Patrick Hennessey

by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars

  and there’s a look in the Major’s eyes like maybe he hasn’t done this for a while, or maybe even at all and I want to sit with him in the ditch and try and explain, try and piece together what it is about the contact battle that ramps the heartbeat up so high and pumps adrenalin and euphoria through the veins in such a heady rapid mix. I want to sit with him in this beautiful field, apart from the well-trained mayhem that has now begun and wonder what compares; the winning goal scoring punch, the first kiss, the triumphant knicker-peeling moment? Nowhere else sells bliss like this, surely? not in freefall jumps or crisp blue waves, not on dance floors in pills or white lines—I want to discuss with him whether it’s sexually charged because it’s the ultimate affirmation of being alive …

  but first we’ve got to win the fight.

  first we’ve got to be the gloating fuckers who are alive, not the crumpled forms barely recognizable in the bomb crater who the Afghans smile and point at—ne mushkill—no more problem from them commander sir.

  so on the contact we whip round to face our full flank towards the buildings we’re being fired upon from and your brain is at once in a thousand places and I start screaming instructions at Sgt T and the ’terp at the same time while shouting on the net what’s happening and scrambling the air support. We’ve turned east so poor old Kuks is now at the back cursing his luck again and bleating to be called forward but we’ve got it in hand and move up under a terrific weight of fire to a ditch about 100m short of the compound. I turn to the random Major whose CIMIC fact-finding jaunt has just taken an unexpected turn and apologize that regardless of rank I’m about to order him around for the next few hours before throwing him forward with some heavy weapons to try and suppress whatever the fuck it is that’s going on up there. The Afghans with better eyes than us have spotted 7 or 8 Taliban moving around the compounds to the front and there’s too much open ground for us to roll straight up at them so we pop up and down from the ditch trying to keep them penned in with RPGs and UGLs. Meanwhile I’m tying myself in knots on two radios with every fucker in Helmand suddenly wanting to know what’s going on and the only people I want to speak to are the jet pilots bearing down on our location to buy us some breathing space. Confident there’s no civilians around and regretfully remembering the commanding officer’s instruction that platoon commanders take risk first, I run forward—no longer feeling the ridiculous weight on my shoulders and sweat mingled now with the ditch water so it doesn’t matter—and use the cover of a donkey who is serenely walking up and down the track, oblivious to all the firing—to crawl into a position to pop the smoke grenades. Red and white billows up from the green poppy fields and it’s a high-risk strategy because now the enemy know exactly where we are, but so do the pilots who swoop in from 1,000ft to a mere 200 and thunder overhead, first pounding the compounds with cannon fire before I’m screaming down the net that fuck the safety distance they need to bomb the compound so we can get out of the ditch.

  it’s testament to the calming effect of so much going on at once that not only do we cease to feel the physical burn but also the mental drag. I know somewhere in the recesses of my training that troops should be 250m from a bomb and I know from my eyes that we’re only 100m tops but I’m happy that the ditch is deep enough and the boys are all for it and screaming fit to burst that we can’t exactly stroll back a safe distance anyway so I assure the WIDOW callsign (not so much hearts and minds from the RAF then …) that it’s my call and before we can draw breath time seems to stop and all the air is sucked out from around and there’s no noise or motion until the wumph which is part shockwave and part ear-splitting thud, cannons out and there’s a few seconds of insane whooping from the Afghans who do love a good bombing before the cloud engulfs us and it’s raining mud and crap and bits of wall and goat.

