by Richard Kemp
The light guns did their brutal job, and within minutes the attack on Inkerman faltered then stopped altogether.
16
Later that afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Carver sent Major Charlie Calder, commander of D Company, to take over at Inkerman until Messenger returned from R and R a week later. D (Cambridgeshire) Company had been split up at the start of the tour, with the Sniper, Anti-Tank, Machine-gun and Mortar Platoons formed into FSGs, allocated to the rifle companies. Recce Platoon usually worked directly for Carver, but its sections were sometimes temporarily grouped to the companies.
Without a company to run, Calder had been working as operational planning officer for the battle group and had been heavily involved in all of the major operations. Aside from the tragic circumstances that brought it about, Calder relished the opportunity to at last spend some time doing what every infantry officer wants to do most – command troops in battle.
Calder was well known to all of the senior men in the company, and many of the junior ranks. Royal Anglian blood coursed through his veins. He had entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1987 and had served with the 1st Battalion since he was commissioned, with breaks only to attend courses and for staff postings. His father, Tony Calder, commanded the 1st Battalion in the 1980s and retired as a brigadier, and his grandfather, Major Johnny Calder, had fought in France in 1944 with the Suffolk Regiment, which later became part of the Royal Anglian Regiment.
With extensive operational experience in Iraq, Northern Ireland and the Balkans, Calder was a calm, level-headed and measured officer, and exactly the man the troops now needed at the helm to restore confidence and balance after the battering C Company had taken over the last couple of days.
When Inkerman was attacked Calder had been at Sangin DC, overseeing the battle group’s reconstruction projects and liaising with the district governor, the ANA and the Afghan police. He was on the next available Chinook from Sangin and landed at Inkerman at 1600 hours.
He surveyed the battered base. Craters and missile debris littered the ground. Thin whisps of smoke were still gently rising from some of the shell holes. The Oshkosh tanker looked burnt out. The FSG tower was wrecked, with its sandbags flung all round the base, and the walls collapsed. Everywhere, soldiers were working to sort out the damage. A stench of cordite, explosives and burning permeated the whole place.
Calder conferred with Captain Ormiston, Lieutenant Olivier and Sergeant Major Taylor. They briefed him on the details of the attack and then he walked round the base, and was shown the damage that had been done and the enemy firing points. As he moved around, he stopped and spoke to many of the soldiers, giving them a word of reassurance and gauging their mood.
Calder sensed that although C Company and the fire support group had been hit hard over the past days, with the deaths of Lance Corporal Hawkins and Private Rawson, and the battering they had taken just a few hours earlier, they remained stoical, resilient and ready for action. He felt, however, that FSG Delta, which had taken the brunt of the casualties and had been in the austere and demanding conditions of Inkerman for two months without respite, should now rotate with Captain Mark Taylor’s FSG Charlie at Nowzad, and straight away he arranged for their transfer.
Calder’s priority was to assess and repair the damage to the FOB and to wrest the operational initiative from the Taliban. He requested additional mobile support, in the form of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force, to move north and probe and harry the enemy, taking the heat off Inkerman. The BRF, two platoons mounted in WMIKs, arrived that night. They were commanded by Major Mick Aston, who had handed over command of B Company when they left for Kajaki. After checking in with Calder, Aston led his force to the Putay area, 7 kilometres north of Inkerman.
Calder also wanted to beef up the company’s fighting power on the ground and requested a squadron, or part of a squadron, of Mastiff heavy-armoured patrol vehicles, newly arrived in theatre.
Calder had been on patrol with Hicks in the Inkerman area a few days before, but he was now taking temporary command of the company and needed to get to know the men quickly. He visited the sangars and the admin areas, meeting and talking to commanders and soldiers.
Around midnight that night, Sergeant Matt Waters woke after a couple of hours’ sleep and took over as duty watchkeeper in the Inkerman ops room. He was told word had recently come through that Captain Hicks had died of his wounds in Bastion. Waters was deeply shocked. Like everyone else, he had thought Hicks would make it. He stood up and walked outside into the warm and dusty night air and stood on his own for a few moments, his eyes moistening, before returning to his post.
