Rain

by Barney Campbell

  We set out at dusk on Boxing Day. The sight was pretty impressive, about twenty vehicles storming through the sunset up this wadi, plumes of dust streaking into the sky and each looking like that pillar of fire that guided the Israelites in the Bible, with the sun bouncing off them. Except that everyone for miles around could see them too; I’m surprised you didn’t notice them back in London. We might as well have had a man in a clown suit flying a plane trailing a banner over us that said HI GUYS, WE’RE COMING TO RESCUE THE MILITIA IN SHAH KALAY for all the subtlety we were displaying. And they guessed our feint. At night, at about 2100, we broke up out of a wadi into the open desert, and had to go through this VP between a couple of compounds. No biggie, we just had to barma it. So Clive’s troop, who had just taken over the Mastiff job from me and so had to barma for the squadron, had to do it. It was their first time doing a proper barma and they were taking for ever. We watched through the BGTI (that thermal sight we have on the Scimitar; it’s epic – you can see anything and everything), and my gunner and I were going mental at how much time they were taking. And then the weirdest, weirdest, most horrible thing. Before I heard it, I saw the explosion in front of me on the thermal screen. On the BGTI, if it’s warm then it appears black; if cold it’s white.

  So there they are, the barma team, picked out black against the white, and then this massive black blot appears as the IED explodes, and then disappears. And then we see the four boys again, but this time it looks like there’s five of them. We soon realize that what we thought was a fifth man was the blown-off legs of one of them, Trooper Ransome, and suddenly the net goes mental with the casevac. We watched as the legs kept on getting yellower and yellower, until by the end you couldn’t see them as they had lost all their warmth. Both at the thigh. He’s twenty-one. Good lad as well. Really good. A real scallywag – mischievous, LOVED scrapping. And now, well, whatever awaits him. The MERT came in to get him out and we got ready to crack on.

  But then behind us, at the very back of the column, there’s this massive other explosion; one of the Mastiffs at the back has been hit. No one’s hurt, and we don’t know what on earth it was. Pressure plate? Command wire? Legacy mine? Either way, it fucked the Mastiff. And every one of the Scimitars had been over that spot. If that had hit one of the Scims then that would have been three KIA, no doubt. Turret ripped off and everything. But yet again the Mastiff sailed through. So we had to wait for another six hours for the SVR to recover the wagon, take it back to Newcastle and then come back to rejoin us.

  So it’s now four in the morning, and we’re still in the wadi. The leader decides to ditch the feint to the north and just head straight for the town. H-Hour was at 0600, and that’s when the helis are inbound, so we race hell for leather to the north of the town. But the ground is awful, dunes set solid by the frost, and even the tracked Scimitars are slipping and sliding. It’s the dark of the moon, and no lights allowed, so the column’s a nightmare to control. The Mastiffs on their wheels are all over the shop, and one of them nearly overturns traversing a slope. It is a total, total nightmare, and we’re all exhausted when we finally get to the LOD.

  So we get to Shah Kalay at dawn, and there’s now a white flag over the police station; the Talibs are in it. So we’re going to have to fight from the get go. The helis land with Tac and some of the ANA. The helis go back to pick up the rest of them from Newcastle, and the plan is that when they’re all here we’ll start the advance. So the CO comes up to my wagon with the Ops, and we’re looking over the ridge at the town, when suddenly the ANA start running down the hill, about a platoon of them. Before we can do anything the Talibs at Bardot open up on the ANA in front of us, and they’re butchered. Like the opening of Saving Private Ryan. All hell’s breaking loose, and it’s going to be twenty minutes at least until the next heli load appears. So the CO gets Frenchie to get us onto the ridge, and we all just start blazing hell into Bardot as Clive’s troop goes forward in his Mastiffs to get the casualties out. It was 0630 now, and there’s already four ANA KIA, and ten Cat As and Bs. All momentum had been totally pissed up the wall. The CO is going spastic at the ANA.

