by John Nichol
They were running out of water, and he called on the soldiers outside the minefield to lob in some bottles in a pouch – a risk, of course, if it landed on another mine, but they were desperate. They’d even drained the last of the intravenous saline solution in Hartley’s medical pack, just to moisten their lips. A chance would have to be taken, and the pouch came soaring in. ‘Thank God I’d played rugby for the army,’ Hartley said, ‘and I was able to catch it. That water was fantastic, the best I’ve ever tasted.’
Still the silent crowd stood and watched, with no idea how this drama in the Afghan desert was ever going to play out. ‘It felt strange, us lying there in the open, and them just watching, so near and yet so far. I wasn’t angry with them and I didn’t think they were chicken or anything for not helping. There was nothing they could do, and I felt sorry for them. I couldn’t have stood there as it all unfolded. It must have been fucking dreadful, just looking down at your mates and not being able to do anything.’
Among those helpless spectators was Alex Craig, still not sure how he had made his escape up the hill, and beating himself up about whether he should have stayed in the riverbed to help. The thought that he had let his comrades down still troubled him years later, though with no good reason. He was grievously wounded, more severely than he realized. His life was in danger – a doctor who treated him confirmed as much later.
As it was, he was one less body for the rescuers to worry about. When he finally struggled into the observation post at the top of Normandy, he knew he urgently had to decompress his chest, to let the air out, otherwise he would suffocate. It meant driving in a needle between the ribs, but he didn’t have the strength left to do it to himself. Calmly, he took a cannula from his pack and guided one of the Paras there on how and where to insert it. This was a tricky enough procedure for a seasoned practitioner in a hospital ward; here, with a complete novice, it was battlefield medicine of the most extreme kind. But needs must.
Craig put a mark on his skin where the puncture had to be made, and lay back. The Para, to his credit, did not flinch, and nor, to his credit, did Craig. ‘He was definitely going to do it,’ Craig recalled. ‘Great guy! God bless him!’ At the last second, they heard a call from outside that a doctor was on the way, and they paused. A helicopter was landing, the Medical Emergency Reaction Team was piling out, an RAMC colonel came racing in and took over. He made his incision, inserted a drain into Craig’s chest and, for one at least of the Kajaki minefield victims, the life-and-death drama of that day was over.
Out in the minefield, there was no such relief. Three hours8 had gone by since the mine had hit Mark Wright, six and a half since Stu Hale – still waiting to be casevaced out – had first wandered into the minefield. Suddenly, a US Black Hawk was overhead. One had been requested from the Americans by the commanders back in Bastion as soon as the emergency was declared, but none had been immediately available. To his annoyance and frustration, Colonel Stuart Tootal, the 3 Para commander, had his request questioned. Was a helicopter really necessary? And when he had insisted that it was, the matter had been referred up to NATO level for approval. The delay in the upper echelons was disastrous for the soldiers down on the ground. But now, at last, in a whirlwind of noise and fuel fumes, the American cavalry had arrived – one of the so-called ‘Dust Off’ platoon, whose logo painted on the helicopter’s side was a raunchy girl bursting out of her blouse under the motto, ‘Hanging out there to pick you up.’
‘They’re here! They’re here!’ Hartley called to his triangle of casualties, ‘and you could see the colour and the hope come back into their faces.’ All except Wright. The arrival of what he had been waiting for broke whatever spell of unreality he had been lost in. ‘For the first time, he began to talk about dying. If things didn’t work out, he wanted me to tell his missus he loved her and to let his mum and dad know he’d been a good soldier. I told him everything was going to be all right, and I promised to see him back at Camp Bastion. I promised. He made me promise…’
From out of the hovering helicopter, the American rescue crew fast-roped down into the minefield with a seven-foot-long metal stretcher. Hartley urged them to be careful, ‘but they just went to work and were running around, clipping in Stu Hale and then Andy Barlow. I was just scared they were going to set off more mines.’ Hale lay there while the crewmen scooped him up, admiring their professionalism and their bravery. ‘It may well have been foolhardy, but at some point somebody had to come and get us out. They just got on with it.’ The risks were still enormous, and not just from the mines. The US crew must have been aware that, just two months earlier, a fellow helicopter medic, an experienced staff sergeant, died when his line snapped in mid-air and he fell three hundred feet to the ground. Hale knew none of this, and was euphoric and, on his own admission, giggling like a schoolgirl as he was hauled into the air and strapped into the belly of the Black Hawk, relieved to be rescued after so long in distress but also tranquillized by the fresh syringe of morphine that was pumped into him.
