by John Nichol
Before returning to England, Pynn found himself back in Sangin, with all the sad and terrifying memories that went with that battlefield of a town. ‘My heart sank as I crossed the footbridge over the canal and back into the fortress that I hoped I would never see again.’ But, apart from a few desultory attacks, the Taliban were quiet. As the RPGs flew in, old sweats like Pynn calmly put on their helmets and sat behind the sandbag walls, while those new to the fort threw themselves down on their belt buckles. ‘It’s strange how familiarity breeds contempt, even with live fire.’ The doctor was even able to do what he and everyone else had ostensibly come to Afghanistan for – help the locals.
A platoon went on patrol in the town and brought back a ten-year-old boy who apparently lost his mother and father in one of our mortar attacks and who himself suffered shrapnel wounds in the elbow that had signs of infection. He was a chatty little kid, though a little nervous surrounded by all these English soldiers. He wasn’t angry and didn’t show any signs of hostility towards us – even though we had apparently recently killed his family. Either he was telling lies, or the price of life here is so little that death is just part of daily existence. We cleaned the wound, dressed it and gave him some antibiotic syrup and sent him packing with a pocketful of boiled sweets. He was the first of several takers that came to the front gate asking to see the doctor. It’s significant that they feel comfortable approaching the compound. However, we must still be careful. There’s an enemy out there, even though they may be ‘sleeping’ for now. We can’t afford to get complacent, but I think we may have turned the corner in Sangin.
Pynn left soon after, but in some ways a piece of him would always remain behind. ‘The Sangin experience was one that will shape my military career,’ he concluded. ‘Not since the Falklands has a regimental medical officer had to deal with such an intensive period of hostile intent and casualty numbers. My time there taught me the value of life and the fact that this is no game we’re playing here – it’s dangerous. I was thankful to leave in one piece.’
*
The doctor’s tour was over, and he was on a plane on his way out of Helmand Province at the very time that, back in Sangin, his medical corporal, Stu Giles, was once again proving his mettle on the battlefield. The desert town was tense again, with the Paras of A Company back in the government compound and determined to maintain their hold over the insurgents. The Taliban were to be hounded, denied access and ease of movement. Vehicles were stopped at checkpoints, and the bazaar was patrolled.
Giles was with a detail tabbing through the streets in the mid-afternoon heat, a show of strength to ram home the message of who was in charge. The medic was taking the back marker with Jarvie, as usual, from where they could keep an eye on what was going on around and ahead. ‘We passed kids on the street and ordinary people going about their normal lives, buying and selling and going to the mosque. We were acknowledging them, trying to be as friendly and courteous as possible.’ On the surface, the atmosphere seemed far from hostile, but the Paras’ nerves were jangling. They were reluctant to stand in one spot for too long and have more than a fleeting conversation with the locals. They were targets, and they knew it. Best to keep on the move.
Suddenly, there was shooting at the front of the patrol. Two gunmen were running along a roof above the street, two more were in a doorway ahead, and others were popping up behind. The Toms, caught in the open, dropped down and fired. Two of the gunmen fell. As the patrol traded bullets with the enemy, Private ‘Eddie’ Edwards was hit. Once again, Giles found himself running at full pelt alongside Dan Jarvie, bullets kicking up the dust at their feet as they went. ‘We were racing along a dry riverbed and into the marketplace, where there were stalls selling fruit. Eddie’s mates had dragged him behind some cover. His leg was a real mess. The whole front of his leg was splayed open, and I was looking at raw meat.’ Jarvie took in the deep wound stretching down from thigh to knee, and was sure the young soldier was going to lose his leg. ‘Eddie,’ he told the young soldier, trying to relax him with a quip, ‘there’ll be no more fucking tap dancing for you for a couple of months.’ Giles pulled out a tourniquet from his Bergen and quickly looped it round the limb. ‘This was a massive injury, from which he could bleed to death, especially in such a hot climate, where the heart and the adrenalin are pumping hard, so I needed to act fast. Then I got as much field dressing on as I could. I got Dan to hold Eddie’s legs as I splinted them together. “I’m sorry, mate, this is going to hurt,” I warned him. “I don’t care,” he said. “Just do whatever you’ve got to do.” He was in a great deal of pain, but he stayed conscious throughout.’
