by Andy McNab
It was initiated with an IED attack. They used a remote control: it had a command wire. They had the remote about thirty metres off to the flank, so that went off and then the electric charge went down the cable into the centre of the IEDs. And the IEDs were a daisy chain of twelve, which went off at the same time.
I was about a hundred metres away when they went off. There were six British blokes and a few ANA that were hit. The front call sign and the call sign behind the OMLT were actually on it [the IEDs]. But to this day I cannot believe how lucky they were. There was a wee lad, a British guy, who lost his right leg. His left leg was damaged. He had flash burns to his face and eyes. He was A Company. He was one of the team in Satellite Station North. It was Ranger Andy Allen. He was nineteen. He received immediate first aid from the guys and we were lucky because we had a CMT [combat medic technician] with us, Ranger Kelly. He and Ranger Fox were the first two there.
I wasn't sure who was caught in the blast. But as we started moving forward, we were engaged from two sides with PKM, small-arms fire and RPG. It turned into a large fire-fight.
At one stage, we were lying in a ditch and the corn on the cob was popping above our head. I had an SA80, a rifle. We also had GPMG and UGL [underslung grenade launchers] with us. The ANA had their PKMs, M16 rifles, RPGs. We're talking maybe twenty Taliban. It was pretty hairy and on two sides as well. It was fairly flat but they had occupied compounds and tree-lines, and they were engaging us from there. To begin with, we could see nothing – until we got about and could see where they were coming from. We got eyes on [the enemy]. Regardless of what was going on, the first thing we needed to do was to try and set the conditions to get Ranger Allen extracted. Believe it or not, the ANA were very good. Their company commander straight away launched teams to where he needed them to go, though obviously it was after I had prompted him. Straight away we had sent a contact report on the radio. Then, once we realized someone was injured, we sent a message: '1 x casualty, catastrophic bleeds to the right leg. Amputation.' The team that was in contact were still trying to stabilize him [Ranger Allen]. Bear in mind, we've only got six blokes, and once one of them gets hurt, there are only five left to carry him. So the team commander that was with them and myself were co-ordinating the plan to get him out.
The first thing we had to do was to get him to a pick-up point for the QRF [quick reaction force] to come and collect him. But we had to sort that out while we were in a contact as well. It felt like it lasted for ages, but maybe the entire contact lasted seven minutes max. The Taliban then ran out of ammunition; they just bugged out back into the compounds. Back into the Green Zone. I didn't personally get rounds off but the boys did. We definitely would have hit people [the Taliban]. During the contact, their closest call sign would have been 100 to 150 metres away at one stage. Once we started returning fire, the gap then increased to maybe 200 metres – because they start retreating. But what they were trying to do was to get closer [to where the IEDs had gone off] and try and disrupt the guys dealing with the casualty. But they had no chance because there were sixty ANA and the rest of the OMLT.
If there had been no casualties, a follow-up would have been carried out. But at that stage the main effort was to get the wee man [Ranger Allen] in. I set the conditions and positioned the ANA where I wanted them to go. We created a kind of corridor for the casualty to get extracted down. He was taken on a stretcher to a pick-up point where we were met by Warriors [mini tanks]. We were very lucky again, the four Warriors had just returned to Musa Qa'leh DC and they were parked outside the gate when they heard the explosion. So they started to move and, by the time all this had finished and we had got to the pick-up point – it was maybe just two minutes before the Warriors rocked in. Ranger Allen survived but, because of injuries to his left leg – due to the infection – he has actually lost that leg as well.
Once Ranger Allen had been extracted, the ANA and ourselves regrouped and pushed north again in order to clear the area we had been ambushed in and to secure the IED location. A number of small engagements occurred on the follow-up but nothing that caused concern.
But it had been a very well-planned ambush. Twelve IEDs going off which were spread at the distance the boys normally patrol at: five to ten metres apart. But fortunately no one else was badly injured. A few of the boys got blasted into the canal. There were a couple of minor cuts and bruises, but there was nothing else. We were unbelievably lucky.
