Lethal Shot
Page 12
‘On the bright side,’ Frank said, ‘you’ll have plenty of time to work on your tans.’
* * *
Steve McCulley wasn’t the only person who asked me to join his company. I had four offers in total, all of them promising me action to some extent or another. There was no question of who I’d go with. Steve and I had history. I admired the way he worked and he’d also shown me great generosity in the past. And he was doing it again: he didn’t want me to go out to Afghan as a foot soldier. He wanted me to be a leader of men.
Fighting-wise, 42 Commando consisted of four combat companies and one support company. Major McCulley commanded J(uliet) Company and its 120 men, soon to be bolstered to 170-plus for the forthcoming campaign. Traditionally, a company is divided into three troops, each with a commissioned troop commander in charge, but for operations in Afghanistan a new template was required. Three troops couldn’t cover all the bases that needed manning, and so it was decided to create ‘multiples’ – smaller groups of men still led usually by a commissioned officer.
In 2010–11 OCs (officers commanding) were short on the ground and so 42 Commando HQ was forced to field-promote to fill the gaps. Steve had seven posts to fill and three young OCs, so each troop’s sergeant was assigned to lead a multiple. That still left one vacancy, which is where I came in. It was a huge honour and a massive change in protocol because the military love a dense chain of command and here we all were reporting directly to the company commander – in other words, Steve. I was honoured to be one of them. I would get my own multiple of seventeen men and be given a checkpoint (CP) in Helmand to man and patrol from. Everything that happened in that area would become my responsibility. I couldn’t wait to get going.
By the time I joined, 42 was already two months into Pre-Deployment Training. I caught the last half. That’s when I met the lads. The three OC troop sergeants were Ollie Augustin, Lloyd – whom we called ‘M’lord’ – and Tom Phillips. The day-to-day sergeants usually reporting to them included a mate from Taunton – and unsung hero of Iraq – Al Blackman. Like me, he was late arriving, due to the death of his father. Then there was a guy I’ll call ‘H’, plus Si Jones. But, together with me, everyone now had the same responsibilities. For the next seven months at least. To be fair to the three original OCs, they took the shakeup in delegation structure well. For two months of PDT we were blood brothers. I hoped it wouldn’t become more literal.
I didn’t know anyone apart from Steve and Al, but the CTC pumps out similar types of people. Pick anyone from the lads in our various multiples – Corporal Sibsy (formerly of 40 Commando), James Wright, Corporal Bruce, Kaz, Lance Corporal Snake, Matt, Duncs, Adz, Corporal Mac – and they were all but identical. Less chalk and cheese than cheese and cheese, and all on very similar wavelengths. Within an afternoon we found enough similarities to know we were cut from the same cloth.
The PDT was intense, with a huge amount of training on weapons. There were non-lethal combat options to go through, arrest techniques, a substantial improvised explosive device (IED) awareness package, plus guidance on leading men in action. Although, as the trainers said, nothing would prepare us like experience.
In rare moments of downtime we discussed everything. We covered the worst-case scenarios, the potential outcomes, the tedium of peacetime. All of it came under the microscope when I, Al and the others were shooting the breeze. We didn’t see danger. We only saw potential – potential excitement, potential fun, potential victory.
We finally flew out to Afghanistan in April as part of Operation Herrick 14. According to military papers, that lasted from May to October 2011. Prior to us, Herricks 1 to 13 had run from 2002 onwards. The early manifestations had been nominal. UK forces in-country were barely in the hundreds at that stage. In 2006 everything escalated. Or, in civilian terms, ‘worsened’. Task Force Helmand was deployed in its thousands. The Afghan threat would, at any cost, be neutralised. As big as I felt at being given my own command, I knew how small I was in the larger picture.
