by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
It wasn’t until the Captain flew in from his recce of the FOBs we’d be occupying in Sangin and our chat after orders over brews and more gateaux in the mess that I realized I’d been lonely. What little Junior Officers’ Reading Club we had had been blown up, literally, and I realized how much I wanted to be sitting around throwing stones with the guys. R&R had been like the Korean version of the afterlife in which heaven and hell are identical, lavish banquets, only everyone has 3-foot-long chopsticks; in hell everyone is starving because they can’t feed themselves, in heaven it’s a party because they’ve realized they have to feed each other. Surrounded by everyone I wanted to see and utterly unable to engage with any of them, and as another nuclear disaster is averted in LA, I realize that the most real and honest conversations I’ve had in months are with Sgt T or CSgt Yates and the boys.
The thought hit me: what if I’ll only ever be able to have real and honest conversations with the boys in future? What if an invisible curtain has come down between me and all the people and things I thought I held close, what if the numbness of R&R was not temporary but permanent and after putting bleeding Kuks on the back of the IRT, the batting order of the marriage XI will never seem important again?
I load up the iPod and jog it off round the perimeter. But, I’m almost pulled up, gasping for breath with the sudden counterpoint déjà fait shock of jumping the ditches along the back fence. Barely four months ago and in the same clothes listening to the same tunes our afternoon routine was to acclimatize with a jog along this same route—keeping fit with earnest sincerity, conditioning ourselves for the scrap we hoped and knew was coming. The tunes had been perfect then for the bloodthirsty daydreams, what we would encounter and how well we would react through the slow build-up of ‘My My My’ to the bridge and the action and the imagined bloody fire fight.
Waiting to go up to Sangin after R&R, I’d done it. All the things I’d imagined doing, all the questions I’d wanted answered had been answered. We’d even engineered the fucking tunes so that we’d pounded the ambush routes behind Gereshk with the right beats in the background. There should have been no more to imagine, nowhere else to go, there should have been peace.
But the daydreams are all too troubling, as bloodthirsty as they had ever been.
I put the violent jogging fantasies down to the frustration at having missed Op Chakush. I’d been spared the guilt of leaving for R&R because I’d had a mission—get the boys pulled out—and it had been successful, and I had known that, as I was flying out of the country, they were spending their first night back in Shorabak in a long time. I could deal with being missed out of the end-of-op photos, dirty poses of the crew who captured Adin Zai, because we’d always know who’d taken it and held it in the first place.
But while I’d been prancing around that Cambridgeshire field, the boys had been crashed out on Chakush and scrapping hard all over again. The close-up videos of US Apache run after run pouring down fire into positions only yards to the front, and the strained smiles of the ragtag bunch thrown together to crash out in Chinooks, told me that it had been a decent fight. As much as it meant for Sgt T and Sgt Gillies to say that they wished I’d been there, it didn’t make it any better to have missed the party.
In the week before we deployed out for the two months that would see us through to the end of tour, packing up bed spaces we’d never see again and trying hard to remind ourselves that two months was still a hell of a long time to go, every daily SITREP was full of Sangin and in particular a patrol base called Inkerman. Isolated, eight clicks up the valley and taking hammering after hammering after hammering. Even though it was pencilled in for another unit, with every fresh report from the beleaguered outstation, I knew where we’d be spending the rest of our tour.
Because deep down I knew we had some fight still in us. Sgt T agreed, it was too soon to be thinking of home, but not late enough to be thinking of hanging up our arms—while there were WMIKs in theatre and a ruckus up the valley we had a few runs left in us on our barbed steeds. Qiam would have agreed if he hadn’t been fuming at his demotion, an extraordinary reward for the man who more than anyone else pulled the 1st Kandak through Tufaan and who I wanted more than anyone else to get a Military Cross (if only for the brilliant PR as much as the balls of a company commander who charges the enemy alone with a spanner).
A different type of bullshit from our own patented British Army stuff, but not less infuriating, as I later learn that, after Qiam’s demotion, Lalaam, his utterly cowardly and completely useless counterpart, was promoted. I think I knew at that moment that we couldn’t win. The ANA, no matter how much we mentored and enabled, were ludicrous and, watching the videos from Chakush, as utterly dependent upon us for our booming air power as we were on them for the veneer of credibility and slender exit strategy which sustained the whole mission.
