Pynn had another patient, however, whose injuries were all too genuine, and whose situation was a reminder of the civilian suffering that the fight the Paras were engaged in entailed. He was ‘a young lad who came in who’d taken some shrapnel in the lower leg and then some nasty grazes and burn-type injuries. We brought him back every day for a week. We sent him away with sweets and he’d come back, have another dressing and some more sweets, so we treated him reasonably well. Poor guy. We’d obviously mortared a position in the town and he’d taken some shrapnel from that’. At least he was alive. Pynn believed that the same attack had ‘killed several members of his family’. The fighting in Sangin and Musa Qaleh resulted in a number of civilian casualties caused by British fire. Such incidents were ‘isolated’, according to Stuart Tootal. ‘That does not mean that they are not very serious,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately in close-quarter fighting in complex terrain there’s always a risk.’ The British certainly took the rules of engagement seriously and there were a number of occasions when they broke off engagements with the Taliban because there were civilians in the vicinity, or called off air strikes because they were not sure whether non-combatants were in the area. Nonetheless, every killing or maiming of an Afghan innocent dented the battle group’s credibility and its claims to be a force for good.
Pynn left Sangin at the end of July, with his ideals intact, if a little bruised by their collision with the realities of Afghanistan. ‘I deployed with a romantic notion that we could make inroads into security and reconstruction but I failed to grasp the conditions that make Helmand province such a difficult place to work,’ he wrote. What he did take away with him was an enduring affection for his comrades. Medical Officers occupied a special position. They were outside the structure of the command and their healing vocation often gave them a privileged glimpse of what their charges were feeling. ‘Working with the blokes so intimately at this level, one gets a very good idea of what they think and what makes them tick,’ he wrote. ‘They are a close knit team who work hard for each other. All they want to do is see this through together and get out the other end intact.’
15
Attrition
As it turned out, ‘A’ Company had only a few days to recuperate before they returned to Sangin on 27 July. They had not, after all, been required in Now Zad. Instead, they were back in their old stamping ground, replacing ‘B’ Company. It had changed a lot since they had first gone there. But despite the improvements to the fortifications, the place was just as dangerous as ever, as they were to discover on the very first day of the new deployment.
They arrived under a new commander, Jamie Loden, who had taken over from Will Pike. Loden had the Parachute Regiment in his genes. His father, Ted Loden, was a career soldier who won a Military Cross with 1 Para in Aden in 1967. ‘I grew up living that life, in various nice places around the world,’ Jamie said. ‘By the time I was fifteen, I decided I wanted to join the army. To me it was a profession that offered you a challenge in three dimensions. It was physical and mental and there was a moral and leadership dimension in there too.’ By now he was thirty-three, with a string of impressive appointments behind him, including a stint, post-9/11, in Afghanistan, as a staff officer with an American brigade.
Loden reached Helmand only on 23 July. He was strongly aware of his newcomer status. ‘I was taking command from a very good friend of mine, and that company had already been through quite a lot,’ he said. ‘I would have had great sympathy with any soldier who said if I tried to suggest a way of doing something, “What the fuck do you know?”’
In fact the transition was smooth. ‘He had a lot of humility,’ said Hugo Farmer. ‘He would say to me, “What do you think about this, what do you think about the other,” and that was something I was not at all used to.’
The battle group operation in Sangin had strengthened the Paras’ determination to deny the insurgents control of the town. Loden intended to patrol aggressively, using expanded platoon groups with beefed-up firepower. Unlike the Gurkhas in Now Zad, the Paras in Sangin felt they had the strength to close down the Taliban’s freedom of movement. The aim was to find and destroy them and to dominate at least the area around the district centre.
The new OC wasted no time in putting the intent into practice. 1 Platoon under Hugo Farmer were sent out on patrol on the afternoon of the day they arrived, and Loden went with them to familiarise himself with the town he had heard so much about. The Paras set up a few vehicle checkpoints, walked through the bazaar, then moved on into the centre of town. It was relatively quiet as they tabbed through the streets. Mid-afternoon was the hottest part of the day and the inhabitants usually went indoors for a siesta. Among the patrol were a Pashto-speaking intelligence team who stopped twice to chat with locals.
