Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

They had spotted a gathering of twelve to fourteen men dressed in black and armed. Two of the support group’s vehicles had peeled off to try to intercept them, but as they did so RPGs started to rain in on the support base – followed by small-arms fire.

  For a moment we stood staring up at the ridge listening to the gunfire and explosions. Then we started walking again through a field, looking for the bridge.

  Within seconds we heard the staccato crack of Kalashnikovs. I threw myself into a ditch as bullets whizzed overhead. ‘Helmets on!’ shouted someone. ‘Put your fucking helmets on!’ I followed the paratroopers, as we ran for our lives across the fields. The ground had been ploughed weeks before and had baked hard into dry, treacherous ridges. We stumbled over the furrows, with bullets and loud explosions all around us. I wished I was wearing camouflage instead of the blue press flak jacket and helmet that made me so visible.

  I did not see Justin fall as we ran. ‘I lost my footing and managed to turn on to my back as I ploughed into the ground,’ he said later. ‘As I looked up, a rocket-propelled grenade flew over our heads about ten feet above, bursting in the field near a group of paras who had made the sprint in better time.

  ‘I struggled back to my knees in time to see the first mortar round land exactly where we had been only half a minute earlier. The troops returned fire. A prolonged burst of rapid machine-gun and rifle fire. Then, using white phosphorus grenades as cover, they moved left to take up firing positions behind the ridge.

  ‘Again we were diving to the ground to avoid incoming fire, but this time it was to our left flank as well as the original direction. Feeling very exposed, we returned fire and ran back to a ridge along the field at right angles to our position.

  ‘Once again we took incoming fire, this time from behind us. Their mortars were mercifully slow at retargeting and they fell where we had just left.’

  All around me was shouting and screaming. The two platoons had been scattered by the ferocity of the ambush. In the deep ditches their radios were not working. The soldiers were releasing canisters of red or green smoke to show each other their positions, even though this would reveal them to the Taliban too.

  The firing came again and again, wave after wave of it, with hardly any break between. The eight-foot-deep irrigation ditches which crisscrossed the fields had turned into trenches. In and out of them we climbed, slipping and falling in the muddy water as the paras tried to regroup, yelling instructions I did not understand like ‘Go firm!’ which means stay still.

  ‘When we shout “rapid fire”, run!’ yelled Corporal Matt D’Arcy as we crouched in yet another ditch. ‘Rapid fire!’ he screamed and, ears ringing amid a clatter of heavy fire that I could not identify as ours or theirs, I forced myself to climb out of the trench.

  One of the Afghan interpreters stayed praying and moaning in the ditch until Private Deerans, the handsome South African, grabbed him by the collar and kicked him out.

  I thought about my husband Paulo and our six-year-old son Lourenço back home in East Sheen, south-west London; of the World Cup birthday party Lourenço was due to have on Sunday afternoon; and how stupid it would be to die in this Helmand field from a Taliban bullet.

  In my belt purse were some of Lourenço’s toy cars and pens he had given me for the ‘poor children of Afghanistan’. I had taken them to the village but never got a chance to give them out. I had to survive and the image of my son’s face kept me running and jumping into yet another trench.

  Frantically, I looked around for Justin. We have worked together on and off for years, surviving everything from arrest in West Africa to abduction by military intelligence in Pakistan and regard each other as a kind of talisman. In the confusion we had split up and I had no idea if he was all right.

  In fact he was with Major Blair, a usually charming man, who was very angry indeed.

  ‘Where’s the fucking air support?’ the major was yelling on the radio to British headquarters at Camp Bastion, reading off a GPS position.

  ‘Two A-10s ten minutes away can be with you for twenty minutes,’ came the reply. Nothing arrived.

  ‘We need air support. Where’s the air support?’ Major Blair radioed again after sliding on his back in another trench, pulled down on to the mud by the weight of the kit.

