3 Para

by Patrick Bishop

  Rifleman Kieran Yonzon was providing ‘top cover’, manning the .50-cal. He saw the man with the grenade launcher but he was only a few yards away and Yonzon could not bring the heavy machine gun’s long barrel down to bear on him. Instead, he jumped down from his perch, snatched up his rifle and fired three shots, which killed the attacker. Another man popped up from behind a wall and fired fifteen or twenty rounds towards Yonzon.

  Then unseen gunmen, crouching in the trees lining the far side of the wadi, opened up with more RPGs, a heavy machine gun and rifles. Lieutenant Paul Hollingshead, a twenty-four-year-old from Southport on Merseyside who had joined the Gurkhas after university, was three or four vehicles back in the convoy. He scrambled out of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover and started shooting back. Everyone was trying to get out of their vehicles to find cover and return fire. ‘It was very, very quick,’ he said. ‘If we’d stayed in the vehicles we would have been cut to shreds.’

  It was the first time Hollingshead had been on the receiving end of an RPG. ‘They made the loudest bang I had ever heard,’ he said. Rounds from the heavy machine gun were smashing chunks out of the wall behind him.

  The Apaches were hovering over the target compound about a mile away, but there was no way of calling in an air strike. In the rush to dismount, the radios had been left on the vehicles. Hollingshead decided he could not ask his ‘boys’ to retrieve one so he ran forward as rounds zipped around him. He returned with an old Clansman-type transmitter, a notoriously poor piece of kit. This one had a label stuck on it reading ‘Dodgy But Workable’. The Joint Tactical Air Controller (JTAC), Lieutentant Barry de Goede of the Household Cavalry, came to join him. But when they tried to get in contact with the aircraft in the area, the radio refused to work. ‘We were beating it, hitting it, taking it apart,’ said Hollingshead. Finally, de Goede managed to raise the Apaches and gave their coordinates. The Gurkhas signalled the air to identify their position and a few minutes afterwards the Taliban positions were raked from the air with 30mm cannon fire.

  The next step was to retrieve the vehicles and get out of the wadi. Hollingshead picked five of his men to come with him and lay down covering fire for the drivers. ‘It was one of the proudest moments of my life,’ he said. ‘I said, “OK, you’re coming with me.” Then it was three, two, one, go.’ The young Gurkhas, some of them only nineteen years old, ran forward unhesitatingly, with bullets cracking over their heads and ricocheting off the rocks around them.

  Rifleman Rai was determined to get back to his WMIK, and rounded up two others to help him. But moving towards it, they came under heavy fire and had to stop. A little later there was a lull in the shooting and he ran forward on his own. He got behind the wheel and the bullet-shattered windscreen and tried to turn the vehicle round but his path out was blocked by a ‘Pinz’. The temptation to panic was strong. ‘I calmed myself down and told myself it didn’t matter if I got shot,’ he said later.

  As they worked forward, firing and manoeuvring, Hollingshead realised that he was way ahead of his men. Before him was a low, flat-roofed building. Something that ‘looked like a bundle of rags’ was lying in front of it. It took him a few seconds to realise it was the body of the RPG gunner who had been shot dead at the start of the fight. As he was taking this in, ‘this guy came skidding out of the building. He looked down at his mate on the ground. He hadn’t seen me’. Hollingshead raised his rifle to shoot. The fighter was wearing a long green dishdasha kaftan and a sparkly skullcap and carrying a Kalashnikov. He had a bushy beard and appeared to be about thirty. He looked up as Hollingshead pulled the trigger of his SA-80. But nothing happened. An empty cartridge case had jammed on ejection, blocking the chamber. He tried frantically to clear it, as bullets from the continuing firefight kicked dust around his feet.

  His opponent was only 15 yards away. Hollingshead yelled for help, steeling himself for the burst of fire. No shot came. The man was having his own problems. His rifle had also failed him, and after fiddling with it for a few seconds he ran back into the building. Hollingshead finally cleared the stoppage and laid down fire to keep the gunman occupied while the last vehicles jolted their way out of the wadi. He would later laugh at the ‘Hollywoodesque’ nature of the encounter.

