by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Afghanistan was only going to work if the ANA could eventually do it for themselves. The Paras (Parachute Regiment), first out when the war began, had been thrust into a fight they couldn’t win on their own and forgot about the ANA in the midst of keeping the Taliban from their throats. The only story anyone heard about the ANA during the whole of the first British deployment into what the papers soon exclusively referred to as ‘the lawless Helmand Province’ was the one about how they ran away when Tim Illingworth of the Light Infantry won his Conspicuous Gallantry Cross. The Marines had come in six months later with a whole lot more people and, in theory, a whole lot more sense. They dedicated almost a whole Commando, the OMLT Battlegroup, to the task of bringing on the ANA, but they hadn’t found it sexy enough and had sulked, taking it out on the ANA, alternately over-working and ignoring them.
So of course, if we’re honest, the Grenadiers hadn’t wanted the task either, but we’d sucked it up when we were told we were going to be 12 Brigade’s OMLT. After all, we were going in with 1st Battalion The Royal Anglians, who had been the lead infantry battalion in 12 Mechanized Brigade since forever and even had previous Afghan experience, although we all knew by then that the Kabul peacekeeping tours of pre-2006 had nothing to do with the war in Helmand. The Grenadiers were tired from their tour of Iraq; the Anglians had trained hard for the task of proving that, if the Paras and the Marines could do it, so could the line infantry.
We knew they’d get the important jobs over us; we’d only just got back from a no-notice deployment out to Iraq so we could finally wear the yellow medal that everyone else in the Army already had. Bumming around Shaibah Logistics Base, feeding detainees and cramming down lobster in the American D-Facs in Baghdad was no adequate preparation for what—even by autumn 2006 and presumably to the justified annoyance of those Falkland veterans marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of what was hardly a picnic—everyone was calling ‘the most intense fighting the British Army has experienced since Korea’. So while the Anglians got the best kit and training and focussed on the ‘main effort’, we could play with the Afghans and teach them how to use their rifles for the time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and could hand a peaceful if not prosperous province over with smiles and handshakes and flag ceremonies. Just like the British Army were supposed to be doing in Southern Iraq.
Problem was, down in Southern Iraq the Rifles and the Irish Guards were getting hammered. The Americans were pouring everything into a surge which nearly bled them dry, but was starting to work, while we were handing over the bases, doing dodgy deals with the militia and then stepping back as Basrah descended to anarchy. And this in a region we’d walked around years earlier wearing berets and smiles and gloating about how good we were at hearts and minds. But even then, Helmand was something else, and no one down there really knew it.
Except the Afghans.
They couldn’t shape their berets. They didn’t get up early and they stopped everything for meals, for prayer, for a snooze. They had no discipline. They smoked strong hashish and mild opium. They couldn’t map-read. They had no tanks, no planes, no order to the chaos of their stores. Their weapons weren’t accounted for. Their barracks weren’t health and safety compliant. They wore what they wanted, when they wanted, and walked around holding hands. They lacked everything that British Army training believed in and taught—and fuck me if most of them hadn’t killed more Russians than we had ever seen.
I loved them.
I liked that they had more balls than I ever did to just stand up and say ‘why’ or ‘no’ or ‘I don’t care if there is a war on and a massive IED threat, I like watermelon so I’m going to steal a car I can’t drive and run a Taliban checkpoint in order to go to the market.’
I couldn’t train them at all.
The video spoof of Marlboro adverts, with all-American cowboys covered in scratches herding cats, didn’t do it justice. We would wander over to the Afghan side of camp mid-morning, the sergeants already gritting their teeth in fury because they’d been up since half-five and couldn’t understand anyone who hadn’t been, hoping for the best. The best would usually be half of the soldiers we expected, lounging around on mattresses, sharing chai. Well, we reckoned half of the soldiers, but since we had no idea how many there were supposed to be, how did we know how many were half? And since there was no commander, or headquarters, or any sort of structure, how could we find out? I spent my first week with toolay se, kandaki awal—3 Company, 1st Battalion ANA—trying to find out who commanded it.
