by Richard Kemp
Half an hour after crossing Route 611 outside Inkerman, 10 Platoon were wading through ditches full of water up to their thighs. Gent was at the front, and Mann was moving near the rear of the platoon with Sergeant Steve Armon. Armon said, ‘If we see any targets, Tom, pass that 338 straight over to me, I’ll take the shot.’
‘Not a hope, Sarge,’ Mann smiled. ‘You don’t seriously think I’m going to be carrying this thing round just so you can fire it, do you?’
‘Yeah, I do. You make a good gun-bearer for a real shooter.’
The platoon, spread out in a snake along the ditch, suddenly stopped moving, and the soldiers automatically took up fire positions left and right. Word came back that the point man had seen movement ahead.
Mann splashed forward along the ditch to join Gent, who was crouched down with Lieutenant Perrin looking intently across the field. ‘Three blokes, Tom, over by those compounds. Look like civvies,’ said Gent.
Perrin said, ‘Yes they do. But I haven’t seen any civvies in this area for ages. I’m surprised they’re here unless they’re up to something they shouldn’t be.’
Mann looked towards them. They were 700 to 800 metres away, across an open field, the other side of a second irrigation ditch. They seemed to be doing some kind of work around a collection of compounds and trees beyond the ditch. They were making no attempt to conceal themselves, and some were wearing white kurtas as opposed to the darker colours favoured by fighters trying to blend in. Whatever they were up to they obviously hadn’t spotted 10 Platoon.
Major Messenger came forward and spoke to Perrin. He looked at the men through his SUSAT sight and said, ‘Yeah, I agree, they look like civvies, though goodness knows what they’re doing here. We’ll move on but keep an eye on them as we go. Try not to let them see us so, if they are involved, they won’t let anyone else know we’re here. I still haven’t heard any radio chatter.’
Perrin pushed 10 Platoon forward. They reached a bend in the irrigation ditch, and beside the ditch there was a high compound wall. They again went firm to check out the group of men, the C Company soldiers taking up low fire positions.
Mann removed his daysack and, wedging himself against a tree growing in the bank, took out the Leupold x40 spotting scope he had so carefully camouflaged the previous day. The scope came in a box with a tripod, which was bulky, and with all the water and ammo that had to be carried, Mann never bothered with it.
The bend in the ditch had brought them slightly closer to the group of men, who were now about 600 metres away. At that range Mann could see the figures very clearly through the 30cm-long Leupold. There were more of them, moving about. He counted six. He trained the scope on a man in a white kurta with a grey waistcoat and black Afghan-style flat round cap. He looked quite young and unusually didn’t have a beard. The others were moving about around him. Could he be a sentry? If he was he wasn’t doing a very good job! The men were partially obscured by trees and undergrowth, and the bank of the far irrigation ditch, and he could not make out what they were doing. They seemed to be carrying things from the compound and placing them outside.
He looked back at the man in white. He could make out something on his shoulder, which appeared to be draped over by a white cloth, a sheet, or maybe even part of the kurta. Whatever it was it was smooth and elongated – and about the right length for an AK47. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. It can’t be. But if it is, this is a gift.
He whispered to Perrin, ‘Sir, I think one of those guys has got an AK. I can’t quite see it, but it looks like it to me.’
Mann carried on watching. He was in an ideal position. With his head up over the ditch, against the background of the compound wall he was less likely to be silhouetted than in the open. And the shadow cast by the trees lining the ditch gave added concealment.
As Mann peered through the scope, the cloth dropped away from the object and he could clearly see the glint of an AK47 assault rifle, with magazine fitted. Adrenalin surged into his bloodstream and he fought to contain his excitement and stay calm.
He told Perrin, who in a low voice briefed the company commander on the radio.
‘Engage,’ replied Messenger.
Ten metres to Perrin’s right, Gent, who had been watching the position through the times 25 Schmidt and Bender sniper scope on his rifle, said in a low voice, ‘Tom, one of those punters has got a radio in his hand.’
