3 Para

by Patrick Bishop

  When the Chinook arrived, the Taliban were waiting. The plan was to put down on the helicopter site close to the compound walls. It was a very dangerous place, in the middle of a complex of compounds and alleyways which provided ideal cover from which to mount an ambush. Hammond went in fast and low but was met by a stream of fire and had to turn away. One of the escorting Apaches saw a pair of RPGs swish 10 yards above and below the Chinook. Once again, the crew spent several hectic minutes returning fire from the door guns. When they got back to Bastion it was found that four rounds had hit the aircraft, one almost shearing off a rotor blade at the root.

  Tootal decided to wait for dark before trying again. Another Chinook was found, and artillery batteries and aircraft were put on alert to batter Taliban positions around the two bases as the helicopter darted in.

  Hammond, along with his three crewmates and the four members of the medical team, took off for Sangin once more. As soon as he touched down an armoured Spartan from the HCR raced out to the landing site and delivered the wounded. As Hammond lifted off, the Chinook came under fire from machine guns. The crew shot back from the door guns until they had reached safety height.

  Back at Bastion, Lance Corporal McCulloch was pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the medical centre. The others would be all right. McCulloch was twenty-one years old and was born in Cape Town. He had already been in the army for five years. He was described by his CO, Lieutenant Colonel Michael McGovern, as a ‘truly outstanding character’ who was ‘a delight to have around’.

  There were still wounded men in Musa Qaleh. As the citation for Mark Hammond’s thoroughly deserved Distinguished Flying Cross later stated, at this point he would have been justified in declaring that the threat in Musa Qaleh was too high and he would not be returning. Instead, he accepted the task without hesitation.

  This time all available air assets were there to support him. There were Apache attack helicopters, A-10s and a Spectre gunship. Just before the Chinook made its final approach they pounded known Taliban positions. This time Hammond got in and out unscathed.

  Wednesday, 6 September, had been the most testing date in the calendar since the battle group deployed. It was, as Tootal said, ‘a day of days’. Once again, the helicopters had taken enormous risks. Once again, they had got away with it. But the deaths in Afghanistan were mounting up. Only four days before, all fourteen men aboard an RAF Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft had crashed while supporting a ground operation. The lengthening casualty list added to the growing perception in Britain that the mission was going wrong.

  The odds were shortening all the time, as Hammond’s first mission to Musa Qaleh had demonstrated. The shot that hit the rotor root could have brought the Chinook down. That prospect once again raised the question of what exactly was being achieved by holding the platoon houses, and in particular Musa Qaleh. Since the wounding and subsequent death of Paul Muirhead, the tempo of attacks there had remained high. On 2 September, six more Royal Irish were wounded, one of them, Lieutenant Paul Martin, seriously. Three days later, the Taliban had made another attempt to overrun the base. The attack was beaten back by the defenders, helped from the air by bombs dropped by Harriers and A-10 gun runs.

  Easy Company were inflicting daily defeats on the Taliban but their position was tenuous, as was only too clear to Corporal Brian Price of 3 Para, one of half a dozen reinforcements who had been flown in to replace the battle casualties. Price had been in Sangin but Musa Qaleh had a far more sinister vibe. ‘Sangin wasn’t easy,’ he said. ‘But Musa Qaleh was hideous at times because of how close they got to the camp.’ After the Hesco ramparts of Sangin, the base’s defences looked flimsy. ‘If the Taliban had the numbers I think they would have got in because some of the walls were six feet tall which were easily jumpable.’

  Attacks at Musa Qaleh came out of the blue from all sides. One night Price was arriving for stag duty in Sangar Three, which faced eastwards, when the base came under rifle fire from the north. This, as it turned out, was just an artful preliminary. ‘The way they did it was they fired small arms from one direction to get us to concentrate on that side, and then they would RPG us from another direction, which did catch us out.’ As Price arrived at the top of the stone steps leading up to the sangar it took a direct hit from a grenade. The shot failed to penetrate the walls, ‘but it was enough to knock me down the stairs and knock me out’, he said. When he came round he struggled back up to the sangar just as another RPG hit. He lurched in, semi-conscious, to see ‘fire hitting the side. All the lads were on the floor. We finally got everyone back up into position and firing back’. They were getting hit from the north, east and west. Then, to complete the 360-degree engagement, they started taking fire from the south as well.