  Afterwards, safely back in Now Zad, the Gurkhas relaxed for the first time. ‘Everyone was pretty elated,’ Hollingshead said. ‘We had all succeeded. No one had backed down, or done anything cowardly.’ They had taken only one casualty, an Afghan policeman who was shot in the stomach. It was all the more satisfying because the Gurkhas had not prepared for full-on war fighting of the sort they had just experienced. The company had been put together at short notice and had not practised more than basic infantry drills together. They were supposed to be guarding the camp. But they had been at the forefront of the first big fight of the deployment and they could feel proud of themselves.

  While the fight was raging in the wadi, Patrols Platoon were also under fire. Sergeant Ray Davis and Lance Corporal Gav Attwell were in the first vehicles, leading the convoy to the cordon position, when they ran into a group of five fighters. This triggered a firefight that went on for forty-five minutes. The Apaches were called in again.

  The helicopters were a British version of an American design and were awesomely destructive. They fired Hellfire missiles and 30mm cannon rounds with explosive tips. The systems were ‘slaved’ to a laser linked to the pilot’s retina. Wherever he looked, the weapon pointed. Like everyone else, Mark Swann, the Patrols OC, had never seen an Apache in action before, and the harsh ripple of the cannon fire took him by surprise. ‘It was cracking right over our heads and for a few moments I thought we were under heavy machine-gun fire,’ he said.

  These dramas were at the periphery of the operation. The main action was just beginning. Two helicopters carrying Will Pike and his company headquarters staff, the engineer search team and ‘A’ Company’s 2 Platoon arrived just after noon, landing near a stand of palm trees to the north of the compound. One was flown by Chris Hasler, a twenty-six-year-old who had grown up in Nova Scotia. He joined the RAF after failing a medical for the Canadian air force. The Canadians had lost a good man. Hasler proved to be an outstandingly able and courageous pilot. They flew in fast and Hasler had to stand the ship on its tail, using the belly as a brake to slow it down. The Paras raced off the back and immediately saw fire coming towards them. Hasler did not notice at first until he heard a warning over the radio net. ‘We couldn’t see the tracer as it was too bright and we couldn’t hear the sound over the din of the aircraft.’ As soon as the last man jumped clear he lifted off and joined the other Chinooks, which went into a holding position to the south of the zone, waiting in case they were needed to evacuate casualties.

  It was a huge relief to be airborne. Despite their size and a degree of armouring, Chinooks were vulnerable to the weapons that the Taliban could bring to bear. An American Chinook had been shot down in Afghanistan in June the previous year and sixteen soldiers killed. The pilots particularly feared RPGs, a staple of insurgents’ armouries all over the world. Like the Kalashnikov they were invented in the Soviet Union and were cheap, robust, easily portable and simple to operate. They were fired from a 3-foot-long launcher, a steel pipe with grip, trigger, iron sight and a cone at one end to dissipate the blast from the gunpowder launch charge. The grenades were roughly the shape and size of a pointed bowling pin and weighed up to 10 pounds. Once in flight a rocket kicked in and fins flipped out to guide the grenade on its flight. It had a range of 1,000 yards. But RPGs were not the most accurate of projectiles and behaved erratically when they went beyond a third of that distance. They were designed to blow up tanks and could do severe damage, especially to an aircraft if the range was right. ‘There’s nothing you can do against an RPG,’ Hasler said. ‘If it explodes it either cuts you in half or takes off your blades and you go down.’

  As the first helicopters departed, Stuart Tootal was still in the air. He had planned to use his helicopter
as an airborne command-and-control platform, but it soon became obvious that this was impracticable. It was impossible to see clearly what was happening on the ground. He ordered his helicopter to land and made his way with his HQ team to link up with Will Pike, who by now had been on the ground for forty-five minutes. With the Gurkhas out of trouble Tootal’s first concern was to move Patrols Platoon to a less vulnerable position. They were stuck in close country which severely limited their ability to manoeuvre. The walls and trees around made it difficult to see and make proper use of the .50-cals mounted on their vehicles. Tootal ordered them to shift to the south-west into more open country, but as they withdrew the Taliban launched two more attacks. Once again the Apaches came to the rescue, forcing them to break off and take cover. Patrols Platoon took advantage of the breathing space to launch a counter-attack. They broke into one compound and discovered bright splashes of blood drying in the dirt. There was no sign, though, of dead or wounded fighters. They were to learn that the Taliban, when they fell back, always tried to carry their casualties and their corpses with them.

