Night harbours were a relaxing way to end the day. After fixing grub and sitting around chewing the fat, we’d retire to our swags until it was our turn for piquet. So often, I’d sit on the more desirable end of a high-calibre machine gun on security piquet surveying the land through my NVGs or thermal-imaging binoculars, letting my mind wander if it was safe to do so. I’d devised a system to overcome the boredom, where I’d reminisce about a certain person – a mate or ex-girlfriend. Day 102 was Sophie day, day 111 was Bodz day, and so on. Remembering a Bodz one-liner was almost enough to make me burst out laughing. If anyone had been watching, they’d have thought I’d lost my marbles. It was my own little happy place.
Sometimes, while I was on piquet, an intruder commandeered my swag. Razz, the black Labrador explosive-detection dog, had free rein over everyone’s bedding when they weren’t using it, putting up stiff resistance and letting loose a silent but violent dog fart when you tried to evict him. Razz was great for morale, and got spoilt rotten when his handler wasn’t watching.
The following day, we drove down into the adjacent valley. This valley was the Badlands, the suspected hub of Taliban activity in the area. We were rolling through some villages on our way towards Anaconda, ever wary of the impending danger, when the temperature of the place suddenly changed.
THE SIXTH SENSE
The sixth sense is portrayed in popular culture as a paranormal phenomenon whereby a person experiences an indescribable sense of foreboding.
In reality, the sixth sense is your subconscious mind picking up on subtle cues from sight, hearing, smell and touch; raising a barely perceptible red flag to warn of impending danger. Dismiss this feeling at your peril.
Something didn’t feel right as the convoy approached the next village, as though the picturesque mountain ranges and flowing rivers were masking an undercurrent of malevolence. The terp was also sitting on the back of my car, and he slowly hunkered down as he absorbed enemy chatter on the radio. Then he put on his helmet. This was very unnerving.
‘What are you doing that for?’ I hissed. ‘What are they saying?’
The terp was relatively new to this game and tended to hear what the enemy was saying without translating. And when he did translate, he’d paraphrase. ‘Well, they say they’ve got a few surprises up ahead for us,’ the terp replied.
‘Fuck that. Tell me exactly what they’re saying, word for word. Translate everything,’ I demanded. Chinese whispers is a dangerous game in a warzone.
The Taliban had advanced warning of our convoy and had prepared an ambush for our ass in the village up ahead. I quickly passed this info on to my patrol commander, and he relayed it over the radio net. The new information completely fitted with my Spidey Senses going ballistic. Everyone felt the crazy energy; we were all on edge, a very tense moment.
The boss halted the convoy and deployed a recon team to assess the area, my car’s .50-cal. gunner included. I jumped up behind the .50 to fill the gap. A gentle breeze rustled through a nearby wheat crop, adding to the eeriness of the situation. I scanned my arc like a hawk, heightened senses on alert. Sporadic radio comms filled my ear as the recon team got to work, killing a Taliban insurgent who tried to run away. A burst of 40-millimetre automatic grenade fire rang out as one of the blokes spotted two squirters. Another two dead. The Taliban had prepared the whole village and river system by digging in fire positions, bugging out at the last minute because they’d failed to prep the ambush.
The dead enemy were stragglers who hadn’t fled in time. One of the more grisly duties of a Kilo was taking photos of enemies killed in action, for intelligence purposes. Most times, this was done by the shooters, but every so often the Kilo had to do it, as we were the only ones allowed to view the deceased due to cultural sensitivities. It was always a confronting spectacle, accompanied by a sense of morbid fascination. Sometimes, the bodies had been lying there for a few hours, so the faces were either a ghostly pale colour if they’d died on their back or had blotches of dark bruising where the blood pooled if they’d died face-down.
