by Richard Kemp
It was getting towards 0900 hours, and the temperature was climbing rapidly. Willan and Garrett were struggling with Rawson. They were moving as fast as they could, dripping sweat and panting hard. ‘Well done, Garrett, mate. Keep it going, you’re doing great,’ said Willan, who could feel for himself how tough it was and was really impressed by Garrett’s determination.
Garrett was a brand new soldier. He had joined only a couple of months earlier, since the battalion had arrived in Helmand. He had come straight from basic training, where his instructor had been a mate of Private Rawson from their own time in training.
The three soldiers continued their terrible ordeal. Every minute it took them to cross the open ground, Willan, Cain and Garrett wondered how they had not been hit and expected it at any moment. They were brothers, welded together in the crucible of Afghan combat. They were prepared to die for each other, and on that morning they very nearly did. And Rawson was their brother too. And they were risking their lives to get his body back home. It never occurred to any one of them for a single moment that they could do anything else. It made absolutely no difference whether he was dead or alive: they were going to get him back.
Farrugia saw Willan, Garrett, Cain and Rawson nearing the compound. Corporal Thomson, a sharpshooter attached from the Royal Regiment of Scotland, and Farrugia raced out into the gunfire and helped drag Rawson the last 30 metres into safety.
12
As Willan was moving Rawson across the open ground, Sergeant Major Taylor and Corporal Ian Peyton, the medic, had made their way, under fire, through a filthy irrigation ditch, into the compound. When he heard there were casualties, without any regard for his own safety, Peyton started to dash across the open, towards the compound. Taylor grabbed him. ‘Hang on a minute, Norm, you’re going to get shot yourself doing that. We need you to treat casualties, not become one. Just wait for a couple of minutes while I get some fifty-one down, then we’ll go round through that ditch under cover of the smoke.’
Peyton crossed to the wounded Snow and removed his field dressing. He cleaned the blood away, then dropped his medical Bergen and took out the kit he needed. The troops were horrified to see Snow stick his tongue through the hole in his cheek.
‘Put it away,’ laughed Peyton and slapped a HemCon pad against Snow’s face. An American product, HemCon was designed specifically to prevent the main cause of death on the battlefield, bleeding. It controls bleeding by becoming extremely sticky when in contact with blood, and its adhesive-like action seals the wound and forms a barrier between an open lesion and dangerous bacteria.
As Peyton finished bandaging Snow, Rawson was brought in. Farrugia stood silently looking at Rawsan, grief all over his face. They were the closest of friends and had been through basic training at Catterick together. Peyton removed Rawson’s helmet. He looked at the horrific wound. There’s obviously nothing I can do for the poor bloke, he thought, but I can give him a bit of dignity, and he carefully put a field dressing over the hole in the back of his head.
While Peyton bandaged Rawson’s head, Taylor started organizing the CASEVAC. Covered by Waters’s 10 Platoon gunners, Watson’s section now came crashing through the compound door, Taliban bullets cracking into the dirt at their feet as they ran across the open ground.
Watson was on fire, smoke pouring from him. He tore off his daysack and webbing and dropped them smouldering on to the ground.
‘What happened to you?’ asked Willan.
Still pouring sweat and breathing hard from his run into the compound, Watson replied, ‘I threw some red phos to cover our extraction, and the grenade bounced off a tree and got me, just as I was about to run! Never was much good at cricket anyway,’ he grinned.
The compound itself was now coming under heavy fire from the Taliban. Farrugia had managed to find only one firing position to shoot back, and his men were taking it in turns going up the steps to fire.
They got Snow on to a stretcher and, dodging bullets, rushed him out of the compound to the irrigation ditch they were going to use for extraction. Realizing how much of a burden he would be to those carrying him, despite his loss of blood and the agony of his face wound, Snow climbed off the stretcher and insisted on walking.
Corporal Nick Townsend, who had himself been wounded by a UGL at Mazdurak in May and had recently returned from hospital in the UK, flung Rawson’s body over his shoulder and carried him down into the ditch. It was tough going. The ditch provided protection from enemy fire through most of its length, but the height of the banks was uneven, and the men had to duck down as they crossed the exposed areas. They were wading through thick, oozing mud, with the stinking ditchwater waist high, and constantly stumbling over tree stumps, branches and roots.
