The flight back to the UK seemed to take an interminable age as we routed through Cyprus and Germany, but all of a sudden I was outside my quarter in Colchester sniffing the cool air of a late summer’s evening. I was unarmed, there was no threat, stinking heat or life-or-death decisions to make. It felt strange and I felt guilty that I was not with the Battle Group. My girlfriend Karin was coming down to join me for a few days before flying to Madrid to see her mother. She hadn’t expected me to come back during the tour and had already booked her flight. I told her not to change her plans, as I wanted to get up to the hospital at Selly Oak in Birmingham to see the wounded and planned to do it when she flew to Spain.
We spent four days together on the Norfolk coast. There was a break in the heat wave of that summer and it rained for most of the time. Having not seen rain for four months, I relished the contrast to the constant bright sunlight and dry dust of Helmand. But Afghanistan was always on my mind and my thoughts were filled with what was going on back in 3 PARA. As we walked amid the Austenesque charm of Southwold and along the sandy fringe of beach, I thought of the blokes in the backs of helicopters, the boom of mouse-hole charges and the chatter of machine guns. An annual crabbing competition was taking place. Families and excited children rushed about with orange-hooked twine and plastic buckets. The sun had broken through the clouds and there was a carefree holiday atmosphere that made me wonder if they had any idea of what was going on in Afghanistan. I talked a little of the past four months with Karin, but we both knew that I was going back and I didn’t want to alarm her by saying too much. She could sense much of what I didn’t say, but kept her concerns to herself. Soon she was heading for Madrid and I was driving my staff car on the M40 towards Birmingham.
I was shocked from the moment I arrived. I had expected to find a proper military wing to the general hospital, run exclusively by military medical personnel for wounded servicemen. But Ward S4, where military patients went for general recovery, was full of civilian patients and staff. Young men wounded in the service of their country, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, were flanked by geriatric patients and attended to by overworked and, in some cases, disinterested NHS nursing staff I spotted Warrant Officer Andy Newell from the Pathfinders who had been shot in the arm in Musa Qaleh a week or so earlier. I asked him how things were. `In truth, sir, shit.’ A civilian patient sat a few paces from Andy’s bed. He had a problem controlling his bowels and bladder. Andy’s complaint was not so much that he wasn’t a fellow soldier, but that the nurses were not particularly efficient in cleaning up his mess. Consequently, Andy ended up doing it himself with his one good arm, the other having been fractured in fourteen places by the bullet that had passed through it. It was little wonder that wounded soldiers later contracted MRSA from their time at Selly Oak.
Admittedly, there was no need to clean anything up while I was there, but my informal presence happened to coincide with a visit by the Secretary of State, which, I suspect, contributed to the absence of any human excrement by Andy’s bed. I spotted Des Browne from a distance being fussed over by medical staff, but I kept out of his way as I hadn’t come to see him. Looking back on it, I regret not accosting him about the poor conditions I had begun to perceive, but he had left by the time I had been exposed to the full extent of the poor care British soldiers were receiving on S4.
I also saw Gunner Knight from I Battery. He had been evacuated with a suspected broken back sustained during operations around Musa Qaleh. He said he didn’t know what the extent of the damage to his back was, as the CT scan he had been promised had not materialized. When I asked why, he said he didn’t know as no one had bothered to tell him since he had been admitted to the ward several days before. I went up to the central desk in the ward and asked a chap in a white coat if he was the senior medical staff member present. He was evasive at first and then accepted that he might be when I pressed him on his status as a doctor. I asked him about what was happening to Gunner Knight. He said he didn’t know and seemed unconcerned. This was until I pointed out that I was Knight’s CO and was about to go and find the senior administrator of the hospital and create merry hell if he didn’t give me a satisfactory answer. Twenty minutes later the threat produced the answer that the scanner was not working and Gunner Knight’s scan would be delayed as a result. I suggested that it might have been prudent to tell Gunner Knight and went over to tell him myself.
