First Man In

by Ant Middleton

  I gave him a few seconds and then followed him discreetly. I found him on his knees behind one of the mud huts, sobbing, strings of phlegm in the corners of his lips.

  ‘It’s Hannah,’ he said. ‘I knew it. She’s been shagging my fucking c-cousin.’

  I crouched down so I was on his level.

  ‘Listen, fuck her,’ I said. ‘Fuck Hannah. She’s clearly not worth your time.’

  He nodded his head.

  ‘You’ve got to straighten yourself up. I need to know you’re not going to let this take you down. I know I’ve been on your back a bit since we got here, but it’s for a reason. I’m trying to keep us all alive. I’m trying to keep you alive. That’s the most important thing to me. Making sure you get out of here in one piece.’

  I put my hands on his shoulders. ‘I’m not bullshitting you. Look at me.’

  He raised his chin and met my eye.

  ‘I would take a bullet for you. I would die for you, without hesitation. Do you understand?’

  His breathing slowed. His sobs quietened.

  ‘What I need is for you to be in the frame of mind where you’d take a bullet for me.’

  He nodded. ‘Thanks, Ant.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Go to your bed, have a good cry, punch some walls, and I’ll see you tomorrow, a new man. Yes?’

  ‘Yes, Ant,’ he said.

  I watched him pace towards his hut. Then I went back to the others, took Emilie’s letter out of my shirt pocket and threw it into the fire.

  Another week, another challenge. A new troop sergeant had arrived in Sangin DC to replace the one who’d returned to the UK to tend to his injured wife. This meant I had to step back down to my 2IC role. In the days before he came, rumours began swirling around the Forward Operational Base (FOB). Our new boss was a guy called Lionel Boyle. He was known as a ‘Lympstonite’ because he’d spent years – pretty much his entire career – back at Lympstone Commando, training recruits. He’d never seen action, never been on ops. ‘And he talks to the lads like shit,’ said one man, who knew him from the training centre. ‘He’s dickmeat. Pure cock.’ But I decided not to listen to the gossip. I’d form my own opinion of the man.

  On the morning of his arrival, I handed in the pistol that had been granted to me as troop sergeant and waited to meet him. A couple of hours later I was chatting with a buddy outside my mud hut when I saw a man who could only have been Boyle coming briskly towards me from the direction of the officers’ block. You could always tell the new arrivals: they were so scrubbed and fresh and clean-shaven, with the sun shining in the tips of their boots.

  I held out my hand. ‘I’m Ant,’ I said. ‘I was section commander, but since you came back I’m now 2IC again.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, shaking it lightly. ‘And what’s been happening out there?’

  ‘We’re covering a lot of ground, things are going pretty steadily. It’s fine. No complaints. And, just to let you know, I’ve handed my pistol in, so we’re all good to go tomorrow.’

  ‘And your pistol was signed over by a qualified operative, I take it?’

  ‘Qualified?’ I said. ‘Well, I handed it over to the section commander.’

  He looked at me with paternal exasperation, as if he’d found exactly the shambles he’d been fearing. He was livid about it.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘You have to go through the proper procedure. You can’t just fling your weapon over and say “Here’s your pistol.” It has to be done properly, in the presence of a recognised witness, and given to someone qualified to take it in. The serial number needs to be recorded, the paperwork signed. Did you follow this procedure, Middleton?’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘I said, did you follow this procedure?’

  ‘No, Sergeant.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, this is a war zone, Middleton,’ he snapped, working himself up into a headmasterly rage. He took a small step back. ‘And you’ve been acting section commander?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Right, get all the lads and line them up.’

  A war zone? What did he know about a war zone? For a start, in a war zone you don’t line up on parade as you would back at base. It’s different out in the field. It’s not all boot-shined and spit-polished. You loosen things up a bit – you shave every other day, not every day, and you let your sideburns grow. It’s a morale thing, a bit of leeway to see you through the shit. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘You want us all lined up?’ I said. ‘Out there? All the lads?’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  Five minutes later there we were, all present and correct outside our huts, feeling like a bunch of knobs. Boyle was marching up and down in front of us with his hands behind his back like he was in his Lympstone parade square.

