Danger Close

by Colonel Stuart Tootal

  An attempt to get a relief column into Musa Qaleh had failed too. Intelligence reports indicated that it was about to run into an ambush as it entered the close country on the only track that led into the town. The convoy commander was Major Gary Wilkinson who would normally have been at my side as my battery commander and fire support adviser. But a shortage of majors within the Battle Group meant that he had been given the task. Gary was prepared to run the gauntlet with the gunners he had taken with him from his gun battery to act as infantry, but I had ordered him to call off the attempt. Instead we had taken the risk of flying in 6 Platoon of B Company into Musa Qaleh to support the Pathfinder Platoon that had already been sent to Musa Qaleh as a temporary measure to relieve the American company that had been based there. Losing 6 Platoon meant that B Company now had fewer troops with which to replace A Company in Sangin.

  In short, we were fixed and our resources were stretched to breaking point. The risk of having one of our few helicopters shot down while they kept all the outstations supplied and got their casualties out was severe. I had already discussed this with Lieutenant Colonel Richard Felton who commanded all the UK helicopters in Afghanistan. I agreed with his assessment that losing a Chinook as they began to set patterns of flying into one of the numerous, insecure and predictable LZs was now a matter of when and not if.

  The implications of the risks we were taking and the conditions that members of the Battle Group were now living and fighting in were uppermost in my mind when I touched down in KAF. I used the time I had before my meeting with Fraser to seek out Ed Butler who was down from Kabul. He listened sympathetically as I aired my concerns about the risks we were running with becoming fixed and being overstretched. He had heard my views before when I had flown to Kabul a week earlier to attend a meeting of the military element of the Triumvirate which included representatives from DFID and the FCO. At the meeting it had been made clear that my recommendation that we withdraw from Now Zad, as a compensating reduction for taking on Sangin, was deemed to be unacceptable. With the fighting that was now taking place I emphasized that we would have to rely increasingly on firepower to hold the various district centres, with the attendant risk of causing casualties and destruction to the local Afghan people. I also reiterated the point that holding so many outstations would cost the blood of more of my soldiers.

  Butler didn’t disagree with anything I said. He knew that I understood the political imperative of not withdrawing from what he described as ‘strategic pins on the map’. He also accepted that there was little emphasis being placed on development, which was not helped by DFID’s unwillingness to consider investing in places like Sangin. Butler said that he would divert Engineer resources to strengthen the defences of the district centre there and that he would take up the issue of the lack of ANP and their behaviour with Daud. He also repeated his view that the Taliban’s attacks were a concerted effort to oust the British from Helmand. In the process they were paying a heavy price in the loss of their own fighters. His opinion was backed up by intelligence reports that indicated an increasing number of their wounded were passing back across the Pakistani border for treatment in insurgent-held areas there. There were also reports that the losses were making it difficult for the Taliban to recruit local fighters, who increasingly saw little point in sacrificing themselves on British guns. In essence he saw it as an attritional battle of wills between ourselves and the Taliban. We were going eyeball-to-eyeball with them and over the next few weeks it would be a matter of ‘who blinked first’. I told him that he should be confident that it would not be us. Regardless of my concerns, I drew a certain amount of confidence from the fact that I could speak plainly with my superior. He was a combat-experienced commander and was fully cognizant of both the risks and the costs.

  As we spoke, the door of the Portakabin office opened and a staff officer from UKTF informed us that we had taken another casualty in Sangin. I resisted the urge to rush immediately to the UKTF Ops Room; Huw was back at Bastion and he would call me if I was needed. I finished the conversation with Butler and excused myself to find out what was happening on the ground. When I got to the Ops Room in the building that UKTF shared with the British logistic component, I was informed that Private Damien Jackson had died of a gunshot wound to the stomach. I got on the phone to Bastion and Huw filled me in on what had happened.

