The men began sifting their memories for what they knew of the dead men. They belonged to 14 Signals Regiment, which helped provide communications support for 16 Air Assault Brigade. They were outside the tightly bound fraternity of the Paras. They had got along well with them, though, in the eleven days they had worked together. Jabron Hashmi was twenty-four. He was born in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. His family came to Britain when he was twelve and he was brought up in Birmingham. He joined the army in the summer of 2004 and was posted to the Intelligence Corps. His brother, Zeeshan, said he was ‘fiercely proud of his Islamic background and he was equally proud of being British’. Hashmi had gone to Afghanistan to ‘build bridges between East and West’. He was regarded by his comrades as exceptionally determined and keen to learn. His language skills made him especially valuable as he could give a soldier’s estimate of what was being said rather than the local perspective provided by the interpreters. He was quiet and thoughtful and seemed to Martin Taylor to be ‘a bit of an intellectual trapped in a soldier’s uniform’.
Corporal Thorpe struck Taylor as ‘a nice bloke, very clever. He was very proactive, always enthusiastic and helpful’. Peter Thorpe was twenty-seven and came from Barrow-in-Furness. He had already done one stint in Afghanistan. The two signallers had made an enormous contribution to the security of the base, providing warning of Taliban movements and impending attacks. So too had Daoud, the translator. ‘The interpreters have become our lifeline here and are very much part of the team so the death of one of them is as much of a shock,’ Pynn wrote later.
Zac Leong laid the bodies out in the orchard, where the mortars were set up, under the big tree where the shuras were held. It was a melancholy business. ‘A’ Company had brought only two body bags with them when they came in. Leong covered the third with a poncho. ‘The blokes were having to walk past them,’ he said. ‘There was nothing we could do with them.’ In the morning they loaded them on to the quad bike trailer and when the helicopter finally arrived drove them out to the landing site, where they departed with the injured.
Taylor was relieved that the survivors were heading off for treatment. ‘But it didn’t fill the guys with enormous amounts of joy to know that if they did get hit, they might not get picked up until the following morning … There were understandable reasons. But it didn’t do a great deal for morale and people started thinking, “Well, if I do get hit, I’d better not get hit too bad otherwise I am going to have to be here all night.”’ Even the ebullient Zac Leong felt down. ‘My morale, I wouldn’t say it was blown but I was gutted. I was gutted for the men who had died. But there’s a job to be done and you just have to crack on.’
‘Cracking on’ was the Paras’ answer to all setbacks. They tried to forget what was happening and carry on with a mission that now seemed starker and more daunting. Things had started to go wrong.
Harvey Pynn woke up to ‘the most welcome dawn I’ve ever witnessed. The birds sang as usual but there was a grim atmosphere around the blokes.’ It had been a traumatic night for him, sweating inside his body armour and helmet in the cramped, blood-soaked Aid Post, trying to blank out the background din of the mortars and machine guns and the incoming rounds as he tended to his patients.
Unable to see what was going on, he felt at times that they might be overrun. He had a contingency plan prepared – run out the back and into the river, which would carry him down to Gereshk and FOB Price.
After forcing down some breakfast Pynn went up to the roof to inspect the damage. The rocket appeared to have struck a concrete pillbox at the top of the stairwell. The need to wear body armour and helmets was constantly emphasised. Zac Leong had been drumming it into the men on the evening of the attack. But the two British dead had been under hard cover when the missile struck and had not been wearing theirs.
Pike took the death of the men under his command particularly hard. It was he who had moved them the day before to the position they had died in. ‘They had been on another roof which was much more exposed,’ he said. ‘There was no cover, just a couple of sandbags, but that was it. I had moved them up to this place because it was more protected and that’s what took the hit and that’s quite difficult. I don’t feel responsible for their deaths, but had I not moved them then they would probably still be alive today.’