July 2008
Captain Alan 'Barney' Barnwell, 845 Naval Air Squadron
It is quite pathetic to think we were looking forward to coming out here [Afghanistan]. But you do. You get used to doing the job [in Iraq], and it's nice to do a slightly different one. And it has certainly been a new experience here. We managed to get hit within ten days of arriving in theatre. It was getting dusk and we were heading west. I had decided that we would fly low-level rather than high-level. It was my decision, but it was not necessarily the right decision because we got hit. We had just done our third trip into FOB Rob [Forward Operating Base Robinson] and we were heading back out to [Camp] Bastion with six pax [passengers]. I had made distinct efforts to cross over the Green Zone at different locations – two K between them.
The problem was the time of day we were going back. It was obviously knocking-off time for the Taliban, having done their work in the fields. And he [his attacker] had clearly got back to his basher [home] and was sitting outside, having lit the fire, and was having his brandy and cigar, with his AK-47 sat beside him, when he heard the slap-slap-slap of a helicopter zooming back across. So he decided he'd have a quick blast at us as we flew past at around eighty feet, doing 120 knots. I didn't see him on the ground but we saw the first set of tracers coming up from the five o'clock position and he must have fired. We saw five or seven tracers.
So we broke off to the left, with my door gunner trying to get a bead on it. Obviously, his neighbour, about 200 yards up the road, had heard 'Joss Taliban' doing his rounds and he thought: I can't have him doing a few rounds without me having some too. So another position opened up on us as well. But it wasn't particularly accurate this time. One went across the nose – a couple of rounds of green tracer. This time my gunner did manage to get a bead on him and he fired off sixteen rounds back at him from our GPMG.
We continued to do some manoeuvring to get out of the kill-zone. We got over the desert, where there was nobody [no enemy around]. We looked at each other, had a bit of a laugh, then quickly checked out all the instruments to make sure everything was OK in the aircraft. We checked it for vibration and there was nothing wrong. The guys in the back were by now starting to grin and get some colour back in their faces because I think it was the first time they had been shot at in an aircraft as passengers. It was the first time I had been shot at in an aircraft with small arms as well, but never mind. So we then had a fifteen-minute journey back to Bastion, where we checked everything out and had a laugh about it. We gave the gunner a hard time for only getting sixteen rounds off when he had a box of 200. When we landed we got refuelled, went to our parking spot and I said: 'You'd better get the engineers up to have a quick look, just in case.' So they came up and they said: 'Hmm, seems to be a lot of fuel coming out of the bottom of the cab, boss. Oh, yeah, and there's a hole in one of your rotor blades as well.' So we had taken two rounds: one in the fuel tank and one in the rotor blade. I guess it was a narrow escape. All it takes is one bullet in your head and that's it, isn't it? So that was close enough.
July 2008
Major Jonathan Hipkins, Royal Military Police (RMP)
Part and parcel of the job is to look at incidents in which British forces appear to have injured, or even worse killed, a local national – it's called the shooting incident review process. I look with policeman's eyes to see if I feel there is any act of negligence or criminality – in essence to see whether it's prudent to conduct a formal police investigation.
I review, in a sterile environment, documentary evidence: statem
ents written by people who were there on the ground. So, for me, it is possible to divorce myself to a certain extent from what has gone on out there in a particular incident on a particular day. It doesn't mean that I don't find it sad when, as has just happened, a local girl, who was just six years of age, was killed as a result of a number of smoke rounds fired by mortars that were utilized on a hill to screen friendly forces. The [British] soldiers on the ground took all reasonable steps to make sure there were no local nationals in the area, thus limiting collateral damage, which is in accordance with the Rules of Engagement. And it was unfortunate. They just didn't see that there was a girl in the field on top of the hill. She caught a fragment of mortar shell that went into her chest, and she subsequently died from that wound. But she was so young and she was an innocent. War should be about adults fighting adults. It shouldn't be about kids. But at the end of the day there is only so much you can do in order to limit collateral damage. But I can sit here confident in the knowledge that British soldiers, certainly from what I have seen in all the shooting incident reviews that I have done, have taken every possible step to limit collateral damage here in Afghanistan.
