by Richard Kemp
With bullets bouncing around his feet, Barke just made it to the outhouse as Barker dragged McLaughlan in through the door. Steph Martin shoved the door closed, but this gave them no more protection as bullets just punched hole after hole in the rusty metal sheet. Shafts of light beamed in where bullets had pierced the door, turning it into a colander. More bullets, lots of bullets, were cracking into the straw and mud roof.
Pressed against the side of the dark hut, only about 5 metres by 5 metres and crowded with the half dozen soldiers taking refuge, Barke went down on one knee and drew breath. He shook his head, wondering how he had survived out there. He also wondered how long his luck would last in here.
He looked over at McLaughlan. Ronnie Barker was on his knees, bent sweating and panting over the badly wounded medic. Barke shuffled across to help. The two soldiers pulled off McLaughlan’s medical bergen and laid him flat on the filthy dirt floor. McLaughlan gasped and groaned. His eyes rolled.
Barker said, ‘Mac, Mac, you’re going to be OK, mate, you’re going to be OK.’
He thought, I’m not sure he is going to be OK, he looks very bad, very bad. But I’ve got to try and save him. Pat him down, pat him down, find out what his wounds are. Where did the bullet go? He quickly figured out that it had entered McLaughlan through the stomach. He couldn’t find the exit wound and thought the bullet could still be in him.
He tore up McLaughlan’s shirt, ripped open a green first field dressing from his team medic’s pack and applied pressure to the entry wound.
Barker was dripping sweat with his exertions in the oppressive heat. ‘Rich, help me lift him up so we can get this round him and tie it off.’
When Barke leant over to pull the field dressing strap under McLaughlan’s back, his 51mm mortar, a heavy, metre-long metal tube, swung off his shoulder towards the medic’s head. He doesn’t need me to smash his face in on top of all his other problems, thought Barke, as he just managed to stop it hitting. He reached round, unslung the mortar and placed it down on the ground.
As the two soldiers worked on McLaughlan, Sergeant Woodrow called urgently into his radio mike, trying to raise Company Sergeant Major Tim Newton, ‘Three Three Alpha, Three Three Alpha, this is Three Zero Charlie, Three Zero Charlie. I have one times T One casualty at my location, compound number five three one. I need immediate CASEVAC. Immediate. Over.’
No reply, but he heard the mush of a carrier wave through his earpiece. Could this be Newton acknowledging, his voice unworkable to Woodrow. ‘Hello, Three Three Alpha, Three Three Alpha, acknowledge my last. One times T One casualty, over.’
More mush. Had to be Newton.
‘Now, how the hell are we going to get Mac out of here?’ he said to Corporal Martin. There’s no way out the front of this building, not with that fire coming down. We’ve got to get him out quickly, as soon as he’s ready to be moved.’ He glanced down at McLaughlan, pale-faced and writhing in agony, and said in a whisper, almost to himself, ‘Otherwise he’s going to die.’
It was obvious there was no other way out – just into the hail of bullets streaming up from the canal.
‘Steph, get your gunners to intensify their fire, I’ll try and get on to 5 Platoon to rapid fire across the canal. Maybe if we hit them hard enough we can get a lull and rush Mac out the front. It’s the only thing we can do.’
As Martin called the gunners on his PRR, Woodrow hit his pressel switch again, ‘One Zero Alpha, One Zero Alpha, Three Zero Charlie, Three Zero Charlie. I have to get a T One casualty out of my compound. You must rapid fire into all enemy positions, rapid fire to cover my movement. Over.’
Nothing. Nothing at all. Like Seal-Coon and Aston, he cursed the radios that never worked when you really needed them to.
Woodrow tried again and again to get through to 5 Platoon. Still nothing.
Sapper Ronald Fong, a wiry young half-Fijian, half-Chinese engineer, interrupted him. ‘Sarge, I will breach this wall.’ He gestured towards the back wall of the building.
‘Don’t be an idiot – set off a bar-mine in here and you’ll kill us all,’ retorted Woodrow, impatient and frustrated at his failure to get anyone on the radio. Or to have any other solution.
