When he drew close to the bridge where the suspicious-looking man had been loitering Poll stopped again. There was another small bridge to the right, which led in the direction the patrol was due to take. He ordered Lance Corporal Sharp and Privates Damien Jackson and Adam Randle to cross it. Poll dropped to his haunches, rifle at the ready, facing the scattered buildings on the southern outskirts of Sangin, where he judged any threat would come from. As he stood up to follow his men ‘the explosion went off … I think I got lifted a few feet off the road and fell into a ditch’. He was knocked out by the blast – whether from an IED or an RPG was never established.
When he came to a few minutes later ‘all hell was going off. The blokes that I had sent across were firing over the top of me, and the Taliban ambush I was caught up in were firing away at me’. The next thing he heard was the voice of the 1 Platoon sergeant, Dan Jarvie, coming over his radio asking, ‘“Prig, Prig, where are you? Are you there?” And I just said, “Look for my hand.” And I stuck my hand up.’
By now Hugo Farmer and 2 Section had arrived and joined in the action. While Farmer laid down ‘a massive rate of fire’, Poll scrambled out of the ditch and scuttled over to his mates. He was met by the sight of his friend, Damien Jackson, being dragged by Randle into another ditch.
Hugo Farmer was just to the rear. He had seen the start of the ambush. The Taliban had opened fire with RPGs and machine guns from behind compound walls ahead and to the left of the patrol, forcing him and a young lieutenant, Simon Bedford, who was acting as his radio operator to gain experience, to duck behind the only cover available – a bale of straw. One of the grenades had hit just in front of Jackson. Farmer saw him fall. ‘He was only six or seven metres in front of me and Randle pulled him into cover.’
Farmer’s first reaction, instilled by his training, was to smother the Taliban attack so that Jackson could be evacuated. ‘What you are thinking of is the security of the situation in order for you to allow your blokes to withdraw the casualty. So you are fighting the battle, securing the area so a sergeant can come forward or at least organise the evacuation of the casualty.’
That seemed a good plan. The problem was putting it into action. The front section was ‘properly pinned down, people lying in shallow trenches, huge amounts of fire coming towards them. Some of the guys were able to return fire. Some weren’t.’
This stasis had to be broken. The drills taught the Paras there was a way of doing it. ‘When you have got seven or eight guys in cover and the enemy are firing at you there will always be someone who the enemy aren’t concentrating on,’ said Farmer. ‘It is their responsibility to start locating the enemy and then returning fire. As soon as the enemy realise they are being fired on their heads come down, allowing someone else to join in – as long as the right target information has been given.’
It was all about delivering heavy, accurate fire. ‘If you put down more than they do, then you will keep their heads down … that is called winning the firefight. That allows you to manoeuvre, which is the first step to winning the battle.’
This made it sound easy. That was not how it felt to Prig, hunkered down in the ditches with a severely wounded man struggling for breath beside him. Poll knew what he had to do. He got behind Jackson and, lying on his back, held the private’s head between his knees so he could check his breathing. ‘It was a small ditch,’ he said. ‘Rounds were coming in and the only way I could treat him was to lie flat on my back and pull him on top of me.’ As he did so Private Randle crawled forward and tried to stop the bleeding from the wound in Jackson’s stomach. In the meantime, Poll went through the first-aid drill: ‘Jaw open, look in the mouth to see if the airway is clear, see if he has swallowed his tongue.’ Jackson’s airway was clear but it seemed to Poll that he had stopped breathing.
He looked up to see the platoon medic, Lance Corporal Stuart Giles, and Dan Jarvie approaching on their hands and knees. ‘I just said, “Take over, he’s stopped breathing.” I thought he had gone at that point.’ Poll’s responsibility was to get on with ‘winning the firefight’.
‘My main effort was to get everyone out of this ambush now because people were getting cut up,’ he said. ‘I crawled back up and took charge of the remaining blokes and identified the firing positions of the Taliban.’ He spotted two figures in the entrance to a building. Another man was shouldering an RPG launcher. On the roof of a nearby building he could see three machine-gun positions. He yelled out the locations to his men and they fired into them. The Taliban were well placed. They were also ‘very determined, putting down good rates of fire on us’. Poll called Billy Smart to move in from his position to the right so he could join the fight.
