by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
And then morale.
LSgt Roper had arrived in the small hours of last night with the Inkerman Company Tac and the welcome sarcastic presence of CSM Scully and C-B, but with the chaos of the deployment had just been sent to get his head down. Dawn reveals not only the peace of a camp finally ours in more than just name, but the bulging mail sacks and welfare boxes so long awaited from Shorabak. For me the sheer twelve-year-old joy of birthday parcels and cards and goodies galore and for the rest of the boys, the simplicity of Coke and crisps and Haribo, which seem to make the next three weeks appear much shorter and more bearable. There is the quiet contented hum of the fan and the rumble of the outside generator as the only disturbing noise to the happy reading of letters from home and a tantalizing sense of what is not too far away now.
On the ground, things seem to be going more quietly and to plan than any of us might have dared hope for at this late stage in the tour. Apaches hum overhead, and our own mortars pop from time to time, and later in the night with the company groups nervously harboured up 4 kilometres north we hear the thump and then eerie whine of shells whistling overhead as the valley bathes in illum, but there’s been little actual fighting and no friendly casualties. The crows are cursing the quietness, filled with the fear of not getting to fire, but for the rest of us they’re months too late, and the only thing they can learn from our weary and smug expressions is a warning to be careful what they wish for and our earnest desire that we all get through the next three weeks as peacefully as today has gone.
Inevitably with over 100 stinking soldiers and over 100 even stinkier ANA living in half a football pitch of dust with a big fire for a lavatory, sickness is rife. I’d gloated back in Gereshk as Kuks had been bedded all the way back to Shorabak with crippling DnV after drinking from a well and I had still managed to avoid going man-down, largely I think because I ate so often with the ANA. However, ‘Inkerman Aids’ finally gets me, and I haven’t felt this sick since I got food poisoning two years ago and spent excruciating hours thinking I was dying, hugging the Wellington Barracks porcelain and somehow making it out on to the Mall for another farcical two a.m. early-morning rehearsal. I tried to concentrate on the ghostly dummy-carriages, the extraordinary sight of us dotted down the Mall with no troops, wondering who the hell jogs in St James’s Park at three in the morning, but couldn’t hold it in and was bent over double vomiting at the salute as the Major General trotted past.
I wouldn’t have felt the injustice of the occasion as much if I hadn’t been the only sober man on the parade, the Micks all still rolling around from the flaming Ferraris they’d got in minutes before jumping in cabs and rolling straight out on to the square.
It was unfair being ill then because everyone else was drunk; it’s unfair now because everyone else is shooting at us.
The funny thing about the dirt is how much more you notice it when you try and wash.
Everywhere the dust which clogs and floats and swishes between toes and sheets, hangs in the air and in the lungs and cakes us so that I’ve never been so dirty in my life. My feet are the unrecognizable things of Third World beggars, hard-chip-caked in grime and loose dust, my hands stained beyond washing in brown with endlessly black nails, and we’ve almost strayed into OCD territory as I catch myself in each bored moment trying to vainly scrape out the crap from beneath them with a makeshift nail file.
Trudging through the dust for a twice-weekly crouch under the closest Inkerman comes to a shower, standing on a shattered pallet underneath a watering-can head affixed on a canvas bag, for a heavenly approximation of a wash. For three hours afterwards we can actually run our fingers through our hair and for at least the first half-hour we actually smell unfamiliar, because we don’t smell.
Walking past the Snatch today, I came as close as I ever have done to ‘not recognizing the face in the mirror’. I knew the face, but bearded and grizzled and massive-haired and streaked with grime in the wing-mirror, it was very unfamiliar.
For my thirteenth birthday I remember my father taking me and two friends flying for a treat. From Halton up in the little fourseater to Duxford, where, having stubbornly and nervously refused so much as a wobble on the joystick, we all begged him to let us ride the ‘flight simulator’. I wonder if there’s something similar playing out here as things seem to have finally settled down a bit in the Upper Sangin Valley, and so we spend our free time watching Band of Brothers. Grey’s Anatomy I could understand, Grey’s was escapist and wilfully incongruous, and those of us with imagination fancied Addison and those without Izzy (and the medic McDreamy, of course), and I knew we were still human when the chat on PRR in the middle of yet another attack was all frustration because the mortars had started landing just as Meredith was about to kiss Derek, or not.