One of the faces I photographed a few weeks earlier had been shot through the mouth: upper lip harshly torn, revealing a row of damaged teeth and gums, with a hole in the cheekbone where the round had exited. The portrayal of dead faces in the movies is vastly different from reality – live actors playing dead simply cannot mimic the lifelessness. In reality, the eyelids ranged from half-closed to fully closed, sometimes on the same person. The pupils were always dilated, staring into oblivion at opposing, unnatural angles. As the life left their bodies, the hundreds of different facial muscles relaxed in different ways, contorting the mouth into an inimitable half-sneer, half-smile. Taking these gruesome photos didn’t bother me by now; I’d developed a thick skin and could switch to icy-cold, almost at will.
As the scene was secured, a local bloke rocked up to our defensive position on the back of a donkey. He’d been clipped in the knee by what looked like frag from a 5.56 round. This was probably a dude that the recon team had been shooting at, coming to us for medical treatment! He had balls, I’ll give him that. But my medic credo was: treat them like they’re a mate; suspect them of being an enemy. So, I inspected his knee with a healthy level of caution.
On one side, there was a large, open gash that exposed the internal structures of his knee joint. On the other side was a pinprick of daylight. He’d suffered a through-and-through wound that missed every major structure in his knee by millimetres. I bandaged him up, gave him a dose of antibiotics and urged him to come to the Anaconda medical centre for ongoing treatment. I hoped that if he showed, we’d be able to gather some more intelligence from him down the track, when we had more time. With that, we moved on, watching our backs as we rolled out of the village.
A few villages later, the convoy stopped to assess the ‘temperature’ of the place. While the shooters were out doing their thing, a few locals approached me for treatment. I dealt with a few coughs, colds and sore holes before one of the locals limped towards me on a makeshift crutch. His right lower leg was fucked up, bent out of shape. As he approached, I thought his problem was just another broken limb that hadn’t been set properly, but the terp described a different story: this dude was old-school Taliban, and his leg was actually bent from a gunshot wound. There were no entry or exit wounds that I could see, though, and the terp kept laughing at me through my questioning.
They were surely playing funny business with me.
Finally, the terp convinced me to look at this dude’s heel. I gloved up and picked up his foot, immediately noticing a gaping hole in his heel. I peered down his leg like a telescope. This was most certainly a gunshot wound – a twenty-year-old gunshot wound. From his heel hole, I could see a gargantuan cavity in the bloke’s lower leg; I could almost see his knee joint at the end of the chasm. The old bullet had struck his thigh and tracked down his leg, exiting through the heel. The leg chasm was lined with twenty years of thick, pink scar tissue. Through one section of the scar tissue, I could clearly see a section of his fibula – an exposed piece of bone that looked dry and brittle. The dude flexed his foot up and down a few times during my inspection, and the scar tissue covering his calf muscle and foot ligaments bubbled and waved in unison.
I tried to hide the shock on my face as I looked the casualty in the eye for a few awkward moments. I had no idea what to do about this. I eventually gave him some money to buy a ride to the American FSB; maybe they could surgically cut away the scar tissue and plug the heel hole. If not, maybe they could find him a better crutch.
Under the protection of US forces, we arrived at FOB Anaconda later that evening. The whole joint was pockmarked with bullet holes and scattered with bombed-out vehicles. By now, the majority of Taliban had fled the area – their bush-telegraph system was faster than broadband internet. Their desertion was only temporary, though; they’d be back. So, I helped out at the base medical centre until the next mission surfaced. Of course, my volunteering had nothing to do wit
h the insanely gorgeous American nurse who worked there; I was all about winning hearts and minds. Such a philanthropist!
The med centre ran a small humanitarian aid window in the mornings where locals could access Western treatment. One kid, about ten years old, presented to the med centre with a huge lump on his eyebrow. He’d bumped his head a couple of days earlier but hadn’t washed the wound in the meantime, hoping that Allah would take care of business. By the time he got to me, the wound was a festering mess. The gash was only two to three centimetres long, but a massive, dry crust had formed over the top. I lightly poked the scab, which left an indent. The whole thing was a pus-filled glob of infection. Over the next two hours, I carefully washed away the mank – the kid never cried once through the whole process.
