At the time of the Helmand deployment Tootal was a bachelor with no family distractions to blunt his appetite for work. He expected the same degree of dedication from his men and worked those under him hard. Yet no one doubted his commitment to his men. ‘When Colonel Tootal came in it was quite clear that he had a human side,’ said one of his platoon commanders. ‘His heart was very much in the right place. He cares a lot about the blokes and their welfare and he wants to look after them. We instantly respected him because he had the right priorities. He didn’t treat the blokes like assets.’
Tootal was supported by a second-in-command who was not afraid to challenge his boss’s thinking. The phlegmatic approach of Major Huw Williams was much appreciated in the many moments of crisis. ‘Huw was a great foil to Stuart,’ said one officer. ‘When he came up with a proposal he would say to him, “Yes, this is plausible, no, that is not.”’ They made a good team and won the confidence of those who had to execute their orders ‘We were all happy with what was coming down from above,’ said one platoon commander. ‘I never heard anyone say, “This is fucking stupid, this is madness.” [They] just came up with good sensible plans … you can’t ask for more than that.’
During the Helmand campaign Tootal would come to rely greatly on the support of his regimental sergeant majors. Nigel Bishop was his RSM for the first three months until he moved on to another posting. He was replaced by John Hardy, a twenty-year veteran known as ‘the Razman’ to the troops, who regarded him as a surrogate father. His relationship with Tootal was a vital element in the battalion’s human chemistry. Tootal was the senior officer. Hardy was the senior soldier. As such, they had a bond that transcended the vertical hierarchy. ‘I bark to one man and that is the CO,’ Hardy said. ‘I don’t wag my tail for anyone else.’ Hardy had many responsibilities. The most important, though, was to act as a conduit between the blokes and the boss – ‘telling the CO how it was’.
3 Para, like all infantry battalions, is configured in tiers. At the top is the CO (commanding officer) and his headquarters staff, who manage and direct the battalion. The fighting soldiers are formed into companies. Each company is divided into two or three platoons and each platoon into sections. The number of men in a company varies, but it can be as many as a hundred or as few as sixty. In 3 Para ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies were the rifle companies, the basic fighting unit. They were sustained and augmented by Support Company, which provided additional firepower in the shape of machine guns, mortars and anti-tank weapons. ‘D’ Company was the ISTAR company providing specialised Intelligence, Signals, Target Acquisition (snipers) and Reconnaissance expertise.
Each company was commanded by a major. At thirty-six, Will Pike, the OC (Officer Commanding) ‘A’ Company, was the most senior. He was the son of Hew Pike, who led 3 Para in their days of glory in the Falkands, and had his father’s strong, square features and thick, blond hair. He had long ago given up worrying whether this connection was an advantage or a burden. ‘In the end I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that anyone else thinks that either.’ Those under him sometimes felt he was hard to please, but noted he was as tough on himself as he was on others.
‘B’ Company was commanded by Giles Timms, a blunt, cheerful fitness fanatic, who had been destined since adolescence for military life. He joined the Combined Cadet Force of his public school. After learning of the army sholarship scheme, ‘everything I lived and breathed from then on was geared to getting into the army’. He joined 4 Para, the reserves, as a private soldier while at university. The artillery sponsored him through Sandhurst, ‘but my allegiance was really to the Parachute Regiment’. It was only at the last minute that he told his sponsors that he would not be joining them. ‘I got quite a hard time for that, for disloyalty. [But] you have got to be true to your own ambitions and I wouldn’t have been happy in the Gunners.’
‘C’ Company’s OC, Paul Blair, known as Paddy, was a soft-spoken, good-looking Ulsterman with a gentle, courteous manner. He did a four-year business course before deciding that office life was not for him and set off for Sandhurst in July 1995. Cadets are required to put down a first and second choice of regiment they want to join when they pass out. ‘I was very much, it’s the Parachute Regiment or nothing,’ he remembered.
Adam Jowett, who commanded Support Company, joined the Paras from the Grenadier Guards and served with them in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. He was working in a staff job when the word came through that 3 Para were likely to be sent to Afghanistan but wangled his way out of it to go with them. Jowett was the most reserved of the company commanders, but a robust soldier when the time came.
For all their combined experience, in the spring of 2006 there were only three men in 3 Para who could claim to have had real experience of a proper war. These were the last remaining members of the battalion who had served in the Falkands campaign. The intervening years had been spent in worthy but uninspiring deployments that hardly matched the expectations of 3 Para’s members when they joined up. As they prepared to leave their drab headquarters in Colchester for the burning plains, soaring mountains and lush river valleys of Helmand province, the atmosphere was charged with the premonition that things were changing. 3 Para were about to get what they wished for.
