by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Of course there weren’t enough vehicles and of course communications were rubbish, of course we needed more helicopters and of course the boys were tired, but it had ever been and would ever be thus. No army in the world ever had all it needed, no commander ever suffered from too many resources, and the funny thing was we resented the presumptuous journalism more than the shortages.
Which was probably why we had a fight with the gobby Territorial captain in charge of the camera crew who came with us for the next phase and started trying to tell us how to do our job instead of shutting up and taking photos of it like he was supposed to. It was frankly a relief when the B Company patrol forward kicked up such a scrap that we crashed out to join the fighting, and the urgent requests for ammunition resupply that night were a most eloquent reminder to all the gossips and commentators that we had more important things to be worrying about.
Making our way back from the forward patrol, the sun setting silhouettes the hulking patrol base and shimmers on the water at the sluice-gates. The Hesco sentry positions look like towers in the lengthening shadows, the uneven loading of the top row forms the battlements, and it’s every inch a castle. Tac visited and left the mail and some cans of pop, and the ANA cooked up some fresh rice from somewhere, the smell of which wafts up deliciously from the riverbank.
Down by the river was home, sweet home.
What ensued was a nine-day odyssey when hours and days blurred indistinguishably into being on stag or not being on stag, driving into Gereshk for resupply or pushing out forward on clearance patrols. Moving up north for briefings or into the JDCC,where the ANA had set up the kandak HQ in the middle of Gereshk, for orders, down to the river for swims and washes and grenade fishing and push-ups and bar curls using the six-foot pickets that are the makeshift gym. The slow-burn madness of drifting off to sleep in the gently swinging hammock as nothing changes.
Progressively clearing the ground around the new front line, we found treasure troves of Taliban goodies: mobile telephones, computer software, radios and even the kit left behind by the Marines who got ambushed not far away six months ago. There were improvised infrared and remote-controlled devices and even English phrasebooks and crudely doodled exercise books, ORBATs alongside with childish drawings of imagined Taliban tanks and burning infidel stick men.
We grew accustomed to the haphazard, side-by-side Afghan living, the unfamiliar compounds; donkeys in the courtyards and primitive tools hanging from the walls, brick kilns and stacks of dry opium and fearsome-looking scythes. We pushed through doors marked with good-luck-charm cat’s eyes into rooms decorated with garish digital posters; luridly coloured mock-ups of Islamo-utopia, dreamlike estate-agent brochure pictures which seemed to depict Palm Beach but with more mosques. Chickens strutted through passages strewn with discarded medicine bottles and cassettes and plastic sandals, looking for the fallen toot-toot berries, which looked like a cross between a gooseberry and a maggot but tasted deliciously of light kiwi-fruit.
Once the fighting had calmed, normal life seemed to resume on the sluice-gates, the main upstream crossing of the river for everyone making their way down into Gereshk. A daily bustle of life and colour through the ANA checkpoint; venerable white-bearded haji-sahibs and young boys with close-cropped hair like Spartans driving forward impassive cattle, donkeys impossibly laden with poppy and cloth and ever-comical herds of skittish, wobbling fat-tailed sheep, the invisible women a ghostly procession of powder blue and green burkhas and teenagers whizzing back and forth on scooters, beaded skull-caps glistening in the sun in the steady flow of families, those from downstream moving back home, those from upstream running away.
Down on the river, it was all Major Qiam. He was almost certainly a bully and maybe a thief, and I knew that without me watching him like a hawk he’d be pounding the crap out of the latest guy he was interrogating; the problem was that, for all that, he was a one-man army. Qiam’s father was executed—he explained to me over lunch in his lean-to, getting fat on greasy pilau and ghosht while the boys preferred the MREs we’d robbed from the Yanks—in front of his very eyes when he was fourteen. His brother one year later, that time in public. The man lives for one thing and one thing only, killing Taliban. He’s good at it as well, smells things out, knows the area and the locals. He’d take one look at suspicious men being questioned at the checkpoint and wave them off, apologizing profusely that they had been inconvenienced by his idiot soldiers, maybe cuffing the corporal in question for good measure, and minutes later he’d pounce on some young guy about to be waved through, whisper something menacing in his ear, and we’d gather in amazement as the bloke would hand over explosives, ammo, radios and meekly offer himself up for detention.
