Ross Kemp on Afghanistan

by Kemp Ross

  As the afternoon wore on, more villagers approached, this time without children. They were village elders, with their white head dresses, long white beards and dark, leathery skin, and they sat in a circle on the dusty ground at a respectful distance from our position, having asked for a shura, or meeting. None of us knew what they wanted, and as Mick Aston was still in the green zone it fell to Captain David Robinson – second in command, or 2ic – to conduct the meeting and listen to their concerns. He walked down to them, taking bottles of cool water with him. The rest of us sat and watched from the hill.

  David returned after a tense hour. The villagers were concerned, he explained, about the bombs that had been dropped on the caves. They knew that there had been Taliban in the area, but equally they were worried that there had been ordinary villagers taking refuge in the same cave system. They wanted to go and have a look, to check that there had been no innocent civilian casualties and, if necessary, bring back any dead bodies for burial, without B Company mistaking them for Taliban.

  The 2ic was convinced that everyone we had engaged had been carrying weapons; nevertheless, the idea that we might have killed civilians in the bomb strike was an uncomfortable one. The Afghan villagers – who had been friendly and unswervingly practical about the situation – could not be denied the right to go and check, so David gave his permission for them to head towards the caves. It was a great relief when word came back that the villagers had failed to find any civilian casualties.

  The Taliban had either fled or been killed. Now the villagers were starting to reclaim their homes. A counter-attack by the enemy was possible at any moment, of course, so everyone needed to stay vigilant; but this seemed as good a time as any to head back down into the green zone and talk to some of the locals. It would be the first time I had actually had a chance to meet ordinary Afghan folk: I was eager to know – and apprehensive about – what they thought of our presence and the events of the past twenty-four hours.

  It was good to see the village returned to some semblance of normality. Sure, there were British troops everywhere; sure, there were Vikings with fifty-cals mounted on top. But there were also children, dressed in traditional, richly coloured garb. Some of the young boys wore charcoal mascara and had painted nails. They were very happy for the sweets handed out by the soldiers. These children had returned with their parents, who were clearly satisfied that the Taliban would not be coming back imminently. That's not to say, however, that we were unconditionally welcomed.

  I approached a group of men. They all wore beards, though they were shorter than the length of a fist once ordered by the Taliban when they controlled the country. I asked a translator what it was these people would like to see done; but my question was answered with another question, and a confrontational one at that. ‘Our question is: what have you done for us since you've come here? You have destroyed our homeland, you have killed our people and you have demolished our houses. We have supported you, but what have you done for us?’

  I was being drawn into a political conversation. I asked the man if he thought one of the reasons for the army's actions was that the Taliban had been allowed free rein to come in and out of this village. He ignored the question.

  ‘We haven't got irrigation channels,’ he declared. ‘The ones we have are in a bad way. They need repairs. The other problem for us is the river. When it floods it washes away the houses and the fields. Also we don't have a hospital. We've got sick people in our houses but no medicine.’

  What this Afghan man was saying was undoubtedly true; yet the more I found myself drawn into the conversation, the more I found myself arguing. Did he not realize, I asked, that before you can have doctors and teachers, you had to get rid of the people who didn't want them? If there were no forces around, teachers would be killed by the Taliban and that was why the Taliban had to be dealt with before reconstruction could begin in earnest.

  My conversation partner, of course, had an answer. ‘That's down to you. You've got power, you've got tanks, you've got planes. Bringing security is also down to you. It's your responsibility, not ours. Why do you ask me these questions? It's all up to you.’

  I found the interchange a frustrating one. I had great sympathy for the way these Afghan villagers were being forced to live their lives; I had sympathy for their wounded children and for the adults who, not for the first time, found their homeland turned into a war zone. But equally I had seen the sacrifices that the Royal Anglians had made to try to bring peace to Jucaylay. I had seen the reality of their job and the ferocity of their enemy. It was galling that the locals were not as welcoming to the troops as they might have been, even if it was understandable.

  I was beginning to see just what a struggle the battle for hearts and minds was in this difficult, morally ambiguous territory. With one breath the Afghan man had condemned the destruction of his homeland; with the next he had stated that it was up to the forces to use their tanks, planes and power to bring peace. In the face of such a contradictory demand, it was impossible to know how successful we could ever hope to be in winning the support of the Afghan population. I also realised that the locals knew they couldn't be that friendly. There could well have been Taliban collaborators in the village.

  What was clear, however, was that chasing the Taliban from Jucaylay had been a good thing, no matter that the Royal Anglians were not being praised left, right and centre by the Afghans. I sensed a determination in the air, a resolution that whatever the reception, the lads were not going to be deterred from carrying out their orders.

  Even though the Taliban had been fought back, Jucaylay remained a dangerous place. None of us knew when or even if a counter-attack would happen, so we took the opportunity to rest for the remainder of the day. I fell asleep in a ditch and woke with the radio operator's socks under my chin. Trust me, his socks were nearly as bad as his tuna breath.

