3 Para

by Patrick Bishop

  Twenty days after they got there, Easy Company were subjected to a concerted effort to take the camp. The attack began on the evening of 26 August. Intelligence reports said that two groups were supposed to take part, but when one was late arriving the other started without it. Just before the OC’s evening briefing the compound was hit from several different directions. The action died out after an A10 was called in but resumed again just as the sun was rising. The new assault was the worst the defenders had yet faced. Village elders later told Jowett that 150 or more fighters were involved. ‘They weren’t all fighting at the same time,’ Jowett said. ‘It wasn’t like Zulu where they line up on the crest and you can count them. But it was a coordinated, full-on attack.’

  Easy Company were ready and waiting. Jowett had ordered his men to stand to at first light. Logically, this was the optimum time for the Taliban to launch an attack. The advantage the defenders had with their night vision equipment would fade with the coming of daylight. The men on the sangars would be groggy after a sleepless night, their alertness blunted by hours spent peering into the hostile darkness. On this occasion, though, the defenders were wide awake. The whole company, together with the Afghan police, crept to their positions, giving away nothing that would alert the insurgents.

  The Taliban started shooting at 4.55 a.m. ‘It was like a Jean-Michel Jarre concert with the tracer and the noise,’ said Jowett. The attack came in from all sides. The defenders had ten machine guns. Only two were. 50-cals and the rest were GPMGs. With these they had to ‘win the firefight, win that initial exchange … we are trying to kill them and stop them … very quickly [they] get the message that we are not asleep, that they are not just going to walk in. It’s part of taking someone’s heart out so they just don’t want to continue’.

  Jowett was on the headquarters building roof with the signallers who had come in with his company, ‘tucked up behind a hip-high, shitty wall, taking effective fire and trying to suppress it’. Most of it was coming from the area of the mosque on the south-west corner of the compound. Jowett heard a shout of ‘Medic!’ One of the signallers, Lance Corporal John Hetherington, had been hit as he moved across the rooftop. Jowett checked his pulse, but could not find one. They carried him off the roof and put him on the quad bike to take him to Mike Stacey at the medical post.

  The first thought was to call Bastion for a casevac helicopter, but it soon became clear this would not be necessary. John Hetherington was dead. The bullet had hit him close to his armpit, in a gap in his body armour.

  The fighting stopped just after 7 a.m. when an A-10 arrived and strafed the Taliban positions, just a road’s width from the Outpost.

  It was a desolate morning. Hetherington’s body was put in a room at the edge of the camp, and extracted by helicopter thirty-six hours later. The bodies of several Taliban were lying in the road in front of the main gate. There was an informal understanding that no attempt would be made to interfere with their recovery.

  The Taliban would not be drinking tea in the compound that night. There were, however, seven more firefights that day. In mid-afternoon the base was struck by five mortars and six RPGs. An American B-1 bomber was called in and dropped a 2,000lb bomb. Calling in air power was a delicate business. Bomb strikes and gun runs killed many Taliban, but the close-quarters nature of the fighting meant there was always a risk of ‘fratricidal’ incidents. The skill of the FSG, which brought in air and artillery strikes, was vital in Musa Qaleh, as it was elsewhere. There were two considerations when giving the coordinates of a target. One was the possibility that there were civilians in or near the location. The other was whether the bombs, shells or missiles would pose a threat to the defenders. The FSG in Musa Qaleh was made up of Bombardier Ray Anderton, Lance Bombardiers ‘Ginge’ Pritchard and Paul Wright of 7 RHA and Corporal Abe Williams of the RAF Regiment. In training exercises, each weapon had a ‘danger close’ range. If you were within it, you risked death or injury. The ‘danger close’ limit for A-10 gun runs was several hundred yards. In Musa Qaleh it was not unusual to have cannon shells exploding 20 or 30 yards from the defenders’ positions. The safe distance for a 1,000lb bomb was more than a thousand yards. The jets were dropping them 140 yards from the base. The fact that no one was hurt in the scores of air strikes mounted in the area was a tribute to the skill of both the observers and the pilots.