  This level of violence placed a huge strain on the defenders’ morale. The Royal Irish felt deeply the deaths of their ‘brothers’ Paul Muirhead, Anare Draiva and Luke McCulloch. They dealt with it by carrying on with extra determination. Adam Jowett was a committed Christian and leant on his faith to keep going. He carried a card tucked in his helmet printed with the Paratrooper’s Prayer and the following lines from Isaiah:

  Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

  But the defenders could only carry on if they had the necesssary means, and supplies and resources were running alarmingly low. There were enough men in the camp to defend it. The Afghan security contingent was more reliable and skilful than its counterparts in the other platoon houses. The problem was equipment and ammunition. The base had only two .50-cals, one of which had been damaged by insurgent fire and put out of action. They were reduced to mocking up a dummy in the hope it would have a deterrent effect. They had no Javelin missiles as they did in Sangin.

  Their biggest worry, however, continued to be the ammunition stocks. In all of Easy Company’s time in Musa Qaleh they received only six deliveries, all of which came in on casevac helicopters. On 8 September the mortars had thirty rounds of 81mm left. This was enough to last for one serious engagement. They had no link ammunition left for the Minimi light machine guns, and had to spend tedious hours pushing 5.56 rounds left behind by the Danes back into the used links.

  The shortages were all the more alarming as intelligence reports indicated that the insurgents were preparing another heavy attack on the base. The Taliban were suffering. In the first few days of September, information came through that a senior commander’s son had been killed in a mortar attack. Later it appeared that it was the commander himself who was dead. More and more foreign voices were heard, apparently Pakistanis who had been drafted in to replace the local casualties. Fighters were complaining to each other that they were starting to feel the cold at night and missing their families.

  The Taliban appeared to be reaching the limits of their determination. They spoke, according to the intelligence reports, of ‘the final sacrifice’ and the ‘end of the story’. A new commander had been brought in to take charge. It seemed that one last attempt to overrun the camp was imminent. The defenders almost welcomed the development. ‘In many ways I think we all hope it is soon,’ wrote Danny Groves. ‘We hate the indirect fire attacks, like mortars and rockets, because we can’t really do fuck all to counter them. But when they come at us, we can take our destiny in our own hands and wipe them out as we have been consistently doing in every battle we fought against them.’

  On the morning of 11 September it looked as if the epic showdown was about to begin. Sergeant Major Scrivener hurried round the compound ordering extra ammunition supplies to all the positions. An aircraft had reported seeing a crowd of four or five hundred men, only two and a half miles south of Musa Qaleh. There were further sightings throughout the day, in different locations. But as the hours passed and the shadows lengthened, the great attack failed to materialise. There was an exchange o
f small-arms fire when the Outpost came under attack. The 7 RHA guns out in the desert bombarded a Taliban position. These, as it turned out, were the last shots Easy Company would hear fired in anger in Musa Qaleh.

  The first signs that a dramatic change was on the way had come a few days earlier, on 8 September, when the defenders had been told, once again, to prepare to leave. Adam Jowett announced to his men that they could be moving out as early as 13 September and returning to Bastion before redeploying to the relative tranquillity of Gereshk to carry out gentle reconstruction tasks before flying home in mid-October.

  What would happen to the base at Musa Qaleh after they departed was unclear. A rumour circulated that it would be abandoned. This story received a mixed reception. Everyone was delighted to be leaving. But no one liked the idea of ceding the place they had fought so hard to defend to their enemies. The soldiers had beaten back over a hundred attacks in forty days. Three of their friends had been killed and fifteen injured. To walk away seemed to negate the value and the purpose of all their effort and sacrifice.