  Since B Company’s 6 Platoon had been sent to Musa Qaleh, Platoon of A Company had volunteered to stay on in Sangin with B Company to provide them with a third platoon. Although the majority of A Company had flown out, other elements of A Company were also still in the district centre and were due to fly out on the helicopter that would bring in the rest of B Company’s men on the morning of 5 July. Giles Timms ordered Hugo Farmer to take 1 Platoon and secure the LZ for the incoming helicopter, while his remaining platoons manned the sangars and provided the standby quick reaction force (QRF). The drill was simple, but an unavoidable pattern had been set and the Taliban knew it, as Farmer’s sections fanned out around the landing site. Corporal Poll’s 1 Section patrolled south down the track that ran alongside the canal. Poll moved cautiously; he had spotted two Afghans acting suspiciously at the side of the track before darting back across the canal over a small footbridge. His section shook out ready for action and Farmer began to close up with 2 Section in response to Poll’s sighting report of a potential threat. As Poll began to push forward with privates Monk Randle, Craig Sharpe and Damien Jackson to investigate, an explosion rocked the ground around him and flung him backwards into a ditch. It was an IED that had been planted by the suspicious Afghans Poll had spotted. The blast knocked Poll out and was followed up by a heavy weight of Kalashnikov and RPG fire from the other side of the canal. The men of his half of the section were caught in the open and Damien Jackson turned and crumpled. Randle grabbed him and dragged him backward across the track towards the ditch as all hell broke loose around him.

  It was any commander’s worst nightmare: a man down and stuck in the middle of a firefight. The remaining members under the command of Lance Corporal Billy Smart poured fire back at them. Poll came to and was like a man possessed. Standing up, he loosed off 40mm under-slung grenades from the SA80 that Jacko had dropped when he was hit. He discarded the weapon and turned his attention to Jacko. Randle was already trying to stem the bleeding as Poll worked on his breathing. They were joined by Dan Jarvie; as the platoon sergeant his job was to organize the extraction of casualties. Corporal Giles from the medical section took over the treatment. Recognizing that Jacko had gone into shock, Jarvie yelled at him to stay with them while Farmer coordinated the fire and called for an Apache to cover the evacuation back to the district centre. It would be a frantic and almost impossible race against time. They were pinned down and Jacko’s life-blood was draining away from an arterial bleed in his abdomen. Sergeant Major Leong arrived with Corporal McDermott’s section armed with a stretcher and extra GPMGs. With assistance from the 81mm mortars firing at danger close ranges from the compound less than 250 metres away, 1 Platoon began winning the firefight. Once the majority of their attackers had been killed or suppressed, Jacko was rushed back to the centre on the stretcher over the pipe bridge that crossed the canal and into the RAP. The rest of the platoon extracted back after them, but Jarvie headed out again almost immediately. The LZ was no longer an option for the casualty evacuation helicopter and he needed an alternative site to lift Jacko out. When he got a radio message calling him back, he feared the worst, but desperately hoped that the doc might have managed to stabilize Jacko, perhaps making the need for the helicopter less urgent.

  Leong was waiting for Jarvie when he returned. He pulled him aside and told him that Jacko hadn’t made it. Pynn had done everything he could for him, but even if he had been alongside him when he had been hit, he wouldn’t have been able to stop the bleeding. With the exception of Poll, Jarvie decided not to tell the rest of the platoon. He wanted to keep them focused on reorganizing themselves in case they ha
d to go out again. He then went to have a moment with Jacko in the RAP. To Jarvie, the young soldier he had mentored since he joined the battalion as a brand-new Tom was ‘a fucking good lad’. Jarvie had been his platoon sergeant, had nurtured him, watched him get into trouble as a young Tom and seen him mature into one of the more senior members of the platoon. Other soldiers had looked up to him; they turned to him for advice and respected him for his professional dedication to soldiering. Jarvie loved him for his youthful optimism, a buoyant disposition to life that had been cut short four days before his twentieth birthday.

