with us – the company signaller and a couple of others I cannot recall.
‘Lads, we need to get in hard against that compound wall and have a look inside,’ I said.
‘Baz, we need to get in there, mate,’ I shouted at him.
‘I know, I know,’ he replied.
‘Let’s go!’ I said and shuffled to my feet, running forward towards the waist-high river.
I moved through the river just to our front, up the other bank, and stacked-up against the wall just down from what appeared to be the main doorway. Fully expecting to encounter armed enemy, I realized I did not have any frag grenades, so I pulled out a smoke. I told Baz to cover to the rear.
That’s when I glanced at Baz, and there was a comedy moment when we realized that we were the only two who had crossed the river. The others members of the company commander’s group had moved backwards into the ditch, and were now watching us.
A smoke was going to be useless – it would confuse me as much as them. I chucked it back in my webbing and fumbled to do up my strap with my left hand.
The noise I was hearing was either rounds hitting this compound on the other side, or firing from inside the compound. I could not work it out. There was nothing else for it. I quietly slipped my safety catch off and rested my finger on the trigger.
Tight to the wall I peeled around the doorway, weapon on automatic.
A little pair of brown eyes looked up at me, and then another. I can picture them now staring at me over the barrel of my rifle. Two children – a girl and a boy, their eyes so beautiful and dark I couldn’t make out their pupils. They were sheltering with their parents in this near corner of their compound.
Initially, I thought that the enemy had commandeered their compound and I crept around the door, weapon raised into the opposite corner, passing their linen hanging in their yard, gently flapping in the wind. It was a small and simple compound, and within a couple of seconds I realized what was going on.
‘It’s clear,’ I said quietly to Baz.
‘I think it’s the next one over,’ said Baz, confirming what I thought.
I called the family over to me and led them to a position outside where they would be better protected from any stray rounds.
‘Get in against the wall,’ I said in English, I’m not sure why; they would never have understood. Baz gestured to them to come over to him in the shade of a small tree that was against their compound wall.
The little girl started playing with the leaves. She picked one up and gave it to me. I smiled at her, took the leaf and then didn’t know what to do with it.
Looking back across the river, I could see the remainder of the company command group in the ditch. Baz was chatting away into his radio. The contact was beginning to die now.
‘They’ve given me an Apache,’ Baz said to me. I was unaware we had asked for one but Baz was very good; by now he just cracked on and let me know what was available. I was constantly computing in my head what I could do to bring the contact to a close. Options were limited, and the fire was not intense enough to warrant anything really. However, the Apache was returning to Camp Bastion after another operation and had a few minutes of fuel left. Baz brought the Apache into the overhead and the contact died completely. I asked the Apache to have a good look in the compound next over from us, and although he could see murder holes facing south onto one part of our patrol, he could not see any insurgents. He was running out of fuel and, content that we were not far from PB Khaamar, I cut him away and we all met back on the road and continued the move back to camp.
When I got back I wanted to be sure of what had just happened so I asked Baz what he had seen. He had not noticed the company commander backing into me, but he did notice that I had briefed up the entire group about getting inside that compound, and was pretty surprised to find it was just me and him who moved.
I went to see the company commander and we headed outside of the Ops room away from the men. I gently asked him if everything was OK. He immediately fronted up and didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. It was disappointing. We were not from the same unit, I did not know him particularly well, but I was not in any way denigrating him, and seek not to now. I hoped for a candid conversation in return. It did not come.
Later that week I was unsurprised to be asked to call Adam Wilson, who by now had moved into the battalion second-in-command post after his predecessor went home with an illness.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked, and I told him.
‘The view from here is that we need to deploy further forces in your AO to try and get to grips with the insurgency there,’ he said. ‘The task force commander has requested the theatre reserve battalion and they are flying in next week.’
‘Where will they go?’ I asked.
‘They will relieve your company, and your company will move back to FOB Shawqat for a rest before deploying further south for a deliberate operation in a fortnight or so.’
‘I think that’s fair. They’re a good group but it’s been tough,’ I said.
‘Do you think they’ve lost the will to fight?’ he asked.
‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ I replied, cautiously, with a very heavy heart.
‘Are your team OK to stay on, show the new company the ground and act as the continuity?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ I lied.
