by alex seymour
He smiled kindly, looking right at me, eyes twinkling. This bloke from the rough side of the tracks wore his heart on his sleeve. My heart nearly burst in appreciation. In less than a minute, he’d turned me around from whining misery into having a fighting hope. He’d given me my confidence back—priceless. There was only one way out of the gloom and that was to get back on the horse. I vowed that if he ever needed me back home, I would drop everything for him. His best mate in the world had recently been blown up and killed for Christ’s sake, and here he was, a sage, mopping up my insecurity, trying to make me feel good. The man was a fucking rock.
Out here, marines simultaneously filled the roles of friends, family, and colleagues. As an organization the corps was intensely social. We were always in extremely close physical proximity. Yoda was boss, yet he patrolled and ate meals with us every day. He slept every night in our tent, in a camp bed less than six feet away from me. One of us. This was an extraordinarily sociable place to work.
The company commander took half of 43 Bravo on a forty-eight-hour tasking, the last leg of which was a fourteen-hour patrol. The remaining eight of us stayed behind to man the fort, working three hours on, three hours off, for forty-eight hours. Monotonous and tiring in the extreme. We stopped complaining when we saw the condition of the men in the patrol when they returned. Several of them were howling crazily, like victims undergoing medieval torture, as they staggered back in through the main gate. “Arrgghh!” No real words. So exhausted that this was the only protest they could make. Coping with the sun and dust, humping kit the equivalent in weight of carrying a twelve-year-old kid, being hypervigilant for snipers and IEDs, needing to watch every single step they made—for fourteen hours. Enough to make you go crazy.
Patrols had taken a toll on all of us. By now half of us had open sores the size of a fist on both of our hips. They were webbing burns, caused when the body armor side plates rubbed the skin off our hips, right through our clothes. This was an age-old problem for bootnecks when they yomped and speed-marched for long distances. The men were resigned to it, applied Sudocrem, and soldiered on.
One day I was in the communal shower grappling with my two-liter bag of water (you really can shower with just two liters) when I grumbled to Jason that I couldn’t understand why soldiering never seemed to get any easier, despite the advances in technology. He considered my comment for a moment and then replied that soldiering has not gotten any easier through the ages, and probably never will, because ultimately it’s all about men hunting men. As one side innovates, the enemy adapts and catches up. And so it goes in endless circles of competition to survive. The technological advancements increased the odds of winning, not in making life easier for the fighting men. Life is hard for the frontline soldier and always will be, as long as other men were the quarry.
10
RULE NUMBER 2
Don’t Shoot Civilians
B ack in the patrol rotation, five minutes prior to setting out, there was a long, anguished scream. Pitiful, torturous—the bellow of a mortally wounded beast. It was Matt waiting by the gate, fully rigged for patrol. Before the gates opened we formed up and checked readiness: comms working, magazines firmly on, weapons ready and cocked (a round up the spout, safety catch on). The patrol commander sorted out the order of march, and the gate bitch for the day stood by to open the gate so we could make a quick exit. Standing near the gate, Matt was still wailing, other blokes were laughing, and the source of his pain was obvious. He was a seething bundle of testosterone—he must have more than a normal man’s allocation. Sweat poured, his bandanna was soaked, and he hadn’t even taken a single step out the gate. The temperature was about 125°F, and he was slowly cooking, constrained by the body armor and aware that within the next minute he was going to be humping it outside the wire. His frustrated howls were nothing more than a protest that he was still here—and he had only two choices: either go out that gate and face the long slog in the desert sun, risking injury and death, or face military prison for the crime of “refusing to soldier.” He trudged through the gate, and the wails ceased.
The next task was the kind that most of us relished—a search mission in a suspected Taliban bomb-making factory. These missions were fascinating, and lives depended on us doing it properly. The suspect uninhabited compound was less than five hundred meters from Zamrod. We were hypervigilant and supercautious because we were in exactly the same scenario as JJ and his team had been when they’d been taken out by an explosive booby trap. Three men had been killed by that bomb.
