The ones with wives and children I feel less sorry for, as at least they don’t have to go and try to impress girls; they’ve already got a captive audience as it were. But the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds in the wards at Headley? Some of them are triple amputees for heaven’s sake. They still think like eighteen-year-olds – they still want to go to nightclubs and cop off with hot babes – but will they ever be able to do that? When they’re back home out with their mates on a Friday night, away from the military, is any girl going to even throw them a second glance as they sit in the corner in their wheelchair? No, of course not. And then one day these boys lose their looks, their youth, their freshness, which is about the only thing they’ve got going for them, and it’ll be ten years’ time. We’ll all have forgotten about Afghan, but these lads will still be triple amputees – fat, unshaven, jobless. And no one will care. I look at these lads in the ward and just think about the last few months, the ridiculous game of chance we played. Some of us, most of us, won; we came through. For these boys, they lost, and some of them have lost really big.
I’m not sure whether it would have been better for some of the really bad ones just to have bled out. To have had the medic overdose them on morphine, loosen the tourniquets and let them just slip away in peace, surrounded by their friends, instead of facing decades of pity that will give way sooner or later to apathy. People won’t even give them a second glance; they’ll look right through them. I do it myself already with old tramps. I look at them and see a ghost, a beardy, scruffy cripple. But I bet you when he got the injury that made him eventually wind up homeless he was fit and strong, a good lad, a hard worker. A somebody. That’s going to be what happens to these boys once the music stops, once Afghan’s over, and once we’ve stopped parading them out in public, presenting the FA Cup, being at the front row of film premieres, all that gubbins. It’s almost unfair we’re doing this to them, as when reality bites they’re going to feel the drop dreadfully.
Christ, this is depressing. I’m sorry to unload on you like this, mate, but I know you’ll understand. Just remember what I told you at that party when you smashed that bloke’s face in: make sure they all come back. Please don’t let any of your lads be injured mate, please.
I’ll write again soon; POTL ends in five days’ time and then it’s back to Battalion in London. I’m looking forward to seeing all the fellas again.
Take care, mate. Thinking of you,
Will
Tom retched into the bowl again but could only manage to produce green saliva. What’s happening to Will? The last few months, ever since he had arrived in Afghan back in March, had seen him descend into a spiral of depression. Tom knew he was hiding the extent of his drinking. He wondered what exactly Will was getting up to in London when he went out. He wouldn’t be remotely surprised if he went picking fights with people, people who he’d accuse of cowardice for not being in the army, people he’d accuse of shirking because they’d decided to avoid the chance of getting their balls blown off in a Dark Ages desert five thousand miles away.
Tom picked up Constance’s letter, and a surge of guilt came. Why had he not spoken to her for so long? He must get to a phone as soon as he could. He opened it.
My darling Tommy,
We are having the most glorious autumn back here. The trees are a fantastic colour, and already there are huge great piles of leaves beneath them that you would love to go and kick up. I wonder what autumn is like in Afghanistan. I hope it is as nice. I look at the BBC website to see what the weather is like in Kandahar and it says that it is 30 degrees. I hope none of you are getting sunstroke. There has been a bumper crop of blackberries and raspberries in the garden, and I have been making some jam for when you get back on leave. Sam has picked what seems to be the world’s supply of sloes as well and is currently making sloe gin in great big glass containers to send some out to you. I hope it will remind you of home when you taste it.
It was so good to get your letter. Is it possible for you to send any pictures back in an email? It would be so nice to see what the countryside looks like and what your day-to-day life is like. And also it would be good to see how you are looking. I hope you haven’t lost too much weight. Dear me, I do bang on! I will stop.
Zeppo is well, but he obviously knows you are away and so sometimes looks sad. I am keeping myself very well; there is all sorts of stuff happening in the village at the moment. It looks like we might soon be getting a new vicar, as Reverend Moore seems to be persona non grata for some reason with the archdeacon. Something about some kind of ‘financial irregularity’, whatever that means. Why can’t they just come clean and say they think he’s been a crook? Honestly, why people never call a spade a spade is beyond me.