Just twenty-four hours earlier, Hicks had sat in this ops room, writing a eulogy for Private Tony Rawson. Now it was Waters’s turn to do the same for his commander and friend, and he concluded with the words: ‘Dave will be sorely missed by all in C (Essex) Company and across the Battalion. He was a true star.’
Among the eulogies by Hicks’s comrades C Company soldier Private Benjamin Emmett wrote, ‘Captain Hicks was a very hard-working and understanding Second in Command. He was a funny, caring man and would always put a smile on your face. He was always willing to give advice and would never put you down. He always had time for everyone from private soldiers to the company commander. He will be missed greatly by all that knew him.’
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Over the next few days Calder directed the reorganization of Inkerman’s defences. He was assisted by Captain Dave Haggar, an officer attached from the 2nd Battalion, who was sent by Carver to take over Hicks’s role as company 2IC and ops officer and remained with C Company for the rest of the tour.
The base was attacked again and again during the following week by 107mm rockets, RPGs and smallarms. Further casualties were inflicted in these attacks. A Grenadier Guards soldier, a member of the OMLT working with the ANA in Inkerman, sustained a shrapnel wound to the head and eventually lost his eye. And a member of the Royal Artillery Fire Support Team received shrapnel wounds to the legs.
As in the previous attacks, the Taliban fire was accurate, and their firing positions difficult to identify. If confirmation were needed, this demonstrated again that a numerically strong, hard-core group of Taliban fighters had been brought into the area. Calder realized that he had to hit back at them and somehow throw them on to the defensive.
The Mastiffs that he had asked for arrived at Inkerman two days after the attack that killed Hicks. Commanded by Major Nick Cowie and crewed by Royal Armoured Corps soldiers from Falcon Squadron, 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, the Mastiffs provided protected movement and heavy firepower for the infantry troops.
Initially Calder deployed the large and aggressive-looking vehicles, operating without infantry, to probe around the desert and on the fringes of the Green Zone 5 or 6 kilometres to the north of Inkerman. Their arrival shocked the Taliban, who had not seen such machines in the area before. Calder decided to use the Mastiffs to deploy his men out of Inkerman and drop them off in the desert so that they could patrol on foot into the Green Zone; they would then provide heavy fire support. Before the first patrol, a Mastiff was allocated to each section, and the men gathered at the vehicle to be shown around by the RTR crewmen.
One of the most heavily armoured troop-carriers used by the Army, the 6x6 Mastiff looks like a large armoured truck. Carrying up to eight troops, the vehicle protects against smallarms, landmines and improvised explosive devices. It features a mine-protected V-shaped steel hull that directs the blast away from under the vehicle. It has blast run-flat tyres, shock-mounted explosive attenuating seats and internal spall liners. It is fitted with Bowman radios. It carries GPMG, .50 cal heavy machine-gun and grenade machine-guns. American designed, the vehicle was modified from the US Marine Corps Cougar armoured patrol vehicles. Thermal imaging equipment allows drivers to operate closed down under armour, by day and night. Powered by the Caterpillar C-7 diesel engine yielding up to 330 shp of power, the vehicle can cruise at almost 90 kilometres per hour
at ranges of around 1,200 kilometres on the road.
On Thursday 16 August, Calder led a patrol north to Putay. He took with him 10 Platoon under Sergeant Waters, an ANA platoon and Falcon Squadron’s Mastiffs. The patrol moved out of Inkerman in the oppressive heat of the late morning. For once, the temperature wasn’t a problem for the men of C Company. The Mastiffs were fitted with dual air-conditioning systems, and the troops were amazed to find air con in Afghanistan that actually worked. The more world-weary soldiers immediately speculated about how long it would take before the systems broke down.
As soon as they left the FOB and moved through the desert, the Taliban radio net came alive, and Calder was told by his interpreter that they were unusually excited and became increasingly apprehensive as they gave a running commentary on the column’s movements.