And the suspected Taliban bloke with the blown-out knee even showed up. After I’d debrided the dead tissue and sutured the wound closed, I handed the patient over to some guys who were more qualified to deal with intelligence-gathering procedures.
12
THE LONGEST DAY
After a few days at Anaconda, a mission was nigh. We were going on a thirty-six-hour clandestine foot patrol in the mountains to act as a blocking force as the commandos cleared the valley below. The commandos were the rock, and the SAS were the hard place.
This op was a different beast to what I’d encountered before on this trip. I’d previously been a vehicle-mounted medic, with ample room for supplies. But now I needed to carry everything on my back. The other first-aiders would be too far away, so there was no one to share the load with. Over the next day, I rifled through my medic pack, discarding everything that didn’t have a dual purpose. What scenarios would I encounter? How could I carry enough shit to be a value-adding member of this patrol?
I finally settled on my new kit configuration. I carried enough IV bags to cater for a small mass-casualty scenario, enough drugs to euthanise Charlie Sheen and then bring him back to life, and eight litres of water, which would make it a thirsty but achievable mission. I completely discarded my sleeping bag and cold-weather gear. Comfort took a back seat to extra medical supplies; I’d just rough it for a few nights. Total kit weighed in at forty to forty-five kilograms.
A convoy dropped us off at the starting point to our mountain trek after the sun had disappeared. We were on our own, and we set off along a dusty goat trail into the mountain. My NVG and naked-eye technique worked wonders as we slowly snaked upwards into the sky; I didn’t fall over once in the unforgiving rocky terrain. Despite the low single-digit temperatures, sweat was leaking from every pore under the strain of my pack. A straight-shot tramp up this mountain would have been hard enough, but it was even more difficult because we were walking tactically. Every step had to be soft and calculated to avoid dislodging rocks and creating unnecessary noise. The weight of my pack dug into my shoulders and made my fingers tingle with the cut-off blood supply.
We reached our position among a rocky outcrop high above the valley. There were still a few hours before daylight, so we settled in. Without cold-weather gear or sleeping kit, my bollocks nearly froze off – a cost I’d anticipated but seriously underestimated. Temperatures at this altitude were near zero. I leant against a rock and brought my knees into my chest, shoving my hands between my armour and chest to stop them from trembling. I ducked my head into my legs and breathed down my shirt to retain heat. There wasn’t much I could do about it, so I just sat there quaking and hoping the sun would clock in early. Not a wink of sleep was had that night.
After hours of frozen shaking, I was relieved to see the sun finally rising to thaw my bones. We were positioned in a horseshoe around the mountain to stop retreating Taliban if they ran for the hills while the commandos swept through the valley below. As the commando hit started, Taliban sprayed into the less populated areas of the green belt. Our snipers dutifully lit them up, killing two instantly. A third was clipped in the foray, but he surrounded himself with children as a human shield to extricate his ass from the field of fire. The snipers didn’t want the death of innocent kids on their hands, so he escaped.
I lay on my back in the downtime, getting the sun’s warming rays into me as the morning wore on. But the mercury kept rising into a typical Afghan furnace as the shadows disappeared in the midday sun. I couldn’t win – I was either a popsicle or a roast leg of long pig in this bipolar climate.
As day was turning to night, I sat on the reverse side of the outcrop eating a square of chocolate for dinner. The mission proper was over, and we waited patiently to descend the mountain under the cover of darkness. One of the radio gurus was close by, also inhaling some grub, when our dinner was rudely interrupted by three fighting-aged males making their way down the mountain in our direction. One of the units higher up the mountain spotted them as they descended towards us, calling out their position over the radio to give us early warning. We didn’t have time to move or communicate with each other.