Perhaps more importantly, he was more effective at motivating ANA soldiers than anyone or anything else I saw. Between him and the quietly meticulous Lt Majhid, the ANA planned and executed patrols beyond the wildest expectations we’d dared to harbour back in Shorabak. Never correctly dressed and always reliant on us for supplies and support but with a nose for the enemy, they’d clear through sectors in hours it would have taken a company of Brits days. But it went both ways, as we discovered one afternoon when the officers had all disappeared and we were woken from a siesta by the general commotion to discover a couple of clowns had got high on the last of the weed and driven their truck straight into the canal to see if it could swim. We stood on the bank, unsure at first whether to laugh or cry as the 4-ton Ford Ranger wagon bobbed downstream with the dopey idiots babbling incoherently, perched on the roof.
In the end we laughed.
Qiam came back the next day to beat the guilty pair and explained apologetically that he’d been off looking for a wife. I was pretty sure this was a joke, but you could never be certain. His soldiers giggled and the ’terp blushed as he explained that he took a wife from every place where he had fought and defeated the Taliban, each one younger and prettier than his first wife, who was, so he said, famously ugly. It was hard to reconcile the jovial character sharing out sweets he’d picked up from wherever he’d been with the cruel bully cracking gags at the expense of some poor woman somewhere. ‘So ugly, Toran Padi’, he told me (Toran was Dari for ‘captain’—I was still a lieutenant at the time, but the ANA had a habit of promoting their mentors one rank up to make themselves feel more important), ‘that when she asks me when she has to stay covered up I tell her I don’t care as long as she stays covered up in front of me!’ He was fearless, tactically astute and obviously cared for his men far more than any other Afghan commander (more than plenty of British officers for that matter), but when he flew into one of his rages over something trivial and I saw the look in his eyes I’d seen in the first ambush, I knew he was slightly unhinged.
Resupply runs back into FOB Price were the treats of roughly once a week, the opportunity to ogle music vids and check out beard growth in the mirrors and gorge on NAAFI stock before snatching time on the Internet and phones and, best of all, a trip to the real flushing loos. In retrospect these days seemed an eternity of iPod nostalgia and nights not quite yet warm, but too tense for blankets, endless excitedly scribbled blueys and an overwhelming sense, even through the occasional IED bangs, of security. The ANA were happy, the hierarchy were happy, Silicon had been a success, and the token triumphal gesture was to rename the Lower Sangin Valley the Upper Gereshk Valley, and the only unsettling question, initially unspoken but sensed among the guys, was how and when would we ever be pulled out of the line we had created for ourselves.
It was perfect. I don’t mean perfect in any sense of ideal, perfect in any sense that living rough on the front line of a hot and bitter fight could be, but perfect in that it was all so clichéd. The dead man’s sandals on the first night, the patrols through thick, head-high fields, the days in the firebase under the sweltering sun, all bandanas and dog-tags and cooling off with dips in the river, the cowboy ANA element still stubbornly toking away and the drone of choppers overhead, the nightly boom and pop and
eerie glow of the mortar illum and thud of distant air-strikes and rattle of nervous ANA defensive fire as the perimeters were tested.
The noisy cicada, the occasional braying of the donkey, the trickle of water through the sluice-gates, the long night hours gazing at the sky, picking out the satellites through the NVGs, the Nimrods from the shooting stars and the thrill of a comet or the majesty of the Milky Way, these became our canvas. A sense of balance sprung from the enforced reduction to nature, the meaningless taste of the same ORPs, the fading smell of unwashed bodies and the banter sat round watching the shitters slowly burn at dusk. The casual professionalism, the fluency of radio chatter and sudden easy familiarity with weapon after weapon after weapon—Afghanistan felt more like being on set than real life.
