Spoken from the Front

by Andy McNab

  On entering the swimming-pool, I can honestly say it was on the chilly side and, with hindsight, I should have come straight out, there and then. But pride (which has always been overrated) and determination to show that not only is Support Troop better than the Fieldies but also way, way more stupid stopped me.

  The following twenty minutes played out as follows:

  1. At the ten-length point, I had to stop doing the front crawl, as my head was beginning to freeze and I could no longer actually see where I was going.

  2. After 16 lengths, even though looking composed on the surface, underneath I secretly wished I hadn't seen the bloody pool.

  3. After 25 lengths, my fingers had morphed into the most inefficient shape for swimming and I was only faintly aware that I had a body to feel the cold with.

  4. After 35 lengths, pride was no longer fuelling me. The only thing keeping me going was the fact that I no longer knew what I was doing and swimming was warmer than not [swimming].

  5. At the 42-lengths point, I had drunk as much pool water as I could take and, with no significant drop in water level, it was time to get out or drown.

  The following 45 minutes consisted of extreme pain, uncontrolled convulsions and lots of gibbering, as three of my section slowly coaxed me out from hypothermia and back to the land of the coherent. The fine line between determination and stupidity had been crossed and redefined in the same instance.

  I have subsequently been informed that I might not be allowed to do any of the winter-warfare courses in Norway next year, as I am now more susceptible to cold-weather injuries. So, the moral of this story is: it doesn't matter how stupid your actions might be, there is always a silver lining somewhere. Only summer tours for me – yippee!

  January 2007

  Lieutenant Rachel Morgan, Royal Naval Medical Branch

  I worked with the Civil Military Ops Cell in Lashkar Gar. One of its roles is to help to build relationships with Afghan civilians, and another is to co-ordinate reconstruction and development. The cell supports the people who are not involved with war and tries to help them get back to normality. I was mostly based between Gereshk and Lashkar Gah, but I travelled all over Helmand province. It's quite normal to get embedded with a group of Royal Marines or Army soldiers for the time you are there in this role; it demands a fair amount of adaptability. I am not a war fighter, but it is necessary to go out on the ground with the patrols as much as possible in order to meet locals and build up relationships with the Afghan community. I took my helmet off, wherever I could, so that people could clearly see I was female. This would particularly help when trying to meet women. It was surprising how open Afghan women could be once they trusted you.

  I never had any problems in dealing directly with men – I did explain to one elder in a shura [meeting] that I was the only person available to lead it and I hoped he would support me openly in front of the other men who might not feel comfortable speaking to me. He told me he would tell them to put up with it – and that his mother had been a doctor in Kabul in the 1960s and that he remembered her wearing a mini skirt. He openly criticized families who would not let their girls go to school – everybody needs education, he said wisely.

  We had a situation where a woman turned up at the gate of the operating base in Lashkar Gah. I was often called to search women [the military always uses a female to search women out of respect]. But when this woman turned up I had been on a three-day operation and was catching up on sleep. She had come in the middle of the night so she wouldn't be seen [by Afghan locals]. In the morning I met her with an interpreter. I was overwhelmed that she had taken the initiative to find me.

  I said I was sorry she had been kept waiting, that she was welcome to be here and that I was delighted that she had taken the opportunity to come and speak to me. I tried to put her at ease and said, 'We don't have much but what we have is yours, so come and share some tea with us.'

  As the Afghan interpreter was interpreting, she was looking a bit blank and perhaps a bit worried. Then a [British] corporal on the gate took me aside and said: 'He didn't interpret what you've just said. What he actually said to her was: "She [Morgan] says you are a very bad woman and can't work out why you are here. She says surely if you were a good Afghan woman you would stay at home and you would not come out because your husband wouldn't let you be here.''' The corporal had only done a six-week introduction course in Pashtu but he had worked out that the interpreter had not interpreted properly. Later that day the interpreter was sacked. There is plenty of dishonesty amongst the interpreters and it's often so hard to pick this up. You can see what kind of things the Afghan women are up against.

  We took the woman into a hardened area and she took her burka off. We gave her a cup of tea and a KitKat and she sat talking to me like any of my friends would. She was in her thirties and had already had ten children – six were still living. She was a teacher and had come to discuss the roof not being finished in her school. She was wondering whether anyone could do anything to support her with this. In fact, we were able to help. Because of recent military successes, the Taliban had been pushed back from near her school and this had enabled a surge of reconstruction and development in her area. Over the next eight months we did all we could because we recognized what an amazing person she was to have taken this risk, and how much it could benefit her community. Her husband was a taxi driver and he was aware of what she was doing. In order for her to get to the operating base, her husband had had to take a big detour out of the area and dropped her five K away [so Taliban supporters would not link them to the British forces]. She lived in a town that was within ten miles of us and walked the rest of the way with her brother and their donkey.