  ‘Look at the state of you,’ he said. ‘You’re a fucking disgrace. How have you let yourselves slide like this? You’re Royal Marines. There are standards, gentlemen, and being on the battlefield does not excuse you from them. I want you back here in ten minutes with your sideburns shaved to the middle of your ears.’

  We filed away and got in a huddle behind one of the huts.

  ‘How are we going to deal with this bloke?’ said someone.

  Nobody answered.

  ‘Let me deal with it,’ I said. ‘I’ll sort him out.’

  Some of the lads wanted to fight back, but I knew that would have been a bad idea. Although the Chelmsford street-fighter in me would have found great satisfaction in putting a crack right down the centre of Boyle’s jawbone, I’d come a long way from there. Those demons were now working for me. I knew the aggressive approach would very quickly have left us with no power at all. We’d only push him into coming back at us even harder. The more we went in on him, the more he’d have to elevate himself over us in order to keep hold of his self-respect. In a matter of days we’d have created a monster.

  Those next few weeks were a master’s degree in wily leadership. The most crucial lesson I learned was that, to be a successful leader, you have to be emotionally connected. This is especially true when you’re not officially in a position of authority and have to manipulate someone above you in the pecking order. To do this, you’ve got to pick up on all their wants and needs and insecurities. You work out how they see the world and let that guide you.

  To me it was obvious that Boyle was a stickler for detail and used arbitrary signs, like the length of our sideburns, as a yardstick to judge how well things were going. But I also knew it went much deeper than that. What Boyle really wanted, deep down in his delicate little pigeon heart, was the respect of the lads. He wanted us to look up to him. He wanted that with all his soul and body. He’d reacted so unreasonably and disproportionately about the length of our sideburns because he’d taken it as a sign of personal rejection. It was as if we’d collectively blown raspberries at him in the school playground. This, I realised, was my way in.

  As soon as I worked out what was really going on, I started to feel quite sorry for him. But I also knew I couldn’t have him treating the lads like that. So, over the next few days I started making an effort to befriend him. I didn’t particularly want to spend my downtime hanging out with Lionel Boyle, drinking coffee with him and flattering his ego, but I had to remember my objective. It isn’t sitting in a certain office or having a certain job title or a badge on your chest that makes you a leader. Sometimes it’s simply putting the group first in order to get the job done. And that’s what I was doing.

  Meanwhile, I told the lads to keep their facial hair in order, at least for now. There were a few grumbles about this – and I didn’t blame them. The last thing we wanted to be worried about when we got up in the morning was having a shave. We wanted to be preparing our kit, getting ready for a long day walking those sweating, deadly streets, feeling constantly surrounded by eyes and sudden noises and shadows behind doors. But I knew, if we were to ever get him off our backs, we’d have to give him this little sign.

&
nbsp; On the evenings after long patrols I started spending more and more time chatting with him, sympathising with him, making him mugs of coffee. ‘Are you alright, Sergeant? What’s been happening?’ I’d overplay it. It was toy respect. But it was my opportunity to make him think I was letting him into the fold, which was where I was convinced he really wanted to be, even if he himself didn’t consciously know it.

  Before long he’d learned to trust me. That’s when I felt able to subtly start changing the way he recognised respect and success, slowly turning his head in a new direction, shifting his focus. I’d emphasise how hard the guys had worked and how completely devoted they were to their mission.

  ‘Cor, that was a long patrol,’ I’d say. ‘The lads have come in and they’ve cleaned their weapons and they’re now getting their heads down because they’re up early in the morning on another one. I’ll make sure they’re up at first light and we’re ready to go.’ Rather than, ‘They’re thinking about shaving,’ I’d make it, ‘They’re thinking about the job at hand.’

