I got to the Humvee and there were two blokes at the back of it. One of them had a big gash at the back of his neck but he was talking. He was all right so I left him. The other guy was fucked up big time … I think the RPG that hit the Humvee had just shredded him. He was in rags. His eye was hanging out and his arm was in a shit state. He had some damage to his leg and he was finding it hard to breathe.
McKinley did what he could with the bandages, IV fluid bags and tourniquets in the team medic pack that he always carried with him. There was no light and he worked with a torch stuck in his mouth. There was no question of giving his patient morphine on account of the head injury and breathing difficulties. Mercifully, the man seemed to be in deep shock anyway and was drifting in and out of consciousness. McKinley was interrupted by an American medic arriving on the scene with a much more lavish aid kit. ‘He took one look at him and said, “Sorry, I’m not trained for this.”’ The reaction confirmed McKinley’s views about the US military. ‘I thought, you fucking dick, this is one of your mates here and I am having to fix him.’
McKinley had been joined by the ‘A’ Company Combat Medical Technician, Lance Corporal Paul Roberts, who had been working on the other casualty. Reckoning he had done what he could, he set off back down the hill to his shell scrape. After about two and a half hours, when the tempo of fighting dropped, a Black Hawk arrived to take the wounded Americans out.
The fighting had died down but the Taliban were still there. Through their thermal sights the Paras could see ghostly white figures moving into a compound facing their position. McKinley and Private Jim Thwaite, next to him in the shell scrape farthest forward, had also spotted two men with weapons moving around on the ambush site less than a hundred yards away. They opened up. An Apache flying overhead confirmed that the Paras had killed both attackers.
Corporal Mark Wright, the mortar fire controller, had now moved up to the forward line, closest to the village. It was very dark, but through his night vision goggles he could now see the activity in the compound, where men seemed to be forming up. He began calling down fire, thirty-five rounds in all, which scattered the Taliban, killing six of them. The attack set off a chain of firefights. By now, an A-10 had arrived overhead. But the Taliban were shooting from among the houses strung along the road and the aircraft could not engage without risking civilian casualties. The Tankbuster flew away after a few passes. Eventually, the crack of gunfire slackened and silence settled on the hill again. It was broken by the arrival of a Chinook, which brought in more mortar rounds, a platoon from ‘C’ Company, commanded by Captain Ben Harrop, and a team equipped with Javelin guided missiles. Javelin missiles are aimed and fired using a Command Launch Unit. This is a thermal imaging sight that picks up heat from human bodies to create a picture. With it, the Paras now had a clear view of Taliban movements on the ground around them. The new arrivals settled down to cover the western approaches to the position but there were to be no further contacts that night.
At dawn, the vehicles pulled away from the village, followed by the Paras, who ‘tabbed’ westwards through the empty desert to a high plateau. The convoy formed a circle and called the helicopters to come and collect them. It was to be a long wait.
As the sun climbed up the sky they sat in their shell scrapes and tried to preserve the dwindling water supplies. They had each taken about six litres of water, which was supposed to be enough to get them through twenty-four hours. Now it was running out. Hugo Farmer began to appreciate ‘how people in cartoons must be feeling, crawling along going, “Water, water.” It was terrible. I was sipping a thimbleful at a time.’
There was no indication of how long they might be there. An American relief convoy was supposed to be on its way to escort their soldiers out, but no one seemed to know when it would arrive. Will Pike got on the radio and demanded a resupply chopper. It took several hours to arrive but ‘morale just flew through the roof as soon as boxes of water and rations were being dropped’. The Paras could not leave until the American rescue convoy arrived, however, and after the load had been kicked off the back of the helicopter, the Chinook took off again.
Time dragged by. Then, out of the heat haze, they saw a column of about forty vehicles approaching. Pete McKinley, Chris Wright and Jim Thwaite watched as one of the Humvees from the convoy rolled by. An American wearing what McKinley judged to be ‘fucking silly sunglasses’ turned to them and said, ‘This country sucks.’
