Sniper in Helmand: Six Months on the Frontline

by James Cartwright

  So this was life in Sangin – going out on patrol, making sure we were nice to the locals and coming in again. Eventually, we received notice that we had one last patrol to complete before we moved on to our next deployment and were to have all our kit packed away ready to move out after the patrol.

  We patrolled out towards the south, through Sangin and the maze of alleyways, fields, dried-up riverbeds and markets. Right at the end of the patrol, we skirted out and around past Deano’s vehicle once more. I looked at it, recalling how I had strapped my bergen to it and realising that the Taliban had picked their ambush spot well with the built-up area providing no real room for the vehicles to manoeuvre out of it. In fact, how we got out is beyond me, but somehow we escaped with a few casualties but no deaths. Shortly afterwards, the Vikings arrived and we all jumped in before heading back to the DC. Later, we drove out into the middle of nowhere ready to receive our orders for Operation LASTAY KULANG.

  Camouflage and concealment training in Brecon 2006.

  Getting into a fire position during a stalk in Brecon 2006.

  Making use of the lay back position in Brecon 2006.

  Author observing the landscape during an observation exercise Brecon 2006.

  A WMIK (Weapons Mount Installation Kit) Landrover. Fitted with a GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun) and a .50 Cal machine gun.

  Me on patrol in Sangin.

  A Javelin missile being launched.

  Me with a L115 (.338) sniper rifle on a rooftop in Nowzad. A sangar from the DC is visible behind me.

  B Company lads taking a break in the Green zone.

  Re-supply by Chinook.

  Me and Teddy on a roof top in Joucelay during Op Lastay Kulang.

  Teddy in Kajaki with Charlie, one of our adopted dogs.

  Kajaki Sofla from OP Sparrow-Hawk. It clearly shows the different terrain of mountains, flats, and Green zone.

  Getting some air support in Kajaki Sofla.

  The reservoir in Kajaki.

  Me and Teddy after a patrol in Kajaki. I am carrying an L96 and Teddy has an L115.

  A soldier from Recce Platoon on patrol in Nowzad, part of our Quick reaction force during Sniper Ops.

  Aviators and beards. Snipers from left to right TM, OB, JL and Kingy.

  CHAPTER 11

  Operation LASTAY KULANG

  This was the last part of our deployment on MOGs and we had so far succeeded in pushing the Taliban from the south, northwards up through the middle of Sangin, and now were to clear much of the Green Zone to the north of Sangin, still close to the Helmand river. The plan was that once we had cleared the Taliban from this area, we would build another forward operating base here, to be called FOB Inkerman. This was going to be another big operation, so A Company, based in Sangin, came out to support us, deploying further to the north and executing a kind of pincer movement. We were to cross the 611 road which was the main supply route that ran all the way from Kajaki in the north, hugging the Helmand River down past Sangin. It finally joins the A1, which equates to the M25 but encircling the entire country rather than just a city.

  Essentially, the plan was to stop the Taliban from moving into the north of Sangin by inserting a forward operating base there, having cleared the area first. Just opposite this area was a large wadi which in size was more like a dried-up valley that swept right up to Musa Qalah, providing the Taliban with an escape route from Sangin. It would not be our task to chase them through to Musa Qalah and take fresh ground, but to push them back and away from our positions and the territory we were to take and hold.

  We spent that first night underneath the stars, cleaning our weapons, preparing them and ourselves ready for battle. Everyone deals with these kinds of circumstances in their own way, I loaded up the Arctic Monkeys on to my iPod and put on my headphones, lying there listening to the music and thankfully managing to get quite a bit of sleep.

