Attack State Red

by Richard Kemp

  The men who had been larking around like boys in the mud and the rain just hours ago were silently pacing across the soggy ground, stooping slightly, and shifting the weight of their daysacks, webbing and weapons. Squinting in the blazing mid-afternoon sun, heads up, alert, looking beyond the poppy fields and the maize, sweat dripping off them. Howes noted with satisfaction that every man was painstakingly covering his allocated arcs, weapon at the ready, poised to open fire at the first sniff of the enemy, knowing that his mates to the left and the right depended for their lives on his alertness and quick response. Some hardened NCOs had called the young private soldiers the PlayStation Generation, but in Helmand they had proved themselves time and time again. Howes was intensely proud of his men and he knew they would be more than equal even to this operation, which promised to be the most physically demanding of all.

  The company continued patrolling for another hour across the cultivated ground, left waterlogged and boggy from the downpour of the previous two nights, troops caked in mud and swearing about how it reminded them of Brecon. They waded and jumped across irrigation channels filled to the brim with brown water.

  A hundred metres ahead there was a group of compounds.

  Always a danger sign, thought Howes.

  Then there was a long, loud blast of fire.

  Automatic tracer arced through the air and straight over the heads of Howes’s point section, leading the way across the open field. Corporal Tom Mason and his men hit the dirt immediately.

  Private Scotty Corless, just behind Mason’s section, fell to the deck and remembered that soldiers’ phrase ‘digging in with your eyelids’ as an RPG whizzed a metre over his head. Corless’s section, under Corporal Paul Kennedy, began hurling a massive weight of machine-gun fire at the treeline ahead of them, where muzzle blasts from the enemy guns were now flashing at an increasing rate.

  Howes yelled into his radio mike, ‘Zero Alpha One Zero Alpha, contact wait out.’

  He saw bullets cutting up the ground all round Corporal Tom Mason and Private Dan Smith, who were well forward, caught in the open.

  The whole platoon went instinctively into their contact drills, on their belt buckles and working their way forward into a baseline to return fire.

  Fearing he was about to start taking serious casualties with so much fire pouring into the lead section, Howes had to suppress the enemy so Corporal Mason could pull his men back into cover. He yelled at his 51mm mortar man, ‘Haldenby – see that tree line, fifty metres? Get some HE down right in the middle of it. Now. Get as many bombs down as you can. Quickly.’

  Under the sustained blaze of fire from both of Howes’s sections, and with Haldenby’s high-explosive mortar bombs blasting into the heart of the enemy, the incoming fire slackened and then stopped altogether. 5 Platoon continued to rake the Taliban positions as Mason and his section crawled back to the gully.

  Howes called Mick Aston on the net. ‘Zero Alpha, this is One Zero Alpha. Reference contact. Engaged from woodline south of my location, fifty metres. Estimate five to six enemy. Am engaging. Over.’

  Aston came straight back, ‘Roger. Get your callsign up on the left flank, get through the compounds, assault and clear the enemy position. Two Zero will provide fire support from current location. They will give you fifty-one smoke cover as you move round. Get it done. Out.’

  There was not a moment to lose. Howes knew Aston intended to shock the Taliban with a lightning assault, to destroy any surviving enemy. He shouted the briefest orders to the section commanders and led the platoon round in cover to a compound on their left. As they moved, Howes heard the continuous hammering of fire into Taliban positions and saw the build-up of smoke as the mortars arced down in front of the enemy, obscuring their view of his platoon.

  Howes and his men cleared through the Taliban position, blasting away with their rifles and Minimis. There were only Taliban dead. The survivors had escaped along carefully planned, concealed getaway routes.

  The platoon found RPG warheads, AK47 assault rifles and full magazines. Howes told his men to pile the weapons up, then called forward an engineer who was attached to the platoon. ‘Destroy them with a bar-mine.’

  At the same moment 5 Platoon came into contact, 6 Platoon were also hit. Captain Broomfield was moving along a street flanked by two high walls, immediately behind Corporal Joel Adlington’s section. Adlington’s point man saw an RPG lying in the street, raised his hand and called, ‘Stop.’

