We Were Warriors

by Johnny Mercer

  ‘But the blokes want to come out,’ the SAS man said to me.

  ‘Of course the blokes want to come out with you. You’re a warrant officer in the SAS. Don’t be fucking stupid.’

  He disagreed with me, and told me he planned to hit another compound that night in the north of the AO. I had been to precisely that compound before; it was deserted and had been for some time. Whatever intelligence he had on it was wildly out of date.

  ‘I personally wouldn’t, but I’m just the fires guy,’ I said. ‘Speak to the OC’.

  That evening Baz came to find me in the Ops room.

  ‘Boss, can I have a word?’

  I assumed he had run out of porn or something, but instead he told me that the SAS sergeant major was waiting in our tent, demanding that Baz give him some joint fires kit so that he could ‘drop’ (some bombs) on his mission.

  I went over to the tent.

  ‘Everything OK, sergeant major?’ I asked.

  ‘I want to control the joint fires on this one, so I just want your lad to give me his 352 [radio].’

  ‘No, buddy, we do the fires for this company in this AO. If the remainder of your squadron come up, then that is a different matter; you guys crack on. But while you are working with the company, I’m afraid that is my team’s job.’

  He exploded.

  ‘You are starting to really piss me off, Johnny. I’m a fucking sergeant major in the British Army.’ He stepped towards me.

  I stood firm. ‘Calm down,’ I said, raising my hands, thinking the guy was going to lay me out. It was strange that he had got so cross, so quickly. ‘Whatever happens now you are not going to get any kit off me or control any fires in this AO. Let’s chat later,’ I said, conscious I did not want to have a scrap with the guy in front of Baz. Baz stood up from his bed.

  ‘Come on, let’s chat later,’ I said again. The sergeant major left.

  To be totally fair to the guy, later that day he came over to me in the Ops room and we went outside for an ‘Officer– senior NCO’ chat. He apologized, stated he was under pressure, and that he’d felt I was deliberately trying to wind him up.

  I promised him I wasn’t. I told him of my first encounter with his 2IC, that had got us off to such a bad start, and I apologized because I had regrettably let this cloud my judgement. I also said I had been in the AO for nearly six months now – I knew it very well, and I was not prepared to take the risks he was prepared to for so little reward, because I knew them better than him. He accepted that.

  We ended the conversation on good terms. A bizarre interlude in a bizarre war.

  31

  By September, we were beginning to get a bit more ‘freedom of movement’ across the AO. We could run logistics patrols to neighbouring patrol bases and even the ANA were beginning to get the hang of it, setting up a couple of shuras (meetings) in a nearby village for us to attend.

  One day, right at the end of September, a logistics patrol was transiting along the main road running next to the NEB Canal, on their way back to their home base to the north of our particular AO. I was in the Ops room watching them through the base cameras. They were passing a dangerous spot, where I had been struck by an IED earlier in the tour. I wanted to react fast if we needed to assist them. I had also conducted multiple strikes into the uninhabited compounds just to the south of that ‘vulnerable area’, or VA, so had the targets on record.

  Being hit by an IED is a strange experience. I was very lucky on all three occasions. I was caught in one that went off at the rear of the vehicle in front of me back in July. On another occasion the detonator went off under my vehicle but the main charge did not explode. On another occasion, it happened just behind me and I was not caught up in the blast.

  The blast is a deafening bang, followed by darkness as the mud and smoke falls around you. The next seconds are horrible, as you call out to those around you to see who has been hit, and what carnage you might have to get involved with. But, like I said, I was lucky, and mine were all when I was in one of the new armoured vehicle fleet. If I’d been in a Snatch Land Rover, particularly for the first one, I and the soldiers I was with would probably not have survived.

  I was watching this patrol both through a jet that Baz had on station, and through a balloon with a powerful camera on it that was now stationed on my PB. As the patrol went past the VA, they were caught in a complex ambush initiated by quite a small IED but followed up by accurate and sustained small-arms fire, suggesting pre-prepared enemy positions.

  I continued to monitor by listening to the radios and watching the feeds on two TV screens in front of me. The patrol commander requested some sort of smoke screen to the south of his position, to enable him to extract.

  One of the smoke rounds came in and malfunctioned, its white phosphorous capsules failing to eject. The round landed with some of the capsules still attached, seemingly onto the back of an enemy fighter in the prone position, engaging the patrol with a machine gun. It was complete luck; good in my case, bad in his.

  Somehow he survived the initial impact of the carrier shell, perhaps it had actually landed right next to him, but now he was burning alive. All I could see on my screen was this guy rolling around on the ground, burning to death.

  The Ops room was paralysed. The company commander looked at me.

  ‘Johnny . . . ?’

  I knew there was nothing I could do except hope the guy died quickly.

  ‘Fuck it, he’ll have to burn,’ I heard myself say to Baz, and we watched him die on the screen.

  The contact ended soon afterwards and we went back to the tent to have a brew and a smoke.

  I think Baz was a bit taken aback.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what we’ve become?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I lied, and scratched another mark on the board where we recorded our ‘kills’, trying not to think about it. ‘Don’t feel bad, mate; they choose the fight, not us.’