Part of our PDT down in Plymouth had been ideological: 42 Commando wasn’t going into Afghan to storm the castle. We were despatched to win hearts and minds by helping to restore order to the war-ravaged country. We were going to help build schools, hospitals and roads, and prepare the Afghan police and military to take full responsibility for national security. We were even going to catalogue the citizens. All of it worthy but dull.
Luckily, we also had to prepare for a determined and motivated enemy.
It probably won’t surprise anyone by now to learn that I was part of the advance party. I don’t think I’ve ever gone anywhere for the military without the back-up being hundreds of miles behind. The six other multiple leaders travelled with me. We landed at Camp Bastion, a large British Army airbase in the north of Helmand Province, and were shown to a big tent all to ourselves. Me, Al, Si, Ollie, H, M’lord and Phil. At that point it still felt like a holiday with mates.
I had seen Camp Bastion during my first tour in Afghanistan, when it had consisted of just some sea containers with nothing much else around it. Not very substantial at all. By 2011 it had become a small city. It was bustling. The fenced perimeter ran for 20 miles, and all the essentials were within it. The buildings were mainly steel containers, enclosed by high-grade fencing. The canteen was massive, probably the size of two football pitches, and staffed by Americans and British. When we arrived hundreds and hundreds of people were there being fed, and, even though everyone had a time slot during which to eat, none of us was on the sort of time restriction I’d known back at CTC.
We spent a week at Bastion. Part of this was for acclimatisation to the weather – even in March temperatures were in the mid-20s. The rest our time there was focused training. Transported everywhere in buses, we did a whirlwind ‘round-robin’ sample of almost everything. Two hours of first aid, two hours of counter-IED training, two hours’ firing, two hours of cultural studies, two hours of absorbing specific information on the area we were going into.
The rest of the time was our own, and in its own way was probably just as valuable. More often than not when we weren’t working we’d catch a few rays. We played football or volleyball, or in quieter times shared stories about our lives and the people close to us. These were small things, personal things, but they brought us all closer.
You might be forgiven for thinking that we were on some weird Club 18–30 holiday. There were daily reminders that we weren’t. On day 2 at Bastion we were leaving the canteen when an alarm sounded. A few seconds later there was an explosion at the far end of the camp. The local insurgents – the Taliban, in other words – had launched a primitive IED over the fence, but not from just outside the perimeter. We saw similar attacks a couple of times a day. Insurgents would launch a home-made missile from up to ten miles away. Yes, their margin of error was huge, but so was Camp Bastion. With 15,000 men and women around the camp, the odds of connecting with one or two were high, and we did take casualties during my time there.
According to our daily briefings, IEDs were the insurgency’s greatest and most terrifying weapon. I already knew that. We had living proof among us.
Our second day was full of surprises. It was also when I spotted three blokes in rags. Men with long hair, tattered uniforms, almost ghostly in manner. They barely looked human.
I asked one of the Bastion staff who they were.
He laughed.
‘They, my friend, are you in six months’ time.’
It took a lot of staring for us to realise that he was right. That once upon a time these wraith-like zombies had been fresh-faced arrivals like us. I spotted another lot the following day. They walked with their shoulders proudly back, but otherwise there was little to remind observers that they were from the military. Their uniforms were unrecognisably battered and stained. It was only by asking that I learned they were from 3 Para, escorting a colleague injured by an IED mine to the hospital. We were there to relieve 3 Para. I had to grab a word.
For anyone in their right minds that meeting should have sounded an alarm. For me and my companions it was just another intriguing feature of the war. The safe option would have been to wangle things so as to stay billeted at Camp Bastion till September. But no one wanted the safe option. We wanted to get out into the field.
When the day came to roll out we were bouncing like dogs at a back door. We collected our weapons from the armoury and drew a day’s worth of ammunition and grenades, just enough to protect us and our transport on the journey. It was nice to have someone else give me this rather than my handing it to them. Then, armed to the teeth, we boarded a Chinook and, leaving the comfort and security of Camp Bastion below, flew into the unknown.