  And so the infantry re-org behind the ridge, as we keep pummelling away into the Talibs as they stick their heads up to fire at us, and then as 2 Troop sit on the ridge giving us covering fire, the infantry and my troop go back down into the bowl, this time with a wall, and I mean a wall, of fire over us. It felt like the end of the world was happening above our heads. And then the infantry start running, and we reach the wall of Bardot. They blow it with a mousehole and then storm through it. I turn the turret round to protect the 30 mil and ram the wall, and then we’re through as well, expecting to walk into a hell load of fire. But there’s nothing; the Talibs have slipped away at the last minute. The CO’s there as well, and he’s thrilled as their absence means we’re going to squeeze them into the middle of the town. Oh yeah, I should have said, the Warrior company were seconded to us for the op, and they drove over from Musa Qala for it, and are lined all along the ridge to the south of the town, so no Talibs can escape.

  We had a short halt in Bardot, and swept the militia station in the middle of it for IEDs. I’d been in that building about three months ago, and it gave me the creeps. An evil place. And when we went in there we found five of the militia hung up from the ceilings by wire, their ears cut off and stuffed in their mouths, stripped naked and covered in whip marks and burns. Good look.

  But the advance south continues. The next two objectives, Budapest and Alabama, follow a similar pattern, with token resistance around the clusters of compounds, a few bursts from an AK that slows the advance, but then they leg it and by 1200 we’ve got back on track and hold about two thirds of the town. The governor’s driven over from Loy Kabir by this point with a load of ANP, so we’ve now got Brits, ANA and ANP cutting about the area. My troop’s at the head of the push, with the infantry crowded behind my wagons as we go over the fields between the objectives, which is ace as it’s all a bit Normandy 1944, but when we get in among the compound clusters it’s terrifying, as the tempo is too high to barma properly and we’re channelled wherever we drive. And with the advanced notice they’ve had, I just know that they’re going to have laid IEDs in the alleyways for the Scims, so every metre south we drive I’m wincing, expecting an explosion at every moment. Dusty and I are standing in the turret ramrod straight, like pencils, so if we do hit something we’ll just fly out like missiles from the turret and hopefully land on a pile of straw somewhere. Yeah right. Probably land in a compound and get hacked to death by some mental family.

  And then we’re on Khrushchev, and this is where they’re standing to scrap. As it turned out later, they’d prepared it as a defensive position amazingly, and it takes the infantry a good two hours to clear it. At one point the CO and the Ops are in the lead assaulting section, and as my wagons are outside the compounds we can hear one hell of a firefight inside as they go through the position, grenading and mouseholing. But then it’s clear, and there are six enemy dead and two prisoners. And then, in a final stand, two RPGs come at us from Princess Grace, one of them I swear going straight between Dusty and me, and so we just blitz it. No more fire comes from it, and when we push south and get to it we find a final two dead, torn to shreds by our 30 mil.

  It’s odd, but I didn’t feel anything. Nothing at all. When I saw the bodies I felt anodyne. All I had done was to remove a threat. That was all. I know the dead enemy had families, I know they had nicknames, had jokes and rivalries. But when I looked at them I saw them as one step closer to going home. I had this strange thing earlier in the tour, a dream about a man dressed in black with a white headdress, as I thought I’d seen him when we were in Shah Kalay back in September. One of the dead in Princess Grace was wearing exactly that, and when I saw him I felt like something had been lifted from me.

  By evening we had the town secured, for the loss of three Cat B GSWs from the infantry lads and two further ANA KIA as well as about a dozen Cat Bs
and Cs. So it was a hell of a fight really. No holds barred. No IEDs at all until the very end, when the Warrior company started to move off from the southern ridge and hit one. We saw the dust plume from about 2 km away. A lad in the back, a lance jack – can’t remember his name – was killed. The angel flight comes in for him, they self-recover the vehicle, which wasn’t even that badly damaged, and then suddenly they’re off, and it’s just Tac, the ANA and C Sqn left in the town.

  The squadron hung around Shah Kalay for four days or so, trying to get the ANP who are replacing the militia to get out and patrol the town. But they were dreadful. You couldn’t fault their enthusiasm in the mornings, but by afternoon they’d lost all interest. And while their fighting spirit is good, their kit is just non-existent, and they were begging us for anything – clothes, water, food, batteries. It’s their own country for Christ’s sake. It’s like having someone to stay in your own house and then asking them for washing-up powder, soap, keys and the code for the burglar alarm.