And, as I had sensed all along, just before we fly off the last-minute change of plan is confirmed.
That night is a final bustle of activity, taking our last showers for months, greedily soaking in hot water before it becomes another aspiration on the end-of-tour tick list. Even though it must be ten years since I’ve played a real computer game, I borrow Civilization from one of the signals corporals. Pass some of the idle last few hours in a nostalgic run-out, knocking up wonders of the world and churning out battleships as if I were fourteen all over again and I can’t help smiling when he’s not in his bed space so I have to leave it for him with a note.
Because we’ve finished for the time being, and are leaving Civilization behind.
Amber 63 are off up to Patrol Base Inkerman.
Sangingrad
There would be no e-mails from FOB Inkerman. No NAAFI runs, no weekly snatched bites of fresh food, no running water, no respite.
Nothing.
Except, of course, dust.
And a diary. In the relief of ‘wheels down’ after the hard Chinook ride, during which I felt more apprehension than possibly at any point so far on this tour, finally able to shift position under the ridiculous and crippling weight of the bergen I couldn’t remove, we charged out to head for the base and could see nothing, nothing but dust.
It is safe to say Inkerman is not how I had tried to imagine it from the comfort of Shorabak, a larger, more accommodating PB South with maybe a couple of tents and a friendly Anglian ops room. The Anglians lost a guy this morning and are sprawled around in exhaustion and grief, naked in the heat. An arrow drawn on a sleeping man’s back in permi-pen, ‘insert dick here’, is the only brave stab at morale in a camp so low we can feel it. The compound is vast and bare, walls enclosing nothing but a token compound building, cool enough but punctured through with bullet holes and SPG-9 craters and forlorn posters of Pinder and Keeley. All around are Taliban and the most appropriate Inkerman graffiti for us reads in black marker on the white wall ‘Welcome to Bandit Country’. A cross sticking out of the mound in the middle marks the previous Anglian to die here, and on another pillar a memorial to Gdsm Downes is poignantly fresh.
As if to hammer the point home, the evening brief is interrupted by the enormous crack of two SPG9 rounds overhead, and a short, sharp battle is joined on all sides with the mad dash from our CP to the Afghan compound involving a terrifying sprint down an exposed forward slope with the rounds pinging at our feet before clambering up the frail skeleton of a ladder onto the front roof. Here it’s a toss-up in the chaos of ANA RPG rounds and good forward arcs as ‘stone-cold’ Sgt Ross gets stuck in with his sniper rifle, dropping the enemy from the trees with practised ease and ‘Gilly’—nineteen-year-old Gdsm Gillespie who only arrived in Afghanistan two weeks ago and is the newest member of the team—looks around in wide-eyed ginger bewilderment that betrays his age, reeling that his first contact has come within hours, not days, of deploying. The paper-thin wall on top of the compound which separates us from the rounds whizzing in causes me to glance enviously up at the Hesco on top but it’s the conspicuous if protected Anglian sangars being a
imed for rather than our flimsy, front garden position, and everything seems to be whistling mercifully over our heads.
I’m guilty, if that’s the word, of an astonishing relief. I knew we had a scrap in us and we’re clearly going to get it.
I was pleasantly surprised by the way we relaxed into the contact and realize with a jolt that I had been partly crushed back in Shorabak by the thought that I might have already done my last fighting. The tired looks in the eyes of Vince and the Inkerman Company boys we’re taking over from would have calmed our anxieties on that front even if we hadn’t just had what is apparently the normal tea-time shoot-off in this OK Corral of a base which makes PB South and its much-missed river look like a sleepy backwater.
Being hit like this will become tiresome. It’s a different type of strain on the nerves to rolling forward to a contact, but it will certainly pass the time in what is a bare-arse limbo of nothingness. Everywhere filth and dusty beards and emptyish ration boxes and a feeling of isolation permeate the sweat and sand. Trying to sleep in the meagre shade of the mosi-nets on rocks and rolls in the uneven ground and looking at the hunger in the eyes of the guys leaving, a hunger to get the hell out of here, I realize it’s going to be a long, hard final few months.