* * *
The area of Helmand we were going into was just under 10 miles to the north, and slightly to the west, of the region’s capital, Lashkar Gah. In Persian the name means ‘army barracks’, which was fitting because, since the 2002 overthrow of the Taliban, American and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops – including British forces – had been living there in serious numbers. Now it was our turn.
Our forward operating base (FOB) – Bastion’s little brother, if you like – was a camp called Shazaad. Picture a dartboard with Shazaad as the bullseye. As a result it’s the safest place in the area. Set around the camp, moving outwards in waves, are a number of checkpoints (CPs), each manned by a multiple of men. Going north along one of three major supply routes (MSR) we named ‘Dorset’, at about the ‘treble 20’ mark, was a CP called Mulladad. That, for the next half a year, was to be my home. North, at ‘double top’, was Taalander, run by M’lord, with Si Jones as his second in command (2ic) and Corporal Bruce among his men. East of Mulladad was Al Blackman’s CP Omar. North-west of us was Sergeant H’s Kamiabi. To the south-west we had Tom Phillips and Corporal Sibsy at Shiran. Ollie and Sam were further afield. On paper it made sense to all of us. On the ground it would be a different story.
We flew at night. Afghanistan doesn’t have amazing power distribution so the entire journey was completed in darkness. Only when we approached the grounds of an old factory – now commandeered as the FOB – did we find any light. And what it illuminated was Afghanistan. Proper Afghanistan, the country that you see on the news. Mud buildings, dirt tracks, roads criss-crossing the irrigation-canal system, local Afghans going about their business oblivious to the foreign armed forces in their midst.
Closer to home, what I saw was dozens more ghosts. They were everywhere in Shazaad. The sunken eyes, the ingrained dirt, the remains of once-proudly ironed uniforms, they were a sight, and there we were, bouncing down from the CH-47, all shiny and new. Our bags were in better shape than these men were. A part of me was sad for them, but there were advantages to the filth because they blended in with the brown walls, the brown earth and the dirty vehicles. I, Al and the rest stood out like sore thumbs. We may as well have had targets on our backs. We were staying overnight and so, the second we reached our tents, I took off my uniform and stamped it into the mud. Ollie caught me.
‘What the hell?’
‘I don’t want to look any different to the people I’m working with.’
‘Fair point.’ Ten minutes later we were all doing it.
I could rough up my desert kit all I liked, I could put mud on my face and hands, but there was one difference between us newbies and the occupants of Shazaad we just couldn’t hide.
Just how hyper we were to be there.
That only got more extreme when the Shazaad CO, a captain, ran us through the locale. They had an ops room with TV monitors showing images from cameras around the FOB, allowing them to maintain a twenty-four-hour watch over any part of the base and the area around it.
Two minutes later we’d seen all over various checkpoints. The thing that really stood out was how close some of them were. Mine – Mulladad – was barely 700 metres north-west of where we were standing. Taalander was about the same distance further to the north-west, on the same road. The FOB commander explained.
‘Trust me, they’re far enough apart when the roads get lined every single day with IEDs,’ he said. ‘It takes an hour to walk between two CPs – if you do it right.’
The other thing we could see via the balloon’s cameras was the canal irrigation system which provided natural borders to each CP’s AOR (area of responsibility), as well as water for the fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Because of the abundant vegetation, the area was known to us as the ‘Green Zone’, but it had other names. Legend had it that that part of the country could provide food for the whole population, and so for a while it was known as the ‘Garden of Afghanistan’. When those food crops were replaced over time by a single plant – the opium poppy – it became the ‘Drug Garden of the World’. At the time, approximately 90 per cent of the world’s heroin was grown right there.
The irony, however, was that, according to our briefings, the whole region had been created by the Americans in an attempt to strengthen local resolve during the Russian occupation from 1979 to 1989. Fast forward a generation and the opium for which the Americans were indirectly responsible was funding the Taliban and the insurgency against them. And us.