This was to be no repeat of Jacko. Out there on the ground, Giles stemmed most of the bleeding, paying no heed to the bullets flying around him. Two of the remaining gunmen had been forced to retreat and taken refuge in a hut. Phosphorus grenades smoked them out, and the rest fled, leaving Giles free to supervise the evacuation of his patient back to the RAP. There, he and the doctor, Captain Phil Docherty, Pynn’s replacement, poured QuikClot into the wound and put a field dressing tightly on top. ‘It got very hot and very uncomfortable for Eddie, but it saved his life.’ So had Giles. The professional medical opinion afterwards was that, without his prompt action out there in the Sangin killing zone, the private would have died. As it was, he not only lived but kept that lacerated leg, though the recovery of muscles ripped apart by splinters from his shattered femur took a long time.
Giles was self-effacing as he talked through his exploits in Afghanistan, but his modesty hid extraordinary courage, which was recognized with the award of the Military Cross, the army’s third highest medal for valour in the face of the enemy, for his treatment under fire of first Jacko and then Eddie. The citation read: ‘Corporal Giles demonstrated the highest standard of medical skill in treating these two casualties, and did so at significant personal risk, with little regard to his own life, in order to save the lives of others. What is remarkable is that he did this on two occasions and was aware fully of the associated dangers of going forward and treating the casualties in exposed positions when under fire. His courageous and exemplary conduct and the contribution to saving life deserves very high public recognition for gallantry in the face of the enemy.’
He received his medal from the Queen herself, at Buckingham Palace, and was thrilled. ‘Who’d have thought I’d be talking to her and getting the Military Cross? That’s quite a hard thing to top.’ He was, though, following a family tradition. His great-grandfather, an infantry officer, won the MC and Bar in the First World War. ‘I heard a lot from my nan about his career. It was one of the things that pushed me towards the army.’ He hadn’t intended to join up. He was eighteen, a mechanic for Ford and had two hours to kill before an interview for a job with BMW.
I passed the recruiting centre in Colchester, and there was a guy outside with leaflets saying, ‘Join the army, be the best.’ I went in and watched a video on the Paras, and that was it. As a kid, I remember the images from the Falklands, the battles at Goose Green and Mount Longdon and the march into Stanley. They were my heroes then, but I never imagined I could be one. I joined as an infantry soldier and decided to specialize as a medic after my dad had a heart attack. I was about to go to Northern Ireland in 2000 and was home on pre-deployment leave when he collapsed. I already had some basic first-aid skills, and I managed to save him. That was the spur for focussing my career on the medical side. If you can save the most important person in the world to you, your dad, then that’s as good a reason as any for getting better at it so you can save others.
The skills to do this can be learned, but the courage to do the job has to be found deep inside, and it did not come easily. ‘My role as a medic,’ Giles would say, ‘is to run into the firefight to help a casualty. But it’s something you have to have personal battles with yourself over. It’s a conscious decision. Someone is hurt and may be dying. Are you going to go to him or wait until he’s brought to you? But seconds save lives �
�� as every medic always says. It could almost be our motto. The quicker a wounded man gets treatment, the better is his chance of survival. Me sitting behind cover and arguing the toss is not going to help him. And it’s not going to cut much ice with your mates either. There are guys ahead of you, even if it’s only fifty yards ahead, who are advancing into battle, and they’ve got no choice about it. The least I can do is back them up when they need it.’ But rushing in where angels fear to tread could be a problem in itself – particularly if where you’re treading turns out to be a minefield.
