No one reacted to the news; everyone just seemed relieved to be going. Trueman went up and down like a mother hen checking them one more time, and Tom, not daring to go any closer to the compound, looked through his binoculars into it, through the gap where the gate had been. He could see the corner where four days ago he had walked among the chickens and the goat. They weren’t there any more. Even the straw on the ground had been raked up and removed. It didn’t look as though anyone had been there for years. Clearly the family had moved away, and someone had left the IED for them should they come back. He wondered how many more were in the compound. He did a final scan of the area. Far away to the left he thought he saw a black figure with a white headdress nip behind a compound wall but couldn’t be sure. He turned and led the boys back to the HQ building to get on the Mastiffs and leave Shah Kalay.
The next evening Tom chatted with Frenchie on the HLS in Loy Kabir. Again an orange sunset. It was the first of the heli moves to get the squadron back down to Bastion to take over the Scimitars. Frenchie, now showered and immaculate again after the five days in Shah Kalay, said, ‘Well, Tom Chamberlain, your first taste of ops. What do you reckon?’
‘I don’t really know what to think. It all seems a bit of a blur, to be honest.’
‘I know. Don’t worry; that was pretty niche stuff out there. It won’t always be as complicated. It’ll get simpler when it gets more kinetic. That’s the rule I use. The more rounds fired, the easier for the boys to cope with it – in a funny sort of way. The trouble with those five days was that no one got off even so much as a shot, and yet it still felt very dangerous, very morally … well, as I said to you guys, grey. And as for having to work with those militia clowns …’ He looked into the distance, dragged on a cigarette and breathed smoke out through his nostrils. ‘Well, let’s just say I hope it’s the last time. Uh oh, here comes trouble.’ He turned away and shouted, ‘Right, lads, hustle up. Heli inbound.’
Brennan placed them all in their chalks as the Chinook appeared out of the sun, thrashing the humid air with its double-rotor whack. The boys crouched in their lines as it circled the HLS, dropped and gently touched down on the gravel, hurling up dust. Two chalks streamed out of it carrying bergens and mailbags, spare parts and an assortment of other junk.
The dust settled, and Tom waved at Jules Dennis, who came off the helicopter after the CO, himself just arrived in theatre to take over the battle group. Jules saw him and ran over while the Chinook was still being unloaded. He shouted at Tom over the noise of the engine, ‘Going already?! What’s it like up here?’
Tom yelled into his ear, ‘Good question. Pretty crazy, to be honest.’
‘That’s how we like it! See you when you get back up here with the wagons!’ He ran off to join the CO, and the loadie on the back of the Chinook signalled for the boys to come on.
They rose as one and ran forward, refilling the old workhorse. Tom was the last one on. He clipped himself into his seat and glanced over at Frenchie in the seat opposite, who gave him a thumbs up. And then his stomach left him as the heli lifted off the ground, dipped its nose and rammed through the dust and heavy air, flinging out white flares either side of it against any RPGs, the heat from its exhausts skewing the ground with a shimmering, hazy film. Tom looked out the tailgate, mesmerized as the heli jinked along, hugging the folds of the earth as it headed into the dying sun.
My tent
A warm night in Camp Bastion
Dear Mum,
I hope this finds everything really well at home, and that Zeppo isn’t missing me too much. I miss him! There are some quite amusing dogs out here. One hangs around the front gate of FOB Newcastle. He has terrible scars on his face from the dogfights that the Afghan soldiers put him in. But he’s terribly friendly, and puts his head on your lap and looks at you with huge, sad eyes. The boys have called him Augustus. I hope I see him again when we get back up north in a few days.
It’s been great being back in Bastion this last week. It feels so different from when we arrived on the first night (Oh my God that feels an age away!). Back then you just felt so completely out of your depth, and the worst thing was that as you filed off the plane, getting used to the heat, and the dust that immediately infiltrates your ears and nostrils – which I don’t think I’m ever going to get rid of – a column of guys who are going home pass you in the other direction, jeering at you and saying things like ‘Here you go, fellas. Six long months – enjoy!’ which was a bit dispiriting. But now we’re the ones who are doing that kind of thing to the new guys, who turn up every day. They are so easy to spot; pale skin, clean uniforms, blank faces thinking what on earth they’ve let themselves in for. Of course we are all wildly unsympathetic.
