Lethal Shot

by Robert Driscoll

  Being taken off active service, I considered myself hard done by. After everything I’d done for the Marines and in their name, to be junked over such a minor injury – which had not in any way stopped me from doing my job, or even hindered me in it – seemed offensive to me in the extreme. I felt seriously down.

  Even when I was awarded the honour of being Mentioned in Despatches for my bravery during that mission in May 2011, I couldn’t take pleasure in it. The citation read: ‘He never bows to fatigue or danger and there is no doubt that his remarkable acts of selflessness saved a number of lives for which he deserves significant formal recognition’.

  I suppose I was proud to receive it. I’d have been prouder to have been allowed to keep my job. For the next year or so I retrained as a physiotherapist with a view to joining Carly’s business as a physical rehab specialist. I believe we made as good a fist of it as we could. The hours were the killer – sixty or seventy hours a week each wasn’t unheard of. It was tough going. It put a strain on the marriage from which, ultimately, we wouldn’t recover. And of course I missed the camaraderie among the lads, my fellow marines.

  Work wasn’t the only thing testing my relationship with Carly. She was becoming more and more concerned about my sleeping – or, rather, the lack of it. On returning to Blighty all I’d really wanted to do was close my eyes and not wake up for a month. Getting to sleep proved to be no problem. Staying that way was impossible. On my first night back I think I must have slept no more than three hours before I became aware that I was sitting bolt upright. I was shouting and was covered in sweat. And I had an Afghan killer in my sights.

  Except it wasn’t an Afghan. It wasn’t a Taliban murderer there to slit my throat as I slept. It was Carly. She had the duvet pulled up to her chin and she looked terrified to be within my imaginary crosshairs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You were tossing and turning so much.’ I could see from the look in her eyes that I’d been doing more than having a fitful night’s kip. I tried to calm her, to tell her I was okay, that it was just hard to adjust to being in a comfy bed. Even as I did so, I couldn’t get away from the realisation that I was just as scared.

  The next night it happened again. And the night after. And the night after. Not always identically, but never a sleep passed without incident. Two things were always the same: Carly’s horrified expression, and my body being covered in sweat. In fact, it wasn’t sweat. It was slimy and it had a smell of sweet vinegar. I really thought something was wrong physically. At my next round of MOD medical tests a few months later – run by the charity Combat Stress – I was told the sweating was not a physical problem at all. It was mental.

  How can slimy sweat be a product of the mind?

  ‘You’re having nightmares,’ the doctor explained, ‘which your brain is interpreting as real-life situations. It thinks you really are under attack so your body is responding for real. The sweat is an adrenal response to what your brain considers a genuine attack.’

  Wow. I sound like a fruitcake.

  That was the last thing the doc intended. He was quick to stress that my condition was a common ‘brain injury’ experienced particularly by those with hearing loss. The brain is used to hearing certain sounds, and when suddenly it doesn’t it assumes it’s under threat and goes into ‘safe room’ mode. Adrenalin levels rocket, alertness switches to 100 per cent. It’s a primeval instinct, and one without which our species would not have survived this long.

  ‘Okay, so I’m not mad?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ He added that it would recover with enough time away from theatre; or he could prescribe medication. Over the next few weeks a series of other experts came to the same conclusion.

  ‘What about my hearing?’

  ‘That won’t improve.’

  I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Civilians can never truly empathise with men and women who have served in battle. Not really. Carly had seen my worst side but still I couldn’t talk to her about it. Not without her thinking me a loony. I needed to reach out to one of my own. By coincidence I ran into my mate Pinky, who’d served ten memorable days with me in Daqhiqh at the end of our tour. I didn’t want to dump my problems on him. Not immediately.

  ‘How’s the real world going for you?’ I asked.

  ‘As well as it’s going for you, I reckon. I haven’t slept since we got back.’

  ‘Nightmares?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. But never about the men I killed.’

  ‘What about, then?’

  ‘Honestly? I can’t help thinking about the ones I let live.’

  ‘Are you thinking of the ambush?’

  The day when he’d accompanied me out on the ‘ghost’ patrol to try to smoke out the insurgents still played on my mind.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I can’t get over it. Why didn’t we take the lethal shot? Who fires a fucking warning shot when a murderer is aiming at you?’

  ‘I’m the same,’ I said. ‘What the hell were we thinking? How many people did that bastard go on to murder or maim because we let him live?’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘If I could change one thing, I swear it would be that day.’

  ‘Really? Not even the sleep? What was it: fourteen hours in ten days?’

  ‘Rob, mate, I’d go a month without shuteye to get another chance at that bastard. With him in the ground I’d sleep easier, I know I would.’

  * * *

  Clinical problems are one thing. Friends of mine were about to suffer something a lot worse.

  October 2012. We’d been back a year. I’d just finished with a client in the clinic at home and I checked my phone. There must have been a dozen messages, all saying much the same thing:

  ‘Have you heard?’

  ‘Do you know who it is?’

  ‘Call me back.’

  Most of the guys were on other calls when I tried to get back to them. Corporal Sibsy was the first to pick up. He only lived round the corner from my house. It would have been easier to have walked over there.