  I had come a long way; from the choirboy of my Strict Baptist youth to racking up my kills on a wooden board.

  I got my trainers on and went for a run.

  By late September, as the summer drew to a tired end, the fighting surge finally started to wane and we were coming under contact about once every other day. Initially I missed the daily contacts; time seemed to pass more slowly and I was getting bored.

  I found myself starting to do that most awful of things; counting the days until I could go home. I had well and truly had enough, and I could feel the sands shifting inside of me. Now I was going out of the gates hoping not to come under fire; not a good place to be mentally.

  I remember the first day that I did three patrols in a row without any contact with the enemy – they seemed to have had enough as well, and some would be heading back to the poppy fields. Winter was on its way, and so was the end of my tour.

  I wondered what it might be like to return to England, to my home, to Felicity. I wondered how I would adjust.

  32

  The day we left PB Khaamar was a hard one. It was tough to leave because it was where we had been with Bing. His bed space had remained empty, with no one taking his place.

  Baz and I had built a memorial to him. I’d had a brass plaque sent out and we mounted it on a concrete plinth surrounded by four 105mm carrier shells that had been brought in by the locals, trying to claim damages. We spent hours polishing up those shells with our small weapon-cleaning kits.

  It felt surreal to be back in Camp Bastion. It was a totally different environment and I hated it. I was very grateful to all those there who had supported us so well on the front line, but I couldn’t stand the place and all its formalities. Fortunately, I was not there for long, and before I knew it I was flying home.

  We flew into Teeside Airport in early October. After the heat and dryness of Afghanistan, the immediate cool of England in the autumn was invigorating. Felicity met me at the airport. She was wearing her beautiful blue dress again. I can remember my first glimpse of her as if i
t were yesterday.

  We got in the car and tried to talk about how she was. I did not want to talk about me, or explain anything that had gone on. I wanted to forget about it. I felt like I had landed on Mars.

  We stopped at the first services we came to where, once again, I ordered about £15 worth of McDonald’s. Again I had a couple of bites and couldn’t eat any more. We had a long drive ahead and I just wanted to get home and get out of my uniform. I knew it was going to be a difficult transition back to a normal life. I wanted to get on with it.

  Regimental post-tour shenanigans are always a drag. I found dealing with the return home from war a very personal struggle, and these collective social events did very little for me.

  Baz and I went our separate ways as soon as we touched down in the UK, as he was returning to the Queen’s Royal Lancers. I missed him painfully. During the waiting in Bastion and the journey home, we had spent hours in each other’s company without saying a word, just grunting to each other, trying to make each other laugh. Once we were ‘off the line’ we felt Bing’s absence acutely.

  It didn’t help that many people in my regiment did not know how to treat me, and seemed very wary of me. I couldn’t work out why at first. I thought I had had a very ordinary tour, but it seemed that mine had been rather extraordinary; not through any skill or doing of my own, but simply because of the sheer amount of time spent in contact with the enemy. I later learnt that I had fired more HE rounds than the rest of the FST commanders in Helmand put together. At a lunch for me to say goodbye to 3 RHA, the CO said in his speech about me that he had done some research around the Army, and that in his mind I was ‘probably the most combat-experienced terminal controller in the Army today.’

  It wasn’t much to be proud of. The reality was that I was the one coming home without my Ack, and the duties associated with that would remain with me for life.

  I had already seen Bing’s parents, Mike and Ann, during my mid-tour break, but that did not make it any easier when I saw them again at the regimental homecoming. We marched through Sunderland – the adopted home city of 4th Regiment Royal Artillery – and were then treated to a horrific night out, as an entire nightclub was hired for the blokes. I drank myself into oblivion, and Felicity carried me back to our hotel.

  I was shortly leaving the regiment to return to 29 Commando in Plymouth, where I was being posted to a desk job as the Regimental Signals Officer. It was a joke to all – me and a desk didn’t produce much work – but it meant I would have three years’ stability with Felicity after three Afghanistan tours in four years.

  We were eventually relieved of duties and put on post-tour leave. I had six weeks off to gather myself before embarking on the Regimental Signals Officer Course.

  Once you leave the men you have been fighting with, there is an all-pervading sense of loneliness that engulfs you like a dark cloud. Baz and I had said goodbye to each other, not knowing when we would see each other again. We were not similar people; we would perhaps have drifted apart had we not gone to war. But we had endured the same formative experiences, side-by-side, day-in, day-out, and without having each other there to say the right thing to help cope with an intrusive and frightening thought, it suddenly felt very lonely indeed.

  During those first few days in Noss Mayo, I felt my soul struggling to come home from theatre. I kept telling myself that home was the real world, that theatre was exceptional. There were a lot of tears, in random places and at random times. I found this embarrassing.

  For those first few nights I hardly slept. I would go and have a cigarette on the balcony overlooking the little inlet that runs into Noss Mayo from the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes, as I stared into the darkness, a little tear would run down my face, although I wasn’t feeling sad. I was so happy to be home; away from the heat, the shit, the blood and the smells of southern Afghanistan.