Loy Kabir is certainly quite amusing! It’s in the most beautiful scenery, almost biblical. The main town’s about five miles from north to south, but only about 800m wide at its widest point, enclosed by the sides of a wadi that must have been carved out of the rock back in the last ice age. The western side of the wadi is pretty shallow, but the eastern one is huge, soaring up to 80m high at one point. And the sunsets are amazing. The dust is so fine and light that it always lingers in the air about six feet up, so when the sun is low it bounces and reflects off these tiny particles to create the most vivid colours in a sort of prism effect. It really is amazing. Everywhere you go here you are constantly amazed by the weird shift from normal colours.
Anyway, all the boys are really well, and they LOVED the brownies you sent out. Lance Corporal Miller – you know, from Gateshead with the badger tattoo – has pleaded that I ask you for some more.
Please send any news at all about what’s happening back home; any gossip at all is awesome! Still don’t know when R & R is going to be, but Sergeant Trueman keeps on making noises about the troop trying to get the Christmas slot. Now that would be good. But don’t get your hopes up.
With all my love, Mum,
Tommy xxx
PS Give Zep a massive hug as well.
PPS Don’t worry, Mum; everything’s all right out here, I promise. And the boys are awesome, like I always said they’d be. Promise you, don’t worry! Tx
Tom closed the bluey, leaned back in the canvas chair and took a draw of coffee. He rubbed his eyes and started another letter.
The C Squadron Troop Leaders’ Tent aka ‘The Playboy Mansion’
Dear Will,
Mate, am I jealous of you! I was gutted to miss you in Bastion. Oh well. We moved up to BG(NE) the day before you must have come off the ground. Anyway, I hope POTL is gleaming, mate; argh I hate writing that – it makes me green with envy.
So anyway I’ve managed to make it through a month. It’s been pretty weird, to be honest. The BG has had its fair share of contacts, especially in the north of the AO, but we’ve been slightly out of it in this barking-mad town called Shah Kalay. You won’t have heard of it; it’s in the arse end of nowhere. This place was seriously spooky. It was riddled with IEDs and was controlled by this militia who we couldn’t trust further than we could have thrown them. We were there for five days, and the only thing that we achieved was getting one of the militia blown up, dead. Proper fucked, mate. Quad amp, and most of his head as well; he was basically just a slug. Good look. And then we bounced back down to Bastion and started taking over the CVR(T)s which amazingly enough are in quite good order. It’s good to be back with them, and the boys are really excited about taking them up north, as there’s loads of open ground to the flanks of the town where we’ll be able to cut about. Fingers crossed anyway. But you know what this place is like. We’ll probably get issued Uncle Sam costumes tomorrow and get sent to Islamabad to march around Mullah Omar’s house on stilts.
Back up north in two nights’ time, the whole squadron – 25 ancient vehicles bimbling through forty miles of bandido country. Ooooh that sounds like fun. If we get there this side of Christmas I’ll be amazed.
Mate, I can’t wait to hear all your news. Also if there are any tips at all you remember then I am
all ears! Thanks so much for the parcel – the salami and biltong went down a treat, as did the Beano. Old skool but I like it!
Already looking forward to pints when back,
TC
Tom got up from the desk, a wooden board perched on two stacks of old Javelin tubes, and got ready to go over to the post office. Clive, Scott, Henry and an engineer mate of Henry’s didn’t look up from their poker game. The tent was their home in Bastion. It had been lived in since 2006 and was full of kit: new, old, borrowed, stolen, sent out by friends, inherited from outgoing mates. A huge sofa had been constructed out of a Hesco frame upholstered luxuriously with camp-bed mattresses, and Jason lay on this, tongue out in earnest battle with the latest Dan Brown novel. A TV stood, altar-like, on another platform of Javelin tubes in front of the sofa. The walls of the tent were lined with posters of topless girls, psychedelic drapes, a Union Flag, a rainbow flag and a CND flag. A couple of lamps were fitted with red bulbs, making the tent look like a dive bar in Vietnam.
