by alex seymour
Long before we got here, we had all known that the cost of this tour would be paid in pain and distress, and perhaps even with our lives. Our sister unit, 40 Commando, had lost fourteen men during their last trip to Helmand, and many more marines had been seriously injured. Everyone knew the odds, and we trained hard to defeat them.
We retrained in a close-quarter battle compound clearing and spent hours firing grenade machine guns and antitank weapons. We listened intently to countless lectures on how to detect different types of IEDs. We took refresher courses in battlefield medicine. We were counseled on how to withstand the extreme heat and to operate in a hostile environment. The threats came not only from the Taliban but also from poisonous insects and nasty infections. Nothing about this land seemed friendly, and we were taught to assume everything was potentially deadly.
As we ticked off the days until heading into the field, a new kind of tension developed, one barely perceptible but somewhat akin to the sensation of static electricity. Banter took on a serious edge, even an aggressive and adversarial one. For example, a common announcement prior to playing an iPod playlist on the speakers in the tent would have been something like, “Lads, listen to this, you’ll love it.” But something that simple gradually morphed into, “Anyone doesn’t like these tunes can fuck off.” Our insults became uglier: the everyday “knobber” or “cock” was now a “fucking prick” or worse. An old derogatory label that had been dished out forever in the corps was to call someone Jack, as in “I’m all right, Jack” (sod everyone else). It referred to selfishness. Our lives depended on the team. As deployment day neared, the term Jack got bandied about with increasing frequency. Everyone was aware of the subtext that every man must always, always maintain the healthy cohesion of the group. So, complaints like “He’s Jack” and “That’s Jack as fuck” were heard with increasing regularity as men became less patient with one another. It didn’t take long for rule number one to become “Don’t be Jack.”
Other changes were in our level of attention and ability to listen. We made sustained, unbroken eye contact, we communicated with increased concentration, our focus became paramount. Every communication conveyed the unspoken message: “I understand what you’re telling me, and I want you to understand that I am listening very carefully and realize that our shared understanding will keep us both alive.” Miscommunications and mistakes could kill us—even here in training. One event proved how cruelly true that was. An hour after we had finished a live firing session, an army regiment stepped up to train in the same position. During a mock assault on a compound using live ammo, a young soldier somehow—perhaps he tripped—shot his friend in the head, not once but twice. His teammate’s helmet stopped the bullets from penetrating his skull, and he was able to walk away, dazed and severely pissed off. We were dumbfounded. How does a man accidentally shoot his mate in the head—twice?
One evening we were sitting around waiting for full darkness to fall so we could complete a night shoot on the range. We passed the time playing poker. A sandstorm erupted, the wind scattered cards everywhere, and the world became bathed in an eerie light, an odd reddish hue. There was no place to get out of the storm, so we became our own shelters. We covered our faces with shemaghs (Afghan scarves) and instinctively closed ranks into small groups, facing each other until shoulders were touching, our backs against the viciously whipping sand and only our eyes visible in our swathed heads. This became an unspoken tactic for dealing with these storms. Jason affectionately referred to these circles as “rings of steel.” Good luck trying to penetrate one as a late entrant—there was no getting in. Dust devils whipped up a frenzy from the desert floor, spinning vortexes rising three feet hight, like tiny perfectly formed mini tornados. Energized by the roiling desert forces, the men’s voices would ratchet up to full volume as would their energy—the effect was electric as they sparked off each other, telling dits and joking. The atmosphere was absolutely bizarre, the desert and all of us at full-blast status. But it was just another moment in a marine’s life. We could add withstanding sandstorms to scaling mountains, sailing oceans, trekking though jungles and deserts, and burrowing into snow holes in the Arctic.
5
Peace Be upon You
W e jumped on a chopper to fly to our patrol bases to get out on the ground at last. My multiple, 43 Bravo, was assigned to relieve the Paras—the Parachute Regiment—in a fort called Zamrod positioned on the edge of a village of approximately three hundred people twenty miles away. The exhilaration of flying in a Chinook in the desert with the tailgate down can’t be denied. Men bristled with bullets, bayonets, and guns. The roar of the rotors made it impossible to hear speech, so everyone was forced to lip-read commands shouted their way. The chopper flew low, swooping and banking to minimize exposure, much like an extreme theme-park ride, only this one could get you shot out of the sky at any moment.
