Danger Close

by Colonel Stuart Tootal

  With four days to go before our first patrol, I spent my time overseeing the continued planning, shuttling back to KAF for update briefings and hosting what was to become a continual stream of visiting VIPs who all wanted to come and look at Bastion. The Secretary of State for Defence was one of the first to arrive. I spent about an hour briefing John Reid, who chastised me playfully about raising the issue of the lack of helicopters with the Prince of Wales. Reid rang me out of the blue a few days later to ask me if our communications systems were robust enough for the task of operating over the long distances we would be expected to cover. He was due to brief the families of the six Royal Military Police soldiers who had been killed in Iraq in June 2003. At the inquest into their deaths the coroner’s findings had criticized the lack of available radios, which might have allowed them to call for help when the Iraqi police station they were working in was taken over by an armed Iraqi mob that subsequently murdered them. Reid wanted to be able to tell the families that lessons had been learned and the Army now had adequate radios in place. I told him that our communications systems were more robust, but reiterated the point I had made during his visit, that we were still short of many satellite radios. He focused on my comment of improved robustness, but said nothing about the outstanding shortages before he rang off. I had been with 1 PARA as the second-in-command in Iraq when the six Royal Military Police had been killed. I had attended the coroner’s inquest in October as a witness. That night I noted the conversation in my diary and wondered whether I would be attending future coroner’s inquests as a CO.

  The morning of 29th April dawned clear and bright, like most other days in Bastion, although by midday the air would be full of sand which would reduce visibility to some 20 metres and blot out the sun. What was different about the 29th was that it was the anniversary of the fall of the Taliban and the date of our first patrol into Gereshk. I had already flown down to join A Company in FOB Price the day before, as Tac and I would be going out with them to get a feel for the ground. After being briefed by Will Pike who commanded A Company, I set off to the ranges with Tac to check-fire our weapons on the base’s makeshift range. I noticed a small group of other British soldiers who were also zeroing their weapons.

  One made a point of introducing himself to me and immediately started with a charming apology. He was a friend of one of my other company commanders and had lobbied hard to get a slot with 3 PARA as a company second-in-command; I was short of one and he came highly recommended so he was offered the job. However, at short notice a vacancy in his old unit turned up which offered him the chance to deploy to Afghanistan with them. Consequently, we were still short of a deputy for B Company. I had been disappointed by his sudden change of heart that left us down a key commander, but I understood his decision; every soldier wants to deploy on operations with his own unit and mates he knows and trusts. Additionally, I was won over by his Irish charm and the fact that he had the balls to come and speak to me when he could have said nothing and I would have had no idea who he was. The meeting stuck in my mind because the next time I was to come across this affable Irishman it would be in far more tragic circumstances.

  The next day the patrol set down next to a large mud-walled compound on the outskirts of Gereshk. The downwash of the rotor blades kicked up dust and debris and scattered it around the compound. Goats dashed for cover and a donkey brayed frantically as the mechanical monster roared into their midst from the sky. Local Afghans came to their doors and looked at us with astonishment, as I hoped the reed-matted rooftops on their outhouses would survive our arrival. As the helicopter departed we waited for A Company’s troops to fan out and secure our route to the town’s hospital. A small boy rushed up to us with a jug of water. A broad smile broke out on his face as we made a show of accepting his hospitality by washing our faces and hands in the cool liquid. We thanked him in Pashtu and began moving out of the compound once A Company reported that they were in position. He ran proudly back to his father who acknowledged our gratitude. However unannounced and unorthodox our visit to his compound had been, the Pashtunwali code of Melmastia, which meant showing all visitors hospitality, appeared to have been satisfied.