Miserable March turned to April, and without warning the temperature soared, and the peaks of the Kush were suddenly hidden in haze, not cloud. The remaining ANA were supposed to have come back from their leave, though still only half our Afghans were in camp. The combination of the rising temperature, the continued lack of action and our utter failure to make any progress in their training was starting to take its toll. The frustration was starting to show in shorter tempers, and the old-school lot were itching to form the whole kandak into three ranks and thrash them round Shorabak like Sandhurst cadets.
Instead we took those we could find out on the range and gulped hard and reassessed our desire to fight alongside them as they missed target after target with rusty and broken AK-47s. As the gap between what we were realizing we would need to do in Helmand and what it was obvious we could never teach the ANA to do widened, so things descended into farce.
I guess it was inevitable that I would get told off for conducting the body-bag lesson from inside it.
Every so often something would stop us in our tracks and almost force a reassessment of our new allies. The blasé way in which the young and impressive sergeant mentioned that he was hoping to go back north with us because he had earned his reputation up there years before, capturing a number of Taliban during the civil war and, unable to take them all prisoner on his own, throwing them one by one down a well and tossing a grenade in after them. Even Mahjid—quiet, considered, intelligent Mahjid, with whom, standing in for all the other officers in his company, I daily talked over chai and too-sugary boiled sweets, liking him more and more—mentioned how he too hoped we made it to Sangin so that he could avenge himself on the man who had shot him in the leg last year, pulling up his trousers to modestly reveal barely half a thigh distinguishable beneath monstrous scarring.
It forced us to remember that we were the tourists here. We were action-starved soldiers who had flown in for our seven months of glory. The Afghans were in no rush—they lived it all year after year. The mandate for OMLT was to be completely integrated with the ANA: if they went out for a fight, we went with them. Brilliant in principle, except that at every rotation of Op Herrick a fresh bunch of British soldiers arrived hungry for some action and started a frenzy of planning and grand ideas, involving the tired Afghans who had just accompanied the previous lot.
Lieutenant Mahjid was weary, a good officer who looked twice his thirty years and who’d never go far because, for all his balls and brains, he had no patronage. He was only supposed to be second-in-command, but there was no company commander and no platoon commanders either; come to think of it, there was no company sergeant major, so it was pretty much his show. His soldiers were from all over the country but mainly, thankfully, far away from Helmand, where Pashtun tribal loyalties undermined what little military command structure there was. His best fighters were northerners, battle-hardened Tajiks and Uzbeks with ruthless eyes and Hazaras with their Mongol fighting blood, guys who had stood alongside Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, who had fought for the only team ever to defeat the mighty Red Army and then been the last rearguard against the insanity of the Taliban. Problem was, they all lived many hundreds of miles away in a country with no roads and they needed to go home once a year. They needed to keep making children.
We had forgotten, if we ever knew, that this ‘training’ we were delivering wasn’t important; was, in fact, insignificant compared to bringing up a family.
&nbs
p; And what the hell did we know? It took me three long days of haggling and translating and drawing pictures and taking digital photographs just to get what I thought was a nominal roll of the hundred or so soldiers I was supposed to be working with. We had the audacity to be cross because thirty of them were still absent, trying to maintain their families on the other side of the country. We had the nerve to be pissed that thirty of those who were in camp refused to turn up to our training sessions, or that twenty of those who did left their shirts untucked. Christ, we must have looked stupid as we trudged back across the sweltering helipad dejected to lunch after another failed attempt to teach vehicle checkpoint drills or safe weapon handling. It was the ones we labelled troublemakers early who turned out to be the best soldiers, lazily pretending they didn’t know how to handle a weapon when later it turned out they knew better than most and were just taking the piss because why would they bother to handle their weapons ‘safely’ when all they used them for was firing at Taliban, not manning gates in Surrey with empty magazines. We grumbled in the cookhouse afterwards over Black Forest gateaux about how the hell we were supposed to go to war with a ragtag bunch like that, forgetting for one crucial moment that most of that ragtag bunch had done this before.