Below us the desert was flat and featureless, giving way here and there to irrigated farmland, dotted with mud compounds. We landed at M Company HQ and disgorged from the chopper into seventeen-ton armored Mastiff vehicles for the final short leg into Fort Zamrod, arriving at the start of what was known as “fighting season.”
Once in Zamrod, the novelty of occupying a fort was short lived. The Parachute Regiment multiple that we were relieving was still inhabiting it. They all looked gaunt, particularly their sergeant, the multiple commander, who looked like the actor Tom Berenger (without the facial scar) in the movie Platoon, although his Yorkshire accent ensured the comparison ended there.
We spent the next two days in a formal handover process, listening to the local intelligence gathered by the Paras. Naturally, we sucked it up, as our lives depended on it.
The first patrols went smoothly, and we got a feeling of the normal pattern of life. All senses on high alert, vigilant. We may as well have traveled back in time five hundred years, as the area was practically medieval. We were especially vulnerable when forced into tight spaces or channeled. Men became alert to known Taliban aiming markers, looking for ground sign, anything unusual and unnatural—suspicious wires, disturbed earth, metal objects. Close attention was paid to atmospherics. The mantra “absence of the normal, presence of the abnormal” played over and over in our minds.
We patrolled through the fields, and opium poppies grew everywhere, blossoming with pink and white beauty. Farmers harvested them as the most normal crop in the world. For them, of course, it was. Initially it was incomprehensible. During his first exposure one of the lads piped up, “Hold on, hold on, wait up, settle down a minute, everyone, please. What the hell’s going on? What the fuck? Can you see all this shit? This takes gangster to a whole new level. This stuff is everywhere!”
“Wake up, dummy,” said one of the old sweats. “Governments have always done this. Same shit, different war.”
No one could move a few meters outside the wire without traipsing through opium poppies, which grew up to our chests. Dried poppy heads crunched under size 10 magnum desert boots. Spread throughout Helmand, elite troops from different countries were securing, guarding, and nurturing the industry that produces 90 percent of the raw material for the most destructive drug. Certainly these poppy fields benefited from government-sanctioned protection. Was this a part of the war on drugs or war with drugs? It has always been like this in one form or another. There was more to this conflict than meets the eye. David would have a field day. We were supporting this community, ensuring their well-being, while they cultivated crops processed into heroin. Quite simply, we were in new territory as a military mafia running shit on a new turf. It’s no accident it’s called the military industrial complex. Nothing random going on there.
Never get high on your own supply. I wondered if anyone had broken the golden rule out here?
The adult men in the villages had deeply craggy faces with thick beards, looking ancient and wizened. The male villagers were either very old or boys. All the able-bodied men were dead or off fighting—with us or against
us. We hardly ever saw any female villagers. They weren’t allowed out of their houses without a chaperone.
On most patrols we wore and carried the following kit:
trousers, UBACS (underbody armor combat shirt), belts, and high combat boots
antiballistic protective underwear
antiballistic groin protector, aka “the nappy”
body armor, which included a large twelve-inch front plate, a similar back plate, and two smaller side armor plates
Kevlar helmet
assault rifle fitted with an ACOG (advanced combat optical gunsight), red-dot laser light, and LLM (laser light module) UV/ black light
plenty of SA80 assault rifle magazines containing 5.56-mm rounds
high-explosive grenades
bayonet and/or commando dagger
smoke and white phosphorus grenades
backpack containing an eighteen-by-twelve-inch steel ECM (electronic countermeasures) device fitted with a brick-sized battery, plus a spare battery
personal radio, microphone and headphone, and spare batteries
eye protection antiballistic glasses
NVGs (night vision goggles)
one set of personalized ear defenders
multiblade Leatherman knife, with pliers
black Protrek wristwatch with compass, altimeter, and thermometer
bandanna
kneepads
headlamp
medical pouch containing two syringes of morphine and assorted dressings and bandages appropriate for gunshot and blast wounds
two tourniquets primed and worn in an upper-arm pocket applied in the event of a catastrophic hemorrhage
three liters of water in a CamelBak (a water pack with a hose that snakes up your shoulder, close to your mouth, enabling hands-free drinking)
a life-saver bottle (a three-liter water-purifying container)
two ration pack meals
weapon-cleaning kit and spare oil
waterproof notebook, pens, pencils
dog tags
biometric camera equipment
This kit had to be serviceable before every patrol, each piece tested and checked as operational. Fully loaded, a typical patrol kit weighed between 110 and 120 pounds, and it had to be humped hour after hour every day in 115°F heat in the shade. And the shade always, always seemed to be elsewhere, tantalizingly elusive, wherever we weren’t. It was fucking merciless.