Everyone in the village is wearing their poppies with pride, you will be pleased to hear. And when I go into the village it is amazing how many people know you are away. I am getting all sorts of free stuff from the butcher, etc. and the newsagents sometimes let me have the papers for free! They all ask after you; I feel a bit like I am some kind of celebrity. The man in the delicatessen – Mr Booth – you know, big white hair – told me the other day that his weekly prayer group always says a prayer out loud for you and your soldiers.
And how are they? I hope they are well. You won’t believe it, but I had a very kind letter from Lance Corporal Miller asking directly for some more chocolate brownies. He sounds like a nice boy, not like the mini-thug you sometimes say he is, what with all his tattoos. He sounds very well mannered. His spelling isn’t great though; could you use the next few months to help him out with that kind of thing?
I am so looking forward to seeing you again, Tommy. I know your father will be very proud of you, and will be watching down on you. I do miss him and you so much.
I am so excited to think that you will soon be in the kitchen eating all this jam I have made; you will be sick to death of it by the time leave is up.
Take care please!
Your loving Mummy
Dusty! What an absolute wretch, Tom thought, then grinned at him going behind his back like this. He reached to the side of the camp bed, had six huge gulps from the jerrycan, laid the letters down on his chest and went to sleep. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. At dusk he woke again, pulled his clothes over his bones and wriggled into his sleeping bag. He was asleep again within a minute. As he slept a rat came into the room and sniffed the speckles of vomit around the bucket, unafraid of his steady, quiet breathing. Tom slept until the morning crumbled away the darkness. He hadn’t dreamed a thing. He might as well have been dead. There was a surge of power in his limbs that he hadn’t had for days. He was better.
November settled in with its longer nights, and squeezed the sun’s warmth into fewer hours around midday. Rain and hail showers harried Loy Kabir, and a great three-day storm turned all the earth into mud, hour after sodden hour. The wadi rose as the rain from the mountains drained into it, turning the normally clear blue trickle into a clay-ridden milky motorway. After it subsided and the town got back on its feet the corn in the fields was harvested, and the green zone suddenly opened up. The eight-foot-tall corn packed together in serried rows which had dominated the fields over the summer gave way to flat brown earth. The only cover now available to foot patrols were the ditches between the fields, six feet wide with oily, filth-ridden water filming over a waist-deep ooze of mud and muck. The water infected open cuts and nicks in calves and thighs as the boys waded along, the freezing black paste sometimes up to their chests when they sheltered in the ditches during a contact.
As Tom emerged from his purgatory, he saw how much had changed in the military landscape as well as the physical in Loy Kabir. RHQ was now fully up and running, with the CO at the helm for three weeks now. He had bounced all over the AO, going on foot patrols, accompanying IED clearances, hanging at the back of night ambushes and joining in compound searches, as well as meeting every village elder, twisting every police commander around his finger and crucially
winning over Gumal, who had been impressed by his ability to drink him under the table after a private drinking session between the two of them at which two bottles of Scotch had been the battlefield. He had barely slept since he had arrived in theatre, but still infused everyone, from the company commanders down to the youngest trooper, with a zeal that defeated the torpor that a dull autumn threatened to produce. With its keen new staff BGHQ buzzed with activity and purpose in Newcastle’s ops room, a pregnant prelude to the focused maelstrom of violence that the staff were planning over the next few months, pushing at the FLETs in the north and south and expanding the bubble of security around the town’s commercial heart.
Despite the daily patrols and compound searches, the tempo had died down into a welcome relative lull after the savage fighting that the town had seen over the summer. In both the north and the south of the AO the patrol bases found themselves in a kind of unofficial and uneasy truce, as the Loy Kabir Taliban downed arms; local fighters to help with the harvest and prepare their homes for the oncoming winter, out-of-area fighters leaving to rest, resupply and make contact with their families. On the British side all the soldiers who had fought in the area over the summer had finally been rotated back to the UK, and by and large, apart from the occasional firefight, their replacements were just concentrating on familiarizing themselves with their new homes.
