The patient was put on a stretcher, strapped on to a trailer and towed by a quad bike the Paras had brought along out to the chopper, then whisked back to the gleaming medical facility at Camp Bastion.
It seemed a lot of effort for a minor drama but the job was now done. Instead of returning to Bastion, however, Pike was told that ‘A’ Company would have to stay on for another forty-eight hours.
The decision appeared to follow an intervention by President Karzai. Sangin was clearly vulnerable and its fall would mean a huge loss of prestige. It was the nearest population centre to the Triangle. The town lay on the banks of the Helmand river. It was the site of the main bazaar for the chain of villages and communities that ran along the river valley. Farmers flocked there each week to sell their crops and livestock. About fourteen thousand people lived there. In the past many of them had been Taliban sympathisers. According to Governor Daoud, however, the people of Helmand had turned against them. They knew from bitter experience what life was like under Taliban rule: ‘No development, no education, no healthcare, no economic progress.’ It certainly seemed a better place to allocate resources than distant outposts like Now Zad and Musa Qaleh. Pike had no problem being there. ‘I always felt that Sangin was an important place that we needed to do something with,’ he said. ‘More so, perhaps, than other areas we were involved with.’
Nonetheless, there was a feeling among the men that the British were too compliant with the wishes of the Afghans and that their own mission was being twisted out of shape by local political considerations.
Daoud, however, was a difficult man to deny. He had the ear of Karzai and would appeal to him when the British tried to resist his requests for help, pleading lack of resources. He was also, in the opinion of some who had to deal with him, inclined to ‘flap’. According to one senior officer, ‘he didn’t do crisis. He would say, if you don’t do this then there is absolutely no point in you being here because if the black flag of Mullah Omar flies in any of these places, then we’ve lost Helmand and we might as well all go home.’
The British were there, after all, to help the Afghan government. As the most senior British officer in the area, Ed Butler had to field Daoud’s demands. ‘You’re placed in this predicament when you have a sovereign state, which has accepted democratic principles and has invited us in,’ he said. ‘It’s a key battle in the war on terror. They’ve asked you to do something, what do you say? To do nothing, to prevaricate, is not an option.’
So the Paras were staying. The forty-eight hours stretched into an open-ended deployment that would last until the end of their tour.
The fact that ‘A’ Company had landed without a shot being fired did not mean that there would not be trouble. The important thing was to prepare for it, at the same time as trying to win the confidence of the locals and to persuade them that the newcomers were there in a constructive role. Pike got his men building up the district centre’s flimsy defences. The compound stood on the western edge of the town with the Helmand river and its sandy flood plain a few hundred yards behind it. The wadi that ran through the town from east to west lay directly in front of it. It was there that the bazaar was held. The wadi led to a footbridge which was used by traders on the western bank of the river when they took their goods to market. A straggle of fields and mud-walled enclosures stretched to the north and the south. Sangin town lay to the east.
The compound was shoddily built out of roughly plastered breeze blocks and mud bricks. There was no running water or electricity. There were a few plastic garden chairs to sit on and no beds. It was dirty and dusty but no one joined the Paras to be comfortable. Pike placed his FSG on the flat roof of the main building on the northern edge of the compound. The FSG tower, as it became known, was two storeys high and commanded a sweeping view over the town. From there, the eastern and northern approaches to the base could be covered by GPMG and .50-cal machine guns, Javelin anti-tank missiles and sniper fire. It was also an excellent vantage point from which air and artillery controllers could call in fire.
Twenty yards to the south was a block that became the administrative hub of the base. One room was turned into the ops room, with an old table as a base for the radios and maps stuck on the wall. Next door, Harvey Pynn set up the Company Aid Post. Other rooms were used as dormitories.
The two buildings were separated by a garden area with a few trees providing some welcome shade. The mortar team chose this as their fire base. Behind, to the west, was a small, fast-flowing canal.