2.iv.04—‘An introduction to Terrence’
and we’re OUT, we’re finally out on patrol and after weeks of thinking too precisely on th’event, Afghanistan finally starts.
we’d come in excitingly enough as the Herc’ had thrown an aggressive corkscrew landing and the first-timers jumped just perceptibly as chaff briefly lit up the cabin in a red phos’ glow and we slammed the runway like some cheap African airliner when the storage cabins overhead all fall open except there is no storage, just us sweating in helmets and body armour so we all leg it off the back and into the middle of the desert.
later—much fucking around later—and we’re tearing down Highway 1 in the middle of a sandstorm and the world is a blur of dust and green through the LUCIE night vision sights and though we’ve successfully wedged the iPod speakers into the dashboard of the WMIK, the combination of wind and static cackle on the radio is drowning out even Metallica’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ which—after extensive debate—has pipped Too Many DJs Prodigy vs. Enya ‘Smack My Bitch Up (Orinoco Flow)’ as the soundtrack of choice for our first foray ‘OUT’ and even if we could have heard it, the shattering cannon smack of the .50 cal booming through the night would have drowned it out and anyway I’m concentrating too hard on the ridiculous exhilaration of firing 6 rounds a second of 7.62 1-bit ammo—crack and tracer crack and tracer—out into the cloudy dark to care, until i wonder idly over the radio if maybe we actually shouldn’t go easy on the fireworks given that there might be some nomadic herdsman or the odd mud hut getting ripped to pieces 500m to the north by our self-indulgent over-response to the remote possibility of ‘Terrence’ in the vicinity.
and when we’ve calmed down a bit and the last of the strangely beautiful red firefly tracer has burned out like a shooting star thousands of metres away I peer hopefully into the dark, reassuring myself that the rounds have tipped out in some harmless sandbank or—optimistically—shaken up some passing Taliban night move, but keep my fingers crossed that we haven’t exploded the camel of some innocent clueless herder whose temporary stop to shelter from the storm just turned nasty in a cacophony of over-excited ISAF troops.
in a way it’s a blessing to have far too much to consider as we rip down towards the mouth of the Sangin valley with essential cigarettes and Haribo and batteries and bullets and football scores for the poor suckers further forward who should have been going home by now but have just had their tour extended by 4 weeks in what the Nam-heads call ‘the A Shau valley’ after the notorious ground of Hill 936 a.k.a. Hamburger Hill. I haven’t time to dwell on the absurdity of blasting out live munitions while driving down the Afghan equivalent of the M25 because within seconds we’ve got to slow down because fuck fuck FUCK the Afghan fucking police are firing at us.
not that we can blame them.
with characteristic sang-froid the British Tommy has come to know and respect his enemy in Afghanistan as ‘Terry’. (à la Vietnam as in Viet Cong = VC = Victor Charles = Charlie, so Taliban = Terrence = Terry). Unfortunately Terry is a kind of funny name conjuring up images of Terry Thomas in tennis whites twirling his moustache and saying ‘good show’ in a silly voice—difficult to take seriously. Whether the Taliban who snuck into the police checkpoint we’ve just passed the night before were wearing tennis whites or had moustaches history doesn’t relate but what is as certain as the nightmares of the boys who went there to take over the shift the next morning is that snuck in they did in the middle of the night and decapitated the policemen on sentry duty leaving the headless torsos still sitting round the table where they had been smoking for the oncoming guard to discover.
which should have been pretty incongruous in the foothills of the breathtaking mountains which rise like jagged walls from nowhere as the desert stops and the Kush starts. in the lush valley of the Helmand River the poppies are head height and in full bloom where fields of bright turquoise give way to a ludicrous pink, blossoms swaying in a delightful mockery of our desert combats and the dark green US Marine Corps hand-me-downs of the Afghan National Army or local drug lord militia (which is pretty much usually the same guys depending on which side of bed they got out of that morning and whether they pick up the rifle we gave them and come along and fight with us or pick up their own AKs—all Westside pimped-up with flashy stickers and painted magazines and in one inspired case a brass door knob for a cocking handle—and shoot at us instead).
