‘You think this is all a laugh, don’t you?’ I said to him; Kush translated.
‘He’s Taliban,’ Kush told me.
I told the man of my recent visit to Bing’s parents and how devastated they were. He continued to smile at me. He either didn’t understand, or he did, and was winding me up.
‘In another time, in another place, I’d just kill you,’ I said, matter-of-factly. ‘Kush wouldn’t help you. I’d say you grabbed my weapon – self-defence. Easy.’
His laughter dried up and his mood changed.
‘But I thought this was all a game to you, right?’ I said.
He started talking again, and as Kush paused to translate, I spoke again.
‘Any more from this house and I will come back and see you on my own. You understand that?’ I said.
‘Yeah, we be friends, Johnny. We be friends!’
He knew some English, and he knew my name. This was no ten-dollar Taliban; he had noticed what the lads were calling me and copied them.
‘No, we won’t be fucking friends, I assure you,’ I told him.
The interpreter winked at me and we turned and left without saying any more. Outside, the section commander asked if everything was all right; I gave no hint of our conversation.
We patrolled back to the PB without incident.
After a contact about a month later, about 2km to the south of this compound, Baz and I were cleaning our weapons and having a smoke at the back of our tent when there was a commotion at the back gate. An injured fighter had been shot in the arse and wanted treatment. We took him in, as we always did, and I wandered over to the medical centre – a shipping container – to see what was going on. The Afghan male was lying on his front, with the doc treating a wound in his arse cheek. I was surprised when the enemy fighter looked up at me and said, ‘Johnny! Johnny! My friend Johnny!’ It was the very same bloke.
‘Make sure you check him for gun residue,’ I said to the doc, who by now was looking very surprised.
I turned around and left them to it. What a fucked up war this was.
25
The company commander who deployed initially with the theatre reserve battalion was replaced after just three weeks – I believe he had another posting to fulfil elsewhere. Either way he was a real loss, and I was pretty devastated to see him go. We worked like clockwork together and had started to achieve some tangible results. We spent his three weeks patrolling hard, day after day, in an effort to reassert ISAF dominance in the area. When he left he was replaced with someone not quite up to his capabilities, who became my fourth company commander in five months.
At that stage it became clear that myself and the senior NCOs in the company, under the guidance of the company sergeant major, were going to have to dictate battle tempo for the new chap, who wanted time to ‘bed-in’ that simply was not available.
Almost every single patrol came under contact that would require some sort of intervention from Baz or me. It was a busy time, and the days generally blurred into one. The moments that particularly stick in my mind are inevitably those in which I played a slightly more prominent role, but it would be wrong to say I was central to our efforts.
One patrol stands out as being particularly bizarre. Baz and I were part of an assault group that was attacking an enemy position from a flank. As we were moving into position we passed a chicken coop. With a loud crack, a round bisected me and Baz, hitting a chicken at our feet, which squawked in a flurry of feathers and keeled over. Baz found it hilarious. Anyway, later in this patrol we came under contact again.
Contacts can be all bullets, sweat and adrenalin. They can also be long, drawn-out affairs with sporadic fire over several hours, at which point they become more akin to a game of chess as both the hunters and the hunted try and locate each other. There can be time for a cigarette; there can be time to get out a small computer and download a feed from a jet in the sky that enables me to have a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield.
This particular patrol was certainly one of the latter type. Baz and I were minding our own business in a bit of cover by a compound, waiting for a jet to come on station to engage the enemy position. All of a sudden, an insurgent popped up about 70m in front of me, firing an AK47 over the side of a compound towards another part of my split patrol, at a right angle to my position.
It was a gift. I slipped my safety off, raised my weapon and fired single shots at the back of his head. To my dismay he did not drop. Instead he looked confused for a second, then started turning around to engage me. I then fired three more shots at his body and somehow missed again! I was furious. Baz and I quickly shuffled backwards around the other side of the compound, out of his sight.
Baz was laughing so hard he could barely speak; I was embarrassed and humiliated.
Eventually the jet came on station, and my memory of the incident stops there, I think because I was too busy having a proper childish strop with myself.
When I got back to the patrol base I immediately went out to the HLS, pinned a handmade target to the HESCO bastion, paced out 25m and started practising my shot. It would never have passed UK standards (I was range staff qualified) but it enabled me to spend an hour sorting out my weapon sight. I had badly knocked it, so that rounds were completely missing the target. This gave me a bit of a shot across the bows in terms of equipment husbandry, and I spent the rest of that day stripping, cleaning and reassembling everything, from my radios to my magazines. It was embarrassing, but I had learnt another lesson and got away with it.
Amongst the enemy I had some sympathy for the moderates, who would pick up an AK47 and engage a patrol base for $20. They believed the screeching sermons and the promise of a better life that was to be had in the dusty desert of southern Afghanistan; more importantly, they needed the cash. The mullahs were a different matter, preaching their rubbish not because they believed in it, but because they wanted to keep their people oppressed and in their control. And then there were the enforcers; the local warlords. They spent the majority of their time going around the population cutting off hands and abusing the children of families they deemed to be assisting ISAF. They claimed a deep affiliation to their jihadist cause, but usually only when someone was watching. Almost all the warlords I had encountered during my 2008–09 tour had some sort of pornography and Western music on their phones, plus videos of themselves getting pissed up together somewhere in the Middle East. They, as ever, actually believed in nothing at all beyond themselves.
