by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
But the days stayed dark, shrouded in stifling dust-cloud, and it might be memory playing tricks, but now it seemed like everything was building up to the inevitable. We’d endured Afghan casualties, friendly casualties, Grenadier casualties and now civilian casualties, and with the weather unrelenting dark and oppressive it was only a matter of time before the company itself, according to one commanding officer ‘the luckiest call sign in Helmand’, took its first casualty.
In retrospect, it was always going to be Kuks.
It was always going to be Kuks because he was a friend. Like Will and Worthers, like Marlow and Harrison had been before and Fergus and Mark before them, forged in something elusive out on the long patrols, greater than the sum of shared banter and time passing in-jokes and professional jargon and our own narrowed tour perspective—Kuks was a friend. He was too obvious, too young and dashing and hot-headed in the heat of the scrap. Too determined to do everything as well as he could and too devoted to his boys and his Afghans to accept my offer of a lazy lift half a click down the road where we were all meeting up with Tac for a quick orders session before the next patrol.
We were getting the brews on outside Patrol Base Centre when a massive thud rocked the track and all heads turned back in the direction of the billowing black smoke, unmistakably an IED, and while the fresh R&R replacements began crawling around on the floor in the vehicles there’s just a flash, and we knew instinctively and began to charge back to the scene with the nervous call of ‘casualty T2’ echoing on the net and the faces of the boys around white with the shock against the mud and dust of the blast.
In the immediate aftermath the image was strangely unaffecting because it’s such a cliché and we’ve seen it all before, the posture and the gore and the burned and ripped combats is such a perfect replica set of Robert Capa stills that I’m unmoved as we whack Kuks full of morphine and I clutch his hand as we wait for it to kick in with the smell of cordite thick in the air with the sweat and the piss.
It wasn’t the sight of an injured friend, but his voice, that hit me. So instantly recognizable as the voice I’d exchanged daily pleasant abuse with for the last three months, but only under unfamiliar layers of fear and pain, in need of a reassurance that we give without knowing. He’s a big fucker, but light as a feather between three of us pumping panicked adrenaline and we try and keep him awake as we hump him back by getting him to recite the alphabet and repeating meaninglessly, ‘You’ll be OK, you’ll be OK.’
The Chinook which comes thundering into the hastily prepared landing site turns out not to be the air ambulance but a diverted R&R flight, and I’ll never forget the look of horror on the face of the young, possibly pretty journalist who’s sitting in the back in gimpy blue helmet, unsure why her flight home has just dropped into the Green Zone, where the air is still a-rattle with fire from the ANA on the cordon, when suddenly the reality of Helmand charges on to her lap as four sweating, swearing, emotional soldiers drop a bleeding, naked, morphine-babbling black man on her brand new hiking boots.
I scream his vitals over the roar of the rotors and point the medic towards the info card we’ve stuck on his chest. The on-board medic gives me the thumbs-up, and I freeze, unsure of what comes next because there’s nothing more to do.
The medics have obviously seen it before and give me a well-meaning shove off the back of the tailgate as the chopper takes off again and I’m left sat in a heap in the grass, wondering what the hell just happened. Afterwards, like squaddies, we dissolve into laughter at the memory of the sight of his cock, flapping in the downdraught as we load him up, but the merriment is forced and Elastoplast-thin over the emptiness.
We got word the following day that Kuks was fine, already up in Selly Oak and wouldn’t lose his leg, but there was no looking back. The mortar shell, dug into the side of our track under cover of the dust storms, had destroyed the last sense of innocent adventure in the project which had already been systematically dented with each ANA soldier we had lost and each casualty taken elsewhere by someone else. It was impossible in those hours and days afterwards to rationalize the sight and sound and smell of losing a friend. Anger and questioning and also relief that he was fine and guilty relief that it wasn’t you and even for fleeting sick-making inexplicable but unavoidable seconds envy that he was back home with the cool story and the cool scar and perhaps if you worked out the odds we were more vulnerable the longer we spent out there and the married men trying to stop themselves wondering if things hadn’t got sufficiently silly that a self-inflicted ‘blighty’ wasn’t the way forward.