  After the failure of the two big efforts of 26/27 August, the Taliban reverted to stand-off attacks with rockets and mortars. The losses they had suffered in the effort to overrun the base seemed to have subdued them. They were also having difficulties with their resupplies, of men, ammunition and medical equipment. D Squadron of the HCR was now operating MOGs (Manoeuvre Outreach Groups) in the desert, small, fast-moving patrols that operated on the principles of mobility and unpredictability. They intercepted and attacked resupply columns of pick-up trucks carrying reinforcements and stores. The insurgents could no longer regard the desert as a friendly hinterland where they had only the Coalition air force to worry about.

  Morale in the base was strong. Everyone was a Musa Mucker now. They were all in it together. ‘There was not a bloke who was tucked away in a storeroom,’ said Jowett. ‘There wasn’t a single man who at some point wasn’t returning fire, shooting at the Taliban from the rooftops.’ He found there was no need for him to ‘keep driving them on. They were chipper. They were up for it.’

  On 1 September their resolve faced another, searching test. The day started slowly. Three mortars hit the camp around 9.30 a.m. Just before 10 a. m., I Battery of the RHA, which was now operating in the desert near by, landed some rounds from their 105mm guns on a Taliban OP. Then, a few minutes before 4 p. m., four mortars flew into the base. Two of them hit the Alamo, one landing on the roof with an explosion that kicked up a huge cloud of smoke and debris.

  Danny Groves was on the mortar line when he heard the impact. Soldiers were running towards the Alamo carrying stretchers. ‘Stomachs began to turn,’ he wrote. ‘There was panic everywhere and one soldier was brought down and stretchered across to the clinic, closely followed by another casualty shortly after.’ Groves went to the clinic to get more information and ran into someone who told him that one man was dead and another severely injured. The dead soldier was Ranger Anare Draiva. The wounded man was Lance Corporal Paul Muirhead. Draiva was one of four Fijians in the Royal Irish contingent. ‘D’, as he was known, was twenty-seven, a big, smiling, friendly man, who belonged to the mortar team. He had served in Iraq and had been one of the first to volunteer for Afghanistan duty. ‘Moonbeam’ Muirhead was twenty-eight, from near Stratford-upon-Avon. He was a member of the Patrols Platoon and another volunteer. He and ‘D’ were friends. He acted as an older brother to some of the younger, less experienced soldiers.

  When Groves broke the news to his mortar men, ‘you could tell by the look in their eyes how shocked they were but I don’t think anyone quite knew what to say so we just said nothing’. After a while the shock was replaced by anger. ‘When something like this happens it’s a natural reaction to want to lash out and get vengeance for the loss. I wanted it, I have to admit, and you could see in everyone else’s face that they wanted it too. We were all wanting to fire and I don’t think we really cared at what or who, just as long as it felt like we were doing something.’

  By now, though, there were aircraft overhead, dropping JDAM bombs and flying gun runs. Danny Groves went up to the Alamo roof with his friend, the mortar fire controller Corporal John Harding, to clean up the mess before any of the other mortar men saw it. The casevac helicopter arrived at 7.30 p.m. Paul Muirhead was flown on to Oman for specialist treatment but died on 6 September. ‘They always say when people die, “Oh, he was such a good guy”,’ said Adam Jowett. ‘But they were, they genuinely were.’

  Even Groves’s optimism and good humour were sagging as he finished his diary entry for a black day. ‘Surely,’ he wrote, ‘something good will happen soon.’

  17

  Peace
of Exhaustion

  There were to be more dark hours for the battle group before their tour was over. Throughout the summer, the soldiers at Kajaki had been living on hillsides, baking in the daytime heat and shivering at night, guarding the dam from continuing insurgent attacks. At about noon on the morning of Wednesday, 6 September, a patrol set off from the Observation Post called Normandy to investigate a sighting of the Taliban in the town below. The insurgents had set up a checkpoint on one of the roads and were waving down vehicles. It seemed they were forcing drivers to hand over money. With the heavy presence of civilians and children, there was no question of the Paras calling in a mortar strike. Instead, Lance Corporal Stuart Hale, after checking with Corporal Stuart Pearson of 3 Para Support Company, decided to get closer to the scene and see whether there was a chance of picking off the gunmen with a sniper rifle. Hale had gone about seven hundred yards when he reached a narrow dry river bed, and jumped over it. He then, as he told a reporter later, ‘found myself hopping back. It was like I had hit a spring and I remember thinking, “That’s strange. What’s going on here?”’ He fell flat on his back. He looked down and saw that he was missing a finger. His leg was twisted at a weird angle and there was a stump where his foot should have been. He had stepped on a mine.

