Danger Close

by Colonel Stuart Tootal

  The heavy machine gun was still causing a serious problem from the wood line. The rounds were coming so close to where Corporal Billy Smith of 2 Section lay in the few inches of shelter he had managed to scratch out from the dirt, that he felt he only had to stick out his hand to catch one. Recognizing the need to do something about it, Corporal Mark Wright ran forward to the position closest to where the fire was coming from. Bullets cracked past him as he made himself visible to get eyes on the target to direct mortar fire. As he fed coordinates to the mortar crews behind him, sights were adjusted and rounds were made ready to drop down the barrels. Satisfied that his teams were ‘on’, he gave the order ‘Five rounds fire for effect’ into his radio mike. The bombs slid down the steel tubes and the mortars coughed loudly. The bright flashes from their muzzles momentarily lit up the darkness and the recoil bit their base plates hard down into the stony ground. Ten rounds landed in quick succession as exploding crumps of lethal steel along the treeline. The heavy machine gun fell silent.

  A Company spent an uneasy night waiting for the break of first light. Standing to in their positions, they scanned the darkness through helmet-mounted night vision sights and hand-held thermal image devices. The latter could pick up heat sources of anyone moving around in the shadows, but the Taliban had had enough. As the first grey of dawn began to lighten the eastern sky, the company moved off to a safer position 3 kilometres further out into the desert. It brought them to a high plateau where they could see far into the distance. With a clear line of sight across the empty desert they would be able to take on any Taliban before they got close enough to engage them. The insurgents knew it and stayed away. The sun rose and the temperature climbed into the forties. A Company blistered in the searing heat as they waited all day for the US recovery column. They had deployed with 6 litres of water per man, but their CamelBaks were running dry and the water bottles on their belts were empty.

  Night had fallen once more when the relief convoy finally arrived. The Americans wanted A Company to stay with them, but they were now out of water and the position was sufficiently well sited to be held by the Americans. The company also needed rest and recuperation for subsequent operations and I agreed to Pike’s request to be lifted out. I listened to the noise of the CH-47s’ engines as they warmed up and lifted off from Bastion to recover A Company. Then I spent the next hour waiting impatiently to hear the tell-tale thump of the rotor blades of the returning helicopters that would tell me they had picked up A Company safely.

  Having to dispatch A and B companies to dig other people out of trouble only added to the tempo of activity in the Battle Group. We were trying to prepare for follow-up operations in Now Zad and find options to secure Musa Qaleh and the Kajaki Dam. We had also been given three more strike targets to work up and as each one changed we had to start planning over again. Battle Groups are not given medium-or long-term operational planning staff. Consequently, when an operation went live, or we had to react to an event on the ground, we had to stop planning future ops and focus on the situation at hand. I asked for an extra staff major, which would allow us to run both current and future ops planning concurrently, but none was available. A decent night’s sleep was becoming a rare commodity and if anyone was getting more than four to five hours a night, then they were doing well. Some planning sessions ran through the night and I would watch weary officers struggle to stay awake during the stifling heat of the next day. Huw Williams and I tried to pace the staff as best we could, but this was not an exercise. Although we were undermanned we had to be able to react to events. If we cut corners and got the planning wrong people could die. It was a responsibility that acted like a moral form of Prozac.

  Meanwhile, there had been a realignment of the command chain. I would now work direct to the Canadian brigade commander. Charlie Knaggs would focus solely on the PRT and the governor, whose demands took up much of his time and required a significant amount of personal investment. It meant that Ed Butler would take a more direct role at the tactical level. Although David Fraser would give me orders, NATO practice meant that I still had to clear them through the senior British officer. I valued Butler’s judgement, so it didn’t concern me overly, but it sometimes bothered Fraser. Luckily, he was a man I liked and respected, which eased the sensitive line I sometimes had to tread.

  On top of this, Butler told me to take over command of FOB Robinson. My problem was that I didn’t have a spare major to do it with. The obvious choice was to get a sub-unit commander not directly attached to 3 PARA to do it. There weren’t many available, but the one I approached displayed a certain reluctance to take on the task. I later found out that he had sent an e-mail direct to PJHQ complaining that to be given the task would be an improper use of his assets. I was staggered by his behaviour at a time when everyone was doing at least one other person’s job and were risking their lives on a daily basis. My adjutant, Captain Chris Prior, jumped at the chance when I said that I would have to give the task to him. It would mean that the never-ceasing administrative paper war would have to take a back seat and I would not be able to give Chris a proper headquarters staff of signallers or a senior NCO to act as his deputy. Nonetheless, seeing an opportunity to get operational field command, and to be free of the trials of being my Adjutant, Chris was almost out of the door before I had finished briefing him. He went off with a smile on his face to grab his weapon, pack his kit and scrabble around to see if he could scratch a headquarters team together.