24
It was early August now, and Britain was enjoying a blissfully hot summer, complemented by one of our national sides making the usual early exit from a World Cup – football on this occasion. The temperature in southern Afghanistan was intolerable – the heat of the day was like a furnace as the sun baked the desert floor. Baz and I settled into a new patrols routine with the new troops, fresh in from Cyprus. Handover patrols were generally not conducted in contentious areas, and we had three or four days out of contact with the enemy.
Despite the heat, I worked hard in the PB to stay fit. I had heard many times how some injured soldiers had stayed alive far longer than they medically should have done because of their fitness. My smoking and appalling diet probably meant I would not ever fall into this bracket, but I thou
ght I should do everything I could to stack the cards in my favour.
On the welfare front, we now had an ‘e-bluey’ machine that could print out letters back in the UK and post them, cutting the postal delay down massively. I made sure I wrote to Felicity every day. Similarly, she could go to a website and write to me, and once a day the machine could receive a packet of data and download and print letters sent to theatre. We made plans for my return, when I’d be heading back to 29 Commando in Plymouth. I was going to be there for at least two years, and so for stability we would rent a small property about eight miles out of Plymouth, on the coast in a little village called Noss Mayo, Devon.
Noss was an idyllic place on the Yealm estuary, with a lovely pub overlooking the water. I had no doubt that when I got home, family life would be as perfect as anything I’d ever dreamed of as a boy. This made accepting the risks of operations ever harder. I wasn’t sure if the letters helped or hindered my operational capacity.
One morning that August I was sleeping in my bed. It was a Sunday. We were right at the end of our handover period between the troops and we took a day off. It was just coming up for eight o’clock, when all seems bright and clean yet not too hot, before the sun can fully erode the coolness that hangs in the air from the night. I was dozing – I had woken, but for the first time in a long time I had not actually got straight up. I was relaxed and content.
Suddenly, I was stirred by enemy fire very close to the edge of the camp. Some of it was going over, and some was slapping into the eastern walls that faced out towards the Jungle – where all our trouble came from.
I was surprised – something wasn’t right. It would require some real nerve from the enemy to attack the base in daylight, and from that side in particular, given the sparsity of cover available to them.
I sat up, fought my way out of my mosquito net and grabbed my weapon and webbing from the bottom of my bed. I always slept with a round in the chamber – as previously mentioned, a personal nightmare was waking up to a Talib at the end of my bed. This wasn’t a false fear; it had happened in another patrol base already that summer, with a rogue ANA soldier targeting the FST tent and killing three. In pants and flip-flops plus body armour, balancing my helmet on my head, I raced over to the back gate.
I jumped up on a step in the HESCO bastion and peered over the top of the wall. I could see the Taliban firing onto a group of our people who were attempting to mend a small footbridge immediately outside the patrol base’s back gate.
The company sergeant major appeared below me and asked if I could see any enemy. There were rounds coming into the PB, and I was loath to put my head above the wall to look again properly.
I had to force myself to do so. I had visions of that scene from countless war films where someone just looks over the trenches and immediately gets one straight in the grid. This was getting ridiculous. I had to get past this fear that was beginning to cripple me since Bing was killed, and stop thinking about getting shot like him. In that moment, on that compound wall, it was only my personal dignity and pride that made me look. Also, the knowledge that the company sergeant major would have most probably told everyone if I’d bottled it and the banter would have been intolerable.
I peered over the top, making myself as small as possible, and saw the enemy firing from a compound about 70m away from me. Rounds from his weapon were striking the patrol base – he was aiming at the blokes immediately below me. They in turn were frantically collecting their tools and trying to find some cover.
As I engaged him with quick single shots, straight into the window where I could see a muzzle flash, my legs were shaking so much I had to put nearly all of my weight onto the wall to still my weapon. I wondered what the fuck had become of the almost-fearless soldier I had once purported to be, when I now couldn’t even control my own limbs in contact.
‘Fucking get him, sir,’ the company sergeant major encouraged me. I didn’t say anything in return. I daren’t look at him and reveal my fear. He had been joined by another senior NCO from the new company, and as I ducked to change magazines, I heard them crack a joke about my ‘disco legs’.