Calder had planned that the troops would be dropped at three locations in the desert, patrol on foot into the Green Zone to check and clear specific compounds, marry back up with the vehicles and move on. The first two operations went without incident. During compound searches the troops found evidence of Taliban activity, including equipment such as RPG boosters and AK47 magazines. At the final location, Falcon Squadron dropped off 10 Platoon and, with the ANA troops remaining mounted, moved up to the high ground to provide overwatch. Waters led the platoon into a group of compounds astride the 611 on the outskirts of Putay. They were in the desert just to the west of the Green Zone. There was no one around, no sign of life.
The interpreter with the Mastiffs on the high ground reported radio chatter. The Taliban were reporting the dismounted troops’ and the vehicles’ activity and discussing their plan to ambush the British soldiers. ‘If the green eyes come close, we hit them. We will hit them with the big thing.’
Calder speculated on what the ‘big thing’ might be – the SPG-9 they had used against Inkerman perhaps?
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Machine-gun fire rattled in towards 10 Platoon from a compound 600 metres into the Green Zone. Waters’s men returned fire, and on the high ground the Mastiff gunners opened up with their machine-guns and GMGs.
Falcon Squadron leader, Major Nick Cowie, radioed Calder on the company net: ‘Hello, Metal Zero Alpha, this is Titanium Zero Alpha. There seems to be a clear route from the desert to the compound that’s causing you trouble. Would you like my callsign to take Metal Two Zero down there? Over.’
Calder looked at the ground. A golden opportunity to take the enemy by surprise and to hit them hard. He replied, ‘Metal Zero Alpha, roger, good idea. Let’s move immediately.’
The Mastiff troop leader that would take 10 Platoon in drove rapidly to Waters’s compound and dismounted. Calder quickly gave orders to him and Waters. ‘10 Platoon will assault the compound, clear through and destroy any enemy within.’ He turned to the Mastiff troop leader. ‘I want you to get them right up to the compound. Move as fast as you can. Then stay in intimate support. The other Mastiffs will remain on the high ground and provide fire support from there.’
Within minutes Waters had given a lightning set of battle orders to his men in an irrigation ditch, and they mounted up ready to assault. There was a smile on the face of every 10 Platoon soldier, as they sensed they were about to give out to the enemy more than they had been getting from him.
As 10 Platoon were getting into the vehicles, the interpreter reported further enemy radio traffic. ‘The green eyes are moving away now, they are driving back to their camp. Do not fire. Let them go.’
Mounted in the Falcon Squadron leader’s Mastiff, Calder was amused. He thought, You couldn’t do this very often, especially in the Green Zone, or they would quickly work out how to destroy the vehicles. But this hasn’t happened before. Shock and awe, I think the Americans would call it.
The mastiffs formed up, three abreast and the fourth just behind, with the squadron leader and Calder behind that. A classic armoured infantry assault formation, pointing towards the target compound 300 metres across the open desert, on the edge of the Green Zone. On the radio, the Mastiff troop leader, standing in the turret of the centre vehicle, gave the countdown to his other vehicles, ‘Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Move now, move now.’
The drivers slammed their feet down on the accelerators, and the heavy vehicles lumbered forward. They moved fast, but not at breakneck speed, as the infantrymen in the back would be bounced from floor to ceiling as the vehicles crashed over the rocky and uneven desert. Even at this speed it was a hard enough ride in the back. As they moved, the .50 cal and GMG gunners in the Mastiff turrets opened up on the compound, sending in devastating fire. They were blasting at the walls and all round the building, spraying lead and explosives into likely enemy firing positions beside the compound.
As they got closer, the Taliban opened up from compounds right and left with PKM machine-guns and AK47 assault rifles. A heavy weight of fire rained down on the Mastiffs, but it was futile, with no possibility of penetration against such heavy armour.
Inside the vehicles, the C Company soldiers were getting a running commentary from the vehicle commanders on the internal speakers, and they could see the other Mastiffs and the desert fly past on the monitors, which showed pictures provided by external cameras mounted on each side of the vehicles.
The Mastiffs on the high ground identified enemy firing positions and possible firing positions and laid down withering fire on the Taliban with their GMGs and machine-guns.
Two hundred metres out, the charging Mastiffs concentrated their fire on the wooden compound doors, blasting and splintering them into small pieces.