  but we use the debris for cover and before the air has cleared we’re into the compound with bursts round every corner and a grenade for good measure through every door and window, and it’s sheer exhilaration, leaping over every wall and barely feeling the impact of thudding down into the dirt as another burst comes in from the now retreating Taliban. It is chaos and only very loosely managed, the bomb and grenades have deafened us all so I’ve no idea if anyone can hear me screaming, trying to coordinate our move through the buildings so we don’t blow each other up, keep myself at the front so I can keep a handle on it but somehow the Afghans sweep round the flank with the PKM and the Bravo team (try saying that in Dari at 100 decibels over the constant rattle of gunfire). The air’s thick with the smell of sewage and meat where a nasty mix of gore and crap is forming in the bottom of the 20ft deep crater that was once the dining room of this compound and on the far wall a cow and person have been flung forty feet across the space and slammed into the bank so that it’s hard to tell where cow ends and Talib begins but the Afghans still let loose a triumphant burst of fire into the corpse for good measure.

  as quickly as everything starts, it stops.

  there’s nothing but the trees swaying in the breeze and the open fields to the front and the odd rattle of machine-gun fire as the forward line watches for any movement but the overwhelming sense as bits of rubble still fall, is of stillness and only the drone of the Harriers monitoring overhead and just as the exhaustion kicks in (and the searing pain in my eye) so do the endorphins so it’s all good and everyone’s faces read the same high, the lights back on at the end of a massive night in some hardcore warehouse and everybody drenched and no longer as beautiful and cool as they were under the strobe lights but still deeply satisfied.

  Kuks still muttering on the radio and I can’t resist calling him forward now that action’s finished to help us mop up and the best is yet to come because we fish a mobile out of the pockets of one of the dead Taliban and it turns out he was none other than Mullah Omar’s driver; big MO is the 2nd most wanted man in the world with a fat reward from Uncle Sam on his head and dammit if we didn’t nearly get him, maybe. But it’s all good because it cuts me enough slack afterwards that no one is in the mood to question the somewhat loose interpretation of the danger safety distance of an air-strike and, after all, if I’m the only one who suffers (more from the pirate jokes from a couple of days of walking around with an eye-patch than anything else and hell a shrapnel wound is cool as long as it doesn’t actually do any damage) well then it’s all worked out rather nicely.

  i really can’t explain the buzz except that looking back at the radio logs when we’re all back in and swilling grateful Gatorades and already exaggerating the kill count (the seven I counted becomes ten, so I think by now it’s twenty and climbing …) I see that I called first contact at 1130 and we finally closed at 1500. Christ, nearly 4 hours and I swear it all feels like minutes, every time you’re transported to somewhere else where you watch your own actions through a lens (or the headcam or shaky snappy snaps of the random Major who had the trip of a lifetime) and none of the ordinary feelings apply until afterwards trying to conjure up pity which is somehow more easily done by regarding the unfortunate goats than the unfortunate Talibs (so English). I guess like anything this could get boring but every time it starts again and there’s the crack or wumph or the overhead fizz it just kicks in and off we go. The Random Major didn’t exactly get to talk to the locals but he got to shoot the bad guys which is much more fun.

  Something was needed to shake us out of the dangerous enjoyment we were getting from it all, the growing swagger and knowing graffiti in the sangar, a tribute to BFBS’s dedication to Amy Winehouse with a wry They tried to make me go to Sangin, I said no, no, no. For all our heroics in the Green Zone and the favourable reports of the breathless major from Kandahar, our run of parklife in FOB Price came to the inevitable halt, and we were back out on the line coming back in only to help HQ redraw the maps because we were the Upper Gereshk Valley.

  Whole days were spent sweating under the makeshift shade out in the patrol bases, balancing the impossibility of moving in a heat we couldn’t ever have imag
ined against the cool invitation of the canal, which remained the essence of the front line. Long evenings of token tanning and half-hearted sit-ups from the guys counting down the days not weeks till R&R because we already knew by heart the tattered magazines lying around the base and there was literally nothing to do.