In early August 2010, I was holed up in a compound for four days as we provided flank protection for some engineers who were building a new patrol base along the banks of the NEB Canal, about twelve kilometres from PB Khaamar. We were under sustained attack for a good proportion of the time we were there; the rest of the time we were all on guard anyway. It wasn’t much fun, although the compound did have a well that we could wash in.
I remember after one particularly heavy engagement onto the compound, we received intelligence that the fighters in the area were having a prayer at last light before planning to overrun us that evening and ‘slaughter all the infidels’. This was standard banter.
While on watch as the sun went down, a sniper on the roof called for me to come and take a look at what he could see. I crawled up and along the roof and lay next to him, looking down his sights. To my astonishment, we could see two men standing in front of about twenty others, clearly leading a service of prayer.
Without wanting to leap to the obvious conclusion, I rushed back down and collected a piece of equipment that essentially enabled me to see this target more clearly. It used thermal imaging, and allowed me to identify the distance and actually record on video what I could see.
With this better sight, I could clearly see that the two taking the service were armed with AK47s. Some of the others seemed to have them on their backs, but I could not identify them so easily. Some did, and some didn’t.
This particular target was no doubt going to be hard to eng
age. I needed a very low collateral weapon that could have pinpoint accuracy, which was also silent so as not to spook the gathering – an airframe of some description might do that.
Fortunately, at the time the British Army had in its arsenal a now de-classified weapons system called Exactor. It was used rarely, had been designed in Israel, and was extraordinarily effective at what it did. Its missiles were ground-launched, manoeuvrable while airborne, and had an extremely small explosive charge. I was trained and qualified in its control, and I selected it as the weapon for this engagement. It also had a camera in its nose, so you could see the guy just before he got hit.
I had to move fast – this gathering was not going to last forever. But striking this group of Taliban in what was – given their brazen nature – quite clearly their ‘safe place’, with this degree of accuracy, was going to have a serious effect on their morale, and consequently their desire to attack our compound that night.
It was an extremely technical engagement which I will not go into, but I cleared the airspace and authorized the release of the weapon as I observed the target. On my imaging device, I recorded the missile going directly into the chest of one of the mullahs, and the rest of the group running away, indicating low collateral damage. The sniper with me (they are odd at the best of times) seemed disproportionately impressed!
26
By now we had initiated a much more targeted patrols plan that involved multiple patrols moving in different areas, in an attempt to channel and flush out enemy fighters into a dry wadi just north of the Jungle. It was hideously exposed for over 700m at its widest point – there was nothing there, just baked earth. I would have a joint fires plan ready to go, and as soon as the fighters were squeezed into the wadi, I could engage them at will. Here they had no cover and no civilians to hide behind. This more aggressive approach started to have significant success.
In mid-August, I was patrolling with a section just south of one of our satellite patrol bases, probing the Jungle in an attempt to squeeze some fighters into the wadi. Suddenly, RPGs whistled overhead and we came under small-arms fire. We began a controlled fighting withdrawal back to a main track that we had just left. From there we could patrol in an orderly fashion back to base, under the watchful eyes of the PB.
We were peeling one at a time back up the track, still under fire. I was running past the other members, looking for a place to break left or right, when I heard that fateful call come up the line behind me.
‘Boss, boss, man down, man down.’
I spun around, and heard the section commander call for us to go firm. I made my way back along the now stationary patrol. The call had come immediately after an RPG had detonated behind me. There was silence – no screaming. My blood felt chilly despite the forty-degree heat; I could feel the colour draining from my face as I prepared myself for the human mess I was about to encounter.
I was pleasantly surprised to see just one man on the floor, being spoken to calmly by the patrol commander. It was the company sergeant major, who had come along on the patrol for a ‘treat’. His fingers were clasped onto the right-hand side of his neck, a fair amount of blood welling from underneath them.
The sometimes tricky relationship between senior rankers and junior officers has always been one of great amusement to both groups. I had a strong relationship with this company sergeant major. I thought he was a good fighting man who enjoyed experiencing all that the frontline operations had to offer. He clearly loathed me for my commission, my education and because I was from the south of England, but underneath he seemed to have a grudging respect. We had some fairly strong banter in camp, particularly after the ‘disco legs’ incident on the walls of PB Khaamar that Sunday morning.
The company sergeant major was taking his injury in good spirits. The medic pushed past me and started ripping open her pack and digging out the trusty British Army first field dressing. As soon as an injury was reported I would warn on my fires net that we may require the MERT. This was one of the important jobs on patrol, so obviously when I could, I left it to Baz! When someone has suffered a catastrophic injury and time is of the essence, we needed to clear the airspace and identify, mark and secure a landing site (possibly using attack helicopters to suppress enemy positions).