‘No, Sarge, with this.’ He held up a 1.5-metre hooligan tool. A standard item of Royal Engineer equipment, the hooligan tool is a heavy bar with a jemmy-like fork at one end, and a blade and spike at the other.
‘Fong, I’ve seen thirty-millimetre shells hit these compound walls and just make small scabs. You’ll never get through with that.’
‘I can try, Sarge,’ replied Fong confidently.
‘Go for it, go for it. It’s worth a shot. Do it,’ said Woodrow, thinking, He won’t do it. Never. But anything, anything’s worth a try. Or Mac will die for sure.
The young sapper swung his hooligan tool into the mud wall. He paused to see what effect he had had. Barely a dent. With all his might, he heaved it again and again into the unyielding rock-like structure. Just standing there he had already been sweating. After three or four tremendous blows his whole body was dripping.
After several minutes, he had managed to make a small indentation. The effort was taking it out of him. He was wearing his helmet, Osprey body armour and daysack. His clothes were soaked through. He was breathing hard, his lungs hurt, and his heart was pounding. His hands were blistered and bleeding. He didn’t care. He was determined to hammer his way through that wall so the medic could get out – even if his hands dropped off in the process.
After a few more minutes, one of the other engineers grabbed the tool from Fong and started swinging it against the wall. But the work was exhausting, and the soldier was flagging in a couple of minutes. Fong took over again, swinging into the rock-hard mud wall with every ounce of strength his body could muster. There didn’t seem to be much hope he would ever get through – certainly not in time to save MacLaughlin, who was fading fast. But he had to try.
Barker at last stemmed the bleeding from MacLaughlin’s abdomen, and he and Barke had managed to secure the field dressing round his body without causing him too much additional pain or damage. What next? thought Barker, then he said to Barke, ‘OK, Rich, I’m going to give him morphine.’
As he reached into McLaughlan’s right-hand map pocket for the morphine autoject, the medic moaned in a low voice, ‘No, no morphine, not yet.’
‘What? why not?’
‘I need a drip. You need to put a drip in me.’ He paused. ‘I’m drifting off.’
Barker felt helpless. ‘I don’t know how, we’ve not been trained.’
In agony, Corporal McLaughlan groaned. ‘I’ll talk you through it,’ he said in a weak voice, ‘then you can give me morphine.’
Barke started to dig around in the medical Bergen to find the right kit.
Following McLaughlan’s halting and pained instructions, Barker put an elasticated strap round his left arm, above the elbow.
‘Get it tight,’ said McLaughlan, ‘then I need to… to move my fingers… tell me when tight.’
He managed to move his fingers then he continued, gasping with the pain, ‘Start tapping… my forearm… get the veins up… then get the… needle… in. You need to… to see a flashback… a flashback… blood coming back up… up the needle.’
Barker tried twice to get the cannula into the vein but couldn’t manage it. He missed altogether the first time and passed the needle straight through the vein on the second attempt.
‘You’ve missed… again… keep trying… got to… got to get it in.’
‘Here, let me have a go,’ said Barke, taking the cannula.
He also missed the vein, then tried again. The fourth attempt.
‘That’s it… that’s in…’
As time passed the adrenalin had worn off, and, without morphine, McLaughlan was in agony. With a massive effort of will and desperation, he forced out, ‘Now… get the drip… on to… the cannula… and… turn on.’
As Barke held up the drip, with fluid flowing through
the needle and into McLaughlan’s arm, the medic, still in excruciating pain, seemed visibly relieved. Until this had been done he expected to die. Even now he knew it would be touch and go.
Martin, keeping a close eye on what was happening outside, glanced at Barker and Barke. He thought, They are awesome, how can they stay so calm dealing with that?
As the two soldiers worked to save the medic’s life, Fong noticed the smallest crack of light glimmering through the wall. Although close to collapse, he swung the hooligan tool with even greater fury. Nothing was going to stop him now. There was still a lot of work to be done, but he was going to get through that wall.