The Americans brought cigarettes, which the Paras gratefully blagged. They also brought with them a contingent of ANA, who had a CD player with them that blasted out local pop. Private Peter Parker got into a dance competition with one of the Afghans. ‘It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, watching those two dancing,’ said McKinley. ‘All the Afghans were loving Peter because he is a young lad and they were all bender boys.’
The Paras had to wait fourteen hours in the desert heat before the choppers arrived to extract them to Bastion. The whole operation had taken thirty hours rather than the two hours they had been told to expect. Hugo Farmer thought back on what had been the second big contact of his tour. Operation Mutay now seemed almost too easy. ‘The tone of this one was totally different. We were in very poor positions, literally hollows, because there wasn’t time to make decent positions so we just dug in where we could. We were a sitting target. If the Taliban had disposed themselves better they could have covered us with fire.’ As it was, ‘some of it was bloody close’.
Scrabbling in the grit trying to offer as small a target as possible, he had felt that he was ‘digging in with my chin strap and so was my radio operator, with rounds bouncing around us’. It had not been an encouraging experience. Back in camp, everyone was keen to know what had happened. Farmer told them, ‘it was pretty grim, that one’. It had taught him ‘that it is not good to be out there and be vulnerable. It is much better to take the advantage rather than trying to be reactive’.
Once again the Paras had been lucky. ‘A’ Company had come through unscathed. But the battle group’s responsibilities were about to be extended once more, and with it their level of risk. The dam at Kajaki was the most strategically important site in their area of operations. It stems the Helmand river, creating a 32-mile-long reservoir. The water powers turbines that provide electricity for much of southern Afghanistan. It also feeds the irrigation system that sustains life along the river valley below. Work on the dam had started in the early 1950s when USAID began pouring money into the project. It had been completed in 1975 and somehow kept running throughout the Russian occupation and the fighting that accompanied it. It had been damaged by allied bombing late in 2001 but had been patched up since. Now it was under American control once more. The dam complex was protected by Afghan guards under the command of a US special forces veteran who now worked for an American security company.
The Taliban found it an irresistible target. Why they did so was unclear. If they succeeded in capturing it, it was unlikely they would be able to hold it for long. The best they could hope for was a short-lived propaganda victory. Blowing it up would require an enormous amount of explosive. If they succeeded, the result would be to cut the power supply to the region, wreck the delicately balanced irrigation system and destroy the agriculture of southern Helmand. It was hardly a recipe for winning the backing of the people on whose behalf they claimed to be fighting. These considerations did not seem to occur to them or, if they did, to trouble them, however. For the rest of the summer they hurled themselves at the dam, apparently unconcerned by the cost in blood.
The first British troops to be deployed there arrived early in June. An eight-strong OMLT team with twenty ANA took over a compound and an observation post overlooking the dam that had been abandoned some sixteen years before by the Soviet army. They had fought many battles defending the dam against the mujahedin.
After all these years, bits and pieces of the junk the Soviets had abandoned were still lying around. The new arrivals drew no melancholy
lessons about the transience of invading armies in Afghanistan. No one expected the Taliban to be able to match the firepower that the British and their allies could bring to bear.
Nonetheless, they were capable of making life inside the dam complex unpleasant. The American running the show was known as Kajaki John. He headed a team of about eight to ten Afghans and Americans, all in their forties and fifties, all ex-military. They controlled a shifting garrison of army, police and local militiamen whose numbers dwindled as the Taliban activity increased. Together, they were supposed to provide protection for a doughty force of technicians who kept the turbines turning. It was said that if a recently trained hydroelectrical engineer were to turn up to service the power plant he would not have a clue where to start. Years of makeshift repairs had made it a mechanical mystery whose secrets were known only to adepts like ‘Joe’, a local technician who had been making do and mending the works since the dam was completed.