In the north an infantry company from the Duke of York’s Regiment, callsign Pilgrim, moved into PB Jekyll, placed on a low rise overlooking the outskirts of the town where it diluted into less densely packed compounds until finally petering out three miles away. In the south A Squadron of the King’s Dragoons, C Squadron’s great rivals, had their vehicles taken away from them and were in PB Eiger in a ground-holding infantry role. The compounds to the south of Eiger were tightly packed together, with high walls creating a complex interplay of alleyways. Over the summer heavy casualties had been inflicted on their predecessors, who had lost three killed and fifteen wounded, earning the area the nickname Satan’s Grotto. C Squadron with their Scimitars were based out of Newcastle, in the middle of town along with a battery of artillery, a squadron of engineers, plus medics, clerks and a few Foreign Office staff.
Despite the relative quiet, there still came a bleed of casualties. During a compound search one of Clive’s soldiers, Smiley, was shot in the hand by an old man with an ancient rifle, the bullet tearing off his thumb, leaving it dangling by a clean yellow tendon as he lay on the floor, white with shock and staring at the fizzing maw above his thin wrist. A Russian legacy mine placed in the 1980s blew the foot off a medic attached to Scott’s troop as they scrambled up a hill on a patrol to get a better view of a motorbike that had fled at their appearance. In PB Jekyll a corporal was killed by a command-wire IED. It exploded four metres from him, and while he survived the blast the compound wall next to him was toppled and his neck broken by falling rubble. His face was dusty from the wall but his body entirely unmarked; when they brought his corpse to Newcastle for the angel flight to Bastion, he seemed to Tom as though he was just sleeping.
Tom and Trueman were struggling to maintain morale among the troop. The lottery for R & R had been held, and 3 Troop had got the last slot, in late February. This meant they would get back from the two weeks away and only have another four weeks to push until the end of tour. The only way it could have been worse was to have got the first slot, in early November. Scott drew that, and he and his troop left the day after they had casevaced the medic who had lost her foot. He didn’t look ready to go at all and stood forlornly on the HLS. Tom chatted with him as he waited for the heli.
‘Have a good one, mate. You lucky fucker. What are you going to do?’
‘I dunno, pal. It seems only yesterday that I was home anyway. I’ll feel like a bit of a fraud. It won’t seem as if I’ve been away at all. I’ll go to Selly Oak to see Corporal Claydon, I suppose. I hope she’s doing OK.’
‘Yeah, man, I’m really sorry about that. What was it like?’
‘Horrific, mate, horrific. I mean, it was a fairly minging injury anyway, but it happening to a girl was just awful, you know? None of the boys could really comprehend it at first. When we saw her there after the explosion, screaming her head off, none of us knew what to do. It was like seeing your sister. I just thank goodness she only lost her foot; she’ll be able to live a normal life, and the important thing is that she’ll look completely normal. But what if it had been worse? What if she’d quad-amped? It’s just strange, mate, seeing that happen to a girl like that, you know, with dimples on her cheeks and who puts a bit of perfume on just before she goes on patrol to raise morale. It was like seeing a child. Would have been a lot easier if it had been one of the lads, you know. Anyway, I’ll go and see her. Apart from that though, I’ll just be hanging at home. Minding my own business really. It’s going to be weird. Like some kind of limbo. I’ll probably just be spending all my time on the MoD website, trying to get any news on stuff out here. Tragic really.’ He trailed off as his ears pricked at the sound of the heli. ‘Well that’s me, mate. I can hear the beers already. See you in a few weeks. Take care, mucker.’
They shook hands and then, silently deciding this wasn’t enough, hugged. Tom then watched as Scott and his boys got their gear together, filed into the heli and lifted off back to Bastion, none of them really ready to go back yet and knowing that they still had four months of tour to push. It was going to be a hollow homecoming.
