by Kemp Ross
The moment we arrived in Sangin, an army liaison officer came up to us. The lads from B Company were in a bad way, he told us. We weren't to approach them or talk to them. It was a bit of a blow. I knew they probably wouldn't want to talk about the blue on blue, but I thought we might at least be able to spend a bit of time with them. At that very moment we saw Sergeant Michael ‘Woody’ Woodrow and Lieutenant George Seal-Coon from B Company. They immediately contradicted what the liaison officer had said and specifically invited us to come and join them. They wanted us with them and that felt good.
7 Platoon had their own little compound at the back of the base, where they had been left to their own devices for a few days. We joined them there. One of the platoon, a Brummie territorial by the name of OD, was quite a bit older than the others. He offered them a lot in the way of emotional support; he was also a bit of a negotiator and had managed to blag some flour to bake bread and pizza bases. It's amazing how something as simple as that could rekindle flagging morale. Nevertheless, it was clear that they weren't in the mood for talking about the incident. Not yet. So I approached Ian Robinson, the Regimental Sergeant Major and the man in charge of discipline and morale. I asked them how the boys were coping. He explained that a single section from 7 Platoon had received all the casualties. ‘They were remarkable, to be honest,’ he told me. ‘I was expecting quite a lot of anger. I was expecting a fair amount of shock. But as I've said previously, the guys have really grown up a lot on the tour, not just as soldiers, but as men as well. They were very, very sad, very low, but in the last week or so they've pulled themselves back up again, and that's really to the credit of them as individuals.’
The deaths of these three young soldiers had taken the number of Royal Anglians killed in action up to nine. I wondered if the RSM had a number in his head before he came out here, an estimated casualty figure. Ian admitted that he had. About ten, but he hoped he was being pessimistic and it would be a lot less than that. It looked as if pessimism was the order of the day, however. What was more, the Anglians still had one sixth of their tour to complete and as Ian quite rightly put it: ‘For the enemy, each day's the same as the next and they don't mind whether they kill us on day one of the tour, day thirty of the tour or the last day of the tour.’
A sobering thought.
If I'd thought that my reintroduction to Helmand Province was going to be gentle, I was wrong. We hadn't been there long before we went out on patrol to a nearby village with A Company commanded by Major Dom Biddick. About eighty of us set out at midnight from Sangin DC. Walking anywhere in Afghanistan is difficult enough because of the rubble, ditches and craters underfoot; walking in the dark is twice as difficult. You stumble all over the place; across the wadis in the green zone you feel your face being whipped by the low-hanging branches of willow and mulberry trees. Add a heavy HD camera into the mix and it's very hard going indeed. For this trip we had a new cameraman, Fred Scott. Fred and I only gradually became adept at swinging the camera over the wadis and irrigation trenches as we tried to keep up with the patrol.
The last time A Company had gone out at this time of night they had come into contact with the enemy in about four minutes. To say we were apprehensive would be an understatement. All around us, dogs howled in the darkness. They didn't just sound spooky: they were constantly giving away our position no matter how quiet we tried to be. We patrolled with caution, going firm for a while to get our breath and check the lie of the land, then moving on; going firm, moving on. Progress was painfully slow. More than once, as we crossed the irrigation ditches, we found ourselves up to our waists in water.
At around a quarter to four we reached a cornfield on the outskirts of the village where we were headed. We laid up here, trying to ignore the smell of the human shit that had been used to fertilize it. The temperature had started to drop severely as it does at that time in the morning. We experienced a severe drop in body temperature. In addition, my skin was clammy from sweat and from wading through the irrigation ditches. I started to shiver from the cold; the shivers became trembles and before I knew it I was rattling inside my body armour like a tortoise rattling in its shell. I'd never been so cold. It felt as if the sweat was turning to ice on the back of my neck; half of me thought I was going to fall asleep and never wake up again. I couldn't move my arms and as I lay there in the cold, soggy, shitty field, I wondered once more what the hell I was doing here.
