by Kemp Ross
Before I even fired the weapon, Stuart Parker gave me a quick tour of its capabilities. For close-quarters battle, he explained, a bayonet was fitted on to the end. These bayonets have been carefully designed to be thrust into the body and to give what Stuart described, in a delightfully military term, as ‘rib-parting capability’. One edge is kept permanently blunt to help it split bone and a long indentation along its length – the ‘blood drain’ – is there to allow the air to get in and prevent a suction effect.
Stuart then took me to the firing range, where I was to see just how well I could handle the weapon. It was difficult at first to hit the mark, as the rifle I had been given had not been zeroed to my eye, but that only made the exercise more authentic because if I were to pick up an SA80 on the battlefield, that wouldn't be set up for me either. I'd had some experience with guns on the range before but this was different because it involved running, kneeling and then shooting. It's one thing taking time to aim at your target; it's quite another going from moving to being very still, and my first few shots went wide of the mark. I began to get the hang of it, however; I even started to enjoy it – even though I knew I was going to have to put up with a bit of ribbing from the lads if I failed to make the grade. The fact that I had portrayed an SAS soldier on screen made it too irresistible for them not to take the mick. In the end I passed the exercise, though hardly with special forces-like accuracy. ‘SAS, my arse,’ commented the guy reading out the scores. Everyone laughed. At me or with me? I wasn't sure, but I knew I had to take their teasing in good heart if they were ever going to accept me into their confidence.
I was pleased that I had done reasonably well, but I also knew it would be a different kettle of fish if someone was actually firing back at you. If that's the case you often need more than a rifle and the SA80 is just one part of the infantry's arsenal. Over the days that followed I was introduced to a whole range of weaponry that would be used in the fight against the Taliban in Helmand Province. The .50 calibre machine gun – or fifty-cal – would be one of the infantry's most valued weapons. It's not new – the same weapon was used during the Second World War, as well as in Korea and Vietnam. I was soon to learn, though, that along with the GPMG – the General Purpose Machine Gun – it's the most effective weapon in Afghanistan. The fifty-cal is too heavy to carry, so it's generally mounted on a tripod and fixed to the top of a vehicle or on top of a building and it's often used by Fire Support Groups – teams that deliver artillery fire from separate locations to help infantry on the ground – from tactically superior situations. From these locations it fires its destructive rounds at a ferocious rate. The Taliban don't like it. When they see fifty-cal rounds, they run like hell.
The 81mm mortar is another powerful weapon. It fires shells at low velocities and high-arced trajectories. The rounds can be fired so high in the air that they can hit aircraft – a problem if you have air support, but the teams that run these weapons are incredibly efficient and good at their jobs, and mortar fire is an essential part of the infantry's weaponry.
The grenade machine gun fires 40mm grenades at a rate of 340 per minute. It's accurate and deadly. Not as destructive, though, as the Javelin anti-tank missile. A single shot from this machine costs approximately £60,000, but you get a lot for your money. It's a fire-and-forget missile that comes with a reusable Command Launch Unit, or CLU. The operator can look through the CLU and lock on to a target. Then, even if the target moves, the missile will follow it. It's an amazing weapon to watch. The missile is ejected relatively slowly from the launcher. It appears to hover for a few seconds while, like a dog after a bone, it sniffs out its target. Then it powers up and when it hits its mark, its destructive capabilities are astonishing. Of course, a weapon like this isn't much good in close contact, but for long-range, moving targets it can be invaluable. And although it's called an anti-tank missile and is not designed to take out infantry, I've seen it used in that way. In fact, I've seen it used to take out one person. Sixty grand to kill a single Taliban – it's no wonder war is an expensive business. One of the company told me he wanted to be a Javelin millionaire by the time his tour was over. I don't know if he managed it, but he probably wasn't far off.
The need for the troops to train properly with these weapons was brought home to me pretty sharply that first day. I was standing by the Javelin during the training session, wind blowing through me and snow on the ground. I watched as the weapon was fired. Instead of reaching its target, it fizzed and dropped about 30 metres away from us like a firework that had failed to explode – a very big firework with the capability of taking out half a football pitch when it went bang.
I stared at it in horror for a few seconds, then turned to the range master. ‘What do we do?’ I screamed at him over the howling wind. ‘Run?’
‘It's a bit fucking late for that now!’ he roared at me.
I started backing off, edging away from the weapon that was sizzling on the ground in front of me. If it had gone off, there was no way I'd have made it to Afghanistan. In fact, there was no way I'd have made it off Salisbury Plain. Thankfully, the technology of the weaponry is such that the missiles don't arm themselves until they've travelled about 100 metres in case such things happen. It brought home to me, though, what a dangerous environment soldiers work in even when they're not on the front line.
