Attack State Red

by Richard Kemp

  As the light began to fail, Biddick decided to move back up the cliff face to the Vikings. Before doing so, he tried one last thing. He thought that, rather than making a conscious decision not to attack, it was more likely that the Taliban had not been alert enough to see the company move into their heartland. He would give them another chance. Positioning the company for an ambush, he ordered his engineers to detonate a bar-mine to attract the enemy’s attention. Still no response.

  Then, moving away from the Green Zone along the track back towards the canal, 2 Platoon soldier Private Tommy Brace, covering the rear of his section, saw an armed man run between two buildings. Brace fired but missed the fast-moving fighter, and the man ran off behind one of the compounds the company had just searched.

  2 Platoon followed up, racing to capture or kill him, but the man wasn’t to be found.

  They headed back towards the canal and the cliffs beyond and they heard a series of loud whooshes overhead followed by series of deafening explosions as a volley of eight 107mm rockets impacted in the desert several hundred metres to the rear of the overwatching Scimitars.

  Colour Sergeant Faupel, with the fire support group, saw a mass of white smoke 2 kilometres away to the south-east, beyond the Green Zone – the firing point for the rockets. He called an artillery fire mission on to the position, and the 105mm gun group from Tombs’s Troop Royal Artillery, positioned back near the original FUP for the start of Op Silicon, fired a barrage of high-explosive shells. Faupel heard the crump-crump-crump of the distant explosions and saw the flashes and clouds of black smoke and dust rising up into the clear sky as the artillery pounded the Taliban launch site.

  As the artillery fire mission went in, Captain Wilde’s gunner, Corporal Paul Kearney, spotted a group of five Taliban fighters setting up an 82mm mortar behind a line of trees in a field 1,800 metres away. Wilde’s Scimitar, and two others in the line, blasted the Taliban team with round after round of the lethally accurate 30mm HE shells, killing all five and smashing the mortar to pieces.

  Immediately, machine-gun, rifle and RPG fire, from a woodline 100 metres to the east, slammed in around the Scimitars. While Biddick was worrying whether or not the Taliban had identified the company’s sortie into the Green Zone, they had evidently been feverishly alerting each other to the British troops’ presence and fighters had been getting together their weaponry and moving fast into attack positions. In twilight, the Scimitar crews were able to use their thermal BGTI sights to track the tracer rounds back to the precise firing positions, with an accuracy that is not possible using the human eye.

  On the radio, Wilde gave quick fire orders, dividing up the dispersed Taliban positions between the four Scimitars, and all engaged simultaneously with their L37 machine-guns, punching long bursts of ball and tracer into the enemy firing points. Over the next ten minutes contacts continued, as Taliban fighters moved from position to position, firing at the Scimitars. Wilde estimated that his men killed six or seven of the enemy.

  It was getting dark now, but that made no difference to the Scimitar crews’ ability to identify and bring fire down on the fighters. When the Taliban firing stopped, the recce vehicles maintained observation over the entire area as A Company continued to patrol back to their Vikings, several hundred metres into the desert.

  Fifteen minutes later it was pitch black. A few minutes later, through their BGTI sights, the Scimitar crews identified a group of seven armed men moving out from a compound near the place where several Taliban fighters had been killed with 30mm while setting up their mortar nearly 2 kilometres away. Clearly the enemy had no comprehension of the phenomenal night surveillance and target acquisition capabilities of Wilde’s CVRTs. As the fighters moved through the woods, Wilde’s Scimitars opened fire again with 30mm HE, killing them all.

  While his gunners engaged the seven fighters, Wilde had been carefully tracking their movement. They had come from a compound 100 metres to the left of the mortar position. Wilde looked at his map and at the notes he had taken from Captain Coleman’s intelligence briefing. It all added up. This must be the Taliban HQ they had been tasked to identify.

  Wilde called Ormiston, gave him the grid reference and target description of the headquarters and asked him to attack the building with Javelin. Using the night-time capability of the Javelin CLU, FSG Delta fired two missiles in top attack mode, blasting high-explosives into the headquarters that the MR2 surveillance aircraft had identified. The Scimitars and the FSG remained in the area for a while, monitoring the building, ready to fire again, but there was no further sign of enemy movement anywhere in the area.