Quietly, calmly, everything started to happen at once as C Company geared up for a contact – for once on their own terms.
Messenger said to his MFC, ‘Get the mortars ready to fire. I want a fire mission in behind those compounds on my command. We will fire it the minute 10 Platoon start engaging. But not before. Understood?’
The MFC was immediately on the mortar net, relaying instructions, and back in Inkerman the three 81mm mortar teams set the bearing and elevation to hit the rear of the compound, which had previously been registered as a mortar target. Like the troops on the ground, the mortar men were excited that they were about to initiate a contact rather than respond to an enemy ambush.
Perrin passed the word along the platoon: ‘The snipers will take them out. No one is to fire unless I order it. If we all fire, it will create obscuration and make the snipers’ job more difficult.’ He knew his men were well disciplined and professional, but he also knew that every man in 10 Platoon would be itching to take a shot.
Gent took out his laser rangefinder. He could have accurately estimated the range but wanted to leave as little as possible to chance. This was a rare opportunity to ambush the Taliban, and he did not want it to go wrong. Added to the need to kill the enemy, he was aware that the whole of C Company would be watching.
The laser range finder looked like a large pair of binoculars, and Mann had coated them too with his camouflage slurry. He put the device to his eyes and pressed the button on top. A red square appeared in the centre of the right-hand eye piece. Mann moved the square on to the man in the white kurta with the AK47 and released the button, shooting a laser pulse straight at him. Seconds later a small red number appeared in the lower part of the eyepiece: 600. ‘Six hundred metres,’ he hissed at Gent, returning the rangefinder into his daysack.
Gent nodded, pushed his own daysack up the bank, and, lying flat, wrapped himself round it into a solid fire position. Mann stowed his Leupold scope back into his daysack, ready to move immediately if anything went wrong. With his back supported by the tree, he got himself into an awkward but steady fire position, sitting cross-legged, with the .338 bipod legs resting on the baked-hard dirt on the lip of the ditch. He undid his chin strap and pushed his helmet on to the back of his head to raise it away from the weapon sight.
Sergeant Armon had come forward, and said, ‘Tom, we’ll do a coordinated shoot, OK?’
‘Roger, Sarge.’
‘Tom, Dan. I’ll give “standby, standby, fire”. Thumbs up when you’re both ready.’
Mann hissed across to Gent, ‘Dan. Listen. I’ll take the man on the left in the white kurta. You take the one on the right in blue. After that they’ll be running everywhere, so just shoot anything you can see.’
‘Roger that,’ said Gent.
Mann had already chambered a .338 Lapua Magnum bullet. He looked at his personal shooting data, which was taped to the left side of his rifle butt. Through experience every sniper knows the precise personal range adjustment that must be made to the scope of his own weapon, and the Royal Anglian snipers had added to this by getting localized atmospheric data from the Marines when they took over. He then clicked in the adjustment using the drum on the top of his scope.
He didn’t think there was any wind at all, but double-checked. Looking carefully at the weeds in the field in front of him he saw there was no movement, and the same further up in the tops of the tallest trees. There was no sign of distortion in the heat shimmer either, so he checked the drum on the right side of the sight was at zero – no lateral adjustment.
He slipped forward
the safety catch to the left of the rifle’s bolt assembly, then looked through the sight picture in his Schmidt and Bender times 25 sniper scope. His target was still standing, facing to the right, sideways on, AK47 down by his side. Mann brought the cross-hairs on to the centre of the man’s shoulder. If he had been firing the L96, he would have gone for a head shot, to guarantee a kill. With the much more powerful .338 Lapua Magnum that would also be virtually guaranteed if he got him anywhere in the torso, and going for the shoulders gave a better chance of hitting. If his aim was slightly high he would get him in the head, if low he would hit the chest.
He gave Armon the thumbs-up and out of the corner of his eye saw Gent do the same. Armon gave the pair a moment to settle down. This was almost it. Mann had used his sniper skills in many contacts before, up in Kajaki. But none was like this. The odds were stacked in his favour now, and if he failed it would be his fault alone. But he knew he wasn’t going to fail.