  The never-ending stream of visitors also added to the frenetic mix. General Richard Dannatt arrived to make his last visit as the Army’s Commander-in-Chief before taking over as CGS from Mike Jackson. Visits were a pain, as they detracted from directing and planning operations, but Dannatt said all the right things, listened to what I had to say and made those soldiers whom he spoke to feel valued for what they were doing. He was almost immediately followed by Lieutenant General David Richards, who came down from Kabul where he was getting ready to take over command of ISAF. It was good to see my old boss again. As is his style, he struck up an instant rapport with the Toms, especially Private Bash Ali when he showed him his magazines that had been struck by AK bullets during Mutay. He told everybody how well they were doing and had that special knack of making anyone he spoke to feel as if they were the most important person in the world. He also took the piss out of me, which the blokes loved.

  I drove him back to the airstrip on my own and we talked about his concern that we were in danger of getting overly fixed in the district centres. I said I agreed with him and recognized that we were deviating from the simple plan of the inkspot development concept that we had discussed over a pint in a pub in Wiltshire six months previously. I explained my dilemma of meeting increasing commitments with ever-scarcer resources and the paradox of having to establish some permanent presence while still retaining sufficient forces with the freedom to manoeuvre. He was serious for a moment when we stepped out of the Toyota. ‘Stuart, your Battle Group is doing brilliantly in difficult circumstances. And you, my friend, keep taking the tablets and keep doing what you are doing.’ He smiled as some senior ANA officers approached. Adopting the custom of how Afghan officers greet each other, he hugged them and then turned and hugged me. With that he was gone, striding across the dirt strip to his waiting Hercules whose engine props were already turning. I drove back to the JOC feeling as if someone had just given me a tonic-boosting shot in the arm.

  Two days later Des Browne made his first visit to Helmand as the new Secretary of State for Defence. He had flown into Afghanistan direct from Iraq and was no doubt feeling the effects of the heat and jet lag. With his background as a human rights lawyer, I detected that he was not entirely at ease in the company of soldiers. When I briefed him on the Battle Group’s operations he pursued an aggressive line of questioning about why we were planning to do strike ops instead of development. He also wanted to know why the military were leading operations rather than the British civilian government ministrie
s. ‘Because, sir, this is Afghanistan and we are in the middle of a vicious counterinsurgency. The Taliban are trying to kill my soldiers, which is why we are conducting strike operations when resources permit.’ I acknowledged the importance of winning consent and that the non-kinetic aspects of the campaign were vitally important. But I thought I might be pushing the bounds a bit if I said that we were leading because there were over 3,000 soldiers in Afghanistan compared to the number of other government ministry personnel in Helmand, which could be counted on one hand. I could have made the additional point that they didn’t get out beyond Lashkar Gah.

  After the briefing Des Browne met some of the blokes. While he did so, I spoke to one of his special advisers and asked him if the minister really understood the nature of what we were experiencing. Before he departed, Browne made a point of coming up to me to thank me for what my soldiers were doing and to say how impressed he was with everyone. It was an afterthought that might have been provoked by the tone of my response to his questions, or perhaps the result of a whispered word from his adviser. But I softened a bit. He was knackered, unaccustomed to the heat and had flown halfway round the world. He was new to a very complex job and had a lot on his plate dealing with the implications of being responsible for an Army fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan. No doubt he was also suffering from spending the last few days being endlessly bombarded with impenetrable military jargon and unfamiliar place names, as he travelled between the two theatres of operations. I headed back to the JOC to work out how we were going to meet the expanding commitments of future strike operations and taking over Musa Qaleh from the Americans. There was also the pressing concern of defending the Kajaki Dam from the increasing number of Taliban mortar attacks being made against it. I was convinced that if we could get our own mortars on the high ground around the dam before the next attack we might be in a position to catch them in the act and ambush them. Consequently, we decided to put a deliberate plan in place to achieve this by dispatching a small force to Kajaki.

  Four nights later we got the message we had all been waiting for. It came across the net, confident, clear and concise: ‘Contact Kajaki, wait out!’ Matt Taylor’s elated repetition of the radio transmission added to the buzz of excitement. I strode towards the map-strewn bird table in the JOC. Others gathered rapidly around the map of the Kajaki Dam that had been carefully prepared in the event of receiving just such a message. Meanwhile, almost 100 kilometres to our north, mortar rounds arced through the night sky to deliver death and destruction among the Taliban’s own mortar teams in the river valley below.

  The Taliban had fired first and their mortar bombs scattered sparks and shrapnel among Captain Nick French’s positions. But Nick’s actions matched the Rules of Engagement; as his men had been fired on he was allowed to use his own mortars to respond in kind. The first salvo went wide of the target, but rapid adjustment of the fire coordinates by the forward controllers made the necessary correction. The next salvo landed among the Taliban; the blast of heat and bomb fragments ripped through the fighters, who moments before had been setting up their own weapons and firing against French’s position atop the high ridge feature that we had codenamed Sparrow Hawk. The survivors of the second salvo sought cover in a reed bed along the banks of the river. However, it offered them little sanctuary. Obscured from the view of the Mortar Fire Controller, the tripod-mounted GPMGs under the command of Colour Sergeant Schofield kicked into life. Firing at maximum elevation, the tracer of his guns’ rounds looped in a high trajectory into the night; burning out at just over 1,000 metres they travelled invisibly over the last 1.5 kilometres to where the insurgents were hiding in the reeds. Delivered at a rate of 750 rounds per minute, the 7.62mm machine-gun bullets sliced into them, forcing out those who had escaped death into another crump of mortar fire. The final bombardment brought the engagement of raining bombs and bullets to a decisive conclusion. The Taliban mortar teams who had attacked the Kajaki team with previous impunity were no more. At least twelve of their number lay dead and several others had been wounded by the ferocity of 3 PARA’s counter-fire.