  20

  By Carver’s rigorous and conservative Battle Damage Assessment, or BDA, the Royal Anglian Battle Group killed ninety-five Taliban during the first day of Op Silicon alone. These were confirmed dead – the real figure was probably much higher. B Company alone had fired more than 40,000 rounds of 7.62 mm machine-gun ammunition just on that day.

  But the significance of Operation Silicon went far deeper than simply death and destruction. During a continuous twelve-hour onslaught from the ground and the air, the Taliban had been battered by infantry, artillery, engineers, attack helicopters and fixed-wing ground attack fighters. For the first time they came to realize that they could no longer operate with impunity from their Green Zone strongholds. Worse still for the Taliban, Silicon enabled the construction of three permanent patrol bases dominating the Green Zone north east of Gereshk. The bases were completed by the Royal Engineers in an amazing forty-eight hours after the end of Silicon Day 1. They were occupied straight away by the Afghan National Army with their OMLT advisers from the Grenadier Guards, and the Royal Anglians handed over reactive security in the area to The 1st Battalion The Worcestershire and Sherwood Forester Regiment, which had just arrived in theatre to form Battle Group Centre.

  Task Force Helmand intelligence reports indicated that the Taliban remnants from Deh Adan Khan and Habibollah Kalay fled north to Musa Qalah to lick their wounds. Brigadier Lorimer’s primary intention – to stop mortar and rocket attacks against Gereshk – had been achieved. It was a significant step in convincing the population that NATO meant business in Helmand, and word of this spread the length of the Helmand River valley. Biddick and A Company had been blooded just over a week earlier, on Friday 13 April. But Operation Silicon was the Royal Anglian Battle Group’s baptism of fire. Valuable lessons were learnt by all of the commanders and troops about themselves, the enemy and the country they were operating in.

  Despite constant smallarms, machine-gun, rocket and mortar fire by a tenacious, battle-hardened and well-armed enemy, no member of the Royal Anglian Battle Group was killed during Operation Silicon. The only injury was B Company’s Private Sheppard, who suffered a shrapnel wound from an RPG missile, was patched up and then just cracked on with the fighting.

  The Raid: 3–4 May 2007

  1

  When the Royal Anglians arrived in Helmand, C (Essex) Company deployed straight to the Kajaki area, the most northerly British location in Helmand. Their role was to protect from the Taliban the strategically vital hydroelectric power dam. The dam had the potential to provide enough electricity to meet most of the needs of the population of both Helmand and Kandahar Provinces. It also provided irrigation for some 260,000 hectares of otherwise arid land. Ninety-eight metres high and 270 metres long, the dam was built in 1953. In the 1970s two electricity turbines were provided by the US overseas aid organization USAID. When C Company arrived they were briefed on an intention to bring in and install a third turbine, which could not happen until the security situation was sufficiently under control at Kajaki and along the route in.

  In early April, just before C Company’s arrival, a group of Chinese engineers was flown in to rebuild one of the turbines, but within twelve hours of being dropped off were evacuated, terrified by a salvo of Taliban rockets. C Company’s main mission was to hold the Taliban back from the dam, to prevent further interference with the vital recon
struction work, and to force further back the Taliban positions, known as the ‘Forward Line of Enemy Troops’ or FLET.

  Within weeks of arriving at Kajaki, the company had pushed back the FLET to the north of the dam by 4 kilometres, and to the south by 2 kilometres. A supplementary element of C Company’s mission in Kajaki was to tie down fighters in the area, to prevent them heading south to reinforce Taliban groups intent on attacking Sangin and Gereshk.

  C Company commander was Major Phil Messenger. His father had been an officer in the Royal Pioneer Corps, having risen through the ranks, and he himself had attended the Duke of York’s Royal Military School in Dover. He had considerable operational experience,

  Map 4. The Raid

  having completed tours in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone and Iraq. During the battalion’s previous Afghanistan tour, Messenger had been 2IC of the company he now commanded. He had an easy, relaxed leadership style when in the base, but on operations was a tough, aggressive and very determined commander with a short fuze, whose eagerness to close with the enemy earned him the nickname ‘Angry Phil’.