  At 04.00 the following morning – the fifth day of Operation Lastay Kulang – we attached ourselves once more to the Fire Support Group and headed back up to the ridge. In Afghanistan, as I had found out, most fighting is done in the morning, before the midday sun has had a chance to sap the energy of the combatants. The FSG were scrupulous in keeping up their observation of the surrounding territory, and the first thing I saw as I arrived on the ridge was a group of Afghans being escorted by soldiers. They were placed inside a Viking vehicle and driven up the hillside to where we were positioned.

  There were five detainees. They had been captured during the course of the operation and interviewed by Company Sergeant Major Tim Newton. There was a suspicion that they might not be the innocent villagers they claimed to be but were in fact Taliban. Despite their denials, Tim clearly still had his doubts, so he had called in the Regimental Sergeant Major, Ian Robinson. The detainees were treated firmly but with respect. They were allowed to sit in the shade of a tree and were given water, but when Ian completed his questioning of them, he found their responses vague and unsatisfactory. He made the decision that the Afghans should be taken to a position further back from the village in an attempt to make it clear that this was not a game and that if the Anglians believed them to be Taliban, the consequences could be severe.

  For me, the incident highlighted one of the most difficult things about the war in Afghanistan. The enemy don't wear T-shirts with the word ‘Taliban’ emblazoned upon them; the moment they put down their AK-47 or their RPG launcher, there's really nothing to distinguish them from innocent civilians. Of course, they use this to their advantage, which means that the British troops need constantly to be on alert. They can never quite trust anybody. And in the battle for hearts and minds, a lack of trust is a difficult hurdle to jump over.

  In the end, it was decided that the detainees were not in fact Taliban. They were released, taken back to their village and given compensation. What effect their experiences had in terms of the relationship between the locals and the occupying force it was impossible to say.

  The remainder of th
e day passed slowly as I started to learn one unchangeable fact about war: it's made up of long periods of extreme boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. When the boredom comes, you don't complain. It gave me a chance to recover to some small extent, and to try to make sense of the events of the past few days. Operation Lastay Kulang was almost at an end. So far, it had lasted five days. As far as I was concerned, they had been the toughest five days of my life. The camera crew agreed. No question. I was totally exhausted; my feet were cracked, infected and blistered, with pus running between the toes. I had scratched the inside of my ear and the flies had been attracted to the blood. Blocked with pus, scab and sand, it had become infected.

  Even the rest of B Company, who were infinitely more used to the realities of warfare than us, agreed that it had been the most arduous operation they had yet undertaken. Even so, it wasn't lost on me that while I had been on the ground for less than a week, the rest of them were out here for a relentless six-month tour of duty.

  But I was alive, which was more than could be said for one young man who had set out with us from Camp Bastion five days previously. Despite Darren Bonner's death, Lastay Kulang had, in operational terms, been judged a success. The Taliban had been forced from the area and ISAF forces were in a better position now to start some measure of reconstruction.

  Whether that would happen or not was a different question.

  8. Stand-Off

  The excursion into the green zone around Jucaylay was not over for B Company, who were going to continue to patrol for a few more days; but it had come to an end for the camera team and myself. Our high-definition camera, which was never designed for the job it was doing, needed attention after so much heavy use; our power packs were dead and we were running out of film stock. There was no point in our being there if we couldn't film – we'd just be in the way. The soldiers were resupplied with ammo and provisions and continued to patrol the area. We, on the other hand, caught a Chinook back to Camp Bastion.

  If our camera equipment was suffering, so, frankly, were we. From exhaustion. We weren't sorry to be returning to base so that we could be reinvigorated too. The troops on the ground have grown to love Chinooks more than anything else on the planet. When I saw the chopper arriving to take us back to Bastion, I understood why. It's like Christmas morning every time you see one; knowing I was about to be taken back from the front line made me feel as if I was about to open all my presents.

  Christmas morning was going to have to wait a bit longer for B Company. Operation Lastay Kulang was supposed to last for only four days. In the event, they ended up being away from Bastion for the best part of three weeks in total. We hung around Bastion licking our wounds while B Company carried on the fight. When the day finally came for them to return, they trundled out of FOB Rob in convoy, just as they had arrived. Almost immediately they suffered two mine strikes, both within thirty minutes and 200 metres of each other. No one was killed, but having witnessed at first hand the kind of damage a mine strike can do to a Viking armoured vehicle, I knew how very lucky they had been. It was a great relief when B Company arrived safely back at Bastion with the same number of men as they had had when they left Jucaylay.

  The guys also knew how differently their return journey could have turned out. When I spoke to Mick Aston his voice oozed relief. ‘Fuck,’ he told me. ‘It's good to be back in one piece. I was shitting myself with those mine strikes, but I think everyone was. We're lucky not to have casualties.’ He smiled as he spoke, the nervous, elated smile of a man who knew that he and the men under his command had just faced great danger and come away unscathed.

  As the soldiers limped wearily back into Bastion I was interested to know how their morale was after such a gruelling operation. After all, I had only spent five days on operations with them and that had been enough to sap all the energy from me; and for obvious reasons there hadn't been a lot of opportunity for chinwagging. As I chatted with Teddy Ruecker I was not completely astonished to learn that it wasn't the constant threat of contact with the enemy that undermined his enthusiasm for the operation; it was the lack of basic comforts that any of us would expect as our due.