Pike was regarded by his officers as a tough man. He was a ‘very, very hard person to work for’, said one. ‘He was a super-perfectionist, very demanding. I think his natural default setting was he thought people would try and pull the wool if they could do. They weren’t self-motivated enough and they needed constant direction.’ But at the same time he was regarded as ‘incredibly professional. He took his job very seriously.’ His junior officers believed that, for all the rough edges, they learned a lot from him.
Pike’s distress at the losses was obvious to those around him. Their view was that he had nothing to reproach himself for. ‘He shouldn’t [have felt] guilty in any sense whatsoever,’ said Hugo Farmer. ‘It was just one of those things, the luck of the draw.’
No one had ever doubted Pike’s devotion to his men. The shrewdest and harshest critic of any company commander is his sergeant major. And Zac Leong was in no doubt about Will Pike’s qualities. ‘He dug out blind for the blokes,’ he said. He had shown it in small ways, as when he wrung a Sky TV subscription for his Toms back at barracks in Colchester out of the bean-counters and got Internet access in the accommodation blocks. He showed it in big ways with the safety drills he rigorously imposed in Iraq, keeping patrols off the roads and minimising the chances of encountering IEDs. ‘We must have covered more miles than any other unit in four and a half months in Iraq,’ Leong said, ‘and we had no casualties. That was down to him because of his determination and his planning and the way he dealt with himself and his company.’ ‘A’ Company’s preparations in Oman before the deployment had been exceptionally thorough. ‘We were practising shuras, practising speaking to the locals and stuff like that. That set the benchmark.’ All in all, Leong regarded Pike as ‘a fucking good bloke’.
For all the work that had been done on building defences and for all the firepower at their disposal, the Sangin district centre on the morning of 2 July felt to those inside it like a very dangerous place. That was how Will Pike saw it. Stuart Tootal arrived with his headquarters team on the helicopter that took the casualties out. He had spoken to Pike before he set out and asked him whether he thought that the presence in Sangin was tenable. Pike believed that Sangin was important and that the battle group needed to be there. But in its current state it was too vulnerable. There was no bridge across the Helmand by which it could be resupplied on land. It was therefore entirely dependent on helicopters – which the previous night’s events had shown could not be relied upon. Combat engineers were needed urgently to build proper defences and a position on the high ground across the river that would dominate the centre. Without these things, the Paras would ‘pay an ever-trickling blood price’.
On arrival at Sangin Tootal was struck by the fatigue etched on the faces there. He listened to Pike and sympathised with most of what he had to say. ‘A’ Company were starting to question the point of being in Sangin. They were doing little more than holding the ground. By doing so they were boxing themselves in, losing the ability to manoeuvre, which was essential for the Paras to do their job. Tootal had similar concerns – not just about Sangin, but also the other outstations that had sprung up in the previous few weeks. The platoon houses depended for their existence on helicopters. And the risks of helicopters being shot down were increasing all the time as the Taliban got to know their likely landing sites.
There was another major worry. All this effort and the loss of life that now went with it was for the benefit of the Afghan government. At the shura the previous week Governor Daoud had promised to provide fifty extra policemen. They had never appeared. His representatives in Sangin inspired little or no confidence. The district governor, whose authority the ar
rival of the Paras was meant to reinforce, had left the district centre, where he had been staying, the night before the attack, saying he was going to visit relatives in Gereshk.
Ill feeling towards the twenty or so Afghan police living across the canal behind the compound was growing. There had been much talk among the intervening powers of the vital necessity of training the Afghans to take responsibility for their own security. On the evidence of the Sangin ANP there was a long way to go. To the Paras they seemed slovenly, undisciplined and often off their heads on dope. ‘They were clearly high on something’ much of the time, said Hugo Farmer. They had ‘blurry eyes and were constantly laughing as if they were on some massive marijuana trip’.
There were serious reasons for doubting the good faith of the ANP. The Paras had begun to notice that when a patrol set off into town it would be followed in and out by one of the policemen. Farmer, like everyone else, was sure information was being passed by the ANP to the Taliban. In the charged atmosphere following the attack there were suspicions that the police had been in on it, perhaps even supplying the weapon. At this stage it was still thought that it was a recoilless rifle which had done the damage. When the Paras had arrived they had seen one on the district centre roof. It had since disappeared. Before Tootal’s arrival, Pike had demanded that the chief of police produce it by last light and provide ten of his men to mount patrols that night.
