by Kemp Ross
Mick set about trying to gain some intel from the assembled elders. ‘How many Taliban do you think are in the area?’ he asked directly.
It was a question that caused a good deal of heated discussion among the Afghans. ‘Around 1,000 to 1,500,’ the translator finally said.
A thousand? That seemed like a lot of Taliban. Were they here all the time, or did they come and go? The Afghans started talking among themselves – it was obviously a matter of some debate. Mick just kept quiet as the room filled with the sound of chattering Pashtun. The consensus, if there was one, appeared to be that they came from all round the surrounding area, but that recently two strangers had been observed, Taliban from Pakistan. Their names were a mystery to the elders, one of whom admitted that they were forced to provide food for the Taliban in the green zone.
Mick smiled and turned to the translator. ‘Tell this gentleman here that the next time the Taliban come and ask him for food, I'll give them all the food they want over here. The Taliban can come and eat here.’
The Afghans laughed. How funny they genuinely found Mick's wit, I'm not quite sure.
Once they had left, I asked Mick how useful the shura had been. He explained to me that the rule of thumb they worked by was to divide everything by ten, so when the elders said there were 1,000 Taliban in Now Zad, the likelihood was that there were only 100. It sounded to me like a much more realistic – and manageable – statistic. Aside from that, however, there was very little to go on.
Either the elders didn't know much about the Taliban's movements, or they didn't feel inclined to tell us. Whatever the truth, I couldn't help feeling that the locals were stuck in the middle and the information with which they were supplying us was distinctly unreliable.
The following morning at 02.00, members of 5 and 7 platoon of B Company set out for a patrol of Now Zad. I joined them.
The crescent moon hung brightly in the sky like a cradle and there was tension in the air. It was on just such a patrol – though admittedly one that went into the green zone – that Private Chris Gray, a nineteen-year-old from A Company, had lost his life just a couple of months previously. His patrol had come under attack by Taliban carrying small arms, heavy machine guns, RPGs and mortars. Private Gray's section had seen a group of Taliban just 15 metres away. They engaged the enemy and several Taliban were killed; but Chris Gray took a bullet through the side of the torso – the bit not covered by body armour. He was triaged as a category T1 and a Medical Emergency Response Team was immediately called in. They administered morphine, pumped his heart and drained the terrible chest wound before loading him into a Chinook so that they could perform a casualty evacuation, or casevac. The Chinook hurried down the Helmand river towards Camp Bastion with the MERT taking it in turns to pump Chris's chest and keep him alive. At Bastion he immediately underwent emergency surgery but it was no good. He died soon after his arrival in camp.
I was shown by one of Chris's colleagues some helmet-cam footage of the moment he was shot. It made uncomfortable viewing: violent and brutal, and to watch the panic of the soldiers knowing they were on the verge of losing one of their muckers was gut-wrenching. It was a reminder to all of us that even though everything sounded quiet out in Now Zad in the thick of that Afghanistan night, you could never afford to be complacent. You could never tell what was just around the corner.
Sergeant Canepa of 5 Platoon briefed his men before the off. He was a young soldier from Gibraltar, the Royal Gibraltar Regiment having strong links with the Anglians. Canepa had been promoted to Platoon Sergeant when Keith Nieves was sent home. He explained to me that the guys on ANP Hill had recently mortared Taliban positions in the town and there was no way of telling if the Taliban had laid booby traps in the town centre. It would be difficult enough to see these during the hours of daylight; at night it would be almost impossible.
We left the compound apprehensively and started walking deeper into the town of Now Zad than I had yet gone. It was like a ghost town. Silent. Eerie. I felt as if we were the last survivors of some terrible disaster and in a sense, I suppose, we were. It was hard to imagine that this place was once a vibrant, busy centre.
We spoke in whispers, not knowing if anyone was within earshot and not wanting to alert them to our presence if they were. The soldiers looked out into the night with the benefit of a heat-seeking camera. For a long while the camera picked up nothing other than the multicoloured shapes of 5 Platoon picking their way through Now Zad.