When I discussed this matter with the SNCO attached to the ward as the military liaison officer, I asked why he hadn’t been able to elicit the information I had just squeezed out of the ward staff. ‘Sir, you are a colonel and have rank, I don’t. Additionally, you looked in the mood for a fight.’ The SNCO in question was not a medical man and undoubtedly was doing his best to make a difference, but he was fighting an uphill battle against bureaucratic indifference and a lack of compassion. He suggested that I might like to hear the experiences of some of the other soldiers who had been wounded in Iraq.
I was introduced to a corporal from an infantry unit who had lost his lower left leg to the tailfin of an RPG in some shitty alleyway in Basra. He was a fit, articulate and enthusiastic young man. On meeting him I was struck by his presence and demeanour that suggested he was not someone who was prone to moaning. He recounted how, after a through-the-knee operation to remove the mangled remains of his lower leg, he had been left unattended to come to from the anaesthetic without any pain relief. While he screamed in agony, it had taken forty-five minutes for the duty doctor to arrive and prescribe the necessary pain inhibitor. During that time he had bitten into his pillow and had trashed his bed space in a futile attempt to subdue the agony that burnt through him. As he did so his wounded ward mates, on crutches and with drips hanging out of their arms, did what they could to ease his distress until the doctor arrived.
In all I spent five hours in the ward listening to tales of woe from those who had sacrificed much and had been treated with scant regard in return. There was no doubt that the specialist clinical treatment the wounded received was excellent, but the general aftercare was woeful. I heard tales of how a wounded TA soldier had been discharged from the ward in the same filthy and bloody uniform he had been wearing when he was blown up by a roadside bomb that killed a number of his comrades. He had been given a rail warrant and told to get the train back to Scotland. The wounded soldiers were not young men who had been injured as the result of getting pissed and crashing their cars, or people for whom the wheel of misfortune had brought about an unfortunate illness or other injury. They had suffered their wounds as a result of volunteering to put themselves in harm’s way in the service of their country. In short, they deserved much better than the disgraceful conditions I witnessed at Selly Oak. How could we ever have let things get so bad? Was this really the supposed better deal we had secured by surrendering our military hospitals in exchange for gaining better clinical experience from the NHS?
I left the ward utterly depressed by what I had seen. To my mind there was no defence for it. I was acutely aware that in a few days’ time I would be leading or asking men to go back into combat. Knowing what now awaited them if they were wounded in action caused me profound alarm. As I drove south from Birmingham on my way back to Colchester, I stopped my car on the hard shoulder; I needed a fag. I toyed with the idea of ringing CGS to register my deep concern. I flicked open my mobile and instead rang Matt Maer in PJHQ. I told him what I had seen, how I felt about it and we agreed that I would write a formal letter of complaint to the chain of command when I returned to Afghanistan.
I kept my concerns about what I had seen at Selly Oak to myself when I got back to Colchester and briefed the 3 PARA families a day later. Although I had written to them as part of the monthly 3 PARA families’ newsletter that we sent back from Afghanistan, I knew that the wives would be deeply troubled by the sensational news reports that they would have been watching on TV and reading in the press. In general, Army wives are remarkably resilient; they need to be, given the considerab
le pressures brought about by the demands of supporting their husbands’ careers. They become used to the fact that operations and training take their menfolk away from home and entail a degree of risk. But for most of them Afghanistan was different. They knew that it was a shooting war and that members of the Battle Group were being killed and injured on an increasingly regular basis. However, I doubted that many of their husbands, in the telephone calls they made home, would be telling them much of the detail about what was going on, or talked of the risks they were facing. Consequently, for many wives the lurid media coverage was proving to be a real challenge. Often they would hear on the news that a British soldier had been killed in Afghanistan, but they would not know who it was and would grow frantic with worry that it might be their husband or somebody they knew. Every time a wife left the house, or took the kids to school they would dread coming home to see a strange car parked near their house that might be bringing bad news from Helmand. I wanted to reassure my soldiers’ loved ones about what we were doing and dampen the over-dramatization of the dangers we were facing. However, I also knew that they would not forgive me for obscuring the truth about the risks involved. It was not an easy balancing act.