Quite how hard we realized after lunch when another attack thundered in ferociously and the RPGs came uncomfortably close overhead down on the ANA roof but smashed into the back of the compound and took the legs of an ANA sergeant. In a lull in the battle I legged it back up to the little command post and at first I thought it was him bloodied and rasping on the stretcher but once the fighting died down I realized it was Captain Dave Hicks, the acting company commander, who’d taken the brunt of an RPG airburst up on the roof. The casualties were more numerous and more serious than we had first thought, and even as the contact died down we poured such fire into the treeline that it was obvious everyone was shaken up.
Back in the little OMLT room we’d thought to chill in with old papers and whatever we could tune into on Sgt T’s radio, fresh bullet and shrapnel scars pockmark the walls, and a frenzy of defensive activity has begun, partly out of necessity but partly I think as the pleasing physical monotony of filling sandbags takes people’s minds off the casualties of the last few days.
Gdsm Gillespie, who is now my thermometer for this last push, certainly has the look of a man whose baptism of fire has been too hot, one of the first on the scene to treat the early casualties, so we keep an eye on him, having fired his first rounds and dealt with his first casualties in far too quick a succession for a fresh teenager now out with a bunch of seemingly hardened strangers in the arse-hole of the world.
When the news that Dave hasn’t made it comes through there is something that snaps in everyone. It is partly the unnerving knowledge that the bloodied and bandaged figure you were trying to reassure actually knew better than you did and was on his way out and the realization that no one’s last moments should be in fear, covered in the fucking Sangin dust while chaos rages around. Dave had been with the battalion in Bosnia, and over quick-snatched fags since we arrived we’d swapped the usual Army stories and compared mutual acquaintances. He’d obviously been holding the company together well while the OC was on leave and then, boom. It feels like everything is crumbling. I flash back to seeing Kuks, the same shock of the familiar juxtaposed with the bloody and iconic, the same touching morphine bravado and it’s just one unlucky guy who chose the wrong moment to go up to the roof, or was stood one foot too much to the left.
On the front wall, feeling the thuds of the rounds striking lower down, we are fine while Sergeant Abdullah, re-supplying the ammo from the back, loses his legs. Kuks will be fine and Dave is dead. I felt a prick of that same fear that I felt in Shorabak. We haven’t been here twenty-four hours, and there’s already two dead and six or seven back in hospital.
Poor old Vince and his ANA, keen as only we can imagine after six weeks up here and the smell of home in their nostrils, are pissed off that they’ll be stuck here another two days. In high dudgeon the ANA down tools and storm off to a neighbouring compound to sit out the next forty-eight hours in protest, an action which, mildly laudable for its comedy value, adds to the sense of madness that everyone is starting to foster as the big joke around camp is to pretend that we’re only on exercise, and we radio back to brigade that we’d like to sit out the next serial because we’re not getting that much training value any more.
Major Calder, who I last saw only months but lifetimes ago round the planning table in Camp Bastion before Silicon, has now been flown in to steady things up and assume command. To the general hellishness of the base is added the tedium of more defensive works and the nausea of stand-tos and similar measures which, though entirely sensible and correct and which we should have been doing anyway, we still resent. People are probably right that the ANA have slackened us as much as we’ve sharpened them, but I’m still vainly hoping that the inshallah method of shrugging, sleeping and scrapping will see us through and help us more pleasantly pass the days.
Days which at this rate will be interminable. Days which will be hateful in sweaty, dusty grime as all decency goes out of the rocket holes in the wall which pass for windows and we’re more cut off than I can ever imagine.