In the first days the Paras spent every spare hour shovelling dirt into any container they could find. Andy Mallet, who had taken over from Tom Fehley as OC 2 Platoon, went into town to search for materials to buy and came back with 750 two-foot-by-one-foot baked mud bricks. Pike tried to contract local builders to build a wall but fear of Taliban reprisals deterred them. Then sandbags arrived and the sangars on the FSG tower grew taller and stouter. Another five sangars were constructed to protect the approaches to the compound not covered by the tower. Two were placed on low buildings inside the compound perimeter. The other three were pushed out 30 yards beyond. Each one had a designated arc of fire, demarcated by two features in the ground ahead of it, interlocking with the sangar next to it.
The Paras were vulnerable to attack on three sides. To the northeast, about 400 yards away across the wadi, was a row of shops which provided cover from which to fire. To the east was a line of garages which marked the edge of the town. The south was full of trees and high-standing crops, watered by irrigation channels that fed off the canal. To the west, though, the ground stretching away to the Helmand river was bare and open for three or four miles. Even the most reckless Taliban would think twice about launching an attack from there.
The platoons split the duties, doing twenty-four hours on each. While one manned the sangars, the other would carry out patrols and stand by as a quick reaction force in the event of trouble. There were five men in each sangar. At any time, two were on ‘stag’, hunched over the guns, while the other three stood by or slept in a sandbagged pit behind.
The Paras had arrived in ‘light scales’ – basically what they needed to live and fight for one day. There was no room for luxuries among the supplies that were later flown in. Sangin district centre was not a place for the fastidious. The daily water ration was six or seven litres. That was for drinking, not washing or shaving. Everyone started to grow beards.
‘As for loos,’ one officer remembered, ‘we dug some ditches and managed to get hold of some poles so that if you needed a shit you would just hold on to a pole and away you went.’ Things were to improve on the ablutions front but it was remarkable that in the early days there was only one serious case of diarrhoea and vomiting.
While the district centre’s defences were being strengthened, Will Pike got on with his plans to build a relationship with the locals. On the day after their arrival, together with the district chief, he called a shura with the town’s notables. About sixty attended. ‘I was quite impressed by how many of them rocked up,’ Pike said. He started off telling them through his interpreter that ‘we are here at the invitation of the Afghan government. We have come a long way from the UK to help the Afghan people’. He candidly admitted that he was sure they had heard these promises of help many times since the NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, only to be disappointed. But he went on: ‘our presence here today and [the fact we are] staying is the first sign that the government is coming to the Sangin valley’.
He emphasised that they alone could not bring security, telling them ‘you need to help us with it. It’s about you and us and the Afghan forces coming together to say, “We want this to be a flourishing place, a place free of risk.”’
This was rousing stuff, but his audience seemed unmoved. ‘They came back with, “Well, we’ve seen this and heard this before. Nothing has happened in four years. Why should we believe you?”’
They also pointed out that the Taliban were strong in the area and they
were powerless to defy them. Pike formed the impression that the people he was addressing were not the elders but their delegates, who would report back after the meeting. He was also convinced that some of them were Taliban supporters. It struck Martin Taylor that there were a suspiciously large number of men of fighting age present.
The town was busy and the pattern of life seemed normal. Sangin was no more than an overgrown village but it was the main commercial centre for the Sangin valley and a major centre for the opium trade. At the twice-weekly bazaar in the open ground in front of the base goats were on sale at one end and tinny Japanese 125cc motorbikes at the other.
Pike got his men patrolling in an unthreatening manner. They wore floppy sun hats rather than helmets and called out friendly salaams to everyone who crossed their paths. ‘We didn’t put on ground-dominating patrols at this point because there was no obvious visible threat,’ said Hugo Farmer. ‘It was more information gathering, getting to grips with what Sangin was like, what made people tick.’