In the early part of June the Taliban grew bolder. In one week they managed to land forty mortar bombs in the dam complex. Kajaki John and his men had no heavy weapons with which to defend the place. He could appeal for helicopters to come to his aid but the Taliban had worked out that they took twenty minutes to arrive. This gave them time to drive in from bases about ten miles from the dam, set up their mortar barrels, fire a few rounds into the compound, then leave. The main effect was to demoralise the Afghans inside. If the attacks were not dealt with firmly, the chances were that they would all clear off.
The OMLTs and their Afghan pupils were not strong enough to counter the threat. The Americans running Operation Enduring Freedom were applying strong pressure on Britain to send a company up to Kajaki to restore the situation and persuade the American contractors not to withdraw. Tootal was reluctant to fix another of his scarce companies in a static location and thought the threat could be dealt with differently. The attacks on the dam complex had become almost routine. It was decided to insert a temporary force into the dam area secretly and, when the Taliban appeared again, ambush them with mortars and machine guns.
The job went to Nick French, the OC of Support Company’s Mortar Platoon. The idea was to take on the Taliban at their own game by hitting them with their own weapon of choice. Along with the mortars French had with him half of ‘B’ Company’s 5 Platoon and some machine-gunners, snipers, signallers and medics – about forty-five men in all, ‘a little marauder force’, as French put it.
French was twenty-nine years old, cheerful, confident and seemingly bred for action. His father had been in the navy but French preferred the air force and spent six years in the air cadets. In the end, though, he decided he ‘didn’t find flying that exciting’ and switched his allegiance to the army. After studying politics at Liverpool University, where he joined the Territorial Army, he went to Sandhurst, and applied for the Parachute Regiment. He had served in Northern Ireland and Iraq. He was proud of the Paras’ tradition of controlled aggression. Now he was flying up to Kajaki to put it into practice.
The insertion was done with a minimum of fuss to fool the watching Taliban into thinking that it was a routine resupply. ‘I wanted to keep pretty covert,’ French said. ‘I didn’t want to scare these guys away. I wanted to sort this Taliban team out. I wanted to kill them.’ Once in, French and his men quietly occupied an area to the south of the dam complex along a ridge. French placed his mortars in concealed positions in a line along the slope, together with the machine guns and some Javelin anti-tank missiles they had also brought along. He placed the others into three observation posts (OPs) 50 metres in front of them. One of them was already occupied by the ANP. Their presence was, at the very least, a nuisance.
Local politics were extraordinarily complex and confusing. The police were meant to be on the opposite side to the Taliban yet they kept in touch with each other by walkie-talkie. The contact ensured that both sides could make an informed calculation as to where their best interests lay. The arrival of the Paras got the ANP ‘very excited’, said French. The reinforcements boosted the belief that they were now on the winning side. They could not resist calling up the Taliban and boasting about the array of weapons they now had supporting them.
The element of surprise seemed to have been lost, but for a while it looked as if the Taliban had been discouraged. There was no attack on the night the Paras deployed. The following evening, though, they appeared as usual, perhaps suspecting the ANP had bluffed them.
The Taliban liked to attack at dusk. Now, without bothering to hide their intentions, they were gathering under the eyes of the Paras. Even though French was convinced that the police had already given away their position, he and his men strained to remain invisible, lying still and showing no lights. ‘I got a call back from one of the OPs,’ French remembered, ‘saying, “Boss, there are two truckloads of Taliban with a mortar on the back and about twenty guys, about fifteen hundred metres away.”’ The Russian 82mm mortars that the Taliban used had a range of about two miles. The quality of the bombs was poor, though, and to be accurate they needed to be closer in. The Taliban performance was remarkably casual, ‘like some military demonstration’, said French. The trucks stopped and the men dismounted. Some began setting up the mortar barrel while the others fanned out to protect the firing point.
French instructed his men to hold their fire until the first Taliban round went off. The rules of engagement that the battle group was operating under made it permissible to fire if there was a clear perceived mortal threat. That already appeared to be the case here, but if the Taliban fired first, then there could be no doubt about it.