Olivier took Rawson from Townsend and carried his body on for a few hundred metres. Then Watson took over. But as they progressed they realized it was too hard going, so, with one man at each corner, they floated him along the ditch.
As the men of 11 Platoon struggled through the irrigation ditch with Rawson and Snow, Hicks was coordinating the arrival of the MERT team to evacuate the two soldiers. The Chinook couldn’t land at Regay because the risk of getting shot down on landing or take-off was too great.
From his map, Hicks identified a suitable landing site west of the neighbouring village of Begay, a small cluster of compounds near the edge of the Green Zone, 500 metres away. He gave orders for the company to break contact. ‘All stations, this is Zero Alpha, callsign Two Zero is to secure a covered route west out of Regay, exiting at the same point we broke in. Two Zero is also to secure an HLS to the west of Begay for the evacuation of casualties. Three Zero is to provide rear security and break contact with the enemy, if possible no further west than the edge of Regay.’
Sergeant Waters, commanding Two Zero, 10 Platoon, with Corporal Tim Ferrand, his acting platoon sergeant, blasted their way through compound after compound to get a clear and covered route through the village and out the other side, with their sections under fire from the flank most of the way.
Exhausted, soaking wet, bedraggled and gasping for breath, the men of 11 Platoon, carrying Private Rawson, emerged from the irrigation ditch into a compound secured by Corporal Ferrand. Ferrand placed Rawson’s body on to a lightweight stretcher and covered it with another. Corporal Willan, Corporal Farrugia, Lance Corporal Ben Lake and Private Suly Saumi carried the stretcher along the secured route and out of Regay. They left Regay and entered a deep and muddy irrigation ditch, with water waist high, that gave a covered route all the way to Begay.
By the time they reached the open, ploughed field the other side of Begay, the stretcher bearers’ arms felt as if they would drop off. To the rear, there was sporadic gunfire as Corporal Townsend attempted to break contact with the enemy. Looking up, Farrugia saw Waters’s men on a compound roof, in all-round defence, protecting their movement and the landing sight.
Beside one of the compounds, Sergeant Major Taylor said, ‘OK, Corporal Willan, Corporal Farrugia, you guys can leave the stretcher here, go back and rejoin your sections.’
Farrugia knew he would never see Rawson again. His body would be flown to Bastion, then back to England for his funeral. He wanted to see him off the battlefield and on to the safety of the Chinook. The last thing he would ever be able to do for the friend whom he had known since basic training. But he didn’t argue with the sergeant major. He knew he had to get back and sort out his section. He looked down at the stretcher and saw the lifeless shape of Rawson’s body underneath its cover. He crouched down, touched Rawson’s head and whispered, ‘Bye, Nicey mate.’
A few minutes later the air was screaming with the sound of Apaches, prowling overhead, hunting for any sign of the enemy, before the Chinook arrived. Then, in a cloud of dust, the big twin-rotored helicopter swooped to the ground. The IRT soldiers raced off and took up fire positions, and Sergeant Major Taylor, assisted by the wounded Private Snow, carried Rawson up the ramp.
After the helicopter left
, the platoon sergeants moved around their platoons, carrying out head-checks and making sure everyone was OK, getting ready for a swift patrol back into Inkerman.
Sergeant Waters sat on the bank of a narrow irrigation ditch, and Captain Hicks slumped down on the opposite bank. Waters knew Hicks well. The two had served as instructors together at the Infantry Training Centre, Catterick. Hicks was composed, but Waters could see he was upset.
Hicks pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and held it out to Waters. Waters had given up smoking in Kajaki, but he needed one now. As the two men puffed on their cigarettes, Waters said, ‘I really can’t believe what happened. I can’t believe Nicey’s gone. The platoon – even the company – they’re not going to be the same. He was such a big character.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hicks, shaking his head, ‘a brilliant bloke.’
He stared back at Regay for a moment, then flicked his fag butt into the ditch, stood up and said, ‘Let’s head back to Inkerman.’