But there is again that funny sense of pride when the ops room back at Shorabak accuses us of having brought the trouble with us. It proves that nothing welds a team like adversity. We’re all smiles and laughs at the thought that the last few days have been the Queen’s Company welcoming committee, and I realize that, even though this is the very substance of nightmares, as the dusty ground crumbles like quicksand beneath our feet and the threat warnings become more and more diabolical—I would rather be here than in PB Tangiers or PB Blenheim or certainly back in Shorabak, idly reading about the action in between games of solitaire on the AFT terminals. It seems that everything up here is tinged with the dust to give it a grey, more hostile feel than Gereshk where we trusted and ate with the locals and the Green Zone was a lush Eden. An Eden crawling with Taliban, yes, but an Eden with a lovely cool river. Crouching under the once-a-week shower, a bucket pricked with bayonet holes, I’m struck by how much we will miss that river, how much we already do.
The Line of Beauty
Of all the books to find in this most improbable of libraries, amid the stinking grunts and crumbling lads mags, I would not have expected a copy of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. But here it is, less worn, admittedly, than Beharry’s ‘autobiography’ or the various Sharpes which seem to be kicking around. With tonight’s threat warning still ringing in our ears (apparently 300 Taliban preparing to overrun the base tomorrow morning, which after the last few days we’re just about tired enough to vaguely believe), and knowing that I shouldn’t, I take it to bed instead of getting much-needed sleep.
I think it shows how much has happened since Kush Dragon, our pre-deployment exercise six months ago on Salisbury Plain, when we all snickered like repressed schoolboys in the huts in New Zealand Farm when I read out the rude bits. Then I’d been struck by the depressingly brilliant accuracy of the parties and the people and the places and, worst, my nostalgia for it all. Then, I had felt a saddened anger that those days and things had already been taken away, not ridiculously and dramatically, as they are in the book, but by the simple evolution of things and the passage of time. Now, as I try and join the dots, lying out here in the half-dark, listening to the occasional pot-shots and waiting, like everyone here, for the next big hit, I realize I couldn’t give a fuck.
Out here I’m already simultaneously nostalgic for the hard-fought patrols out of Gereshk and the contrasting hedonistic release of R&R and I wonder whether this habit of looking back is a generic thing or whether only certain points get fixed and remain special. Will these bloody days seem a golden age from whatever perspective five years’ time has to offer?
Because it should all seem ridiculous from out here. I should be meticulously planning tomorrow’s p
atrol, considering anything and everything in detail to make sure we all get home to have the memories at all. I shouldn’t even be reading The Line of Beauty whether or not I read it and feel moved. Instead I look at the boys and wonder to which worlds they retreat with cordite-grey, stubbly faces and long stares and burned fingers nursing stale fags, while retreating to my own and composing hyperbolic letters home to all the girls. When we make it back from here I’m sure I’ll sit staring out of train windows yearning for Sangin and all the things we learned about ourselves under siege in Inkerman. It seems strange that part of that will be the indulgence of sitting in the lull between attacks and yearning for the things before.
These thoughts of past fripperies are so out of place here that perhaps it is a triumph that I am thinking them at all, that my mind is capable in the whirl of bullets and rockets and the bleeding and dying of recalling somewhere beyond the black-and-white, life-and-death of the fire fight that it’s Claudia’s birthday today and I fondly remember her twenty-first, appropriately themed ‘The Last Days of the Raj’, sigh and pick up a Dragunov and, with Sgt T spotting on my shoulder, register my first sniper kill. Watching the tumble of foliage, the man-shape which changed only just perceptibly but so fundamentally even as I was still focusing on exhaling and releasing the trigger, I should be moved, or appalled, or at least worried that Sgt T is now filming LSgt Price instead of watching for the enemy response, but instead I’m back at school recalling Graham Greene.
‘This is hell, nor are we out of it.’
If these weeks are going to pass at all every stolen midday hour’s nap and cigarette or unread magazine and discovered curry and rice in a box of Menu E will have to be lingered over like a treasure.
I escape the C Company daily business to share chai with the ANA, which has the advantage of being my job. It allows me to sit, calm in the eye of their chaotic storm, amid the soothing philosophy of inshallah and the happily familiar endless Dari squabbling. I realize with a pang that what we have lost which we had in PB South is our own empire: we are no longer kings of our own Hesco castle, we’re joint tenants with the real English soldiers, who implicitly disapprove of these idle hours. I’m torn between how much more chilled life would be out here if it was just us and the ANA, and how hopelessly vulnerable that would leave us.