  The message came back that the A-10s had been called off to Sangin, a village to the north where two British Special Forces soldiers had been killed. No other planes were available because fighting was still going on. Why they were more important than us was unclear.

  ‘We’re going to have to get out of this alone,’ Blair said. He checked the grenades on his belt. Later he explained: ‘I was counting them because I thought the fight would get down to twenty-five yards.’

  I was in a group led by Corporal D’Arcy. At one point we ran back towards the village only to be fired on from that direction.

  ‘They’re playing with us like chess pieces,’ shouted the corporal. The Taliban clearly had someone on the ridge to the right of us directing movements, for they were constantly changing position.

  I ran again and found myself in a trench with the platoon snipers, including Private Deerans. Some used.338 Magnum rifles, which sounded like cannon. Others were armed with Minimi 5.56s, the army’s lightweight machine gun.

  ‘Look, two over there behind that white mound!’ shouted Sergeant Whordley, who at 39 is in his last year in the army.

  Known as the Buzzard, the sergeant usually controls the helicopters

  in and out of camp, but he had begged to go along on the patrol. ‘In twenty-two years of service I’ve never been in anything like that,’ he said later.

  ‘Got him!’ shouted Private Deerans as a man in a blue shalwar kameez with a short beard popped out from behind the mound and straight into his sights to be hit in the chest. ‘I fucking killed him!’

  The day before I had learnt that a private like him earns just over £1,000 a month, and that the British Army is the only one in the world whose soldiers pay tax while overseas.

  ‘Happy days!’ someone shouted back. I looked at him incredulously. This was the worst day of my life by an awfully long way.

  In the nineteenth century thousands of Englishmen spilt their blood on fields like this and I didn’t want to join them. I thought about John Reid, the former Defence Secretary, glibly saying he hoped to complete the three-year British mission to Helmand without a shot being fired.

  Why were we there? Why had we thought the Afghans would not fight – they defeated the Russians after all. And why did everyone in Kabul and London keep insisting nobody in Helmand really wanted to support the Taliban but were being forced to?

  What if they were wrong? After all, almost everyone in the province now depends on growing poppies. Whatever the British commanders might say, villagers must see the presence of British troops as threatening the opium trade.

  I thought back to a conversation with Captain Alex McKenzie, commander of the FSG, before the patrol began. ‘We’ve never been out to these villages and want to see what kind of reaction we get,’ he had said, adding that, according to US intelligence, there were between six and eight medium-level Taliban commanders in the valley less than a mile to the north.

  ‘If you ask me, what we get is a Taliban attack,’ I had said to Justin.

  ‘How much ammo have you got left?’ Corporal D’Arcy called to his snipers. Were we running out? And where was the promised air support? What about Britain’s new Apache helicopters that we had all heard so much about?

  ‘Targets at ten o’clock! Targets at ten o’clock!’ shouted someone.

  ‘No, don’t shoot, they’re civvies!’ yelled Corporal D’Arcy.

  ‘How can we fucking tell?’ screamed someone else.

  The firing had been going on for almost two hours and I was finding it harder and harder to run. I had thrown off everything, even dropping my notebook – something I have never done in nineteen years as a foreign reporter – and, less wisely in Helmand’s infernal
heat, my water bottle.

  I was gasping from thirst. Leigh, the military policeman, saw my plight, thrusting the straw from his camel pack into my mouth and urging ‘Drink!’ before pushing me to run again. My helmet was almost falling off because of the broken strap I had never got round to fixing.

  I have been in some hairy situations, not least in Afghanistan, a country that I love, where at the age of 22 I was trapped in trenches by Russian tanks with a group of mujahideen. But this was the first time in my life that I thought I would not survive. Worse, I looked at the taut faces around me and could see the soldiers thought that too.

  I thought about all the things left undone in my life, words left unsaid or unwritten, but most of all, I thought about my little boy’s big blue eyes and curly hair, and I just wanted it to stop.

  We were under relentless fire from AK-47s, RPGs, mortars and a Dushka, a Russian-made heavy machine gun.

