‘Any light within the market square at night-time we kept an eye on,’ explained Mountford. ‘Sometimes we put warning shots down to stop people.’ Occasionally, during daylight, heads would pop up unexpectedly on rooftops. ‘Now you can’t just go shooting people’s heads off unless there is a definite threat there,’ he said. ‘It happened on a couple of occasions that you would see them, and the next thing an RPG would come whanging towards you. They were getting up, having a quick look, then getting back down and coming up with an RPG.’ Mountford insisted on telling his men, ‘Right, if you see any heads, just fire warning shots next to them. Don’t shoot them.’
One day Corporal Andy Key was manning a sangar when he saw shapes moving behind a wall about five hundred yards away. Looking through his sight he could see a gunman in a black turban taking cover behind a wall. ‘I just took him out,’ he said. ‘His mate was behind the wall and he engaged us with RPG and then ran off.’ He felt some satisfaction at killing the would-be shooter, because ‘obviously it stopped him shooting you or any of your friends. But nothing bad about it. Nothing like that. No way.’ None of the snipers ever knew how many of their opponents they killed. A lot of the time they were fighting in darkness, shooting at muzzle flashes.
The enemy had become depersonalised. No one thought very much about the motivations of ‘Terry Taliban’. They were too busy trying to stay alive. Someone wrote a poem on a scrap of cardboard from a box of rations and stuck it up on one of the sangars on the FSG tower.
Watch out Terry, we’re hunting you down
There’s nowhere to hide in Sangin town
You shit yourself when the .50 cals are fired
No point in running, you’ll only die tired
Got A-10s on call for brassing you up
No food or water, we don’t give a fuck
So do one, Terry, you’ve plenty to fear
We run this town now. The Paras are here.
The sentiments were shared by many in the battle group. The soldiers did not underestimate their enemies but they held them in contempt. ‘We had no respect for them,’ said Private Craig Sharp, a twenty-one-year-old from Portsmouth who served in Sangin with ‘A’ Company. ‘Some of them weren’t even from Afghanistan but had gone there simply to cause trouble. We all wanted to hammer them so we could put an end to the fighting, or at least make it easier for those who would have to follow us.’
Life at the base was uncomfortable and loaded with stress. The snipers often kipped on the roof of the FSG to save time running up the stairs when they came under fire. ‘We didn’t have luxuries,’ said Craig Mountford. ‘We just slept in what we wore, wearing our body armour … when it came to first light we would go downstairs and try and recuperate, have something to eat and go down to the river. Then try and get a couple of hours’ sleep so that when it came to that night we were full-on.’ There was nothing to do in the brief periods of downtime. Sometimes they played cards. One or two had brought along books. Otherwise the reading matter was restricted to half a dozen well-thumbed copies of Zoo and Nuts and some old newspapers.
Daytime duty was an ordeal. It was exhausting, constantly scanning the bazaar and wadi, the pharmacy area and the garages, scrutinising every movement, trying to establish who was innocent and who was not. The men stretched ponchos and khaki-coloured camouflage netting over the top of their sangar to try to soften the pounding of the Afghan sun.
The mounds of sandbags around the snipers’ position got thicker and thicker. The sniper sangar attracted particular attention from the Taliban, who seemed to understand it was a prime observation post. One night Mountford was on stag with another sniper, Steve Hurst, when a protracted firefight broke out with a Taliban team who were firing from the bazaar area. At one point an RPG hit their sangar, bursting against the sandbags they had arduously installed that day. For a moment, the danger was forgotten as the pair of them peered over the front, oblivious to the rounds zipping past them, earnestly inspecting the damage to their handiwork. All of a sudden, the ludicrousness of the situation struck them as hilarious. It was not the first time that soldiers had dealt with the weirdness of battle by falling about laughing. ‘If you tell someone who doesn’t know about it, they think you’re crackers,’ said Mountford. ‘But at the time it was quite funny.’