We lost our first friend.
As they must, things start again. A camera crew arrive from Shorabak, Ben and Robin from BBC’s Panorama, in for the long haul, a proper documentary not some in-out get the juicy quote and stitch up the boys job, so we decide to give them the benefit of the doubt. Of course, they were expecting Kuks, had been assigned to Amber 62 and promised the glorious multicultural Army, so it’s not clear who’s more bemused, them or CSM Edgell—the old-school Bristolian who’s stepped up to command 62 now that Kuks has gone.
Edgell would have made priceless TV if you could have understood his west-country drawl. In the muted muddle after Kuks had been hit we’d tried to keep an eye on the guys who’d been first on scene, make sure they weren’t more shaken up than they appeared. Young Barnes was smiling, but his hand, the hand that had held Kuks’ tight as we loaded him up, was still shaking. I’d asked him if he was OK and he nodded, but said he felt a bit numb …
‘Do some press-ups then, you fucking HOMO!’ had been Edgell’s reassuring contribution. He’d meant it compassionately.
Ben and Robin had arrived in time for the shaping ops for the next big push. If the recent casualties we’d taken told us anything it was that we’d been resting after the success of Op Silicon and that the Taliban were getting stronger, bolder. Op Tufaan was to be the response. The next big thrust up the valley, Op Silicon, Phase 2. It would have been nice to have some of the assets that supported Phase 1, but someone in their infinite wisdom had decided we could do the same again with half the men.
Against twice the enemy.
The BBC’s first patrol out with us is a little prelude to the op itself to sniff around the FLOT—the forward line of own troops. Some of the credit the Panorama guys have is instantly used up when we step off and Ben is wearing a bright-red daysack, in the Green Zone. ‘Is it usually this quiet?’ they ask seconds before the contact flares up and RPGs boom overhead.
The ANA officers who’ve only come on patrol because they saw the cameras charge to the back of the column before we’ve even started laying down return fire. The lead Afghan scout is shot in the neck, and as his head flips out like a Pez dispenser Robin wonders aloud and urgently if we might not pull back. The grizzly moustachioed Marine visiting from Kabul is itching to get up front and has unsheathed an enormous knife from somewhere in sharp contrast to the young Intelligence Corps officer who’s accidentally found herself attached to the wrong unit and couldn’t have been more at the bottom of the ditch if she tried. I want to tell them to get the camera ready, sit back and enjoy what’s about to follow, but the cracking of rounds overhead and excited buzzing in our ears would drown it out, so I just laugh and point upwards.
The DUDE callsigns are out today and sure enough within minutes of our call F18 Super Hornets off the USS Eisenhower way back in the Persian Gulf roar into view, jaw-droppingly low, almost touchable, deafening overhead, and even with the ground spitting around us we smile and wave—the angels on our backs.
As I ran back up the track to save time and was sent sprawling by a last-minute dive underneath an oncoming RPG I suddenly and with crystal clarity remembered watching Blood Diamond in the Coronet on one of my last nights in the country. Not the best film to take a nervous girlfriend to, but it was out of genuine conviction, not to calm her down, that I had scoffed then at the fighting scenes and the Hollywood notion that Leonardo DiCaprio could look down th
e street and dodge the oncoming RPGs. The CSM’s last-minute scream warned me off, but I could distinctly see the fucker as I hurled myself down and then bounced back up off the incredible adrenaline surge with a roar of fuck me! and what the CSM told me, half-despairingly half-thankfully, was a beaming grin of manic proportions.