  We patrolled along the town’s main street in soft desert hats with our Para helmets slung in order not to appear threatening. I moved with my Tac group of key staff officers, signallers and immediate force protection among a bustling traffic of white Toyota Corollas, minibuses, motorbikes and donkeys. We passed open-fronted shops which seemed to sell everything from food produce to transistor radios. Small, angelic-looking children went barefoot on the stony ground as they gathered around us. Excited by our presence, they asked for sweets and took an intrigued interest in looking through our rifle sights. We greeted everyone we met, aware that this would have been the first foreign foot patrol most of the inhabitants of Gereshk were likely to have seen since the days of the Russian occupation.

  Our salutations of Salaam alaikum were met by some with the customary response of Alaikum es salaam, the right hand spread to the chest, and the odd handshake. Other people watched as we passed; some smiled and waved as they went about their daily business. Old men, all wearing beards and black or white turbans, sat on their haunches drinking tea from small glass cups. Some smoked and others fingered prayer beads. Their look was one of mildly interested curiosity. No doubt they had seen soldiers of many different armies pass this way before. However, the expression on the faces of the younger men caught my attention. They tended to be dark looks of suspicion and hostility; few were prepared to return our salaams. They lounged in the background looking menacing. A few solitary individuals watched and followed us from a distance either on motorbikes or on foot. They stopped occasionally to speak into mobile phones; it was obvious that we were being ‘clicked’, a term borrowed from experiences in Northern Ireland where local inhabitants kept tabs on a patrol in Republican areas and reported its movements to the IRA. Did these men represent our first encounter with the Taliban? It was impossible to tell.

  The women were the one element of the population that ignored us completely. We didn’t see their faces; shrouded head to foot in burkas of light powder blue, they looked out on the world from behind the meshed eye slits of their veils. They followed dutifully a few paces behind their menfolk or scurried past without sparing us a second glance. To do so would have incurred the wrath of their male relatives. Any engagement with us, or any other unrelated man, would be seen as besmirching family honour and could have resulted in a savage beating, or worse.

  We found the hospital quickly enough. It lay behind a thick iron gate in the middle of a shady compound off the main street by the side of the canal. The canal drew water from the Helmand River that cut north to south through the town. We loitered dutifully at the bottom of the steps while we waited for the hospital administrator to come and meet us. His hooked nose and dark olive skin suggested he was a Pashtun, but he wore western clothes, a doctor’s white overcoat and spoke excellent English. He willingly invited us into his facility. I left my rifle at the door and entered with Harvey Pynn, the unit’s medical officer, and Major Chris Warhurst, who was the Engineers’ squadron commander. We were given a short tour of the hospital wards and a small operating theatre. It was basic but functional. At the end of the tour I asked the doctor about his concerns as we drank sweetened black chai (tea) from the small glass cups that we had been given.

  The doctor mentioned that he had difficulty accessing basic drugs, and that the hospital had no modern washing facilities so everything had to be done by hand. We had all noticed the soiled sheets in the ward we had visited but asked why the large industrial washing machine we had passed in a corridor was still sitting in its cellophane wrapping. He told us that it had been given to the hospital by the US government agency USAID, but that they had failed to install it before the American PRT had withdrawn from Helmand. Chris Warhurst chipped in that some of his Engineers were dual trained as plumbers and electricians and he was pretty conf
ident that he could get it working. Harvey Pynn also said that he could afford to provide many of the drugs the hospital needed from our own supplies. The doctor nodded enthusiastically and we all felt elated. Within the space of a few hours on the ground we had identified a quick-impact project that would make a small but near-immediate difference to the lives of some of the locals. Additionally, it could be delivered from the Battle Group’s own resources.

  The rest of the patrol was uneventful. We visited the main ANP police station and met the police chief before patrolling back to FOB Price on foot. As we climbed out of the town we passed one of the ANP checkpoints on Highway One. The policemen wore uniforms and allowed the traffic to pass unmolested. No doubt when we were out of sight, they were likely to slip back into civilian clothes and extort bribes again. The corruption among the ANP was endemic and it made us all wonder how we could ever help the Afghan government win the consent of its people when it had a police force that was little better than a bunch of bandits.