  Her bravery was inspirational. If the Taliban knew what she had done, they might have kidnapped her or her children, or worse. At the time, male and female teachers were all getting night letters. These were anonymous letters through their letterbox saying, 'Don't work with the British. They are working for the [Afghan] government. You know what will happen to you or your family if you continue to work.' To the Taliban, the government were as much the enemy as we were.

  17 January 2007 [email home]

  Robert Mead, Ministry of Defence press officer

  Forgive me, children, for it has been almost two weeks since my last confession. In that time much and little has happened, though it's still freezing at night and the beard's still coming along nicely, so no need to worry there. But two weeks is clearly too long a wait for you all as at least one person has been pining for my heroic tales and made a personal plea for me to pick up the mighty quill once more.

  But let me first say it has not gone unnoticed that there are still several of you lucky people receiving these tales of derring-do who have yet to put finger to keyboard and reply. Now I know this sounds shocking to those who have, not least for those of you who know how self-important I can be. Pull your fingers out. Don't you know how many bullets I had to dodge to make it to the McDonald's Internet café at the end of the road?

  So here I am. You join me at the four-week juncture, which means I am just over a quarter of the way through. Yoicks.

  The extent of your hero's heroic heroism hasn't gone much beyond a trip to the lavatory cubicle as a beefy Marine just leaves and one is left in the momentary uncertainty of turning round and leaving the man thinking you have only come to perv, or soldiering on and then having to sit on a warm seat engulfed by someone else's noxious vapours. And bearing in mind the dried fruit they give us for roughage, this is not a pleasant experience.

  I was due to take a day trip to Camp Bastion last Saturday only for the small matter of a fatality to tie me to the desk instead. As it happens, there isn't much for us to do in the event of a fatality, other than spend the rest of the day in negotiations with the other authorities we have to deal with over who and when should release details.

  Lummy, that was a bit serious.

  Last Thursday was a long day. A long day. For once
it did not begin in the early hours with me being awoken by my bladder wishing to make an entrance stage left. Instead I had to thank a member of the local insurgency as we were woken at 2.15 a.m. when a bomb went off 150 metres from Grenade Alley (you remember Grenade Alley – the delightful walllined avenue in which I live). I say I was woken by the bomb. I wasn't. I slept through it, but was woken by the rest of my tent when the alert was sounded. Was this upsetting? Too bloody right it was upsetting, as I then had to sit out in the mother-lovingly freezing cold for the next three hours in my helmet and body armour huddled in the bomb shelter. I say shelter, it provides possibly slightly less shelter than the average non-stick cake tin. And it provides even less warmth at 2 in the bloody morning after one has only been asleep for an hour and a half. I went dressed for a long night just in case as, thankfully, your hero sleeps in his armour-plated thermal vest and long pants, so I was already half dressed when we had to helmet-up. The first hour or so was OK but, by crikey, I was rigid by the time we were eventually given the all-clear. Next time I shall be sure to take my hat, gloves and MP3 player.

  The day perked up with the chance to write some proper war-y stuff after an attack on a Taliban HQ early in the morning allowed me to get my teeth into things.

  However, the highlight of the day occurred when Mead received his first post of the tour (take note, family, hang your heads in shame). On this occasion the boys had come good and I was treated to a parcel of porn from EG [Colchester Evening Gazette – his former colleagues], Gawd bless 'em. Well done, the 70s throwback super-group of Clifford, Jones and Palmer.

  Then I had gammon steak and egg for tea. Lovely.

  What more can I tell you?

  I am getting fat, or at least fatter. Coupled with my beard there is every chance I may well resemble Ricky Tomlinson/Jim Royle by the time I return. My feeble state of fitness was exemplified last Wednesday when I was on the verge of free-vomiting. I am told this is a popular sport in Army camps, what with the fear of dysentery and vomiting always being only a squirt away. (Not here but when I was in Iraq – oooh, get me – one camp always set aside a Portaloo for those struck down by the liquid laxative so prevalent was it.)

  On this occasion, my being doubled up was all of my own doing. I had agreed to take part in a bit of circuit training for charity, organized by our combat camera team. I started with a 1.5 kilometre cycle ride and moved on to a 500-metre row. Both of these were, I see the stupidity of it now, undertaken alongside a very large Marine with a high volume of muscle definition. Mead being the macho-competitive type and always up for a challenge, decided to attempt to match the pace that this trained killer adopted. After the first two disciplines, in which I was a mere couple of seconds behind our well-honed adversary, I moved on to the floor mats to attempt 60 press ups, made it to 11, stopped, lay down, had my photo taken and lost a fair amount of facial colour as my body went into meltdown and I had to take myself off to a well-ventilated area and collapse. I am now a laughing stock.

  You will be pleased to know the deficiencies in my expensive sleeping system have been rectified, thanks to a $15 duvet bought from the camp shop, which provides considerably more warmth than my bloody expensive sleeping-bag.