They were back in ten minutes for Mark Wright, then again for Pearson and Prosser. All five were landed beyond the minefield and transferred to a waiting Chinook to be flown to the hospital at Camp Bastion. The Black Hawk then returned to the riverbed to pick up Hartley and the stretcher-bearers who’d been with Hale since they first tried to carry him out of the minefield. As he awaited his turn, Hartley, his casualties gone ahead of him, was standing on his own and surveying the now-empty scene of so much destruction and pain. He was still struggling to breathe. Now he had a moment to think, the shrapnel in his chest began to ache. Something caught the corner of his eye a few yards away. It was the emblem of a wing on a green T-shirt. Without thinking where he was and what he was doing, he walked – walked! – over and picked it up. The shirt was Alex Craig’s, blown from him by the mine that caught him and Mark Wright. It was bloody and torn, but the proud words stencilled on the chest were clearly visible through the grime and gore – ‘Airborne Paramedic’. As a memento from a minefield, and of extraordinary heroism, it took some beating.
The cable came down for Hartley, and he clipped on, but he could still barely believe it. ‘They winched me up, and all the way I was sure something was still going to go wrong and I was going to die. It was not until my bum was on that bit of metal in the helicopter and one of the blokes gave me a bottle of iced water that I finally grasped that I was safe and on my way out. I looked at the rest of the rescue team who’d been down there on the ground with me, and not one of us said a word. We just looked at each other and sort of hugged each other… and that was it.’
At Camp Bastion, as he limped and wheezed his way off the helicopter, Hartley was met by his good mate, Gary Lawrence, the medic who just a few weeks earlier had saved the life of Sergeant Major Andy Stockton (see Chapter One). Lawrence was taken aback by his friend’s condition. ‘He was pepper-potted with shrapnel, had burns like soot marks to his face and his chest and he couldn’t breathe properly. It brought home to me how vulnerable we all were. You think you’re invincible, but we’re none of us bullet-proof.’ But he was alive. One of the minefield casualties, Hartley now discovered, was not.
His first thought was that it was Alex Craig who had not made it, but then he found him lying on a treatment table in the Accident and Emergency tent with a team of doctors around him putting a new drain in his chest. His condition had been deteriorating since that emergency procedure to relieve the pressure in his chest up on the hill. He had been the last of the injured to be air-lifted from the scene, and the MERT helicopter had got him to Bastion none too soon. Hartley pushed his way through the crowd round the bed and handed over the T-shirt he’d found at Kajaki. The two of them wept. ‘We were just looking at each other,’ Craig remembered, ‘and trying to get our heads round what had happened. It all seemed so unbelievable. Tug said, “I’ve got your T-shirt, I went through a minefield to pick it up,” and I told him he was an idiot! It was all a bit emotional. We were both completely
drained, but it was a relief to see each other. I was just pleased that he was fine.’
There were more tears when Hartley learned that it was Wright who was dead. The loss of blood had been unsustainable, and in the helicopter on the way to Bastion he had gone into cardiac arrest. Hale had been lying beside him, ‘screaming for him to hold on’, but Wright had gone. Hartley was mortified. ‘I was sick about him dying. I’d known him since we were together in Iraq, and he was an awesome bloke, a real pro and the bravest man I ever knew. As I said in my official report on the whole incident, he exercised command and control the whole time, giving outstanding leadership in dire circumstances. His presence contributed significantly to the eventual rescue and survival of those who were injured and prevented others from also becoming casualties.’