  The two weeks we first spent in the base and which seemed to stretch like an addled eternity were laughable by comparison, a distant and fleeting memory in the slow-motion, dying-battery afternoons spent watching the fish attempt to jump the sluice-gates upstream, feeling slightly that there’s an unfair, unBritish advantage to tossing grenades in the broiling water, swirling with enormous freshwater carp and mahi, which we thought was a local specialty until we realized it’s just the word for ‘fish’. Then again the new ’terp was pretty handy frying it up with rice and chilli powder from the MREs and no one wants Lancashire hotpot for lunch on another hundred-plus day, so we would sit back and let the ANA play and add the expended UGLs to the next ammo request.

  On quiet days the entire valley spread out below our castle, hazily beautiful and deceptively calm, and with each patrol forward and scrap the Taliban were less and less up for it until our nights were back-to-back calm and the locals started to emerge. In groups they came, tentative at first but with increasing confidence and numbers, to the easy shurahs we held under the ANA lean-to with suspiciously good-looking and made-up young soldiers serving chai and sweet yoghurt. The requests of the grey-bearded elders at these councils never changed. We offered blankets and medical supplies and maybe petrol for the decrepit generators rusting in a garden up in Habibolah Kholay, legacy of some long-gone, obliging but clueless NGO. The Americans offered us millions of dollars for QUIPs (Quick Impact Projects) and all they wanted was the one thing we couldn’t provide, the one thing which all our guns and armour proved was in short supply: security.

  The basis of all my hope and optimism for Afghanistan lies in the fact that the more specific requests we occasionally got were always for schools and teachers, never clinics and doctors. Even for these timeless men with craggy, biblical faces who could be 50 or 150—and either would be a good innings out here—the violence is temporary but learning is permanent. Our new neighbours had come down from Oruzgan province, awarded the land we took in the last op by a ballot conducted by that mythical entity we’re fighting for, the government of Afghanistan, which they kept repeating, GoA GoA GoA, like it’s the password. They are so chuffed with the fertile fields that are suddenly theirs in this lotto—as long as we stick around so the Taliban don’t come back in (which of course we won’t). They offer to continue building the ‘school ’ which is currently only a brick lavatory block (which of course they won’t). All was going well but relationships deteriorated slightly after they were accidentally terrorized by the Czech Special Operations Group.

  The SOG are awesome, bigger men (if it were possible) than the Yanks we’d met up in Sangin and certainly with bigger beards and more defiantly non-military heavy-metal T-shirts. You could almost hear the WFRs’ warrant officers grinding down their teeth in barely concealed frustration every time the guy with a plait and beads in his beard came in to lunch with one of the two enormous Alsatians they never went anywhere without. Two female ‘medics’ spent eight hours a day in the gym, the most noteworthy girls in town working out on the cross-trainers, waiting for their Visigoth warriors to come back in off patrol. The whole British camp could only watch on with awed jealousy and wonder if the SAS get this sort of thing.

  We were shaken uncomfortably when the owner of one of the compounds we hammered a week before turned up for an afternoon chat like a neighbour with a broken window and unmistakably your football. In the heat everyone was sleeping on the roofs, and it wasn’t to complain about the fact that we’ve destroyed his home but to ask that we stop firing illum, the sharp metal cases of which spiral alarmingly down to earth once it’s burned out, because it’s scaring his kids. This man who now has no home is actually thanking us for destroying it, for having the courtesy to get close enough to make sure his wife and kids had fled down the ditch before calling in the air-strike, and is now politely and calmly asking us to keep the noise down after lights out.

  I can’t imagine how it must seem to him as I trot out the usual blithe and meaningless assurances and my own heartfelt and sincere apologies and hopes. Shaking hands as they leave, so utterly foreign we might as well be from different worlds, the old boys unblinkingly calm and only the cosmopolitan nephew who knows how to work the village mobile slightly distrustful of this young pup who gives with one hand and blows up with the other.