Laughter, behavourists say, is a classic response to fear, and there was plenty of reason to feel it in Sangin. ‘What sticks in my mind’, said Andy Key, ‘was the constant shooting at you. Even when you went to the river to have a wash, the next thing you heard was a “whoosh” or the “click, click, click” of rounds and you thought, “Let’s have some peace for once.” But no, you had to grab your weapon, put on your shorts and helmet and body armour and go running up to the roof, still with the soap sticking all over you. It was just non-stop.’ After he was nearly hit by the same RPG that struck the sniper sangar he thought, ‘I really don’t want to go on this roof any more, but I had to, because everybody was in the same shoes.’
Alex Mackenzie, the FSG commander who was sent into Sangin as ‘A’ Company pulled out, found that the constant danger ended up having a numbing effect. The first night he mounted the FSG tower a contact started straight away and ‘it had been quite tasty’. But after a few days, he found he was getting ‘slightly blasé’. By the time he finished his three-and-a-half-week stint he was thinking, ‘we need to turn people around now. I need to go back because I have had X number of RPGs fired at me and they have missed every time, so every time I duck a little bit less’. The first time on the roof he had been crawling around, not daring to stand up. Towards the end he ‘saw a bloke with his helmet off and people walking around and I thought, “Fellas, you only need to be unlucky once and the chances of that happening up here are high”’.
Mackenzie had noticed the effects of a protracted stay on the ‘A’ Company men before they left. ‘It was attritional,’ he said. ‘People were psychologically, physically, mentally and emotionally run down.’ The same process was working away at the mental stamina of their replacements.
The patrols that ‘B’ Company pushed out were no longer conducted with any intention of providing security, or demonstrating to the people of the town that they were in safe hands. By now, many of the inhabitants had left or moved away from the western fringes, where most of the nightly mayhem occurred. The sorties were intended as a show of will, a signal to the Taliban that the Paras’ resolve was as solid as ever.
The patrols ventured no more than 500 yards beyond the compound walls. Inevitably their appearance would draw Taliban fire. ‘It was an advance to contact, it wasn’t a patrol,’ said Mackenzie. His duties kept him on the roof of the FSG tower. But he watched with admiration and sympathy as the soldiers left the base, loading magazines, their thumbs flicking in anticipation at the safety catch of their SA-80. ‘Younger soldiers were shaking with fear, every time they went out,’ he said.
Like many, Mackenzie found that the worst part of being shot at was the anticipation of being hit, and the antidote to fear was the thought that you would be seen to be failing to do your job. ‘The one thing I felt, as soon as it started, was “am I going to let my blokes down here?” I wasn’t at all worried about getting shot. I think that everybody felt the same way, but particularly the blokes in a position of responsibility.’
Yet despite the danger and the exhaustion and the hardship there was something strangely satisfying about life in Sangin. Mackenzie thought it was ‘the happiest I have seen the blokes’. At one point, the Taliban attacks slackened off. ‘There were three or four days when there was no contact. I had never seen the blokes so depressed and bored. And then we got hit again and there were blokes cheering, whooping – absolutely ecstatic! It was amazing.’ This was, after all, what they had signed up for.
But their situation was still precarious. The dangers of resupplying the base meant there were shortages of food and water. On 12 July the men of ‘B’ Company were down to sixteen boxes of rations, ‘enough to f
eed one man for sixteen days’, noted Tootal, ‘but there are over a hundred to feed!’ They were also reduced to one bottle of water per man per day. They supplemented this with water from the river. They boiled it and added sterilising tablets but it was hard to stifle the thought that the river had flowed past several thousand Afghan families and assorted livestock before it reached them. The daily food ration consisted of two boil-in-the-bag hot meals. The choices included bacon and beans, corned beef hash, Lancashire hotpot, curry and chicken-and-mushroom pasta. The Paras could also snack on brown biscuits and pâté, and chocolate bars that melted in the 40- and 50-degree Centigrade heat.
Tootal had toyed with the idea of a parachute resupply. It was a nice idea, but experience taught that getting the goods to land where they were supposed to was a difficult business and the exercise was likely to benefit the Taliban as much as the Paras. To get the supplies in that the garrison would need to sustain itself for a reasonable period would require a road convoy, with all the dangers that entailed. Plans for one got under way.
