The engineers’ activities building up the camp inevitably attracted the attention of the Taliban, who would harass them with fire. During August the sappers built the Hesco wall, complete with sangars, around the base. To the south, they cut back the corn and maize fields surrounding the helicopter landing site to a distance of 100 yards, robbing the Taliban of cover. Despite this, the HLS was still vulnerable, and on 17 August Loden ordered a dawn patrol to clear the area. The objective was to deter the Taliban from hiding weapons in advance of any helicopter resupply. One of the attackers’ techniques was to cache rifles and RPGs in buildings and fields along likely patrol routes. This gave them the freedom to move around unarmed, pick up the weapons, carry out the attack, then drop the arms and assume the guise of civilians.
By now, the Paras had a reasonable idea of how their enemy were organised. It seemed that they operated in sub-units of about ten men. In the course of the fighting that summer the Taliban had evolved more sophisticated tactics, firing simultaneously from several angles and using a variety of weapons. Above all, they had developed very fast reaction times. Any patrol was ‘dicked’ immediately. If the Paras stayed still for more than ten minutes they could expect to be ambushed – hence the short times allowed for vehicle checks and intelligence-gathering encounters with the locals.
To counter the increased threat, patrols were now often more than forty strong. At three o’clock on the morning of 17 August, 1 Platoon tabbed to a lying-up position in the green area to the south known as the Gardens and regarded as ‘Taliban Central’. At first light, a troop of HCR moved out west to the gravelly, scrub-covered flood plain of the Helmand river, to provide them with covering fire. Once they were in place, 1 Platoon began their patrol. The plan was to walk along a lane that cut through the fields, back to the district centre, searching compounds as they went. Before they set out they received an intelligence report saying the Taliban knew they were there. As soon as they started they saw two young men on a motorbike who appeared to be dicking them. Farmer ordered their arrest. They were grabbed, masked with blacked-out plastic goggles and handcuffed prior to being taken back to the base. While his men were dealing with the prisoners, Farmer glimpsed, through a gap in the crops, another pair of men walking along a path about seventy yards away. ‘I didn’t know who they were at first,’ he said. ‘I thought they were farmers.’ They were ‘laughing and joking, just two of them walking along’. Then, as they got closer, he saw ‘webbing, AKs, RPGs, and not only that. I saw five guys behind them with exactly the same kit’. He turned to warn Sergeant Carl Lane, who had taken over as platoon sergeant after Dan Jarvie returned home on R & R. As he did so, the Taliban saw them, and the firefight began. Farmer called in the mortars and 1 Platoon started moving forward.
‘Whenever we got in a fight with the Taliban, I always made a point of forcing them back,’ said Farmer. ‘Taking the initiative, showing them that if they are going to take us on conventionally then they are not going to win.’ Things started well. ‘This was a nicely coordinated, satisfying attack. The covering fire was going in well, the mortars were going in well, sections were moving well and it was all good.’ When they reached the Taliban position the Paras found they had ‘bugged out along a little covered route. We exploited beyond that, trying to find them and looking for blood trails, etc., but there was not much to see’. The Paras were ‘a bit pissed off. But we had made the point. We had won, we had pushed them back and given them something to think about.’
The Taliban had not given up, however. During the fight, the two prisoners the Paras had seized were killed, apparently caught in the crossfire of the initial contact. One died on the ground, the other was shot dead as he ran away. The incident was looked into by the Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch, who were in camp to investigate the death of Lance Corporal Tansey. They determined that both men had been killed by Taliban fire and found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Paras. Farmer had not heard that the prisoners were dead until the time came to extract. It seemed to him that the Taliban did not know either. ‘It was pretty clear that they thought we still had these prisoners with us and they relentlessly pursued us for a kilometre into camp,’ he said. ‘They were obviously keen to get back the detainees they thought we still had.’