3
‘The Lawless Province of Helmand’
On 26 January 2006 Defence Secretary John Reid announced to the House of Commons that British troops would be sent to Helmand province in the spring. The decision caused immediate controversy. Britain was already deeply committed in Iraq. Pessimists recalled the history of British military interventions in Afghanistan. They raised the grim precedents of the First and Second Afghan Wars and retold the story of the retreat from Kabul in January 1842. Of the 16,500 soldiers and camp followers who set off, only a handful stumbled into the safety of Jalalabad. The rest had been killed by the freezing weather and the relentless attacks of Ghilzai tribesmen.
It was not just the British who had come unstuck there. All the might and brutality of the Soviet military had been unable to crush the spirit of a people who, however incapable they might be of living together harmoniously, were united in their hatred of outsiders.
The Paras had known about the deployment for months. Rumours had been circulating since the previous summer and they had been officially ‘warned off’ to prepare to go in August 2005. They were used to false alarms. But this one sounded genuine. For many in the battalion this was the news they had been waiting for all their military careers.
Sergeant Craig Mountford was coming up for thirty-five when the buzz started gathering volume. He had started his working life as an apprentice welder in Stoke-on-Trent but had always liked the idea of army life. He had first heard about the Parachute Regiment through their exploits in the Falklands. He was attracted to them by an early reality TV show, The Paras, which followed a group of recruits from day one of basic training to acceptance or rejection. In 1989, aged nineteen, he joined up. So far, though, his operational experiences had been disappointing. ‘It was really frustrating,’ he said. ‘We weren’t getting a look-in. We were constantly being told – “Right, you are being stood by, you are going to go.” And we never went. This isn’t warmongering. You just want to do your job – go away on operations, to see what it is like, to experience it.’
In the spring of 2003 the second Gulf War seemed to offer great possibilities. In the end ‘it was just a case of securing a couple of oilfields, patrolling in Basra and that was it. We didn’t do any war fighting as such’.
With the news of the Afghanistan deployment, Mountford began to think again that he might finally see some serious action. ‘It was in all the papers. Mad Max country. The lawless Helmand province.’ But by now he was inclined to be sceptical of media prophecies. ‘They said the same about Iraq. Fighting through to Baghdad. Millions were going to be killed. Initially everyone thought it was going to be good, but then it began to die away. We started thinkin
g, “It probably won’t come to anything. It probably won’t happen.”’
Iraq had been an anticlimax for most of those who had been there. Hugo Farmer went to Basra on his first deployment with the Paras in December 2005. He was unlikely to be satisfied with the sort of duties that awaited him. Farmer was twenty-six. He had had a stellar university career, graduating from Bristol with a double first in Chemistry and Law. His first ambition had been ‘to make as much money as possible’. The City snapped him up. It did not take long for him to decide that a career in corporate finance was not for him.
My life was pretty rubbish. There was very little satisfaction and lots of work that seemingly went nowhere, lots of people above me justfying their existence by creating heat and light but not actually doing anything substantial or proper. I would be in the office by eight a.m. Initially it wasn’t too bad. I would be gone by seven p.m. But then I switched teams and it was eleven p.m. You go home, shower, go to bed and you get up and it all happens all over again. You couldn’t guarantee you weren’t going to be in the office at the weekend.
Farmer felt he was ‘becoming a grey man’. He was haunted by the example of one of his colleagues, only a few years older, who had a wife and child and was saddled with the huge mortgage needed to buy the sort of house his status demanded. ‘He was a beaten man,’ he said. ‘He was resigned to the facts.’ There were lots like him, ‘treading the same old boardwalk, just getting richer and fatter and older. I thought to myself, “I need to change tack here. I need to do something interesting.”’
Farmer had no soldiers in his immediate family but knew some from university and thought they were ‘fun-loving, always doing interesting things’. There was a friend of the family who had joined the SAS. He thought to himself, ‘If he can do it then I can.’ A little research told him that 50 per cent of the SAS had started off in the Paras (the figure now is 58 per cent). He left his job even before he had been accepted at Sandhurst. He went there in January 2004, sponsored by the Paras, and arrived at ‘A’ Company under Will Pike in the early autumn of 2005.
Most of the time in Iraq, Farmer led 1 Platoon on patrols along the border with Iran. He found it ‘actually quite interesting’. The only real threat was from IEDs – improvised explosive devices made from artillery shells which the insurgents planted by the roadside and detonated remotely when a patrol passed by. There was an easy way of countering it. The patrols, operated in armoured modified Land Rovers, simply kept off the roads, an easy thing to do in the flat country bordering the Shatt al-Arab waterway which marked the Iraq–Iran frontier.
Their task was to stop Iranians sneaking in bombs, weapons, drugs or any other contraband. The border was long and porous and smuggling was part of the local economy. Farmer thought it ‘a very good introduction as to how to run a platoon on operations … It wasn’t high tempo by any stretch of the imagination but it was a nice way to learn.’ The Paras were also supposed to mentor the Iraqi border security forces. That meant visiting border posts strung along the frontier, ‘making sure they had the right equipment, making sure that they were trained and knew how to run it, and also to give them a warm fuzzy feeling that they were being looked after and that what they were doing was important’.
