Danger Close

by Colonel Stuart Tootal

  Will Pike was tasked to fly out with A Company and attempt to recover any sensitive equipment and casualties he could find. Lacking precise locations they overflew the length of the route. But with darkness approaching and running short of fuel, they were forced to turn back empty-handed. The search resumed the next morning. They located and destroyed some of the vehicles, but there was no sign of the dead Frenchmen. Before returning to Bastion, Will was also tasked to look for the missing ANA soldiers, who had managed to make radio contact with their headquarters. Located on a lonely hilltop, they reported that they were surrounded by Taliban and were running low on ammunition. Without a map they were unable to confirm their position. The forlorn group of men were asked to describe their location, but without coordinates it was like looking for a needle in a haystack among the rugged peaks of the Sangin Valley. The Chinooks circled likely areas to no avail until the radio contact went dead. It was a salient lesson against using predictable routes that invited ambush. Sadly it was a mistake that was to be repeated.

  Several days later it was reported that the town of Now Zad was about to fall and Daud was keen to get British troops up there as fast as possible. I gave Major Giles Timms a warning order that the task was likely to fall to him and what he had left of B Company. Then I dashed off to grab my kit and make my way to the incoming helicopter that had been sent to pick us up for an emergency meeting at UKTF headquarters. After arriving in Lashkar Gah, we were briefed by Charlie Knaggs on the situation. The twenty ANP in Now Zad’s district centre were claiming that they were about to be overrun and Knaggs wanted me to come up with a plan to establish a ‘platoon house’ in the town. He believed the presence of thirty-odd British soldiers would bolster the mettle of the ANP. Butler was there too, but he was keen to demonstrate that he was keeping out of the tactical business and allowed Knaggs to lead. Darkness had already fallen and there was no time to eat. I asked him to give me four hours to conduct my estimate before I back-briefed him on my plan. We then started to work through the night.

  We briefed Knaggs and Butler four hours later. I made the point that defending the district centre compound would take more than a platoon. Having studied detailed air photographs, I realized that all thirty men would be required to guard the place. It also needed a quick reaction force to fight off attacks and reinforce vulnerable points, and sufficient troops to conduct local security patrols and build up its defences. The troops stationed there would be vulnerable and isolated. They would need to be able to operate as an independent sub-unit capable of holding out on their own until reinforcements could be sent to relieve them. This required specialist communications back-up, in-place logistics, medical support including a qualified military doctor, a mortar team to provide fire support and an FST to call in close air support if required.

  In short, it needed all I had left of B Company. In an ideal world I would have liked to have given them an additional platoon, but there was none to spare and they would have to go as they were. I said I was confident that we could hold the compound. But I pointed out that it would stretch the Battle Group and fix troops to another static location at the expense of having an effect elsewhere. Additionally, more of our precious helicopter hours would be burnt up keeping the compound supplied with rations and ammunition. My one condition of taking the place on was that the UKTF found B Company a doctor to go with them. If someone got hit, they would be at the end of a fragile evacuation chain and having a doctor attached to them would improve their chances of staying alive until the casualty evacuation helicopter got to them. Knaggs and Butler accepted what I had to say and agreed to get us a doctor, but stressed the political importance of being seen to support Daud. Despite my reservations at the tactical level, I understood the bigger picture imperative of backing up the governor. They asked when B Company could go. ‘The company is already standing by and the assets are in place to lift them. Let me get back to Bastion and give them final confirmatory orders and we can be on our way,’ I replied.

  I flew up with B Company. Like most provincial Afghan towns in Helmand, Now Zad is a nondescript collection of flat compounds built of mud bricks. The dusty main street was flanked by an assortment of small open-fronted shops. Most of them were trading and, with the exception of the barefoot children, the townspeople went about their business seemingly unconcerned by our presence. There was not much evidence to suggest that the ANP were about to be overrun, although many of them had fled. Some had since returned including the district police chief, Hajji. I went round the sangars, which were built-up defensive positions of sandbags, breeze blocks and wood, that B Company had started to construct and spoke to the blokes. I noticed some empty AK-47 cases, indicating that there had been some fighting, but there weren’t enough to suggest that a full-scale battle had taken place.