The pursuing Taliban had been reinforced with fighters from the town. Other groups began shooting towards the Paras from several different directions. They were now about a thousand yards from the safety of the base. It was a long way in the circumstances. ‘We were a big unit and we stuck together so they could target us quite easily,’ said Farmer. ‘There was a lot of dangerous ground to go through. If we got a casualty we were going to be in a lot of trouble.’ The Paras dropped back, firing and manoeuvring, and called for help from the air. Two RAF Harriers appeared overhead and the team back at the district centre tried to guide them on to the Taliban position. But the pursuers were hard on the Paras’ heels and the chances of a deadly cock-up were high. The Harriers were too fast-moving to get more than a glimpse of the ground as they swooped over. They did, however, open fire, at one point hitting the Hesco walls of the base. Farmer tried to help by marking his location with a coloured smoke grenade, but this only gave away their whereabouts to the Taliban and drew their pursuers towards them.
Farmer decided to set up a snap ambush. The platoon peeled off and turned to face their enemy. As the Taliban advanced up the path they were hit with fire which inflicted some casualties and slowed down the pursuit.
By now everyone in the base was involved in the drama. The engineers had stopped work and were manning two WMIKs, mounted with .50-cals, which emerged from the base to provide supporting fire. The guns of FOB Robinson joined in with salvoes of 105mm shells. The HCR had moved their armour to a better position to cover the withdrawal, but in the process a Spartan threw a track and could go no farther.
After a second snap ambush the Paras were able to break out of the vegetation and into the scrubby dry river bed to the east. The pursuers chased them right to the edge of the wadi. The sight of the disabled Spartan distracted them and they began to spray it with RPG and small-arms fire. The crew were still inside. As the Paras fell back, everyone in and around the base concentrated fire on the Taliban while an HCR Scimitar raced out to rescue their comrades and retrieve sensitive equipment from the stricken Spartan.
Once everyone was safely back in camp, the Harriers came over again, dropping two big bombs which put an end to what had turned into a very long engagement. As on so many occasions, everyone had been very lucky. Farmer thought to himself that it was ‘an absolute wonder that no one died that day’.
By now they were wondering how long this could last. The Taliban were becoming more tenacious, more daring and more skilful. Their numbers did not seem to have gone up but the quality of the fighters had. It appeared that the Pakistani newcomers had more experience and imagination than their local allies.
It was essential to unbalance the enemy by coming up with new approaches. Intelligence reports suggested that the Taliban were preparing to plant IEDs on the Paras’ well-trodden routes into town. The need to find new ones was pressing. On 20 August, 1 Platoon set off to find a new path through the area north of the base. It meant blowing holes through a series of compound walls. 1 Section, led by Bryan Budd, pushed ahead into cultivated land to the north and east of where the demolitions would take place. 3 Section, commanded by Corporal Andrew Waddington, and supported by a WMIK, moved out to the north and west. Together they would screen 2 Section under Corporal Charlie Curnow and the engineers who set the charges.
Budd was leading from the front. As he pushed through a field, shoulder high with maize, he saw a group of Taliban about thirty yards ahead. He used hand signals to warn his men and to prepare them for a swift attack. They started to move stealthily round in a left flanking movement. As they did so, however, the WMIK with 3 Section came under fire. The element of surprise now vanished. Alerted by the shots, the
Taliban spotted the advancing Paras and began firing. The gunmen were invisible, hidden by the thick maize. Budd charged into the oncoming fire, followed by his section. Immediately, Corporal Guy Roberts spun back, hit in the shoulder. Private Andy Lanaghan was struck in the upper arm and the face. Craig Sharp took a bullet in the chest plate of his body armour, which knocked him over. ‘I heard the buzz of the round a fraction of a second before and then it was like being hit by baseball bat.’ His chest and stomach were burning. He put his hand under his vest, expecting to feel blood, but there was none.