It didn’t take long to find detonators and other IED components, as well as a diary containing the names of Taliban commanders. All the evidence was tagged and bagged. Just as ominous were the hypodermic syringes that littered the floor in the rooms. I almost knelt on one as I bent down to give Yoda an update. Before long, men were finding used syringes strewn everywhere. Such a wicked place. The implications were stark: our base and home was five hundred meters from a nest of fundamentalists, hell-bent on martyrdom and smacked out of their heads, mainlining heroin.
In July, the villagers reported that they suspected an IED had been planted ninety meters from the fort in the tree line to our west. We patrolled out, skirting around the device before closing in to within twenty meters of it. We could see it buried right along the tree line. Jack, who, at nineteen, was the youngest of us, cautiously approached with the metal detector, clearly marking out the safe lane for the bomb-disposal guys.
We then found out that the underresourced bomb disposal team were preoccupied with higher priority devices, so they wouldn’t be able to deal with ours. They took four days to show up. In the interim we cordoned off the site, patrolled (tiptoed) around it, and watched over from the sangar as it sat there, pregnant with menace. The digital rangefinder permanently ensconced in the sangar tower steadfastly refused to waiver in accuracy. Every time I picked it up, it precisely measured ninety meters to potential doom. The bomb-disposal team finally arrived and disabled it—in and out in forty-five minutes flat. Another pressure-plate IED neutralized. Thank you, gentlemen—we owe you. Again.
Still blistering hot we yomped up to the Nor Mohammed checkpoint. One of the marines from Recce Troop was struggling. “Think I’m goin’ down,” he mumbled. His face was crimson. Time to cool off. Arriving at Nor Mohammed we stripped off our body armor and waded fully clothed into the stream that ran through the base. We had less than five minutes of immersion—it was only about two feet deep—before we had to get our kit back on and get patrolling. It was sheer ecstasy floating on my back in the stream. Indescribable pleasure. Other submerged bootnecks were laughing in delight and relief. I couldn’t believe how lucky the men were who were based here. They got this pleasure after every patrol.
We got back to the fort at 10 p.m., and I was up again at 4 a.m. to rendezvous with my friend, the sangar. At 5:30 a.m. we were off on another four-hour patrol. When I got back my shoulders were killing me. Dashim gave me a deep shoulder massage while I sat on a bench in the welfare tent. It felt like heaven—the first kind touch from another human in months. I told him it was the best thing to happen to me since I had gotten to Afghanistan—well, at least equal to that dip in the stream. He smiled, announcing proudly, “My grandmother taught me.”
There were other moments of respite. Local friendlies began making daily deliveries of an eighteen-inch block of ice. At last, before the ice block melted, we could count on something cold to drink every day, just between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.—by which time there would be nothing left of the ice except a bucket of warm water.
We took a delivery of powdered eggs. It was like taking another step back in time. The last time I had heard of anyone consuming that kind of food was in the Second World War. We were surprised it still existed. But we were all sick of the boil-in-the-bag menus and so couldn’t wait to tuck in. Taff, a former chef, showed us how to cook a powdered-egg omelet. Not too bad when seasoned with garlic salt, dried onions, and Spam. Delivered straight
from the 1940s—a real treat. Things were looking up.
But I lost one of my key diversions, reading, when my Amazon Kindle broke due to the heat. I lost access to all my ebooks. Fuck it. This was the second Kindle that had broken in the last few months. They were way too fragile for this environment.
Other diversions were not so benign. On July 30 we heard a massive firefight erupt in J Company’s area. They suffered one casualty. Some of the lads were selected to go out on a heli-borne op, so we had to man the fort with a skeleton crew again. Three hours on, three hours off, for the forty-eight hours of their mission. If insurgents had taken a crack at overrunning the fort in sufficiently high numbers, it wouldn’t have taken much of a sustained effort to kill us all. It wouldn’t be the first time that British troops had been overrun in a hostile outpost in a remote part of the old Empire. For the first time since we’d arrived, I felt vulnerable within the confines of the fort, even though we had the grenade machine gun, the general-purpose machine gun, various semiautomatic weapons, shotguns (affectionately christened “the zombie killers”), plenty of pistols, and grenades—basically enough to put up a decent fight and probably thwart a direct attack. That’s what I kept telling myself at the time . . .