16. Where Angels Fear to Tread…
No post in Afghanistan could ever be described as an easy ride – certainly not Sangin or Musah Qala or Now Zad, or any of the other desert strongholds where the Taliban would hold sway if given half a chance. But there was an extra dose of hardship for those manning and maintaining the positions protecting the Kajaki Dam, a 300-foot-high concrete and rock-filled structure straddling the Helmand River and creating a lake thirty miles long. If the whole objective of the mission was to bring light to a benighted nation, then the dam, with its massive hydroelectric and irrigation potential, was a symbol of what the western powers thought they could achieve. The electricity it generated could power the lighting of schools for evening classes, of hospitals, and of refrigeration plants to store the country’s wheat crop, as an alternative to its opium-based economy. Destroying that potential was, equally, a crucial part of Taliban strategy, and the dam came under frequent attack from the insurgents. Its remoteness in mountains sun-scorched during the day and marrow-chilling at night made the outpost at the dam – Forward Operating Base Zeebrugge – and the three observation posts on hills around it, ramshackle remnants of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan twenty years earlier, an endurance test, even for those acclimatized to this harsh terrain.
It was on one of those bare hills, codenamed ‘Normandy’ as a nod to regimental history, that after a night sleeping out under the stars, Lance Corporal Stuart Hale, a 3 Para sniper, woke on the morning of 6 September 2006. Far below him, in the crisp light of day, he could see a small town whose occupants were clearly on the move, packing their possessions into cars and, so he thought, heading back to their villages. He read this as a good omen, that the Taliban forces around Kajaki had withdrawn and the locals were feeling safe enough to return to their homes and get on with their lives. ‘Great,’ he thought. ‘The war’s over.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘It turned out those people were moving away from the area permanently because they knew things were going to get a whole lot worse.’1
He breakfasted on a bag of bacon and beans from a ration pack and then, as his eyes roamed the arid land below him to the south, he spotted a checkpoint being set up along a road out of the town. Through field glasses, he could make out two figures in the unmistakable black garments and headgear of the Taliban. ‘They’d drawn up barriers to create a sort of chicane and were stopping vehicles going through. They had rifles, and they were forcing money out of any locals who came along, intimidating them.’ Here was a threat that had to be dealt with, and quickly, before the guerrillas could settle to their task and call in reinforcements. With his platoon commander, Corporal Stuart Pearson, he discussed calling in an air strike on the checkpoint, but they ruled this out: there were houses nearby, children were running around, so civilian casualties would be almost inevitable, ‘and I didn’t want that on my conscience’. He decided to go in on foot, get within rifle range, ‘and take those guys out individually myself’. Two sniper shots from close by would get the job done without endangering anyone else. It would be just another thankless task in an increasingly thankless operation.
Hale, frankly, was wearying of this war. On his last leave, his wife, Shannon, could see in his face how drained he was. At night he tossed and turned, unable to rest, clearly troubled. ‘He didn’t say much about what they were up against – he wasn’t allowed to. But I knew that sometimes they were fighting twenty hours a day and not getting any sleep. There was lack of water, lack of food – they were dug in and living in holes in the ground. Waiting for supplies, nearly running out of ammunition. To me, it sounded like the worst fighting since the Second World War. I just prayed that he would get through it and come back.’2 Hale had every reason to want to get home in one piece. Shannon was pregnant, and they were both thrilled at the thought of starting a family. Hale was twenty-four and had been in the military since just before his sixteenth birthday. A different future beckoned, if only he could get through this tour.
He set off down the hill, leading the way, close behind him a Fusilier with a Minimi light machine gun to back him up should he get into a firefight and a radio operator who could double up as team medic. ‘That’s covered all eventualities then,’ he calculated. It was 10.30 a.m. when they began their descent, literally in leaps and bounds through the rocks and scree, the lance corporal jumping ahead, then stopping to cover the other two as they followed behind. There was cover, too, from the top of the hill, where another sniper had them in his sights, tracking their every move in case of trouble. Hale reached the bottom first and took a cautious dog-leg jog, first in one direction, then doubling back on himself along flat open ground, keeping a wary eye on a nearby hill in case, as seemed all too likely, the Taliban had set up a position there. He came to a dry riverbed and, instinctively and without pausing, stretched out his right leg to hurdle it. ‘Normally, whenever I hop or jump, I land with both feet and knees together. It’s what we’re taught in parachute training. But I got lazy this time.’ Luckily. ‘I jumped with just my right foot out, and as it touched down I felt it slip away beneath me. I fell. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see a flash or feel a blast or heat. It was as if I’d stood on a banana skin.’ In this matter-of-fact manner, he was maimed.