The compound walls at Zamrod formed a square, with each wall eighteen feet high and five feet thick, constructed from Hesco mesh-wire blocks filled with sand and rubble. Stout enough to stop a rocket-propelled grenade. At two of the corners, opposite each other, were sangar towers (elevated sentry posts that provided an unobstructed view of the surrounding terrain). There were sixteen marines in our multiple, and we all rotated sangar duty. Each tower had to be manned 24/7, which meant we pulled guard duty all the time. The sangar towers were our early warning system of attack. The local Taliban could attack at any time and in a variety of ways: suicide bombers in vehicles or on foot, grenades lobbed over a wall, snipers shooting from local compounds. Every one of these threats had materialized into real-life horror stories.
Our accommodation was two tents: olive green and canvas, with space in each for eight marines and their gear (one rucksack and one shoulder bag as a maximum for each man for the entire tour). There were camp beds, each with a mosquito net. I considered the cots a luxury, having spent countless months on exercises over the years in the field with just a foam roll mat to sleep on. But that’s where the luxury ended. This was home for the next six months, and immediately we discovered, with devastating disappointment, that the tents were impossible to spend more than ten minutes in between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. due to the heat. During the day, if it was 120°F outside the tent, it could get up to 130°F inside. Instant sweatbox.
A third tent was used for “welfare.” In it were two battered-looking laptops with the odd key missing and an intermittent wireless Internet connection. Facing the communal TV were a couple of makeshift sofas creatively fashioned from wire, covered with blankets. We discovered that a sofa made from thick metal wire could never be made comfortable. We also shared a kitchen-eating area, commonly known as the galley to marines, that was little more than wooden posts holding up a corrugated tin roof. There was rarely anything to mix together to cook. Our food for the next six months was a daily (twenty-four-hour) ration pack, of which there were about ten different menus. Each ration was a ready-made boil-in-a-bag affair, and they quickly lost their appeal. Even with the ten different menus, after we had been through one rotation, we cursed the monotony. Same food, same menu, week after week for six months. Men became alchemists trying to spice up meals, but there was no turning lead into gold. No fresh meat or vegetables. No dairy. No milk, except occasionally in powdered form.
Communal jobs—the housekeeping tasks—were divided up among us, usually with two men assigned to each job: cleaning the galley, shower area, and welfare tent and emptying the crap from all the toilets. We crapped into plastic bags called John bags, which were then dumped into larger black trash-can liners and burned with petrol along with the rest of our gash (rubbish) every day.
Standard operational procedure dictated that we strive not to patrol according to any set pattern, which impacted the timing and how and where we patrolled. Consequently, there was no routine for the duration of a patrol or the time of day it went out. Patrols went out day and night, typically averaging four hours. When not patrolling, there were plenty of other things to do, including manning the sangars. With only sixteen men in the fort, we each typically spent six hours a day manning a sangar. We developed a system of two hours on sangar duty, then six hours off. A typical day started with a patrol at 6 a.m., usually until about 10 a.m. Even on the shortest patrol, we would come back exhausted, drenched with sweat. Then we’d either work two hours of sangar duty or have two hours of admin time—personal time filled with laundry, cleaning our kit, and preparing meals. The pattern repeated: back out on patrol, back in the sangar, admin time.