He calmed himself and got control of his breathing. He would do this by the book. Exactly by the book. Contrary to myth a good sniper will never hold his breath. If you hold your breath you strain and your body becomes uncomfortable, leading to a miss at longer ranges. You use natural breathing, and you shoot between breaths.
Armon said, ‘Stand by.’
Mann breathed in and took up the first trigger pressure.
‘Stand by.’
He breathed out.
‘Fire.’
He did not squeeze the trigger with his finger. If you do that it can pull the hand slightly, which jerks the rifle and can lead to a miss. He squeezed with his whole hand and the rifle jerked back into his shoulder. Three-quarters of a second later the .338 bullet ripped open the upper body of the man with the AK47; he was flung back and crumpled to the ground in a heap.
Gent fired at precisely the same moment but missed. He could not afford to curse himself, but quickly adjusted his sight and fired again, sending a 7.62mm black spot bullet into the shoulder of his target, who dropped to the ground.
There was panic among the group of Taliban. They picked up rifles and RPGs from the ground and were running in every direction, like ants in a nest that had been kicked over. Mann calmly continued to engage. He was concentrating totally on his task, but behind him he heard the interpreter, with his radio scanner, shouting that the Taliban net had suddenly come alive.
A fighter holding an AK47 ran up the bank of the distant irrigation ditch. Gent caught him squarely in the chest with his third shot, and he did a spectacular back flip into the ditch.
As the two snipers continued to hit the enemy, they heard explosions from Inkerman, and seconds later crump-crump-crump, crump-crump-crump as the three mortar teams in the base bombarded the area behind the compounds with high-explosive 81mm shells, cutting off any escape.
While the mortars continued to explode, throwing up clouds of dust and smoke, all activity stopped around the compounds. Mann and Gent remained in their fire positions, scanning the area for any sign of movement.
‘OK, lads,’ said Armon after a few minutes. ‘I reckon that’s it.’
While the rest of C Company kept their rifles and machine-guns trained on the area round the compounds, the two snipers slid back down the bank. Armon said, ‘Well done, lads, good shooting. Tom, you got four, and Dan, you got two.
‘I reckon that was all of them, unless maybe one or two somehow got away, but I doubt it.
‘Glad you learnt some of the stuff I taught you, Tom, I never thought you’d be able to get them at 600 with a 338. Thought I might have to step in.’
Mann smiled but was on too much of a high to make any retort.
3
Back at Inkerman later that day, Mann and Gent were briefed that, when the shooting began, a Taliban fighter in the compound had been screaming into the radio that they were pinned down by accurate fire and needed reinforcements. Suddenly the radio went dead, and, despite calls from other Taliban fighters, there was no response from the compound.
The radio callsign that had been used was Farouk, believed by the Royal Anglians to be an important Taliban leader. Not much was known about him, but two days before he was killed he had travelled back into the area of Inkerman from Musa Qalah, perhaps with instructions for a further operation. Farouk had been linked by intelligence to a known Taliban HVI, or ‘high-value individual’, named Haji Qalam. Farouk was thought to have been behind many of the recent attacks, perhaps including the mortar and rocket attack on Inkerman thirteen days earlier that killed Captain Hicks and wounded several others. It was also assessed as possible that he had been involved in the attacks that resulted in the deaths of Lance Corporal Hawkins and Private Rawson.
The Taliban fighters were caught off guard and didn’t manage to fire a single shot in return. It was not clear exactly what the group had been doing, but assessment of their activity and the proximity to Inkerman suggested it was possible that they were preparing another indirect fire attack on the base. Whatever the truth, the number and ferocity of attacks against Inkerman, which had continued for the previous two weeks, now dramatically reduced.
At around the same time as Lance Corporal Mann and Private Gent were dealing with Farouk and his team of fighters, Private Oliver Bailey, one of the A Company snipers, was having an altogether different form of contact 7 kilometres away, south of Sangin.