  Major Mick Aston had decided that he wanted a full sniper asset again, so Teddy and I were reunited to work as a team again. He still only had the L96 rifle, which he had acquired from the sharpshooters, while all I had was my laser rangefinder and my CWS for my SA80 rifle. We also had our PRR to communicate with each other while I was equipped with a Bowman radio, which provided communications with every other commander on the ground. I carried six litres of water in addition to a pistol in a holster strapped to my leg, and four magazines strapped to my other leg in a double leg pouch with another two in my pouches on my Osprey body armour. We were running around in extreme heat carrying approximately 70 pounds of kit. As Teddy was the designated shooter, I wanted to try to reduce his load so that his heart rate would stay down, enabling him to engage targets properly. I carried much of his ammunition and other items as well as all my own front line scales, so my kit was really heavy. I treated myself to two packs of Super Noodles this time and squirted two Yorkie bars into my mouth to make sure my energy levels were as high as possible, ready for the next day.

  We woke up quite early, just as the sun was coming up, and drove to some high ground overlooking the Green Zone. We parked the Vikings some distance away and dismounted to spread out and carry out final radio checks. We were attached to 7 Platoon again, moving with Corporal Parker’s section, but Deano and Scotty were not around and Major Aston had told me that he wanted major sniper cover for the company. We were well aware that we were going to be covering a lot more ground than usual.

  We pushed forward towards the Green Zone and could see it stretching out in front of us as we came down from the high ground, making our way past some compounds that looked as though they had not been occupied for a while. There was a deathly hush with no activity or people out and about, the normal calm before the storm as the locals clearly knew something was going to happen. It was only too obvious that we were about to be involved in a heavy contact.

  We reached the road where we took cover in one of the deep drainage ditches that lined it on either side, staying for a while and watching the road while discussing the next move. We decided that we would move across to the road and push in properly. After crossing the road we began moving forward, and I remember it just being so deathly quiet. We came across another compound and at that point came under fire, the cracks from the bullets resounding around us as we kicked in the door of the compound, quickly double checking it was empty as we took cover. There were three rooms towards the end of the compound and we discovered the third room on the right had been painted totally black by soot. This, together with a few holes in the walls, provided us with the perfect position for a sniper so I called up Teddy on my PRR. He came running in and took up his position while I found an old blanket covered in crap and straw and hung this up behind him to ensure no silhouette of him could be seen, so we were now in a position where if anyone looked in, they would see nothing, just total pitch darkness.

  One of our Minimi LMG gunners was just outside, so I pulled him into the room we were in because it was the perfect place from which to give covering fire for the guys coming up. It was now time for us to move, so I grabbed Teddy and we followed Corporal Parker’s section across to the drainage ditch. It was quite high, around chest height, with shallow water underfoot, so we were running along bent down, zig zagging along the ditch. We stopped short and braced ourselves while the guys blew a mousehole in one of the compounds to provide entry to it; as they did so we were observing for any sign of the enemy, ready to give cover. There were a few compounds in the distance covered with trees and the crops in places were quite high, so it was difficult to see because we were quite low down in the ditch.

  There was a loud bang to our right as the guys punched another mousehole in the wall. I grabbed Teddy’s shoulder and indicated that we were going to push up to where they were going in. We got the call on the PRR, ‘Compound clear, compound clear,’ so moved straight up, crawling over the rubble in front of the hole. Inside, the compound was ideal for us because there were stairs leading to the roof, with three rooms in a similar layout to the
previous house in which we had taken cover. We got ourselves up on the roof, which was flat and had a sort of foot-high parapet enabling us crawl along it without exposing ourselves as targets. There was a hole in the parapet, so I called down to one of the engineers for a hooligan tool, a heavy crowbar-type tool.

  I began to hack away at the hole to make it a bit bigger, while taking my day sack off for Teddy to use as a support, in order for him to be able to aim through the hole without having the barrel sticking out of it. Teddy positioned himself around half a metre back from it while I moved down to another aperture and, using my laser rangefinders, zapped the tree line nearby and gave the range to Teddy. I continued this process, giving distances and ranges for the whole area and terrain in around us. I would always try to provide information on prominent land marks staggered outwards, so one would be about 100 metres away, followed by another 200 metres away and continue outwards, creating almost a virtual distance range out of the landscape and things within it. This way Teddy could change the range on his dial swiftly and score a direct hit. We stayed up there for quite a while because we had been told to remain where we were, as we were now conveniently central to 7 Platoon while the other platoons were also moving up.