  My thoughts about the ANP were quickly replaced by the sheer mental effort of moving through the oppressive midday heat on foot. Wearing body armour with ceramic bulletproof plates, plus water, ammunition and weapons, each man carried in excess of 50 pounds in weight. Those with radios carried nearer 70 pounds. I noticed how I quickly began to lose situational awareness of what was going on around me, as I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. FOB Price’s watchtower loomed in the hazy distance 5 kilometres away across the sun-baked and featureless gravel plain. As the sweat ran in a constant stream under our body armour we sipped persistently from the tube-fed CamelBaks on our backs, but the FOB didn’t seem to get any closer.

  The first patrol into Gereshk might have been uneventful but 150 kilometres to our north events were unfolding that heralded the end of the poppy season and the start of the fighting season. With the final gathering of the opium sap, the Taliban were beginning to call on the services of tribal males of fighting age who were no longer needed to work in the fields. While we were tabbing out of Gereshk, the isolated northern town of Bagran had fallen to the Taliban. A day later an ANA convoy on Highway One was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) on the outskirts of Gereshk. Four Afghan soldiers were killed and another three were injured. I was walking past the medical centre when the casualties were being brought in. The grisly residue of the body parts of the dead were being lifted out of the back of an ANA pick-up truck. They had been placed in large surgical bags and the face of the severed head of one Afghan soldier stared back at me through the transparent green plastic. It was a sobering reminder of the human cost of conflict and I saw it register on the living faces of two of my young Toms who were passing in the opposite direction. It focused my mind on the fact that Afghanistan was a dangerous place and that we couldn’t afford to take anything for granted. This was brought home to us the next day when the second patrol we conducted came under fire as we left the town.

  In comparison to the battles that were to follow, the incident was of little significance. But it confirmed that not everyone welcomed our presence. However, I felt that a significant proportion of Afghans would be willing to support our efforts to help their government if we could demonstrate that we could bring security and development to their society. The reconstruction and development of Helmand Province was going to be a mammoth and long-term task. However, ‘quick-impact projects’, like getting the washing machine working, could go a long way to gaining goodwill and consent. They would help develop relationships, understanding of our mission and demonstrate that promises of helping to provide a better life were more than just empty rhetoric. Like the finite supply of goodwill that existed at the start of the invasion of Iraq, the support of those Afghans willing to give us a chance to make a difference would quickly evaporate if we weren’t seen to deliver tangible improvements.

  Our one concrete act of goodwill from that first patrol would be worth more than a thousand empty promises. Consequently, DFID’s reaction to our proposed project at the hospital caught me by surprise. I was informed that it was not UK policy for the Battle Group to get involved in such issues. I was even more surprised when I was told that no one else was going to do it either. The department countered with thin arguments that any small-scale immediate help on our part would generate a dependency culture among the Afghans. They also maintained that it would raise ethical issues of the military being seen to get involved and further argued that such work should be left to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I told them that I didn’t mind who did it as long as someone did. However, the NGOs were incapable of doing anything about it as most had stopped working in Helmand as a result of the prevailing security situation.

  I was dismayed. Such viewpoints were based on DFID’s limited experience in places such as Africa and the Balkans. But Afghanistan wasn’t Africa or Bosnia and their edict bore no resemblance to the reality of conditions on the ground. They naively assumed that the Afghans would wait patiently for the promise of long-term social and economic development and reconstruction once security had been established. It was an attitude summed up by one DFID official who commented that they ‘didn’t do bricks and mortar’. But lofty ideals of an intangible Western-style society with a functioning bureaucracy, national health service, women’s rights and higher education meant little to a populace where the majority of government officials couldn’t read, village schools were burnt to the ground by the Taliban and the most basic ailments went untreated because of a lack of access to drugs. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by DFID’s attitudes given that their personnel were not allowed by EGO policy to go beyond Lashkar Gah, where the security situation was relatively benign. Consequently, they were never in a position to assess a situation on the ground, having seen it themselves. Two months later DFID were to withdraw their personnel from Helmand altogether, having never visited the hospital.