It seemed that, finally able to write the letters home I’d spent the last three years apologizing for not writing, I couldn’t, because no one would believe them.
‘All Along the Watchtower’ played out into the night as the projected five days of Op Silicon rolled into their third week and we were still on the ground we’d taken and held, abandoned first by the Anglians, off to prepare for something else, and then by the WFRs, off back to the comfort of Price, until it was just us, the three Queen’s Company teams and the three ANA companies spread thin along the patrol base line. We were Silicon, we were the valley, and there was no way out of there, there was too much confusion and we couldn’t get no relief.
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
What should have been a routine move back down the tow-path for more toffee popcorn and fresh batteries and into week four of our long camping trip in the valley somehow became the mother of all road-trips. At the JDCC everyone was a flurry of excitement, announcing that we’re being attached to the monster company group that B Company Royal Anglians and the Viking Troop have put together, to fight through the desert up to Sangin.
Sangin itself held all the romance and mystique of where the fighting was as fierce as you like, but the drive up to Sangin was the stuff of legend. The BRF, with all their fighting punch and specially trained hardness, had only got as far as Zumberlay before turning back in a hail of rounds and early casualties. The Canadians only did the journey in Leopard tanks and LAVs, rumbling armour formations through the heavily mined desert passes where the French SF had ignored entreaties to wait for an escort and had paid a heavy price, ambushed and tortured to death in the desert that was definitely Terry’s. You only flew into Sangin, holding your breath as the enemy mortar teams ranged in on the landing site at FOB Robinson, the ever-growing base just south of the town, and if for some suicidal reason you had to go by road you went in heavy armour and as fast as you could through the night down to the relative safety of the A1—the only road in the whole country.
The plan of Op Lashtay Kulang was to roll our massive group, slow as you like in broad daylight, up the valley from Gereshk to Sangin, picking fights all the way. The concept was to create a mobile operations group, a MOG, which sounded nice and clinical, but we might as well have put loud-hailers on the vehicles shouting ‘come and have a go’ as we rolled into Zumberlay and Pasab and Hyderabad and Mirmindab, a-MOGing in the month of May all the way up to what the guys had charmingly named the Kessel after the trap in which the German 6th Army found itself, hence ‘Sangingrad’.
You couldn’t not be impressed, though, awed by the gargantuan statement of fighting intent. The Fire Support Group WMIKs in the van, Javelin and I-Law hanging from every available strap, .50-cal and GMG nimbly proving the route for the twelve articulated Vikings rumbling behind, sweeping top-cover GPMGs eating up every possible gradient and terrain, countless Pinzgauers and Vectors in the rear with all the comms teams and logistic support you could eat and even the drops and the hulking fuel tanker in the middle, vulnerable like painted targets but still screaming ‘we’re off to war’ and to hell with the Taliban dickers, frantically waving laundry from rooftop to rooftop across Gereshk to signal that something was up.
On the day we moved out I only realized how serious it was when we were roused by the sentries at four and took in the majestic steel-blue dawn over the dunes and the massive company group, the only thing for miles and miles the lead wagons already kicking up sand columns on the horizon.
There are no crossing points for vehicles between Gereshk and Sangin on the Helmand River, so we followed the south side, popping into the villages which occupy the little bends and fingers, snaking upstream as villagers poured out of each hamlet we came across, full of assurances that there were no Taliban then feigning confused surprise when the inevitable ambushes kicked off. Being in a fully kitted-out UK company group was a mixed blessing. We drew confidence from our awesome fighting presence but suffered the reports from the attached electronic warfare team employing their black magic and listening in to the Taliban. Radio updates built the suspense as we moved in from the outskirts of a village to be told that the enemy had spotted us, that the nervous forward sentries wanted to open fire but were being told to wait until we got closer and then that the big things were being brought forward—which usually meant the RPGs.
Even out on the cut-offs the enemy were slick, and mortars landed nerve-rackingly in and around the vehicles, which was enough to send the ANA scuttling but not to distract the B Company ground troops who were caught up in the main ambush in whichever village it was that day. Ominously our obvious task was always to secure a landing site for the IRT to come in and pick up the casualties the forward platoons had already taken.