  High up on the hill, about a mile away, the men in the ‘Athens’ OP heard the explosion. Private Dave Prosser of 3 Para’s Mortar Platoon thought little of it. ‘You just got used to loud bangs going off all the time,’ he said. ‘You just didn’t react to them.’ Then Corporal Mark Wright began calling for medics and stretcher-carriers. A party of nine men hurried off down the hill to help.

  When they arrived, Stuart Pearson directed them on a safe route to the casualty. They applied tourniquets, gave Hale morphine and attached intravenous drips to get fluids into his system. Mark Wright took charge. He decided that Hale was likely to bleed to death if he was carried back up the hill so he called Bastion for a casevac helicopter. Together with Stuart Pearson and some of the others, he prodded the ground for mines, to clear a path to a flat patch of ground about fifteen yards away, where they thought the helicopter could put down. They stretched warning tape along the route, put Hale on a stretcher and carried him across to the landing site.

  Pearson then turned to go back along the cleared path to the spot where Hale had been hit and where other members of the group were still waiting. As he picked up a water container, there was another explosion. Private Jay Davis, who had helped carry the stretcher, watched with dismay. Now they knew that there were mines everywhere.

  Everyone’s first instinct was to help Pearson. He was only four or five yards away. But they also knew that if they took a step they risked further catastrophe. ‘No one could get to Stu because obviously if we moved, other people would get blown up,’ said Davis. Pearson, who, like everyone in 3 Para, had basic medical training, would have to treat himself. ‘He put the tourniquet on himself, put morphine into himself and we just had to leave him.’ They were ‘standing stock still. Everyone was shouting orders. Then it calmed down a bit and we heard the choppers coming in’.

  By now it was 1.30 p. m., more than an hour and a quarter after the first mine went off. The arriving Chinook was fitted with emergency medical equipment. But none of the battle group CH-47s had winches. The stretcher party marked the landing site with green smoke but the helicopter landed about fifty to a hundred yards away, in a cloud of dust and grit. The pilot ordered the medical team to stay on board because of the mine threat. The loadmaster was told to signal to the soldiers to bring the casualties to the aircraft. He stood on the ramp and gave a thumbs-up sign. But no one came forward.

  There was no question of them risking the journey over ground that might be densely sown with mines. In fact, the soldiers thought the helicopter’s presence itself was a hazard. There had been talk before it landed that its downdraught might dislodge rocks that could cause more explosions. According to Davis, before the Chinook landed ‘Mark was trying to tell the pilot to fuck off just in case it set more mines off, because it didn’t take a lot’. Then the loadmaster saw a bare-chested man dressed in boots and shorts make the letters ‘T’ and ‘O’ with his hands, which he translated as ‘Take off’. He told the pilot and a minute after they had landed, the Chinook rose again in a swirling column of dirt.

  The soldiers ducked down to shield themselves from the dust storm kicked up by the rotors. Jay Davis watched Mark Wright ‘crouch down, just to get out of this down blast. He put his hand out and – boom’. Another mine went off. Wright was badly wounded in his left upper chest, arms, face and neck. The blast also caught Lance Corporal Alex Craig, one of the medics, wounding him in the chest. Dave Prosser went to help him. By now medical supplies were running low. Prosser improvised, taking off his T-shirt and using it as a bandage. Craig decided to take his chances and, despite his injuries, set off to walk up the hill to an OP.

  He managed to make it to safety. But it was a rash thing to do. It was clear that the slightest movement could trigger another explosion. Yet despite the appalling danger another medic, Lance Corporal Paul ‘Tug’ Hartley, moved forward to help his comrades. He flung the medical pack he had carried down from the ‘Athens’ OP on to the ground in front of him, to detonate any mines in his path, then moved forward to stand on the patch where the kit had landed.

