The Parachute Regiment’s training, history and fierce professional pride made it an obvious solution to my aspirations to engage in a more ambitious form of soldiering. However, my initial jubilation at being seconded to the Paras having already passed P Company was checked by the daunting prospect of joining a new and very different military club to the one I had been used to. Driving down to Dover one sunny autumn morning in 2000 was akin to going to a new school on the first day of term. I tried to suppress the butterflies in my stomach as I drove up the steep hill by Dover Castle which was the home of the regiment’s 1st Battalion.
I need not have worried. I had joined my own regiment at a time when it was still traditional for more senior officers not to talk to a new officer during his first six months in the mess. The ethos in 1 PARA was completely different and I was made to feel welcome from the moment I arrived. The members of the battalion who I met first were the Late Entry officers. Joining as private soldiers, or what the regiment refers to as Toms, each had been commissioned from the ranks and had a minimum of twenty years’ individual experience from across the regiment’s three battalions. As Toms or junior NCOs, each of the men I met that first morning had fought through the gorse line at Goose Green with 2 PARA, or had climbed the rocky slopes to fight on Mount Longdon with 3 PARA during the Falklands War. Their experience gave them every reason to doubt me as an outsider, yet they immediately took me into both their company and confidence. It was something that set the more general tone of my arrival and was to last for the three years of my tour with 1 PARA. It also reflected one of the Parachute Regiment’s key strengths of diversity. An eclectic mix of people, they have a progressive willingness to take in outsiders; when I joined 1 PARA, six other officers in the battalion had started their careers in other regiments, including the commanding officer.
Taking over command of the ninety-odd paratroopers that made up B Company I PARA was equally heartening and it felt like coming home. The soldiers I commanded were bound together by common characteristics of being fit and highly motivated. They had an edifying propensity to talk endlessly about going on operations and being ‘Ally’. In essence this meant having a certain martial coolness and taking pride in looking and acting like a paratrooper. No one seemed to care about your heritage, as long as you didn’t harp on about it and you were fit, good at your job and cared about the blokes. There were no armoured vehicles to maintain, duties were kept to a practical minimum and eschewed ceremonial bull. The training was also imaginative and demanding. My time in 1 PARA took me back to Northern Ireland for other emergency tours and we conducted exciting exercises using live ammunition in Kenya and Oman. Serving in PARA also took me back to Iraq in 2003 during the invasion to remove Saddam Hussein. Although it came late in the day, my experiences of serving with 1 PARA were all that I expected soldiering to be. Consequently, it felt like a natural process to transfer to permanent membership of the regiment towards the completion of my tour as a major.
Leaving 1 PARA ended with promotion to lieutenant colonel. After completing a 6-month visiting fellowship at King’s College I assumed the post of Military Assistant to the Assistant Chief of the General Staff. My boss was Major General David Richards, who was Mike Jackson’s right-hand man in the MOD and was later to command all NATO troops in Afghanistan, including 3 PARA. But taking over command of 3 PARA was still over a year away and my duties as his military assistant were to keep me extremely busy. At the time we were in the process of reorganizing the infantry regiments, fighting hard to minimize the impact of the MOD’s continual cost-cutting exercises and dealing with the ministerial fallout of fighting a vicious insurgency in Iraq. However, my thoughts were never far away from the prospect of getting back to field soldiering and becoming CO of a Para battalion. In fact I thought about it constantly. It was a very bright spot on the horizon amid a sea of ministerial bureaucracy driven by process-obsessed senior civil servants. I was still a long way away from the coal face of real soldiering but I knew that I was going back to it. Tubes and buses as a means of getting to and from work were soon replaced by running to and from the MOD with a weighted pack on my back. As I struggled to manage a training regime around long office hours, I marvelled at how much fitness I had lost since wearing a suit in Whitehall.
Had I joined the Paras at the start of my career I might have expected to have served in all three of the Parachute Regiment’s regular battalions. Having not done so, 3 PARA was an unknown quantity and I set about trying to get a feel for the nature of the unit I was about to command. If you took off a paratrooper’s DZ flash (a coloured square patch of cloth sewn on to the right arm to mark members of individual battalions on a parachute drop zone), you might not see any appreciable difference between them. The Paras’ basic ethos, physical toughness and high standards of robust soldiering are the same, but in the collective identity of a battalion differences do exist. The unique nature of 3 PARA went beyond the mere fact that they wore a distinctive emerald-green DZ flash. I knew that 3 PARA enjoyed a reputation for being the wildest of the regiment’s battalions. Although widely respected for its high standards of professionalism and preference for field soldiering, it had a tradition of having an even more relaxed attitude to discipline and dress and an intolerance of military bullshit than I and 2 PARA. These attributes were captured in the battalion’s nickname of Grungie 3. When I sought the advice of several senior Parachute Regiment officers who had already commanded Para units, virtually all of them commented that they considered 3 PARA to be a particular command challenge compared to the other battalions in the regiment.