Band of Brothers was something else, and with it the creeping and unpleasant sense which I thought had finally dispersed of an itchiness of feet. I’d been happy through Palk to sit back and interpreted that happiness for a mature realization that enough was enough. Listening to the inspirational old boys at the start of each episode, realizing anew just how good it was as we watched the shelling of Bastogne episode in helmets after another mortaring, we couldn’t help but feel a little shiver of excitement.
Maybe, maybe there’s a couple more patrols to be done, but the time still drags between them, and we watch whole films and then can’t remember what they were two hours later. We couldn’t be further, physically, mentally, from the troops that began in Shorabak months ago, but it occurs to me that this tour might be ending not dissimilarly to how it started: in boredom, counting down the minutes, hours and days.
After a sleepless night on sentry duty we haul ourselves out of bed at 0430 for a long patrol out on to the 611. Still groggy after breakfast, shorts and flip-flops give way to the reassuring sturdiness of boots, trousers and belt, and our wake-up is the comforting routine of preparation. The bulge of morphine in the left pocket and then the strapping-on of pistol right leg and magazine-holders left. The final checking of straps, pouches and radio switches, forcing down sickening litres of pre-patrol water and then the final action of black sweatband on the right wrist and the Wimbledon one under the watch on the left, the slow, deliberate tying up of bandanas, and then we’re ready to go mentally as well as physically.
Once we’re out there’s one of those extraordinary moments that sometimes happens on exercise when there’s an incongruous calm in the middle of what should be tense or hectic or nightmarish, and we debus from the Mastiffs, and the whole valley is as quiet as a mouse, so with the ANA chewing the fat with locals at the bottom of the hill I lie down flat in the sand, gulping grateful lungfuls of fresh air after the cramped and bumpy ride and feel the day already warming in the harsh sun and fall into a deep and dreamy sleep.
I’m troubled by faint memories of Sandhurst bollockings, being woken up from snoozing in the FUP with helmets propped craftily against the foresight and being screamed at that we weren’t taking it seriously and that we wouldn’t fall asleep if we were doing it for real.
Little did they know.
Every so often I wake up and groggily sit up to check that the ANA are still happily in position, wondering idly what would happen if next time I wake up the Mastiffs have somehow driven off or the ANA have disappeared or there’s an AK in my face and some improbable Taliban snatch-squad have snuck up on us. But I know it won’t happen and feel the reassuring weight of the 9mm against my thigh and flop back into the wonderful sleep that can only be snatched out somewhere, illicitly in the sand.
It’s amazing how crisply the dawn thump of a nearby explosion wakes me from a pretty deep sleep and has blood charging and all stations ready to go for the inevitable stand-to. It’s funny to see which mosi-nets stir, which commanders balefully stick a head out of sleeping bags now cuddled against the coming autumn coolness of the mornings, and we wait for a second thud and the scurry of frantic activity, or hope for nothing.
And we think we got noth
ing until the ANA wake me with slightly more difficulty two hours later to come and see the old guy they’ve brought to the gate, he who triggered the earlier mine blast in the desert. A bundle of rags is pushed in on a wheelbarrow, and the doc laconically observes that ‘this could be interesting’. An elderly man lies unconscious on the rags, flaps of skin and grotesque long vessels dangling from beneath the gap where his lower left leg should be, a ‘perfect’ traumatic amputation, according to the doc, and as we stretcher him up the hill I can’t believe he’s still alive, he should by all logic have bled out hours ago, but with horrific blast injuries—his bell-end blown clean off as the boys can’t refrain from remarking—he’s a typically stubborn Afghan bastard and simply won’t die. There’s an uncomfortable few minutes after I call in the 9-liner and request IRT while Bastion all too obviously probe to find out if ISAF are at all responsible, and we can almost hear them over the net, squirming at trying to get out of casevacing the guy, and we’re already mentally coming up with pitiful excuses as to why his family should just wheelbarrow him further on to a local hospital when we finally get wheels up. Someone, I suppose, remembered just in the nick of time what the fuck we’re supposed to be doing here in the first place.
