Painting the Sand

by Kim Hughes GC

  Ainsworth was sweating profusely. His shirt was covered with dark, damp patches and his hair was slick with sweat. Even in October the Afghan heat could be oppressive for the uninitiated.

  ‘This is the equipment we use on a day-to-day basis. But not the bomb suit, that’s too heavy and too hot,’ I added with a smile.

  He seemed to get the joke. ‘I can believe that,’ he said, wiping his brow with a clean handkerchief.

  I went through some of the more interesting bits and pieces for five to ten minutes trying to keep it informative but brief and pausing just long enough for questions.

  At the end of my little brief he turned to me and said: ‘Right, Staff, you’ve been at the coalface for six months. You’ve had a busy tour, from what I understand. What do you need or more pertinently what will be needed by those taking over from you?’

  I thought for a few seconds and felt the eyes of the senior officers burning into me. The press were poised with pens and notebooks in hand and the TV crews and photographers massed behind him, presumably looking for the money shot that was going to make their editors back in London happy. Even Sandy was there in the background almost willing me to say ‘lightweight kit’. But as I thought about the answer in those few brief seconds I realised it wasn’t just the kit, it was troop numbers, too.

  ‘More men on the ground, sir.’ Now I don’t know what answer he was expecting or whether he had been briefed that I would talk about the need for more advanced kit but he certainly wasn’t expecting that answer. Possibly for just a fraction of a second I think his world stopped spinning. No one spoke, no one moved. Nothing. It was a real tumbleweed moment. Then the shit well and truly hit the fan.

  His face dropped and the press moved forward as one, suddenly engulfing us. I gave him a look as if to say: ‘Well you did ask.’

  ‘Err . . . OK,’ he said stuttering. ‘Can you explain that?’

  Filled with confidence that my comments seemed to hit home, I was now on a roll: ‘With more men on the front line, we could do more. Secure more areas and have a greater presence on the ground. At the end of the day we haven’t got enough manpower physically on the ground. For example, the infantry will clear an area from the Taliban either simply by being there or after a series of costly battles. The Counter-IED teams will then come in and clear the area of IEDs but we can’t hold that ground because the infantry have to go elsewhere and clear more areas, or we do, and the Taliban move back in and reclaim the area and rebury the devices. Sir, I’m not just saying this. This has happened to a colleague of mine. He had cleared an area, a device had been pulled out of the ground. The cordon that was securing the area collapsed and the infantry returned to their patrol base. As the troops left the last man periodically turned around to check the rear. When they were about three hundred yards away they saw someone planting another device in the same hole they had just pulled one out of.’

  Bob Ainsworth was nodding as I spoke and was genuinely interested but the senior officers and my bosses were less than impressed.

  Undeterred, I continued: ‘And this is why I say, sir, that we don’t have enough people. This is happening all the time. Senior officers call it mowing the lawn – we go out and clear the Taliban, can’t hold the ground, withdraw and the Taliban come back in and the whole cycle repeats itself a few weeks later, with a few more of our lads dying or getting their legs blown off. The Taliban are putting bombs back in the ground as quickly as we are taking them out. And on the equipment front we need more helicopters and we need light scale equipment.’

  But the damage had been done. I looked up and could see almost unconstrained glee across the faces of the press while the faces of senior officers revealed a different story. I caught Sandy’s eye and could see him shaking his head in despair.

  Bob Ainsworth was quickly ushered away by his aides no doubt in fear of what I was going to say next but not before thanking me for my frank comments and shaking my hand.

  I took a breath, turned to my team, and said, ‘Well . . . that went well.’

  Lewis looked at me as if to say: ‘You’ve just fucked yourself.’

  Sandy appeared and wasn’t impressed. ‘One thing, Kim. We asked you to say one thing. Mention light scale equipment and you’ve come out with that.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said in protest, ‘what I said wasn’t wrong. I told him the truth. If they wanted someone to lie to him they probably shouldn’t have asked a soldier.’