Harvey Pynn checked out the local healthcare. There were several clinics, ‘private medical facilities so people had to pay, but they were happy’. There was no need to offer any services so he concentrated on finding out whether there were any quick-impact projects that could be performed to boost the local welfare system, in the spirit of the great Gereshk hospital washing-machine saga. Cleanliness was certainly an issue. The standard of hygiene was the worst he had ever seen.
On the second day after their arrival Governor Daoud flew up from Lashkar Gah to hold a shura. Stuart Tootal and Charlie Knaggs went with him. This time it seemed that the audience were the real representatives of local interests. There were about thirty of them. They wore long beards and carried themselves with authority. They gathered under a mulberry tree in the district centre and listened to what the visitors had to say. Daoud argued that the British presence was a good thing. He also tried to persuade the locals to accept the authority of the men he had appointed to govern them.
Tootal had yet to be given his own translator so the soldiers had to wait until the meeting was finished before Daoud gave them a précis of what had been said. Halfway through the translation, they were approached by a representative with a statement from the elders. He carried the message that everyone wanted stability and good governance. But the reality was that they could not do anything without the agreement of the gunmen. He asked for three days’ grace while they consulted with the Taliban and the local drug lords to see whether they would allow the British soldiers to stay in town.
The Paras agreed to undertake only limited patrolling for three days. But this response was not encouraging. The dilemma of the citizens of Sangin was close to the plight of Wild West settlers threatened by marauding outlaws, as seen in many an old cowboy movie. Like the peace-loving townsfolk of the Wild West Sangin residents hated the intimidation and extortion imposed on them by the bad guys. The information he had picked up from the interpreters on the street left Pike in no doubt that the locals lived in fear of the Taliban, though this did not mean that some did not share their ideological goals. ‘There was talk about them dragging guys through the streets behind pick-up trucks. They are spoilers. They would burn schools, deliver threatening letters. They didn’t really have anything to offer. Some of the people supported them because they didn’t like Westerners being in Afghanistan. But I think mostly they were coerced, directly or indirectly.’
Whatever their feelings about the Taliban, the people of Sangin had good reason to be wary of siding with the British. They looked powerful. But were they inwardly strong? Did they have the staying power to see their oppressors off? The locals feared, with great justification, that for all their promises their would-be saviours might eventually tire of their mission and leave the people they had come to liberate to the mercy of the bandits. In the meantime, Sangin’s civilians could expect to be caught in the crossfire as the two sides slugged it out.
The war between the Taliban and the coalition forces was moving closer to the inhabitants of the town. In the early hours of 27 June, a few miles south of Sangin, a Coalition operation to capture an important Taliban commander went awry. First reports said one of the team was killed in the raid and another was missing. A quick reaction force of Gurkhas was launched from nearby FOB Robinson. About sixteen men from 12 Platoon set off in their vehicles. They were showing no lights and the night was dark. As they approached a bridge near the eastern edge of Sangin they came under heavy fire from the west. They immediately pulled back, dismounted and got into cover. One Snatch was hit by four RPGs. The firefight that ensued went on for three hours. ‘There are no words to explain how it feels to be in a firefight,’ said Sergeant Major Trilochan Gurung, the OC of 12 Platoon. ‘At first all the boys were confused and shouting to each other, but soon we got a grip as our Gurkhali blood started to flow.’ They called in fire from I Battery’s guns at FOB Robinson. After jets and helicopters had attacked the Taliban positions the Gurkhas moved forward and eventually linked up with the men they had been sent to find, then fell back thankfully to their base.
The whereabouts of the dead and missing soldiers was still unknown. 3 Para was asked to go and find them. ‘B’ Company and the battalion’s tactical headquarters group were flown up before dawn.