  I chatted to a TA soldier from 4 PARA who had put his struggling acting career on hold to come out to Afghanistan with 3 PARA. It was a bizarre situation. He sat on a sandbag with his GPMG covering the street below us. While he talked of the few bit-parts he had got in soaps like EastEnders and whether he might do better to take up a career in law, a donkey and cart passed below and a small scruffy Afghan child called up to us. In the distance the bright orange globe of the setting sun began to sink below the rocky skyline and the Muslim call for prayer echoed out across the town. It all seemed a long way from the sets of Albert Square.

  I had supper with Hajji later that night. As we sat cross-legged and ate a very palatable goat stew with thin leavened nan bread, he talked of his desire to use our helicopters and jets to help him hunt down the Taliban. He maintained that they had left the town but believed that they lurked in the surrounding countryside. He seemed unconcerned about socio-economic issues, such as education, which was strange since all the town’s schools had been closed or burnt down by the Taliban. He dismissed my suggestion that we should hold a shura, the Afghan word for meeting, with the local tribal elders. He argued that all of them had recently fled the town and would be too frightened to talk to us. Hajji did not necessarily strike me as a man who could be trusted, but I agreed that we would conduct joint patrols with his motley crew of ANP who, since B Company’s arrival, had abrogated complete responsibility for defending the compound. I noticed the adolescent who served us chai. He had foppish henna-dyed hair that fell over eyes that had been highlighted with make-up. His enhanced femininity stood out in contrast to the rugged Pashtun features of the rest of the ANP and suggested he was Hajji’s catamite. He was probably a local boy and I doubted he was a willing volunteer for the role, which would have done little to enhance the legitimacy of Hajji in the eyes of the townspeople.

  While B Company watched and waited in Now Zad, the rest of the Battle Group continued to respond to the whims of Daud. On 24 May A Company had flown a rescue mission to extract one of the governor’s supporters from the Bagran Valley after he claimed that he was being surrounded by Taliban. Again this consumed scarce helicopter hours and we were becoming increasingly reactive to events. I wondered whether we had got too closely into bed with the governor and were in danger of chasing shadows. We were deviating from the principle of using our forces to have an effect in one area which could then be secured for development. In response to pressure from Daud, Knaggs was also talking about establishing platoon houses in Musa Qaleh and at the Kajaki Dam as both areas were perceived to be under increasing threat. I didn’t doubt it, but our resources were finite and were already dangerously overstretched.

  3 PARA were also coming under increasing pressure from the Americans to contribute to Operation Mountain Thrust, the brainchild of Major General Ben Freakly. He was responsible for overseeing the conduct of all military operations in southern Afghanistan before the US handed over to NATO command. Freakly was David Fraser’s boss and he wanted to clear the Taliban out of Helmand Province in a series of search and destroy operations before ISAF took over. An American battalion was already operating between Musa Qaleh and Bagran, but Freakly wanted the
Brits to target some of the Taliban leaders who were believed to be hiding out in farmers’ compounds to the south of the US troops. They were considered to be ‘high-value targets’ and it was assessed that each had a band of hardcore fighters who would fight to the death to prevent their commanders from being captured.

  We were continually stood up and then stood down from conducting a number of raids to kill or capture insurgent commanders. Each involved lengthy planning sessions, only to be called off after hours of painstaking staff work had been put into planning each mission. Freakly also wanted to get British troops up to the Kajaki Dam to relieve an American company that had moved into Musa Qaleh. I conducted reconnaissance missions to both locations, which only served to confirm that I would need a company to hold each of them. However, with what was left of B Company in Now Lad and C Company in Gereshk, I had only A Company’s two platoons of infantry, an FSG and one section of mortar barrels left uncommitted.