  We then spotted some enemy moving from the left to our right, so I reported to the OC on the radio and described what we were watching. They were withdrawing, but not along the river, moving instead up the Green Zone some 500 metres away. They knew exactly where we were and were making sure they were not anywhere near us. While this was going on, I suddenly noticed the left-hand side of my body was getting somewhat sweaty and felt a tingling sensation on my thigh. Rolling over, I noticed black smoke and realised that the room below was on fire. I crawled away from the area and fortunately at that point we were told to move out.

  Teddy and I attached ourselves to Corporal Mason’s section of 5 Platoon, moving along the drainage ditch next to the 611 road where we came under fire from an enemy sniper. We were told to locate him urgently. I came across Major Aston as we moved on, and explained that there was only Teddy and me, and that a sniper-on-sniper scenario quite often took a long time to resolve. He understood and told us that he was not looking for miracles and to try our best to locate the sniper.

  We eventually came to a point where another road forked off from the 611 road, leading up towards the Taliban. This meant that we had to scramble up and out of the drainage ditch, run across a road into the open and back down into the drainage ditch, so the call went out for one of our guys to lay down some really heavy covering fire us as we crossed over. As we ran across the road, we both heard a single loud crack. The enemy sniper had obviously seen us and opened fire, his round passing between us. Teddy now fancied his chances, because we now had a good idea of the opponent’s approximate location – there was only one building in the near vicinity, surrounded by fields with crops. The sniper clearly could not be in the crops because they would have obscured his vision, so common sense dictated that he was somewhere in the building.

  We moved up and, as our guys began to move in to clear the compound, Teddy and I both had our scopes trained on the building. Suddenly, I spotted a figure in white with a black turban and followed him as he came around the corner of the building about 200 metres away, holding an AK-47. I watched as he fired towards some of our guys to my left, before lining him up and firing a few rounds from my SA80. I watched him drop and chalked up another confirmed kill. There was then another crack of a round as it clipped a tree behind me just above my head before ricocheting into the branches of another just behind that. The enemy sniper was still out there but had clearly changed his position, something we needed to do as well and pretty damn quick.

  With the compound now clear, we moved in and looked to see how we could position ourselves up on the roof, but in this case we needed one of the lads to bring a ladder for us. Once on the roof, we did not have a great deal of joy in spotting the enemy’s movements due to the proximity of the treeline, so we stayed up there while our troops moved around and onwards.

  We were essentially chasing the Taliban in parallel fashion – they were in the Green Zone moving northeast, while we were just on the edge of the zone, opposite to the 611, also pushing north east. It was a sort of race, as we crossed another road and zig zagged along, jumping back down in the drainage ditch. We approached up one road, which swept away from the 611 and led all the way to a few compounds spread out diagonally to each other with large trees between them. The plan was for us to push along this road and get ourselves into these buildings and then into the Green Zone itself. We moved down this road at quite a pace, heading towards the compounds as quickly as possible, the boys kicking the doors. In a few minutes we heard the shouts of, ‘Compound clear, compound clear!’

  Once again, Teddy and I made our way on to a roof, followed closely by the FAC who had a couple of Dutch Apache helicopters on standby overhead. We also had the MFC who was getting ready to bring some mortar fire in as well. The enemy fire had died down a bit at this point, as we had a couple of GPMG guys laying down fire. One of them was a Grenadier Guardsman from Manchester called Tommo, who had volunteered to come on tour with us. He and another guy were laying down fire with their GPMGs towards a compound that was around 300 to 400 metres away to our half-right, as we had been taking fire from there.

  Teddy moved himself along the wall and was now facing directly into the Green Zone and I moved myself up to where the GPMG guys were, because I could see Tommo was having trouble with a stoppage, and got on my hands and knees and helped him clear it. I remember noticing that the other guy was just watching us, so I said, ‘What’s wrong – can’t you see anyone?’ By this time Tommo had sorted himself out and said, ‘I see them, I see them’ and began to lay fire down again. I turned to the other guy and said, ‘Look mate, just watch Tommo’s tracer. Not continual fire, just keep it slow in bursts because you don’t want to waste ammo.’ Between them, they put down a nice steady rate of fire into the building, switching it from doors to windows and around the place.