should have been incongruous, but wasn’t. isn’t.
out here, it seems, anything goes.
back in the camp in the rear with the gear (which sadly isn’t the Baghdad swimming pool or the Kuwaiti Ice-Cream parlour or a Saigon-style Baby-san massage hut so this war really needs to sort out its perks) exhausted, filthy, hungry soldiers drop their kit on their beds and head straight past the kitchen to queue for a desperate fix of Facebook. Before bedtime in the stinking hut with 30 blokes under mosquito nets, the Light Dragoons are in the middle of inventing a brilliant new game. You sellotape a peanut M&M above the double 20 of the dartboard, aim for it and laugh with each chip of coloured shell (the milk chocolate melts in your mouth and not in your hand) that falls to the floor as your opponent is obliged to lick it off the dusty concrete, that is unless the mice get there first. This is our entertainment and I shrug as Kuks or Will or one of the other guys I live so completely on top of that even after only three weeks our senses of humour have morphed into one grotesque entity misquoting constant Coogan-Gervaise-Morris-Atkinson-Ferrell-and-every-war-film-you-ever- saw, walks past and winks and in bad Afrikaans intones our favourite borrowed line from Blood Diamond.
‘TIA bru’. TIA.’
This Is Afghanistan.
Of course, as soon as we started having fun, it all got serious.
As if the weather had known what was coming and everything was getting a bit biblical, a plague of flies descended on the camp and crawled in food and eyes and ears until, foolishly, we wished anything would clear them away. Then midday turned to chocolate dusk as the sandstorms rolled in, and we spent the next half-hour running around camp like kids in a snowstorm, shocking each other with the static. Of course, the storm brought the giant cricket locusts, which were uglier but less annoying than the flies, but nothing topped the first round of DnV—diarrhoea and vomiting—which I only avoided by taking lunch of greasy rice and lamb with the Afghans until I saw them prepping the raw meat in the dirt next to their shitters.
Not that any of this bothered anyone when the news of the first casualties came in. The UN aid workers blown up in Kabul by suicide bombers as we’d arrived were too distant and we were too fresh. But when only three weeks in six Canadians a few miles north got killed by a mine like the one which had bounced Dave Groom’s Humvee two foot up in a puff of smoke we
realized how lucky he’d been to walk away and more importantly how lucky we’d all have to be too.
But it only properly hits home when we’re stood on the tarmac at Bastion, watching the silent and birdlike then deafening and grey hulking flypast of the Hercules taking Private Chris Gray’s body home. Private Gray had been shot by the Taliban during a clearance patrol up in Now Zad. It didn’t matter that we’d never met him, didn’t know his platoon, weren’t even part of his regiment. It mattered that he was nineteen years old, someone’s son, someone’s brother and someone who’d been shot in a fire fight doing the job we were all there to do. Grief was etched harder on the faces of the Royal Anglians at that first repatriation ceremony, but we were all thinking hard. Private Gray was any one of us, and we all knew he was the first but not the last. How many more solemn hours would be spent stood by this runway? Who would be next in a box?
We should have taken the moment to question our desire to get out on the sort of deliberate ops the Anglians were conducting. Was there starker evidence of the lunacy of our desires than the familiar geometric blocks of crimson and blue draping the coffin being carried by the six guys with the worst job going? I caught myself thinking about our dog-tags, about how we always laugh at the idea that there are two in case the one round your neck comes off when your head gets blown off, about how every twat in a provincial nightclub at home seems to be wearing them as fashion accessories. Glancing up and down the lines of sombre faces, I do a quick count of how many of my guys are nineteen; Gdsm Lloyd, certainly, LCpl Price, probably, Mizon?