  In order to free up more troops we stripped men from the Gurkha Company which was tasked with guarding Bastion. Replacing them with support troops and soldiers from a Danish squadron that had been attached to UKTF, we formed two additional platoons of infantry. One was sent to take over from Giles Timms’s men in Now Zad which had remained relatively quiet since his arrival. The other was sent up to reinforce the ANA troops and the troop of guns that were in FOB Robinson. Freeing up B Company from Now Zad meant that I had the makings of a second sub-unit available for operations. It would allow the Battle Group to contribute one company for strike operations as part of Mountain Thrust and dispatch another one to Musa Qaleh if we had to.

  5

  The Hornets’ Nest

  Of all the strike options that we worked up, Operation Mutay was the most straightforward and represented the most efficient use of the scarce resources available. This dictated its selection from a host of other targets we had looked at. The location of the target compound was only 3 kilometres from Now Zad, which meant it could be used as a launching pad for the outer cordon and would help us to achieve surprise. I could use the Gurkha Platoon stationed there to drive the short distance to provide an outer security cordon position to the north. They could take Hajji’s ANP with them to provide the important Afghan face to the operation, although to preserve security they wouldn’t tell him what we were about until just before they left. The Patrols Platoon could also stage through the district centre the night before. This would allow them to move smartly in their WMIKs to secure the southern cordon position the next morning. Consequently, we could snap the outer cordon ring shut quickly before inserting A Company by helicopter a few minutes later to secure the compound for the Engineers’ search team.

  This provided us with the best chance of catching the targeted Taliban leader if he was at home. Intelligence also suggested that the man we were after would have only a few of his fighters with him, as it was believed that the bulk of the insurgents had been dispersed by the arrival of British troops at the district centre. Based on this assessment I was confident that we had sufficient troops to provide the net to capture them and the necessary combat power to overmatch them if they decided to fight. What I didn’t realize was that the intelligence we had been given was wrong and the Taliban leader we were after had all his fighters with him. By the time we had made the decision to launch the operation the intelligence had already been revised to indicate that over sixty Taliban were well established in the area. The revised estimate never reached us.

  The Taliban picked up the movement of the vehicles from the district centre in Now Zad from the moment they drove out of the gate. They had posted men who had been monitoring our presence in the district centre since the first troops had arrived there. But this was unknown to the Gurkhas. As the Taliban spotters reported the Gurkhas’ movements on their ‘push to talk’ radios, other fighters were rushing to grab AKs and RPGs and get to the routes the troops were likely to use. The surrounding vegetation, compound walls and ditches dictated that any vehicle movement would be constrained to only a limited number of approaches. If the Taliban moved fast enough they could ambush them. Two Russian-made beltfed PKM machine guns were moved to cover the exit junction of a dry wadi bed that the Gurkhas had begun to move into.

  Another group of ten to twelve Taliban moved at right angles across a cultivated field in an attempt to cut off the Patrols Platoon as they drove down a narrow track flanked by a long mud wall. The open field on the other side of the track was impassable to wheeled vehicles because the ploughed earth furrows had been baked as hard as concrete by the scorching sun. The terrain was hideous and lay in stark contrast to the empty desert the platoon had previously driven across to get up to Now Zad. Using the cover of thick hedges, walls and irrigation ditches that criss-crossed the area, the insurgents moved undetected into their battle positions. They primed their RPG launchers and slipped off the safety catches of their AK-47s. The thump and crack of bullets over their heads and the wushing fizz of RPGs would be the first indication of the dangerous nature of the situation my troops had driven into.