  ‘What’s going on, mate?’

  ‘What rock have you been hiding under? Seven marines have been arrested.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Gets worse – they’re all from Four-Two. Seven of us. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Do you know what the charge is?’

  ‘Haven’t got a clue, mate. They could be coming for any of us. What do you know?’

  ‘Sibsy, mate, I know I’m not sleeping and I know I can hear fuck all. That’s about it.’

  I called all the lads from my multiple to check that they were still at liberty. All present and correct. Then I managed to get hold of Steve McCulley. It took a few goes, which should have told me everything. When he came online he knew a lot more than he was prepared to let on.

  ‘Trust me on this, Rob,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you want to know. It will be out there soon enough.’

  ‘At least tell me this: are any of my men under scrutiny?’

  ‘No one from your multiple.’

  At least that’s something.

  Twenty-four hours later the whole thing was in the media. The people arrested weren’t named. But their charge was. I couldn’t believe it. They’d all been picked up on suspicion of murder. Murder? What the hell had they been up to? From time to time you read about military men losing their shit with civilians and, because of the nature of their training, going too far in the ensuing fighting. But seven of them losing their tempers in a bar brawl? That didn’t stack up. It had to be something else.

  The truth proved to be even more unlikely. Over the next day or two I realised that the arrested parties had all served at Omar. For some reason the entire multiple was being shaken down. As the days passed, more information seeped out into the media. What I was reading blew my mind. The seven men hadn’t strolled up to some bloke in a Devon pub and ended his life over a girlfriend dispute. The crime they were accused of committing had taken place in Afghanistan.

&nb
sp; Afghanistan.

  While they were on active service. While they were there to kill insurgents.

  When they’d done their job.

  Everyone I spoke to was as confused as I was. M’lord, H, Mac, Fergie, Si, Robbie, Matt, Pinky, Sibsy – all the boys were bewildered. How are marines who have been chosen for their almost superhuman abilities to end the lives of enemy forces suddenly being hunted down for doing exactly that? And why? You can’t send an army to war and then punish it for being violent.

  It was a mindfuck.

  * * *

  Over the course of the next few months, four of the seven were released. Thank God. That still left three facing serious charges. I assumed they would be let off in due course. It had to happen. We all believed it. The option was to arrest every soldier, sailor, marine and pilot who’d ever served.

  Not so.

  It transpired that, following a domestic quarrel and unfounded accusations, one of the marines was found to have files on his laptop that he had deleted but which were, unknown to any of us, recoverable – these were helmet-cam videos containing footage from 15 September 2011, when Al finished off the insurgent that the Apache helicopter had failed to kill. Everything that happened thereafter stemmed from that point. To be fair to them, the cops were just following procedure. And to their credit, they acknowledged that the file concerned matters beyond not only their jurisdiction, but their moral code. While they felt uneasy with its content they didn’t know whether or not it was an issue legally. As a point of procedure they passed the file to the MOD. At that point I would have put money on someone high up in the food chain making the film disappear.

  ‘Oh, thank you, officer. We’ll take it from here.’ Followed by the sound of the case file being stamped ‘Closed’.

  I’m sure that plenty of outsiders would assume that the military’s own legal set-up would naturally tend to find in favour of its own men. Based on some of the decisions that had affected me in my career, I knew that wouldn’t be the case. The wellbeing of their men seems hardly the armed forces’ greatest concern. Having experienced in theatre the nonexistent levels of support that I had, I wouldn’t have put a penny on anyone high up the military pole coming to the right decision. If anything, I wish I’d bet against it.

  Not only was the file not lost, hidden or destroyed – any of the options I would still consider more practical in civilian life – a full-scale investigation was launched and the seven suspects taken into custody. When their number was whittled down to three no one celebrated. All seven were innocent. Maybe not in the civilian world, but totally within the framework of war. What the hell was going on?

  The three Omar men still under suspicion were named simply as Marine A, Marine B and Marine C. At least in the media they were. Thanks to the jungle drums I knew exactly who those initials belonged to. Corporal Chris Watson and Marine Jack Hammond were as solid soldiers as you could hope for. Trust me, if your country needs defending, you want hundreds of Marines B and C.

  As for Marine A, I don’t care what the media called him. In my house he would only ever have one name. He was a marine, and my mate. He was a hero. He was Sergeant Al Blackman.

  And no way was he guilty of murder. It made no sense to me. The order had been given: the insurgent must die. When the helicopter gunship assault had come up short, Al had done no more than administer the final blow. It wasn’t as straightforward a kill as you’d hope but the net result was the same. HQ wanted the Taliban guy dead. By the end of the mission he was.

  I’ve said it before and will say it again. On 15 September Al Blackman removed a terrorist from the playing board. A terrorist who had been trying to kill us and would have continued so to do for the duration of Herrick 14. I for one was grateful that Al had done what he did. Nothing since then has changed that opinion. There were so many other opportunities where similar action should have been taken.