  I could sense Sandy was pissed off but we all knew I was right. We had often spoken about why no one ever told politicians and senior officers how life is at the coalface. This was an opportunity and I took it.

  Sandy took a deep breath. ‘You’re right,’ he said with a smile and patted me on the shoulder. ‘See you later.’

  Once the mass of top brass and the VIPs had left, some of the other soldiers also giving presentations began packing up their kit and heading back to the main camp but, unknown to me at the time, some of the press were still hanging around.

  As I was packing away the bomb suit, a member of the Task Force came over for a chat. ‘Fucking hell, Kim, do you think you should have said that? Do you think you’ll be in the shit? Telling the Defence Secretary that we need more troops on the ground. You’ve got some balls.’

  I couldn’t see the big deal and without checking to see if anyone was in earshot, I said: ‘You know what? What’s he going to do – send me home?’

  My mate chuckled before saying, ‘Yeah, fair one.’

  I thought nothing more of the whole event until the following day when I was walking into the Ops Room and noticed that the place was almost empty and those who were at work were looking at me with a mixture of amusement and concern. ‘Where is everyone?’ I thought to myself as I sat behind a desk and logged on to my Facebook account to see what had been happening in the weeks I had been out on the ground.

  I opened a message from a friend back in the UK that read: ‘LOL. What’s he going to do send me home – nice one mate.’

  As I was trying to make sense of what the message meant, another ATO came over to me and said, ‘Kim, you’re a legend.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ He then flicked to Sky News on the TV in the Ops Room ‘chill out’ area and the main story running was my brief Q and A with Bob Ainsworth, along with the headline: ‘Bomb disposal expert challenges the defence secretary’ along with ‘Soldier says: “We need more men.”’ I was surprised but not overly concerned given that everyone present at the event had heard what I said. That was until another picture of me appeared on the screen with the words: ‘After the confrontation Staff Sergeant Hughes was undeterred and added: “What’s he going to do? Send me home?”’

  I closed my eyes in the vain hope that what I had just seen was some sort of dream or event that hadn’t really happened. My heart began to beat faster as I realised I was now in a world of shit.

  ‘You are joking,’ I said out loud, now possibly more worried about my immediate future than at any time in the last six months. I had visions of being dragged in front of senior commanders for a major bollocking and sent home in disgrace.

  It then emerged that the reason why the Ops Room was empty was because all of the senior officers had been called into a meeting with the Helmand Task Force commander, as part of a damage limitation operation. I sat down and went over the previous day’s events at the demo. I thought about what I had said and then realised that one of the reporters who’d been hanging around at the end had probably overheard my conversation. I might have spoken out of turn, I thought, but had I really said anything that bad? Was I wrong? Ultimately it didn’t matter what I thought.

  About half an hour later Sandy and the OC returned to the Ops Room and before they could say anything I stopped them in the doorway: ‘Look I don’t even know when or how that happened. Am I in the shit?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. The commander was pretty relaxed. His attitude was what do you expect? A politician asking a SNCO a straight ques
tion. He said he hoped a SNCO would always give a straight answer.’

  The sense of relief was almost overwhelming and it was nice to know that the chain of command was backing the troops. The spin being placed on the whole episode was that the Defence Secretary should have known better than to ask a soldier who had been on the front line for his honest opinion. The drama and the noise created by a brief and honest conversation between two adults died away after a few days. But it did make me question why the Army was seemingly so worried about soldiers speaking their minds. Everyone in Helmand knew we didn’t have enough men, so presumably every senior officer back in the UK knew that was the case so why the fuss? The whole experience did leave me wondering whether anyone in the military was really giving the politicians the hard facts about life on the front line in Afghan.

  25

  Going Home

  It was over. Brimstone 42 was finally offline. I’d always assumed I’d be really happy, ecstatic almost, doing cartwheels, laughing, joking. But the reality was very different. It was a massive anticlimax, brought about by the constant, unremitting weariness of war. I felt conflicted. I was relieved that my part in the mission was over but I also felt almost empty and disappointed.