  As they moved on again to seek the open ground they came under fire once more. Private Bashir Ali felt something hot and heavy hit his chest. He looked down to see that his body armour was on fire. When the flames were doused he realised how lucky he had been. The thump had been caused by two AK-47 rifle bullets which ignited the tracer rounds in the magazines in the pouches of his chest rig.

  Patrols Platoon’s running fight was to last, with some lulls, for nearly four hours.

  Will Pike and 2 Platoon had landed where they were supposed to, 50 yards to the north of the target. 1 Platoon, under Hugo Farmer, was meant to put down just to the south. Pike waited for the news that they were in postion. It was some time in coming.

  Farmer and his men arrived to an alarming reception. As they piled off the tailgate and into an open field rounds flew into the back of the helicopter. The first man to hit the ground was Corporal Quentin ‘Prig’ Poll, whose skill and seniority made him the automatic choice as the lead man in the platoon’s lead section – number 1. ‘That meant being first off the chopper, first in, which gave me quite a bit of pride,’ he said. Poll had been a butcher and run a vegetable stall in a market in Norfolk before hearing the call of the Paras. He had been in for eleven years and was highly experienced, having served in Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Iraq. But this, he knew, as he ordered his men forward in an extended line, was the real thing.

  A hundred yards ahead he could see where the shots were coming from. There was a wall with a gap in it. Two gunmen were darting into the opening, firing, then dodging back into cover. The Paras returned fire but the small-calibre rounds of the SA-80 rifles made little impression on the baked mud wall. Poll decided to ‘get on top of them’ and bounded forward. He split his men into two groups for the real-life execution of the drill called ‘fire and manoeuvre’.

  ‘I got the blokes spread out into a single line and four of us moved forward while the other four fired,’ he said. ‘Then they would start firing and we would move forward so there was always fire going down and we were gaining ground on the enemy position.’

  When they reached it, they saw the Taliban fighters retreating into an orchard. Through the sparse leaves they could see a compound with two entrances which the gunmen ducked into before emerging to start shooting again. Poll called on his section to ‘go firm’ – to stay where they were. It was impossible to know what was on the other side of the compound wall. He was also worried they might lose contact with the rest of the platoon. It was time to take stock. He called up Farmer, told him what had happened and relayed his position. Farmer told him to carry on, and moved up to join him with another section. It had been Poll’s engagement and Farmer left him to him work out how to proceed. Para doctrine was to allow commanders at every level to make their own decisions wherever possible and to encourage the Toms to exercise initiative. Poll decided ‘I couldn’t take all my section in because it was getting too tight.’ He left four men behind and dashed forward with the rest. They fired into the doorway on the right and the gunman ducked away. Poll moved on to the left-hand doorway where another gunman was still shooting. He was on the point of throwing a grenade into the entrance when he saw movement inside the compound. He could just make out a group of people who were clearly not fighters trying to keep out of the path of the flying bullets. ‘Straight away’, said Poll, ‘the idea of putting grenades in went out the window.’

  He called up Farmer, who told him to stop his men firing. The gunman had disappeared now but shots were coming from inside the compound. Poll moved forward with Private Adam Randle and Private Damien Jackson. He ordered them to go through the doorway but not to open fire unless they could clearly identify whoever was doing the shooting. The gunman had dodged into one of the buildings inside the compound. It was full of women and children who had taken shelter there when the shooting began. As he continued to fire in the direction of the Paras, the civilians scrambled to escape through windows and doorways. Randle and Jackson took cover and held their fire. Poll darted in to join them. Some of the women were screaming, while other civilians seemed amazingly calm. Poll dredged up his smattering of Pashto to yell at the civilians to get down, and made wild hand signals. ‘But the old ones and the young kids didn’t understand and kept walking around.’ The soldiers were to witness many examples of the incredible coolness shown by some civilians when bullets were flying about.

  There was no sign of the gunman. It seemed to Poll that he had made his escape out of the back of the compound. ‘We knew we had lost him and to carry on any farther would have separated me from the rest of the platoon,’ he said. They stayed put while Farmer came up to join them.