Iraq did not prove an uplifting experience for many in 3 Para. The Iraqis themselves seemed feckless and ungrateful. Martin Taylor had, like Farmer, turned his back on a conventional, modern career. After a media studies degree at Sussex University he spent two and a half years working for a recruiting consultancy and commuting to London from Kent every day. His family and friends were surprised when, restless with his life, he started talking about the army. ‘But the more I looked into it the more I heard people saying, “I can see you doing that sort of thing.”’ He initially applied for the Royal Artillery but after his second term decided he wanted to join the Parachute Regiment.
He too spent his first operation patrolling the border. Taylor was cheerful, good natured and inclined to think the best of people, but he found it ‘an enormously frustrating chore. For some reason the Iraqis just did not want to help themselves. It was frustrating just watching these guys living in squalor.’
If there was a lesson to be learned from Iraq, it was how not to do things. Stuart Tootal had watched the aftermath of the triumph of America’s ‘shock and awe’ strategy with an expert eye and increasing dismay. He believed that ‘our approach was fundamentally wrong. We rather assumed that once we’d finished the fighting it was merely a case of putting a new government in place, and we underestimated the difficulty of winning over the consent of the people for that regime. What we failed to achieve from the outset was proper security, and [we] stood by allowing a lot of looting to go ahead. And then we didn’t improve the lot of the people.’
Tootal’s background in counter-insurgency studies convinced him that there was much in Britain’s imperial past that could be applied to the present. He was impressed with the example of General Sir Gerald Templer, the high commissioner appointed by Churchill in 1952 to find a solution to the communist uprising known as the Malayan Emergency. It was something he shared with another British officer, Lieutenant General David Richards, who had been appointed commander of ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan), which was due to take over the whole NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) operation in Afghanistan from the Americans. Templer had wielded complete control of every aspect of military and civilian life in Malaya and had devised an intricate committee system that integrated counterinsurgency operations with the reconstruction effort. He once declared: ‘the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people’, thereby coining a phrase that would echo through counter-insurgency operations ever after.
The political situation in Afghanistan, which had a democratically elected government under President Karzai, would not allow such overt control. But there was one aspect of Templer’s approach in Malaya which could be applied without offending political sensitivities. This was the application of the ‘ink spot’ theory. It held that the best way of tackling an insurgency was to concentrate on securing specific towns and improving local services, including schools, hospitals, sewerage, water, roads and electricity. Life would then be so good that no one would want to support the rebels and the uprising would wither away.
John Reid had presented the situation in Afghanistan as another emergency. He told the Commons: ‘Whatever the difficulties and risks of this deployment – and I do not hide them from the House or the country – those risks are nothing compared to the dangers to our country and our people of allowing Afghanistan to fall back into the hands of the Taliban and the terrorists. We will not allow that. And the Afghan people will not allow that.’
It was a reassertion of the claim that Afghanistan was the front line in a war whose effects, if it went wrong, would be felt painfully in the cities of Britain. That had been the argument for invading Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since then, Britain had been under pressure from America to supply troops to continue the ongoing NATO mission of stabilisation in Afghanistan. The plan was now moving into its third stage. The ‘easy’ parts had been done. The area around Kabul and the northern and western regions were relatively peaceful. Now it was time to concentrate on the south. Tony Blair answered the call willingly. Since 9/11, he had committed Britain to playing a major role in Afghanistan. His government had proved that it honoured its NATO responsibilities and would do so again, even though the deployment would place a further strain on the country’s stretched military resources.
The south of Afghanistan had been neglected after the fall of the Taliban. In 2002 the Americans and their allies had put most of their effort into squeezing the life out of what remained of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the mountainous east of the country. Since 2003, their military effort had been diverted into fighting the war, and then the insurgency, in Iraq. The American troops based in Afghani
stan concentrated on targeted operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.
The material help that was promised after the Taliban were driven out of the main cities was slow in coming to the south. There had been little reconstruction and no large-scale deployment of troops to secure the region. In the absence of any Afghan or foreign soldiers to stop them, the Taliban, many of whom had fled to Pakistan after their defeat, began drifting back to Helmand and Kandahar provinces. It was their historic home. Kandahar was the birthplace of the movement. Most Taliban were Pashtun and the provinces were Pashtun territory, part of an ethnic belt that stretched across the border to Pakistan. At the beginning of 2006 they were trying to re-establish themselves through violence and intimidation, murdering and terrorising anyone associated with the government and its NATO coalition allies.
ISAF was led by NATO. It was set up by the United Nations Security Council to secure the country and allow the authority of the central government to take hold. Its operations had begun in the capital, Kabul, and slowly expanded throughout the country in planned stages. Now it had reached stage three – the establishment of Regional Command South.
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