Dawn arrived, and with it the call to prayer from the village. The company started to rouse itself. It hurt just to stand up but we needed to get moving. We must have been an odd sight, rising like the dead from that dung-covered cornfield in the half light of morning. Something from a zombie movie. That's certainly how I felt. We continued unwillingly into the village, where Dom had a shura with the elders. They informed us that the Taliban had left some time ago: either our intelligence had been wrong, or they'd cleared out, or the people we were talking to were the enemy. Whatever, it looked as if there wasn't going to be any contact that day. We continued our patrol nevertheless.
At 11.00 we stopped for ten minutes. I was so exhausted that I fell asleep standing up and leaning against a wall. Come the afternoon, we started heading for home. I was, in military jargon, snapped. My feet were hanging off, I was cut to pieces and I felt as if I could sleep for week. An hour or so later there was the sound of gunfire in the distance. The Coldstream Guards who were mentoring the Afghan National Army had got into a contact, so Dom ordered that we turn back on ourselves to help them out. At that moment I started feeling mutinous.
In the end our presence wasn't required – the Coldstream Guards managed to get themselves out of their hole – so this time we really were headed for home. We finally got back to base at 19.00, having been on the move for nineteen hours with no sleep.
Welcome back to the army, Ross.
As far as we were concerned, Sangin was just a stopover. The soldiers from B Company who had been involved in the blue on blue couldn't stay there indefinitely. When the time came for them to return to Kajaki, we were to go with them. On the day of our departure we rose early. As I pulled on my clothes I noticed that already the material had started to stiffen where my sweat had evaporated. They call it human starch. A soldier's clothes are often in tatters, full of rips and holes: when they reach this starched, stiffened state they become brittle and tear easily.
A Chinook arrived at the landing zone to take us on the dangerous journey up the Sangin valley. Not long previously, seven men had died when a Chinook was shot down by Taliban fire as it approached the British base at Kajaki. In order to avoid a repeat performance, the immensely skilled helicopter pilots vary their landing patterns at the base, approaching from different heights and different directions. Our new cameraman, Fred Scott – very experienced and as brave as you get – strapped himself to the aircraft and hung out the back to get the shots he wanted. At one stage there was more than half of him hanging out, but he managed to capture the sublime nature of that journey. And though the constant threat of ground-to-air fire somewhat took the edge off the spectacular trip, it was indeed spectacular. The wide, still waters of the enormous lake at the top of the Sangin valley – one of the biggest stretches of inland water I've ever seen – were an intense, crystalline, Mediterranean blue; the mountains were craggy and sublime in the distance; the dam itself was like a massive rocky plug in the valley. We flew over the lake above the dam to approach the landing zone – the Taliban don't have any boats, so it's a safer way to approach. It's a beautiful way, too. In less troubled times, this part of the Helmand river was a prime destination on the hippy trail. The Afghan royal family used to come on holiday here. The tourist industry in Helmand Province has tailed off a bit since then. Anywhere else, you'd actively want to take a trip like this; but then you probably wouldn't have an Apache attack helicopter as a chaperone, hovering overhead as you came into land, ready to take out anyone who opened fire on you.
The buildings that form the base at Kaja
ki, set in the craggy hills above the dam, look like some kind of austere, Soviet-era ski lodge – very different from the residential compounds I'd seen elsewhere. The inside of the base is divided into a number of rooms, giving the soldiers somewhere to bunk down; but it's very basic. I was billeted with the 2ic, Dave Robinson. That meant I had the benefit of the only bit of air conditioning at the base – a luxury that can't be overstated. Our quarters were, however, hardly five star, not least because we had a terrible mouse infestation. Each night I was there we spent more time trying to splatter mice than sleeping. It started to resemble the Monty Python mouse organ sketch where Terry Jones thwacks his musical rodents with big hammers. Either that or a scene from The Shining. The little critters got everywhere, searching for any crumbs of food that might happen to be lying around. I would wake up with them on my chest and in my ears. Alternatively I'd be woken by Dave – a very mild-mannered bloke – screaming ‘Fuck!’ at the top of his voice, which was normally a prelude to us crawling round the room with our head torches on trying to exterminate our room mates.
