3 Para

by Patrick Bishop

  ‘Rounds of tracer were zipping over, smacking into the building,’ said Mallet. ‘As I was running I was doing up my chinstrap and my body armour on the move.’ It was about a hundred yards to the front sangar, part of it over open ground. When he reached it Corporal Tam McDermott was blazing away with the GPMG at the enemy, who were identifiable only by the muzzle flash of their weapons. Mallet began ‘putting down rounds myself’. Before long such dramas would become routine.

  After the initial night attacks the Taliban tried to maintain the pressure into the hours of daylight. Pike was sitting under the trees in the shady space between the main building and his ops room, talking to some elders, when there was a sound ‘like a swarm of hornets coming over’, as Kalashnikov rounds zipped harmlessly overhead.

  One day Hugo Farmer saw ‘a number of Taliban fighters trying to manoeuvre towards the compound. Some of them were in the open by the [bazaar]’. They were coming down the ‘pipe range’, as the Paras called the road that led from the district centre eastwards into Sangin. Two pick-up trucks raced up and pulled off to the left and right and armed men jumped out. They were under the sights of Private Martin Cork, who was manning a GPMG in one of the two sangars in front of the compound. He opened fire, hitting at least two of them.

  On 30 June intelligence reports passed on from Bastion said that a big insurgent operation was in the offing. The assault began late in the evening. About twenty fighters split into three groups had advanced towards the compound from the north, firing RPGs and rifles and hitting the FSG tower.

  By now the district centre was as well set up as it could be without the assistance of the battle group’s combat engineers. There were ninety men in Sangin. All their extra weapons had been flown in. Amongst them they had two .50-cal machine guns, six GPMGs, the same number of Minimi light machine guns, 81mm and 51mm mortars and Javelin anti-tank missiles. They had plenty of ammunition. Their firepower easily outmatched the RPGs, machine guns and rifles that the Taliban could muster. The Paras also had all the might of the air force at their disposal. From their perch on the FSG tower the fire support team controllers, Matt Armstrong and Shaun Fry, could call in strikes by jets and helicopter as well as bombardments by the artillery based at FOB Robinson.

  As the insurgents advanced over the open ground to the north and east of the compound the darkness was torn by the flash of outgoing tracer, and the steam-hammer thump of the .50-cals shattered the night silence. Before they could recover from the first shock, 81mm mortar rounds and 105mm artillery shells from the FOB Robinson battery exploded around them. There seemed something mad about the assault. Harvey Pynn speculated that ‘they must have been on some mind-bending drugs to believe that they could assault our position from that direction using such schoolboy tactics’.

  When the shooting stopped, up to a dozen of the attackers were dead, including the commander. On the defenders’ side one man had suffered minor cuts from flying masonry and another was singed by the back-blast from a Javelin rocket. Inside the district centre there was quiet satisfaction. ‘I don’t think they knew who the British or the Parachute Regiment were,’ said Tam McDermott. ‘If they’d looked at history they’d have known that all the troops were up for a fight – itching to do something.’

  As they dragged away their dead and wounded the Taliban now knew what sort of enemy they were facing. But they would be coming back again, and the next time the fight would not be so one-sided.

  9

  The Testing

  When Harvey Pynn woke up the following day in Sangin his immediate concern was for the pharmacy, which lay at one one end of the row of shops across the wadi that the Taliban had chosen as a launching point for their attacks.

  The pharmacy doubled as a dispensary, and the doctor who operated from it had become an ally. Pynn ‘didn’t want to wake up and see his surgery a sieve of holes’. He went up to the observation post on the roof and looked across through binoculars. The pharmacy was still intact but the compound next to it had been flattened. A couple of families sat in adjoining fields, waiting for ‘jingly trucks’, the lorries painted psychedelic colours and decorated with chains that ply the roads of Afghanistan. ‘I really feel for these people,’ Pynn wrote in his diary, ‘but really hope that after a short period … we’ll have more control of the town and be able to commence the reconstruction effort.’