And it turns out to have been appropriate to ask as we get the secondhand news that there’s been a big hit on the WFRs in Lash. We get the news in the form of an instruction to stop all non-essential patrolling and movement and minimize risk (a wonderfully bland and meaningless phrase out here).
‘Why?’asks Sgt T fairly enough, and when the doc looks up as if surprised that we hadn’t worked it out and points out that all the beds in the hospital are now currently full, we know for sure it’s time to go home.
The rapid fire which wakes me from my post-stag slumber around midday (a sign of the cooling days that it is now possible to still be snoozing as late into the day as lunchtime) and has C Company stifling the cries of ‘Stand to!’ in their throats, is not the enemy but the ANA giving an exuberant ‘Beirut-Salute’ to a passing wedding. Everyone shakes their heads in disgust, and I’m secretly delighted at the eccentricity of our little brigands.
Later, the Vikings push out on patrol with Sherlock and me escorting a squad. All quite token as we’re tasked with ‘Rear Security’, but even from the comfy vantage point of the front of the Viking, even enjoying the ride, as the driver throws the little cab over improbable drops of the wadis and up the roller-coaster-steep sides all the way back to base (and laughing at the guys crammed in the back like sardines, groaning on the net), I can’t quite dispel the images of the burning Viking hulks back on Lashtay and find myself pining for a Mastiff.
It’s one of those patrols where, without unnecessary fuss and bother and nerves, we have known throughout that someone was going to shoot at us. So much so that, when the contact finally comes as we’re pushing back after an uneventful clearance, during which all we’ve done is shoot a local through the leg with a ‘warning shot’, it’s almost a relief.
What isn’t a relief is the initial ferocity and accuracy of the ambush which has us cabbying around frantically in the Vikings and my mind a whirl of whether I’m happier inside the armour but stuck in the commander’s seat looking out through a decidedly flimsy-seeming windscreen or whether I’d rather be free and in the prone position and getting rounds back down but out there where tracer and RPGs are flying back and forth in the furious chatter of the exchange. The Vikings are actually magnificent, with rounds pinging off without a bother, and we push the doors ajar enough to wedge out rifles and AKs and spray out bursts of automatic, setting the treeline aflame across the whole 300 metres of the ambush. Overhead the .50-cal from the Mastiffs cracks and the GMG thumps and Sherlock pounds down a reassuring quantity of UGL while the 81s come on task and, for the finale, spectacularly low F15 strafing runs, by which stage we’re all just having great fun with extensive watch and shoot as i-com reveals the Taliban taking casualties and so the ANA jump out with glee and pink flowers behind their ears, unleashing RPGs and round after round of PKM to dust it all up in time for tea.
As the contact dies down we dismount and push neckily forward, pure infantry porn now with bayonets fixed, but it’s difficult to see anything beyond the apocalyptically scarred earth where the mortars came in and the smoke from the poppy-stack inferno is making the dusk light even harder than it should be. Just beyond in the ditch lie the shattered bodies, and the vivid redness of blood against the dull earth is mesmerizing. It’s the closest we’ve come to what my vision of the aftermath of a battlefield should look like, and it’s most certainly the best way to view it, from the comfy and armoured vantage point of the Vikings, which then thunder wonderfully back, cutting swathes through the head-high poppy and maize, bouncing like the first terrifying tanks of World War One over ditches and streams as we push back for Inkerman, pretending that we won’t be haunted that night by the flash-backs of our gory voyeurism.
More important, when we get back in, Izzy slept with George.
