As Jackson fired he heard a loud crack that passed him and struck his platoon sergeant in the shoulder. He looked to his right and saw Paddy Caldwell falling backwards in slow motion. Jackson shouted for rapid covering fire from the GPMG and Minimi machine gunners then grabbed Caldwell and dragged him off the roof. He manhandled him into an irrigation ditch and cut off his webbing as he frantically looked for the wound with the help of Corporal Hart, the company medic. The first aid a soldier receives at the point of wounding often makes the vital difference to his subsequent survival. Jackson and Hart knew this, but the new field dressing they used wasn’t working, as they couldn’t apply the right pressure to stop the bleeding from Caldwell’s shoulder. Eventually, they plugged the wound with an older type of bandage and noticed that the round that had struck Caldwell had exited through his neck. As Sergeant Major Willets arrived on a quad bike and trailer, Jackson braved the incoming fire to climb back on the roof to resume command of his section. Willets and Hart lifted Caldwell on to the stretcher on the trailer. Fire continued to rake the whole area and Hart shielded Caldwell with his own body while Willets drove the quad back into the wadi to meet an armoured Sultan ambulance that had been driven out from the district centre by the Household Cavalry to meet them.
I heard the report that B Company had taken a man down and handed over to the battery commander Gary Wilkinson before making my way down the steps of the FSG Tower with RSM Hardy. Paddy Caldwell was being stretchered out of the back of the vehicle as we got down to the courtyard. He was carried into the small cramped RAP in the main compound building. There Tariq Ahmed set about stabilizing him for evacuation while the RSM and I tried to keep him still; he was in pain and kept trying to look up, as he complained about the awkward position he was lying in. We tried to make him more comfortable and reassure him that he was going to be okay. I held his hand and told him that I was there. ‘I know it’s you, sir, I’m paralysed not blind.’ As he spoke, his ability to control his legs was draining away and this feeling was spreading up the rest of his body. As I reached out to hold a drip for one of the medics, I momentarily let go of his hand and noticed how his arm flopped limply back on to the stretcher. The casevac helicopter was already coming in as he was stretchered out of the RAP to the LZ. I watched him go, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
Gary Wilkinson gave me an update on the situation on the ground and Matt Taylor asked me about Paddy. I said that he would be all right and changed the subject, as a 107mm rocket ripped through the air high above us. The attacks had dropped off against B Company, but the Taliban were now focusing their efforts on C Company. The empty trucks belonging to the convoy had got back out of the wadi unmolested with the Household Cavalry in escort. Before they left, the Household Cavalry had fought a series of sharp engagements with some Taliban who had attempted to attack the Engineers who had resumed building the bridge. We had mounted wire-guided Milan antitank missiles on their Spartans and they had put them to good use against the insurgents, who were surprised to find themselves suddenly being blasted by explosive warheads from vehicles that usually mounted nothing heavier than a GPMG. The Engineers had managed to finish constructing the portable ferry bridge and it would be ready to be test-floated the next day.
I decided to pull C Company back into the district centre, as they would need to get ready to stay behind and take over from A Company when the rest of the Battle Group lifted from Sangin once the bridge was operational. I watched the company withdraw back down the line of the wadi. They were followed by the fire of insurgents who took them on from the cover of the narrow alleyways as the platoons pulled back from their positions. A running firefight broke out and the mortars started dropping rounds behind them to cover their move. Those moving along the right-hand side of the wadi had a more sheltered approach, but the men on the left were exposed and I could almost see the rounds skip off the ground at their feet. It was a relief to see them all get behind the safety of the HESCO. They stooped forward like old hags resting on their weapons, each man sucking in lungful’s of air and marvelling at how they hadn’t been hit during the frantic extraction down the wadi.
