by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
Except, of course, that the blue smoke we threw and the grid references we gave in the midst of the confusion weren’t enough for the pilot who started ramming 30mm cannon fire right across our toes, and with energy I didn’t realize I had I’m screaming ‘CHECK FIRE!’ down the net to a suitably nervous and apologetic-sounding Tac. The callsign had regrouped, and at least a handful of the ANA had joined us behind the outer wall of the compound, and there was a wonderful slapstick moment as the next round of blue-on-blue cannon fire from the Apache came in even closer with everyone lined up behind me charging into my back to push round the corner of the wall, except I wasn’t budging because round the corner there was fire coming in the opposite direction from the enemy so we really had nowhere to go and concertinaed like the Keystone Kops. The Taliban in the depth positions had us pinned down and unable to consolidate our current one, and it was only after recommending a Hell-fire strike that Lloydy observed with bleak humour that if the last two efforts have been wrong, how did we know the pilot was not going to drop the missile on us as well. I shrugged; we won’t be in any position to complain if he does.
The roar and crack-thud of the missile coming in, sure enough, on top of our position, was felt rather than heard. My first thought was that we’re all dead as the thick stone wall started to collapse on top of us, and then the ANA were running around screaming like madmen and there was dust and tingling everywhere and mouthed and silent shouted FUUUUUUUCKS! At least one of the guys reacted pretty badly and started ripping off his kit, screaming up at the Apache pilot and anyone within range between firing off massive bursts towards the enemy positions, still untouched 100 metres further forward which, once we’d calmed him down, seemed to have had the effect that the choppers couldn’t. It was the shockwave and the deafness and the winded gasping for air which slowed down time and what I couldn’t believe is that, despite the rantings of the ANA and a few burst eardrums and cuts and bruises, we were all in one piece. From within the compound we could hear voices and movement, and everything sped up again as we primed grenades to finish off the remaining enemy, who were presumably waiting for us to clear the rooms, and at the last minute the same feeling I had just before the contact kicked in and we opted for a green instead of red clearance and burst through the door.
I’ll always be more haunted by the sight of what could have been round the corner than the actual screaming and terrorized family huddled in the rubble of the missile strike. Streaked with tears and covered in dust like shattered ghosts they were so alive that I was gasping with relief that the fifty-fifty calls were good. The thick walls which somehow saved our backs somehow saved their fronts, and I’m thanking I don’t know what for the 500-pounder we didn’t drop which would have killed us all, for the 10 metres north the missile didn’t land, which would have killed the section, the 10 metres west it didn’t come in, which would have killed the family, or the red clearance drills we didn’t use, which would have had me even now staring down the point of my bayonet at a mess of women and children and horrific narrowly avoided carnage of my own doing, so for all the tears and screams I can only stand there wildly and giddily thankful.
It had been the classic Taliban gambit of occupying the compound and forcing the family to stay in as insurance and then, if we’d killed one of them by mistake, propaganda. Darkly, in nights and daydreams long after the battle, the haunting image of what might have been is far more difficult to dispel than the otherwise perfectly ghastly reality we’re still slap in the middle of.
Tac came galloping in with the cameras and the rest of the ANA. Suitably keen to make up for things, the Apaches didn’t make the same mistake four times, and the USAF and mortars joined the party so the Taliban in the forward positions got a healthy dose while we consolidated and tried to calm down the family who’d been caught in the middle of a really, really bad day, which was easier said than done with an entire ANA kandak pinned down in their compound. The fierce battle ebbed and flowed for the next few hours, with each attempt we made to break out and forward drawing a terrific weight of fire from the positions to the front even while we hammered the Taliban and watched and listened to them taking casualty after casualty. Martin set up in the cool shade of the vines and the guys starting to go down in the heat were stacking up worryingly near the well as we tripped uncomfortably over each other’s toes, and I was keen to try another break-out when we realized we’d used all the water for the injured guys and they weren’t getting any better.