  Justin – separated in a trench with a group led by Major Blair – was under attack from all sides, but witnessed the turning of the battle.

  ‘We were ordered out of the ditch and, under heavy covering fire, scrambled up the sides. Breaking towards the river, we came under fire again. This time there was a massive burst of fire from the FSG on the ridge directed at the Taliban.’

  The paras had managed to regroup impressively. The men of the FSG beat off their own ambushers, drove their vehicles to the south where they were more secure and then moved back along the ridge to our aid – with devastating effect.

  ‘We could see the group of ten to fifteen men who engaged us moving towards the houses down below,’ said Captain McKenzie later, ‘so we let rip with the four 50-cal heavy guns. The force of the blast from those guns is so powerful it can rip off your arm without even hitting you. All that was left of those guys was a pink mist.’

  Down below we managed to get away from the fields of trenches and on to open hillside where I felt terribly exposed but the paras were much happier because they could see. ‘Single file with good spaces between! Single file!’ barked Sergeant-Major Bolton. ‘This is not Club Med!’

  By that time it was 8.30 p.m. and the light was fading. Only then came the reassuring rumble of the Apaches, two hours after they had been requested. With those overhead, we reached the vehicles and withdrew.

  The battle was not over. There was only one way back to Camp Price and only one bridge back over the Helmand River. Major Blair was convinced the Taliban would lay an improvised explosive device (IED) or ambush us there. We could not go back.

  Instead we drove south through the desert. At last we had air support. I was in Major Blair’s Land Rover and all the time his radio operator was in touch with the planes overhead.

  On and on we drove through the bumpy sand until the pilots assured us there were no ACMs (anti-coalition militia) within a mile or so and we pulled the vehicles into a herringbone formation, where we would stay for the next few hours.

  We all tumbled out of the vehicles and started talking, pumped up with adrenaline at having survived. Veterans of conflicts all over the world said they had never experienced such a battle, and none of us could believe we had escaped unscathed.

  ‘I’ve never been in anything as intense as that,’ said Major Blair. ‘That was a 360-degree battle.’

  Everyone was stunned at how quickly the Taliban had organised themselves and how coordinated they had been. From the time we had walked into the village to the start of the ambush was less than an hour and they had been undeterred by our array of hardware.

  ‘That’s as bold as it comes,’ said Captain McKenzie, shaking his head in awe. ‘The Taliban are quite ingenious but they’ve probably got twenty-five dead blokes and we’ve got none, and that speaks volumes.’

  Private Deerans said: ‘We don’t tend to think the Taliban can fight as well as us, but they’re fighting for something they really believe in and they have the advantage of local terrain. They’re world class at getting rounds down but fortunately their shooting was crap. Still, it was close enough for me. They had the advantage from the beginning and I don’t know how none of us got shot.’

  Some of the men realised they had forgotten to wear their wedding rings that day. ‘I have my fiancée’s ring on a string and it’s the first time I’ve gone on an operation without it,’ said Sergeant-Major Bolton.

  I looked at my own bare finger, remembering how while checking in for my flight at Heathrow three weeks earlier I had realised the two rings I always wear were in an oyster shell by the side of my bed.

  The big question was whether the villagers were in on the ambush. It seemed clear to me they had directed us straight into it, and there must have been locals fighting for them to organise so quickly.

  ‘Maybe they were coerced by the Taliban,’ said Major Blair. The official British line is that 80 per cent of the population of Helmand are ‘floating voters’ stuck between a rock and a hard place of an evil Taliban and a government in Kabul that does nothing for them. It seemed more likely to me that they feared the British had come to take away their source of income, the poppy.

  While we were discussing this, another burst of gunfire rang out. Surely we were not under attack again? ‘Hush,’ warned the sergeant-major. ‘Everyone still and quiet. It’s not over yet.’

  We still had to get back across the bridge into Gereshk, and we needed air support.