But then Sergeant Canepa received word. A heat source had been detected 400 metres away. There was something – or someone – out there.
I could almost taste the tension. No one knew what the heat source was. It could have been a dog; it could have been an innocent villager; or it could have been a Taliban soldier. The Platoon approached with care; but the heat source disappeared. I didn't know what to make of that. The town was interlinked with underground tunnels that led up into the compounds. It was well known that the Taliban used these little rat runs to move around and to get up close to British forces. Maybe one of them had appeared nearby and then ducked down one of these tunnels when he realized we were there. Or maybe it really had just been a wild animal. There was no way of knowing.
The sun rose. It took away the threat of the darkness but it brought with it the inevitable heat. Before long we were patrolling in 40 degrees. We didn't need heat cameras or night vision to see movement now and it was just as we were heading for home that movement was indeed spotted. The platoon divided itself into two, each group flanking one side of the suspicious area. They approached with caution, fully prepared for a contact with the enemy.
But it wasn't the enemy. It was some locals packing up a vehicle. They must have been the only stragglers left in this part of Now Zad, taking the last of their belongings, firmly locking up their compound and getting the hell out of there.
As I looked around that war-torn, deserted place, I couldn't really blame them.
Now Zad was tense. Everywhere in Helmand Province is tense. But Mick Aston had been right: the tempo here was a lot slower than it had been in Jucaylay during Operation Lastay Kulang. There was a risk that the soldiers would become stale. Not bored, exactly, but perhaps lacking some of the excitement they had come to expect. Something needed to be done to keep morale high. A distraction. Fun. So it was that B Company decided to put on its own talent show: ‘Mr Now Zad’. X-Factor Afghanistan-stylee.
Everyone was involved –5, 6 and 7 Platoons plus the Fire Support Group. Tim Newton was the MC; Mick Aston, 2ic Dave Middleton and I acted as judges, the British Army's answer to Sharon Osbourne, Danii Minogue and Simon Cowell, though I'm not saying which was which. The lads threw themselves into the proceedings with gusto. To start off with there was a shooting competition. Someone drew a load of heads – mine, the OC's, various others – which were pinned to a wall and then shot at with Browning pistols. There was the obligatory EastEnders skit with some hilarious Grant Mitchell impressions. Penis-pulling, bollock-twisting and other eye-watering genital puppetry seemed popular. Robert Foster showed how brave he was by licking the toe jam out of one of his mate's toes. He also raided the inadequate kitchen at Now Zad where he found chilli sauce, tomato sauce and mayonnaise which he then licked off someone else's feet. There was stand-up, singing and a lot of in-jokes aimed at the company's resident luvvie me including plenty of piss-taking about my character in Ultimate Force. The platoons competed against each other in a massive, heated tug-of-war. As a prize I offered tickets for any Premier League football match when the tour was over: it gave the event a whole new dimension of competitiveness. In the end, Private Hirsch was crowned Mr Now Zad – a title to be desired if ever there was one – and he went to watch Liverpool vs West Ham when he finally got back to England.
‘Mr Now Zad’ was a lot of fun and you could tell the effect it had on B Company. Morale, which had been flagging slightly, was lifted; and though this display of bravado and silliness might have appeared daft to th
e man in the street (not that there were any men in the streets of Now Zad), in fact it was a crucial moment for the lads, boosting their flailing spirits and making the relentless nature of their tour of duty a bit easier to bear.
I had been in Now Zad for about two weeks and my time here was coming to an end. So was my time in Afghanistan. It had been an eye-opening few weeks, to say the least. The myth that modern wars are fought electronically and at a distance had been well and truly debunked in my eyes and I had seen at first hand something of what these young British troops were up against in Helmand Province. I had seen how they lived and how they fought; and even though I was strictly a noncombatant, I had experienced to some extent the fear and excitement of battle. If I had learned nothing else, it was to respect the job that these remarkable young men, some of them still teenagers, were doing in the service of their country.