They landed on the eastern bank of the Helmand river near Sangin and headed off to the grid reference they had been given. They had brought along a quad bike but it soon became clear that it would never be able to negotiate the wide irrigation ditches that lay in their path. The water was chest high and they had to hold their weapons over their heads as they waded across. When, just as dawn was breaking, 5 Platoon of ‘B’ Company arrived at the site of the clash, they saw the bodies of two men in uniform. There would be no need to search for the missing soldiers. Near by were four dead Taliban. The sight of their own dead was a shock. ‘It really hit home,’ said Mark Willets, ‘B’ Company’s sergeant major. ‘For a young lad to walk past the dead body of a Taliban, to be honest they’re not bothered. He’s the enemy. They’re not fussed. But seeing the body of one of your own – you think, fucking hell, it could have been me.’
As the senior man in the company, it was Willets’s job to collect the dead. He went forward with the company medic, Corporal Bradshaw, and the body bags, telling the others to keep back. When he got close to the bodies he realised with a start that he recognised one of them. He had sat down for a brew with him some weeks before, along with Giles Timms, who had known the dead man well.
The body bags were carried back to the landing site. Willets and his men pressed on to hunt for the Gurkhas’ abandoned Snatch. When they found it there were inquisitive boys swarming all over it. They scared them away and recovered some kit from the vehicle before an Apache fired a missile into it to deny it to the Taliban.
The firefight seemed to have a marked effect on the mood of the people in Sangin. An intense battle involving artillery and aerial bombardment had been fought on the edge of their town. There had been power and water cuts to parts of the town, though whether these were due to the fighting was unclear. Hugo Farmer regarded the incident as a catalyst. Carrying out a low-tempo patrol in town the next day, he encountered a crowd who were ‘clearly pissed off. They were asking us questions, saying, “You say you are coming here to rebuild and do all these good things but actually you are just destroying the town.”’
The Paras in Sangin had also been kept in the dark about the operation in their neighbourhood. It seemed politic to blame the trouble on the Americans. The crowd were not buying that. ‘They said, “Well, you are here with the Americans. The Americans tell you what to do.”’ Farmer replied that they were there to help and had no intention of fighting unless the Taliban started it.
‘A’ Company had been there a week. Until now the only sign of trouble had been a few potshots aimed at the district centre. The day before, Corporal James Shimmins, a machine-gunner, had been sitting in his sangar on top of the FSG tower. He bent
over to fiddle with his gun and heard a crack. Bits of grit stung his face. Two shots had been fired at him from long range. It caused some excitement at the time. A few days later it would barely be worth mentioning.
There were strong signs that trouble was on the way. The ANP passed on reports from their spies in town that people were beginning to move out. Some trekked away to stay with relations. Others shifted from the likely confrontation zones facing the district centre into less exposed quarters of Sangin. As the civilians drifted away the Taliban filtered in.
After the early morning battle, a group of elders came to the district centre and told Pike they wanted the British to leave. Their presence, they said, would guarantee a fight with the Taliban. That night the first attacks began. Initially they were low-key affairs, apparently designed to test the Paras’ responses. ‘It was mostly at night and so you would get flurries of RPGs, mostly on the northern side,’ said Pike. ‘It would stop for a bit and then kick off again and it would run through sporadically from as soon as it got dark until about three in the morning.’
The first experience of coming under fire was never to be forgotten. Andy Mallet had just gone to bed after inspecting the sangar positions. ‘I remember taking my belt off and lying on my sleeping bag, and thinking it was all quiet,’ he said. ‘I could hear insects chirping and the sound of the river floating through the district centre.’ He drifted off to sleep then jerked awake as ‘the whole world opened up’. The Taliban were firing from the north-east with light machine guns, rifles and RPGs. ‘It’s a hell of a shock when rounds are fizzing above the building, over your head, snapping into the walls. You get sprayed with plaster, it’s complete darkness and you don’t know what’s going on.’ He grabbed his helmet, body armour, rifle and webbing and ran out to check on those of his men who were hunkered down in the sangars in the front of the compound, while his platoon sergeant, Huw Davies, checked on the rest.
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