So we broke out to the rear instead to find somewhere safe enough in the bedlam for the IRT to land. It’s a thankless mission in the heat, whoever carries the casualties almost bound to go down themselves with heat exhaustion, and even the medic, having spent a heroic few hours charging from man to man, had collapsed with the horrible pallor on his face, and the thermometer said 106, which means hurry the fuck up! The CSM pulled his casevac party out, and the promise of water being brought in on the chopper kept us going, but when the guys returned with the water, there were only three of them, and we were suddenly so down on numbers, having lost a couple more to the heat on the extraction, that, heartbreaking though it was, our only realistic option was to pull back and regroup.
Pull back from the building we’d fought into and held for four torrid hours, pull back past the positions we’d charged through that morning and, with the over-watch of the British units on the high ground in the north who had done next to nothing all day, pull wearily all the way back to the start-line. Pull back over ground we’d lost a third of the Company group taking, pull back over ground we’d been shot and blown up by both enemy and our own side alike on, pull back in one steady, demoralized trudging hour over what it had taken us twelve to take. The faces of the Welsh Guards mortar lads in the first patrol base we stumble back into told us how bad we looked, like the moment when a veteran of LSgt Alexander’s years and grit stumbled only 500 metres short of the harbour and, looking around hopelessly, dropped the ammunition he’d been carrying, and I’d never understood ‘command legs’ as much as when I wordlessly picked it up and carried on even while every fibre in me was too exhausted to move. Approaching the vehicles we’d left behind that same morning, Martin summed pretty much everything up in his hilariously angry response to the repeated buzzing questions of the Number Two Company sentries.
‘Amber 21 this is Amber 60A. I’ve just had the hardest day of my life. Fuck off and leave us alone. OUT!’
Despatches from the Battle of Adin Zai
Before Sandhurst the joke was that they gave you the Bible and Stalingrad to read and told you that only the latter was important. All they should have given anyone was Herr’s Despatches, which, quite apart from being the best writing on war, period, was probably as culturally influential as anything written in the second half of the twentieth century. This guy was the Vietnam War; in fact, this guy was war.
I think what thrilled the sensitive souls was not the gory hellishness of it all—the crazy-eyed LURPs (Long-Range Unsupported Reconnaissance Patrols) guys who thought collecting ears was for girls and constructed entire Vietcong mannequins out of body parts—but the way the further you got into the war, into the jungle, into the heart of darkness, the more the scales of normality fell away.
Normal parameters were meaningless, rules didn’t exist, time bent, and only the heat and exhaustion were real enough to remind you that this wasn’t a dream sequence. The lost philosophers of the twentieth century missed a trick. Their world wasn’t Parisian cafés but out here in the Green Zone, where signifier and signified had become so detached that we didn’t know what was going on any more. As Lloydy intoned with Bill Murray comic deadpan brilliance into his own video diary (the actual journos long since scuttled back to camp to assess how much they actually wanted the footage we were madly scrapping for)—Day 86 in the Big Brother House and no fucker will give us a break.
Everything after 7 July became a blurred trip, the days and hours and minutes just interludes of snatched sleep and f
ire fights and the odd few pages of Ayn Rand to grasp vainly at a recognizable world of books and leisure, counting down to R&R, which seemed like something that would never come, could never come. The next day we pushed up on a different axis and occupied the quiet compounds in Rahim Kholay, eyebrows raised in silent amazement at the complex defences abandoned by the Taliban, defences that no way in hell would we have ever been able to fight through. Just to be sure, the Engineers blasted mouse-holes in the walls of whichever compound was to be chez nous that night, and, too tired to take in our surroundings, we flopped in the cool, dark rooms during the day and like lizards on the warm stone roof at night, the stag rota meaningless, with no one really asleep and the defensive battle the WFRs were finally fighting forward all the night-time entertainment the insomniacs needed.