This regime played out day after day, for the entire six months, and was, to be frank, demoralizing. Imagine a life where on Friday, the next day is Monday. The whole fucked timetable was compounded by the fact that there were no days off whatsoever, so every day was Groundhog Day. Days of the week and weekends became utterly meaningless.
Typically, men never got more than four hours’ sleep at a time, five if they were exceptionally lucky. In addition, all hope of any downtime for meditation or rest was snuffed out by the constant clatter and seventy-decibel judder of a hulking diesel generator, killing the aspiration on day two. So sleep, and the lack of it, soon became an all-consuming preoccupation. I’d often leave to go out on patrol at 1 a.m. and return at 5 a.m., getting only three hours in bed before being awakened for rotation on the sangar—which never ever, ever went away.
Worse still, we had to wear full body armor and a helmet while in the sangar, whether it was day or night, and the heat was beyond oppressive no matter what time of the day. Sangar duty became our curse. Inescapable, like taxes and death.
Bish was a twenty-two-year-old, wearier than his years. This was his second tour, and he was no stranger to the rigors. During his previous deployment, he had had a brush with a suicide bomber who had unhelpfully detonated his load only a few meters away from where he stood. Bish had to pick bits of the bomber’s flesh and bone off his weapon and uniform. Whenever he relieved me on the sangar, I could always hear him approach. He would climb up the stairs saying, “I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life.” So much for maintaining the marines maxim of “cheerfulness in the face of adversity.”
We were owned by the military with no autonomy. We had no control over where we went, when we slept, whom we worked with, what we wore, what we ate, the workload, or its duration. The machine had us by the balls, and we all knew it. Our only mechanism to vent frustration was swearing, and we swore and swore�
�and then swore we’d never come back here. I tried to keep my dripping (grumbling) to a minimum. Everyone had volunteered, and we had gotten what we’d asked for.
It took only a few patrols to learn that it took an astonishing level of exertion to complete each one. With all the weapons and kit, the heat was brutal. Everybody rapidly lost weight. Sweat ran off our bodies the moment we started to get rigged for patrol. The only way to stop a river of perspiration flooding your eyes was to wear a bandanna, which became soaked through and sopping wet within two or three minutes of getting kitted up.
We had the agility of tortoises. Commando training taught marines to be agile, focusing on deft athleticism and speed. These attributes were now sacrificed to meet the demands of combat effectiveness while attempting to optimize safety. Wearing body armor made sense and saved lives, but the price we paid was in agility. Medieval knights in suits of armor had more freedom of movement than our sorry limbs did. Disgusting was the word some of the younger marines used to describe how they felt during the long patrols. Staying fully hydrated was essential but impossible. No matter how much water I drank, my piss was always a dark amber brown.
On patrol the local children chased us endlessly, shouting “Chocolate! Chocolate!” We’d respond with the customary salaam alaikum (peace be upon you). The kids wanted the boiled sweets that we carried in our ration packs. We would throw them by the handfuls, like a shower of confetti. The children would scramble and scuffle, fighting one another to grab them and gobble them down. It never ceased to amaze me how bold these kids were. If the patrol halted, you’d find some cover, drop to one knee and assume a firing position, covering your arcs of fire. When we did this, the kids had no qualms about reaching out and actually unbuttoning our combat trouser pockets in an effort to fish out sweets. Countless times children tried to remove my watch from my wrist. When they got obnoxious we were tempted to slap them away, but we had been warned not to, or do anything that could be misconstrued by the villagers as abuse. Some marines had booted pesky kids up the arse, and it had not gone down well with the village elders. They filed assault reports that had been fed up the chain of command, and the whole incident had led to bad vibes between the community and the troops. Incidents like that could undo many weeks of building goodwill. Luckily, sometimes the children’s own elders intervened, disciplining unruly kids themselves. The punishment usually was brutal and immediate, fathers and grandfathers slapping and beating their children in front of us.