  I lay on the warm sand staring up at the stars that covered the sky. In the distance were flashes I first thought were shooting stars until someone told me it was from the fighting at Sangin.

  I looked at my watch. It was after midnight Afghan time, mid-evening in Britain. I realised that had I been in England I would have been at a summer party on the roof of New Zealand House in Haymarket, central London.

  For the next two hours Camp Bastion kept telling us that ‘all assets’ were tied up in Sangin where the snatch raid on four Taliban commanders had succeeded in getting two of them before descending into a bloody firefight where Harriers, Apaches and A-10s had all been called in. Surely they weren’t going to leave us to go back on our own?

  In between his radio pleas for air support, Captain McKenzie and I discovered we grew up near each other, although I had done so a good ten years before him, and knew the same pubs.

  It was after 1.30 a.m. when we finally got the nod for air support – only to find three of our Snatches had got bogged down in the sand. Amid all the stars we could just see the lights of two American A-10s, antitank aircraft of awesome firepower.

  ‘How long have we got air for?’ asked Major Blair as spades were used to dig the vehicles out.

  ‘Forty more minutes,’ came back the pilot’s American accent. After that they would have to refuel.

  Major Blair checked his watch. It was going to take a good half-hour to get to the bridge and some of the Snatches were still stuck.

  I remembered Corporal Robert Jones, an American Humvee driver I had met, who had expressed horror at how exposed the British vehicles were. He had told me that if any American vehicles got bogged down for more than five minutes in Helmand they abandoned them.

  ‘We just hate going west from Kandahar,’ he said. ‘It’s all IEDs, RPGS, Taliban, al-Qaeda. We call it Hell-land.’

  Eventually the vehicles were pulled out and we were on the road to the bridge. We reached it just before the planes had to refuel.

  ‘Please don’t let there be an IED,’ I prayed.

  ‘Do you want me to give a show of force?’ came the pilot’s American drawl over the radio. ‘Could drop to 5,000 feet and drop some flares.’

  ‘Many thanks,’ replied our controller and we laughed in relief at his very British reply as we crossed the bridge safely, white flares dropping all around.

  It was first light as we drove into Camp Price to be met by those who had been left behind, half anxious and half envious. It was clear there was now a big question mark over the British hearts-and-minds operation.

  ‘I’m going to have to re
view our approach to villages,’ said Major Blair. ‘We’re going to have to go in with far more security. It’s very annoying to think we were sitting there offering things and having a laugh and a joke with villagers who knew that five minutes later we’d be attacked.’

  More and more senior military officers are saying it has been an enormous mistake for British troops to move out of the main urban centres of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk and into outlying areas.

  They blame the Americans – and some over-enthusiastic British generals – for dragging British forces into Operation Mountain Thrust, a large offensive against the Taliban in which some 500 people have died across the south, creating much local resentment.

  What some have described as ‘military and developmental anarchy’ may change when Lieutenant General David Richards, NATO commander in Afghanistan, takes control of the Helmand operation at the end of this month.

  On the military front, the general wants more fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and the British government is seeking more military support from its European allies. But General Richards has also been bashing heads together on the need to make some improvements in the lives of the Afghans.

  Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan still remains bottom of the list for almost every significant indicator from infant mortality to lack of access to water or electricity. ‘We’ve got to stop talking and start doing,’ he said last week. ‘Otherwise we’re in danger of losing this.’

  Camp commanders are frustrated that despite being in place for two months they are yet to offer any help to the local community. ‘Our credibility is at stake here,’ said Major Blair. ‘After a while people are going to start saying you came and promised to help us but what have you actually done?’

  The main problem is that the British mission is led by a so-called triumvirate of military, Foreign Office and Department for International Development (DFID). The latter is insisting any development must come through its auspices and NGOs rather than the military. Thus Major Blair has been prevented from renovating Gereshk hospital or repairing water pumps. Yet most aid agencies are terrified of going south of Kabul, let alone to Helmand.