Some bits of our training went better than others. During a mock contact, the platoon to which the camera team and I had been assigned found themselves stuck in the crossfire between the rest of B Company and the ‘enemy’. If live rounds were being fired, we'd have been dead. Subsequent to that, during the night exercises, similar mistakes were made; the platoon seemed to be confused, not knowing what to do as orders were shouted and rounds cracked overhead. It was a quiet group of soldiers that received a no-holds-barred bollocking from Sergeant Ben Browning. The lads assembled under canvas. They did their best to hold their heads high, but they couldn't hide their sheepishness and disappointment in themselves as they sat around with the embarrassed grimaces of pupils being told off by their teacher. This was no schoolmasterly ticking off: it was a robust reminder that this was more than just a game of soldiers. ‘It just wasn't fucking acceptable tonight. Just because you don't know what's going on, it's no excuse to stand around walking up and down the line. Who sent the schmooly out?’
There are two kinds of schmooly – a type of flare – both of them generally sent up by mortars. One of them lights up the sky, the other sends out an infrared light. If you're wearing infrared goggles it means your enemy is displayed without being able to take advantage of the light. But it's essential that the schmooly lands in the right place, as otherwise the advantage is given to the enemy – and that's just what had happened that night.
A sheepish private raised his hand when Sergeant Browning asked the question. ‘Fucking hell, buddy,’ Browning told him, his voice at once comradely and chiding, ‘it's got to go over their side. All you done was fucking light us up.’
Nobody was under any illusion that if these battle situations had been replicated in Helmand Province, there would have been casualties. As for the camera team and me, we could only hope that the training we had received on Salisbury Plain would be enough to keep us safe if and when we finally came under enemy fire.
3. The Road to Kandahar
They say that when somebody goes away, it's always more difficult for the people left behind. It seemed to me that this might be especially true in the army. Many of these men had wives and children; those who didn't had parents. All were to be subjected to the agony of waiting for their boys to be sent to one of the most dangerous places in the world. I wanted to know how they would cope with this; while the lads were in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, I wondered how they would deal with the uncertainty and the fear.
Josh Hill, the eighteen-year-old private who'd had difficulty with the ladder during the FIBUA training, had a markedly resolute attitude to the prospect of the tour. When I asked him how
he felt about the fact that he might be called upon to kill someone, he answered without hesitation. ‘At the end of the day it's either I get shot, or my muckers get shot, or the enemy gets shot. I'd rather kill them than they kill me or my muckers, so it'll have to be done.’
Fair enough. But speaking to his parents Lesley and Graham a few weeks before the Anglians departed, I got a different perspective. They sat together on their sofa in the comfortable front room of their house, clearly bristling with pride at what their young man was about to achieve – and rightly so. There were other emotions than pride, however. Josh had just told them that their departure had been brought forward a day. ‘You look at his face,’ Lesley told me quietly. ‘You see worry on his face and then he's gone, because he doesn't want to talk about it.’
They were full of parental anxiety but, as Graham explained, they didn't want to show Josh how worried they were. Their son was looking forward to the thrill, the excitement of doing what he had trained to do, and I sensed that they did not want to stamp on that excitement by making their own worries too obvious. But worried they were. Desperately. I could only imagine how difficult it must be, spending your life ensuring the safety of your child and then standing helpless as they are sent to perhaps the least safe place in the world. I admired them for dealing with it so calmly, albeit only on the surface.
Many of the Anglians had been soldiers for a lot longer than Josh Hill and not all of them had yet come in contact with the enemy. Sergeant Keith Nieves had been waiting thirteen years for this moment and he was looking forward to it. ‘It puts a glint in your eye,’ he told me. ‘You know the cliché: we're trained to do it. It's like a dream come true for me… hopefully I'll get the chance to actually do my job and fight an enemy.’
Keith didn't know it yet, but his first experience of enemy contact was going to take a toll. He was clearly looking forward to getting out to Helmand, which is more than could be said for his wife, Angie, who would be left at home with their two sons, four-year-old Harry and two-year-old Peter. Angie became tearful when Keith described his preferred method of leaving for a tour of duty: early in the morning while everyone was still in bed. That way all the goodbyes could be done the night before and he could just give his family a farewell kiss while they were still sleeping. ‘That's the easiest way,’ he told me. I wasn't quite sure that Angie agreed.
I wondered how she dealt with the sudden absence of her husband. ‘That's the hardest bit,’ she wept, ‘when Keith goes. There's lots of tears for the first couple of weeks and then you just let the weeks go past until they come home. That's all you can do.’
Angie apologized for crying, but really she had nothing to apologize for. As she stood there in the kitchen of their army accommodation, I was struck by how different her life was going to be to her husband's while he was away. It made me painfully aware that it's not only the fighting soldiers who are affected by this war. Girlfriends and wives like Angie wouldn't be facing the enemy on the front line, but they would have their own battles to fight, bringing up children by themselves, not knowing whether a grim-faced representative of the MoD would be knocking on their door the next day to give them the news that every armed forces family dreads hearing.
Away from home, the lads lack many of the comforts that the average civilian takes for granted: hot food, a table to sit at, porcelain toilets. They are allowed to take a comfort box – a stash of personal items intended to make their lives out there a bit more bearable. Obviously, when they were on operations at the outstations they would only be able to take the bare necessities with them; but at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Afghanistan, where there would be a bit more room, simple comforts such as quilts, footballs and rugby balls might put a smile on their faces and make all the difference to them. Keith Nieves supervised the packing of some of these comfort boxes as I looked on. He performed this task with a quiet sensitivity – he knew how much some of these items meant to the troops.