  But from here, Afghanistan all seemed so fucking pointless. We had sacrificed so much of our bodies and minds, but it felt like no one in my village even knew where Afghanistan was. And of course Bing would never be coming home. He had been required to make the ultimate sacrifice. For what?

  I decided to buy a boat, so I could get out on that ocean by myself and spend some time coming to terms with what was going on. With my post-tour cash, I went to a nearby dealer and bought a rigid inflatable boat with a powerful 125hp outboard engine.

  The dealer asked me if I knew what I was doing. I said yes. I had actually driven a RIB before, but only in the military, and knew nothing of the upkeep, maintenance or skills required to keep her on the water.

  I managed to get her home, and after finding a local farmer’s field where I could leave her full-time, I took her down to the water. I chucked her in, fired her up, and in a couple of minutes I was a mile out to sea. I turned the engine off, and for the first time since I had returned I genuinely felt a little calmer.

  Off the water, though, things were not easy. Remembrance Sunday quickly followed, and I found that I simply could not bring myself to dwell on losing blokes in war. I had a terrible attitude, feeling that while the nation respectfully remembered, most could never begin to understand the sacrifices made on their behalf. And particularly not the politicians at the Cenotaph on the TV. I switched it off and went for a run along the cliffs.

  Maybe we should have booked a holiday, but I don’t know if it would have made things any easier. I thought of Bing four or five times a day; of Afghanistan itself hourly. As soon as that happened, I would immediately stop myself and do something else. So even if I was in bed, I would get up and read a magazine or go and watch some sport on the TV. I would steadfastly refuse to let my mind go down that path.

  Intimacy with Felicity was off the table – I could not even consider it. If she so much as touched me, or sat on my lap, I felt uneasy. It was different with our little girl, Amalie. She was a truly beautiful little human being. I could watch her just potter around for hours. I took pleasure from the simple times I shared with her; watching the dying sun reflect off her shiny, perfect nose as we sat down the local pub on our own, her drinking her usual Fruit Shoot and me nursing a pint of West Country ale. We must have looked like an odd couple indeed.

  The boat was a big distraction for us, and I would often take Amalie out for a spin up the river Yealm – sometimes it was bitterly cold but she never seemed to make a fuss, or bore of our time together.

  On these trips I often thought of the compound Baz and I had entered thinking it was a firing point, and the little Afghan girl we encountered there. I remember looking at her over the barrel of my gun; the expression in her eyes was not one of terror, but almost acceptance that men with guns storming into your house was part of growing up in Afghanistan. I wondered what the future looked like for those children and their families. Now it would be winter, and hopefully a bit quieter for them, but the Taliban would return and the brutalization of their generation would start again next year.

  But there was also a whole generation of young men and women in my country who had been brutalized by this conflict. Baz had called me a couple of times; he was finding things really tough. I thought I was struggling, but Baz told me he had seen the doc and he was now being treated at his local Department of Community Mental Health. I asked him what he was struggling with specifically, but he wouldn’t really open up on the phone, understandably. He preferred recounting stories from our tour, and laughing with me about some of them. His favourite was the story of the patrol when a fighter presented himself right in front of me and I tried to shoot him three or four times and missed. Baz thought that was hilarious; he thought I got just a little bit too excited. The funniest part for him, what really cracked him up, was that chicken’s squawk as it died at our feet. Baz was recounting this story to me over and over again, almost every time I spoke to him.

  It was 18 December 2010, the night of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, when I came off the phone with Baz and finally realized what was going on. He was struggling
to let go of this particular event, which could have killed either one of us, and seemed to have something resembling post-traumatic stress resulting from it and some other incidents he mentioned. The laughs were hiding the private tears, and I know he was grieving hard for Bing, having not allowed himself to do it in theatre. I went back to the sitting room, where Felicity was waiting for me.

  ‘Baz OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I replied.

  She didn’t know what to say. Neither did I. We turned back to the TV and watched as they gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to David Beckham. I had first seen David Beckham when I was fifteen – on my birthday in fact. My dad, who is one of those classic Manchester United fans who have no connection to Manchester, took me to watch them play Wimbledon at Selhurst Park. Man Utd were 2–0 up in the last minute and we were getting up to leave the ground when Beckham got the ball just shy of the halfway line, looked up and lobbed it in the net. The crowd went mad, and my dad could not believe it. It was a quite brilliant goal.

  Before I knew it, I was formed in my father’s own image as a Manchester United fan with no links to Manchester, and a fan of Beckham through his career. So I was more than a little disappointed that when he came out to visit the troops in Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, he was not prepared to hop on a helicopter and come and see me personally on the front line (!). Instead, he went to Camp Bastion and mingled with soldiers there. He went down a riot – he was down to earth, ‘one of us’ apparently, who had done well, got lucky and seen the tough times through.

  When he was awarded the Sports Personality Lifetime Achievement Award I was pleased for him – a good guy, getting acknowledged. He went on stage, thanked his wife and children, but then paused. What he said next seemed completely unprepared.

  ‘This year I went to Afghanistan, and I saw the bravery of our troops . . . they risk their lives to save so many people . . . I dedicate my award to the men and women serving our country in Afghanistan: be safe, have a great Christmas and thank you.’