by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
as the others push peacefully and enviously through on D-day it’s almost immediately more of the same except this time there’s no turning back and so hours which seem minutes become two days in which progress is measured only in compounds and the strangely sweet evening smell of dead bodies or the pit in the stomach that widens every time we charge back for one of our own casualties. But we’re lucky in the grand scheme of things and even Bismillah who has his right eye shot-out could have been a centimetre further forward and we’d be scraping his skull out of the back of the wagon. No one is in a worse state than the POWs we’ve found where we thought there would be no survivors and so a cliché is played out as I put myself between the Afghans who want to execute them and the trembling Taliban who no longer care whether they’re off to Allah economy or business.
sure enough once it had been safe for a few hours the cameras arrive and it’s the BBC to sell us down the river with exciting tales of being in the front line in the ‘Taliban dominated Sangin
Valley’ with the plucky team of Brits actually fighting alongside the Afghan National Army. Brave and hilarious and terrifying and mad the ANA who park up overnight next to a mountain of what we later discover is gear but it doesn’t seem to affect them as the Taliban kick up again in what will become the regular pulse-quickening night-time pattern of rattle and panic response and bathing the beautiful river valley in the eerie glow of the flares.
through 17 days of pounding the area the iPod is unfailingly mischievous, throwing up Dolly Parton ‘9-to-5’ as once again the plaster of the compound behind our heads kicks up as we scurry for helmets and body armour and pound in all directions until whoever it is that was shooting is shooting no more. It all becomes a parody of a pastiche at night when we get the Stones or Hendrix up on the Dam while popping up mortars and picking off ‘Terry’ as he tries to crawl up to the wire. In the day, the WMIKs bristling with firepower and ploughing through the poppy fields as if they weren’t there, we’re appreciative of the lift of 2 Many DJs’ mash ups or AVH’s ‘My My My’ as we cock pistols or fix bayonets and charge once more into a labyrinth of stone and goats and rabid dogs, as likely to scare an old lady as whoever was firing from the roof the night before and afterwards I’ll try and gauge my own response to all this mayhem, maybe staring at the sunset over the valley or luxuriating in the cool water of the river or even steeling myself to loading up more enemy dead, ungainly on to the back of a pick-up to head back to the morgue where sinister messages of congratulations come back to us days later that the most recent batch had 15 rounds of UK ammo in a nice tight group in the chest which means at least we’re good shots as well as heartless bastards.
it’s all so real that it doesn’t seem real at all.
tell that to the Taliban who didn’t make it, it’s no consolation I guess but everyone’s a winner because they’re now martyrs enjoying virgins we can only imagine from the cruel FHM scraps sent up with the resupply drops and we’re the toast of Helmand—which is a double-edged sword because all I want now is a wash and something real to eat and to lie on a bed and work out what it all meant but it starts again with a vengeance in twenty minutes and it will be no more real than it was last time and all I’ll remember is the donkey tethered to a tree which stood there unmoved through the mother of all fire fights as we finally broke through and took the Dam itself and then held the front line which we’ve now abandoned so it wouldn’t really have made any difference if we hadn’t done any of it at all and now we’ll go and do it all again somewhere else and hope there’s more grenade fishing and more lucky escapes and hope that whoever said adrenalin was finite is wrong because there’s no heroin replacement substitute for this shit and for now the show must go on.
Setting out from Shorabak for the start of Silicon had been as vivid as that first Queen’s guard. Turning the corner from our side of camp with the commanding officer’s and the padre’s inappropriate blessing ringing in our ears (but hearing only de Niro and imagining the six inches in front of our faces), we were lifted by the insanely glorious sight of the kandak ready to roll. A kaleidoscope of headdresses and rugs and blankets and plants and casual RPGs strewn amongst the naan breads. Faces we’d never seen before snuck in for the scrap, doubled our numbers and clambered ten to a man over the pecking order of the vehicles, fighting over who gets to man the fearsome-looking dushka heavy machine-gun wagon.