But that wasn’t the case any more, was it? Not according to the troops in Shazaad. Nor those I was about to replace. According to them, the dangerous stuff was over. The mission now was policing and data collection.
That night the seven of us from Bastion had a chat. We would all have been gutted if the fighting was over, but none of us believed it was. The IED problem, in particular, hadn’t gone away. As a result, we actually came up with a bit of a plan. When we went out on patrols in the first few weeks we’d try to go with whichever CP was nearest. So in my case that would be Al’s troop in Omar, due east of us, or M’lord’s up in Taalander. If you imagine a clock face, one route, Dorset, ran north-west along the midnight line from Shazaad via Mulladad to Taalander; another route, Devon, ran from the centre to 1 o’clock out to H’s Kamiabi; Cornwall, leading to Omar, was the 2 o’clock position.
‘We should always try to be within six hundred metres of each other,’ I said.
It was agreed. We all shook hands, said goodnight, and the next morning went our separate ways.
* * *
I was driven the 700 metres along the dusty track to Mulladad the next morning and dropped outside a compound protected by 12-foot walls, a sentry tower, barricaded at its base, set just outside the compound, and rolls of barbed wire, while Ollie, Al and the others continued onwards to their CPs.
I was surprised to be greeted by a welcome party. I was less surprised at how they looked. More ghosts. More of these creatures who used to be men once. That’s how they appeared. They were standing there in shorts, the uniforms hanging off them, absolutely stinking, their hair long and unkempt – it hadn’t been washed for weeks, by the look of it. They were quite muscular but very skinny, and armed to the teeth, with their body armour close at hand.
But welcoming they were not. I went up to shake one guy’s hand and he blanked me, proper mugged me off. But he did pick up my luggage and lead me into the CP. Apparently he had only been there to see if the mail had arrived. Oh, and he was a para.
Stepping into the compound was like that moment in the pub in An American Werewolf in London: everyone stopped what they were doing and just stared me up and down. There was I, slightly sunburnt, probably looking quite well fed, healthy, shaven, with clean hair and a still-shiny Marine uniform. And there were these people, with their Para rags and their camaraderie as tight as a drum. The last thing they wanted was an interloper.
I don’t mind admitting that it was intimi
dating. I was the only marine among twenty paras, not one of whom would piss in my ear if my brain was on fire. The only person who looked genuinely happy to see me was Sergeant Frank, the CP commander.
Because, with me there, he knew he would soon be going home.
The way the military moves its chess pieces around the board is interesting. My multiple wasn’t just going to be dropped into Mulladad en masse. The high command operates an RIP system – relief in place – whereby personnel arrive to shadow their predecessor before taking over their spot. There are no individuals in the military, remember: Replacement B follows Replacement A. It’s just a question of logistics. So, for one week I would be shadowing Frank. I ate where he did, I slept where he did, and of course I monitored how he ran the CP.
The most important thing Frank could do was show me the area. Directly outside the compound the terrain was not unlike the English countryside, but completely flat. It was March, so everything was starting to get lush and green. There was maize growing, wheat and other grains, and either side of the canals was a patchwork of meadows. Frank said the locals called them jerubs. Each was owned by a different family, as were all the various mud buildings and enclosed compounds in the vicinity. From what I remembered of history, back in the Middle Ages English peasants used to build homes using the ‘wattle and daub’ technique, yet here we were, a thousand years later and it was still employed. Effectively so. The mud is applied layer after layer and the sun bakes it until suddenly you have a building to survive all weathers. Our own compound, once the home of an Afghan family, was a case in point.
Clearly, our CP was in the middle of a farming community. But not all the crops were maize and wheat. There were meadows not too distant that showed the distinctive stems of poppies. They weren’t even hidden. As far as the locals were concerned, growing opium was a money-making venture like growing vegetables or raising goats – part of their daily lives.