  Captain Mark Swann urged his men to move quickly. He felt that the plan hinged on getting his Patrols Platoon WMIKs into position quickly and he could already hear the approaching helicopters that were carrying A Company. Suddenly his lead WMIK came under contact, and Lance Corporal Hughes saw the attackers. His .50 Cal kicked into life; then it stopped as the first few rounds of faulty ammunition fouled in the barrel. Corporal ‘Ray’ Davis filled the gap as he poured back fire at five Taliban gunmen with the GMPG mounted on the front of his bonnet. He managed to account for two of them before extracting back out of the killing zone. Swann was still desperate to get to his allocated position and sought to find another route, but the difficult terrain meant that he was stuck to using the track and the Taliban knew it. He dismounted half of his men to protect the vehicles as they pushed forward again.

  Corporal Atwell spotted more Taliban moving through an orchard towards the patrol when the whole treeline on their right appeared to erupt in a blaze of muzzle flashes. Davis and Atwell were already returning fire from their vehicles. Private Ross refused to take cover as he pumped rounds from his .50 Cal at an RPG gunner he had spotted. The words ‘Contact left, rapid fire!’ crackled in Private Rowel’s headset as he got a couple of rounds off from his own vehicle’s .50 Cal before it stopped. He couldn’t re-cock it and screamed at his driver, Private Webley, to get on the front-mounted GPMG. In the ensuing chaos, Swann was yelling orders into his radio telling his men to drive through the ambush site. As he did so bullets thumped past and RPGs scythed into the roadside trees, cutting down branches that landed among the vehicles. While the platoon returned fire, Flight Lieutenant Matt Carter, the Patrols Platoon Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), was in the process of fighting back with his radio as he called in one of the hovering Apache helicopters.

  Channelled by the banks of the wadi, the Gurkhas were unable to bring their heavy .50 Cal machine guns to bear when the Taliban manning the PKMs opened up on them. They were forced to abandon their vehicles as bullets smacked around them and an RPG round glanced off the bonnet of the lead WMIK. One of the accompanying ANP was hit in the stomach and was dragged into cover as one of his police comrades sprayed the contents of his weapon in the direction of the insurgents. Some of the Taliban fighters had moved more slowly than others; one was cut down by Rifleman Yonzon as he emerged from the entrance of a building with an RPG launcher on his shoulder. The Gurkhas were also calling in air support, but their JTAC, Lieutenant Barry de Gode, was having trouble getting one of the radios to work. It had initially been left in one of the stricken vehicles, but the patrol commander, Lieutenant Paul Hollingshead, had braved the fire to retrieve it. AK-47 rounds were punching into the mud wall where the troops had taken cover when de Gode eventually got the radio working. He popped a red smoke grenade to assist the pilot in spotting his location.

  As the Apache pilot looked down at the contact site his monocular vision s
ight automatically slaved the barrel of his helicopter’s cannon on to where he was looking. Confident he could discern friendly forces from the enemy, his number two lined up the video cross-hair sight of the cannon on the coordinates de Gode had given him. The Taliban appeared as dark silhouettes against the cold grey background of the sighting systems screen. He squeezed the trigger and 130 30mm rounds began ripping through the trees into the insurgents. The storm of fire from the Apache allowed Paul Hollingshead to rally his men. They fired and manoeuvred their way back across the wadi, regained their vehicles and extracted back to the district centre.

  The Apache in action above the Patrols Platoon also assisted them in their break clean from the first contact. They reorganized by a large compound. The vehicles formed a rough defensive perimeter with weapons facing outwards over the fields of dry poppy stalks which now burnt fiercely, having been ignited by RPG and tracer rounds. Swann heard the other contacts around him: the Gurkhas in the wadi to his north and the crackle of small-arms fire to his east indicated A Company’s helicopters had also come under fire as they landed. Swann was still determined to get to his cordon positions, but more Taliban were moving against him and another fire fight broke out. Private Ali was suddenly flung backwards by two AK bullets that tore into his chest webbing. They struck his magazines and ignited the tracer rounds inside them. Corporal Berry kicked dirt over him to put out the fire as Lance Corporal Clayton dragged him back into cover.