It was a reputation that was well known throughout the rest of the Army and was reflected in the legendary antics of the infamous 3 PARA Mortar Platoon. The heavy weapons platoons of any Para battalion enjoy a particular inner sense of identity based on their specialization and relative maturity compared to the more junior Toms in the rifle companies. In 3 PARA’s case this was especially true of the Mortar Platoon, where every member who served in Afghanistan has ‘3 PARA Mortars’ tattooed on their wrists. Once famous for their wild parties, a certain gay abandon of normal conventions and breaches of discipline, the myth was founded on events long past. However, it still managed to attract several non-specific mentions on my CO Designates Course which was designed to prepare lieutenant colonels like me for command of their units. I wasn’t sure whether to be quietly proud or somewhat alarmed that no other student’s future command was getting mentioned. I decided on the former, believing that it is perhaps better to command a battalion that has a reputation rather than a unit without one. Nevertheless I drove through the gates of 3 PARA for the first time with a certain amount of trepidation: taking command of any unit is a daunting challenge, but assuming charge of the freewheeling, wild-child battalion that 3 PARA was vaunted as being was something else.
Added to this, 3 PARA had been warned off to be ready for operations in Afghanistan. Rumour of an impending deployment had been rife since the start of the year and had been building during my last few months in the MOD. The government had announced its intention to shift the focus of the UK’s military effort in Afghanistan to Helmand Province in the lawless south of the country. Two months before joining the battalion, it had finally been confirmed in military circles that 3 PARA would be the first UK Battle Group to deploy into the area. The precise dates of our deployment were still to be confirmed, as an official announcement by John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, was still to be made in Parliament. The delay in the announcement was subject to diplomatic negotiations with some of our European partners, many of whom were less than convinced about deploying into the more dangerous south. However, what I did know was that we would be expected to begin operations in Helmand sometime in the early spring of 2006.
The uncertainty of our deployment combined with the unknown quantity of my new command was not helped by the fact that, with the exception of the Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM), I knew virtually no one in 3 PARA. Nigel Bis
hop was thirty-nine years old and had been my company sergeant major in PARA. We had served together in Northern Ireland in 2001 and in Iraq two years later. `Bish’ was a committed professional. He had initially joined 3 PARA as a new recruit fresh from the regiment’s training depot in 1983. He had arrived at a time when 3 PARA’s exploits in the South Atlantic were still a central part of the battalion’s identity. Those who joined after the conflict felt a sense of inadequacy for not having been there. Bish felt it particularly because he joined 4 Platoon in B Company whose platoon sergeant, Ian McKay, had won the VC. McKay died along with many others of the platoon fighting on Mount Longdon. By the end of his first year in 3 PARA Bish had managed to prove that he was a capable young soldier and became accepted by the Falkland veterans. I rather hoped that it might take their new CO a little less time to fit in.
I arrived at the battalion’s barracks in Colchester at the end of October 2005 and soon began to realize that there was nothing wrong with 3 PARA’s reputation, as some of those whom I had consulted suggested. Within the first week I had visited each of the battalion’s six companies and I had also spoken to each of the battalion’s three messes, made up of the corporals, SNCOs and officers respectively. I had also addressed the whole battalion to tell them who I was, what I expected of them and what we would be doing to prepare for operations in Afghanistan in the coming months. Speaking to the massed ranks of several hundred paratroopers assembled before me might have seemed like a nerve-racking experience. But it wasn’t; I wanted to be there and relished my good fortune at being CO of 3 PARA. The one matter that might have concerned me was my own personal foot-drill. Marching in step, halting and turning about with parade square regulation was something I had always been crap at from the day I started my Army career at Sandhurst. However, I was at 3 PARA now and it was a relief to know that I could dispense with having any anxieties about it. In essence foot-drill was not something they did much of and certainly not something they put any great store by.
When I came to address the battalion for the first time I had a feel for the manner of the men I commanded. They were different, even from their equally professionally committed regular sister battalions, 1 and 2 PARA. Self-assured and freewheeling in their approach, they cared passionately about what was important in soldiering and disregarded the unimportant. They were my type of soldiers and I was now one of them. In essence they were my `angels with dirty faces’; relaxed in style, their attitude to soldiering appealed to me. All they wanted to do was go on operations and be tested in combat; like all Paras it was what they had joined the Parachute Regiment to do. Different though they were from the rest of the pack, if they had any malaise it was nothing to do with their diversity or approach. What they suffered from was a concern that the impending deployment to Afghanistan would turn out to be a disappointment.
The men of 3 PARA had also taken part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and had been disappointed by their experiences there. It had been billed as a combat operation, but they saw relatively little of the action and felt that their combat talents had been wasted. As a result, they were wary of having high expectations for Afghanistan. Many were concerned that it was being billed as a peace support operation. Their disappointment with Iraq and concerns that Afghanistan might turn out to be another damp squib reflected a general frustration in the regiment, as it had seen relatively little action since the Falklands War in 1982.