After about forty seconds the team on the bridge made a run for it and re-entered the camp. The sangars had finally woken up by this point too, and were engaging into the compound with automatic 7.62 from their GPMGs. The excitement was over within perhaps a minute and a half, with, remarkably, no casualties.
I climbed down from the wall. Others had joined me further down the wall – perhaps about six of us were engaging in the end. Baz wasn’t one of them. I could see him emerge from our tent in his army-issue Lycra pants and flip-flops, stretching like an old man on holiday. It would take more than that to get him out of bed on a day off.
‘You all right, sir?’ the company sergeant major said to me in his strong Scouse accent. ‘Enjoyed that for a Sunday morning?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I lied, picking up my empty magazine from the HESCO and heading back to my tent. Inside my soul I felt like I was twelve years old again, lonely, nervous and child-like. My arm was shaking so much I struggled to unload my weapon.
I needed to sort myself out. This and the incident where I shit myself – what was going on? Something had changed in me since Bing’s death.
Baz went for a shower. I went to my bed space and sat down. Fear was beginning to take hold. Real fear – the sort that you feel is going to suffocate you, take your breath away. The sort you feel when you wake up in the night having a violent nightmare. It wasn’t passing as I’d hoped it would.
I put my running gear on and ran slowly around the compound for just under two hours in the now baking heat, until I almost passed out. I kept going, slowly plodding on while I thought about what had just happened. I wondered how this crippling fear had crept up on me, and started to feel angry. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it – I felt too ashamed. I needed to sort it for myself – within myself.
I finished my run in a better place than when I started it. Not literally – I was on the loo for quite some time with mild heat exhaustion – but once I had got past that I went to find the OC and told him we needed to do a clearance of the compound from which the enemy had engaged us that morning.
This 2 LANCS company had a brilliant commander, who understood what I understood. If we did not get out of the PB and on top of the situation, deal with an enemy that thought it was entirely reasonable to try and attack the base during daylight hours, and reassert our authority, which had started to wane under the previous company, we were going to struggle significantly.
As well as getting the theatre reserve battalion, we had kept the 22 SAS team, who were now billeted in PB Khaamar with us.
Our first target was to stop the individual who had attacked us that morning from either shooting PB Khaamar himself, or facilitating the Taliban using his compound.
The new company commander, the company sergeant major, the SAS team and myself chewed over a few options over a cup of tea. I wanted to sneak out at night and lace the place with Claymore mines, and as soon as we were engaged from that compound again, clack them off. This seemed like a good idea, but had too many downsides attached. We could not be sure there would be no civilians milling around the area at the time we wanted to detonate the Claymores. Also, planting the devices would be difficult given that the compound was used regularly, and any approach routes out of sight of the building were probably well guarded by IEDs.
In the end, we decided to put a patrol out to the compound that evening. We would approach using the main road that ran right past it, which was under the cover of the sangars from PB Khaamar. We would then have a chat with the owner, search his compound and see if we could persuade him to desist.
We headed out at about 4 p.m. that Sunday, placed a cordon around the area, and myself and a section commander – a good young lad – went with a new interpreter called Kush to have a look around the compound. The company commander was watching through a camera we had mounted in the PB
as part of our defences.
We knocked on the door, which was answered by a man in his forties. He seemed to live there alone, in what was a fairly simple compound with two rooms. The room facing the patrol base had two curtains, which I pulled back to reveal two neatly made murder holes cut into the structure of the compound wall. Through the murder holes you could directly engage our PB. There were AK47 shell cases on the floor. He clearly didn’t live there, and was as guilty as a puppy sat next to a pile of poo; or a Talib sat next to a pile of empty cases and a murder hole, if you like.
The section commander started to search the property, while I spoke to the company commander on the net to report our findings.
We then had a good look outside the property for concealed weapon caches, but had no joy. The man thought this was all a bit of a joke, and was laughing as he denied ever having even heard of the Taliban. I was getting a bit bored, and so when Kush and the man went back inside the compound, I followed him in.
Inside the compound it was considerably darker than it was outside. I couldn’t really see anything so I started heading back for the door. The man continued to snigger and smile at me.
‘Kush, ask him what’s so fucking funny,’ I said.
‘No funny, no funny,’ he started saying.
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