July 2008
Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Parkhouse, 16 Medical Regiment
Over the past three years, I have dealt with high-energy wounds and low-energy wounds. A wound caused by a rifle round, a military rifle, will always be serious because the bullet, or the round, is travelling so fast that it has such a lot of energy, or potentially an awful lot of energy, to dump into the body. It is not just the hole that it drills through, but the energy it passes through the body. Even though the round might be only 5mm in diameter, the hole it can produce can be big enough to put your fist through. And that is purely due to the energy transfer because the momentum is mass and velocity. It's the velocity that's important when you're talking about a rifle bullet.
If you're talking about mortar shrapnel, by most standards it's travelling fast, but it's actually travelling quite slowly. But it's a big hunky piece of metal or stone or whatever, so that would cause damage to what it passes through. So with a hole caused by an assault rifle, you will often see a small hole where it hits the body, but the exit wound is huge. If it's in an arm, it can take the limb off effectively.
The wounds we were seeing have changed since Op Herrick 4 in 2006: a lot of those injuries were caused because of gun battles. They were full-on Wild West gun battles so a lot of the injuries we were seeing were gunshot wounds. There was just the odd mortar attack. Whereas the injuries that you see now, in 2008, are much more commonly associated with IEDs, booby-traps, mines, things like that. This is due to the fact that the Taliban have realized they can't win a gun-fight and they are putting their efforts now into IEDs – they're laying hundreds. The wounds now are multiple amputations, traumatic amputations. The new vehicles are saving a lot of lives, but we are finding multiple fractures, spinal injuries – head injuries due to the concussion effect of the explosion.
I am married but no kids. My wife, Helen, is excellent. She's ex-forces so she knows the score. I think for all people, the families, it's harder on those who are left behind. At the end of the day you come out here, you're fed, you're watered, you're looked after. All you have to do is get up in the morning, do your job and go to sleep. You don't have to worry about the bills, you don't have to worry about going to work, servicing the car, paying the tax. All the crap of life is done for you, so it's the people left at home who have the harder time. They have the separation, and the worry about what the other half is doing.
But we have bad days out here too. It's never nice when you lose somebody. I think we tend to take it personally, which is bizarre because we don't know these guys. We don't know them from Adam but we still consider them to be ours. We had this guy with a wound to his body. There was a long extraction [rescuing the patient] because they were TIC [troops in contact] for a long time. Unfortunately, we had to circle for several minutes before our forces were able to secure the landing site. Then, eventually, we had to go down and pick him up. So he had been down a long time and he came in cardiac arrest.
We continued doing our usual bits, securing the airway, opening up his chest both sides, pumping in as much fluid as we could. He was covered in absolute crap because he had clearly been dragged through ditches and whatever to get him out – to be extracted. I knew pretty much that he was unlikely to survive and I just realized that there was another family, in about four or five hours' time, who were going to be destroyed. You know it. Their world in four or five hours' time was going to be shattered. There is nothing you can do, absolutely nothing. And sure enough he died. But you take it personally. You shouldn't, but if you reach for perfection, now and again you're going to be disappointed.
July 2008
Sergeant Hughie Benson, The Royal Irish Regiment
On one occasion we were conducting a route clearance. It was a road that runs south to north through Musa Qa'leh. There were twelve of us Brits – but there were another hundred Brits clearing the route and providing protection on the west flank in the Green Zone. We were in the urban desert with sixty ANA and twelve of us, broken down into two teams of thirty ANA and six of us. We started about six in the morning and at about midday all was well. The route clearance had gone fine and everyone started extracting. We were the last to extract. And what they [the Taliban] had done was they let us push through inside the urban desert and then infiltrated behind us. I say infiltrated – they never actually had to fucking go anywhere. They had just come out of their compounds, armed themselves and waited for us to come back. So at this stage we were cut off from the patrol base.