We regrouped in huge desert leaguers, where I would produce my trump-card from the back of the WMIK, a bright green frisbee, and pretty soon in the afternoon stand-down the tension of the morning’s fight would ease into a riotous game of frisbee-rugby with even the Anglians, who had been suspicious of the trigger-happy ANA stoners at the back of their company group, joining in with giggles and gusto.
During the day we charged pretty quickly across the desert, billowing dust clouds marking us out to the spotters on the hills, but because we’re looking for a scrap why not let them know we’re coming? At night, movement became almost impossible, with vehicles lost in the monstrous dust, the NVGs useless and the ANA with no kit flashing on and off headlamps like an infuriating disco at the rear of the column. We lost depth perception through the goggles and were constantly rolling and slipping through uneven wadis, left waiting for the recovery vehicle in the sudden patches of impossible fine sand. We would arrive at the FUP the next morning ill-tempered, dusty and tired, an inauspicious start to the day which the ANA superstitiously and accurately suggested would get no better.
Bruised after another intense fight and more B Company casualties and the release of the massive 2,000-lb bombs and the Apaches spitting angry 30mm rounds to cover the withdrawal, we push on for Sangin itself. Past the nomadic herdsmen and under the shadows of the Kush, more formidable with every mile we get closer to its foothills, the natural spectacle of the drive sustains us until the maps become a colourful, dangerous blur of minefields, and everything is edgy silence on the limited approaches to Sangin. The final bend of the wadi which leads to FOB Robinson, our destination, is the notorious ‘fish-hook’, and we inch through it past the haunting carcasses of trucks and previous military vehicles which lie rusting in the desert like dinosaur skeletons, and jarring Stravinsky would be about right on the radio at this stage.
And sure enough a mighty thump from the front of the column and the billowing horrific smoke of a Viking ablaze from an IED strike, poor bastards running on fire from the inferno, and we grind to a halt on the vulnerable valley floor, waiting for a follow-up ambush and the arrival of the Apaches to deliver cathartic hell-fire vengeance and cover our limping progress into the base, where we collapse in an exhausted heap in the middle of the dust bowl and sleep.
It took us four days to fight from Gereshk up to Sangin, and then we sat in FOB Robinson for another four doing nothing, which we would have enjoyed if we hadn’t been choking on the swirling
brown-out clouds of fine dust which caked the place and whipped up every time the choppers came in to pick up another casualty or resupply the busy gun line. We mooched around trying to play with gnarly-looking yank SF guys and pissed off a visiting delegation of generals with our uncleanness and unshavenness (and the inappropriate T-shirt I’d got from Finchy and lent to one of the Afghans: My brother went on jihad and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!). And after all that we got back down in four hours, tootling along peacefully behind a column of Canadian tanks and ready to start again.
In the Green Zone
26.v. 2007—How Patrick’s boys were briefly the toast of Afghanistan and nearly won $10 million (and lost an eye)
i’m slightly nonplussed when the random Major from Regional Command South HQ in Kandahar rocks up to my O-group to attach to a routine patrol we’re putting forward but the plan is just to make nice with some of the villagers on the front line, so if he wants to tag along and take some cheesy pictures for the REMFs back in KAF, a last hurrah in the twilight of his twenty-two, then fine by me, an extra pair of legs to carry water. And up until about half-way through the patrol it’s all going according to plan and we’re sweating buckets through the midday sun carrying everything because we’ve decided to go ‘soft posture’ and maybe the vehicles are a bit aggressive. And Kuks’ boys are forward because they’re fed up with my lot getting all the action and want some for themselves and we’re all posing for fun snaps in the shade of a vineyard when the unmistakable wumph of an RPG comes in from the flank and our cowardly pathetic excuse for a ’terp has jumped into the nearest ditch which is a sure-fire sign that things are about to kick-off as a steady burst of machine-gun fire rattles off the building next to us and a 107mm rocket hurtles overhead to remove any doubt.