Tom loved it; in the middle of the order and rigidity of Bastion the tent shone as a beacon of nonconformity. He pulled on ironed trousers and shirt, adjusted his beret in the shaving mirror hung by his bed and went out into the night air. It was starting to get a bit colder now; he’d probably start wearing his jersey at nights soon.
He passed a few of the boys on their way from the Naafi and then chatted for a moment with Miller and GV, just back from the gym. The last tent was the senior NCOs’. He walked into the porch and hung back to look for a moment through the mosquito netting at the scene within. It was a different universe from the officers’ tent. Sergeant Williams stood at an ironing board in tiny Y-fronts, ironing a shirt as if his life depended on it, biceps straining down onto the board as if trying to rip open the regimental crest tattoo on his arm. Where Tom’s tent was all soft and mellow, here a thin bare fluorescent tube threw its light into every corner. Brennan, Trueman and two other sergeants sat on rigid plastic chairs in front of a television, watching the news on BFBS, each drinking a steaming brew. Above Brennan’s bed were paintings that his daughter had sent out, and above Trueman’s was an Oldham Athletic flag and a Grateful Dead poster. Tom walked in.
Trueman greeted him: ‘All right, sir, how’s tricks? How much money you lost in that poker game? If you’ve come to borrow some then no can do.’
‘No, Sergeant Trueman, those other maniacs are doing that. I’ve been writing some letters. Off to the post office now. You guys have any letters that I can take?’
‘Nah, cheers though, sir,’ said Brennan. ‘That’s kind of you. Hang about, what’s this?’ He looked at the television, and they all watched the story, about a mother who had been driven to committing suicide along with her disabled daughter after enduring years of bullying torment by a gang of thugs on their council estate. Apparently the police had ignored all her complaints and calls for help. Pictures flashed up of the woman and her daughter, and the car that they had gassed themselves in. Tom sensed something come over the tent. Normally stories in the news attracted nothing but mild shrugs from the soldiers, who tended to view everyone else’s sufferings as child’s play compared to what they were going through in Afghan. But this was different; Tom could see Trueman and Brennan looking shocked at the news.
‘Fucking cunts. CUNTS!’ Brennan broke the silence and threw his mug onto the floor, where it smashed and sprayed coffee up the wall of the tent. ‘How fucking DARE those pikey scum. If I got my hands on any of those fucking cunt cowards I’d rip their fucking cocks off and shove them down their fucking throats.’
He was screaming, red-faced and spitting at the TV, and Tom watched nervously.
Brennan steadied himself. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s just fucking unacceptable. How are we meant to stand here and watch our fucking country be taken to the dogs by these feral little pieces of shit?’ He was whispering his words at the end, grasping the reality that he was unable to look after two little girls and a wife five thousand miles away.
Tom looked at him, unblinking, and said softly, ‘I know, Sergeant Major, I know, I know. It’s not right.’ At that moment he felt nothing but Brennan’s anger, an anger even worse than he had felt in the weeks before deploying. Tom wanted to destroy those half-men and felt as pure a rage against them as he had at anything before in his life. But the rage was shackled to an impotence that made it futile. Without another word he smiled sympathetically at Brennan, who was now slumped back in his chair and distractedly watching the next news item, went to go and pat him on the back, hovered his palm over him, but didn’t. He withdrew his hand, left the tent and walked the lonely dark kilometre to the post office.
The next two days were a whirlwind as the squadron prepared to move north. While Frenchie and the troop leaders pored over maps and aerial photographs of the route, planning and counter-planning, developing actions on, locating key vulnerable points and areas of high threat, Brennan masterminded the physical preparation of the wagons. Four troops’ worth of Scimitars plus an SHQ of four vehicles were parked up in immaculate rows on the Bastion football pitch with just a metre between them so that munitions and supplies could be passed easily from vehicle to vehicle. The boys swarmed over the wagons like bees on honeycomb.
All the bomb racks were filled, chains of lads passing ammo clips into turrets. They took mostly high-explosive as opposed to armour-piercing shells. HE rounds, with their bright yellow warheads, were designed to explode upon impact; if they missed the target they would probably still kill with shrapnel, whereas AP rounds would, if off target, just drive into whatever they ended up hitting. Boxes of 7.62 for the GPMGs were stuffed into every available turret space. Schmoolies, grenade boxes, smoke-grenade boxes, bin bags full of cyalumes and Claymore mines all found accommodation in nooks and crannies. Javelin tubes were strapped to the back of the wagons.