  I remember what you wrote back in the summer – how on earth are they going to be trusted to fend for themselves when we’re gone? I’ve got a theory about this actually, that Dusty and Dav helped come up with. Here goes. At the moment we’re playing a tennis match, us v. the Taliban. We’re pretty good and have much better tactics and kit than they do, but they’re playing at home and know their way around the court better. So it’s pretty even. The problem is though that there’s someone on the sidelines who’s going to have to replace us halfway through and carry on the rally for us when we leave. Now imagine – and stay with me on this one – that this someone isn’t a bloke at all, but a monkey (Alan Partridge’s Monkey Tennis finally gets a series!!) who’s never wielded a tennis racket in his life. And so we, at the same time as continuing the rally, have to teach this monkey not only how to play tennis, but then how to win some points and eventually the match. So sometimes we let him do a shot or even a whole rally on his own, and sometimes he wins a point with an amazing cross-court dipping forehand that he’s plucked from nowhere, but at other times he just lies down and goes to sleep and we have to rush in and save the point. On other points he just starts smoking crack, or throws his racket away, and in the worst instances he actually starts attacking us with the racket – did you hear about that green on blue down in Gereshk last week? Mental, mate, mental. Now, give us a few years, until 2018, say, and I reckon we can give you a monkey who’ll take on anyone – Borg, McEnroe, Federer – but we ain’t got that long. It’ll be a wonder if, by the time we leave, the monkey will be able to sustain a rally. I don’t think that’s going to work its way into any counter-insurgency manuals, but you get my drift. They’re great scrappers, the ANA, but we both know scrapping’s the easy part; it’s everything else that’s hard.

  After four days we finally left Shah Kalay, hopefully for good. I hate that town; it gave us all the spooks. It came at a hell of a cost. Ransome’s legs, the lance jack (Latimer, that’s his name) and all those ANA dead and the Cat As and Bs. And the sight of those dead militia hanging there. Mmmm yep, that’ll be a nice memory for the rest of my life. ‘So, Daddy, what did you do in the Afghan War?’ ‘Well, little Tom junior, I actually had to cut down five naked, tortured dead guys who’d had their ears and noses cut off and then throw them in the back of a pickup truck.’

  Since then though, we’ve had the best bit of tour so far, two weeks of cutting about as a squadron way to the north of Loy Kabir, completely self-sufficient, living and sleeping off the wagons in the desert, interdicting TB supply routes and doing proper old-fashioned recce stuff like going into villages where no ISAF have been before and getting the local gen. It’s been great, and Frenchie, the leader, has given us a load of autonomy. Three Troop have been operating miles and miles way from SHQ sometimes, and it’s like being in the LRDG way back in the Western Desert – gleaming!

  Sometimes we regroup back as a squadron and go and try to pick a fight if we know where there’s a build up of TB in an area and BGHQ want us to go and take it on. The other day we had this massive firefight over about ten hours on the outskirts of this town in the north, Tuzal. My wagon almost got rid of a whole bombload – Dusty was absolutely loving it – and SHQ had the works called in: guns from Newcastle, Apaches, American A-10s. We’ve got this legendary USMC FAC team with us at the moment, centred on SHQ, and these guys have walked straight out of a comic book. The officer, a lad called Rob Martinez, spends the entire time chomping on a cigar and in his spare time reads a copy of the Iliad that he has with him. In the original Greek. Berserker. And he loves to do nothing more than, as he says, ‘bring the rain’. He always bangs on about it. It’s a squadron joke now that whenever guns or air get called in someone sends over the net, ‘Charlie Charlie One, get yer brollies out; rain is forecast.’

  We’re out here in the ulu for another ten days or so, and then … drum roll … it’s back to Newcastle for a few days and then … uh-oh … lock up your daughters … it’s R & R! Finally, finally 3 Troop get to the promised land. I should land back home on the 31st Jan or thenabouts. I. Cannot. Bloody. Wait. Please say you’ll be about. I’ll try to phone or email from Bastion or Kandahar. Ah yes, Kandahar. I’ve been hearing about that place all tour. It sounds like the land of milk and honey. The boys who have been out here before say it’s almost the best bit of R & R, as though it’s better than being home. Can’t wait to see for myself.