Three of the eight-man section were down. If they stayed where they were, they might all die. Budd made a decision that cost him his life, but saved those of his men. By now he was close enough to see the gunmen, only 20 yards away. He ran forward, crashing through the vegetation, firing as he ran. That was the last time he was seen alive. His self-sacrificing action had succeeded. The enemy fire slackened and the rest of the section crawled back to a drainage ditch 25 yards away.
Hugo Farmer had been with Charlie Curnow’s section, but moved forward when the shooting began and met up with Budd’s men. When he learned that their commander was not with them, he and Curnow led 2 Section towards where the 1 Section commander had last been seen. ‘We tried to move forward and it was clear there were enemy all over the place and it wasn’t going to work,’ he said. They tried a different approach, moving south, then flanking right and following the stream northwards.
As they advanced along the bank they saw ‘Taliban bodies … I could see two from where I was quite clearly. Someone had tried to patch them up, or maybe they tried to patch themselves up because there was cotton wool and medical equipment lying around.’ There was no sign of Budd and no possibility of going farther, as the section came under intense machine-gun fire. The bullets were ‘hitting rock, hitting chest plates and they were splitting’. Farmer got ‘shrapnel in my boots, shrapnel in my chest plate and shrapnel in my arse’. Curnow was hit in the leg.
Back at base it was clear to Loden that 1 Platoon were ‘now in a fairly sticky plight’. He had three men badly injured and another missing. He called Bastion for air support and was told that two Harriers were just arriving and Apaches were on their way. By this time, Bryan Budd had not been seen for forty-five minutes. Loden needed more men on the ground but was running out of soldiers. He had already dispatched a quick reaction force under Tam McDermott to secure the casualty collection area. He now scraped together a second platoon, plundering every unit that was attached to the base. He stripped out the sangars, leaving each one manned by a single engineer. The HCR troop commander and seven of his soldiers made up another section. The third was formed from four engineers, two members of the sniper team and the two military policemen who were still in camp. They hurried out of the district centre, led by Andy Mallet.
Their task was to advance to where Hugo Farmer and his men were pinned down and stop them being cut off from behind. The Harriers had arrived, but the air controller was unable to see the enemy and direct the pilot on to the target. Then an Apache appeared and the Paras’ fortunes began to improve. Loden spoke to the Paras first then passed them on to Farmer, who was able to talk directly to the crew. ‘I asked them to strafe the enemy positions on the other side of the stream and very soon after that they started forcing them back,’ Farmer said.
The Paras were at last able to move up to where Bryan Budd had last been seen. They found his body lying on the sun-baked earth at the edge of the maize field, where the crops thinned out. The bodies of three Taliban lay around him. Four of his comrades carried him back to where a medic and quad bike were waiting. At first the medic thought he could feel a faint pulse, but it was wishful thinking. They loaded Budd on to the quad and collapsed back into the base, while the Taliban harassed them with mortar and small-arms fire.
The engagement had lasted more than an hour. The death of Bryan Budd sent a chill through his comrades. The tempo of the fighting was relentless yet the high attrition rate the Taliban were suffering did not seem to wear them down. Every firefight, every contact, increased the chances of death or injury. Farmer found himself thinking, ‘Right, I have had enough of the army now. I am going to sort this mess out and then I am just going to see my time out because I don’t want this any more.’ He knew what he was supposed to do: ‘get the blokes to agree that they are going to carry on as per usual. They are going to keep on doing the job. That this is part of war fighting and no one said it was going to be easy, so let’s just crack on.’
But at the back of his mind he was wondering, ‘Next time I go out, is it going to be me? Is it going to be more of the blokes? Are we going to get into a real state and start getting a number of people killed?’ Bryan Budd had seemed indestructible. If he could die, anyone could. ‘His blokes had a belief in him,’ said Dan Jarvie.
Budd was twenty-nine years old and a newcomer to ‘A’ Company, having just arrived in June. Before that he had served with the Pathfinders. He shared most of the qualities that made a popular soldier. He was, according to Jarvie, ‘outrageously fit, outrageously switched on, with a mega sense of humour and very, very helpful’. But he had a noticeably gentle side. He was devoted to his wife Lorena and their daughter Isabelle, and could not wait for the birth of a second girl, who was due in September.