Harvey Pynn sat in on Tootal’s discussions with Pike. He ‘could see the emotion in Will’s eyes as he vehemently made the point that soldiers would die here on a nightly basis if we stayed any longer’ in the same conditions. Pynn was ‘impressed with the CO’s listening skills’ and thought he ‘took little convincing’. But whether they would see it that way farther up the chain of command was another matter. ‘It’ll be a hard sell to higher command to withdraw now,’ the MO observed shrewdly. ‘It would be seen as a victory for the Taliban – but let’s face it, they control most of the town anyway.’
Pynn’s feeling was that a good case could be made for abandoning Sangin on the basis that by defending themselves the British risked killing innocent civilians. Also, the governor had not stuck to his side of the bargain and had failed to provide the promised reinforcements.
Pynn’s analysis turned out to be correct. The political and military interests which ultimately controlled 3 Para battle group decided that the loss of face involved in withdrawal was too great. As the day wore on reports came in that the Taliban were building up their forces around the compound. Tootal decided to spend the night in Sangin with RSM Bishop and other members of his HQ team. It was, Pynn thought, ‘a good morale booster for the men’, especially when the CO ‘mucked in with filling sandbags’. Tootal toured the district centre’s positions, chatting to his men and offering suggestions on how the defences could be improved.
He and his staff offered to build a sangar of their own on the main building roof which would cover the southern approaches to the compound. As they heaved the sandbags into place they attracted the attention of the Taliban, who started to spray them with small-arms fire. Tootal and his men had put in a GPMG gunner to protect them while they worked but had sited him in what, it was now clear, was the wrong place. They dived for cover then jumped up to shoot back, allowing the RSM, who had been caught in the open, to leopard-crawl his way to cover. ‘I can’t remember how many rounds I fired off,’ said Tootal. ‘But the feeling among us was one of euphoria. We were elated because we’d actually engaged with our weapons. You can go through your army career and never fire your weapon in anger and suddenly some quite senior people and the CO were up there trading fire.’
With nightfall the violence resumed again. Pike was taking no chances. He ordered his machine guns and mortars to fire on known Taliban forming-up areas and called in artillery barrages from FOB Robinson. The defenders were reassured by the drone of a C-130 overhead for much of the night. The Hercules was known to the servicemen and women of many nations as the workhorse of the skies, a homely aircraft that humped supplies and carried troops around the world. This version, though, had undergone a deadly modification. It was a C-130 Spectre gunship, which trundled over the battlefield pumping rounds from its 105mm light gun and 40mm cannon into the ground wherever the Taliban showed themselves.
The threat from the air and the guns at FOB Robinson were powerful deterrents. Intelligence reports revealed that the Taliban fighters were frustrated. The weight of fire from the air and from the base was devastating. The Taliban assault was doomed before it started. There was no rocket attack that night. Through their night sights the defenders saw the ground littered with the dead and dying. During the lulls in the shooting, foxes slunk out to feast on the fresh meat.
As light crept over the compound on 3 July, the only sound was the friendly racket of birdsong. Harvey Pynn noted the subdued mood. ‘Stories were told but no one bragged or boasted about their actions,’ he wrote. ‘There was quiet contemplation. The eyes said it all. The thousand mile stare was out in force.’