The radio guru and I both stopped instantly, deathly quiet, not moving a muscle. A few moments later, the trio came into sight. Neither of us had silencers, so we’d all have an extremely bad night if we lit them up and gave away our position before being able to bug out of the mountain. It was dusk, so we couldn’t see whether they had weapons or not.
Thirty metres away now.
We were both in the shadow of the outcrop, with the sunset behind us providing some concealment. I knew that nothing on my kit was shiny; I’d scuffed my pouch buttons for this exact reason. But the M4 scope might glint in the ambient light, so I slowly pointed it towards the ground. I carefully and silently flicked the safety catch to single-shot. My heart pounded out of my chest as I mentally rehearsed options.
If these guys have weapons, they won’t be silenced so there’s no point playing it quiet. If they’re strapped, and they spot us, I’ll drop Fronty with a shot to centre of seeing-mass. Then I’ll give Righty acute lead poisoning, followed by Lefty. Then it’s a second sweep of double-tap head shots.
If they’re not packing, and they spot us, I’ll try to stop them, chase and tackle if I have to. I just hope the radio guru covers me.
If they don’t spot us, they can pass.
Twenty metres away now.
If my hands moved, they’d be able to hear the weapon jiggle in the dusk stillness. If I accidentally thought bad thoughts, they’d be close enough to sense the negativity.
Fifteen metres away now.
The trio stopped, just metres away. They were jawing off calmly to one another as one of the guys gazed into the shadows of the outcrop.
Don’t you do it. Don’t you do it. Don’t you do it, fucker.
I held my breath. Every little internal noise that my body made seemed louder than a Foo Fighters concert.
After a few tense moments, the trio continued down the hill. I let out a sigh of relief as they disappeared from sight. I didn’t care that I nearly had to fire at them; I was just so relieved that I didn’t blow our cover and let the boys down. They’d never know how close they’d come to winning the wrong place/wrong time award. We’d remained uncompromised, and exfiltrated back down the mountain once the darkness set in.
Back at Anaconda, it was assessed that the Taliban had been sufficiently subdued, for now. The base was safe-ish, so we planned our move back to Tarin Kot. The commando element were rolling back the way they’d come, so the SAS contingent planned the same. Before long, we’d reached the high ground of CV Alley and continued on through the pass. This place was prime ambush territory, so we wanted to rip it off like a Band-Aid. As my car traversed the crest of the mountain range, a puff of dust erupted in the tight valley below. A split second later, a boom rang out.
‘Kilo, we need the Kilo at the front of the convoy right fucking now,’ the radio screamed.
Kilo. A word that I’d come to love and dread. I loved it because it usually meant something exciting was happening. I dreaded it because it might mean that mates had been injured.
My car sped towards th
e front of the convoy and down into the valley, where it dropped me off a few metres from the scene. The next few moments happened in slow motion as I snatched the med kit and tried to steady my breathing. There was no dramatic music playing, like in the movies. I could only hear my breathing and the jolt of my footsteps reverberating through my body.
The guys in the lead car had seen a bloke up ahead and driven forwards to catch up to him. They’d crossed a tiny creek that cut through the road and had triggered a pressure-plate improvised explosive device (IED) made from anti-tank mines. The gearbox had absorbed the brunt of the explosion, but there were a number of casualties. Jake, the explosive-detection bloke sitting on the back of the vehicle, had been thrown off but was luckily not seriously injured. Tom, the main gunner, had been ejected from the turret and propelled into the air, only sustaining minor injuries from the fall. Richard, the driver, had crashed his arm into the steering wheel as he was violently bucked from the car, and Harry, the passenger, had sustained suspected spinal injuries as he was thrown onto the ground.
The first-aiders had arrived before me and were busy assessing the three casualties lying on the ground. I went into triage mode. Tom was sitting up, so I got an update from the first-aider and did a quick pat-down and set of neuro obs. He was conscious, but dazed. ‘Lay him down and keep talking to him. Keep me updated if he doesn’t start to improve,’ I said to the first-aider.
Bad Medicine Page 13