  During the afternoon, Pynn joined a patrol into town. There were more families packing up their stuff on trailers and moving out. He went to one of Sangin’s medical facilities, the Farooq hospital. They knew him now and were friendly enough. One of the lab technicians told him that an elderly man had been killed and five women wounded in the shooting the night before. ‘It never ceases to amaze me how blasé these folk are to weapons and gunfights,’ he wrote. ‘In my eyes last night was a major battle but to these locals who have grown used to it all over the years it must have seemed like a pea shooting contest.’

  Later he visited the pharmacy. There were some bullet marks in the façade but it seemed otherwise undamaged. It appeared that the Taliban had taken over the roof of the building to use it as a firing point. The owner was pathetically grateful that the British had not bombed it flat.

  Throughout the day, intelligence reports filtered in about the Taliban’s next moves. It appeared that the top commanders in Helmand had decided to move to Sangin so they could direct the battle themselves. There was reportedly talk of sending in suicide bombers.

  At dusk on 1 July, the men on the roof of the FSG tower watched the sinking sun paint the hills beyond the Helmand river red and prepared for another night of shooting and being shot at.

  By now a pattern was emerging. Once darkness fell the first RPGs would scorch out from the line of shops across the dried-up river bed and thump into the compound. The defences were improving all the time. The bricks Andy Mallet bought had proved very useful. Earlier that evening, yet more sandbags had been humped up the stairs on to the flat roof of the FSG tower. There were about twenty men in the six positions on the roof. There were four machine-gun teams, two sniper teams and a Javelin missile crew, fourteen soldiers in all. There was also a shifting group of mortar, artillery and air fire controllers. Finally, there was the three-man signals team. As they settled down for the night the defenders felt reasonably secure.

  The evening started quietly. Everyone had been given their tasks for the night. 2 Platoon was on stag duty, manning the OPs and sangars. Some of 1 Platoon were resting, or what counted as resting in the special circumstances of Sangin. There was no real relaxation. Men dozed off, still in their webbing, with their body armour, helmets and rifles by their sides, ready to race to their firing positions when the contact began. It was a Saturday. Thousands of miles away in Germany, the World Cup was reaching a climax. England had reached the quarter-finals and that night were playing Portugal. There was no way of following the drama. Some of the Toms asked optimistically whether the game would be broadcast on the BBC World Service, the only radio station they could receive.

  At 9 p.m. Will Pike was in his ops room, talking to his sergeant major, Zac Leong. Leong was thirty-five years old. He was brought up in Cornwall and had spent all his adult life in 3 Para, apart from a two-year stint instructing. He too had been seduced by the TV series The Paras. ‘I fancied a bit of it, just to taste it,’ he said. ‘I joined up and stayed in.’

  Pike and Leong had worked together for two years. They had shared the burden of the Iraq deployment and respected each other. ‘He was great in every regard and brilliant for me because I would set my direction, make sure that everyone understood that, then he would see that it was tidied up and done,’ said Pike. ‘He was very human, very humorous, just a terrific guy.’ Zac Leong’s qualities would be displayed to the full that night.

  It had been a trying day for Pike. Earlier he had gone to visit FOB Robinson. There had been a suggestion that it would make sense if it was brought under his command. On the way back the Chinook dropped him off near
what appeared to be the district centre. He jumped down from the tailgate of the chopper and into a huge cloud of dust. When it eventually cleared he looked around for Hugo Farmer, who was meant to be marking the landing site. Instead, a few yards away, he saw a pick-up truck with men in the back who watched him closely for several minutes before driving off in the direction of some compounds. It seemed ‘pretty clear that something was awry’. Pike had no idea where he was. Night had fallen. The Chinook was dwindling into the distance, the throb of its rotors getting ever fainter. And now more men were emerging from the compounds and advancing towards him. Pike retreated through the fields adjoining a barren area that he thought must be the flood plain of the Helmand river. He tried to raise the aircraft or the district centre on his radio, but it had a limited range. ‘It was extremely unpleasant,’ he said. ‘All the time I was saying “fuck” a lot and trying to put some distance between myself and the compounds.’ When he reached the river, he crouched behind the bank. ‘That got me a bit of cover so I could repel anyone who came.’ Then he heard the sound of salvation. A helicoper was coming in his direction. It was one of the Apaches that had escorted the Chinook in. At the controls was Lieutenant Colonel Andy Cash of the Army Air Corps, who had flown to the correct landing site at the district centre, just over a mile from where Pike had been mistakenly dropped off. He had noticed the dust cloud when the Chinook put down and flown over to investigate. Pike began signalling to the helicopter, praying that the pilot would see him. Peering into the gloom below, Cash spotted Pike, called the Chinook back and hovered protectively overhead until it touched down about twenty minutes later.