By now, the Paras’ nerves started tingling if they spent more than a few minutes in one place. The conversations seemed to take ages and they began to get impatient. Farmer sympathised, but was keen to know what was being said on the streets. Eventually, they resumed patrolling. The plan was to circle through the town, taking in all the points of interest, and exit by the pharmacy. Then they would turn south-west and head across the bazaar to the safety of the base. As they approached the bazaar, everyone noticed an ominous quiet. ‘It was totally silent,’ said Farmer. ‘There were never usually that many people cutting around but it was totally dead. I had never seen the town totally abandoned before and this was eerie.’
Pete McKinley was famous for his eyesight. Now he spotted two figures on the pharmacy roof, clutching rifles and ‘running along like monkeys’. Farmer ordered Corporal Bryan Budd to take his section, including McKinley, towards them. They had gone 50 yards when McKinley saw two gunmen dart out of a doorway by the pharmacy. ‘I brought my weapon up to my shoulder and dropped the first one,’ he said. ‘I shot at the second one but I don’t think I got him. The next I knew, two other blokes popped up behind us. The fire was coming in from two places and me and Bry were in the open.’ They both started to shoot back. In the firefight that followed, Private ‘Eddie’ Edwards, who was a stand-in from 2 Platoon, was hit twice in the leg.
Dan Jarvie was still in the main street towards the back of the patrol when he heard the shout of ‘Casualty!’ Jarvie was one of the most popular men in 3 Para. He was thirty-one years old, from a small mining village near Dunfermline in Fife. His father had been in the Black Watch. His brother joined the Parachute Regiment when Jarvie was eleven, ‘so obviously that was where I wanted to go after that’. He had been a Para since he was sixteen. He looked tough and spoke loud. His confidence was reassuring. But what made Jarvie so popular was the paternal warmth he showed to everyone, officer and Tom alike.
Together with Corporal Stuart Giles, the medic on the patrol, he now ran forward towards the front of the patrol. ‘It was like the gunfight at the OK Corral,’ he said. ‘There were rounds whizzing by us, rounds hitting the dirt at your feet.’
Edwards had been pulled into cover. It was appalling what two rifle bullets could do. They had ‘basically opened the top of his leg from his thigh to the knee … from my initial assessment I thought, “Fuck, he is going to lose it”’. Giles applied a tourniquet. Jarvie and Hugo Farmer held the wound together while the medic patched it with field dressings, injected Edwards with morphine and splinted his bad leg to his good one. There was a short wait until the Samaritan, an armoured ambulance belonging to D Troop of the HCR, arrived. Jarvie tried to take Edwards’s mind off his injuries. ‘Eddie,’ he told him, ‘there will be no more fucking tap dancing for you for a couple of months.’ Ten minutes later Edwards was in front of the new MO, Captain Phil Docherty.
After the first contact, Budd and McKinley had kept advancing, driving the Taliban back and creating a space in which Edwards could be treated and evacuated. As they moved forward, McKinley suddenly found himself lying on his back. He had no idea what had happened. Budd pulled him to his feet and they carried on fighting. Budd forced some of the gunmen back i
nto a shelter used as a public toilet and lobbed in a couple of phosphorus grenades in an attempt to smoke them out. The interpreters reported hearing someone screaming, ‘I’m burning!’ As Budd kept coming, the remaining fighters fled, running across an open field under fire from the rest of the section.
McKinley was starting to think he had been hit. He called to Dan Jarvie, who examined him. ‘I pulled his body armour down at the back and sure enough there was a fingernail-sized piece of RPG shrapnel in his back.’ By now the fighting was dying down and McKinley was driven back to the base and, against his wishes, casevacced back to Bastion that evening.