  Afghan was now in my blood. It had given me a direction and purpose, possibly for the first time in my life. I had spent the last six months riding a wave of adrenalin, dodging death every day, pitting my wits against the Taliban and saving lives. Soldiers in Afghan had a saying: ‘Living the dream’. It was an ironic take, I suppose, on the various life choices that had taken them to the front line but I really was ‘living the dream’, I just hadn’t realised it.

  Tours of duty in Afghan don’t just end. It’s never a case of ‘Right you’re finished – pack up your kit and get on that plane.’ There’s a whole river of bullshit admin you have to wade through before you step foot on the flight and the first part of that was the arduous process of de-kitting and handing back all the equipment we’d been using every day for the last six months. Everything from weapons to radios, including all of my bomb disposal gear, the ECM equipment, the robots and IED weapons, all had to be cleaned and handed back into the stores – it was a real balls-ache.

  After de-kitting we had one final job to complete before we could relax. All new Brimstone teams coming into theatre had to go through Role Specific Training (RST) – it was basically a last chance to iron out any issues and be brought up to date with the latest Taliban tactics and IEDs. Brimstone 42 had gone through the same process six months earlier and it was a bit of an awkward transition. As the new team you just wanted to get out on the ground and do your job and not have to listen to people constantly pointing out the errors in your drills. Everyone tried to be professional but the clenching of jaws and biting of lips was always a giveaway.

  The new ATO coming into theatre was Staff Sergeant Paddy Read. He knew the score and was only too willing to scoop up every bit of knowledge on offer. Each member of my team sat down with their opposite number and basically gave them a breakdown of the type of missions undertaken over the last six months – it was a full-scale intelligence brief on how the threat had changed and how Taliban tactics had evolved. Next, out on the training area, Paddy’s team were put through a series of scenarios they could expect to encounter once they were online and operational. It was a fairly intense couple of days and by the end of the week his team were ready for action.

  With Paddy’s team ready to go, Brimstone 42 was moved out of its tent and into transit accommodation as we waited for information on our flight home. Bastion was now in the full throes of the ‘relief in place’ (RIP), when a new brigade is coming in and another going home. Over the six-week period from the end of August to the middle of October 14,000 troops were on the move, 7,000 coming in and 7,000 going out of Bastion, and it only took one mistake to throw the whole system into chaos.

  I was never quite sure whether it was one of the flights out of Bastion that went tits-up or if the RAF crews hadn’t managed to get their beauty sleep, but our flight was delayed by at least forty-eight hours. Morale plummeted. It didn’t seem to matter that we were going home – or home via Cyprus for twenty-four hours’ decompression – the mood among the blokes was grim. It was as if the entire military system was working against us, fucking us around until the very last minute.

  Bastion wasn’t the sort of place you hung about in unless you had to. There were only so many times you could go to the NAAFI, or the gym, before the days began to drag miserably. The prospect of spending twenty-four hours in Cyprus having a few beers before flying back to the UK didn’t do much for our morale either. As far as we were concerned it was just another delay.

  On 8 October, at around 1000 hrs, I was heading over to the Ops Room to see if there was any news on our flights when the sound of a massive explosion rumbled through Bastion. I knew immediately that it was an IED. Had the Taliban got inside the camp and planted a bomb? My pace quickened and pushing open the door of the Ops Room I headed straight for the watch-keeper.

  ‘What’s going on? That was an IED. It sounded like it was inside the wire.’ I was dressed in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. ‘My team just need to re-kit. Use us.’ Although I had no real idea what was going on, I still wanted to be part of it.

  The Taliban had managed to sneak onto the training area – the same place I had been earlier in the week putting Paddy’s team through their paces – and planted an IED on one of the ranges. The whole training area was beyond the wire and a series of manned watchtowers were supposed to provide over-watch to prevent any incursions by the Taliban.