  That second a long burst of PKM machine-gun fire zipped along the wall, and Broomfield and his men dived for cover.

  Howes grabbed Private Oliver Hare and dragged him forward, shouting, ‘Get the GPMG firing down the street – at that compound.’

  Kneeling behind him, Broomfield fired five rounds over his head as Hare opened up with burst after burst.

  Corporal Murphy and Corporal Adlington pushed round the corner and saw eight armed Taliban withdrawing fast along the wall of a compound beyond. Murphy opened up, killing two. The remainder escaped.

  The platoon rapidly cleared the position they had been engaged from. They attacked at red, blasting their way in with a bar-mine, following up with grenades and automatic fire. It was empty: the enemy had got away.

  Private Ross Green had been firing his GPMG in the direction the Taliban had escaped. RPG rockets were being launched from that area towards the platoon, and one exploded close to Green, dazing him.

  Above Broomfield, a tree disintegrated in a rapid series of explosions. It could only be a GMG. Immediately realizing that FSG Delta, still up on the high ground, must have mistaken his position for an enemy firing point, Broomfield called them on the net, yelling into his mike, ‘Check fire! Check fire! You are engaging my callsign!’

  Broomfield led the platoon forward, and they cleared through the area where Murphy had killed two Taliban. They discovered 82mm mortar bombs, plastic explosives and piles of expended PKM ammunition links and spent cases. The two bodies were a middle-aged man and a boy aged about sixteen. Broomfield and Murphy searched them but found nothing of intelligence value.

  Adlington and his section moved forward to another group of compounds. Broomfield followed with his signaller, Private Andrew Archer. On the radio, Broomfield heard Adlington’s voice calling urgently, ‘Boss, drop now!’

  Broomfield and Archer dropped straight to the ground, and immediately Adlington’s section opened up with rifles and Minimis, killing two Taliban they had seen in an alleyway. Had the platoon commander and his signaller remained on their feet they would have been shot by the fighters.

  Adlington and Corporal Jay Owen pushed forward with their sections, through the alleyway, looking for further enemy. They killed two more in a ditch. Searching them, they found weapons and a Taliban propaganda tape.

  The platoon pushed forward, and Broomfield heard his point section firing again. He looked through his binoculars to see what they were firing at. Standing frozen in the middle of a field 200 metres away was a man in a black and grey kurta with a traditional flat Afghan hat and a grey beard. He couldn’t see a weapon.

  Broomfield raced down to his men shouting, ‘STOP – STOP FIRING!’

  The men stopped straight away. A soldier, kneeling in the grass, looked up. ‘What’s the problem, sir? Why have we stopped?’

  ‘He’s not armed.’

  ‘But he’s Taliban.’

  ‘He’s not armed. You can’t shoot him. You don’t know he is Taliban.’

  When the firing finished the man slowly walked away towards a compound.

  Maybe he was Taliban, maybe he wasn’t. Broomfield wondered why someone would be around here in the middle of this battle if they weren’t involved. But he didn’t know and, like all the Royal Anglian officers, he rigidly enforced the rules of engagement.

  ‘Only if they are armed!’ he shouted.

  ‘If you see a weapon then open fire – if not, then remember the rules of engagement.’

  It reminded Broomfield just how tough the
soldiers’ job was out here, often fighting in among the population. They had crashed straight into a Taliban position, taking the enemy by surprise. Had any of his men hesitated for a moment, they could have been killed or allowed the enemy to escape. But they hadn’t hesitated. They had all automatically followed the infantryman’s code – hard, fast and aggressive. Because of that they had hunted down six enemy and killed them as they tried to get away. But even as this pursuit unfolded, with the men still pumped up on adrenalin, they had then encountered an unarmed man, and in this environment, restraint had to be as much second nature as aggression. The red mist had to clear instantly.

  Suddenly it had gone quiet. There was no noise except the heavy breathing of exertion and the click of metal on metal as the soldiers reloaded their magazines and checked their weapons. Some clacked their bottles of water or sucked through a tube attached to their Camelbak water bag.

