McDermott handed over point position to Corporal MacLachlan. They were both robustly Scottish, but Scottish in different ways. McDermott was assertive and outspoken; MacLachlan, who had once considered a career in marketing, was quiet and reflective.
Progress was slow. Every 30 yards there was another wall to climb. They thanked God for the scaling ladders. They were moving through a maze of ‘long passageways, narrow channels, paths through orchards. You would think it would be good underfoot but in most cases it was marsh, quagmire’, MacLachlan said. ‘[We] didn’t know exactly who we were looking for – just Taliban types. We knew that what with everything else that had been going on, the chances were we would be hit. They knew all the rat-runs and escape routes. It was their battleground and we were the new kids on the block.’
After fifteen minutes they emerged at the edge of a large square of open ground. MacLachlan’s orders were to push forward across it. Before he did, he paused to scope out the terrain. The field was about 150 yards across. There was an orchard on the far side. It was overlooked in one corner by a rocky mound, perhaps 250 feet high. He decided that from the Taliban’s point of view, the field was ‘a perfect killing area’.
Crouched behind the wall, he was understandably ‘a bit apprehensive about taking that step forward, out from that cover, because if I did get hit there was no escape route for me with a brick wall behind me’. He consulted Fehley, who agreed that he should work his way to the left along a sandy pathway that ran round the field. As they approached the corner where the path turned away to the right, ‘a sixth sense, a Para sense, was kicking in’. He told the rest of his section to stay put behind the wall while he and his lead scout, Private Dale Tyrer, came out of cover and rounded the bend. In front of them was a path that stretched for 100 yards before disappearing into the streets of Now Zad. ‘As we started to advance I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, about seventy metres away in the shadows. Just at that point, three or four feet in front of me the sand kicked up.’ The motion that MacLachlan had glimpsed was a machine-gunner dropping to the firing position on his belly. ‘The next thing I knew’, he said, ‘there was machine-gun fire and rounds ricocheting off the walls, kicking up sand and dust.’ MacLachlan guessed that the heavy fire was coming from a Russian-made PKM – the Taliban’s equivalent to the British GPMG. It was a good weapon, capable of accurately blistering a position from 1,000 yards away. MacLachlan noted with some concern that at the range it was now firing at it was ‘in a position to basically knock hell out of the street’.
Instead of retreating, MacLachlan and Tyrer stayed put, crouching in the lee of a wall skirting the path until they could identify precisely where the gun was firing from. Then, coolly, they began laying down accurate fire until the PKM stopped shooting. Taking it in turns to cover each other, they dropped back round the corner to join the rest, while marvelling that they were still both in one piece. ‘How the hell we never got hit I have no idea because there were rounds all over the place,’ MacLachlan said later.
The rest of the section were ‘sat wide-eyed behind the wall. It was like, “lucky bastards!”’ But it was not over yet. MacLachlan counted down, ‘Three! two! one!’, then he and Tyrer darted round the corner and ‘put down a massive weight of fire’. Tyrer lobbed three 40mm grenades from the underslung grenade launcher on his rifle into the spot where the machine gun had been firing. With that, it all went quiet.
The pair fell back once more. There was a brief calm. Then across the field, from their positions among the trees on the far side of the big field, the Taliban opened up a scorching barrage of small-arms, RPG and machine-gun fire. The other sections of the platoon were strung out along the wall opposite the Taliban fighters. For the next one and a half hours Tam McDermott and his men traded fire with the Taliban across the field while the Fire Support Team pelted the insurgents with mortars.
Fehley was looking to take the battle forward somehow. He asked MacLachlan to move to the right to try to find a firing point from where they could look down on the Taliban positions. MacLachlan and his men plunged into the cover of an orchard, squelching through the waterlogged soil until they emerged by the side of the rocky hill overlooking the field. They moved cautiously and laboriously. After the adrenalin jolt of the ambush, MacLachlan’s metabolism had calmed down. ‘Time, instead of going at a hundred miles an hour, became treacle time.’