  Our ANA were much less respectful of the old Helmandis. Apologizing to us for their backward kinsmen and despising them as yokels, liars and Taliban sympathizers. Up north at home, they assured us, every house had a VCR, and the women walked uncovered. Of course, it’s a two-way thing: we calculate the reparations for another destroyed home and accept the slightly exaggerated livestock figures but are suspicious of the claim for three million Pakistani rupees that the family apparently kept in a chest which also got destroyed in the bombing. Stiff with pins and needles from long hours sitting cross-legged, strolling past the river I noticed that the guys had built a diving-board down by the sluice-gates and was overcome with a mixture of shame and pride that the stinking young infidel is master of all he surveys.

  Dark Days in the Valley

  Surprisingly Tac and the units back in Price didn’t come up to visit us so much with each fresh IED ambush or mine-strike, which left us more and more vulnerable on the front. With increasing regularity the ANA resupply patrols got hit, and arms were lost, and then legs, and then whole company commanders vaporized and Ranger vehicles ripped in two.

  Up in Sangin the Grenadiers were taking casualties of our own—Guardsman Downes had been a great favourite in the Ribs, and the mood in camp was sour. We patrolled all the way back to Shorabak with a compassionate case of our own—Sgt Cooper’s mother had died, which was somehow worse because you prepared yourself for the possibility of losing mates out here, but not for losing family while you were away. The flags were still at half-mast and tempers short and we were barred entry to dinner until we’d shaved. We put the pettiness down to the misplaced frustration of the proud soldiers stuck in the rear watching their young guys take the hits and unable to help. We wore our beards as proud badges of how long we’d spent away from the comforts of a camp, the running water and the safety, but it all seemed so petty in light of the casualties, so we showered and shaved and left defiant horrible moustaches and scoffed seconds and thirds of the rich puddings we’d earned.

  We pushed back out to the line, freshly shaven and thinking ourselves lucky to be escaping camp bullshit until we got back to the patrol base and the temperature nudged up to unbearable. As we sprawled through the hellish midday hour like sweaty lizards, unable to move for the oppressive heat, we’d have gladly shaved our whole bodies to be back under the air-con. An ominous storm blew in from Pakistan, a welcome drop in temperature and the ANA sheltering in the sangars like old ladies at the bus stop watched bemused as we greeted the downpour like primitive revellers and danced naked in the cool rain. But the dust storms that followed had us waking up blind and deaf, choking on the crap that hung in the air so thick you couldn’t see your rifle in your hands and pointless stag.

  For days everything was either annoying or depressing; either too hot or too wet or too dusty. The Taliban started using human shields, ambushing the patrols from buildings which they wouldn’t let the families leave, which the poor old WFRs didn’t realize till it was too late and the air-strikes had already been called in. Of course, the next morning they were back in FOB Price, licking their own wounds. We pushed out with our ANA to reassure and help, and collateral damage was no longer a trite phrase but the blood-stains on our trousers and the heartbreaking kids we patched up as best we could before sending them back down the towpath to the hospital.

  The moments of lightness were
fewer and further between. We caught one of the ’terps shagging a donkey through the night-vision goggles, but when you thought about it, it wasn’t actually that funny. A desperate plea came forward from the planning cell in Gereshk for help with their mapping. Back at HQ they’re trying to reassess the valley, so I’m called in with my ‘expert local knowledge’ to tell them which cluster of houses is actually a village, and which still exist, and what the hell do the people who live there call them. I’m wondering how these monkeys can have been monitoring our battles if they don’t even know where we are on the very maps that they’re making for us when I’m suddenly struck in my weariness by a marvellous and mischievous sense of opportunity and decide to make my own contribution to this quasi-colonial nonsense that’s going on. So having given them all the real and valid info I have I pick an innocuous and unnamed village which we pass through from time to time, full of friendly hash farmers and cool kids racing donkeys in the fields, and leave a little mark of my own on the map.

  I imagine they might not be that impressed up at Kandahar with the antics, but it’s the least tribute I can think of to the girlfriend I miss more than I’ve the time or the balls to tell her, and the boys all think it’s hilarious that next time the sun breaks out the ISAF patrols will be rolling through the village of Jen-i-Deen.