  The plan that had been put into action two nights previously had been an outstanding success. The Taliban had followed a pattern of setting up their 82mm Chinese-made mortars in the valley bottom to the south of the Kajaki Dam. They would come at night and fire a salvo of bombs at the compound that housed the US civilian personnel, who supervised the maintenance of the dam’s hydro-turbines, and the Afghan security guards. Over the last few weeks insurgent pressure had increased and over half of the guards had deserted. The American company that provided the contractors at the dam were considering pulling their people out. If that happened the dam would be vulnerable to being taken over by the insurgents and the supply of electricity to Helmand and much of Kandahar would be under threat. In response, General Freakly was coming under pressure from the US Embassy to station a British company of infantry there to prevent this from happening. But it was another company that we didn’t have.

  I had flown up to recce the dam at the beginning of June. We landed on an LZ next to the dam that held back the melt water of the Hindu Kush in a large aqua-blue lake before allowing it to rush through the dam’s one working turbine to generate electricity. It then surged as a torrent of white water into the crystal clearness of the Helmand River below. Flanked by high craggy features, the serene beauty of the setting was out of place with the abandoned debris left over from the time when the Soviets held the dam. A large Ukrainian-made crane sat wrecked by the LZ and the surrounding rocky outcrops were dominated by old Russian positions. At the foot of one were the remains of two destroyed Russian T-64 tanks. Their turrets had long been blown off and their burnt-out remains rusted into the sand. The minefields were the other Soviet legacy that littered the surrounding countryside. They had been buried at every likely approach to protect the complex from attack by the mujahideen. Some had been lifted and red-and-white painted stones marked the areas that had been cleared. Moving beyond the stones would invite the danger of stepping on a mine that still lurked beneath the rocky soil.

  We were met by John Kranivich, a larger than life ex-US Special Forces soldier who had responsibility for the dam’s security. He cradled a snub-nosed AK assault rifle and was glad to see us. As we drove down the track to his compound he filled us in on the Taliban activity that had increased over the last few weeks. They regularly engaged his Afghan guards who manned the positions in the surrounding hilltops. He had originally had over a hundred men, but now he had only seventy. Many had been intimidated by the Taliban who occupied the villages below the dam and controlled Route 611 running up from Sangin 30 kilometres to the south. As we entered his compound we passed a building called the Old Russian House. During the war with the Soviets, the dam had been overrun and the Soviet technicians had made a desperate last stand there. The mujahideen had broken into the ground floor capturing a number of Russians, whose comrades on the upper floor had to listen to their screams as they were tortured to death below them. When the rest of the house eventually fell, the survivors were taken to the dam and fed into the giant metal fans of the turbines. No longer used, the building still bore the battle scars of that terrible and long-forgotten night over twenty years before.

  With the tale of the chilling encounter with the mujahideen still on my mind, I was straight up with John and told him that I couldn’t spare men to come and guard the complex. However, I said that we could draw up emergency reinforcement plans to come and get him out of trouble if the need arose. John was happy with this, as he was confident that he could hold off any attack for long enough for us to reach him. Matt Taylor and I sketched out some rough contingency options and agreed code words with John. They could be used over his satellite phone in a crisis to dictate exactly how we would arrive and what he would need to do. On our return to Bastion we studied intelligence reports about the attacks. Our analysis suggested that they followed a pattern that made the Taliban vulnerable to ambush. Havin
g conducted the recce to the dam, Matt and I were convinced that we could catch them at their own game. If we could hit them hard enough we might be able to protect the dam without having to station troops there permanently. I gave the task to Captain Nick French who commanded 3 PARA’s Mortar Platoon.

  Nick was given a small force of two of his mortar teams, a platoon of infantry from B Company and a section of machine guns from one of the FSGs. His temporary command was called French Force. It was infiltrated into the dam complex under cover of darkness in what was made to look like a routine resupply to the twenty ANA who had already been sent up there to bolster the dam’s defences. Landing at the LZ, Nick’s men manhandled their mortars and machine guns up the steep ground and into position on Sparrow Hawk, which overlooked the dam from the east. There they waited, until the Taliban attacked.

  The insurgent attacks against the dam stopped for several weeks thereafter and I was able to withdraw French Force a few days later for use elsewhere. It also negated the need to station a whole company there on a permanent basis. The covert insertion of a temporary force of just forty men had allowed us to deliver the desired effect differently. It made the best use of scarce manpower and the limited resources at our disposal. We had checked the threat against the dam while preserving our freedom of movement. For once we had been allowed to be proactive rather than reactive. However, the elation at the success of forcing the Taliban to react to our decision-making cycle, rather than theirs, was short-lived.