13
That night, tired after a physically and emotionally draining day, Hicks sat in the dust-coated Inkerman ops room and wrote about Private Tony Rawson for publication on the MOD website. He sifted through the eulogies he had asked for from Rawson’s mates, to be emailed back to Bastion and then transmitted onwards for publication with his own.
Among them was a characteristically brief message from Corporal Farrugia, ‘I’ve known Rawson since day one of training; what a good bloke. You don’t get the name “Nicey” for no reason. You will be missed, mate.’
And jointly by Private Curtis Cumberbatch and Private Scott Garrett, who had struggled across the open ground in Regay with Rawson’s body: ‘Mr Nice Guy: Never let any one of us down even at the hardest of times, a great friend and just a brilliant soldier. Thanks for showing us the ropes when I first got to the Battalion. We felt privileged to be in the same section as you. Missed but never forgotten.’
Hicks, who personally knew Rawson well, then wrote his own piece. ‘Private Rawson epitomized not only the core values of the British Army, but also embodied the spirit of the British Infantry. Selfless, good-natured even in the face of adversity and courageous under fire, he will be sorely missed by all his comrades within C (Essex) Company. His loss will be felt deeply by all those who knew him. All our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time.’
Private Harry McCabe was on night stag in the FSG tower on the roof of the ops room where Hicks continued to work on reports from the day’s battle. McCabe was the Javelin operator who had dragged Lance Corporal Hawkins from his blown-up Pinzgauer a week earlier.
The FSG tower was made up of an outer layer of green sandbags, double thickness and four high. In the middle was a sandbagged sangar, about 10 metres long, topped with a roof of corrugated iron to keep the sun off. In one corner was the FSG command post, with maps and radios. The tower was bristling with weapons: GPMGs, Javelins and a grenade machine-gun. The whole was draped with sand-coloured cam-nets to break up the glare of the sun and provide some concealment against sniper fire.
When he came on duty, McCabe had been briefed to be on the lookout for movement in the area of the Four Archways, a distant two-storey compound. He was told that intelligence showed Farouk, the man believed to be responsible for organizing the Taliban’s return to the area north of Sangin, may have been in and around that building. McCabe had also been reminded of the change to the Rules of Engagement that had just come into force. Until this time, British forces in Helmand had been able to shoot identified Taliban fighters. That did not mean they had to be carrying or using weapons at the time. Now they were only allowed to fire an enemy that were positively identified carrying weapons.
It was 0030 hours and McCabe had been on stag for two hours. There was no movement at all across the vast expanses outside the compound and very little inside. The minutes ticked by slowly. It was stifling hot, and the only sounds were the wild dogs down by the river howling at the bright, eerie moon, whose glare was unbroken by clouds. Sometimes all of the dogs in the valley would start up at once, with their blood-curdling yelping, howling and screeching.
McCabe moved the CLU steadily from left to right, scanning through the whole of his arc, viewing the dim green image that clearly showed the detail of the ground all round the FOB. He tracked slowly past the Four Archways and then jerked back on to the buildings, hundreds of metres away. Was that movement?
Fixed on the compound, he peered intently through the sight. It was! He counted: Two, three, four. He could make out four shadowy figures moving. Is Farouk among them? Is one of them the man who led the ambush that killed Nicey Rawson a few hours ago? Maybe all four were there, firing machine-gun bullets and rockets at the C Company patrol. And maybe one of them dug in the mine that blew me up and killed Hawks.
‘Come over here and look at this,’ he hissed to Drummer Jonathan Cucciniello. McCabe handed the sight to Cucciniello. ‘What do you reckon mate?’
‘Definitely people down there. I can see four people.
‘Any weapons?’
‘Can’t make it out, yeah, one of them has… no, not sure. Can’t really see. What do you reckon, Harry, shall we whack them.’
‘We can’t, can we? The ROE change, remember. I’m going to call Captain Hicks and let him have a look.’