But what was it, I wondered, that drove them? Were they as surprised by the intensity of the fighting out here as I was? And just who were they fighting for? The answer to that final question was answered in no uncertain terms by the group of lads with whom I sat around in Now Zad DC just before the time came for me to leave. ‘For each other,’ I was told. ‘At the end of the day, Queen and country aren't holding a rifle on each side of you. You're relying on every bloke that's around you that's got a weapon system keeping you alive as you're doing for them.’
So what about the people back home? Did the lads think that they appreciated what the soldiers were going through out here? ‘I don't think they fully understand,’ came the reply. I had to agree with that and I hoped that what I was doing would go some way to filling that gap in the public's understanding.
One of the soldiers told me how much money he earned: his take-home pay was about £1,000 a month. It didn't seem like a whole lot to be paying someone for putting their life at risk on a daily basis and I certainly sensed that although morale was high in terms of B Company's self-belief, there was an underlying dissatisfaction with more general aspects of life in the army, and an agreement among them all that when this tour was over, they'd be getting out. It was only partly to do with money. As Lance Corporal Blewett succinctly put it, ‘Once you've done a tour like this, you can't go back to Brecon and throw Chorley grenades and fire blanks at someone.’
I could see their point; but I was also aware that battle weariness and homesickness were surely kicking in. I felt it myself and I hadn't been out here for half as long or undergone nearly as many contacts as this lot. I wondered how many of them, back in England and in the cold light of day, would really be resigning their positions.
Not many, I suspected, and in the event I was right.
10. Blue on Blue
At the time it was by no means certain that I would be returning to Afghanistan. I wasn't sure that I wanted to. Coming back home was, to say the least, peculiar.
Having spent so much time in the desert, your eyes become accustomed to the ever-present sandy colour. As I flew back over the fields of England, the patchwork of summer greens was almost hallucinogenic in its intensity. Home Sweet Home.
If only.
For the first week I went out every night and got drunk; I tried to exhaust my girlfriend; during the day I was in a lethal mood, a pig to be with. I'd only been out in Afghanistan for a month, but I'd come very close to taking a bullet. That alters your perspective on life, at least for a while. You feel angry with people around you for not understanding what you've been through. Having been with a bunch of guys who were managing to keep up morale in such difficult circumstances, who were always there for each other, I found it galling to walk down Earls Court Road and see everyone so wrapped up in their own affairs. I couldn't help wondering if they'd got their priorities wrong. They didn't have a clue about anything, surely? With hindsight, of course, I can see how skewed my attitude was. These people were just living their lives. Why should they stop doing that just because I'd been in Afghanistan? But when you come back from a war zone, it's sometimes difficult to think straight. I didn't know it at the time, but I was experiencing in microcosm the problems soldiers have when they return from a tour of duty. If I was like this after one month, what would B Company be like after six?
What was more, I felt guilty about the fact that I had come home while the rest of the lads were still out there. I wasn't a proper soldier; I wasn't one of them. But I had grown to know them well. To like them. I missed the camaraderie and the simplicity of life: eat, sleep, keep yourself alive.
I also felt in some way closer to the people they had left behind. So it was that when I went to visit Helen Gray, the mother of Private Chris Gray who had lost his life in the green zone just under a klick from Now Zad DC, it was an emotional moment for us both. As we sat in the comfort of her home, she spoke with a piercing, desperate eloquence of the trauma she was suffering at the loss of her son. ‘I just want him to walk through my door,’ she wept, ‘and dump his bag and raid the fridge. And plonk himself down. I don't sleep very well: I can't get to sleep at night and I wake up constantly through the night. It's like this massive brick wall that's been built and I can't get over that brick wall. And I feel like some days I'm never going to get through it. He said, “I'm going to bring you home a medal.” I told him I don't want a medal. “I just want you, Chris. You make sure you come home.”’
Chris Gray wasn't coming home. He would never again raid the fridge, or dump a bag of washing on the floor for his mum to do. He would never plonk himself down on the sofa. I had a tear in my eye as I listened to Helen's heartfelt words. And I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that what had happened in the green zone of Now Zad would affect so many people – family and friends of the departed – for the rest of their lives.