Ten metres from the badly smashed-up compound, the troop commander yelled into his radio, ‘Stop – debus!’
The drivers jammed on the brakes, and the troops flung open the double doors in the rear of the Mastiffs. As Waters leapt to the ground, he remembered the many times he had been through this drill, jumping out of Warrior armoured vehicles in Canada, Germany and Bosnia as a young soldier in the 2nd Battalion’s famed Point Company.
The Mastiffs were still blazing away at the compound, and immediately checked firing as Lance Corporal Robinson led his section forward of the vehicles and into the compound. His men lobbed in high-explosive grenades and then rushed straight in with rifles and machine-guns blazing – attacking at state red.
As they went, the Mastiffs reversed back, then moved into position to cover left and right of the compounds, ready to cut down escaping enemy.
Robinson’s section broke through a series of small huts inside the compound, grenading and shooting as they went. As they moved through, decimating everything in their path, a Minimi gunner with 10 Platoon’s reserve section, still outside the compound, saw a man carrying an AK47, running for his life out of the right-hand side of the compound. He was making for a nearby irrigation ditch, but the gunner cut him down with a twenty-round burst. At the same time two more Taliban escaping from the left of the compound were blown to pieces by a lethal blast from a Mastiff machine-gun. On the high ground, the fire support Mastiffs identified more Taliban fighters trying to escape down an irrigation ditch, and with their machine-guns cut down seven of them as they ran.
Waters ordered Lance Corporal Thomas’s section, stacked up against the wall outside, to move in through Robinson’s men and clear the central dwelling area, which was within a further walled area of the compound. They hurled grenades, broke down the door and raced in firing.
Then there came the dreaded cry, ‘Man down, man down. Medic!’
Not again, thought Waters, please – not again.
Corporal Tim Ferrand, acting platoon sergeant, rushed forward into the compound. Private Luke Harris was in one of the small smoke-filled inner rooms, clutching his bleeding leg and shouting in pain. Ferrand checked him out and then clapped him on the back. ‘Just a bit of glass, Luke, you’ve not been shot. Get back in there, boy.’
Blasting into the room, firing automatic, Harris’s bullets had shattered a glass bottle, and a chunk had been hurled back at him
, ripping a gash into his leg. Normally cause for concern. Right now, relief that it wasn’t a bullet. Crack on and worry about it later.
After a few minute the section commanders were reporting, ‘Compound clear.’
Calder, with his Tac, which had been behind Waters’s reserve section, walked into the compound. He was smiling. ‘Well done, Sergeant Waters. Good job. Now please get your men to thoroughly search every room, see if there is anything here of intelligence value.’
The 10 Platoon soldiers found several photos of bearded men in kurtas posing with AK47s, PKMs and RPG launchers. They also found water and warm bread. They had clearly interrupted the Taliban fighters as they were tucking into their lunch. They had taken them completely by surprise. Seeing C Company mount up in their Mastiffs, the fighters had expected them to be heading back to Inkerman.
They were not used to being assaulted by infantry mounted in heavy armour. They were used to soldiers on foot approaching their ambush positions. They would fire at them from multiple well-concealed positions, stand and fight for as long as it was safe to do so and then escape through cut-outs and mouse-holes in compound walls and then down well-recced irrigation ditches, moving away to set up the next ambush or reappear innocently as farmers tilling their land. But now for the first time, and the last for some of the fighters, they had experienced the shocking impact of a Mastiff attack.
C Company’s morale soared. Within a week of the worst attack that Inkerman had experienced, leaving Hicks dead and several others wounded, they had hit back decisively at the Taliban, killing at least ten of their number.
Darkest Day: 23–24 August 2007
1
Just before B Company deployed to Kajaki at the end of July, Major Mick Aston had handed over as company commander to Major Tony Borgnis. The two officers had been students at the Staff College together, and several years before Borgnis had handed over to Aston as operations officer of the battalion. Borgnis arrived in Helmand following a two-year staff job in the UK. With the exception of courses and postings, Borgnis had served with the 1st Battalion throughout his fourteen-year military career, which included operational tours in Bosnia, Belfast and Londonderry.