When Hicks got the call he had just finished his reports and emailed them to Bastion and was chatting to Captain Ollie Ormiston, the FSG commander. They were discussing girlfriends back home. Hicks asked Ormiston about Rachel and told him about how he and Nicola were planning to buy a house after the tour ended. Hicks said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute, Ollie,’ then scaled the makeshift ladder cobbled together from steel pickets, and appeared next to McCabe in the tower.
Some commanders might have been irritated to be called out at this time of night, especially after such a hard day’s fighting. But not Hicks. He was always even-tempered, and he knew and understood what men like McCabe and Cucciniello had to go through for hour after hour of mind-numbing, tedious, uneventful sentry duty. He often deprived himself of hours of valuable sleep at night, going round the sangars, chatting to the troops, taking brews round, encouraging them, breaking up the tedium.
Hicks was on the same wavelength as the men, and while they scanned their arcs he could happily chat about football, nightclubs, women and beer – although most found it hard to understand how he could prefer some weird-sounding concoction he called ‘Old Speckled Hen’ over an honest pint of good British Stella.
For the soldier in combat the most important quality in an officer is that he knows how to do his job, and can think and act quickly enough to keep them alive. But a very close second is to care. Officers who look down on their men, treat them as numbers or are just not interested are despised by all. Those who look at them as individuals, who speak to them like human beings and have a genuine care for their welfare, their interests and their concerns are respected and sometimes liked. Hicks was the personification of that type of officer. He revered his soldiers, genuinely enjoyed their company and would do anything for them. In return they loved him and would follow him anywhere.
‘What’s up, lads?’ he said.
‘Have a look through there, sir,’ said McCabe. ‘We’ve PID’d four possible Taliban at the Four Archways.’
Hicks squinted into the CLU. ‘Yeah, seen. Well done for spotting them, McCabe. I would have said fire at them, but because of the ROE change I can’t. No weapons. If you hear any shots from over there, go for it – splat them.’
Twenty minutes later McCabe was relieved in the tower and went down to get some sleep. He was back up again at 0500 hours, and it was all quiet. Even the dogs had packed up their howling for a bit. And there didn’t seem to be any movement at all now at the Four Archways.
14
McCabe’s last stag of the night finished at 0700 hours, and he went back to his camp bed, as Inkerman was rapidly coming alive with soldiers washing and shaving, organizing brews, checking ki
t and getting themselves sorted out for the day’s operations.
Although he was knackered after having spent the whole of the previous day and most of the night on duty, it was too hot to get straight to sleep, so he read a bit more of his sun-bleached, grit-encrusted and dog-eared paperback, Sharpe’s Tiger, a novel centred on the Battle of Seringapatam, in which the 12th of Foot, one of the Royal Anglians’ former regiments, played a major role. Although the tale was set over 200 years ago in Mysore, 2,500 kilometres south-east across the Indian subcontinent, McCabe couldn’t help chuckling about how little life in the Army had changed over the centuries. Sentry duty, get no sleep, fight for hours, eat rubbish food, get everything squared away at the double then wait for hours before you get to go anywhere. Moan about waiting to go in then moan when you’re in. Too hot to sleep, too knackered to do anything else.
Wouldn’t have it any other way, he thought. He chuckled again and nodded off.
After a few hours’ fitful sleep, McCabe was almost thrown off his camp bed by the ground shock and deafened by the ear-piercingly loud explosion as an 82mm mortar bomb slammed into the base. He was showered in dust and the wall next to him shook as a bomb landed on the other side.
It was 1330 hours, and baking hot. All round Inkerman, C Company and FSG soldiers, dressed in T-shirts, shorts and trainers, who seconds earlier had been drinking brews, cleaning weapons, smoking, reading and ragging each other, were hastily throwing on helmets and body armour, grabbing weapons and ammo and dashing to their stand-to positions on the walls.
McCabe pulled on his body armour and helmet, put on his boots without wasting time with the laces, grabbed his rifle and ran out of the cam-net. He looked at the WMIK-mounted .50 cal machine-gun pointing over the wall near by and thought, No, I’ll get up the tower. Probably be more useful on a Javelin. I want to fire one anyway. Maybe this’ll be my chance. More exposed up there, but what the hell. When it’s your turn…