  Anyway, you’re boring me now. Oh, one turn-up for the books before I go: very, very slowly, it’s getting a bit warmer. Hopefully by the time I’m back from R & R I’ll be just in time for a bit of Op Bronze before the end of tour. Oh, and just in time for the fighting season to kick off again. Yippee. Mind you, if the last three weeks has been the low season I’d hate to see the summer of love out here.

  All best mate,

  T

  Just before dawn they began their routine, established over a month now and formalized into a rite. Ellis, on roaming stag, walked around the four wagons, put his head into the canvas shelters at their sides and prodded the sleeping bag closest to the entrance. In Three Zero it was Dusty’s, who levered himself out of his cocoon to lean over and shake Tom in the middle and Davenport beyond him. They lay there for a minute, in the cold damp of the shelter, dank with the frozen mist of their snores, then scrambled out of their bags and out of the shelter into the glowing purple of the pre-dawn desert.

  Davenport switched the engine on, and the Scimitar juddered into life. Dusty got into the turret, and Jessie, who’d been on the last radio stag slot, got out to amble back to his own wagon. Dusty oiled the gimpy and switched the BV on to heat up the boil-in-the-bags he’d placed in there the night before. Tom and Davenport packed up the shelter, teeth chattering and grey fingers fumbling in the cold as they rolled up the sodden canvas and fixed it onto the bar armour with bungees. Tom chuckled at something Davenport had said the previous night just as they were about to drift off to sleep, their sleeping bags pulled tight high over their heads: ‘Fucking hell, boss, it’s always bags around here. All the time. Bags, bags and more bags.’

  ‘What do you mean, Dav?’ Tom had mumbled, waves of sleep crashing against his eyelids.

  ‘Well, think about it. We sleep in a bag, we shit in a bag, we eat out of a bag, and then when we get slotted we get carried home in a bag. Might as well just rename Op Herrick and call it Op Bag instead.’ They had trickled off to sleep giggling and exhausted.

  Tom walked round the wagons. In the distance, about half a kilometre away, he could see the emerging silhouettes of SHQ at the centre of the ‘death star’ formation the squadron adopted each night, with the three gun troops the points of the star protecting its four wagons. Trueman was sitting on the front of his wagon drinking a brew, its steam spiralling into the air and catching on his thick dark beard, his cut calloused fingers poking through fingerless woollen gloves. He greeted Tom cheerfully.

  ‘Well, boss, we done all right, ain’t we? Six hours’ time and I’m going to s
mash my wagon straight into the scoff tent. I am desperate now, desperate, for some fresh. My body’s screaming out for some proper vit C. Any more of this and we’ll all get scurvy. Here, want some?’

  He held out his flask and Tom sipped from it. Hot chocolate mixed with coffee. It was delicious.

  ‘I know. I can’t wait. None of my clothes are going to fit me when I get home. Look at me.’ He tugged at the waist of his torn and oil-stained trousers, which billowed around his scrawny legs. ‘And my ribcage is even worse.’ He ran his hand up his left side and felt the undulations over his bones, and his gaunt face with its straggly beard grinned. He took another sip. He changed the subject, knowing that now was the time to ask. He had been sitting on this for days but now felt ready. It was a bit like when he had first asked Cassie out.

  ‘Um, Sergeant Trueman, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea if we, er, met up over R & R, if that’s OK, to go and visit Ransome and Acton in Selly Oak. I know it’s a bit irregular, but I think it would be good for them.’

  Tom tried not to laugh at his own stiffness. He thought in that moment about how Trueman had seen him grow over the last few months. His sergeant had known him for almost a year now. They had become great friends in that time, and yet they still both liked to maintain the gap between them, both slightly scared of admitting the depth of their friendship and nervous that they might become too close and then have it all crash down if they disagreed about something. Tom knew it was the right way for him. When they disagreed any awkwardness was taken away by being allowed to fall back on the rigidity of the army’s hierarchy. The matey-matey approach could work – Trueman had been close to Jules Dennis in Iraq – but it had proved a disaster for 4 Troop with Clive and Sergeant Leighton, who had started the tour all lovey-dovey and were now hardly speaking to each other.