As the others traded fire with the Taliban, Stu Giles and Private Sharp were frantically trying to resuscitate Damien Jackson. Dan Jarvie lay alongside them, alternately returning the Taliban fire and yelling requests for a casevac helicopter into the radio. He couldn’t see his enemy but was blasting away in the hope of keeping their heads down. A few feet away, one of his men lay dying from a bullet wound to the lower abdomen.
‘It was the worst thing I had seen in my life,’ he said. ‘He was lying back and I was shouting at him, “Jacko, look at me, look at me, don’t fucking go, stay with me.” We were trying to keep him stable, trying to keep him awake … but he was quiet, really quiet. He had gone white and he was looking up.’
Twenty minutes had now passed since the start of the shooting. Poll could hear an Apache overhead. He called Farmer, who, together with Charlie Curnow, was lighting mini-flares to let the pilot know their location. Prig passed on his position and the coordinates of the enemy and waited for the missiles to rain down. They never came. Instead, the Apache peeled away.
Angry and frustrated, Poll got on the net to Tam McDermott, who was back in the district centre, and asked for supporting fire from the mortars. Soon bombs thumped into the Taliban positions, forcing the fighters back and slowing their rate of fire.
By now Zac Leong had arrived from the district centre with reinforcements and a stretcher party. Tam McDermott, one of a small group from 2 Platoon who stayed behind when the rest left, was also there. He moved forward to join up with Prig Poll while Jacko was loaded on to a stretcher. Dan Jarvie watched him go. ‘His kit was ripped off and he was looking at me. There was a feeling of helplessness when you see one of your men in such a bad way.’ It seemed to Stu Giles that Jackson was still breathing.
The Paras were now gaining the advantage. As they started to hit the Taliban positions with grenades from the underslung grenade launchers on their rifles, the incoming fire slackened. Farmer took his men to the right to seek better cover while the stretcher-bearers hurried away.
Farmer thought that Jackson might survive. ‘It wasn’t clear at that point that he was a goner,’ he said. ‘It was clear that he’d been hit hard but there wasn’t much of an entry wound and there wasn’t much of an exit wound. It had gone through soft tissue.’
Farmer was told to take his men to secure one of the established helicopter landing sites (HLS) in the wadi behind the district centre, about 900 yards from where they were. As they arrived, ‘Martin Taylor got on to me on the net and said, “Come back.” Not really thinking, I said, “What, don’t you want me to secure the HLS any more? And he said, “No, no, no, come straight back.”’ Farmer was about to question the order when he realised, ‘Oh, wait a minute, there is only one reason why they would be calling me back.’ Jacko was dead.
Taylor had known it when he saw the stretcher party hurrying into the compound. Jackson’s arm was hanging lifelessly down, jolting from the motion. Harvey Pynn had gone out to meet him. He had known him well as one of the team medics. ‘Jacko was blue and unresponsive,’ he wrote. For nearly half an hour they pumped his chest and filled his lungs with their breath. It was no good. A bullet had passed underneath his body armour, hitting him in the lower abdomen and exiting on the other side. It had struck a major artery, the abdominal aorta, causin
g catastrophic bleeding.
Pynn was devastated. He sat with his head in his hands while Paul Roberts and Brian Reidy zipped up the body bag. The MO then went in to tell Giles Timms the bad news. He found it harder to face Stu Giles when he arrived in the CAP drenched with sweat. Before Pynn could speak the expression on his face told Giles that his patient had died. ‘He broke into floods of tears,’ he recorded, ‘followed by tears of blame.’ Jacko had been breathing when the stretcher-bearers carried him away. Pynn believed that he had gone into cardiac arrest due to a catastrophic drop in blood pressure caused by fluid loss while he was being carried back to the compound. It would have been extremely difficult for the men on the ground to control the bleeding given that the bullet had passed neatly through the abdomen, and there was no open wound through which the injury could be accessed. They were also under heavy fire at the time. Pynn reassured Giles that ‘even if I had been next to Jacko when he was shot it is unlikely I’d have managed to save him, such was his ill fortune that the round had struck a major artery’.