When it started, we were about a K and a half – 1,500 metres – away. They [the Taliban] were between us and the PB. So we started moving back. The team that was on the road were engaged with RPG and small arms, and, straight away, we were hit as well from the north. So we started extracting, back towards the enemy behind us. Again, another planned attack on their behalf. We started coming back towards the PB. And then we were hit by those between us and the PB – and we were cut off. At one stage, there were thirty ANA and my team lying on their belt buckles on the floor behind a wall about two foot high. And the walls were just crumbling. PKM, small arms and RPGs were all fired. A couple of RPGs went over the top of us and hit the wall. Then they were airbursting the RPGs above us: deliberately trying to get them to blow up above us so that the stuff [shrapnel] came down on us. We actually got cut off from one of the squads of ANA – about fifteen of them. They were on the other side of the alleyway – they couldn't get across because of the walls. So we RVed [rendezvoused] at a rally point. I managed to get shots back, only because we were trying to get out of there, to be honest.
The ANA in the sangars [at the patrol base] had identified one of the firing points so they started engaging with a Dushka [Soviet-made anti-aircraft machine-gun], the equivalent of our 50-cal. We had a sniper that was at the base and he had pushed up to the top and engaged the enemy. We had people coming to help us but, in the end, we couldn't wait. We had to move.
That was probably the closest I've come to getting shot. We heard the bullets coming in around our feet and they were also hitting the wall we were hiding behind. And the wall was crumbling around us.
July 2008
Major Jonathan Hipkins, Royal Military Police (RMP)
I'm sometimes asked what is the bravest thing I've come across in Afghanistan. I didn't witness this incident but I discovered that a young twenty-year-old from the RMP had been exceedingly gallant when he reacted to help save the life of Lance Corporal Tom Neathway, who was twenty-five when he lost both legs and an arm in a Taliban IED attack. I had to look into exactly what Lance Corporal Chris Loftus had done and ended up having to write his citation. His unpublished citation – which resulted in him being Mentioned in Dispatches – is detailed here:
On Tuesday 22 July 2008 Lance Corporal Loftus was operating as part of a 7 man Section of X Company, 2
nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment. Whilst conducting a reassurance patrol to the north of Kajaki, Loftus' sub unit was directed to occupy a local compound in order to provide 'over-watch' to the north of the Area of Operations. A short time after establishing the position and without any warning, an Improvised Explosive Device detonated approximately 10 metres away from Loftus' position. As a result of the explosion, the Royal Military Police Junior Non-Commissioned Officer was blown off his feet and stunned. Whilst picking himself up, Loftus heard one of his comrades screaming for help and, without regard for his own safety and despite suffering from shock, he immediately went to the aid of his wounded colleague. Upon arriving at the location of the explosion, Loftus could see that his comrade had suffered traumatic amputation of both legs and extensive injuries to one of his arms. Despite the horrific scene before him, Loftus remained calm and, together with another member of the Section, carried out first aid treatment; applying four tourniquets in an attempt to save the life of the wounded Parachute Regiment soldier. Shortly after they had started medical treatment, the patrol came under attack from Rocket Propelled Grenades and Small Arms Fire. Despite the threat to his own life, Loftus did not flinch from his duty and courageously remained by the side of the wounded man in order to treat and reassure the casualty until a Medic arrived to take over. Loftus then remained in the open assisting the Medic in lifting the gravely injured soldier onto a stretcher and then onto a waiting quad bike. Once the casualty had been safely evacuated, Loftus returned to the scene of the explosion and whilst still under sporadic harassing fire, coolly reverted to his Royal Military Police role, taking a number of post incident photographs and recovering the casualty's military equipment in order to assist in any future police investigation.