  Boyle had his Lympstonite book that he was devoted to. What I was doing was adding extra pages to it. And it worked. Within a fortnight our sideburns were creeping down our faces, and he was happy and leaving us be. Life was returning to normal.

  We were out on patrol when we just happened to be in the vicinity of our base at somewhere around lunchtime.

  ‘All right, lads. Special treat,’ I said. ‘Let’s hop back into the fob and have a cooked meal.’

  We settled down in the relative safety of Sangin DC and lit our burners, happily anticipating beans, stew and corned beef hash served hot, for once, just as God intended. The bubbles had just started popping on the surface of my bacon and beans when I became aware of a commotion over by one of the offices. It was Boyle. Now he was running towards us, his face long and pale, his eyes bright.

  ‘Quick!’ he shouted. ‘Get your kit back on!’

  I stood up. ‘What’s happening, Sergeant?’

  ‘An IED,’ he said, between puffs of breath. ‘Two kilometres to the west. We’ve taken injuries, maybe worse. We need to get out there now as a QRF.’

  Minutes later, Boyle and the rest of us were marching out of the front entrance of Sangin DC as a Quick Response Force, helmets and headsets on, SA80s ready, all thoughts of lunch a long-forgotten dream. The forty minutes it took us to reach the IED site passed as if in seconds. All twenty-four of us fell into that strange, zoomed-in state in which nothing else exists but the mission. The heat, the fear, the aches, the pains, the sweat, the sores, the thoughts of family and home, the human politics of Boyle, Cressey and all the rest of it had gone completely. The entire universe vanished around us and the only thing that was left was one foot in front of the other.

  The incident had taken place outside a typical Afghan compound. It was a large, two-storey structure built from dried, compacted mud, which took up the area of roughly half a football pitch. Inside the compound would be a maze of darkened rooms that could either have been booby-trapped or have Taliban fighters lurking in its shadows, armed with grenades and AK-47s or strapped up in suicide vests. You couldn’t have imagined a more unpredictable environment if you were a designer of first-person shooter video games. The level of adrenalised fearfulness inside that dusty shithole would be high.

  We gathered around Boyle, awaiting further information that he’d been receiving on his radio.

  ‘All right lads, huddle in,’ he said. ‘An officer has been blown up. We’re going to clear the area, then retrieve his remains so they can be sent home. The IED went off over by the south wall of the compound. That’s where his arms and legs are. His torso is on the roof.’ He turned to me. ‘Middleton.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant?’

  ‘Take one of the lads, clear the compound and retrieve the torso.’

  I glanced around at the other lads, looking for a suitable candidate. Immediately this tough-nut Welshman called Miles stepped forward. Ordinarily he’d have been my automatic choice, and he knew it. But to his surprise and mine I found myself nodding past him to a familiar face hiding at the back of the huddle.

  ‘Cressey,’ I said. ‘Come on, mate. Come with me.’

  Miles was respectful enough not to say anything, but I could tell by his face that he thought I’d fucking lost it.

  I walked around the corner with Cressey to the door of the compound. ‘What I’m going to do is put a grenade in each room,’ I told him.

  ‘A grenade?’

  ‘That’s how we’ll clear the building. You’ve got to cover me as I go in. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘It’d better be, mate,’ I said. ‘We don’t know what kind of badness is in there. I’m relying on you, one hundred per cent.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘I’m good.’

  We stacked up against the door, which wasn’t bolted and hung slightly ajar. I kicked it open, unpinned a grenade and tossed it in. For the crucial moments between my appearance in the doorway and the blast, I had only Cressey to protect me. They were very long moments. And then, boom! Out of the building came a barrage of grit, sound and wind. The instant it settled we moved into the space, exactly as we’d been trained, each covering a different corner. Then we stacked up against the next door. And that’s how we did it, the entire building.

  Before long we located the entrance to the roof. We crept up the short flight of steps and pushed at the door, which opened with a rusty groan. For a moment it was if all that existed on the other side was a realm of pure, blinding light. Our vision quickly adjusting, we stepped out into the heat that beat hard on the back of our necks.