After a stint in Afghanistan my perception of what was dangerous changed. Needing to keep busy, I travelled to East Timor to film an episode of Gangs. By most criteria it was an edgy couple of weeks: we found ourselves caught in the middle of a massive riot, with burning buildings blazing all around us. The place next to our hotel was set on fire. I got tear gassed. Nobody could say it was a walk in the park, and yet it wasn't Jucaylay: I didn't have a Taliban fighter shooting AK rounds directly at me. I was shown the East Timorian gangs' weapon of choice, a hand-fashioned dart called a ramba ambon. It was a wicked-looking thing, and could do you a lot of damage. But it wasn't an RPG.
Gradually I acclimatized. Life started to get back to normal; I went back to being a rat in the rat race. I suppose I became once more like those people on Earls Court Road. Afghanistan, though, was always there, at the back of my mind. It would be going too far to say that I longed to return, or that I was addicted to the place. All I knew was that being out there had been one of the most intense times in my life. Surrounded by all that danger you somehow feel more alive. Back home seemed like a bit of a let-down after that adrenaline rush. What was more, I felt that the story hadn't fully been told, that there was more for us to film and to learn about the soldiers' lives out there. As their tour of duty progressed I wondered how they were coping. How they had changed.
I decided that I wanted to go back.
I was standing in my kitchen the week before I was due to return to Camp Bastion when the news came through. My ears had long become attuned to picking up details about the war in Afghanistan on the TV or radio and today was no exception. It was with a creeping sense of horror that I listened to what had happened. Three British soldiers had been killed by friendly fire. An American F-16 had dropped ordnance on their positions.
The three soldiers were members of the First Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment.
All manner of thoughts flashed through my head. Who had been killed? Was it any of the soldiers with whom I had struck up a relationship? Where had it happened? How had it happened? How were the survivors coping? And just what were the families of the dead men going through? To have your son or friend killed by the Taliban is a tragedy; to have him killed in an avoidable accident like this was unimaginable.<
br />
Gradually more information started to filter through to the media. The friendly fire incident – or ‘blue on blue’, as the troops refer to it – had happened in the village of Mazdurak, near Kajaki. Kajaki is one of the most isolated British bases in Helmand Province, at the top of the Sangin valley near the border with Kandahar Province. It's Taliban heartland. Kajaki is home to a huge hydroelectric dam. At the time it was working at only half its capacity. Plans were afoot to install another turbine: when that happened it would supply electricity to nearly 2 million people in southern Afghanistan. The dam is a main target for the Taliban. Whether they want to destroy it or control it is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, defending the dam is a major operational imperative for the ISAF forces in Helmand Province and its continued operation is crucial in the battle for hearts and minds.
It transpired that B Company had been engaged in a fierce firefight with the Taliban. They had called in fast air support to bomb the enemy's positions but something had gone horribly wrong. The dead, members of 7 Platoon, were Private Robert Foster, Private John Thrumble and Private Aaron McClure. I remembered them well, especially Robert Foster, who had been such an enthusiastic participant in the Mr Now Zad competition. It seemed impossible that they were dead. As I made my final preparations to leave, I could only imagine what sort of effect this incident would have had on the rest of the company. My mood was both sombre and apprehensive as for the second time I boarded a military transport from RAF Brize Norton to Kandahar Airport and then on to Camp Bastion.
The surviving members of 7 Platoon had been moved to Sangin District Centre for a short while to do sentry duty and get them away from the scene of the blue on blue and give them time to start coming to terms with their loss. A Company were stationed at the DC at the time and would be going out on patrol on a regular basis; but the B Company boys were excused that for the time being, and rightly so. I had been to Sangin once before, during our attack on Jucaylay. The lads then had been in reasonably high spirits as we swam in the river and prepared for the rigours of Operation Lastay Kulang. As we left Camp Bastion in a Chinook and flew low over the desert, I knew I couldn't expect them to be in the same frame of mind this time round.