The evening fell calm and warm, the day’s fighting over. Despite the presence of a sizable chunk of the Battle Group, the Taliban had stood and fought us all day. It was estimated that they had lost forty men killed in the fighting and another fifty wounded. Although based on intelligence reports, I was always sceptical of the figures and eschewed using body counts as an indication of success. First, they were often inflated: insurgents reported as hit might have been wounded or might simply have taken cover. Second, the body count did nothing to demonstrate whether we were winning the real battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Finally, those we killed were always replaced by others. However, the Taliban’s guns fell silent for the next two days. But it had not all been one-sided and I thought of how Paddy Caldwell was doing. Bastion had informed me that he had been flown out to a hospital in Oman. The fact that he had not been airlifted back to the UK concerned me. It made me reflect on the fickle dynamics of chance in war. Many of my soldiers often remarked how they had just changed a fire position, when seconds later the location they had vacated was raked with fire or hit by an RPG. Why does one bullet narrowly miss a man by a hair’s breadth and yet hit another? Why do some rounds pass straight through a soldier causing him comparatively slight injury from which he will recover, when others strike bone and tumble hideously inside the human body causing catastrophic injury?
I also began to notice how easy it was to become complacent about being under fire. Continuous exposure to combat brings with it a familiarity with danger and people learned to tell the difference between incoming and outgoing mortar rounds. It was a standing joke among the veterans of Sangin to laugh and ridicule those who jumped at the loud retort of the mortars being fired from the courtyard, as newcomers often did. They were also able to distinguish between effective fire, which was likely to hit you, and ineffective fire, which would probably not. However, it was a complacency that often annoyed me, even if I was sometimes guilty of it myself. It would vary from person to person and between locations, but I noticed it most in Sangin. I would harangue Toms who walked nonchalantly across the roof of the FSG Tower as rounds cracked a few inches above their heads. Longer-range small-arms fire might often seem innocuous; but it always did until it hit you. It might have looked cool to adopt an attitude of casual indifference, but lethal projectiles are no discriminator of rank, sex or age and I remember thinking that it wouldn’t look quite so ‘Ally’ to have had half your head removed by a stray bullet.
After giving orders to the company commanders and updating the JOC in Bastion on the activities for the next day, I did what hundreds of soldiers were doing around me. I put on a brew to heat up my boil-in-the-bag meal and provide water to make tea, which would be drunk from a home-made mug fashioned from one of the discarded `greenie’ containers used to hold the mortar bombs. I stripped and cleaned my weapons, recharged my magazines and thought about where I would kip down for the night. The pungent smell of cordite still hung in the air when I visited the sangars after finishing my brew. I smoked and spoke to the blokes around me.
I noticed how the men of A Company had bonded after the losses they had suffered in the last few weeks. They were men who had developed a particular closeness through exposure to the constant companionship of death, hardship and everyday thoughts of survival. Despite the rigours of what they had experienced, their morale was sky-high and I marvelled at their continual will to combat. Every young paratrooper wants to be tested in battle. It is what he joined the regiment and trained so hard for. But after the first exposure to combat, any romantic ideals of being a warrior are quickly replaced by the grim realities of war’s rough canvas and the true nature of its bloody and brutal business. The impact of the loss of friends, the grip of fear, numbing fatigue and the feeling of being sick with a constant lack of sleep had all formed the tapestry of their daily liv
es. They were not motivated to keep on going because of abstract sentiments of patriotism. Belief in the cause of what we were doing played a part, but at the worst moments people sometimes began to doubt that. The real motivations were the ethos of the regiment, being paratroopers and loyalty to a small cohesive group that engenders a keen sense of not wanting to let their mates down.
Humour also played a part in the motivation of my soldiers. The nervous emotion of combat often engenders a seemingly incongruous level of humour and sense of the ridiculous that seem absurdly out of kilter with the associated risks of the surrounding environment. Paratroopers often spoke of how they found the immediate aftermath of a near miss, or someone’s small mishap under fire, hilarious. It was not uncommon for people to be reduced to fits of giggles after such incidents. It was often an automatic reaction to having survived them and a vital coping mechanism for facing the rigours of the abnormal situation in which they found themselves. Despite the most adverse of conditions and regardless of rank, the banter between officers and men was excellent. The ability to laugh at ourselves and each other served to lighten the seriousness of the grim business we were often engaged in and draw some of the blackness from the sorrow that we suffered.