When they emerged from the trees, the Apaches were up, tilting and turning over the battlefield, trying to spot the Taliban. The risks of getting it wrong and unleashing a horrendous ‘fratricide’ incident were enormous. MacLachlan’s men anxiously signalled the Apaches to warn them not to fire. They could see the hillock quite well now. There were a couple of men on top but MacLachlan could not make out whether they were carrying weapons. ‘They were in typical Afghan wear with the old black turbans, beard and all the rest of it but I couldn’t identify any AK-47s or anything.’ In keeping with the rules of engagement, he told his men not to shoot unless they were sure the Afghans were fighters. Nonetheless, there was ‘something dodgy’ about one of them. ‘He was a bit furtive. He kept looking up then ducking down as if he was looking out for us but couldn’t see us.’
MacLachlan told his section to stay put while he pushed on to get better ‘eyes on’ the hillock. There was a wall to the left. He squatted down in the lee while he took stock. He could definitely see two figures on the top now. They were about a hundred yards away. He was reluctant to call his men forward and expose them to fire so he decided to deal with them himself. His plan was to ‘sucker them into engaging with me’. He moved out of cover, deliberately exposing himself to attract the men’s attention.
As soon as the men saw him they raised their rifles, which had been slung behind their backs, and began shooting, in wild ‘spray and pray’ bursts. MacLachlan ‘drew a bead on one of them’ and fired four or five single shots. His victim fell back against the tawny dirt of the hillside. MacLachlan turned to the second and fired again, and again the gunman toppled. There seemed to be no more of them. MacLachlan called his men forward and radioed Fehley to report their success. He told them to stay put and put the occasional burst into the hilltop to dissuade anyone from reoccupying it.
The Taliban were now under attack by land and air. Pike had sent his Forward Artillery Observer (FAO), Captain Matt Armstrong, and Forward Air Controller (FAC), Corporal Shaun Fry, forward with Fehley. They now put in a request for extra help from the Americans, who ordered A-10 jets and B-1 bombers to the area. The A-10 Thunderbolt was a terrifying prospect for anyone underneath it. It was known as the ‘Warthog’ in reference to its clunky profile and ‘Tankbuster’ owing to its ability to chew up armour with 30mm cannon shells at a distance of 4 miles. It had a range of 800 miles and could manoeuvre well at low speeds, which allowed it to loiter over the battlefield for protracted periods in support of ground troops. Not long after 2 Platoon’s fight began, an A-10 made its first run. Hugo Farmer could hear it from where he and his men were hunkered down outside the target compound. ‘I didn’t see it come in,’ he said. ‘All I heard was the noise. It was absolutely incredible. It’s very difficult to describe but it sounds like an angry dinosaur.’ He was talking not about the engine note but the cannon shells. They fly out of the nose-mounted guns at a rate of 2,100 or 4,200 rounds a minute, splitting the air and ripping up everything in their way. It was said that pilots could fire bursts only for a maximum of four seconds before the counter-punch of the recoil caused the engines to stall and the Thunderbolt to fall out of the sky.
Farmer was eager to get his platoon into the fighting. He moved over to Will Pike’s command post so that he was on hand to be tasked if reinforcements were called for. The fight had turned into a mosaic of separate encounters in which each side was trying to dominate the other. There was no front line, which suited the Paras, whose ethos and training were founded on the notion that they would have to fight on their feet an enemy that was all around them. It seemed
to Pike that the Taliban were ‘operating like packs of hyenas, and I think there were about seven packs, each about ten or fifteen strong’. Sometimes there seemed to be some order to what they were doing. At other times the Taliban ‘were just floating about’.