The regiment had not deployed during the first Gulf War and had not been involved in operations in Bosnia with the rest of the Army in the mid-199os. The balance had been addressed to some extent by 1 PARA’s operations in Kosovo and Sierra Leone in 1999 and 2000 and 2 PARA’s deployments to Macedonia in 2001 and Kabul in 2002. However, despite two commendable but brief actions, fought by A Company 1 PARA against the Westside Boys in Sierra Leone and C Company of the same battalion in Iraq in the last few days of their tour, these events had fallen short of the combat operations that Paras aspired to be part of.
At the time we knew little of the prevailing circumstances in Afghanistan. Reports from British military planners already based there suggested the area we were to deploy into was relatively peaceful. At the time I shared the same nagging doubt of my soldiers that Afghanistan could turn out to be another anti-climax. This was not helped by a comment made by John Reid in March 2006, a month before 3 PARA deployed. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he stated that: ‘If we are here [in Afghanistan] for three years to accomplish our mission and have not fired a shot at the end of it, we would be very happy indeed.’ Events were to prove that he could not have been more wrong.
2
Afghanistan
On initial inspection, Afghanistan has little to commend it as a country worth fighting and dying for. Located in one of the most inhospitable and remote corners of the earth, it is the world’s fifth poorest state and has become synonymous with instability, terrorism and war. It is a land of rugged mountains and dusty desert plains, where the winters are bitterly cold and the summers are blisteringly hot. It possesses few of the prerequisites of a modern nation-state. There are no railways, no national health system and the road network is restricted to one two-lane potholed circular highway. Racked by crippling poverty, a quarter of Afghan children die before reaching the age of five and 75 per cent of its population are illiterate, including many of its government officials. Afghanistan is a country of some 32 million souls made up of different tribal races of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Pashtuns. Fractured by ethnic and complex tribal divisions, they are a people bred of a tradition of hostility to central authority. Even with the presence of over 50,000 NATO troops, the writ of the Afghan government and the rule of law extend little beyond the capital of Kabul. Unity of national purpose is infrequent and brief; when it comes, it has taken the form of bloody resistance to outside interference.
Yet in geopolitical terms, Afghanistan has long been an area of global strategic interest. Sitting at the crossroads of Asia, the armies of Alexander the Great, the Arab Empire and Genghis Khan have all passed its way. Its borders were born of the imperial squabbles of the Great Game between Russia and Britain in the nineteenth century. But like many armies before them, the British Army’s previous interventions in Afghanistan have echoed with failure and less than successful conclusions. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42) resulted in the humiliating retreat from Kabul and the destruction of an entire British force. The second, between 1878 and 1880, saw the rout of a British brigade, while the third, in 1919, ended in inconclusive skirmishing with rugged Pashtun tribesmen along the North-West Frontier. Followed by the bloody Soviet occupation in 1979 and their ignominious withdrawal a decade later, these more modern incursions suggest that Afghanistan is a place where the normal rules of great power intervention do not apply. But after al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001, Afghanistan once again attracted international attention.
With the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001, as a consequence of America’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, NATO agreed to take command of an international stabilization force in 2003. Known as ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), the force was centred on Kabul and included a British infantry battalion. Initially, NATO’s mission remained confined to the capital and was kept separate from the American counter-terrorist operation in the south and east of the country. However, in opening up a second front of the war on terror in Iraq, the US took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan. Failing to stabilize a country in desperate need of reconstruction and development after three decades of war, it allowed a resurgent Taliban to return. Having already expanded into the north and west of Afghanistan, NATO agreed to extend its mission into the lawless and more violent south and east of the country. NATO troops would first assume responsibility from the Americans in an area known as Regional Command South. This included the provinces of Oruzgan, Zabol, Kandahar and Helmand and was to be completed by August 2006.
The decision to send 3 PARA to Afghanis
tan formed part of Britain’s agreement to switch its military contribution from Kabul and send a United Kingdom Task Force (UKTF) of 3,700 troops to Helmand Province. The troops were drawn from 16 Air Assault Brigade with 3 PARA providing the infantry element of the force. As well as its normal complement of three rifle companies and specialist platoons of heavy machine guns, antitank missiles, mortars, reconnaissance patrols and snipers, the battalion expanded to become an all-arms unit of nearly 1,200 personnel. Two troops of Sappers from 51 Air Assault Squadron of the Royal Engineers provided demolition and construction capabilities. Communication experts came from the Royal Signals, and combat medic technicians from the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) reinforced 3 PARA’s own medics. The artillery was made up of a battery of six 105 mm Light Gun howitzers from 7th Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery (7 RHA). D Squadron of the Household Cavalry Regiment, equipped with Scimitar reconnaissance vehicles and Spartan personnel carriers, provided a light armoured capability, which was further strengthened by a mechanized infantry platoon from the fledgling Estonian Army. As an airborne unit, the Battle Group would move by CH-47 Chinook troop-carrying helicopters. It would fight in conjunction with airpower and artillery, which would be coordinated by Fire Support Teams (FSTs) of forward air and ground fire controllers from both the Army and RAF. Close air support was provided by A-10 tank-buster aircraft and AC-130 Hercules Spectre gunships from the US Air Force. Other NATO countries also provided fixed-wing air support, including Harrier jets from the RAF. Apache helicopter gunships from 9 Regiment Army Air Corps provided further firepower.
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