Two days later we linked up with the Afghan police who were helping to man a fort about a mile from us. We were sharing a cigarette and a bit of banter with some of them when one told me that he had four wives. Four! Imagine the hassle. Working with the police later that day, Chris discovered thirty-five kilograms of opium in one of the compounds we searched. It had been processed into a resin. How much heroin would that make? The Afghan army found the man hiding the opium, and they slapped him around the head and face in front of his hysterical wife and children. He was sent off for interrogation, with most of his family trailing after him, crying. He wailed, proclaiming his innocence, trying to convince the Afghan soldiers that the Taliban had forced him to hide it. One thing for sure, he was dirt poor, dressed in rags, trying to eke out a living. Chris was totally nonchalant about the opium find. This kid was just too cool for school, but I was pleased for us all, a rare occasion when we actually got a tangible result from a mission.
Patrolling three-quarters of a mile from the fort, a series of huge explosions erupted close by— Jee-zus! I jumped out of my skin, my heart slamming in my chest. The shock was so great that in the two seconds it took to come to my senses, I thought I was already halfway through a heart attack. You felt the power thunder through the ground and air. I was eager to find out what happened, but when I got back and started to de-rig, I noticed I’d been bitten on the wrist by an insect and it was swelling up nastily. Within fifteen minutes I was clobbered by sickness and nausea, and in another fifteen minutes I collapsed and started vomiting. Two of the guys picked me up off the deck; each hooked one of my arms over their shoulders and they walked—dragged—me to the medical point in one of the fort’s ISO freight containers. Once there the vomiting started again. When it stopped they got me to a stretcher and hooked me up to an IV drip.
I was disoriented and couldn’t stand the heat inside the ISO container, which was made of steel and had no windows—a perfect oven for the midday heat. I fought back the nausea and dizziness, grabbed the drip and the stretcher, and staggered out to find a piece of shade. I felt like an animal crawling off somewhere to die quietly. I found a sliver of shade less than three feet wide where the ops room ISO cast a shadow and lay there out of the sun’s glare. I spent the next twelve hours there unable to do anything except groan quietly. Those were the worst hours of my life. I didn’t expect any sympathy and didn’t get any. We all knew that until I recovered, others would have to pick up the slack.
While I was recovering, a villager, age about thirty, came to the fort to see our medic, complaining he was in pain. He lifted up his dishdash, an ankle-length robe, and pulled down his trousers. His legs were heavily scarred, nasty looking. He told us his house had been destroyed by bombs from fast jets and he had been burned. He had been trying to live with the constant pain from the badly healed burns and was literally begging for something to relieve it. The nearest hospital was twenty miles away—a very long walk—so he had turned to us. The best our medic could do was give him some ibuprofen and Sudocrem, the stuff we ordinarily use for crotch rot and webbing burns, and send him on his way. Headache pills and nappy rash cream. Pathetic. He trudged away despondently. We felt like shit.
We had made a makeshift gym, and most men worked out there between patrols. Matt’s physique stood out. He paced around the fort like a caged animal, his face and arms jutting skyward, blood vessels about to burst in his eyeballs, shouting to everyone and no one in particular, “For the love of fucking God, will somebody please just get me on the cover of Men’s Health magazine! Just get me on the fucking cover—now!”
He was serious—in peak condition, ripped, lean—and looked formidable. A savage. A sleeve of tattoos covered an arm from shoulder to wrist. He’d have eaten the male-model cover stars of Men’s Health for breakfast. No one complained about his exuberance. Just being around a warrior with such massive confidence was reassuring.
Laughs kept us going. If one of the men crept forward on their belly on a dirt track to confirm an IED, the young guys would sing the words to “I’m a Barbie Girl.” They knew the whole song word for word. “I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world, life in plastic, it’s fantastic.”