I’m not sure how a phone conversation can go so quickly from sexy whisperings and longing for clean sheets and sturdy double beds to tearful recriminations and complete lack of understanding, but somehow that’s the trajectory of my call to Jen, and I’m cursing the waste of precious sat-phone time. I’m not sure if this disjoint is a symptom of what we will all have to deal with when we finally get back, the wall that’s been quietly built between those of us who are here and have lived these things and everybody else, no matter how close to us they previously were.
Deep down we all know there’s something incredibly selfish in what we do, something self-indulgent that makes it far easier for those of us who have left and are dealing every day with new and previously unimaginable challenges than for those we’ve left behind, for whom each day is the same as the one before, simply without their loved ones. Part of me, part of everyone I suspect, wants to shout down the phone that we’re sorry, that we love you and the only reason we pretend we don’t know what you’re going through is that to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge our own crippling longings. How do you say good night to the person you miss more than anything else in the world as if it’s that last tender whisper in the ear of the warm body next to yours, when in fact you’re thousands of miles away, and the only body close to yours is Sherlock’s because he’s next on stag.
We have to keep a maddening separation, don’t want in the space of a quick phone call to remember who we were at home, because we hope that’s not the person pushing out on patrol tomorrow to kill or be killed. So it’s easy to dismiss these things as the inevitable frictions of seven-month separation, to ignore them and crack jokes with the lads about ‘the trouble and strife’, but in quiet moments when we miss you the most, we’re scared by the question posed cheekily in the next episode of Grey’s Anatomy: ‘How would you spend your last day?’ None of us out here could answer that question with the certainty I suspect those at home would want and expect.
Maybe it’s just not a question we want to ask ourselves while a possible answer remains ‘scrapping with the boys in the Green Zone’.
We’re horribly, disgustingly, unbearably close to the end when LSgt Ball loses a leg in an attack on Amber 64. There are certain things I realize as I try and get my head down that, when we are back home and the dust has settled, I’ll always associate with this country and this tour. The taste of chai and hard, stale naan. The incessant barking of dogs long into the night. Dust. The raw smell of unwashed sweat.
And the emptiness of learning of another casualty. The mind games and mental images and subconscious reckonings, the shock, helpless grief, debilitating anger and the whole cocktail of barely identifiable emotions which we go through when a guy in his early twenties, fastest runner in the company, has his leg blown off.
Ramadan
On the Laylat-ul-Qadr (night of power), the ANA commander is patiently explaining to me, Muhammad received the first revelation of the Quran. This, among other reasons, is w
hy Ramadan is such an important celebration and why I’m handing out laminated cards to the Anglians telling them not to get cross when the Afghans seem to be lazy (six months too late) because it’s just the effect of the roza (fasting).
I’ve fought alongside these guys for six months now and know that most of them are pragmatic about their religion at best. We’ve had the odd soldier who puts down his weapon in the middle of a fight and bangs out a quick prayer, but I’m not surprised by the confusion of the Anglians as we ask them to refrain from eating, drinking, chewing, even smoking in front of the boys for the next month, and they wonder where they’ll get their supply of cheap fags and Miranda from.
The atmosphere down in the ANA compound is, however, electric, and everyone and everything seems different. Even for our most agnostic of soldiers, it seems, Ramadan is huge, which I guess is appropriate because, for even the OMLT ourselves, the most non-Muslim of soldiers, Ramadan is huge.
During the build-up to Eid, we’re going home.
The start of Ramadan is, for us, the beginning of the end, the justification of no more patrolling with the ANA, of preparing things for the handover/takeover with 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, the unit who drew 52 Brigade’s ‘short straw’ and have come to take over as OMLT Battlegroup. The tracker annoyingly reveals that Worthers and Sgt Davis and God knows how many others have already gone back. Chatting with a handful of punters around Inkerman, I realize it’s not only us infected with the end-of-tour fever. Each department is jealously regarding the other and calculating who will be home first, and the CSM good-naturedly threatens to cancel our helicopters because the OMLT are supposed to be the first out. I laugh along but check the FLYPRO once he’s gone to bed.