Farmer was to get his wish as the action was now moving in the direction of his men. Taliban fighters were streaming eastwards to escape the battering they were getting from the Paras and the jets. Their line of flight took them straight towards the 1 Platoon positions. Farmer had pushed Prig Poll and the lead section up to a wall 30 yards to the west of the main platoon position. 3 Section under Corporal Chris Wright were a little to the north. Poll had split his men into two groups, placing one, led by Lance Corporal Johnathon ‘Billy’ Smart, a little to the north, on the far side of one of the ubiquitous walls. Private Randle was with him. As they hunkered down, Randle thought he heard Afghan voices coming from the undergrowth about twenty yards away and called out a warning to Smart, who was farther forward. According to Poll, Smart reported back to him, ‘I’m afraid we’ve got fucking enemy coming straight towards us’. Poll told him to shoot if he was sure they were gunmen. By now two men were clearly in sight. One was carrying an RPG and the other a Kalashnikov. Smart still remembered to yell a warning – the Pashto phrase for ‘Stop, I am a British soldier’. When the gunmen kept coming he and Randle opened fire, killing both. The necessity of shouting a warning had been drummed into everyone. ‘The view is’, said Pike, ‘that you take life when there is a threat to life and if you don’t have to kill an insurgent or anybody else then don’t because an insurgent is better alive than dead and we are not here to kill people wantonly.’
Poll heard the shooting and spoke to Smart on the Personal Role Radio (PRR) net. Each soldier is electronically connected to his comrades by an individual microphone and transmitter which allows short-range communication on the battlefield. Smart described what had happened and warned that a third gunman was moving in his direction. Poll scaled a wall and looked over. Ahead, a man was coming towards him. ‘He was walking backwards, looking at the two of his muckers that [the others] had just dropped and he looked confused and dazed at what had happened,’ he said. ‘Then he turned around and saw me.’ Both men froze. They were 15 yards apart. The gunman was carrying an AK-47. Poll glanced through his SUSAT (Sight Unit, Small Arms, Trilux) telescopic sight and got to the trigger first. ‘I dropped him,’ he said. ‘I put about four rounds into him, dropped him there.’ For a second or two Poll looked down at the dead man, the first he had killed. He had black hair and a black beard. He was wearing a black dishdasha shift which he had tied between his legs to stop it dragging on the ground. As well as the Kalashnikov he had a small pack on his back full of RPG grenades. Poll had no time to think about what he had just done. More Taliban were coming towards him and the deaths of three of their comrades had made them angry.
‘They were giving us everything they had,’ said Poll. ‘They were firing RPGs, PKMs …’ Poll decided to fall back with Privates Stephen Halton and Andrew Lanaghan who had joined him, ‘because it was too naughty in there’, but left Smart and his group in place.
From their position to the north, Chris Wright and 3 Section had heard the noise of the firefight. Private Peter McKinley had climbed a tree to get better ‘eyes on’. About a hundred yards away, he saw a man in a dark dishdasha, wearing an assault vest and carrying a rifle, clambering over a wall. McKinley ‘flapped’ at first then ‘finally got my safety catch off. By that time, I think he had seen me and tried to get back over the wall. I shot him’. McKinley got off nine rounds. The Paras fired only single shots. It saved ammunition and made their shooting far more effective than the extravagant approach of their enemies. The gunman dropped on to the wall then slipped back over the other side. His comrades responded with a volley of shots that chopped through the branches of McKinley’s perch, showering him with twigs and leaves.
When Poll met up again with the OC, Will Pike, and his platoon commander, Hugo Farmer, there had been a shift in the battle. Some Taliban fighters had been seen falling back southwards from the area where 2 Platoon were fighting. Poll suspected they might be planning to take cover in a compound that 1 Platoon had passed earlier in the day when making its arduous way to meet up with the main group. He asked to take his section towards it and try to cut them off. Pike advised Farmer to give him his head. Poll was delighted. According to Dan Jarvie, the platoon sergeant, in his elation Poll ‘called out the immortal words: “Married men with families stay here! Single men with me!” Then it was a case of “Hold on a minute, Prig. Take your section. Let’s not start jumbling things up.”’ Prig saw sense and set off with Lanaghan and Halton. Farmer went with them, taking his radio operator, Private Philip Briggs. They entered the compound, checking the buildings inside as they went. One was empty except for a generator. Another was someone’s living quarters. A gaggle of silent women and children were huddled inside. On the far side of the compound a small open doorway, about four feet high, was set in the wall, which led into a field. It seemed the obvious line of withdrawal for the retreating Taliban. The Paras moved towards it carefully. As they approached they were met with a flurry of badly aimed shots that whizzed harmlessly over their heads.