  As it turned out, the timetable laid out by Jowett was wildly optimistic. But the episode reflected a profound shift in Britain’s strategy in Afghanistan. The incoming chief of the general staff and head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, had just made a visit to Afghanistan. Brigadier Ed Butler had spelled out for him, in stark terms, the risks that were being run every time a casevac operation was mounted and the strong possibility that ‘an immeasurable strategic shock to the overall campaign’ was likely. He outlined the worst case scenario he had gone over many times with Stuart Tootal. It was ‘that we’d have a casualty, we’d put a casevac helicopter [out], that would be shot down. We’d then have [to make] the decision: “Do you send in another helicopter into a high-threat area to try and rescue the helicopter that was down, and the casualties?” That got us very close to the decision for me to say, “We’re going to have to withdraw from Musa Qaleh.”’ This, Butler said, was not an admission of defeat. ‘It was the fact that professionally, personally and morally I could not keep my troops in such constant danger without a viable casevac system in place.’

  Butler’s concerns were deepened by intelligence reports he was getting saying that the ‘Tier One’ Taliban had identified the platoon houses’ reliance on helicopter support as a critical vulnerability and were more determined than ever to shoot one down. In his opinion it was ‘very much a matter of when, and that was going to be sooner rather than later’. His professional judgement ‘was that to lose a helicopter, with twenty troops on board, would be a significant blow with strategic consequences from an Afghan, a London and a NATO perspective’. He had decided that ‘we should come out unless there was a dramatic … change in the situation’.

  He passed this on to Dannatt and to PJHQ in Northwood, which had ultimate operational control of the British effort in Afghanistan. The decision was his own. He would ‘make the call when the next casualty came through’. It was a very exposed position to be in for an ambitious officer. But Butler felt that the risk of catastrophe was enormous. He compared it to having ‘a loaded revolver pointed to [your troops’] head, and there’s a bullet in the breech, the safety catch is off and [you’ve] taken the first pressure on the trigger’.

  Butler’s message was taken very seriously in London. He had raised the question of how the British public would react to the sort of disaster he had outlined. The deployment had not been popular. The reasons behind it had never been properly articulated. Few understood what the British were doing in Afghanistan and the scant reports filtering back from the battlefield painted a gloomy picture.

  Plans were now made for an immediate withdrawal from Musa Qaleh. Events had moved quickly. Butler’s superior General David Richards, the commander of the NATO-led ISAF force in Afghanistan, was opposed to the idea of a swift pull-out. He had inherited the outstation strategy when he took over command from the Americans in August and had made it clear to all that he thought it was mistaken and an inappropriate use of military resources. He believed that Butler should have resisted the Afghan government pressure to ride to the rescue in Musa Qaleh and Now Zad and concentrated on securing the ‘Triangle’ in central Helmand and establishing the reconstruction programme.

  Although Richards was keen to reverse the policy, he believed there were considerable long-term dangers in simply withdrawing. He thought an abrupt retreat would be portrayed by the Taliban as a historic defeat for the British. It would be ‘Maiwand revisited’ – a reference to the debacle in 1880 when the self-proclaimed sovereign, Ayub Khan, defeated a British brigade near Kandahar and besieged the garrison in the city. That had happened 130 years earlier, but was still fresh in the minds of the insurgents.

  The claims the Taliban made mattered. A scramble from the platoon houses would demonstrate to the great army of the undecided in Helmand, the huge swath of the population who yearned for stability and prosperity but above all wanted to survive, that the British could be beaten. The promises of devotion to their wellbeing and commitment to the long haul were not to be believed. The British had shown that they could not provide protection. Survival, then, would mean living with the Taliban.

  Richards spoke urgently to London. He talked to the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, and the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup. He told them that a unilateral withdrawal would count as a defeat. Any pull-out would have to be finessed if the British mission to Helmand was not to go down in history as a disaster.

  The Afghan government were also dismayed by the plan. A retreat would mean that, despite all the fighting, the ‘black flag of Mullah Omar’ would fly over the district centre of Musa Qaleh and the Taliban’s dreams of reconquest would take on a little more substance.