At the other end of the village, Company Sergeant Major Newton was receiving a call from Aston, very faint, crackling, but just workable. As his radio had drifted in and out, Aston, in the compound behind Woodrow, picked up his message calling for CASEVAC. It was Aston’s carrier wave, attempting to acknowledge, that Woodrow had heard. ‘Hello, Three Three Alpha, this is Zero Alpha. Three Zero Charlie’s got a T One casualty. Get down here and evacuate.’
‘Roger, moving now, out.’
Newton raced forward in his Viking, as fast as he could, and was amazed at the skill with which the marine driver flung the careering vehicle through the narrow, twisting alleyways between Heyderabad’s network of compounds.
Past the graveyard, the Viking swung round a corner and into the open, grinding to a halt as they were hit by a wall of lead and tracer streaking up from the hedgerow across the canal to their front. As Newton tried to work out what to do next, Sergeant Moxham, the marine gunner above him, immediately returned fire, sending a continuous blast of GPMG bullets back into the hedgerow.
Aston’s voice crackled through his headset, ‘Reverse, reverse, the casualty is behind you, reverse up twenty metres.’
Newton’s driver backed the Viking up and stopped next to a soldier kneeling in a fire position. Against the odds, Fong had breached the wall and then crawled through to provide cover on the other side. Smashing through the wall had nearly killed him, and, exhausted as he was, Fong was going to protect his breach. Newton sent the company doctor, Major Andrew Tredget, head first through the jagged hole, which was only just big enough to take a man.
Inside, Tredget looked at the crumpled, white-faced figure lying on the floor and yelled at Barker, who was crouched over him, ‘Where’s the company medic, where’s the medic, I need to know what he’s done.’
Barker said, ‘He is the medic. Mac the medic. I’m the team medic. I’ve put an FFD on him and got a drip in. I was just about to give him morphine.’
Tredget dropped to his knees, pulled out an autoject and punched it into McLaughlan’s thigh.
Under Tredget’s supervision they manhandled McLaughlan on to a field stretcher, and carefully fed him through Fong’s hole in the wall and into the waiting Viking. The doc and Barker got in with him, and the Viking screamed back up through the village towards the emergency HLS. By now, the MERT Chinook was inbound.
From the doorway, Martin called his gunners back up. As they crawled towards him, he emptied mag after mag towards the Taliban positions.
Private Lewis had sustained a shrapnel wound to his leg while forward but had stayed in position putting down fire on the enemy. Gillmore, who had also been wounded forward with Parker’s section, was carried back up the hill by Private McLure. Martin and Woodrow put the two into a second Viking that had arrived outside their compound and dispatched them to the HLS.
10
Down on the canal, with Foster crawling back to the ditch to sort out his stoppage, Parker was on his own. Just as he was thinking, I need Thrumble up here with his GPMG, he looked across and there was Thrumble. GPMG and 1,000 rounds of 7.62mm link on his back, he was crawling forward across the exposed field. And he was motoring, despite the tremendous weight he was carrying. Parker had never, in any circumstances, seen any soldier crawl so fast.
No one had ordered Thrumble forward in the teeth of enemy fire. But he knew that, in contact, Parker always wanted the guns with him, out in front. He could have moved along the ditch and come up further to the right. That would have been safer. But also slower, and Thrumble knew Parker would need him there fast. So he crawled forward, under fire and in line of sight to the enemy.
When Thrumble got up to him, Parker saw, as always, a big, beaming smile. Nothing fazed Thrumble, not even the breathtaking rate of enemy fire that was still pouring in all round them, throwing up dirt and fragments of rock. Parker swore that the height of the bank in front of him was reducing visibly under the weight of fire cutting into it.
The minute Thrumble got to the bank he pushed his gun up and started blazing away at the enemy firing points across the canal.
Minutes later Lee arrived with his UGL and Booth with his LMG. Parker was surprised to see Taff, an engineer corporal attached to the section. There was no specific role for engineers here, but this man knew Parker could use all the firepower he could get and came forward. And engineers, like all soldiers, have to be ready to act as infantry when the chips are down.
They had all passed by Foster, who was heading in the opposite direction screaming for rods to clear his stoppage. Before long he had found a set, forced the expanded cartridge case from the breach of his rifle and was firing again.