  As I turned round, I saw Ross Kemp and his camera crew. To this day, it was a proud moment for my arse to be on national television. I said, ‘All right, Ross?’ He replied, ‘Yep. All okay with you, mate?’ Major Aston then gave him a briefing as to what was happening, and I sat down next to Stewart, the FAC, who was busy talking to the two Dutch Apache attack helicopters circling overhead, and looked over in the same direction as Teddy and Josh Lee. The two GPMG guys got down from the roof as their section was to move on to another tasking, while Corporal Parkinson’s section moved into the compound with Woody to take up position there for a while. Teddy spotted some movement by the Taliban a few hundred metres away through a hole in a wall about 6 feet high, which ran from left to right. The hole was where it looked like a high explosive had taken a chunk out of the wall and Teddy had seen Taliban running from one side to the other. He pointed it out to Josh, who had a UGL attached to his SA80 rifle, and readied himself to fire. Josh aimed his launcher and fired, and we watched the grenade detonate; if anyone was anywhere near that hole they were either dead or, at the very least, in a world of hurt.

  Out of nowhere at that moment, the enemy fired an RPG straight at us and I watched Ross Kemp duck down shouting, ‘F...ing hell!’ Meanwhile beside me, Stewart was going crazy with the Dutch Apache helicopters because they had not yet identified where we were and therefore could not fire. Stewart asked me to pop one of my signal smoke grenades and throw it over the wall, so I did and we watched the plume of orange smoke drift upwards. As it happened, the Apaches still couldn’t identify the smoke. By this time Stewart was going absolutely mental, saying: ‘If you cannot identify bright orange smoke, how are you going to fire on the right target!’ I threw another one, this time purple, and the helicopters finally spotted it.

  While this was going on, Teddy had been quietly looking through his scope trying to locate the RPG gunner who had fired on us; out of nowhere his rifle cracked ri
ght next to me, which made me jump and this was followed by a whoop from him as the RPG gunner was dropped and that threat was no more. I remember calling out, ‘Nice shot, Teddy.’ Later, we both wondered if that bit would have been edited out of Ross Kemp’s film but, in due course, it was nice to see that it had been included.

  We kept up the pressure and eventually the Taliban began to realise they were clearly losing the battle, and so began to withdraw. Meanwhile, the FAC had been trying to give the circling Apaches a steer on to the enemy but they still could not see them. At this point, he lost his rag and told them to get out of his airspace, go home and retrain, which made me chuckle. Major Aston murmured, ‘Mmm… this means we have no air cover.’ However, Stewart explained that we had British Apaches en route, their call sign Ugly. I remembered hearing that callsign before, when Deano was wounded in Sangin, and thinking what a cool one it was. They would be arriving in five minutes, so we had to stay put until then, as Major Aston was not happy about moving on with no air cover.

  We remained there, trying to keep eyes-on for any enemy while taking some sporadic fire from the building that our guys were hitting with their GPMGs. Teddy and I zapped the area with my rangefinder, but we could not really obtain a fix on anyone. At this point the British Apaches came in and we threw yet another smoke grenade which they spotted first time. We thought, ‘Thank f.... for that’ as Stewart directed them to the building Teddy and I were firing on. The boys in the Apaches gave it a good dose of 30mm cannon fire, giving it a really good going-over. Now that the immediate area was clear, Major Aston was happy to press on. To the north of us, A Company was coming up against some quite heavy resistance because the Taliban that were trying to escape from us, moving north as we had intended. They had to decide as to which was the lesser of two evils, us or A Company, as they were basically trapped between us and would have to decide which they were going to take on. Alternatively, they could play the joker card option, which was to cross the river and head for the Musa Qaleh wadi and safety.