At this point the Paras might well have considered they had done enough and fallen back. Instead, Farmer ordered Poll and Halton forward to charge the doorway. ‘No sooner had they passed through [than] they came under a huge, concentrated weight of fire that peppered all around the door,’ Farmer remembered. ‘Corporal Poll and Private Halton fell to their belt buckles and crawled back through the door.’ Poll managed a joke as Farmer and Briggs helped drag them into cover. ‘I think they know we’re here,’ he said. Farmer could not believe that they had not been hit.
They could hear radio chatter from the Taliban on the other side of the doorway. Through it they could see only a densely planted field, with head-high foliage. Despite their previous experience, Poll and Halton were adamant they wanted to go again. Private Lanaghan volunteered to go with them. Once more they dodged through the doorway. Once more they were met with a riot of fire. To add to their problems, a deep irrigation ditch lay just beyond the doorway. To cross it would mean getting cut off. It was impossible in any event to see anything clearly through the thick crops. They turned round and crawled back through the doorway. Farmer decided that ‘the enemy had gone firm and had the entrances to the location in their killing area’.
As they considered what to do next, they heard a thud and something bounced down in the middle of the group. Farmer screamed, ‘Take cover’ and everyone dived. They were within 5 yards of the grenade when it exploded. Miraculously the only casualty was Farmer, who got a bit of blast debris in his backside. He fell back 20 yards to the middle of the compound and covered the doorway, hoping that the Taliban might decide to emerge through it to counter-attack.
Poll, Halton and Lanaghan also moved out of grenade range. As they took up their new position they were surprised to see a group of Taliban suddenly appearing on their left. They seemed to know what they were doing, leapfrogging forward in a classic fire-and-manoeuvre. For the first time, Poll was impressed. His experience in Iraq had not taught him much respect for the fighters of the region. His attitude had been: ‘What do they know, this bunch of flip-flop, dress-wearing bastards. This was the first time I looked round and went, “Fuck, they actually know what they are doing.”’
He yelled at his men to pull back. As they withdrew, another four grenades exploded on the other side of their position. ‘That shook us a little bit, knocked a couple of the blokes down, but again there were no injuries.’ They dragged themselves back 20 yards, hid behind a mound of crops and hay and laid down fire which forced the Taliban back. But the respite was temporary. The Taliban moved forward again and it took another flurry of fire from the Paras to drive them back.
For a while it went quiet. As they lay there behind the flimsy cover, the indefatigable Poll decided to tr
y once more to get through the door. As he advanced, ‘the sixth grenade came over, which rocked me a bit. This time I knew I couldn’t go forward.’
Hugo Farmer was now weighing the merits of launching a direct assault on a group of Taliban who had begun firing from behind a wall to the right of his position. They were protected by a dense orchard. ‘There were only a couple of holes in the wall and there were dozens and dozens of rounds coming through,’ he said. He moved round with 2 Section, led by Corporal Charlie Curnow. They lined up to go, and Farmer took a deep breath. ‘I looked at the approach. I looked at the blokes in the line. I looked at the section commander [Curnow], who could see what I could see. I hummed and hawed for a minute. We were talking to each other. I was saying, “Right, this is the way to go,” and he was saying, “Good, right, OK, fine.” Then I looked down the line and I thought: “Stop.”’ Machine-gun bullets were spitting from the wall of vegetation ahead. It was impossible to see the firing point. Suddenly the whole thing seemed suicidal. He told himself, ‘This is just not on. This next bit is not going to happen.’ He turned to Curnow and said, ‘I’m not going out there and if I’m not going, you’re not.’ Curnow accepted the decision philosphically. ‘He said, “Yep, happy with that, boss.”’
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