And it was still joyous as we charged in broad daylight, brazen as you like down the A1 towards Gereshk, running taxis with whole families clinging to the roofs off the road, hooting past the bewildered gate sentries in FOB Price. Everyone tensed up the first time we cut through Gereshk proper; the town came closing in on all sides through the bustling noise and smell of the badr (market) and we were on our own and this was really happening.
Flashes of those hours stay with me, the sight of Qiam—squat and paunchy and ill-shaven like an Afghan Falstaff—roaring up over the dam and into the police sangars, where the ancient guards were cowering behind the Hesco, spraying ineffectual bursts over the top without even looking. Qiam furious, foaming at the mouth and damning us all as cowards as he ran forward on his own, screaming, ‘I don’t need helmets and body armour, I’ll kill fucking Taliban with my bare hands,’ or as close to that in Dari as the terrified interpreter can manage. That was leading by example. Will jogging up his side of the canal with the same ridiculous grin I knew I must be sporting, and Sgt Gillies just behind, crimson-faced and panting good-naturedly that he was too old for all this, but smiling as well now that sixteen years after Operation Granby he’d be able to update his war stories.
But what I couldn’t say in an e-mail because maybe at the time I didn’t know it or didn’t want to believe it in case it ran out or wasn’t true, was just how easy it all was, how natural it all felt and how much fun. That night I lay listening to the shots and the ghostly call of the muezzin across Deh-Adam Khan, where we knew and they knew we’d be fighting tomorrow. Lying in the hammock, too excited to sleep and too exhausted not to, it felt like everything had built up to that moment, but that everything had also just started. As I reminded the boys, we had only just finished day one of what was supposed to be a week-long op.
Which was still going on a month later.
The objective of Op Silicon was to push the Taliban out of the fertile river corridor, the Green Zone, which lay just to the north of Gereshk, Helmand’s commercial capital. While Gereshk was vulnerable to marauding attacks from the city limits the government of Afghanistan had no credibility in the province, so we were to clear a 10-kilometre block north of the city.
The teamsheet (the ‘order of battle’ or ORBAT) was impressive. A Company 1 Royal Anglian to the northwest in the desert itself with the Light Dragoons and their tanks, bristling with firepower and mobility; Big Mick Aston’s B Company, also 1 Royal Anglian, on my left flank, supported by the impressive Vikings—lightly armoured, articulated troop carriers driven by mad Royal Marines—bringing the fight to the enemy. To the east, on my right, where I hoped they’d watch where they were shooting, Will and Sgt Gillies and their own ANA. 2Lt Will Harries, one of the junior platoon commanders in the battalion and a good officer despite a predilection for sketching, and Sgt Gillies, possibly a veteran of Waterloo, made an unlikely but good couple, pushing their ANA forward even as they bickered about immigration and whether their boys should be allowed to wear T-shirts.
To their southeast the rest of the ANA, kandak HQ, with the pathetic ANA senior officers trying to keep as far from the fighting as possible, and frustrated ‘Tac’—our own Company HQ with Major Martin David and CSM Snazle banging Afghan heads together in an attempt to get anything done. Martin had been the Captain of the Queen’s Company since back in Iraq, had commanded companies in Northern Ireland and London and knew how to run one like the back of his hand. CSM Snazle was one of the most impressive soldiers in the Army, huge and bald with a head so shiny it risked giving away our position to the enemy. He was exactly the man you
wanted charging up from the rear to scoop you up if you got shot and, having already managed to get Martin to drop the C-bomb (‘Cunt!’), he’d won his first battle of the tour.