  Where we had failed to gain traction with DFID, PJHQ had at least begun to recognize the changing dynamics in Helmand and speeded up the deployment of the rest of the Battle Group. B and C companies arrived in May with a troop of gunners. But the rest of the artillery and light amour would not arrive until July. The companies were beefed up with a Fire Support Group (FSG) of heavy machine guns, snipers and Javelin missile antitank launchers. C Company replaced A Company patrolling in Gereshk and B Company’s platoons were used to provide small immediate reaction forces. One platoon was used to provide the Helmand Reaction Force (HRF) and to escort the Medical Emergency Resuscitation Team (MERT). This consisted of an anaesthetist and other specialist medical personnel who were on standby to fly out with the casualty evacuation helicopter to stabilize casualties during the flight back to surgery in Bastion. A second platoon was held at KAF and could only be released for use by the Canadian brigade headquarters. This meant that A Company were my only uncommitted forces.

  Although we had only patrolled into Gereshk, the first three weeks in Helmand had passed in a blur of frantic planning activity. Constant briefings, readjustment of force groupings and re-planning had meant that the headquarters staff had got very little sleep. The troops in the companies fared little better. People were constantly stood up for missions, given orders and then stood down again in response to changing threats and newly emerging tasks. My problem was that I had precious few troops to meet them. Even when the rest of the Battle Group arrived I would only ever be able to field a few hundred boots on the ground at any one time. This number would be reduced further as two weeks of R and R kicked in and routine illness, injury and combat casualties started to take their toll. It was a reality the governor, Mohammed Daud, found hard to grasp. He had envisaged that all the 3,000-odd UK troops would be available to fight. However, the vast majority of them were support troops in the form of medics, headquarters staff, logisticians and technicians. Spread between Kabul, Kandahar and Helmand, their job was to sustain the fighting troops. Of the entire British force the ratio of support troops to fighting pers
onnel who could be expected to fire their weapons was probably less than 3: 1. With the changing threat in the north, it meant that we had to rely on the ANA. But they were still arriving from Kabul, were not trained fully and lacked much of their equipment. Regardless of these shortfalls, they were sent to relieve the Canadians in FOB Robinson, 7 kilometres to the south of Sangin.

  Just before last light on 17 May reports began to come in that Musa Qaleh was under attack. The town’s district centre was in danger of falling to the Taliban and over thirty of the ANP defending the compound had been killed. The situation was temporarily restored by the dispatch of 200 pro-government militiamen supported by the UKTF’s Pathfinder Platoon. The attempt to take Musa Qaleh was a clear indication that the Taliban had launched a concerted effort to challenge Kabul’s authority and kick the British out of Helmand.

  If anyone wanted confirmation that the poppy season was over and the fighting had started, it came two days later when a French military convoy was ambushed as it attempted to make its way from the Kajaki Dam down to FOB Robinson. It was a costly mistake that left three Frenchmen dead and led to the subsequent killing of a score of ANA soldiers. The survivors had made it to FOB Robinson where they had been picked up and flown to Bastion. Two of the French officers came into the JOC to give us an indication of exactly where they had been ambushed. Clearly suffering from battle shock, they had difficulty pointing out the precise location of where they had lost men and vehicles. We gathered round the bird table to listen to their story. They had just rounded a bend when the first AK bullets began to smack into the side of their trucks. Following standard anti-ambush operating procedures, they had attempted to drive through the killing area. But the ambush extended for virtually the whole 7 kilometres of the route down to Sangin. As they pressed on they faced an increasing gauntlet as every ‘man and woman’ seemed to come out of their compounds to fire at them. The added complication was that twelve of the ANA soldiers who had been with them were missing.