  Others checked for injuries. Often in the thick of battle the adrenalin and noise would be so intense that a soldier might not realize he was bleeding, and infections set in quickly in this filth and heat – especially as much of the Green Zone became swamp as they advanced nearer the river.

  It had been fifteen minutes of intense fighting. None of the Taliban had survived, and bodies lay in the open. The men from Aston’s Tac HQ searched them. They found cigarettes, a few personal items, some wrappers containing dubious-looking powder and mobile phones. Sometimes mobiles found on Taliban fighters contained stored videos or pictures of beheadings recorded elsewhere in Afghanistan or in north-west Pakistan, where many fighters were trained before coming into Helmand.

  Another 200 metres south of the first battle they found two more Taliban bodies, shattered by heavy fire from the FSG on the hill as they had fled the B Company counter-attack. AK47s lay beside them.

  5

  It was now early evening and the men were shattered. They had only been on the go for two hours, but the heat was searing and the destruction of the Taliban positions had been utterly exhausting. The adrenalin rush that sharpened an infantryman’s senses in combat also drained away huge amounts of his energy.

  Checking his map, Aston worked out that the enemy that escaped from his platoons must have fled to the nearby village of Kshatah Malazi. He pushed the company towards the sparse collection of shabby, decrepit compounds and sent Howes’s 5 Platoon to skirt round the village and cut off any further retreat, while 6 Platoon under Broom-field cleared through the compounds.

  Corporal Owen led his 6 Platoon section along a narrow alleyway between two of the compound walls, rifle in the shoulder, scanning over sights, ready to fire. One hundred metres ahead, a man in dark local dress leant round the corner of the wall, aiming his AK47. Owen levelled his rifle and killed him with three rapid shots. With his section following, he dashed up to the enemy fighter, lying in a pool of his own blood. A second fighter, also armed with an AK47, was running down the alleyway, and they cut him down with a hail of bullets.

  Aston was straight on the radio to Broomfield. ‘Two Zero Alpha, this is Zero Alpha. There may be more. Push your complete callsign right through the village and find them or flush them out. Move now. Out.’

  Following close behind with his Afghan interpreter, Aston questioned three local men, all aged around forty, all friendly. They said there had been twelve Taliban fighters in Kshatah Malazi, and they had now gone to Katowzay, a nearby village. His immediate thought was to take the company straight to Katowzay to deal with them, but he had other orders from the battle group commander. The company was to move to the Helmand River and create a screen. Focusing on likely enemy crossing points, the objective was to identify and kill enemy trying to escape across the river as A Company advanced through the Green Zone from the south.

  Reluctantly Aston got on the company net and gave orders to his platoons, ‘Hello, Charlie Charlie One this is Zero Alpha. Move now to task locations on the river line. You all know where you’re going. Order of march One Zero, my callsign, Two Zero. Report when in position. Out.’

  B Company arrived at the Helmand River in darkness, and the platoons moved into their pre-planned positions, silently setting up their observation posts.

  Aston collocated his Tac HQ with Broomfield’s platoon. Their home for the night was the sand, low in the bushes right beside the river.

  Once they were set up the men gulped water and squeezed their cold boil-in-the-bag rations into their mouths. They took it in turns to keep watch and get some rest. They slept on the open ground within the compounds. Despite the exhaustion of hours spent marching and fighting, few got much sleep in the fetid heat, and they were constantly attacked by midges, fleas and other insects.

  The only noise in the compounds was the whispering as sentries shook their replacements awake, and the occasional snore. Outside the wild dogs howled like wolves in the distance, and there was the constant creaking of crickets, almost deafening in the Green Zone as soon as darkness fell.

  Carver called Aston on his Iridium satellite phone during the night.

  ‘Move your company towards Jusulay to try and push the Taliban south into A Company. So far there hasn’t been much enemy down there.’

  As Carver spoke, Aston was checking the map under the glow of his red head-torch. A slight dog-leg would take them through Katowzay.

  ‘Do you mind which route I take to Jusulay, Colonel?’