He didn’t realize at first and cursed himself for dropping his rifle, leaving himself defenceless, when at that very moment a Taliban Kalashnikov could be aiming at his head. He scrabbled across the dirt to reach it, ‘and it was only when I raised my hand to go to lift it up that I saw the little finger on my right hand was hanging off. Then I looked down and saw the stump.’ The bottom of his right leg had been sheared off. Shrapnel had exploded into the meat of his calf. The bone was broken, and his leg was splayed out at an impossible angle. ‘Then I knew. I’d stood on a mine.’
*
On ‘Athens’, one of the other hills overlooking Kajaki, Lance Corporal Paul ‘Tug’ Hartley of the Royal Army Medical Corps was having a lie-in. Some of the platoon had gone off for a swim in the lake but, that morning, he had chosen not to go with them. ‘It was always great going down to have a swim and a wash, but by the time you’d flogged back up the hill, you were sweating all over again and there didn’t seem much point. I couldn’t be bothered.’3 Hartley was an old Afghanistan hand. He’d been there on his first tour in 2004 and was now six months into his second. He’d been out with Special Forces, been under fire, seen plenty of action, but never been scared, never thought about the chances of dying… until the events that were now to unfold.
Corporal Mark Wright, his platoon commander, hauled him from his bed. ‘There’s been a fucking mine strike. Let’s go.’ Hartley pulled on his shorts and laced up his boots, grabbed his medical Bergen and followed Wright and the rest of the platoon as they hurtled down Athens, then up Normandy and down the other side. As he ran, he wished he’d been fitter, that he could go faster. But this was tougher than any assault course he had trained on. ‘All I could think was that mates of mine were going to die because I couldn’t get to them quickly enough.’ He was knackered – ‘absolutely gopping’ – but covered the mile of rugged country to the riverbed in a little over fifteen minutes. As he came down the side of Normandy, he could see Stu Hale propped up on the bank below. He could also see what Hale had failed to notice – the tops of mines protruding from the ground. ‘I’d once been in the Royal Engineers, and this was something I always looked out for. But we hadn’t known that minefield was
there – not until our guys were in the middle of it!’ Only later would they discover these were remnants of an old war, sown by soldiers long-departed. This was not a Taliban trap they had stumbled into, but a Red Army minefield from the Soviet occupation.
Stu Hale lay there surveying his stump, ‘a pretty gory sight, believe me’. He screamed his head off, more, he later thought, out of anxiety and the fear of pain rather than the pain itself. His radio man, Private ‘Jarhead’ Harvey, had rushed to his side as soon as he went down and helped to fill him with morphine. ‘He’d been a good thirty yards behind me and had come straight to me, without any regard for his own safety – which was contrary to all our drills. Some people say it was quite stupid of him, because he might have triggered another mine himself. But, to my mind, he was just brave. He saw his mucker in danger and he reacted.’ Now, as he lay on that sun-scorched riverbed, Hale’s concern was that a Taliban attack was about to be launched. He wasn’t to know the mine that had felled him was an old one. He naturally assumed it was newly laid and that a coordinated ambush would follow. He fumbled once more for his rifle and called out to Stuart Pearson, now arriving pell-mell down the hill with reinforcements, to stay on alert.
Pearson made his way forward, jumping from solid rock to solid rock to avoid soft earth where more mines could be lurking. Hale was calmer now and quieter, and when Pearson got to his side he swallowed down the pain and managed a joke. Was having one leg going to ruin his chances of being selected for the SAS, his big ambition? he asked, and they both roared with incongruous, tension-easing laughter. ‘You’ll be fine, Stu, you’ll be back on your feet in no time,’ said Pearson, and they laughed again. A cigarette was held to Hale’s lips, and he took a long drag from it. His mind began to wander, and he started to talk about Shannon and how much he loved her. He wanted the baby she was carrying to be called Alex if it was a boy and Sophia if it was a girl. If he died, he pleaded, would someone, anyone, please make sure this last request of his was fulfilled? A slap across the cheek dragged him back from the coma he was slipping into. ‘You can name him yourself, you prick, when you get home,’ he was unceremoniously told.