  Jarvie discussed with Zac Leong how the news should be broken to the rest of the platoon. As the senior soldier in the company, Leong felt that it was his responsibility to do it. They gathered the boys together and talked of the need to remain focused; Jacko wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Leong reminded them that they were there to fight the Taliban and to remain even-handed in their approach to dealing with the locals. Jarvie could see the determination in the faces of the men who sat in front of him to crack on and get the job done. As he looked at the likes of eighteen-year-old Private Lanaghan and Private Phillips, it made him proud to be their platoon sergeant.

  After Hugo Farmer had spoken to his men, they filed into the RAP to pay their respects to Jacko. Lance Corporal Roberts watched them come, and as they looked down on their fallen comrade, he was struck by the closeness of the bond that existed among the Paras as they said goodbye to their mate. Lance Corporal Smart came in last, rested a hand on Jacko then tucked his own maroon beret inside his body bag; he didn’t know where Jacko’s Para beret was, but he didn’t want him to go home without one.

  It was early evening. Jacko had been killed in the late morning but I was still in KAF waiting to see David Fraser. I felt rotten about not being with the Battle Group. I had spoken to Giles Timms on the Tac Sat, but it was managing the morale component by remote control and I wanted to be back with 3 PARA. As I hung round the UKTF hangar, many of the brigade staff came up to me and offered their condolences, but I noted how those of the UK’s logistics component kept their distance. I wondered how many of them could immediately pinpoint Sangin on a map. I felt the traditional hostility of those who fight towards those who sustain the fighting rising inside me. The latter are generally held in contempt by those who take the risks of front-line combat duty. They are known disparagingly by combat troops as REMFs, which stands for Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers or what the Gurkha troops called Lungi Fungi which became an adopted term in 3 PARA.

  I lumped them in with the 10,000 plus NATO troops who lived inside the airfield, the majority of whom never deployed beyond the confines of the airfield’s perimeter. I thought of them working shifts, using the gyms, strutting the airfield boardwalk of pizza huts and frequenting the coffee shops of KAF, when most of my soldiers were sweating in austere conditions and under regular attack in places like Sangin and Now Zad. I didn’t doubt that many of them played a vital supporting role and many worked hard to help us. But the common antagonism I felt between teeth and tail was provoked by the thoughtless, unhelpful behaviour of some of those I encountered. At one point during Jacko’s contact, an officer of the logistics staff had asked UKTF personnel to keep the noise down. He felt that it was disturbing his daily update briefing taking place in another part of the hangar. It was all I could do to contain my anger as my blokes were fighting for their lives on the ground.

  Anxious to get back to Bastion, I managed to find a Lynx utility helicopter heading that way. I went to see Fraser. I apologized that I couldn’t hang around any longer for his planned meeting and said that I needed to be back with my Battle Group. He understood and expressed his sorrow for the loss of Jacko. My mind was preoccupied with thoughts of leadership as we flew west into the night. Matt Taylor sat quietly next to me. It was at times like this that commanders earned their pay. Something told me that with the right injection of leadership, compassion and firm guidance about the importance of the mission, the blokes would be fine. They would take the losses in their stride and step back up to the plate.

  I talked this through with the new RSM, John Hardy, over a brew and a fag after we landed. I discussed going to see A Company, but he advised against it. ‘Not tonight, sir, let them be on their own and get a good night’s sleep, then go and see them tomorrow.’ I welcomed his words of wisdom. It confirmed that I had made the right choice in selecting him to become my new RSM. John Hardy was the archetypical image of a paratrooper, immensely fit with an imposing presence, his droopy `tash’ curled round either side of his mouth. Uncompromising in his approach, he was known as Uncle John by the blokes and cared passionately about their welfare. He was also a fighting RSM, and carried an under-slung grenade launcher fitted to his rifle with spare grenade rounds strapped to his thigh. Whenever possible he made sure he got forward to use it. When he arrived, I had flown to KAF and it took all Huw Williams’s efforts to prevent him from deploying straight up to Sangin with B Company the moment after he had landed at Bastion. He oozed self-confidence and said he only barked for one man, which was the CO. However, despite his unfaltering loyalty, he was always prepared to tell me how it was and I loved him for it.