  In a strange way, my wife took Al’s arrest almost harder than I did. One of her good friends was Claire, Al’s wife. For the seven months that he and I had been away, the two Taunton women had become even closer. In the same way that no one understands a soldier’s experiences like another soldier, the only person who truly appreciates what a military wife goes through is another military wife. When J Company returned from Afghan the four of us began socialising. Dinners, lunches, family afternoons, Claire’s fortieth birthday party. It was great. Refreshing, and sometimes quite surreal. What other table in a restaurant would have diners discussing the kind of topics we were? We were lucky to have each other.

  From the point of being charged with murder, despite the world remaining oblivious of his name, Al was not allowed to leave Bickleigh Barracks. He was virtually under house arrest. There were no visitors, at least not from the likes of me, no phone calls and no emails. Once the investigation had been completed, however, he was allowed a bit more freedom. In fact, one day I took the boys to our local driving range and there he was, in the flesh: Sergeant Al Blackman.

  I say ‘in the flesh’. There was nothing of him. He was skeleton thin. He had sunken eyes, a dishevelled air. When he saw me he smiled with his mouth, but his eyes were dead.

  ‘Mate,’ I said, ‘how’s it going? How are you?’

  ‘I’m good, Rob.’ He paused. ‘Good as can be expected.’

  My kids were running around me. He was with a friend. We were both distracted. But I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Al Blackman. My mate. Hero sergeant of Omar CP for seven months in 2011. Leader of men, scourge of enemy agents. Why did he seem so weak?

  Our time together was limited. But I wouldn’t be a mate if I didn’t ask him if there was anything I could do. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But if the worst comes to the worst, please look after Claire.’

  As I have said, his wife was a close friend of Carly’s. But even if she weren’t, of course we would do everything we could.

  ‘Al, you’re going to be all right,’ I said. I genuinely believed it. ‘They’ve got nothing on you. No one would call you a murderer. No one who knows anything about what we went through.’

  ‘I dunno, Rob,’ he said. ‘They look pretty confident.’

  I’d spoken about Al’s case with my dad. Neither of us was an expert on court-martial procedure but if anyone knew his way around a court room plea it was Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll.

  ‘He has to come clean,’ Dad said. ‘Bombard the court with stories of the environment, the hierarchy, the pressures, the lack of sleep. Give them more information than they can process. If his tour was half as bad as yours, they’ve got to let him off.’

  Al didn’t have access to my dad, but he did have a team of civilian counsel led by Anthony Berry, QC.

  ‘I’m pleading ignorance,’ Al said. ‘I didn’t know he [the insurgent] was still alive.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Really?’

  I’d heard the original radio transmissions. More importantly I’d seen the helmet-camera video. I will defend the actions of Al Blackman until my dying day because he did nothing wrong. Why didn’t he just say that? We both knew what had gone on that day of 15 September. And he’d done nothing wrong.

  ‘I have to follow the advice,’ he said, absently. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. But if you ever need to talk …’

  ‘Yeah, cheers …’

  * * *

  Every month that passed I fully expected to read that the charges against Al and the others had been dropped. Not only dropped, but retracted with full apologies. That didn’t happen. In October 2013, two years after we’d returned broken and disillusioned from an Afghan mission that was as poorly co-ordinated as it was supplied, the full court martial of Marines A, B and C commenced.

  I wasn’t sure whether I felt more angry or ill. The idea that three of my colleagues were being hung out to dry for doing their job terrified and sickened me in equal measure. If the murder charges stuck, these men would become the first serving members of the British military
since the Second World War to have been found guilty of murder while on active service. It would be a black day for the marines in question. It would be a worse day for the UK and its armed forces.

  What young person in his right mind is going to sign up for a career where you’re given a gun and told to shoot strangers – knowing that, if you do, you could find yourself facing a lifetime in jail for murder? What naïve youngster is going to be swayed by pull-up tests and fancy promotional posters when that is the potential outcome?

  Whoever had sanctioned the arrest order was not a patriot. They were not thinking of the bigger picture. Of the protection of the UK’s borders. Of seventy million hearts and minds at home.

  * * *

  Once the whispers around the armed forces got going, however, I realised there was more to it. The full weight of the British military machine appeared, to me, to be working against my mates. Not only was Al giving – on the advice of his counsel – a defence plea which, to me and to many others, made no sense, the court martial panel – its version of a jury – comprised worthy people but some of whom were undeniably desk bunnies. I would have felt far more comfortable with a full panel of men who had seen active service sitting in judgement on my friends. Servicemen or women who’d faced bullets and the daily – and nightly – threat of death at enemy hands. Courts martial are not civilian courts. Twelve good men and true are not enough

  Al’s defence was ridiculous in my opinion. But it was the defence he’d been advised to mount. That wasn’t the worst of it. Behind the scenes I heard that various high-profile Marine men had been denied the opportunity to speak on behalf of the accused.

  Al and the others gave their evidence at the Military Court Centre in Bulford, Wiltshire, from behind screens. The principle of anonymity needed to be upheld for fear of terrorist reprisal. I have to believe that the process unfurled without influence or collusion. When the verdict came on 8 November 2013 I was more confident than hopeful. Not because Al was a friend, not because I was scared for my own integrity, not even because I believed he’d mounted a good defence (I didn’t, and still don’t).