  Pike said later that ‘in my judgement he saved my life’. Intelligence reports said that the area he was in, south of the district centre, was full of Taliban. ‘Who knows what would have happened? It could have been horrific.’

  Now, an hour later, Pike was hoping for a quiet night. At about 9.30, as he and Leong stood chatting, the compound was rocked with what Pike described as a ‘God Almighty explosion, much larger than anything else we had had … we exchanged this look. It was like, “What the fuck was that?”’ The blast was followed by a brief, sinister silence. Martin Taylor immediately radioed Bastion on the satellite link to report a ‘significant contact’, then called Matt Armstrong, the fire support team commander, to get him to request any jets in the vicinity to come to their aid. An old-fashioned land-line ran from the ops room up to the roof. Taylor rang the OP and one of the snipers answered. ‘I said: “What the fuck was that?” He said, “Boss, we’ve been hit. I don’t really know, but I’ve got blood coming out of my ears. There’s a lot of blokes screaming.”’

  Now everyone’s PRRs were buzzing. Taylor heard someone from the roof saying, ‘I have got significant casualties up here, you have to come up here and sort things out.’ As the message came through, the stretchers in the RAP were being broken out and Zac Leong, together with Paul Roberts and Brian Reidy, the company medics, was on his way out of the door.

  Across the orchard, Leong could see smoke and flame pouring from the top of the main building. ‘The shrapnel was glowing red hot,’ he said, ‘a massive shower of sparks.’ He grabbed a stretcher and rounded up Prig Poll and some others to give him a hand, then ran over to the open concrete staircase that led to the roof. Fire was still coming in. On the roof he found a scene of devastation and chaos. Three men lay amid the debris of burst sandbags and shattered concrete. One was clearly dead, with a massive wound to his head. Another lay on his back, with a film of dust over his eyeballs. Leong crouched over the third, looking for signs of life, checking pulse and breathing. There seemed to be some hope. He tied a tourniquet to the man’s terribly wounded shoulder and frantically pumped his chest.

  Leong placed the wounded man as carefully as he could on a stretcher and then Roberts and Reidy carried him down three flights of stairs to the Company Aid Post (CAP) and Harvey Pynn. The CAP he had set up next to the ops room was cramped and basic. Supplies and equipment were limited to the man-portable kit that was all the Paras had been able to bring in. The main resource was a Piggott’s Pouch. This was a sort of suitcase which unzipped and hung on the wall, containing 20 kilos of medical supplies – enough to look after several seriously injured men. They used the stretchers for beds.

  When they arrived, Pynn was already dealing with the walking wounded who had reached him first. ‘Two dusty bodies fell through the small door in the CAP and staggered to the ground at my feet,’ he wrote. Corporal Stephen ‘Hoss’ Cartwright, one of the mortar fire controllers, had severe shrapnel wounds in his backside. Private Paul Brown had injuries to his thighs.

  Pynn started with Cartwright, whose condition seemed the worst. As he was dressing the wound ‘a party of soldiers appeared at the doorway carrying a limp, bloodstained body’.

  Pynn left the other casualties to his colleagues and concentrated on the new arrival. He blew air into the man’s lungs and vigorously pumped his chest, continuing until long after it was clear the casualty was dead. Something told Pynn that it was essential that each soldier should know that every effort would be made to save him, even though that effort might be in vain.

  The dead man was Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, a member of the signals team which had its base on the roof of the main building. He and his colleague, Corporal Peter Thorpe, and their translator, Daoud, were engaged in an important surveillance task, together with the company intelligence officer, Sergeant Emlyn Hughes. Earlier that day, Will Pike had decided to shift them from the position they had been occupying to somewhere he thought was more safe.