It was some time before the men were told that Jackson was dead. The danger was far from over. Dan Jarvie knew it, but ‘wanted them to remain focused … it was “Right, lads, get your magazines rebombed up, GMPG gunners get your link, LMG gunners same detail, stand by ready to go again.” It was a wee bit hard when you knew what had happened.’
The Paras were used to dealing with difficulties. The answer to every setback or ‘drama’ was to ‘crack on’, to deal with the difficulty and sort things out – ‘screw the nut’ in Para language. But the death of one of their own was more than a mere ‘drama’.
It was Zac Leong who broke it to them. Jarvie called the men together under the shade of a tree, ‘and then Zac gave the brief. He said, “Right, lads, Jacko has gone.”’ Leong went on to talk to them in a way that Hugo Farmer reckoned later was crucial in preserving the Paras’ discipline and motivation.
[It was] not what I would call a rousing speech. But he made them buy into what they needed to buy into, which was that this wasn’t going to change the way we were going to operate. It would only strengthen our resolve and make us want to succeed even more. Together, he got the platoon to give agreement that this was what we were going to do … that was a very, very important thing to do. Otherwise the blokes would start getting their own ideas about what we should be doing and it becomes fractious. The ethos and spirit starts breaking down … it was a very quick way to nip in the bud any possible negative reactions.
Farmer went round afterwards talking to each of his men in turn. ‘They were shaken up, I was shaken up. It was a really shit experience. But it brought us together and that togetherness was reinforced by what Sergeant Major Leong had said.’
Dan Jarvie also stressed the need for cohesiveness and purpose. ‘Paratroopers are paratroopers but they are still human,’ he said. ‘A lot of these boys were eighteen, nineteen. They were good friends of his. But without being callous I needed to make sure they were focused.’
Jarvie told them, ‘this job is still the number one priority … everything that you do, bear in mind that you are doing it now for Jacko. If we come across the Taliban we kill the Taliban. We take no chances with the rest of our lives.’
One by one, Jacko’s section comrades filed into the CAP to pay their last respects. Billy Smart reverently laid his mate’s maroon beret on his body. Jarvie, one of the hardest but also one of the warmest-hearted men in 3 Para, could not contain his grief.
Once they were outside, the intense emotion subsided, but Jarvie noticed that there was an added firmness to the men. ‘There wasn’t a feeling that they were going to go out and do anything for revenge. That’s not what we were there for. We weren’t going to hand out any punishment to anyone who wasn’t Taliban. But we had a resolution … we will go out there and fight harder, fight more aggressively because we know what we have lost.’
The deaths of Jabron Hashmi and Peter Thorpe had been a sobering reminder of mortality and a source of sadness for the Paras. But the death of one of their own created a special kind of grief. Damien Jackson was a much-loved member of the battalion. He was born in Sunderland and was a fanatical Black Cats devotee. Dan Jarvie had known him since he had arrived two and a half years before. ‘Jacko came to me as a young Tom,’ Jarvie said. ‘When he first came he was always in dramas but he was a good soldier, a fit young soldier. He was intelligent and he had a good personality on him. He wasn’t just one of my men. He was a mate of mine as well.’
Hugo Farmer thought he was ‘a great bloke, really, really well liked. He was always happy, always smiling, very professional … he had a great future.’ Farmer had a picture of him taken during Operation Mutay, posing with his gun and ‘looking particularly “ally”’. ‘Ally’ is a Para term of approval meaning ‘cool’. His mates called him ‘Combi-teeth’, reckoning his snaggle-toothed smile looked like the all-purpose tool used for maintaining the SA-80 rifle. Jarvie relied on him as a link between the senior NCOs and the young Toms who looked up to Jacko and came to him for advice. Not that he was very much older than them. When he died he was four days short of his twentieth birthday.