We pushed forward on a reckless ambush, picking a fight just to see what was out there. The doctrine called this ‘recce by force’, and it took to a new extreme the sense that we were actually doing things we’d laughed at in training. The Taliban recce screen was a series of dogs chained in the compounds, somewhere out in the dark human sentries monitoring our progress by the progression of barking. So we gave in completely to the jungle ’Nam fantasies and advanced noiselessly up the waist-deep irrigation ditches. Nearing the objective, we occupied a long-deserted hut, and suddenly I was face to snout with a nightmare vision of a grizzled mongrel Saint Bernard, a huge snarling Beethoven with myxomatosis who smelled of rabies and bit me in the arse as I turned to warn the others, but we were too close to the enemy to risk the clear report of a gunshot, so I smacked him in the face with my rifle butt, and he’s the luckiest dog in Helmand to be spared the pistol execution that’s almost routine for these Taliban scouts.
And it was a good thing we saved the ammo when the forward ANA stumbled on the inevitable and, as was the plan all along, our tiny cowboy patrol fired everything we’d got and charged back down the river like naughty schoolboys as all the fire support that had been sitting silent and invisible all the while up on the ridge opened up and over our retreating and laughing heads, pours UGL and .50 cal and GMG, and it will be another night of no sleep, slow fags and coming down feeling like the World War Two mayhem-raising vagabonds we all wished we were and hoped we look like.
Unfortunately it was all merely putting off the inexorable next big push, 7 July Mark II, which we knew would be like Mark I, only worse. Martin returned from Orders with HQ up on the hill and announced that we were to clear eighty-odd compounds in forty-eight hours while the better-equipped, better-manned units up on the hill would take on a dozen. If we hadn’t already, it was about this time that we all began thinking of ourselves and the ANA as one unit, together and distinct from the other ‘British’ units, who always seemed to be on the flank or just behind.
We were ambushed on the line of departure, but there’s absolutely nothing to do but charge on, roll through compound after compound, through the bodies, with no time to work out whether they’re the guys who seconds before were firing at us or the guys from last night’s raid or the night before or maybe even stiffs from last week.
Propriety went out of the window at about the same time we barely stopped to listen to Will call in his own casualty status on the radio: ‘Amber 60 this is Amber 61B, I’ve been shot in the leg, applying tourniquet now, OVER.’ The boys wolfing down the Taliban breakfast we’d discovered in the courtyard of the next compound we took, ignoring the blood trails and corpses of the guys we’d disturbed. We were too hungry and it was only nine o’clock and we’d another forty-six hours at least of this. The air-strikes which were our oxygen, the only thing which bought us the time and breathing space to bounce from compound to compound, coming in so close that we could actually see the 1,000-lb bombs come smacking in. From somewhere, one of the ANA sergeants found a rainbow umbrella, an enormous, bright Joseph’s-Technicolor-Dreamcoat of a thing with which, noticing the sweat I’ve got on, he follows me around for the rest of the day, a walking parasol man attracting fire from all directions. But the gesture was too kind and we’d gone past the point where that sort of thing was going to make a difference, and there’s no point in wondering why Will got shot correctly crawling up the bun-line and I was fine walking around all day under a multicoloured target. Our entire lives, our entire world, had filtered down to crossing off compound after compound in our progression through the objectives, and when night drew in we literally stopped where we were, put sentries out and collapsed in the dirt.
The next morning it was gone. The valley was quiet and, although the ANA did their best to gnarl things up, initially refusing to fight and then accidentally shooting each other in a farcical replay of yesterday’s start, we moved forward relentlessly. Morning turned to afternoon and then, as certain as the tide and without a shot being fired for hours, we were at the end-line, job done, half the company gone and two days till R&R and nothing, nothing left to give. Nothing left to do except leave Rob on the hard shoulder by the river and push north to link up with the WFRs for congratulations and tea and medals, except that half-way up the road the Taliban, quiet all day, suddenly revealed why.