  Their new post was against the wall where the explosion struck. The force of the impact made people think at first that they had been hit by a recoilless rifle – a long, old fashioned anti-tank gun. Later it became clear that the damage was done by a 107mm rocket. These were Chinese manufactured and had a reputation for extreme inaccuracy. But the aimer had only to get lucky once. And this had been the Taliban’s lucky night.

  Martin Taylor’s call to Bastion provoked a flurry of immediate demands for more details. Given the adrenalin-soaked confusion, it was impossible to answer their questions. Manning the radios, Taylor felt ‘totally impotent’. There was nothing for him to do. Zac Leong was on the roof; Pike had gone out to oversee the firefight that had broken out after the initial impact; Pynn and his team were dealing with the casualties.

  On one side Bastion was demanding information. On the other, Pike was reluctant to give an assessment until he knew exactly what the situation was. But the OC was adamant about one thing: they needed helicopters urgently to get the casualties out.

  How many were there? Bastion wanted to know. Leong had just appeared, ‘absolutely covered in blood’, yelling that there was one definitely dead and two ‘really bad’. Taylor tried to get information from Pynn. He ducked into the CAP.

  ‘There was a really weird light in there. It was a gas lamp that he had procured from town somehow. He had his hand on [Corporal Hashmi’s] chest and he was covered in blood. He was frantically pumping his chest. I said to Harvey, “What’s going on?” He said, “Fuck off, just get me some helicopters.”’

  As far as Taylor could work out there were four or five casualties. He ‘got on the radio and said there are three P1 casualties and five P2s’. Injuries are categorised in descending order of seriousness, with P1 the most acute. Taylor ‘would much rather say someone is worse than they were and have someone come back later and say, “Oh, he wasn’t as bad as you said.” It means that he is then in hospital and not with us.’

  Taylor was told that Bastion understood the need for casevac helicopters, but at the moment it was too dangerous for them to fly. He ‘went to Will and told him we had got bad news … he was getting very worked up because he wanted to know when the helicopters were coming. He was getting equally annoyed with me because I wasn’t giving him the answer he wanted.’

  Taylor told Pike he would go and request a casevac again. Before he did so he l
ooked into the CAP. Word had come down from the roof that Thorpe and Daoud, the translator, were also dead. There were by now another three P2 casualties who should be evacuated that night, making five in all.

  Taylor got on the radio and reported ‘five P2s and three P4s’ (P4 means ‘dead’). He was answered by Major Huw Williams, the second-in-command of the battalion. He was ‘speaking in a very calm voice and that was very welcome because there was someone there who was cool and collected’. Williams could not quite believe what he was hearing and wanted to make sure. ‘Do you mean P4 as in slightly wounded or P4 as in dead?’ he asked. Dead, Taylor told him.

  There was nothing that could be done for those killed. The living would survive until the helicopters could get in at first light. The firing had stopped now. The adrenalin seeped away, to be replaced by weariness and depression. There was work to be done, carting away the dead and clearing up the mess. About forty minutes after the explosion Taylor saw Zac Leong ask a young signaller to give him a hand getting Corporal Thorpe down from the roof. ‘He said, “What, me, sir?” and [Leong] said, “Yes, you. Come on, son, let’s go and get it done.” And so they went up and put him in a bag and brought him down.’ When he got back the young soldier was ‘shaking, shaking uncontrollably, and he had this bit of tissue and he was trying to wipe the blood off his hands’.

  The men took Thorpe into the CAP. ‘He was motionless, grey and unresponsive,’ Harvey Pynn wrote in his diary a few hours afterwards. ‘The body count was rising. The only saving grace was that neither soldier would have felt a great deal.’

  Elsewhere, others were trying to salvage some comfort from the situation. Martin Taylor clung on to the thought that it could have been a lot worse. If the rocket had struck half an hour earlier the roof and staircase ‘would have been absolutely packed with guys who were ferrying sandbags up to the roof and very few of them were wearing body armour because of the heat. If that had hit then, we would probably have been looking at more like fifteen or twenty killed.’