  The company was based beside the dam in Combat Outpost (COP) Zeebrugge. The base was constructed of sturdy, modern stone buildings surrounded by a barbed wire and wall perimeter. When not on patrol or guard duty, the men could swim in the icy dark-blue water of the lake which lay at the bottom of steep-sided mountains.

  COP Zeebrugge had a murky history. Like many buildings in strategic outposts across Afghanistan, it had once been defended by a company of Russian conscripts. The troops avoided one particular stone building, just outside the wire. It had an eerie atmosphere. Its walls were bomb- and bullet-scarred, a reminder of a hand-to-hand fight to the death as Afghan mujahideen slaughtered Russian soldiers who had been abandoned by their officers.

  A ridge-line behind Zeebrugge was permanently manned by one of C Company’s platoons, dug into a network of Russian-built trench systems that overlooked the Helmand River, the base and a vast plain dotted with largely deserted villages and criss-crossed by irrigation ditches and deep wadis. Each platoon spent ten days at a time on the ridge, known as ‘The Peaks’, manning observation posts intended to protect the base and provide surveillance, overwatch and fire support to the company’s patrols. The OPs bristled with machine-guns, Javelin missiles, radar, thermal imagers, sniper scopes and powerful binoculars.

  Behind the ridge-line to the south was a vast open area of golden dunes and emptiness. Despite its beauty there was another chilling reminder of the hidden killers that lay all over Afghanistan. The dunes were a minefield, sown with anti-personnel devices by the Russians in the 1980s. Remnants of an incident during the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment’s tour at Kajaki still lay in the sand and could be picked out from the hill with a pair of binos. It was here in September 2006 that three paratroopers were killed in the minefield, and pieces of their equipment still lay there untouched.

  2

  Dawn was about to break on 3 May, and a few feet behind him Private Matt Woollard could make out the crouched figure of his best mate, Private Steve Walker. They had first met in Southend recruiting office aged sixteen, went through basic training together and then joined the battalion just months before the tour.

  ‘Reckon you’ll be able to hack the tab back in, mate?’ hissed Woollard.

  ‘It’s you that’s struggling, Matt, with your dead leg.’

  On a messy night out in Southend just after his eighteenth, Woollard had jumped off a stage and broken his right ankle. Under intensive physio he missed the battalion’s pre-training in Kenya. But he worked hard to get back on the road and was given the green light to deploy just before the company left for Helmand.

  ‘Well I can still beat you on a tab, even with a broken ankle.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Anyway the birds aren’t interested in who can tab fastest. It’s looks that count in this game.’

  ‘Piss off. There aren’t any birds here, not even feathered ones. Anyway, if anyone’s got looks it’s me. Everyone knows I’m a pretty boy. I have to fight the women off.’

  Despite his tender years, Woollard did have a reputation as something of a ladies’ man in his home town of Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex. Or so he told everyone. He spent most of his school days chasing the girls. That and sport. He was a good sports player, excelling at tennis, badminton and squash. But football was his first love, maybe more than the ladies. He was a good player, and a fervent, almost fanatical, West Ham supporter.

  And Walker knew how to wind his mate up. ‘Matt, the Hammers are struggling again this season, aren’t they?’

  A third voice whispered through the gloom, this time with a strong Norfolk twang. ‘All right, ladies, shut up both of you. Haven’t you heard of battle discipline?’

  This was Lance Corporal Matt Boyle, the company medic. A veteran compared to most of C Company’s young soldiers, Boyle had been in the battalion for fourteen years. Regimental red and yellow blood coursed through his veins. His grandfather had been a Royal Norfolk and his great grandfather had died of wounds he sustained serving on the Somme with the Norfolks. Boyle was as fanatical about the Army as Woollard was about West Ham. As a boy he had been both an Army Cadet and an Air Cadet at the same time, so he could go to Cadets four nights a week. As soon as he left school he did a uniformed services course in King’s Lynn and entered basic training at Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire the minute he was old enough. Since joining the battalion he had done many jobs, including rifleman, anti-tank operator, equipment repairer – even regimental tailor. For the last two years, since the battalion started preparing for its Iraq tour, he had been a medic. This was a role he had quickly grown into, enjoyed and was good at.