I talked in general terms about the harsh conditions and the hazards we faced. But I also told them that morale was incredibly high and that their husbands were relishing the opportunity to do what they had joined the Army for. I majored on the fact that they were exceptionally well trained for the task, that they had good people around them and that we would not take unnecessary risks. I hoped what I said helped put their minds at ease. I used some photographic slides to give them an insight into life in Helmand which I had populated with the grinning faces of men whom I knew were married. I asked for questions at the end and answered each one as honestly as I could. One was from a wife who rightly gave me a bollocking for not mentioning the role and contribution of the Battle Group’s exceptionally hard-working chefs.
I took some time to go into the office and visit the Rear Details element of the battalion that had stayed behind to run the domestic base. I talked with members of the Families Office who were doing a brilliant job in looking after the wives and children while the men were away. They provided a vital service, as it meant that those of us in Afghanistan could focus on operations without having to worry about what was happening on the home front. Under the command of Sergeant Major Billy McAleese, Colour Sergeant Neil Wingate and Rosemary Kershaw, the hard-working trio organized trips and parties for the families, sorted out domestic problems and were always there to help and give advice when it was needed.
They also took on the enormous burden of helping to look after the wounded and their next of kin, as well as the families of the soldiers who were killed in action. By the middle of the tour, Billy and Neil were driving from Colchester to Birmingham every other day to see the wounded. They picked up relatives and took the soldiers packs of spare clothes, magazines and wash kits. They assisted the casualty visiting officers who were assigned to look after relatives and organized and attended the repatriations of the fallen. They badgered the hospital staff when needed, filled in many of the gaps in their inadequate welfare system and helped the families take the strain of bereavement or the impact of a serious injury to a son or husband. Billy never switched off his phone. If it rang in the middle of the night he would answer it, drag on his clothing and head out into the darkness to visit a family or head back up to Selly Oak. They played a critical role in keeping the show on the road and were the unsung heroes of the tour.
After a week in the UK, I felt rested. Apart from the general medical treatment of the wounded, I knew that my people on the home front were being looked after. But I felt that I had been away from the Battle Group for far too long. Even though the approaching date of my flight to Afghanistan provoked feelings akin to those of returning to school at the end of a long summer holiday, I wanted to get back and be done with the waiting. I had only heard once from the Battle Group. Unfortunately, it was bad news. Lance Corporal Sean Tansey of the Household Cavalry had been killed in an accident in Sangin. He had been carrying out field repairs under a Scimitar when it collapsed on top of him. Although not a combat death, he died working in an environment that would have not have existed in peacetime and it brought home the general risks a soldier faces, even when not in contact with the enemy. I thought of D Squadron and the likely impact of another death among their number in less than two weeks. It made me even more impatient to get back.
I checked my mobile phone before I went to bed; it was my penultimate night in the UK before heading back to Afghanistan and I was spending it with a friend in Gloucestershire. I checked the mobile again in the morning and there were still no messages. It was a daily routine that I had adopted since arriving back on R and R. Good, I thought: there was nothing from the Rear Details element of 3 PARA in Colchester to suggest anything untoward had happened in Afghanistan while I had been asleep. Content with the thought that no news was good news, I focused on the day ahead, which I would spend visiting my goddaughter, and the prospect of fishing with her father after lunch. The sun was finally shining and I set off in buoyant mood as I drove along a leafy, high-banked lane in the Slad Valley. I was in the heart of Laurie Lee country where he had set and written his famous novel Cider with Rosie. The English countryside was at its quintessential best and for a brief moment my mind was a long way away from Afghanistan. What I didn’t realize was that as I slept, members of A Company were fighting for their lives in a vicious firefight among the high-standing cornfields to the north of the district centre in Sangin.