  By now Farmer was feeling uneasy. The landscape and the buildings around them didn’t seem to correspond with his map. Checking his Global Positioning System, he realised that the RAF had dropped them 350 yards to the west of where they were supposed to be. ‘I can understand why they didn’t drop us in the right place,’ he said, magnanimously, later. ‘For a start it’s very confusing. Secondly it’s a dangerous place for helicopters to hang around. So they saw a good place near where we had to be and they put us down.’

  Farmer worked out a route to take them to their planned location, and having apologised as best he could to the civilians in the compound for the intrusion, set off. In their preparations the Paras had not formed a clear idea of the sort of terrain they would be operating in. They knew it was close country but did not expect it would pose too many problems. In reality it was a rural obstacle course. There were endless mud walls, thick and high, which made it difficult to see more than a few dozen yards ahead. Irrigation ditches cut a graph-paper pattern in the fields. All around were pomegranate orchards and fields of poppies, sunflowers and other high-standing crops. ‘We hadn’t expected it to be so lush,’ said Will Pike. ‘It was a bit like the South of France except flat. You couldn’t see further than sixty yards.’ The landscape looked pleasant and unthreatening. But it offered every advantage to a defending force and only hazards to those attacking.

  The 400-yard journey to their correct position tested even the Paras’ stamina. ‘It was a nightmare,’ said Farmer. Every 15 yards they ran into 8-foot-high mud walls that would have been impassable if not for the old-fashioned scaling ladders that someone had had the foresight to bring along. They had last been used to go over the back fences of suspects’ houses on Northern Ireland council estates. They were to prove a vital bit of kit in these very different circumstances.

  Even so, it was hard work clambering over them in full fighting order. That entailed webbing, body armour and a helmet, as well as the weight of your weapon and ‘day sack’ pack, crammed with extra ammunition. This was known as ‘light scales’, although it weighed from 70 to 80 pounds. Nonetheless, as Poll observed, when the bullets were flying, ‘it’s amazing how the weight just disappears. You feel it when you are coming down, when things go quiet. That’s whe
n it all starts niggling and pulling on you, tearing you apart. But during the contact you don’t notice – it’s out the window.’

  After a quarter of an hour they met up with Tom Fehley and 2 Platoon. They could hear the snap of rounds coming from the Patrols Platoon’s running engagement, and see smoke rising where the .50-cal tracer had set the vegetation ablaze. Farmer’s men started to take up their positions to the south of the target compound. They were forced to take cover as shots started cracking overhead from unseen gunmen. But after ten minutes it went quiet and 2 Platoon moved in to clear the compound.

  The search was a disappointment. They found a few hundred rounds of Kalashnikov bullets, a single grenade and a few bits and pieces of kit. There were also several bags of opium. The ammunition was removed. The opium was left where it was, in line with the battle group policy of disassociating themselves from any attempts to threaten the locals’ livelihood. Either the intelligence was faulty, as it often was, or the Taliban had already removed the bulk of whatever guns, ammo and explosives had been stashed there. ‘2 Platoon felt a bit out of sorts,’ remembered Corporal Scott MacLachlan. ‘We just sat there saying, “What’s happening?”’

  For two hours the Paras waited where they were. It was hot in the afternoon sun. They sipped water continuously and tried to rest. Then, at about 3 p.m., Fehley called his section commanders together. A signal had come through from brigade headquarters in Kandahar saying that an important Taliban figure was hiding in the area. The new orders were to arrest him and Will Pike had given them the job.

  From the outset, there was little hope of catching their quarry. The information could not have been more vague. They had no idea of what their target looked like or where precisely he was. The situation was in any event likely to have changed since the first intelligence was received. Fehley’s orders were to move forward to a grid location 500 yards west of the target compound and deal with anything that he encountered on the way. If they found nothing, they were to return. At 3.30 p.m., 2 Platoon set off. ‘We had only gone a hundred metres when we realised how difficult the terrain was and how vulnerable we had become,’ said Corporal Tam McDermott, who was commanding 1 Section. ‘There were high walls, high fences, little tunnels going through the walls. It just seemed to have been prepared for someone to have a go at us and withdraw. It was ideal ambush country.’