  ‘If you two boys don’t keep quiet I’ll start telling you war stories.’

  As Boyle spoke, the soldiers were suddenly lit up by a blinding flash. A split second later the ground shook from a massive explosion just behind them.

  ‘OK, lads, that’s the engineers done,’ called Sergeant Matt Waters. ‘Get ready to move.’

  The Taliban had been using an old Russian trench system on Nipple Hill as cover to direct rocket and mortar fire against C Company’s base and observation posts. Major Phil Messenger had decided to destroy the trenches to open up the ground so that his surveillance systems could get better coverage of the area. During the night the company had patrolled out, using the wadi beds as cover, and provided security while the engineers rigged the trenches with bar-mines.

  Woollard’s platoon had recently finished their first stint up on the peaks. Walking between the crouching soldiers, Messenger joked, ‘Come on 11 Platoon, you’re not up in the OPs any more, stop being idle. I hope you’re enjoying your first patrol in Afghanistan. Not too much like hard work for you, is it?’

  He looked around, smiling, then, walking back down the line, said, ‘All right, let’s head back to base. Move now.’

  The soldier in front stood up, checked back to make sure Woollard could see he was moving, and began to patrol forward along the M5 wadi back towards Zeebrugge.

  Woollard got to his feet, turned to Walker and said, ‘Come on, then, mate, let’s go. If you think you can make it.’

  He turned back, took a single step and was hurled into the air by a huge blast beneath his feet. He felt his body twisting upwards in slow motion. It seemed like forever before he crashed back on to the ground. He was engulfed in thick black smoke. He felt his heart beating in his throat. His ears were ringing, really, really loud. Through the constant high-pitched screech he could hear himself breathing, also really loud. His eyes were closed and he just didn’t want to open them. He dreaded what he would see.

  Eyes tight shut, instinctively, he started screaming, ‘Woollard, I’m hit, Woollard, I’m hit,’ over and over. His cries pierced the half-light, and every soldier in the company was rocked by his terrible, blood-chilling anguish. He had unbearable pains in his head, under his helmet, and everything was stinging. He tried to move his neck and
his fingers but he found he just couldn’t control any part of his body. His mind went blank. Then he thought, I’ve just died.

  His body was racked with terrible, piercing, stinging pain, and the pain did not leave him for a single moment.

  Ten metres away, the medic Boyle watched Woollard step on the mine. He felt the flash burn into his retina. The ground shook, and a wave of heat hit him. He was immediately deafened. He saw a plume of dust and smoke, and lumps of rubble flying in every direction.

  Covered in dust, Boyle dropped to one knee, shook his head and looked over. His brain told him, That didn’t happen. That didn’t just happen. That wasn’t a mine. It was an incoming mortar round. That missed everybody. No one’s been hurt. Desperate to wipe out what he had just seen, and convert it into something more reasonable, Boyle started shouting, ‘Are there any casualties?’

  The smoke cleared quickly, and Boyle saw Woollard sitting in the bottom of the mine crater. He was twisted backwards over his day sack, entwined around his LSW, which was contorting his arms back upwards. Boyle saw that he was conscious, and despite a loud ringing in his own ears, he heard his low moans.

  Near by, Sergeant Waters was shouting, ‘Go firm, go firm, stop moving, it’s a mine, there may be more.’

  He heard Messenger yelling into his radio, ‘All stations – stop, stop, stop, mines, mines.’

  Boyle looked at Woollard. He thought, Sod stop, stop, stop, Woollard needs me over there – now. A second or two after the blast he was racing to the crater, across ground that was almost certainly concealing more of the deadly high-explosive mines. He knew and he didn’t care. He was a medic and his job was to deal with casualties. Simple as that.