  The 1st Battalion, Coldstream Guards had been going through their RST on the ranges when Lance Corporal James Hill, a soldier from Surrey, who was planning to get married at the end of the tour, was killed. One of his mates, Guardsman Jack Davies, was severely injured, losing a leg and suffering spinal injuries. It was a major fuck-up. A year earlier an officer had sent a report up through the chain of command stating that he believed the shooting ranges were unsafe but it seemed that the report had been lost.

  Clearing the ranges could take up to four hours but the demands on getting soldiers through their training meant that on that particular day the range had been cleared in just forty-five minutes. The ranges were like a magnet to the local Afghan population. They would walk onto them at night and collect the empty bullet cases to sell on as scrap. The Taliban had obviously clocked that the area was insecure and dug an IED into one of the firing points on the range. Lance Corporal Hill was just twenty-three. He had been in Afghan less than a week. Soldiers know operations carry risk, they know they can get killed in battle – that was part of the deal but being blown up in an area meant to be safe was unacceptable.

  I was desperate to get back out on the ground for one last job and just when I was hoping Sandy might change his mind Paddy walked in looking serious and focused. As well as the casualties, there were a couple of hundred soldiers out on the different ranges, who had been ordered to stay exactly where they were until the area had been cleared.

  I had to stop myself from getting involved and took a step back. I wished Paddy and his team good luck, before heading back to the transit accommodation and spent the rest of the morning lying on my bed feeling useless. Paddy and his team did a great job. The casualties were recovered and there were no further injuries.

  Later that afternoon the word came through that we’d be flying out to Cyprus for twenty-four hours’ ‘decompression’ in four days’ time. Decompression consisted of a one-day stopover in Akrotiri where troops were supposedly allowed to blow off steam and get pissed in a controlled environment. Frankly I thought it was a load of bollocks. I simply didn’t like the idea of being told to have fun. I was a bit too long in the tooth for that kind of bullshit, especially after six months of being smashed in Afghan. Now that my tour was over, I just wanted to get home and face the music and deal with my marriage.

  The next four days dragged like fuck. Each day t
hat passed we all lost a little bit more of our sense of humour. When our departure date finally came, we dropped our kit off at the airhead where hundreds of Bergens were loaded onto pallets before being moved inside the C-17’s massive cargo hold, which was large enough to carry a tank halfway around the world.

  Then later that evening, after spending what seemed like an eternity drinking coffee and watching comedy repeats in the NAAFI, the order came to board. The Afghan sun had slowly slipped beneath the distant snow-capped mountains and as I climbed the steep metal stairs up to the giant transport aircraft, I paused briefly for one last look. Bastion was lit up like a football stadium on match night – it was huge, the size of a small town. The hospital was bright and busy with helicopters still bringing in the dead and wounded.

  Looking back down at the single file of soldiers stretching across the runway I smiled and gave Afghan the finger one last time. Inside the main cabin, soldiers were strapping themselves into rows of seats. The atmosphere was end of term with jokes and smiles from soldiers no longer young. Everyone carried the signs of loss and war either physically or mentally. They were the lucky ones, the soldiers who had made it. Six months older than when they had arrived but most had witnessed and experienced enough death and gore to last a lifetime.

  Every single one of us on that flight had been touched by tragedy and I believe that none of us gave a fuck about Afghan. Not the people or the country. Was the sacrifice worth it? Absolutely not. Unquestionably, some things in life are worth dying for: family, friends, but Afghan didn’t fall into that category. It was a fucked-up country when I arrived and it was just as fucked-up when I left – the only difference was that more blood had been spilled.

  The aircraft began to fill and soldiers began putting on body armour and helmets in preparation for departure. I plugged myself into my iPod, closed my eyes and forty minutes later the C-17 climbed effortlessly into the velvety black sky. The sense of relief in the aircraft was palpable. The pilot’s announcement that it was safe to remove our body armour and helmets was greeted with a raucous cheer. It really did start to feel as if we were going home. I dozed fitfully during the two-hour flight into Minhad, the military airbase in the United Arab Emirates, and from there it was another four hours on board a charter airline to Cyprus.