  A crisis was approaching. But just as a diplomatic and military collision seemed inevitable, an escape route appeared. It was provided by the people in whose name the battle was being fought. The representatives of the long-suffering citizens of Musa Qaleh approached the Afghan authorities with a proposal. The battle of Musa Qaleh had been a disaster for the inhabitants. Much of the town centre was in ruins. They had lost homes and businesses. Most of them had fled to the countryside or the fringes of town. Anyone who ventured into the streets was liable to die. A woman and child had been killed in a pick-up truck in the bazaar to the west of the base during a firefight on 26 August. It was the fate of the powerless to accept the rule of the victors. But it seemed to the people of Musa Qaleh that no one was winning.

  A group of local leaders devised a plan by which both sides would withdraw and they would take responsibility for running the town. ‘It was a tribal elders’ initiative,’ said Governor Daoud. ‘They proposed it. They said, “We will be responsible for security. We will ask the Taliban to leave the area, not to fight any more in the town.” They came to us. They said, “We have convinced the Taliban, because we told them we have lost property and you are not able to capture Musa Qaleh.”’ The insurgents had failed to capture the town from the British. But they had kept on trying, nonetheless, bringing continuing destruction and misery to Musa Qaleh. Daoud said the locals had threatened to side with the British unless the Taliban gave up.

  Daoud called Butler in on the evening of 12 September to tell him about the offer. According to Butler, the elders had ‘turned to the Taliban and said, “You’ve now caused so much destruction here our people aren’t being fed, we haven’t got our crops in … winter’s approaching, hospitals are being blown apart, no one’s in the bazaars, the kids can’t go back to school. You created this situation as much as the Coalition. You must stop the fighting.”’ Daoud told Butler the elders would be phoning later on and asked him what he could do to help. ‘I said, this is very easy,’ he recalled later. ‘If they get the Taliban to stop firing at my troops, I will tell my troops to stop firing at them.’ At ten minutes to ten the governor’s satellite phone warbled. ‘The message came back saying, yup, they’re prep
ared to cease fire. And I said, “Well, fine, I will tell my troops to stop firing unless there is a direct attack on a sangar.”’ There had been some exchanges of fire that evening. At 9.41 p.m. the shooting stopped and Easy Company were given orders to fire only in self-defence.

  The elders’ intervention was later presented as one of the achievements of the platoon house strategy. It was a triumph of people power over coercion. Whichever way the initiative was spun, the proposal was a sign of desperation. It was not only the civilian population who had reached their limit. Both sides were ready to disengage. The solution the elders offered would never have worked if it had not suited the Taliban and the Coalition alike. The attackers were all but fought to a standstill. The defenders were exhausted. The elders offered a solution that allowed everyone to draw breath and, as importantly, save face.

  Their proposal was snatched up with telling enthusiasm. When Butler told his superiors in PJHQ that they were no longer pulling out because of the changed situation he was told they ‘fully understood’. The move fulfilled Richards’s conditions for a finessed withdrawal.

  It was a peace of exhaustion. It was important to set up a meeting to cement the deal while the mood lasted. There were certain presentational problems that had to be overcome. The Coalition could not be seen to be dealing with the Taliban. The Americans in particular, who were never to accept the Musa Qaleh arrangements, regarded any negotiation as an act of surrender. The understanding would have to be brokered through the elders.

  The following day the men of Easy Company, perched on the sangars, saw a surreal sight – a group of robed, bearded men walking from the direction of the bazaar and up to the main gate. It was, as Danny Groves wrote, ‘probably the first time in two months that anyone has been allowed to walk up to the base without being pumped full of lead’. The elders of Musa Qaleh had come to see Adam Jowett. He cleared away the rusty junk that had accumulated around the gate during the siege and came out with an interpreter to greet them. ‘There were about sixty of them just standing there,’ he said. ‘And behind them, in black, were the Taliban. Without a shadow of a doubt.’ The sight was oddly reassuring. It told Jowett that the deal was serious. ‘These guys had the influence and realising that very quickly made me feel better about the whole thing.’