As soon as they had dragged Veal’s men into the safety of the ditch, Lance Corporals Teddy Ruecker and J. C. Carter, the sniper team, started moving forward, along the ditch. As they went, branches, leaves and twigs were falling on them, cut down from the trees by the torrent of machine-gun fire from across the canal.
Ruecker crawled along the side of the canal towards the bank where Parker was under fire. When he got into position he called out, ‘Stu, where are they? Where are the bastards?’
Parker said, ‘Reference compound, left-hand corner of that compound.
Ruecker crawled along behind the bank, keeping very low, until he got to the end. Slowly, carefully, he inched forward to a point where he could just about see round the bank, towards the compound. He eased the muzzle of his sniper rifle out through the grass, desperate to avoid any sharp movement that could draw attention to his position.
Rubbish fire position, he thought. His body was bent half round the end of the bank, his rifle resting on a small lump of earth. This situation was tough for a sniper – trying to move into position in the face of an enemy that was observing and firing on to the area. And relatively close to the enemy. Far better to get in position before the enemy arrived, and to be as far away as possible, to take maximum advantage of the range and accuracy of your weapon. But you couldn’t always have the situation that suited you.
Looking intently through his sniper scope, all he could see was dust and smoke where a machine-gun was firing. He couldn’t actually see the weapon or the firer. He figured out the distance to the target area: 400 metres. He clicked in the correct range setting on his sight. Then he saw a face. Momentarily one of the enemy fighters had stuck his head up to observe.
This was the first Taliban Ruecker had seen. He had been near to the enemy as a WMIK commander on Silicon and had fired at them. But he hadn’t actually seen any. The bristles on the back of his neck stood up as he felt a surge of adrenalin.
He carefully moved the cross hairs of his sniper scope on to the man’s head. As his training had taught him, he blanked out the noise of the bullets flying all round him, and the RPG missiles exploding near by. He slowed his breathing. He took up the first pressure on the trigger, then, a split second after he hit the second pressure, he saw the top of the fighter’s head peel apart, exploding in a blur of red mist.
Thrumble, to the right, shouted out, ‘Well done, mate, well done.’
For a brief moment the incoming fire slowed down, with one of the Taliban machine-gunners killed. Fire from Parker’s men increased as they were able to push further up the bank to engage the enemy positions. But then the Taliban opened up from further left and right. Bullets were landing m
uch closer now, coming in behind the bank at an angle.
Steve Veal, the Section 2IC, immediately picked up on these new fire positions, splitting the men who remained back in the ditch with him, and directing them to return fire to the left and right.
Ruecker continued scanning through his scope. He identified two Taliban fighters in a dip in one of the the compound walls, both firing AK47s. Just head and shoulders. About a metre apart. Range 400 metres. He engaged the man on the right. Hit him. He dropped out of sight. Ruecker switched to the fighter on the left. Through the scope he saw the man looking down at his dead comrade. Shocked, the fighter failed to get down. The man looked from his comrade towards the bank where Ruecker lay. Ruecker saw on his face a flash of realization that he was about to die. He fired. The man dropped.
Ruecker was exhilarated. He had just killed three men who had been trying to kill him and his mates. He had converted theory into practice. All those long hours studying and enduring the gruelling regime of the sniper course had paid off. What he had been taught did work. For a sniper 400 metres was not a long distance, and he thought that it would have been difficult to miss at that range with the superbly accurate .338 long-range rifle. But the targets had all been small, just head and shoulders at best. Ruecker was ever critical of himself, but he thought this time he had done well enough.
Parker realized that Corporal Mann’s Guards section on the left were also in an intense firefight. The amount of incoming rounds they were receiving and the rate of their own fire had increased dramatically. With fire coming at his own section from the front as well as left and right, and no end in sight, he knew it was going to be really difficult to extract both sections from this situation.
He needed mortar or artillery fire. He called Corporal Wilsher, the MFC. No answer, nothing. He called the fire support team commander. Nothing. He called Snow up in the fire support group. Again, nothing. He managed to get through to Seal-Coon, a short distance to his rear, who was also desperately trying to reach someone on the net so he could bring in fire support.