The section commanders in 1 Platoon were ‘very much the big brothers’, said Hugo Farmer. ‘They weren’t heavy handed, they would mould the guys. It was a bit like a family, and Bry fitted in with all of that.’ Budd was also outstandingly competent in a culture that prized professionalism. Farmer ‘remembered a time we were being mortared and everyone went down to the basement to get away – quite rightly so. But I decided to go up to the top of the [FSG] tower to see where the mortars were coming from to try and locate it and pass it on to Major Loden who would call in air if needs be.’ When he got there, ‘who was there, already doing exactly what I was going to? Bryan Budd. That was typical. He thought above and beyond his immediate safety and about the bigger picture.’ He was notably brave amongst men for whom courage was the norm. ‘He would always be happy to go forward. There would never be any questions, any indications that he was scared and didn’t want to do it.’
But what he was finally remembered for was his devotion to his life beyond the battlefield. ‘He was different,’ said Farmer.
Every now and then he would come up to me with pictures in his hand of his family and he would say, ‘Boss, this is my little girl, this is my wife, we are expecting another baby.’ Whenever he put his bed down he would put up pictures of his family. No one else did that. They would have their magazines, books and ration packs strewn about the place, but he would have a nice, neat bed space and a picture of his family, and that is what he wanted to talk about most.
Budd seemed destined for a long, successful career. He was due for promotion to platoon leader. He was ‘an outstanding soldier’, in the judgement of Stuart Tootal. ‘He died doing the job he loved, leading his men from the front, where he always was,’ he said. ‘He was proud to call himself a paratrooper and we were proud to stand beside him.’
An investigation was carried out into the circumstances of his death. There were suggestions that he might have been the victim of friendly fire, though these were not substantiated. A subsequent ballistics investigation could not confirm a match with any of the Paras’ weapons. What was certain was that Bryan Budd had sacrificed his life for his men in an act of selfless heroism that thoroughly merited the Victoria Cross he was awarded four months later. ‘It was rare to see the enemy when a firefight began,’ said Craig Sharp, who was a few yards behind Budd when he ran forward. ‘Bryan saw the gunmen and knew it was going to turn very nasty. He acted in the best interests of his men. He decided to precipitate the attack in order to save our lives.’
Hugo Farmer was due to fly out for a fortnight’s R & R but offered to stay on after Budd’s death. Loden told him to go and get some rest. ‘A’ Company, who prided themsel
ves on their toughness and resilience, were feeling bruised and haunted by doubt. ‘The company was at its lowest ebb,’ said Andy Mallet. ‘We had lost an extremely talented NCO, but also a magic guy as well. He was a big character and he was missed by a lot of the blokes.’
Mallet prepared himself to deliver the inevitable ‘crack on’ pep talk. He told the men: ‘Right, you are probably not going to want to hear this right now, but we have to go out again. We have to find these guys. If we don’t go out they have won.’ He could see in their faces that ‘probably all they wanted to do was go home. But over the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours they managed to find it within themselves to carry on with the job that needs to be done’.
There might be no patrolling the next day and perhaps the day after. But they were going to have to go out again. He told them: ‘When we next patrol I need you to be on the ball, I need you to be focused on what you are doing. And they looked at me and said, “Yeah, when are we going out, boss?” For an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old kid to say that to you after some of the stuff we had done was completely humbling. That’s when I realised that these blokes are a bit special.’
Their reaction, he thought later, was a fine demonstration of the Para ethos. It was the supreme manifestation of the spirit that they had shown in P Company in the boxing ring, and when they threw themselves, heavily laden, out of aircraft at night. ‘At that moment, every man was milling something,’ he said. ‘They were milling their consciences or milling their fear, but every man found it in himself to jump when the green light went on, day after day after day.’
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