Stuart Tootal and John Hardy went to see both men in the medical centre. Edwards’s left femur had been shattered and the bone splinters had ripped the muscle from knee to pelvis. He would keep his leg, but recovery might take a year. He was sedated when they visited. McKinley was very much awake. Before the deployment Tootal had known him mainly for his record of indiscipline. Now it was his courage which attracted the CO’s attention: at Now Zad during Operation Mutay, during the rescue of the ambushed American convoy on 14 June, and lately for the alertness and aggression he had shown in Sangin.
The Paras continued to push out patrols over the next few days, and invariably provoked a Taliban response. On 30 July two patrols came under attack. The following day another was shot up as it fell back to base. That evening, the district centre came under fire yet again from the roof of the pharmacy. A request was made for the building to be bombed flat, and duly granted. A few weeks previously Harvey Pynn had worried that the pharmacy, which also served as a GP’s surgery, might get damaged in the crossfire. Now it was a smoking ruin.
Loden had to balance high-risk patrolling with the Paras’ duty to protect the camp and offer some security to the Royal Engineers as they went about their work of building up the defences. The sappers were often called on to guard the district centre themselves when the Paras were out on the ground, and on many occasions were swept up in the firefights around the base.
‘A’ Company theoretically had the resource of the Afghan forces lodged at the district centre at their disposal. But, as elsewhere, their services turned out to be of very limited value. A platoon of ANA soldiers and half a dozen policemen were based at Sangin. The British were expected to work alongside them in as visible a fashion a possible, to give an ‘Afghan face’ to operations. The Afghans were often reluctant partners, however. The police refused to join patrols or even to wear uniform.
The thirty ANA soldiers had recently undergone training by Coalition instructors and were under the eye of an OMLT sergeant. They did not appear to have gained much from the experience. The Afghan platoon commander was given cash to pay his men but preferred to spend it on drugs for himself, which he bought in town. His men disliked and distrusted him and the platoon split along tribal lines into quarrelsome factions. ‘They were going feral and threatening to shoot each other,’ said Hugo Farmer.
Initially the Afghan soldiers were prepared to stand to when the base was attacked and mount the occasional patrol in town, where the Taliban seemed to leave them alone. When the engineering work required extra protection, Loden would send them to check on people traversing the wadi route that ran through the centre of town. They made use of their authority to ‘take little boys off the street and round the corner and then go and wash themselves in the river. It was blatant. There was no disguising what was going on’. Most of the soldiers had no particular problem with the Afghans’ sexuality, but the abuse of minors appalled them. Eventually the platoon commander was sacked. But if the soldiers performed poorly, the police were no use at all. There were further promises from Governor Daoud of new, better-trained and more reliable police. Their loyalties had never been clear, however, and in the first half of August half of them fled into town while the rest joined the Taliban.
This confirmed the low opinion the Paras had formed of their Afghan allies. Circumstances demanded that they try to get along with the ANA and ANP but it was hard to trust them, particularly the policemen. In Farmer’s experience, ‘every other hour someone would come up to me and say, “Boss, we are being dicked by this guy there on the roof, signalling to people over there”’.
It seemed to the Paras that they were now fighting a different sort of enemy. At the outset, the Taliban had appeared to be a hybrid force. It was led by what were called the ‘Tier One’ Taliban, committed ideologues, who had a degree of military skill. Their foot-soldiers were the ‘Village Taliban’, local youths who were attracted to the insurgents’ ranks by the pay of 10 or 12 dollars a day, rather than puritanical religious zeal. Intelligence reports suggested that as time went on, the top tier found it increasingly difficult to keep the youths’ allegiance. The insurgents’ losses were painful. No one was able to establish exactly how many were killed and wounded. The Taliban carried their dead away and had a basic casevac system by which casualties were passed back to rear areas or over the border to Pakistan for treatment. But if British estimates were correct, sixty-three were killed in Sangin in the first week of July alone. Suffering on that scale made money an insufficient motivation, especially as the Taliban were making no visible progress in their aim of dislodging the foreigners, something they had boasted they could accomplish in days. The word being picked up by intelligence was that elders in the towns where the fighting was going on were starting to tell the commanders that their young men were no longer available to fight.