‘Tug’ had one more duty to perform. ‘I’d promised him that he’d be OK and that I’d see him again. So, though I was offered the chance to fly straight back to England, I stayed for Mark’s farewell ramp parade when his body was repatriated. I went into the ambulance where his coffin was waiting to be slow-marched on to the plane. I had promised him I would see him again, and I did. I just wish it hadn’t had to be like that.’
*
Stu Hale had almost no memory of leaving Afghanistan. He had a vague recollection of being in the helicopter on his way back from the minefield and then being in the Bastion operating theatre. But the journey home on an Aeromed C17 cargo plane with the other Kajaki casualties passed him by. It was not until he was in Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham that he began to come out of his coma – a full five days later. But still he suffered. Hooked up to life-support systems and barely conscious, he then endured days of intense paranoid hallucinations as his mind processed and misinterpreted what was happening to his body. These terrors are a common enough phenomenon for patients in intensive care but, afterwards, Hale had something to judge them against. And he reckoned the hell of those nightmares was ‘the most awful thing I’ve ever experienced. I would rather do Kajaki ten times than go through that again.’ He was too scared even to press the button for more morphine, thinking he would die if he did, and suffered hours of unnecessary and excruciating pain until he was made to realize he was safe. ‘Your brain plays tricks on you – it was a horrific time.’
Shannon, his wife, sat beside him. She had been out in Colchester when she got the news of his injury. They had just sold their house – part of their plans for a new life – and she was on her way to sign the papers when her mobile phone rang. A voice said: ‘This is 3 Para Welfare. We need to come and see you.’ She stopped in her tracks, as if hit by a hammer. She hadn’t heard a word from Stu, not a letter nor a phone call, for five weeks, because he was up-country. ‘You think the worst, that he’s dead, and I asked but they said, no, he’d been injured. And they wouldn’t tell me any more.’ At home, two visitors from the battalion filled her in on the details. She was in shock. ‘He’s a sniper, so perhaps I expected him to have been shot. But when they said he’d walked into a minefield and he’d lost his leg, I went cold, shaking, sobbing, really sobbing. I knew how devastating this would be for him. Unless you’re in the military, you can never really understand how awful the loss of a limb is to a fit young career soldier.’
When she peeped into the Selly Oak intensive care unit and saw him, unconscious and wired up to a life-support system, her heart almost broke.
There were all these brave young men in there who’d lost limbs. That’s the cream of our youth, all at the peak of their physical fitness and now just broken. It didn’t even look like him. They’d all had this mad facial-hair-growing competition while they were out there, and he had a massive moustache coming right down on to his chin. I just broke down when I saw him lying there. And where his leg should have been, there was just a sheet. Nobody knew for sure he was even going to pull through. His other leg was quite badly injured too, and he’d lost a lot of blood. The doctor took me and Stu’s mum to one side and said they still didn’t know whether they were going to be able to save the other leg, because so much shrapnel had gone into the knee. I think he was millimetres away from losing the tendon that controls your lower leg and, if that had gone; he would have been a double amputee. It was bloody terrifying, horrendous.
Life could have got worse for Hale. It didn’t. It got better, as did his shattered body. His child was born, the one who had occupied his thoughts as he had lain wounded in the minefield. It was a girl and, for all his fears that he might not survive, he was at the birth to name her Sophia.
‘Having her was a big thing for Stuart,’ Shannon recalled. ‘When he was lying out there on the hard ground at Kajaki and losing blood for all those hours, the one thing that kept him going was to get back and see this baby being born. She looks just like him, she’s got a big smile like him, she’s very placid like him. Got all of his best qualities.’ Shannon knew too that he needed one other thing to see him through the ordeal of recovery – to be with his mates. Whatever plans they had had for him to change career now went on hold. ‘One of the first things I said to him when he came round was, “Right, Stuart, you’re not leaving the army. You’re staying in, and that’s it. Whatever they find for you to do, it’s something to belong to and to hold on to.” ’
His determination to get back to a normal life – ‘or as close to it as possible’ – astonished even her. He was soon up on a prosthetic leg and getting around with a walking stick. Not long after, he was back in the gym, getting fit again, as a prelude to returning to work. When the last 3 Para contingent came back from Afghanistan, he was there to welcome them. ‘Yes, I was in my wheelchair but it was important for me to be there.’ The camaraderie of military life would see him through.