A Company had mounted a patrol to prevent Taliban interference with the distribution of US humanitarian aid to the people of Sangin. FSG Alpha was moving through the Green Zone, about 800 metres south of Sangin DC, with 3 Platoon. A section patrolling to the rear of the FSG came into contact. The FSG went firm behind a partially demolished wall next to a cornfield. They were in close country, and Bailey had his .338 sniper rifle in his left hand and his Browning pistol, ready to fire, in his right. Knowing how adept the Taliban were at infiltrating round the flanks, Bailey moved forward to make sure the enemy weren’t approaching beyond a corner in the wall directly to their front. Private Clay Donnachie and Drummer Richard Railton covered him.
Suddenly a fighter popped up from behind the wall with an RPG, right beside Bailey. Bailey smacked him straight in the face with his pistol, then, moving back, fired a full magazine of 9mm bullets into him as he collapsed, dropping into the cornfield. As Bailey moved backwards, Donnachie fired at the fighter with his rifle.
A short distance along the wall a second fighter raised his head and fired an RPG. It smashed into a tree right beside the soldiers but didn’t explode. Donnachie fired at him but got a stoppage, and Railton opened up with his GPMG from the hip, ripping the man apart.
Another RPG missile whizzed past them, fired from within the cornfield, and exploded further down the track, narrowly missing FSG Corporal Gavin Watts. Donnachie lobbed a hand grenade over the wall and rushed forward, spraying the cornfield with his SA80 on automatic. Lance Corporal Terry Findley and his section ran to assist and with two Minimis and a GPMG blasted hundreds of bullets into the cornfield.
Bailey couldn’t believe what had happened. This was the second time since arriving in Helmand that he, a sniper, had ended up killing a Taliban fighter at close range with his pistol. The first time was right at the start of the tour as he was moving through the compounds of Sorkhani, at Nowzad, on Friday 13 April.
4
A few days later, on Tuesday 28 August, the bodies of Privates Foster, Thrumble and McClure, killed in the accidental air strike near Kajaki, were repatriated to the UK following a ramp ceremony in Camp Bastion. Their platoon commander, Lieutenant George Seal-Coon, who had briefly returned to Bastion for medical checks after the battering he took from the 500-pound bomb that killed his three soldiers, carried the Colour.
It is against military protocol for Colours to be on parade during such a ceremony, unless the deceased is a commissioned officer. But Lieutenant Colonel Carver took the view that honouring his dead soldiers with the Colours that embodied the fighting heart and soul of the battalion was more important than observance of
regulations born in a now outdated era. To Carver, his soldiers’ lives were every bit as important as those of his officers. The Queen’s and Regimental Colours, emblazoned with the battle honours of the regiment’s 300-year history, were on parade at the ramp ceremony for every Royal Anglian officer and soldier killed in Afghanistan.
The night before the ceremony, Regimental Sergeant Major Ian Robinson paid a private visit to the three dead men in the Camp Bastion mortuary. Unknown to anybody else Robinson made a point of being the last person to see the body of every soldier before the coffin lid was sealed and they left the battalion for ever. Robinson paused for a few moments beside each soldier, whispered a quiet goodbye on behalf of their comrades and ruffled each man’s hair. A final human contact with the regimental family with whom they had been through so much.
At the precise time of the ramp ceremony, B Company held their own memorial service for their three dead comrades, up on the hillside above Kajaki, looking across to the spot in Mazdurak where they died. Dusk was gathering as Major Borgnis read out eulogies for each of the three men that he had prepared the day after they were killed.
Captain Dave Robinson, the company 2IC, spoke the exhortation:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
With barely a dry eye among the group of tough, battle-hardened infantrymen, the soldiers responded, ‘We will remember them.’
There was a brief pause and then a lone American F15 Eagle flew directly towards them, fired its flares in salute to the three dead soldiers and soared upwards across the Peaks.
The 81mm mortar section in Zeebrugge then fired a star shell to mark the start of two minutes’ silence. During the silence the mortars shot three more star shells into the sky, one each for Privates Robert Foster, Aaron McLure and John Thrumble.