The medic called me over.
‘Boss, we’ve got a tricky one here,’ she said, and showed me the wound. Essentially a fragment from an RPG had taken off a fleshy part of the company sergeant major’s neck. The wound was bleeding, but it wasn’t the catastrophic bleed that one would reasonably expect. I soaked up the blood in the dressing, and each time, before the blood obscured my vision, I could clearly see his carotid artery still intact, pulsing away, with a small scratch on it.
The medic told me that in her mind this was a Category A wound, requiring the MERT. If the sergeant major so much as coughed too vigorously, that carotid artery might split, and he would bleed out within a couple of minutes. The trouble with this scenario was that we were still dealing with sporadic fire and had only just about escaped the clutches of a clearly pre-prepared ambush, and this meant it was too dangerous to conduct a helicopter extraction unless the casualty was actually dying.
I assessed the options with the patrol commander and my battery commander on my radio, and we got the MERT airborne from Camp Bastion with one of the emergency Apaches.
But Baz was clear, and eventually so was I, that we could not land the MERT into a hot HLS if the casualty was not in immediate danger of death, which strictly speaking he was not. The area was riddled with the enemy, but I contended that as our PB was due west of where we currently were, we might be able to extract north, quietly, handrailing the wadi. We would then have to cross the wadi ourselves before linking up with some armoured vehicles on a main road to transport the company sergeant major back to PB Khaamar. The rest of us would walk back.
Firstly, I had to stop the contact. I couldn’t see the enemy, but I needed them to back off and give us some space and time to get this right. I ordered two rounds of 105mm high explosive into a field I could see, just next to the enemy position. We remained firm and listened for enemy movement. They had either left, or were now sufficiently put off from following us.
I told the sergeant major the plan. He was slightly unaware of the precariousness of his position, as he could not directly see his own wound. The medic told me that if we came under contact on the way back, she was seriously worried about him reacting in a way that would burst his artery.
The company sergeant major started arguing the toss with the section commander and the medic, saying he was fine and didn’t need special treatment. The section commander was one of his blokes and revered him – he wasn’t going to disagree. I intervened and told the sergeant major that we were sticking to the plan I’d outlined and that was that. I was going to make his weapon safe (unload followed by a load, to remove a round from the chamber) so that he could not use it, and he was going to walk next to me the entire way back to the road, as a walking casualty. There, he was going to be met by a vehicle and taken back to PB Khaamar.
‘You can hold my hand if you feel you need to,’ I finished.
With that, we started moving out. We patrolled north at a painstakingly slow pace. It’s tougher than it sounds to walk slowly when you feel you are being hunted, but the HE seemed to have got the message across for now.
As we came to the top of the large north–south running wadi, it was clear that we would have to cross some open ground before turning due south and linking up with the patrol that had pushed out in armoured vehicles from the main PB. It was the same wadi we had been pushing the Taliban into to try and trap them, and the irony was not lost on me.
The first three British soldiers and the medic ran across the open ground at the top end of the wadi to secure the far side. Baz shuffled over on his own and came under contact. The ANA, in their usual fashion, legged it across the gap through the fire. How none of them got hit I had no idea.
That left myself and the sergeant major on the eastern side of the wadi by ourselves. We had a bit of a laugh as to what we were going to do now. The fire was not intense but sporadic, and the whip-crack was pretty loud, so they were reasonably accurate today.
Our options were limited. We could wait for some sort of joint fires platform that I knew Baz would now be requesting on his net; or I could launch some more HE into the bottom of the wadi. But I could not see the target area clearly, and at the southern end there were definitely family dwellings.
The sergeant major wanted to go for it; he was becoming impatient with a desperately slow patrol which, even before contact, he’d been finding tedious in the extreme. I remember at that moment thinking that impatience out here leads to mistakes, and someone getting shot. But he wanted to get moving, and gave me a wry smile with a little wink, implying that I would be a bit of a wimp if we didn’t go now.
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘but you cannot run. If that thing splits, you really have got something to worry about.’
We slowly walked out into the open ground, and I grabbed his webbing with my left hand to stop him running. This was so that I could engage with my right-handed weapon, but as I remarked to the sergeant major at the time, it also meant that any rounds coming in our direction would strike him before they struck me.
We came under almost immediate contact. I returned fire in the direction of the firing point, although I could not identify it straight away. The remainder of the patrol engaged from their covered position and we slowly walked the seventy or so metres across the open ground, waiting to be shot.
I was extremely frightened, while the sergeant major clearly thought it was a laugh. To this day, I remember vividly the look on his face as he turned towards me with that crooked smile that had been punched a few times in his youth and said, ‘You can run if you want, sir.’
‘Fuck off, Sergeant Major,’ I replied.
My entirely false bravado made me feel better, and eventually we reached the other side. It was a very odd experience, not running when one is under contact. I don’t think I had done it before and certainly haven’t since. I could feel the fear driving through my veins, urging my muscles to run. Walking required discipline and a courage I thought I had lost after Bing’s death.
We Were Warriors Page 19