Collocated with them and, inevitably, whichever media attachments were in town, were 2Lt Folarin Kuku and Sgt Davis. Poor old Kuks was a contemporary of Will (which didn’t half make me feel grizzly as the ‘senior’ platoon commander transferred into the Queen’s Company for the tour) and was cursed with being ‘the first black officer in the Grenadiers’—a fact which was neither true (Prince Freddie of Uganda apparently, whichever Evelyn Waugh novel he’d wandered out of, sometime in the fifties) nor as impressive as Battalion HQ seemed to think. They put him front and centre for every photo shoot and interview going—which he hated because it invariably meant he wasn’t in the thick of the scrap—as if people were reading the Sun and going look how progressive they are when, of course, everyone with half a brain was choking on their Corn Flakes at the realization that it was 2007 and we’d only just got our first black officer.
In the rear in support was 1st Battalion the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters (the WFRs), still blinking and hoping they were about to wake up from the bad dream that had seen them crashed out of Hounslow Barracks, where they’d been doing public duties, and suddenly, unpreparedly, dropped in the middle of Helmand. Way to the southeast of this glorious force, distracting the enemy as we crossed the start-line with a dummy assault, were the marauding beards of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force (BRF), the hand-picked recce soldiers whose job throughout the tour was to penetrate deep into enemy territory, have a sniff around and generally cause mischief. It was the pride of the battalion that so many of them were Grenadiers; Sgt Frith and the Seadog, Inkerman Company boys from distant Iraqi days, had already acquitted themselves well, and the Seadog was later cited for his calm and courageous leadership (not, as was scurrilously whispered, for neutralizing a particularly vicious Taliban donkey in the heat of an ambush).
But after the excitement of being ambushed on the way in, the morning of D-day and all its H-hours and phase lines was an uneventful and boiling-hot slog through empty villages. Uneventful, at least, until Qiam—the mad Tajik major who’d been nicknamed ‘Rocky’ back in Shorabak because we were pretty sure he was beating the crap out of his boys—decided to do things his way and threw the British Army rule book out of the window.
Not that I could completely blame him as we cleared through compounds complex in a way that our photo imagery and naive planning had utterly failed to understand. Micro-communities behind little tin gates in high mud walls hidden in the fields of thick poppy. Labyrinthine interconnecting passages and mazes of children and cattle and crops spilling out into courtyards and wells with only the broken generator in the corner behind the donkey and the rusting Pepsi cans hinting that it was the third and not the first millennium. Every time we glimpsed the Anglians I winced for their slow progress, weighed down by the full issue of regulation kit and bewildered by the alien worlds through which they were clearing at a pace which made our ANA seem like whippets. I might have gloated until a wailing prompted me to run round the corner to find Qiam holding a pistol to the head of a boy on his knees and the old mother screaming in the corner and the ANA grinning and pointing at the boy and shouting ‘Talib’, with which the widow increased her wailing and Shirzai, our consistently unreliable ’terp, kept shifting uncomfortably on the fringes.
When Qiam’s repeated demands to be shown the weapons elicited no answer he fetched a stinging back-hander across the boy’s face, and as I started forward to stop him I suddenly realized that I was on my own with only LCpl Price watching at the gate and the ANA looking at me, not hostile but curious, like why should my rules and regulations get in the way of their job?
Desperate, I grabbed Shirzai and got him to accuse Qiam of cowardice. It was the last thing I suspected he was guilty of, but surely the high and mighty Englishman act, some crap about never striking someone unarmed, was worth a shot. For a second Qiam looked like he was going to rise to my bait but instead roared his Brian Blessed laugh and cocked his pistol, at which point the mother rolled her eyes, sighed and gave in with a little shrug and calmly led him to a haystack and pulled out a bundle of about eight AKs, magazines, ammunition and even tacky little assault vests.
High-fives all round on the way out indicated there were no hard feelings, and I sounded like a fool explaining the ‘hearts and minds’ theory and why we should have searched for the weapons instead of intimidating the people while the ’terp translated Qiam’s response, patient as if explaining to a child: ‘Force is the only way to deal with liars and anyway, how on earth will we have time to search all the houses in Helmand?’