Men in combat also seek solace from other quarters. For some it is spiritual succour. I noticed how men, regardless of their previous religious conviction, became closer to God when in harm’s way. It has often been said that there are no atheists in fox holes and the attendance at Padre Richard Smith’s church services increased dramatically. Every memorial service we held at Bastion was always packed to capacity. Sometimes I felt that their function was not so much for the fallen, but for those that they left behind, as they helped provide a point of reference for the living to come to terms with loss and sacrifice. Sergeant Zip Lane never pretended to be massively religious, but he wore a St Christopher and always felt that ‘someone upstairs’ was looking after him. He also carried a copy of the Paratrooper’s Prayer in his notebook and would get ‘a real panic on’ if he couldn’t find it before a patrol. When things got dangerous, Sergeant Hope would think of his family and say a little prayer. He would ask his wife’s dead grandmother to look after him, as he was convinced that she would not want her great-grandchildren to lose their dad.
For others superstition had its place and I was no exception. I would always make sure that I had my grubby white leather flying gloves with me on every mission. They had a practical purpose, but I also began to see them as a kind of talisman and wouldn’t be without them. I sometimes chided myself for my absurdity, but was quietly relieved to know that others had their own charms. For Sergeant Dan Jarvie it was his threadbare lucky combat shirt, which he wore on every operation even though it was in severe danger of disintegration.
The Battle Group operation brought a temporary lull in the attacks on the district centre and demonstrated the effect of being able to operate with more than one company group in Sangin. It also demonstrated our resolve and created another opportunity to talk to the town’s elders. I sent out a message that I wished to hold a shura and the next day they came as they had been invited. Unarmed, the thirty or so elders of the town gathered at the front gate; they were wearing shalwar-kameez, turbans and long beards that defined their status as men of tribal influence. I went to greet them, offered my salaams, shook hands with all of them and invited them to sit. It was a surreal moment. These were the people who only a few hours previously we had been fighting. They had spent the last few weeks sending their young men against us to die on our guns and in the storm of our mortar and artillery fire. We were the infidel who had dropped 1,000 pound bombs on them and sprayed them with cannon fire. They were the people who had attacked us relentlessly and had killed some of my soldiers. An image of young Jacko and how his family might be coping with his loss back in Newcastle flashed through my mind. I thought of the sniper tower, only a few feet away from us, where one of their rockets had ended the lives of another three members of the Battle Group. Now we were about to sit down on thick rugs and drink tea together under the shady glade of a large tree in the corner of the compound. The manner and tone were as if we were meeting with civic dignitaries in Colchester. It was cordial and polite, but the seriousness of the agenda was not lost on anyone.
I explained our mission: that we were there at the invitation of the Afghan government to bring security in order that reconstruction and development could start in Sangin. I said that we didn’t want to fight, but would continue to respond robustly if attacked. I asked them to help stop the Taliban from launching attacks against us. This immediately brought a chorus of protest. They stated that they were simple farmers who knew nothing of the Taliban. An old man with a wizened and heavily lined face took the lead. He was animated but not aggressive. An interpreter whispered what he was saying into my ear as he spoke. He claimed that the fighting had forced the town’s bazaar to shut and that our bombs were killing innocent civilians. He further stated that we should withdraw and leave the security of Sangin to the town’s people. He fingered his prayer beads nervously and occasionally inclined his head to glance at the three younger men who sat behind him. Dressed in black, these men said little, but they appeared to exert a sort of reverence among the older men whose tradition of seniority of age suggested that they should have been their betters.