  ‘It was the rations that got to me,’ he explained. ‘By the third week I had to physically force myself to eat the food because I just couldn't stand it any more. It was just the same shit every day, having to wear the same dirty socks, the same dirty clothes. It fucking gets to you. And the blokes are just fucking exhausted, especially having to carry all the fucking extra ammo.’

  I'd noticed a lot of the guys using the word ‘fuck’ on their return. I wasn't surprised. They'd had a fucking hard time of it. It's easy to forget, amid all the other dangers they face, that soldiers' morale can be severely compromised by the conditions they have to live in on the front line. Napoleon said that ‘an army marches on its stomach’ and it's true. I had become increasingly aware of the poor quality of the ration packs issued to the troops. Not only are they substantially less inviting than those issued to the American and Canadian armies; they show evidence of a severe lack of forethought. What is the point, I couldn't help wondering more than once, of issuing chocolate bars to troops fighting in 50-degree heat? It turns into chocolate sludge and the best thing you can do with it is squeeze it over your biscuits brown or your biscuits fruit. And there's a reason why the soldiers renamed their corned beef hash ‘corned beef gash’…

  While I was out on Operation Lastay Kulang, Colour Sergeant Ivan Snow – Snowy, as everyone called him – had thrown me a Canadian MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat). The difference between that and the British ration pack was stark. I found a sachet of pineapple chunks in syrup – it was like nectar in the arid heat of the desert. I was like Homer Simpson as I tried to squeeze every last drop of that fruity syrup down my parched throat. In addition, there was a Sloppy Giuseppe pizza. It sounds like a small thing, but the morale boost of a bit of half-decent food – a taste of home – was unquantifiable. It changes your outlook for the day. It's a sad truth that the care the Americans and Canadians put into the MREs is replicated in other facets of their soldiers' lives. They're looked after better than British soldiers, of whom we claim to be so proud.

  Camp Bastion is hardly luxurious, but it sure as hell must have felt like it to the soldiers returning from Operation Lastay Kulang. The first thing they did on their return was square away their kit and clean their rifles – just in case they needed them again straight away. They soaked up the relative luxuries their desert home afforded like a dry sponge absorbing water. Fresh food, a decent bed, washing facilities, lots and lots to drink. Having been away for so long in the dust and the heat it took all of them a number of good, hot meals to rid themselves of the memory of all those relentlessly undelicious ration packs and several showers to wash away the accumulated grime. I knew from experience that there was no greater relief than getting back to camp and bathing your sandy eyes in Optrex. The dust gets ingrained in your pores. I have a watch that I wore out there, the leather strap of which is peppered with specks of dust that I can't get out, no matter how much I scrub it. Similarly it takes a good few scrubs even to start getting it out of your skin, and you bleed for a few days after that.

  Like wilted plants that had been given water, you could see their spirits rise dramatically. That process was immeasurably helped by some morale-boosting contact with the people they had left back home. It's impossible to overstate how important it is to the troops to have letters and news from loved ones in England. The smiles on their faces as three weeks' worth of accumulated mail was handed out was testament to that. While they were out on the ground, one of the lads – Corporal Pete Toynton – had become a godfather. He was clearly chuffed to bits by the news, and by receiving a picture of his new godchild. There were not only letters but also parcels containing food and other bits and bobs to make the lads' life a little easier and to remind them of what was going on back home.

  These letters and treats came not only from friends and family. Good-nat
ured members of the public write postcards and send food to the troops, which are dished out equally. It does the soldiers no end of good to realize that what they are doing is remembered and appreciated by the folks back home. It doesn't even really matter what's in the package – it could be a pair of socks that you're never going to wear, or a slice of cake so hard and stale that you could use it as armour plating – but it means so much to have that little bit of contact with the outside world. A taste of home.

  We filmed one such postcard being read out by Private Robert Foster. ‘We just thought we would drop you a line to let you know we are thinking of you all. We're so proud of you.’ This message of support was accompanied by a food parcel. By complete coincidence, several months later I was walking with my parents along a beach in Norfolk when a couple came up to me. It turned out that they were the people who had sent that very package. It felt good to be able to tell them how much their gesture was appreciated by the lads of B Company. It felt less good to know that Private Foster, at the time he read that message, had only months to live…

  The brief respite at Bastion gave the lads time to relax, relaxation being a commodity in short supply when you're facing the Taliban. Alcohol was banned, of course, although I could tell that a certain amount of booze was smuggled in via food packages and it was hard to disapprove of that entirely. (I never, ever saw booze anywhere near the front line, however, and despite the fact that marijuana grows like a weed in Afghanistan, I never saw anyone partake.) Reading matter of a predictably laddish nature was passed around. I seem to remember Nuts magazine featuring highly, and various centrefolds being pinned up on the wall. Women's breasts were allowed to be on display, but there was a strict pussy embargo. The rule seemed to be pretty well adhered to. It surprised me that a lot of them would unwind by playing war-based video games on their Nintendos. Maybe it was a generational thing; maybe it just felt good that Game Over meant you could start again with all your lives intact.