Brennan was everywhere, encouraging and ticking off in equal measure. ‘Come on, fellas,’ he shouted. ‘I want more ammo. There’s shedloads here, and I promise you, you can never have enough. We are going to take it all up with us, so let’s start finding some extra fucking space for it. If you hit an IED you’re going to be fucked anyway in these deathtraps, so you might as well make the wagon into an atom bomb and make sure you die and not end up in the Paralympics. If you want to be one-limb Jim or Billy the stump then crack on, but don’t come crying to me when it happens. No half-measures.’ The younger boys blanched at this. ‘Come on, fellas; lighten up. If you can’t laugh what can you do?’ he would say as he bounced from wagon to wagon.
In the afternoon Frenchie took Henry, whose troop was going to lead the column north, on a helicopter recce of the route. Afterwards Henry came to see Tom, who was with his boys as they sat around a wagon, chatting about nothing in particular and smoking. Tom was on the turret, quietly cleaning his rifle and listening to Trueman hold court, reeling off impersonation after impersonation or regaling them with stories of previous tours. The boys were all cackling away, in particular GV, whose high-pitched almost girlish laugh completely belied his barrel chest, his white teeth flashing smiles. Henry bounded up to the wagon.
‘Hi, mate; how was the flight?’ asked Tom.
‘Great, pal, really great. That’s the way to travel. A bit gutting when you realize that we covered the route in twenty minutes when it’s going to take about twenty-four hours tomorrow, but oh well.’
‘What about VPs? What’s the going like?’
‘Like the maps really, mate. Pretty flat, a few wadis with steep sides but nothing the wagons won’t handle. The only real drama is that the moment we break off Highway One it’s immediately obvious we’re going up to Loy Kabir, so any Talib worth his salt will start guessing where to put the IEDs.
‘We’ll be able to cut about off the main tracks pretty easily, but there’s one or two places where we’re going to be channelled. But we should be all right. The weird thing is, there’s this massive town about two thirds into it that isn’t on any of the maps. I tell you, ma
te, massive. Just about five miles by five miles of compounds sprawling over the area.’
‘Can we not just skirt around it?’
‘That’s the thing: no one’s gone through it in the last three years, so, by extension, Frenchie thinks no one’s going to have IED’d it. Everyone who’s skirted around it on the obvious bypass tracks has been smashed. You can see the craters of previous hits from the air.’
‘Well, chum –’ Tom grinned as he punched Henry on the shoulder ‘– just as long as you don’t get us lost we’ll be fine. Good luck with that one; I can’t wait. Every time it all gets a bit too much I’ll just think of you up front flapping about getting lost with Frenchie breathing down the radio.’
‘Thanks, mate. It’s going to be a nightmare trying to lead this thread of vehicles through the route, especially at night, and especially through that sodding town. And you jack bastards are going to be monging it in your wagons just following the previous vehicle. You lucky fuckers.’
‘No probs, mucker; any time.’
That night in the tent they huddled round Clive’s laptop to watch Black Hawk Down. They were all able to quote from it verbatim, and they found it amusing that even here they still watched war films. They were asleep by ten, their minds able now to switch off at will, knowing the next few days were liable to be completely sleepless.
The next morning the squadron mustered, and Frenchie walked around the wagons, inspecting kit, climbing into turrets, sniffing round like a search dog. Brennan, the SQMS and the tiffy trooped after him, and as the party came to each troop the troop leader and sergeant followed nervously on, hoping the wagons would pass Frenchie’s high standards. He never cared much about cleanliness, a losing battle in Afghanistan, but if any moving part hadn’t been oiled to within an inch of its life he would get very angry. He clambered over the wagons, jumping into the gunners’ seats to test the smoothness of the elevation and traverse of the Rardens, making sure the GPMGs were dripping with oil, checking the running gear of the tracks to see that oil levels were correct and burrowing into the engines, twanging the generator belts for tautness.
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