With him in Selly Oak was Alex Craig, who found it difficult adjusting to a non-military environment, where there was little comprehension of what those returning wounded from Afghanistan – in increasing numbers – had been through. He reacted badly to the loud crashes of the metal medical bins on the ward, each bang a nerve-racking reminder of that long, long day when explosion after explosion had shredded the silence of the desert. It took him a long while to get his health and his fitness back. His mind, though, still plays tricks. ‘I still think about that day – should I have gone back in, could I have done more for Mark? There is a level of self-imposed guilt, and it nags away at me. I expect it always will.’
As for ‘Tug’ Hartley, he had come out of the Kajaki minefield relatively unscathed, but it was never truly out of him. Back home, he was a changed man. He drank too much and was short-tempered. ‘I thought I was coping, but my wife sat me down one day and told me I wasn’t. I felt this anger, unbelievable anger. At work I would get frustrated, wound up. I never hit anyone, but I could feel myself wanting to. Loud noises would set me off. Every time I heard a helicopter, it just drove me mad, made me so aggressive.’ He had all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder but with an edge unique to medics. ‘I used to imagine all my friends getting injured and me not having the bottle to go in and help them.’ Eventually, he was medically discharged. ‘I was told it would be the best thing for me really. In my own mind I was 50/50 about staying, but I knew Afghanistan was going to be around for many years to come, and I never want to be put back in that situation. It’s not watching mates dying that was the problem. It was making promises I couldn’t keep.’
The award of a George Medal, one of the highest for bravery, was little consolation.
To be honest, I was pissed off by it. There were ten of us who went in as a rescue party and only three of us got awards, and one of them was dead [Mark Wright]. Everyone who went into that minefield acted above and beyond, put their lives at risk, and yet some got no recognition. I would rather have got nothing, or got the same as everybody else. I did what I hope every British soldier would have done for me. I’m not the fittest soldier, I’m not the best soldier, but you know when it’s one of your own you’ve got to do everything you can. You do your best. I fee
l a bit bad about the way it all happened – not being told there was a minefield there, the helicopters not having winches, but I’m still very loyal.
The Kajaki incident does, however, strain credibility, if not loyalty. It showed members of the British Army and the medics responsible for their welfare in a truly glorious light – if raw bravery and the willingness to risk all for one’s comrades are the only measures. But it was also a series of preventable disasters, a dismal catalogue of errors by those who send young men under-equipped to fight a shoestring war whose military objectives are hard to fathom. A board of inquiry was forthright in its findings. The minefield should have been known about in the first place – it was on some maps but not all, and the information had not been relayed to all the soldiers patrolling the area. The Chinooks should have had winches and hoists to extract the casualties.9 It also transpired that the soldiers had had to turn off their radios because of a shortage of batteries and battery chargers, leaving them without communications at vital times, when a quick message could have stopped the incident escalating. Far from Corporal Wright’s injuries being so severe that he was unsaveable (which was the line put out by the Ministry of Defence), the expert care he received on the ground was such that he might have survived had it not taken so long to get him to hospital. The men on the ground that day did their duty. It was others who let them down, who left them, in every terrible sense, without a leg to stand on. The statistics of this sorry incident said it all – one dead, six seriously injured, three lost limbs.
There was one further casualty – the promising career of Colonel Stuart Tootal, the 3 Para commander. He resigned from the army when his tour of Afghanistan was over, reportedly in disgust at equipment shortages and what he considered the poor and shoddy treatment of his troops. ‘Resources were stretched to breaking point,’ he said. We never had enough helicopters.’ The Kajaki minefield was where all those deficiencies were exposed, at a fearful human cost. A civilian coroner who heard the tale unfold at an inquest in Oxford10 two years afterwards concluded that MoD chiefs should hang their heads in shame for the lack of equipment that had cost Corporal Wright his life. This death, he declared, had been preventable.