  It was about six feet in front of us, not far from the edge. It was fully clothed and, because its owner had perished in a blast, the heart had stopped pumping instantly, so there was no blood. It didn’t look human. It looked like a thing – a package ready for posting or a piece of a resuscitation doll. Under the torn shirt you could just make out a ragged disc of meat from where, just this morning, an arm had brushed teeth and made coffee.

  ‘You all right?’ I said to Cressey.

  ‘Yes, Ant.’

  He meant it too. I glanced over my shoulder to see his gaze fixed on the body part. There was a fire in his eyes I’d never seen before.

  ‘Fucking cowards,’ he muttered.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ I said.

  We grabbed a shoulder each and dragged it across the roof, then carefully lowered it down, into the waiting hands of the men on the ground, where the torso was placed on a stretcher next to its arms and legs. Cressey was all business.

  ‘Good man,’ I said to him, as we moved back into the compound.

  ‘I just want to …’

  ‘Kill cunts?’

  He nodded grimly. ‘Fucking kill cunts.’

  We arrived back at base fired up and mostly silent, each man in their own space of shock and fury. Just then, as we were clearing our weapons, there was the unmistakable ricocheting crack of a round being fired. It came from inside the compound. Everyone flinched and went to ground, grabbing for their weapons. Everyone, that is, except for one man. Over in the corner, looking red-faced and sheepish, was Cressey. He’d made a basic error, a ‘negligent discharge’. He must have cocked his weapon before taking the magazine off, rather than taking the magazine off first to extract the round. But there was no harm done: he’d done everything else correctly, and the round had just fired harmlessly into the dirt.

  As the lads slowly and wearily rose to their feet, Boyle stormed furiously towards us.

  ‘You! Cressey!’ he said. ‘You fucking idiot. I’m sending you back to Camp Bastion. You’re getting charged.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d never wanted so badly to knock someone out.

  ‘Sergeant,’ I said, blocking his path towards him. ‘Come on.’

  But he ignored me. When he was done with Cressey I followed him back to his office and closed the door behind me.

  ‘This isn�
�t right,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a serious mark on his record. He’s a young lad. He’s just turned a corner. If you charge him, everyone’s going to know about it. This is going to knock his fucking confidence badly.’

  He sat himself down behind his desk, then said with a contemptuous sneer, ‘And they gave you the King’s Badge?’

  Savage electricity charged through the fingers of my right hand, trying to curl them into a fist. But I wouldn’t let him have it. I was my father’s son, not my stepfather’s.

  I went back to my mud hut fuming. Leadership isn’t about throwing the book at someone the moment they fuck up. It’s not about saying, ‘I’ve made my way through the ranks and this is what the book says, so follow it or suffer.’ That book is not followed by leaders, it’s written by them. We were a team operating in a risky situation. What message does that send? What’s going to happen when things go wrong, as they inevitably will, out there on the battlefield? The very reason you can operate outside of your comfort zone in a dangerous situation is that you know the people behind you and above you will be there when you fall. If Cressey made the same mistake again, fair enough. But I could guarantee he wouldn’t.

  I soon decided that my game of manipulation with Boyle had reached its limit. I walked over to the office of my sergeant major.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  It was dark outside and the only light came from a single low-wattage bulb hanging off a wire. There were maps on the wall, mosquitos in the air, and the smell and crackle of the fire getting going outside. The sergeant major sat behind his desk, the dim yellow light casting shadows off the lines in his face.

  ‘What can I do for you, Ant?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Boyle. I need to talk to you about him, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He wants to send Cressey back for a court martial. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. He was up there with me on the roof today, recovering body parts, and he didn’t fucking flinch. And it’s not as if he’s shot anyone. He had his weapon pointed into the sand. No harm done, you know? He’s not the most confident of lads as it is. I’ve been working really hard with him, building him up, and I was getting somewhere. Today was a breakthrough. I saw it in him, that strength coming out. Sending him to Bastion will destroy him.’