Martin and Tac had led off and made it to the northern link-up, about 400 metres further up the track, Rob and Amber 61 were about a kilometre down behind us in the hard shoulder, and just as we were passing a couple of huts the ambush opened up on us with a ferocity unprecedented even after the last few days. And I don’t know why we climbed, like the stupid but cheerleader-fit girls in the horror movies who back up and up to the attic even though we know they’re going to get stabbed, but there’s something instinctive about scrabbling on to the roofs of the two huts to get a better position to fire back into the treeline which had suddenly erupted 50 metres away on the flank. Once we were there, of course, we were stuck there and nothing for it but to fight from our precarious roofs through hour after hour after hour. Eight British soldiers and thirty Afghans as day turns to night and the mortars and the artillery and the tank-busters and the 500-pounders and the 1,000-pounders pounded and pounded and pounded the treeline with even the French Mirages joining in, and every time an attack was repulsed and we were firing alarmingly down off the roof into the oncoming Taliban, every time there was a pause and the i-com registered more Taliban casualties, and this time surely they were broken, every time they started up again.
You couldn’t hate an adversary like this. A slugger in an old-school boxing match, Queensberry rules out of the window, and we curse the rules that mean we can’t just burn the bastards out, fire up the treeline with shake’n’bake and catch the carnage. Hit after brain-damaging hit and he won’t go down, and we’re reduced to individual heroics, LCpl Mizon running without a weapon the mad-dash ammo-resupply gauntlet up to where Tac were having the time of their lives, joined by the Czech SOG with the quad-bike-mounted AGS-17, und you vant some help, ja. It was strange to chat to Martin on the radio, an amazing calm and reassuring presence throughout the night, knowing that I could see him off to the flank but that with us stuck up on the roof we might as well be worlds apart.
Ten foot by ten, perched eight foot up, the creaking stone roof was our twelve-hour heaven and hell. We bombed and blasted and burned and shot the enemy and it wasn’t until four in the morning and the first hints of a perfect midsummer purple dawn that things were finally, finally quiet. The roof was ankle-deep in brass like some warlord’s paddling pool, fag butts everywhere, and, sticky with the all-nighter and the numb sense of not really being in our bodies, we tentatively climbed down and had a sniff around.
And nothing but quiet and dawn and Martin on the radio saying he’s coming down to link up with us, and the BBC are back and the CSM is grinning on his quad-bike that Sherlock and I were being sent back for R&R and to let the commanding officer know we’re running on empty. Nothing but smiling like a loon, sprawled on the back of the quad like Martin Sheen flying out on the Huey, drinking in the sense that we’ve bust the icons and made our own, have taken and held the spray-
painted, blasted walls of Adin Zai.
What was home after this?
16. vii. 2007—Intermission
there are moments when the tone changes.
standing in the middle of the road for five baking hours surrounded by the spread carnage of the suicide bomber who ran into the rear vehicle and detonated 1.5kg of PE packed with 600 ball bearings. Not so much the pumping blood from Shadders’ neck or the hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach which emptied instantly when we finally found the driver’s body, thrown from the WMIK into a nearby sewer, and could only think of the blood and the charring and the fucking mortality. Sgt Dave Wilkinson had volunteered to come and give a hand at the sharp end because he was that kind of guy and a damn good soldier and in unimaginable seconds after being hit and the flaming WMIK careering into the shitty ditch which would probably be his ignominious corner of a foreign field, I can’t imagine the thoughts of the rest of the boys in his wagon. I keep trying to get my head around this as we secure the scene and control the incident but you can’t ignore the incongruous legs, thirty metres apart on either side of the road, the only tangible evidence of what remains of the cunt bomber except the sickening sweet smell of barbeque and faeces which he’s martyred over the dual-carriageway. It’s with almost detached curiosity that another hundred yards away I find what I assume to be a bit of head but which turns out to be jaw and beard—unshaved so it’s a rushed and opportunist job and all the boys know that it’s just a game of luck—front wagon vs. back wagon, morning vs. afternoon,
chomping down junk food during the strange hunger, trying to shut out the image and smell when we finally get it all cleared up vs. already on the plane back to Birmingham.