It was three days later that I woke in a cold sweat, crippled by fear and the memory of the RPG round. Field Marshal Slim had reckoned that courage was like a bank account and, commanding the 14th Army against the Japanese in Burma, he should have known. Everyone is born with a certain amount of credit, hopefully never having to make a withdrawal. The thing was that you couldn’t check your balance, didn’t know when you might be about to bounce a cheque, when yesterday’s bravest man was about to go overdrawn and think ‘fuck this’. The idea that everything that had passed to that point had been luck, that all the tall tales and well-earned envious REMF glances were nothing more than an accident of us having been in the right places at the right times (or the wrong places at the wrong times, depending on how you looked at it) and none of us yet having run out of courage we hadn’t earned or built up, but had simply been born with.
Which made me wonder the next day whether suicide bombers counted as brave.
You didn’t need any experience or training or instinct to know that 1 July was going to be different when freshly promoted CSM Edgell burst in screaming and covered in blood to shatter the morning peace of the tent. Like the shake in Sgt Dragon’s voice that told me somehow that Kuks was the casualty when they’d been blown up the week before, you knew even through the mumbled shouts of ‘suicide bomb’ and chaos of the crash-out that the worst had occurred. Barely conscious outside, half of Amber 62 were blackened and pumping arterial bleeds all over the med tent but there was barely time to stare in horror as we flew out towards the ominous column of smoke on the road outside the camp.
Then there was too much time to stare in horror at the crumpled shell of the WMIK and dead Sgt Wilkinson and the scattered piecemeal remains of the bomber, and even Martin’s emotions were up to rage-spitting point as he demanded of the uncomprehending ’terp whether the bastard would be going to paradise. The finer points of Islam were not for debating on the nervous cordon through the hot afternoon and the sickly sweet smell amid the remains and the tentative work of the evidence-gathering team who come and scoop up legs and bits of head which are all that remain of the bomber, and the ANA, almost as though they’re trying to compensate for the violation of hospitality, shooting wildly at anything that moves.
Peeping out from shops and round the corners of curtains that hang in front of doorways, Gereshk knew that the happy few months of ANA soldiers shopping in the badr and British patrols strolling down to the river were over, that it was warning shots and nervous overreaction from here on in. Even as we’d been pushing the security bubble out, someone had pricked it from inside. There’s no precedent for how to feel, no convention for this except surely it’s inappropriate to feel as hungry as both the CSM and I guiltily admit to each other we later felt, fighting the unwholesome barbeque cravings. Kuks was joined in hospital by his entire callsign, and with days to go before Tufaan began, Amber 62 had simply disappeared.
The Longest Day
D-day of Tufaan was to be 7 July, which would become for all of us who were there the longest day, but for me it started before that, perhaps on 1 July, when Gereshk lost its magic and innocence once and for all in the ball of fire and death of the first but not last suicide bomber, perhaps even back in the last days of June, long, endless summer evenings back home and festivals and parties and weddings while we were scrapping forward yet again and not only noticing but filming the new intensity of the fight.
We could have been distracted by the hasty reshuffling of personnel, by the sense that something was wrong in Orders that we couldn’t quite put our finger on until we remembered that we didn’t have three platoons any more, just two, and LCpl Mizon, the lone survivor of his team. Could have been distracted by the cameras rolling in the background as Martin talked us through the impossible scale of the task ahead, but for once the firm set of Mizon’s jaw was not a pose but determination, shared by everyone in the room, that after the events and casualties of the last few days, however hard the op was going to be we would take it.
We could have been distracted by the pure Shakespeare of the massive reparations shurah that some idiot timetabled for just before the op kicked off—genuine high politics and millions of dollars changing hands between aggrieved parties and big-cheese GoA and ANA officials, and us snoozing at the back of the hot room while the rude mechanicals prepared the feast next door and our own ANA ran around on the cordon giggling like school-children because there’s a note from Karzai, and Afghan media are in town.
We could have been distracted by the arrival of the Number Two Company forward elements, new rising-star company commander in the seat and Mark in town and suddenly in the middle of a shit-storm, having promised his fiancée he’d be flying a desk in Bastion for three months. Could have been distracted by the insult of our ‘relief ’ arriving just in time to hunker down in our comfy cot beds and secure patrol bases and wave us off on the mother of all deliberate ops, but we weren’t. We were too focused on the absences, the names scrubbed off the zap-cards; no Kuks, no Shad, no Mac, recovering back in Selly Oak. Of course, no Sgt Wilkinson. No CSgt Yates, back in Shorabak with a knock he picked up on what should have been Amber 63’s last easy patrol forward before a rest spell in camp. No LCpl Price, grinning as we dropped him off for R&R.