As I approached the outskirts of Stroud I felt the ominous buzz of the mobile phone in my pocket. I stopped the car and heard Bish’s voice as I pressed it to answer. ‘Sir, I am afraid I have got some bad news from Afghanistan: Corporal Budd was killed earlier this morning in a firefight in Sangin.’ As I listened to the sketchy details of what had happened the optimism that came with a perfect summer’s morning was suddenly banished from my mind. Three hundred miles to my north in North Yorkshire, it was the lack of a telephone call that told Lorena Budd that something was wrong. Calling his wife on the mobile satellite welfare phone in Sangin every Sunday morning was a weekly routine that Bryan Budd had established with Lorena since arriving in Afghanistan. But that Sunday, the black satellite handset lay silent as the men of A Company carried Corporal Budd back to the district centre after a bloody engagement in the maize fields.
12
Crucible of Courage
Bullets zipped through the high-standing maize as the men of Hugo Farmer’s platoon thrashed through the vegetation in a desperate effort to get back to the district centre. Farmer struggled to work out where all his men were. Fighting for breath and dripping with sweat, he would pause to speak into his mike to get a location report on each of his isolated sections in an attempt to coordinate their disparate movements. Rounds continued to cut through the leafy screen of crops to his left and his right as the Taliban followed the platoon which tried to make good their withdrawal. Farmer’s men would lunge through the rows of plants then stop to set up a snap ambush to catch their pursuers. Each man struggled to regulate his breathing as they adopted hasty fire positions, shouldered weapons and released safety catches. On the order to fire, they poured a heavy weight of lead back in the direction that they had come from. It would gain them a brief respite. But as they began moving again, the resumption of the zip, zip of the bullets cutting through the fibrous maize indicated that the Taliban hadn’t given up the chase.
Stationed on the roof of the district centre, the company commander, Major Jamie Loden, knew that his men on the ground were in trouble. Usually his patrols had the upper hand, but this engagement was different. The Taliban were getting better: instead of breaking contact when Farmer’s men had first engaged them, they had followed up and were giving battle in a relentless cat-and-mouse chase through the maize crops. As the company commander, Loden’s job was to marshal the r
esources to get his platoon in the fields out of the shit. He was working the mortar fire controllers hard to rain down supporting fire on the Taliban, but the enemy were too close to Farmer’s men and a clear view of who was friend and who was foe was obscured by the thick greenery through which both sides moved. Loden’s forward air controller reported that two RAF Harriers were inbound on their way to help. There was a nagging doubt in Loden’s mind as to whether they would get there in time, as Farmer and his men continued to race against the insurgents to reach the safety of the earth-filled mesh baskets of the HESCO bastion perimeter.
A Company had begun their second tour of duty in Sangin at the end of July. They went back in under the command of Loden. He had been plucked out of Staff College at short notice to replace Will Pike when illness had prevented Pike’s original successor from deploying to Afghanistan. In essence Loden was the new boy and he was prepared to listen to his men who had already spent one tour of duty there. They knew something of what to expect, but they also noticed some changes. In their absence the Engineers had laboured round the clock to turn the district centre increasingly into a fortress. Often coming under fire as they worked, the Sappers had used their earth-moving equipment to throw up a 3-metre-high HESCO bastion perimeter around the compound and the LZ. Topped with razor wire and enhanced with firing platforms for vehicles and men, it was 2 metres wide at its thickest point and was capable of sustaining a direct hit from an RPG or a 107mm rocket. Subterranean bunkers were later dug into the pomegranate orchard to provide protection from mortar fire. The sangars on the FSG Tower and those around the main compound were also in the process of being reinforced by hundreds of additional sandbags. Although much of the work was still to be completed, the district centre was now an urban strongpoint that would not have looked out of place in a conventional battleground, such as Stalingrad. Despite the improved defences, however, the base still came under regular attack and inserting aircraft remained vulnerable to small-arms and RPG fire as they landed into the LZ.
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