How indeed, once the sun got up, and the ANA, satisfied with their morning’s work, sat down for their usual mid-afternoon snooze, which wasn’t exactly on the agenda in planning but which everyone was so astonished by that they didn’t even bother to bollock us. Which was just as well because B Company found the enemy or vice versa, and there wasn’t time for worrying about the little things like waking up the ANA so, much to LSgt Rowe’s annoyance, we left them behind and pushed up alone to where Big Mick was taking pretty uncomfortable mortar and RPG fire.
I’d worried that the second time would be a letdown. That some of the thrill of the contact was its novelty, something so long anticipated, finally fulfilled, and that next time round the adrenaline-burst response would be less. Instead it felt even better. The emotional baggage of the previous day had gone, replaced by a calm focus which got serious as we realized that this was a different type of fight—not an opportunistic ambush on the start-line but a coordinated defence, with the bastards moving through prepared positions, fighting from trenches and trying to lure us into their killing areas.
I’m amazed that time is not an issue. That clattering into one of the compounds to find Marouf sweating heavily and bleeding from the foot, man enough to admit that he shot himself climbing through the window, I look at my watch to call back the casualty and find that hours have passed since we started scrapping forward. Sure there’s amusement on the net when, for a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot, we call out the IRT—the awesome Chinook-borne Incident Response Team who never fail to make it out to a casualty and get them back to the hospital in Bastion within the crucial ‘golden hour’ that substantially increases survival. But it doesn’t last when Bismillah, one of the only reliable Afghan NCOs, is shot through the eye, and the casualties start to mount.
A kilometre forward I can see our target, the limit of exploitation that the original plan had us clearing towards, trying to winkle out Taliban, except that now it is just a mad dash for the line because the Taliban need no winkling, determined to hold their ground. Silhouetted as the sun starts to set, the sluice-gates, the convenient point on the map and now strategic ground, not because anyone wants to divert the canal but because that’s where we’ve decided we want to camp tonight and that’s where the enemy has decided to stand and fight. The evening becomes a slow but steady pincer, relentless as the Royal Anglians’ firepower forces the Taliban into our skirmishing vanguard and the hard shoulder of the wide canal. Strange how detached I feel from what’s happening, how I seem to be watching myself as we manoeuvre the vehicles up for a point-of-fire and let loose all three GPMGs and the deadly GMG at the same time. Even in all this we don’t forget the photos, the cameras in easy reach for the perfect comedy timing of the lucky unobservant Afghan who gets his beret blown off by the RPG back-blast or the magnificent muzzle flash of the roaring dushka.
Although the closer we get, the longer things take, and the last click has been hours; as we approach the final hundred metres the momentum suddenly increases and, caught up in it, we fix bayonets to push forward to the ditch which the last of the Taliban were trying to flee down. I’m about to charge off when CSgt Yates grabs me with an experienced paw, suggesting that there’s no need to risk it at this stage, so we lie exhausted in the dirt, s
hooting at the occasional head that pops up like a game at a carnival.
‘A fucking good scrap and a fucking good day’ is Mick’s Aussie assessment when we meet up with the Anglians that night for orders and congratulations, a tough day that could have been a lot worse. My boys—Amber 63—have been the first to the finish-line, and our reward is to hold the sluice-gates we took, and, although Sgt Thornborrow is freaked out by the dead man’s sandal that dropped off as we loaded the bodies on to the police trucks to take back to the morgue, still lying in the middle of our admin area, there’s something amazing about the feeling of holding ground that we physically took, of sitting back, propped up against the wall we were shooting at hours earlier, enjoying a brew on our hard-won territory.
It was jamsai (‘Well done!’) all round when the posture slipped and we could hold back the inevitable no longer, we posted sentries and, with no enemy for a few hours, stripped off and jumped into the cool, fresh water of the Noor-I-Bugrah. All the fatigue and sweat and excitement of the last few days flowed away downstream with the giggling of the ANA, who, I suddenly realized, without their weapons look very young. I suppose that without our weapons so do we.