It was easy to conceive that they had come out of their mother’s wombs invisibly tattooed with the motto “It’s a grave mistake to take yourself too seriously.” A failure of humor in a tight spot was a failure of character, and they knew this deep down in their DNA. High spirits kept everybody from going insane.
In the first week of August, another company got hit in a drive-by grenade attack at one of their checkpoints. A young marine, James Wright, was killed. Rest in peace, James.
I found out about the attack while on sangar duty listening to the BBC World Service on one of the windup transistor radios that we gave away to the locals. The somber archetypal voice of the BBC World Service radio presenter announced, “Today another Royal Marine has been killed in the Nad Ali district of Helmand in a grenade attack on a checkpoint.” It startled me because I was hearing it first live on a global radio station. I became much more alert as it dawned that I was also in a checkpoint in Nad Ali. God bless the BBC, now I was really paranoid—the attack that had claimed James’s life could be the first of a series on other checkpoints. At that very moment I heard gravel crunching below the sangar, toward the outer wall of the fort. My heart raced as I looked down from the tower, searching for the killers—two local dogs scavenging for scraps.
Ordinarily, when you’re within the confines of the sangar, you tend to feel safe because of the four relatively high walls that surround you. However, all it takes for carnage to ensue is one insurgent cycling past and lobbing a couple of grenades over the wall. That is exactly what had happened at J Company just a day or so before and had killed James.
On August 8 we were sent to patrol into a town nearby to provide security for a military stabilization team (MST). Their role is to liaise closely with the Afghan civilians, running cash-for-works programs for small infrastructure projects, such as providing hygienic outside toilets for schools or clean water wells for villages. Tosh was a twenty-yearold sharpshooter from Liverpool; he had a habit of chewing a toothpick whenever we were out on patrols. That day, Tosh and I were working as bodyguards for an MST officer in a compound at a cash-for-works project site. The locals were building a tiny outhouse for a school, but the progress that had been made in the last couple of months was pitiful. Approximately thirty-five cinder blocks had been roughly built into a couple of shaky-looking walls. The MST officer looked exasperated at the lack of progress. He told us that this was typical: most often a portion of the money for a project was given up front, and so the locals were in no hurry to complete the construction.
While we were examining the work—or lac
k of it—a truly ungodly burst of gunfire erupted close to the walls of the compound. Tosh shot me a wide-eyed “holy shit” glance, but in the space of two seconds we realized there was no threat to life within the walls of the compound and so no need to take cover. Apache gunships were on the scene—their guns opening up in a roar, no doubt finishing the job. But what fascinated me was that while all hell was breaking loose a short distance away, the locals we were talking to never once paused in their activity. They were utterly unfazed by gunfire and explosions. They hadn’t flinched or even batted the proverbial eyelid. In London people would be screaming and taking cover. As the firefight raged, they simply kept negotiating better terms for their project, trying to weasel more cash from the MST officer and more time to complete the outhouse. I marveled at how inured they had become. We were in a land that had endured armed conflict for more than thirty consecutive years, and for many of these people, war was all they had ever known.
Days later our company came under attack again: the marines from Fort Zulfakar were being engaged, and we yomped up to support them. It’s a strange rush running toward a firefight, instinct telling you to move fast in the opposite direction from the battle. Exciting. My God, you feel so alive—such an almighty buzz! We had a new Afghan terp with us, whom we called John because no one could pronounce his real name. He was carrying the radio that transmitted Taliban radio chatter out of a small speaker, and today there was lots of it. Having access to their transmissions as they coordinated their attacks was invaluable, especially as they believed that their transmissions were private. This was a huge tactical advantage. We’d been out on hundreds of patrols with Dashim, but this was John’s first, and we were all are wondering if he would hold up under the pressure and deliver—his literal trial by fire. He passed me a fluent real-time update of the insurgent chatter. I’d get the information and pass it up the chain of command. I was riveted listening to the Taliban voices as John translated, reporting that “Now they’ve seen us, and they’ve just described how we moved into this tree line!”