  ‘No problem. Whichever way you want. Just get down there.’

  ‘Roger, sir, in that case I’ll swing by Katowzay and have a little look round. I’ve heard some of the enemy we ran into yesterday may have gone there.’

  6

  At 0300 hours Howes and 5 Platoon led the company away from the river, towards Katowzay. It was very dark, with a low moon. As soon as he set off, Howes began to pour sweat. Even in the small hours, without any sun, they were drenched within minutes.

  Approaching from the north, Howes halted his men 1,000 metres short of the village. It was 0500 hours, and the rising sun was sending long shadows across the Green Zone.

  The company moved into a well-concealed defensive formation in a network of irrigation ditches. The men stowed their night observation kit and – glad of a brief respite – slumped down to chew on the hard biscuits from their twenty-four-hour ration packs.

  Half an hour later they were on the move again. Aston had pushed Howes’s platoon to the right and Broomfield’s to the left as they approached the village across open ground. His Tac HQ was in the centre, just to their rear. Aston was thinking how much he would have given for some cover.

  Also sensing the danger presented by the open ground, Howes pushed 5 Platoon even more rapidly than normal into the compounds on the edge of the village. Aston’s Tac was close behind.

  6 Platoon were still 400 metres out, in the open, when a long blast of automatic fire opened up around waist height.

  There was a scream. ‘I’m hit.’

  That was the last thing Broomfield wanted to hear while they were still out in the open.

  A bullet had ripped between Private Luke Watson’s arm and upper ribs, slicing into his bicep and chest. Watson was on the ground, writhing in agony. A medic crawled forward and pressed a field dressing on to the wound.

  As soon as the firing started, the men of 6 Platoon hit the ground then blasted fire back into the enemy-held compounds. Lance Corporal Ashby fired an AT4 anti-tank missile into a compound, and fire from there stopped but continued to pour in from at least two other directions.

  Looking forward to the outskirts of the village, Broomfield saw Howes’s men appear on compound walls and roofs, firing down into the enemy positions.

  Aston turned to his MFC, Lance Corporal Tony Warwick. ‘I want a fire mission on those buildings over there. Figure out the grid and check with me before you engage. Quick as you can.’

  The JTAC, in an observation position 1,000 metres away on the high ground at the edge of the desert, made an immediate call for air support.

  The FST comm
ander, Captain Ridley, was figuring out deconfliction between the mortars and air.

  Seconds later the Taliban positions were being hammered by high-explosive bombs fired by the Royal Anglians’ 81mm mortars. Aston was impressed at the speed with which Warwick had managed to get the fire mission on to the ground, but he wasn’t surprised. Warwick was an outstanding MFC.

  The ground shook, and mud, dust and bits of compound wall flew into the air. With the enemy heads down, Broomfield was able to pull Watson and the rest of the platoon back into cover.

  The mortars continued to pound the enemy positions, and there was a loud blast near by. A Taliban 107mm rocket streaked over their heads and exploded 200 metres in front of Aston’s position. It was followed by three more.

  ‘Harriers on station,’ the JTAC reported.

  Aston agreed the target grids. The JTAC radioed his instructions to the pilots, and in moments every member of the company felt the massive shock waves of two 500-pound bombs, destroying everything in and around the rocket launch points.

  Crouching down, Broomfield moved along the ditch to where Watson was lying. He said to the medic, ‘What’s the score?’

  ‘Not too much bleeding. Looks like the bullet missed any bones, so he’s lucky. But we need to get him CASEVACed.’

  ‘Are you certain about that?’

  ‘Yes, he needs to go back.’

  Watson said, ‘It’s OK, sir, I can keep going, I’m not too bad.’

  Broomfield thought, It’s good that he doesn’t want to take the easy way out. Not surprising because Watson’s a tough lad. But there’s no way I’m going to be influenced by the bravery of a nineteen-year-old soldier pumped full of adrenalin. He may not be too bad now, but he’s taken a high-velocity bullet to the arm. He is very likely to go into shock. And how do I know he won’t get much worse in two hours’ time. We can evacuate him now – it might be a lot tougher then.