  I missed Bish when he went, as we had gone back a long way. I had said a fond farewell two days previously and was glad we found the time to say goodbye to him publicly. Being pinned down and returning fire had been a fitting way for him to end his career as a Para RSM on being promoted as a Late Entry captain. But now I had a new RSM who, like all good RSMs, was to have a profound and pervasive influence on almost everything that went on in the battalion. He was also to become my friend and closest confidant during the difficult moments in the months that lay ahead.

  The next morning I spoke to A Company, conscious that some of them were still in Sangin. It was obvious that they were feeling Jacko’s loss, but I detected the grim determination that they shared. We held a ramp ceremony for Jacko shortly afterwards. Although members of A Company wanted to act as pall bearers, John Hardy felt that the company was still too raw and nominated members of Support Company to carry Jacko to the waiting Hercules. The prop wash of the aircraft’s engines blasted us with sand and grit as we followed the bearer party to the rear of its lowered tailgate. The logistic HQ at KAF had decreed that repatriation services were only to take place at Kandahar. We ignored the edict and the RAF aircrews screwed the nut to spend a little extra time on the ground at Bastion so that we could say a final farewell to Jacko with some dignity. The RSM and I halted as we watched Jacko’s coffin being carried up the ramp and placed in the space between two para doors. As the padre blessed his coffin, I thought that it was a fitting place for a paratrooper to begin his long, final journey home. I watched the faces of the men who had carried him up the ramp. Standing to attention with heads bowed, they strained to listen to the padre make himself heard over the noise of the turning engines; each man alone with his thoughts of loss and saying goodbye.

  The short service complete, the party turned smartly and marched back down the ramp. The RSM and I stepped on to the tailgate. We marched the few steps before halting and saluting. We both paused, then turned to our right and returned to join the assembled ranks of those few members of the Battle Group who were not defending the district centres. Standing to attention, we watched the C-30 taxi along the runway before gathering speed to take off I felt a choking lump in my throat as the aircraft climbed into the sky. The pilot levelled briefly and dipped each of the plane’s wings to us as a sign of respect to Jacko and the loss we had suffered. The words of Charles Wolfe’s poem, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, rang in my head as I headed back to the JOC and ‘thought bitterly of the morrow’.

  9

  The Manner of Men

  The loss of Private Damien Jackson during the attempt to bring in the rest of Giles Timms’s men had been a real eye-opener to the harsh realities of Sangin. Compared to what A Company had experienced since the beginning of 3 PARA’s tour in Helm
and, B Company were relative combat virgins, but their own initiation was not to be long in coming. Unlike A Company, Timms’s men knew that their turn of duty in Sangin would be for the duration and they flew into the district centre carrying as much kit as possible. The company’s FSG landed at an offset LZ and men like Corporal Dennis Mitchell struggled over the pebbled shale of the riverbank in the blazing heat with over 150 pounds of weight on their backs. As well as humping in their personal weapons, ammunition, three days of rations and water, each man also carried Boo rounds of linked 7.62mm ammo for the GPMGs, an AT4 antitank launcher and a plastic `greenie’ container of two 81 mm mortar bombs. By the time they reached the compound they were absolutely knackered. Within an hour of Corporal Mitchell’s arrival the attacks against B Company started. These set a continuous rhythm of daily attacks that was to go on relentlessly for the next three months as the immediate area around the district centre increasingly became a war zone.

  Faced with the overwhelming weight of firepower ranged against them, the Taliban placed an increasing emphasis on the use of 107mm rockets, recoilless rifles and 82mm Chinese-made mortars to conduct standoff attacks. Setting up their weapons from a position of cover a kilometre or more from the compound, they would lose off several rounds and then attempt to withdraw before aircraft or artillery could be brought to bear against them. A shady glade of trees 2 kilometres to the north of the compound was a particularly favourite Taliban firing location. To the troops in the compound it became known as Wombat Wood, after an old British recoilless rifle variant. These standoff attacks were largely inaccurate, but as the rocket attack that killed the men in the sniper tower demonstrated, the Taliban only needed to be lucky once.