Despite the privations, when Tootal visited Sangin on 15 July he found ‘B’ Company in good spirits. It was the day after Operation Augustus, and the Paras’ purpose now was to lay on a show of overwhelming force to persuade both the locals and the Taliban that the British were determined to stay.
The town was saturated with battle group troops. The Paras of ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies and Patrols Platoon were joined by Canadians mounted in LAVs and 2 Troop of the HCR. When the Taliban saw the dimensions of the operation they prudently withdrew, falling back across the Helmand river to the north and south of Sangin. For the first time in weeks, the Paras were able to patrol in peace.
They carried out a clearance of Taliban positions and found a few RPG warheads and some bomb-making equipment. The insurgents seemed to have taken their stores with them. The exercise had proved that given enough soldiers, it was possible to scare the Taliban away. The problem was that there never were enough soldiers. It would have taken all of 3 Para battle group’s resources to secure Sangin alone, creating the conditions that would allow reconstruction – or construction, as the realists preferred to call it – to take place. No one doubted that once the reinforcements departed, the Taliban would be straight back. Hugo Farmer believed that they would have returned no matter how many troops were present.
‘Frequently, when something changed markedly, whether we had a different way of operating or we had different assets or more people, the Taliban would sit and watch. So I’m sure that if we had stayed with that number of people, they would have come back at us somehow.’ For the moment, though, they ‘were just standing off and watching’.
Tootal spent the evening of 15 July preparing for a shura with the local elders. It had been designated as a ‘super-Shura’, a high-level affair, to be attended by Governor Daoud, Ed Butler, Charlie Knaggs and the Foreign Office representative, Nick Kay. Daoud had been reluctant to come, and it had required a certain amount of arm-twisting to secure his presence. British patience with Daoud was wearing thin. It was he who had pressed for the battle group to expand into the district centres. By agreeing to this approach, Butler had put himself in conflict with the Americans and in particular Ben Freakley, who was firmly against the notion of immobilising troops in fixed positions. The two men did not get on. Freakley disliked Butler’s confident manner and determination to do things his own way. After one fractious meeting, the American told another senior US commander that he had come very close to landing up in Fort Leavenworth, the military penitentiary, so tempted had he been to ‘punch that guy’s lights out’. The British viewed Freakley as an outstanding tactical commander. But they doubted his ability to see beyond war fighting and to grasp the political and cultural complexities of the Afghanistan mission.
Butler had stuck his neck out for Daoud. Now he was expecting the governor to deliver his side of the deal and make a serious Afghan contribution to the effort of maintaining the British presence.
Before the meeting, Butler gave Daoud a warning. British and Canadian blood had been spilt on the governor’s behalf and if he failed to cooperate, he could expect the UK task force support in Helmand to be withdrawn.
At the meeting, the elders complained about the continuous violence and the damage it was doing to the trade that sustained the town. Tootal could only agree. Sangin, he thought, was in a dreadful state. ‘The town is a slum,’ he wrote, ‘rubbish and animal parts strewn everywhere.’ The need to fulfil the promises of non-military help that had been made so frequently was acute. But, as always, nothing lasting could be achieved without security. An ITN news crew had flown up with the shura team. When interviewed, Tootal took the opportunity to try to counter the perception that was growing back home that the Paras were desperate, demoralised and on the point of defeat. This had partly been created by alarmist newspaper reports on the ration shortages in the district centre.
The supply problem was about to be solved, at least for the time being. A convoy was on the way, carrying enough provisions for thirty days. It was also loaded with engineering supplies to provide proper, top-specification protection for the district centre. Instead of sandbags and mud and breeze-block walls, the base’s defences would be bolstered by Hesco Bastion. This was a British invention that was used at military bases throughout the world. It came in flat packs of steel mesh which were easily erected. They were lined with heavy-duty plastic sheeting and could be filled with sand, gravel or dirt. A 2-foot thickness would easily stop rifle bullets or shrapnel, though it was reckoned that 5 feet were needed to guarantee protection from an RPG.