‘A’ Company was reaching the end of its endurance. The Paras and their battle group comrades had spent seven consecutive nights under fire. They were dirty, exhausted and numb. It was obvious that fresh troops were needed. Tootal decided to bring in ‘B’ Company, and then send ‘A’ Company back to Bastion. ‘B’ Company began arriving just before last light. Pike and half of ‘A’ Company were ordered by second-in-command Huw Williams to go back to Bastion the following day. Pike wanted to stay until his men were out but was told he was needed for an upcoming special operation. Tootal was also returning. Before he set off, he called Ed Butler to report his concerns about the dangers facing the Sangin garrison. It was vital, he said, to get engineers in as quickly as possible to build up the defences. He also said more men were needed to hold the district centre – three platoons rather than two – and that the Afghans needed to live up to their promises to provide more policemen. Butler was sympathetic. It would take time to reinforce the base. But both men knew there could be no question of withdrawal. The Afghan government and its international supporters had staked their prestige on maintaining a presence in Sangin and the other outstations where the battle group was now scattered.
10
Jacko
Timms and the first elements of ‘B’ Company were subjected to the full Sangin experience immediately after their arrival. In the middle of the evening of 3 July, a shell from a recoilless rifle was aimed at the FSG tower. It missed, smashing into the compound wall, shaking the base but hurting no one. Looking across towards the town as night descended, Pynn noted that ‘as the light dimmed, the town was eerily empty. Many of the private compounds had been vacated and the shops in the bazaar were boarded up. The Taliban had free rein to roam as they pleased and in turn we assumed anything that moved was enemy and was going to get a warning shot at least.’ A Spectre gunship circled overhead. The snipers gazed into the darkness through night sights, occasionally calling in an artillery or a mortar strike. At one point a vehicle came into view with a recoilless rifle mounted on the back – presumably the one that had fired earlier. It was demolished, with a satisfying whoosh and thump, by a Javelin missile.
Will Pike and half of ‘A’ Company left the following morning. Timms was now in charge. The day passed relatively quietly. So did the night. The 3 Para Regimental MO Harvey Pynn, who had stayed on in Sangin with ‘B’ Company, thought the insurgents might be considering their tactics. ‘Hopefully the Taliban have realised that we’ve got too much fighting power for them,’ he wrote. ‘As we get more ANA into this location we can spread our dominance throughout the town.’ But on reflection it seemed as likely that they might ‘just be licking their wounds and regrouping before they have another go’.
That night the rooms of the compound were full of snoring bodies, with the remaining ‘A’ Company soldiers getting the first uninterrupted sleep they had enjoyed for more than a week. The rest was therapeutic. On the morning of 5 July, everyone seemed in goo
d spirits. Some more of ‘A’ Company were due to be extracted that day. 1 Platoon would have to hang on a little longer, however, and cover their departure.
The relief was due to take place in the afternoon. Timms ordered Hugo Farmer and his men to secure the area to the south of the compound where the helicopters would be coming in. It was one of several landing sites that had been used for resupply. ‘We had been sent out to secure it on previous occasions and knew the score,’ said Farmer. His platoon headed out at 2.30 p.m. Farmer took 2 Section over to the west, close to the landing zone. Prig Poll led 1 Section south and east through the densely vegetated plantations that fringed the eastern edge of the town.
‘I had done that route no end of times by then,’ Poll said. ‘At least a dozen. I have a bad habit of putting myself at the front. It’s not that I don’t trust my blokes … but it is nice to show them sometimes that I will go up front.’ The fields were intersected by channels and ditches, linked together by sluices and small bridges. Shortly after leaving the compound Poll noticed a man crouching on a bridge with his back to the Paras, about two hundred yards away. He had often seen locals before at that spot, washing in the waterways or using them as latrines, so it was ‘nothing untoward really’. Nonetheless, Poll ‘had a feeling, because of the way he got up and walked away. [He] wouldn’t show his body to me. [He] walked away with his back to me, sidestepping off the bridge and disappeared into a doorway.’
Poll radioed Farmer and reported what he had seen. Farmer told him to ‘go firm’ while he brought 2 Section round to join them. When they arrived, they joined the end of the line and Poll pushed on again. He was still uneasy and after another 100 yards went firm again. He told Lance Corporal ‘Billy’ Smart, who was in charge of half the section, to move out to the right across a field and take cover in a ditch so that he could provide covering fire while the rest of the patrol pressed on.
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