One of my officers whispered in my other ear that he was convinced that the three younger men were Taliban; he thought he had seen one of them during some of the recent fighting. I focused on the man who spoke, out of deference to his supposed prominence as an elder, but intermittently I fixed my eyes on the three younger men. Although silent, it was clear to me that the old man delivered their message and I wanted them to know that I could see through him. I refuted the claims of civilian casualties, reiterating that we took every measure to avoid them and I was confident in the knowledge that the Taliban would have exploited the situation for their own propaganda had we been inadvertently killing innocent women and children. I reminded the elder that we would continue to kill those who attacked us and would have no compunction in doing so. As I placed an emphasis on this last sentence, I stared at the three men so that they would be clear that my message was for them.
15
Day of Days
His eyes scanned both the ground in front of him and the horizon ahead, as he carefully picked his way down to the gully at the bottom of the Kajaki ridge. His mind was on the mission and his hands grasped the principal weapon of its execution. His .338 sniper rifle was designed to kill a man at over 1000 metres; Lance Corporal Stu Hale and his fellow members of the Sniper Platoon had demonstrated its lethal use to ranges well beyond that on many occasions. Now this capability was to be used again to attack a Taliban checkpoint that had been set up along the road leading to the Kajaki Dam. It was out of range of the direct fire weapons located on the high feature of the ridge and using the mortars had been ruled out for fear of causing civilian casualties among local Afghans who lived in the surrounding buildings.
Consequently, Hale was leading his small team on a sniper stalk to get into a position close to the Taliban where a precision snipe on to the checkpoint could be made. The sniper team moved forward in tactical bounds, Hale pushing a short distance forward while covered by the Minimi machine gun of Private Harvey behind him. Lance Corporal Hale would then go firm until the rest of his team caught up, then they would repeat the process. Having completed two or three bounds, Hale pushed on again until he came to a small dry wadi in the gully. He hopped across and suddenly found himself being thrown on to his back by some unexplained force. His mind didn’t register the explosion, but as he searched for the rifle he had dropped, he noticed one of his fingers hanging off. He looked down and saw that his foot was missing from the top of where his boot should have been; the rest of his leg was bent at a grotesque right angle where his femur had been shattered. He saw the small black crater and smelled the caustic tang of burnt explosive; it was only then that he real
ized that he had stepped on an anti-personnel mine.
Hale’s sniper team formed part of the forty-strong FSG and mortar section that 3 PARA had sent to defend the dam at Kajaki in early July. The fire group had dug themselves into the steep, craggy ridge line that dominated the dam area and used a combination of Javelin missiles, heavy machine guns and mortars to keep the Taliban at bay. They came under sporadic attack from 7mm rockets and Chinese-made mortar bombs, but their engagements with the insurgents remained long-range standoff affairs. Hale discussed sending out a sniper stalk to engage a distant Taliban position with his immediate commander, Corporal Stu Pearson. They knew that there was a possible risk of mines. The area was littered with painted red and white stones that warned of their presence and the soldiers used set routes to move between the rocky sangars that had been constructed along the narrow spine of the ridge. But they had spotted a goat track which had been used to place out trip flares at the bottom of the ridge a few hundred metres below them. They had also seen local Afghans moving in the area, which suggested that the proposed path to where Hale intended to take his shot might be clear of mines.
Their positions had been under mortar and RPG fire earlier that day, but the attacks had petered out and Stu Pearson was able to discern the difference when he heard the explosion of the mine in the valley below him. The blast shattered the peace of late morning as it echoed up the sides of the precipitous slopes of the ridge. Hale couldn’t believe what had happened to him. His initial thought was that his dreams of joining the SAS were over. Private Harvey rushed over to him and applied a tourniquet to the mangled stump of his leg. He also helped Hale administer his own morphine. Hale felt no pain, but he suspected that it would only be a matter of time before it kicked in; he gritted his teeth against the impending agony. There was a frantic scramble of activity on the ridge line, as the men above the patrol worked out what had happened. Corporal Mark Wright ran from the top of his position by the mortars on the northern part of the ridge towards Stu Pearson’s sangar. He shouted to the men around him, including Lance Corporal `Tugg’ Hartley and Corporal Craig who were the FSG’s two medics. They took only their weapons and the medical packs: there wasn’t time to don body armour or helmets; one of their mates was down and they needed to get to him.
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