The operation to protect the convoy went ahead without the Canadians. Their LAVs were being withdrawn to combat a Taliban offensive that was developing in the south around Garmsir. The ANP who were defending the town were reported to have fled, leaving it to the insurgents. Tootal was sad to see the Canadian armour go. The LAVs were robust. They had eight wheels and were mobile and fast, capable of 60 miles an hour. They were also well armed, with a 25mm cannon, and were feared by the insurgents.
The convoy arrived in two waves on 18 July and got in and out without trouble. The Taliban watched it arrive but were dissuaded from attacking by the numbers of soldiers on the ground. The extra presence was clearly having an effect. Tootal decided to leave ‘A’ Company in place for a while to boost ‘B’ Company. It was unlikely, though, that they would be able to stay for long. The situation in Now Zad was becoming critical. The latest reports said that the Taliban had complete freedom around the platoon house in the town and that the Gurkhas who were manning it alongside the Afghan police were under enormous pressure. ‘A’ Company might have to go to their aid. There was also, however, another call on their services. Tootal had been warned by the Canadians that they might be required to reinforce the effort in Garmsir. The pressure to retake the area was coming from President Karzai. Yet again, the battle group’s resources were being stretched in several different directions at once.
To add to Tootal’s problems, concerns were now floating down from on high about the amount of ammunition his troops were expending. One communication from PJHQ in Northwood queried the need to have an artillery battery in Helmand. By the end of July more than four hundred shells had been fired in defence of the platoon houses and in support of operations. The news of Northwood’s anxieties caused some bitter amusement. Did they think the soldiers in Helmand were firing their weapons for fun?
In Sangin, though, things were going better than at any time since the deployment. Patrols were able to penetrate parts of the town that had been off limits for weeks without fear of attack. ‘I don’t remember any shots being fired at all,’ said Hugo Farmer. Some commercial activity was taking place. On the other hand, the attitude of the local people seemed to have turned to one of indifference or hostility. When they first appeared in Sangin the Paras had distributed leaflets printed with a Union Jack with Pashto text explaining who they were and what they were there for. ‘Initial
ly people would take them,’ said Farmer. ‘They were a funny novelty.’ Later on, he ‘would be handing them out as we were going around and some people would litereally throw them on the ground and I would think, “Ah, well, that’s the attitude now is it?”’
‘A’ Company stayed a week without trouble. The Taliban might not be shooting, but they were still around and, on occasion, visible. Farmer was eager to counter them by mounting a deliberate ambush along a route that the insurgents used across a cornfield to the north-east of the district centre. It was a tricky operation. It was difficult to hide a platoon of soldiers for long. If you lay up, waiting for your victims to arrive, you risked being stumbled upon by a local farmer, or spotted by the Taliban themselves. The trick was to establish an OP that would give a last-minute warning of the insurgents’ approach, allowing you to get into position fast.
The ambush was scheduled for the night before ‘A’ Company were to leave. 1 Platoon were all set to go when it became clear that the Taliban had got wind of the operation. Farmer was all for going ahead anyway but the decision was made to call it off and the platoon withdrew to the base.
By the time they left, said Farmer, ‘Sangin had really quietened down. Things were looking up. It was still clear that people didn’t like us and the damage had been done and we weren’t equipped properly to change that … we weren’t winning hearts and minds by any stretch of the imagination but we were dominating the ground by force.’
Harvey Pynn had done his best to show the Afghans the human face of the battle group operation. He had made use of the lull to provide a much-needed medical service for the town’s depleted population. Sangin’s one, shabby hospital had closed and most of the general practitioners had departed. ‘There was no healthcare provision at all from what I could make out,’ he said. Pynn put the word out through the base interpreters that he would provide basic medical care for anyone who needed it. He set up an open-air clinic by the front sangar. ‘We saw a handful,’ he said, ‘not many, because there just weren’t many people left in Sangin except our “enemy”.’ Patients were searched on the way in. Among them were a couple of guys who came in complaining of ‘global’ body pain. Pynn could find nothing wrong with them; he gave them some vitamin pills and sent them on their way. He reckoned they were ‘fairly blatantly enemy fighters who came in just to have a little recce’.
3 Para Page 22