We could have been distracted sleeping on the dirt outside the patrol base, unceremoniously kicked out of our castle while we snatched our last rest before the big push. Could have been distracted by the ominous and familiar open-ended nature of the op, the ‘what-next?’ of reaching the new LoE, pushing the front line another 10 miles up through the thick Green Zone, and then what, with only the agonizingly week-close promise of my own R&R to sustain an easy ‘let’s-cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it’ mentality.
And then Fuck Me!
Groggy in the three a.m. dark, stepping off at the rear of the swelled and now unwieldy kandak, Amber 61 in the lead boosted by Rob’s return and all the new attachments which had beefed us up almost enough to cover for the missing Amber 62. Us moping at the back with the instantly useless quad-bike, stuck in the ditch on the line of departure so the casevac plan had gone to shit before we’ve even started. Kakaran was familiar as the light came up, painfully anticipating a slow and heavy day but maybe too calm as the BBC remember Is it always this quiet? Thirsty and aching before morning with the stop-start, up-down at the back of the snake and we almost might have been back on the long Sandhurst insertion exercises, willing the mind to wander in time-chasing daydreams to bring the leave weekend a step closer.
Then there was a surreal pause, just after we’d switched the lead rolls and we’d echeloned through Will and Rob and taken up the forward positions, just after the ANA had become jumpy and the i-com was chattering ominously and a few sporadic shots which might or might not be ours rang out. A fifteen-minute calm as the camera pushed up greedily and Azim and I stood tight to the wall in earnest discussion about the next move which was probably neither the time nor place but there’s unmistakable movement in the ditch, so he slams a speculative RPG into the treeline.
And off we go.
Tight in on the wall with fire coming in from the front and side and the BBC looking unhappy but the ANA whooping with the release of all the morning’s built-up tension and boredom and I’m laughing with Sgt Davis and Sgt T that the call on the net is once again Amber 63, CONTACT WAIT OUT. We decided to push straight into the compounds 80 metres forward. The Taliban obvious now, popping up and down in the ditch in front with obligingly beaded skull-caps sparkling in the rising sun and setting such a pattern that I was conscious even as I watched one through my sights get up, adjust his position with the RPG and then fall back in the ditch. So immediately
after I twitch the trigger that the two events are no longer distinct but part of one chain in which to think it and will it is for it to happen and I know in that instant, even while noting how unlikely it should have been for a captain to find himself popping away like this, we’ll be all right today.
Perhaps it’s this feeling, as certain as if some fairy godmother had assured it, that keeps the mind clear from the nagging thought that we’re doing all the things I’d scoffed at in training, all the full-frontal, lung-bursting assaults of yesteryear which I’d never signed up to in my peacekeeper daydreams, and that the enemy are right there. Perhaps it’s just the kick of fixing bayonets and then waiting for the point of fire to start up from our left and the 51s before breaking cover and charging with the shouts and screams we always thought were token but turn out to be primordial, but suddenly we’re out in the open and there are bullets flying everywhere.
Out in the open, but completely alone and with no time to stop or think or wonder as Lloydy tripped under the I-Law and went sprawling and we’ve still 40 metres to get to the next wall and cover. The ANA, after all their brilliant and match-winning performances of the last few months, finally lived down to expectations and calmly sat back to watch their idiot mentors—foreigners with comfy beds and beautiful girlfriends and lives back home so what the fuck are we doing out here anyway?—charge through the enemy positions.
Maybe they just decided to stay with the cameras, but there was no time for contemplation or recrimination as the Taliban further back had just withdrawn to the next compound along and so, while catching our breath, we called in the Apaches and let someone sitting down do a bit of the hard work.