If only the same could have been said for me. When I saw one of the lads packing a small cuddly toy, I started jeering. ‘Who's taking a teddy bear?’
The lad looked a bit crestfallen. ‘It's mine,’ he said.
‘What, are you going to want cuddles from your teddy?’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘My girlfriend gave it to me when our child died.’
I felt about two inches tall, clumsy and foolish. Not for the first time I wondered what right I had to be holding a spotlight up to these people's lives; and it was a reminder that the infantry troops I was to be spending time with were not just fighting machines. They were ordinary people, with ordinary concerns and ordinary lives. They just happened to be doing an extraordinary job.
On 5 April 2007, the First Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment left Pirbright Barracks for their six-month tour of Afghanistan. Many of them left wives and children behind them. None of them really knew what would be waiting for them. Some of the soldiers would come back wounded, their lives irreparably changed.
In a sad kind of way they would be among the lucky ones, because others would never return.
Britain's disastrous retreat from Kabul, which ended the First Anglo-Afghan War, did not make Afghanistan any less tactically important. And though it took a while for the British to lick their wounds, it wasn't long before they started trying to exert their influence once more in that country, which had become a buffer between the British and Russian Empires.
Dost Mohammed, the Afghan leader whom the British had toppled, regained power in 1843. A decade later, realizing the need to have some kind of influence in the area, the British resumed relations with him and in 1855 signed the Treaty of Peshawar, which pledged that Britain and Afghanistan were friends of each other's friends, and enemies of each other's enemies. It even permitted the British to establish a military presence in Kandahar, the main city of the province adjoining Helmand, from which to wage their conflict with the Persians to the west. This promising political situation deteriorated over the next twenty years.
On 22 July 1878, an uninvited Russian diplomatic mission arrived in Kabul. The British demanded that the current leader, Sher Ali, receive a British mission too, but he declined. Not only that: he would hinder such a mission by force if it were despatched. In September, the Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, ignored this warning and sent a diplomatic delegation to Kabul. They were turned back at the eastern entrance to the Khyber Pass. This diplomatic rebuke sparked what would become the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
The British deployed 40,000 troops and proceeded to occupy huge swathes of the country. In order to prevent the full occupation of Afghanistan by the British, the new leader, Mohammad Yaqub Khan, signed the Treaty of Gandamak. This treaty ceded control of Afghan foreign affairs to the British, who withdrew their army, having installed representatives in Kabul.
Perhaps the British had forgotten what a treacherous place Afghanistan could be for those not welcomed by its people. On 3 September 1879, the British representative in Kabul, Sir Pierre Cavagnari, was murdered along with his guards and staff as a result of an uprising. It was suspected that the Afghan leader, Yaqub Khan, was complicit in the assassination. Khan was forced by the British to abdicate in the aftermath of this bloody event. The British considered placing his brother, Ayub Khan, on the throne, but instead opted for his cousin, Abdur Rahman Khan. As a result, Ayub Khan started a rebellion and in July 1880 he clashed with British forces at the Battle of Maiwand.
Maiwand saw 25,000 Afghan warriors fight against a combined force of 2,500 British and Indian troops. Nearly 1,000 of these British troops were killed and although the Afghans lost almost 3,000 of their men in some particularly vicious fighting, the battle represented a decisive victory for them.
Ayub Khan was later defeated in the Battle of Kandahar and it is generally accepted that the Second Anglo-Afghan War eventually resulted in a victory for the British. But not before they had sustained unacceptably heavy casualties and a bloody nose. They withdre
w from Afghanistan once more, the determined, warlike nature of its inhabitants having been displayed to them yet again.
*
Six weeks after the Royal Anglians left for Helmand Province I prepared to join them. The night before my departure my documentary series Gangs was awarded a BAFTA. The award did not go uncelebrated so, truth to tell, I could have arrived at RAF Brize Norton in better shape. Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. A fuzzy head isn't the worst accompaniment to your first trip to a war zone. It helps keep your mind off the reality of what you're doing. In the few short weeks they had been away, the Royal Anglian Regiment had already lost two men. A tragedy for their families and colleagues; a bitter reminder for us that this was going to be a long way from the world of awards ceremonies and parties.
Checking in at Brize Norton is not quite like checking in at Gatwick. There's something a bit unusual about the soldier behind the check-in desk asking you in one breath whether you've got any sharps on your person and in the next if you have your body armour and helmet with you. We were to fly to Kandahar Airport before transferring to Camp Bastion. Kandahar Airport was constructed by the Americans between 1956 and 1962. Ostensibly it was built as a refuelling station for aircraft travelling between the Middle East and South-East Asia; the fact that it was designed along the lines of a military base, however, suggests a bit of forward planning on behalf of the Americans in the case of a military confrontation between the US and the USSR. During the Soviet occupation it served a military function and it is now maintained by ISAF – the International Security Assistance Force, part of the United Nations. It's the second biggest airbase in Afghanistan and home to more than 12,000 personnel. It functioned as a staging post for the 7,000 British troops serving out there at the time.