The mortar teams lined up the target and waited. The first Taliban round fizzed out of the barrel and landed just behind one of the OPs. The Paras’ answering salvo was well off target and landed 100 yards short. The Taliban now knew that their enemies had mortars of their own, but the discovery did not seem to bother them. To French’s surprise they popped off six rounds in rapid succession, which cascaded down around the OPs.
The Paras responded immediately and the second salvo hit the Taliban full on. ‘We could see through our binoculars blokes flying apart,’ said French. ‘Mass panic ensued … we saw six or seven guys trying to sneak up the hill so we engaged them with heavy machine guns.’ In the half-hour fight that followed, ten Taliban were killed and two wounded. French thought that ‘the initial shock and the fact that we could react within two or three minutes of them firing really put them on the back foot. They had been doing this for a week completely untouched and then within two minutes of them firing we had ten of their mates spread across the desert sand.’ The racket alerted Taliban gunmen arrayed along the edge of Kajaki town, about 900 yards from the ridge. They could see the British positions and opened up. French calculated that there were ‘maybe ten or twelve guys with light and heavy machine guns’. He called for help from the Apaches but was told there was none available and he would have to crack on with what he had. Luckily, it seemed the Taliban had had enough and the firing died away.
French was highly satisfied with his men’s performance. ‘It was like a case of duelling mortars, like you [imagine] gunslingers in the Wild West,’ he said. ‘You stand at either end of the street and you go for your guns and the first one who hits the other guy wins.’
Up at the dam complex, Kajaki John and the local police chief were equally pleased. The Taliban seemed taken aback – intelligence was that they had been badly shaken by the mortar barrage as well as by the experience of being on the receiving end of a Javelin, which had also been fired in the fight. The weight of fire convinced them there were 1,000 men on the ridge, rather than the forty-five there were in reality. French and his men stayed on for another two days. A continuous Para presence was established shortly afterwards, placing a further burden on the battle group’s resources.
Even by Helmand standards Kajaki was exceptionally tough duty. Corporal Andy Key was attached to the first deployment as a sniper. Much of his work was spent in visual
intelligence gathering, observing the lie of the land and movements across it. He occupied an OP in one of the old Russian positions with four others. It was a tight fit. ‘We each had a space about two feet wide,’ he said, ‘and that was with all our kit on.’ They stretched a camouflage net overhead but it did nothing to alleviate the pounding heat. They settled down into a routine of one hour on watch, followed by three hours off for sleeping and eating. No one wanted to eat much. Water was something else. It might be warm but it still tasted good. Crouching in their positions, stifled by the heat, they could not afford to relax their vigilance. Their experience with the British mortars was not enough to deter the Taliban from continuing mortar attacks throughout July and the first half of August.
Despite the increasingly ‘kinetic’ nature of the battle group’s activities, attempts were still being made to pursue its goodwill mission. In the middle of June ‘C’ Company expanded its patrolling out of Gereshk with the aim of establishing friendly links with some nearby villages.
Mid-afternoon on 27 June, a convoy set off from FOB Price and headed eastwards into a parched landscape of rolling sand. It was made up of ten Snatches, four WMIKs and a Pinzgauer troop carrier. Leading the patrol was Paul Blair, the OC of ‘C’ Company. Alongside his own men he had with him a detachment from 9 Platoon, The Royal Irish Regiment, and a Fire Support Group. The FSG were there to provide firepower from the .50-cal machine guns mounted on their WMIKs. There was also a mortar team, who travelled in the ‘Pinz’. Unusually, some journalists came too – Christina Lamb from the Sunday Times and photographer Justin Sutcliffe. Lamb had been covering Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet occupation. The Paras had called on her expertise before deploying, inviting her to come and talk to them about Afghan history, politics and culture. She was notably brave and unflappable. The day’s events were to test her to the limit.
3 Para Page 11