After discussions with his men, Hugo Farmer asked whether they could go on guard duty that night. It seemed like the right thing to do. The first attacks began at dusk, from across the wadi, the usual RPG and small-arms fire. Just before midnight another big-calibre round rammed into the compound.
On the night of 9 July, when all of ‘A’ Company were finally back in Bastion, the men held a memorial service for Jacko. There was an opening prayer, and then they sang some hymns. Will Pike and Zac Leong read out tributes. The company was told that there were plans to set up a new forward operating base across the river from the district centre. It would be called FOB Jackson. ‘The blokes liked that,’ said Hugo Farmer.
The plan came to nothing but Jacko would not be forgotten.
11
Musa Qaleh
Sangin was only one of five forward locations. By now there were troops in Now Zad, Musa Qaleh and Kajaki, as well as FOB Robinson. The parameters of the mission were gradually widening. Governor Daoud’s philosophy was that if you didn’t ask you didn’t get, and he had proved very good at asking.
There were simply not enough men to do the job. It had been decided at the outset that everyone would be allowed a mid-mission two-week ‘R and R’ break. Sticking to the plan meant that companies were always under-strength. Tootal had tried to ease the strain on human resources by advocating abandoning a permanent presence in Now Zad, but had been overruled. On the plus side, he could look forward to some reinforcements. On 10 July it was announced that a 125-strong company group from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers would be sent from Cyprus to Helmand to garrison Now Zad.
The commanders told themselves that, despite the problems, the direction that events had propelled them in was producing some unforeseen but nonetheless beneficial consequences. The vigorous reaction of the Taliban to the arrival of the British had forced a ‘break-in battle’ which the Paras and their comrades were winning. The Taliban were taking a beating. Intelligence assessments spoke of many wounded fighters retreating across the southern border to Pakistan to seek medical treatment. It was also claimed that they were having problems finding men to take their place. Local males were reported to be increasingly unwilling to join what looked more and more like the losing side.
These alleged successes were unquantifiable, however. The difficulties of keeping men in the field and supplying them with food and ammunition were serious and seemed likely to get worse.
Musa Qaleh and Now Zad, moored on the northern fringes of the battle group’s area, posed particular problems. A British reconnaissance party had visited Musa Qaleh in late May. They had gone there on the insistence of Governor Daoud, who claimed that the government’s forces were enduring vicious Taliban attacks. A Pathfinder patrol confirmed that this was no exaggeration. ‘There were bloody huge rocket strikes, holes in the wall
s,’ said Major Nick Wight-Boycott, the Pathfinders’ OC. The Pathfinders are an essential element of 16 Air Assault Brigade, the formation built around the Paras. Their job was to go ahead of the main force, by land or air, to scope out the territory in which it would be operating. That meant gathering information about landing sites and drop zones. Thereafter they were to act as the brigade’s reconnaissance arm. They were also expected to contribute to the brigade firepower, launching diversionary attacks if necessary. Despite their small numbers – there were only about thirty of them – they punched well above their weight. They were known as a ‘force multiplier’.
The Pathfinders operated at distances of up to 200 miles from base. Six-man teams cruised around in WMIKs. Each team had a commander, a second-in-command, a medic, a signaller and sniper and a demolitions expert. Each member also had cross-training in another skill – such as forward air controlling. The Pathfinders were tough, versatile and extremely engaged and motivated. Their selection process has been described as ‘P Company on speed’. It is a masochistic endurance test culminating in a 40-mile march across the Brecon Beacons staggering under a ligament-tearing burden of kit. That is before they start throwing themselves out of aircraft. Trainees do HALO and HAHO jumps. HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening. ‘That is up to twenty-five thousand feet,’ explained Wight-Boycott. ‘With full kit. So it’s oxygen masks, rucksacks, rifles, going out the door and free fall for two minutes then pull your parachute. It requires quite a lot of determination to do that.’ HAHO stands for High Altitude High Opening. The advantage of this type of jump is that men can be dropped far away from the target zone and fly in at high speed on their parachutes undetected, checking on GPS until they get to the landing point. Most Pathfinders come from the Parachute Regiment. They are augmented by specialists from the Royal Signals and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.
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