The squadron had started the troops’ rotation around the AO. There was a troop in the north based with the infantry at Jekyll, a troop working off the Mastiffs on route security, a troop on QRF in Newcastle, and a troop either on R & R or standing by for the other jobs that came up from time to time. The worst job was definitely route security, and 3 Troop were on that for four weeks. It was tedious, thankless work, and more dangerous for being so dull, which encouraged the soldiers to take risks when they shouldn’t.
The job was to keep the routes to the PBs clear so supply convoys could pass easily. Every day one of the routes would be swept. There were three main ones: Bristol, Glasgow and Canterbury. Route Bristol, the route from Newcastle into the desert, was only used once a month for the great eighty-vehicle-strong Operation Tulip convoys from Bastion. But its totemic value was such that it still had to be cleared; if they couldn’t keep that artery clear they were essentially cut off in the town. On the route at roughly kilometre intervals were small checkpoints manned by ANA and ANP. In theory they had eyes on the entire route, and there were no blind spots where devices could be planted. Too often devices were found on it, however, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the ANA didn’t bother patrolling by day or night. The Afghan forces were chastened by news from Babaji of Taliban sneaking into a police checkpoint at night and slitting the throats of its sleeping occupants, but the CO knew he couldn’t really trust the integrity of Bristol.
Route Glasgow went north through the town to Jekyll. It also had a few checkpoints on it; some manned by ANA and others by a couple of sections from Jekyll. But the route was too long and winding to be covered fully, and the track, just wide enough for a Mastiff to squeeze through with its bar armour scraping against compound walls, was riddled with blind spots. By and large though it was clear, as the Taliban stayed further out to the north and seemed unconcerned. Route Canterbury was another matter. No matter how many patrols were sent from the checkpoints along it, no matter how many night-time lurks and ambushes were put out to get bomb-layers, devices always found their way onto it. It was the CO’s single greatest concern. If it was shut, Eiger was isolated. The route had to stay open.
Tom didn’t mind doing Bristol and Glasgow; they were usually clear runs, not too draining on nerves, patience and fingernails. But Canterbury was dreadful. Progress was torturous. Local children were paid by the Taliban to drop nails, nuts and bolts in the sand to slow the barma teams. The more often one of the barma boys came up with a reading and found a nail, the more likely he was to assume the n
ext reading was also a nail and ignore it. But then that was the intention, and it was actually a bomb. It was a war of patience, pure and simple.
Tom let the barma team take things at their own pace, using their own instinct, judgement and skills, and knew he had to try to devalue the concept of time. Every reading had to be treated as a potential bomb, even if they had just found fifty nails. Sometimes it wasn’t intentional Taliban decoys; whenever they passed a crater where a wagon had been hit they would be slowed by bits of metal debris in the ground. The only advantage about Canterbury was that it was a route through open fields, with nowhere near the same number of bottlenecks as the other routes.
The drills became well worn, slick and unspoken. The barma team selected by Tom was Ellis, GV, Livesey and Acton. Livesey and Acton were add-ons from SHQ on loan to the Mastiff troop. Tom didn’t really know much about them. He liked Acton, whose broad moon-shaped face sat atop an ungainly torso and who had a friendly and vacant grin to go with a soft Black Country accent. Everyone knew him as Yam-Yam. Livesey, with his small pinched weasel face, was sly-looking and had an unpleasant joyless cackle. His breath stank, and none of the others liked him, but he was excellent at barma, and in this, if not anything else, Tom trusted him implicitly.
He was loath to rotate the other boys in the troop into the barma team because this foursome quickly established a good working relationship, and, as was the case all over theatre, despite the extra danger of the job and the lack of extra money for it, those who did it enjoyed a feeling of quiet pride that their mates were relying on them. They were protective of their kit and hated letting the others use it. Tom once tried to help, to show that he wasn’t shying away from the job. He did it for ten minutes but was so much slower than the others that he realized he should concentrate on letting them carry out the job themselves and stop tinkering with their way of doing things. Trueman and Tom had asked them if they wanted resting or to have the other boys help out, but the answer had been an emphatic no. This suited everyone, and Tom could see Dusty and Davenport’s relief when he told them they wouldn’t have to be part of it.
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