As a result, Taliban leaders were having to bring in replacements from outside. Some were from other parts of Afghanistan, and a smaller number from Pakistan and elsewhere. Punjabi speakers were heard on occasion. The newcomers were militarily far more experienced and tactically smarter than the hired guns, whose marksmanship was poor. They knew how to fight, as the British were to discover.
Between 7 and 11 August, 1 Platoon patrolled every day. The idea of walking into town filled everyone with foreboding. ‘No one really wanted to go because of the high risk of ambush on the relatively few routes in and out of the bazaar,’ said Hugo Farmer. ‘You could say they were reluctant. There were all sorts of arguments being raised about how it was not the right thing to do.’
The younger Toms were beginning to wonder what the point of being in Sangin was. ‘They would say, “We are not having any effect here, we are going out for the sake of it, people are dying, there is no clear benefit.” It is those sorts of negative attitudes that start eating away at the whole thing.’ Farmer regarded himself as ‘not the sort of commander that stamps on discussion and tells people to shut up … I would much rather they told me what was on their mind than going, “Yes, boss, yes, boss,” and blabbing off to someone else’.
With Loden, Farmer explained to the men that ‘we couldn’t develop this siege mentality. We had to go out, we had to dominate the ground and not just hand them the initiative. We couldn’t just be reactive.’
The men listened, but it was ‘difficult to persuade the blokes when whenever they go out the gate they get ambushed, people are getting seriously injured, people have died and they start thinking about their R & R and home’.
On 12 August the Taliban carried out one of their most daring attacks to date, ambushing a 2 Platoon patrol led by Andy Mallet when it was only 40 yards from the front gate. The lead section were already home when a group of four or five insurgents popped up from behind a wall about twenty yards from Mallet and his radio operator and opened up on them with rifles and RPGs. ‘That was a defining moment for me,’ said Mallet. ‘I was the commander on the ground and I had been ambushed.’ They had taken every precaution, but the insurgents had ‘still managed to catch us on the hop’. He and his section scrambled into cover behind a wall and he radioed the mortar fire controller for help. Once the 81mm mortars started landing the Paras returned fire, gradually subduing the ambushers. A Household Cavalry Scimitar light tank emerged from the base and began firing its 30mm cannon, covering the Paras while they hurried to safety. Hugo Farmer saw
Mallet come in. ‘He had the “thousand yard stare” look in his eyes and I think he was counting his lucky stars,’ Farmer said.
Spirits were low that day. There had been another death. Corporal Sean Tansey of the Life Guards was killed when an armoured vehicle fell on him while he was carrying out routine maintenance. He was twenty-six years old, and the fourth to die in the time that ‘A’ Company had spent in Sangin.
The Paras also were having to endure repeated strikes on the base with 107mm Chinese rockets of the type that killed three men on 1 July. They were mostly fired from a treeline to the north, which the men nicknamed ‘Wombat Wood’.
They improvised constantly to improve their security. The path into town was blocked at several points by thick mud walls, which dictated which route the Paras took when they went out on patrol. This made their movements predictable and liable to ambush. They tried to solve the problem by blasting holes through the obstacles using bar mines, to create new approaches. Bar mines were five times as powerful as mousehole charges. They needed to be, as the mud-brick construction was incredibly tough. On 14 August Farmer led a patrol to clear a new route. He asked the engineers to blow a gap in one wall ‘big enough to drive a vehicle through’. They decided to use three bar mines. They set the fuse and everyone took cover. The marketplace appeared to be empty, then suddenly Farmer noticed two men on a motorbike driving towards them. ‘I stood up and shouted at them to stop,’ he said. ‘They didn’t understand at first but then they did stop and just stood there watching us.’ All of a sudden there was ‘the biggest explosion … a massive boom and you saw the shock wave go through the valley and the dust kicking up’. The two men were knocked off their feet by the blast, to the amusement of the Paras. If they had come any farther they would almost certainly have been killed.
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