  And I know you liked them last time so let's take a few moments for today's lesson on TLAs (and TLA stands for ...?)

  SAF – Small-Arms Fire

  PID – Positively Identified

  MSR – Main Supply Route

  ISTAR – Information, Surveillance, Targeting, Acquisition and Reconnaissance

  EF – Enemy Forces

  FF – Friendly Forces

  Put it all together and you get: 'Using ISTAR, FF PID EF on MSR and engaged with SAF', and so on.

  And answers on a postcard as to the definition of today's phrase, 'dynamic unpredictability', which sounds about as far removed from a definition of my good self as one could imagine.

  In such an environment, where every day seems strangely like any other, the little things become important. Each day is currently being given meaning by the 'Chick of the Day' poll, conducted by an engineer clerk who sits a few feet away and who, each day, changes the screen-saver picture of a woman on his computer. The few moments, which are often stretched as long as possible, spent looking at the day's picture are important reminders that women who don't dress solely in combats and who aren't disguised as men and, in most cases, it's a pretty thin disguise, do exist.

  Next time we speak I hope to have finally been out of camp as I am due to go into Lashkar Gah in the next few days. I might have even had my hair cut by an Afghan who charges $4. I hear he uses one of the rusty machetes you can buy at Kandahar airfield market. These are warrior people after all. Pictures to follow. Grrr.

  January 2007

  Lieutenant Rachel Morgan, Royal Naval Medical Branch

  The soldiers on guard duty at the FOBs [forward operating bases] try to make themselves quite approachable. However, if people come in looking for food or medical support, they are usually turned away. We had a guy who often came into an FOB in Gereshk to give us intelligence – about what was going on with the Taliban in the area. One day he had given us some information and one of the soldiers thanked him and enquired as to whether there was anything we could do for him. He asked if there was a doctor available, as he was suffering from a headache and perhaps he could take a pill to make it better. The [British soldier] explained that we don't provide health care for everyone we meet, but he'd see what he could do. When he [the Afghan] saw the British doctor he told him that there was a piece of shrapnel in his head which he had had for twenty years, since an injury sustained when fighting with the mujahideen. The British doctor agreed to take this shrapnel out of his head. He [the Afghan] did not receive any anaesthetic for this. The doctor just cut his head open and yanked it [the shrapnel] out. He [the Afghan, in his late thirties] just chanted all the way through, praying, and got himself into an almost hypnotic state that most of us cannot imagine. It was an incredible thing to witness. The British doctor gave the Afghan, a Hazara tribesman, his shrapnel in a plastic bottle to take away.

  20 January 2007 [email home]

  Captain Charlotte Cross, Territorial Army

  I went on a really long patrol to an IDP [internally displaced people] camp north of Lashkar Gah the other day. A female elder there has been threatened because she and her daughter work at the school ('school' being 5 UNICEF tents with nothing inside). The woman's very feisty. She's been beaten up before and shot in the leg. Apparently her phone number's been given out to somebody who's now phoning her up and threatening her, and she said she'll drink the blood of the person who betrayed her by giving her phone number away – these people don't mess around. So a colour sergeant asked me to go with him to the camp, to try to find out what's going on, and to speak to any females we might come across. We already know the Taliban infiltrate the camp; it's right next to the Helmand river and they use that area as a crossing point, and hide out in the camp before moving into Lashkar Gah or further south.

  It was a really cold windy day, and even in my thermals and body armour and webbing, I was freezing. We drove through Lashkar Gah town, then up through Mukhtar, and when we stopped the vehicles and got out we were in the middle of a maze of mud-walled compounds, some with UNICEF tent material for a roof, some with little chimneys made of hollow tree branches, and smoke pouring out. We went over to where some middle-aged men were sitting against a wall, and suddenly we had about 20 children crowding round us as well ... These were definitely the poorest Afghans I've met so far. The kids all had bare filthy black feet and red, streaming eyes ... and huddled miserably in the howling wind. Some smiled when I spoke to them, but mostly they just looked desperate. So did the men. We asked the kids if they go to school, and they all replied yes, and one older boy held up a little black bag with a school exercise book and a couple of pencils. It was obviously his pride and joy, pathetic though it was. The men denied the Taliban were in the camp and said everything w
as fine, no security problems here, but we didn't believe them. They said nothing ever happens on this camp it's very quiet ... so we said what about the mine we found here 2 weeks ago ... and they said oh apart from that. And we said what about the fire-fight at the police check-point down the road ... and they said oh yes and apart from that. The CSgt told them he wanted to help them, but while they continue to allow their elders to give what little food aid they get to the Taliban, and shelter the Taliban in the camp, the Taliban will fight us and we won't be able to help them. The men listened intently and looked very sheepish. They didn't argue. We left them and walked through the streets to find some different people to talk to.