  He reached Mark Wright without setting off any mines. As he got to him, Fusilier Andy Barlow, a machine-gunner attached to 3 Para who was standing near by, stepped back to give the medic room. As he did so, Barlow trod on another mine, which blasted shrapnel into his lower left leg. The explosion also blew Hartley to the ground and hit Prosser. In mine strikes, the debris on the ground around becomes almost as dangerous as the shrapnel. Prosser got ‘bits of stone in my leg and in my ear, and a big bit of frag in my chest’. He had to ‘start first-aiding myself with what I could find. I had blood pissing out of my chest and everywhere. I lay on my side. I remembered that if you have a bad lung, the one that’s uppermost will still work because the fluid will drain into the lower one and if you lie on your back, the fluid will drain into both and knacker both lungs’.

  Paul Hartley threw across a field dressing. Prosser ‘put that on, but the blood started coming through that straight away so I got another one on. I basically scrunched up the field dressings, poked one in the hole and got another one, wrapped that round, tied it in a knot and lay on my side’.

  When the first news of the mine strike reached Bastion, Stuart Tootal had asked his higher headquarters at Kandahar for an American Black Hawk helicopter, equipped with a winch, to go to assist, but was told that there would be a long delay. Three hours after the first mine went off, two Black Hawks were finally on their way.

  The wounded and the stranded waited calmly for them to arrive. No one screamed, no one groaned, but Mark Wright talked, quietly. He spoke about his wedding plans. He was about to get married to his girlfriend Gillian. ‘He was saying how much he loved her and how much he was looking forward to seeing her again,’ said Jay Davis. ‘He said he might have to call the wedding off because his arm was in clip and we were telling him not to be so stupid.’ Wright made brave jokes about the amount of insurance that would be coming to him.

  The helicopters were a long time getting there. To Dave Prosser, ‘it felt like bleeding for ever, just lying there’. At last, they heard the throbbing of the rotors and the Black Hawks were hovering over them. They were from a rescue unit and had specialist American jumpers on board. Two of the jumpers were winched down with a scoop stretcher and started hauling the wounded to safety. Stu Hale went first, then Mark Wright. When the wounded were on board, the crew winched up the unharmed members of the rescue party.

  Wright was flown off to the helicopter landing site at Kajaki Dam and loaded on to a waiting casevac Chinook, which took off immediately for Bastion. He died of his wounds on the way. Mark Wright was twenty-eight and had been a member of 3 Para Mortar Platoon since October 1999. ‘He was a brill
iant bloke,’ said Dave Prosser. ‘I went to the Mortars in January 2001 so I had known him a long time.’ Wright would join in when they went for a drink and liked a game of cards. But he also had a quiet side. He was a dog lover who kept a picture of his black Labrador with him and went back to his home in Scotland every weekend from Colchester to see his fiancée.

  Shortly after they got back to Bastion, news arrived of further casualties in the platoon houses. There were wounded men in Sangin and more in Musa Qaleh. It had been another hot day in Sangin. Since morning, the Taliban had launched four attacks with small arms, machine guns and mortars. At 5.30 in the afternoon they landed a number of mortars in the compound, in the orchard area, where a platoon orders group was taking place. Three men were injured, including Lance Corporal Luke McCulloch, one of the Royal Irish soldiers attached to the Paras’ ‘C’ Company. He had been hit in the head by shrapnel and it was clear that his injury threatened his life. A casevac helicopter set off from Bastion, flown by Major Mark Hammond of the Royal Marines. When he and the crew arrived, shepherded by two Apaches, a firefight was still in progress. There was no way to safely land the Chinook, and Hammond reluctantly swung away and back towards Bastion.

  In Helmand, a bad day still had a long way to run. Immediately after reaching Bastion, Hammond was told to prepare for a second mission. Another casevac would have to be flown to extract two wounded Royal Irish soldiers, Rangers Panapassa Matanasinga and Dominic Whitehouse, who had both been hit by shrapnel when mortars hit the base at Musa Qaleh, just after 5 p.m. Matanasinga had the more serious injuries. Mike Stacey, the MO at Musa Qaleh, had told Stuart Tootal in Bastion that he could keep Matanasinga alive only for six or seven hours.