To one side of the base there is a contingent of ANA (Afghan National Army); on the other side there's an ANP (Afghan National Police) position. Rumour around the camp was that the ANP would pass information over the radio to the Taliban about the British forces' movements. I never had this confirmed, but I'm inclined to believe it was true. These ANP recruits were local Afghans: they knew perfectly well what would happen if the Taliban came knocking on their door and they refused to play ball.
In addition there are three observation posts at Kajaki: Athens, Sparrowhawk East and Sparrowhawk West. Look out from one of these OPs – a crucial exercise if you're going to keep the Taliban from advancing – and the surrounding territory looks as if it's been shat upon by a thousand seagulls. These white markings indicate mine positions: Kajaki is littered with them, a hangover from the days of the Soviet occupation. It was the most heavily mined part of Helmand I had yet been to. It's as tactically important as it is dangerous, as I found out from the new OC of B Company. Mick Aston was no longer with them. He'd joined a recce platoon that would go out into the desert for a month at a time, gathering information about enemy positions. So hardly shifting down a gear, then. In his place was Tony Borgnis – a man who had quickly won the respect of B Company and with whom I got on extremely well. He explained to me that the Kajaki dam was crucial to the battle for hearts and minds in the province: ensuring the supply of electricity meant better facilities and a greater chance of regeneration of the local area.
Kajaki is regularly attacked using long-range rockets and the British forces are constantly engaged at the FLET the Forward Line of Enemy Troops. The FLET runs north to south of the base and for the last ten days B Company had been unable to engage the Taliban at the FLET because, with 7 Platoon at Sangin in the wake of the blue on blue, they were undermanned. This meant that the enemy were growing stronger in the area. They were getting closer to the dam. This couldn't be allowed to continue, so B Company were preparing to go on the offensive – and I was preparing to go with them.
Before I accompanied them out into the field, I wanted to speak to the men involved and find out just what had happened on the dreadful day of the friendly fire incident. Sergeant Woodrow and Lieutenant Seal-Coon agreed to speak to me.
B Company, they told me, had entered the village of Mazdurak when they came under heavy fire from the enemy based in the neighbouring village of Kavalabad. The two opposing forces were separated by only a couple of hundred metres of dried-up wadi. Fast air was called in to drop a bomb on the enemy positions. Woody, who was in the reserve section behind the compound, heard the jet overhead; when the bomb hit it was clear that something had gone wrong, but at first he thought it had simply landed in the wadi.
It hadn't, as George Seal-Coon was very well aware. He was on the roof of the compound with Corporal Parker, Private Leigh, Private Thrumble and Private McClure. There was a bright flash and a sudden, deafening shockwave. George described to me how it pushed him into the rooftop. He hunkered down, and when he got back on his feet in the wake of the explosion, he saw four casualties lying around him. It was a miracle that he had remained largely unhurt.
When Woody realized what had happened, he advanced on to the roof. The first casualty he came across was Private Thrumble. His helmet had been blown off and his clothes had been blown away. He appeared to be dead. Private Leigh's clothes were in a similar state; he had a bad eye injury and was in a lot of distress, but he was at least alive. Woody got him off the roof and then heard the bad news from a medic who had arrived on the scene. Thrumble was T4.
The medic went to work on Private Leigh as Woody started to get Corporal Parker off the roof. Stu Parker's body armour had been blown open, his clothes were also blown away and his ribs were crushed and broken. The Taliban continued to rain down heavy fire on them as the dead and wounded were evacuated from the compound. Private McClure was pronounced dead at the scene and the company retreated.
Away from Mazdurak, Woody went through the list of guys who'd been on the roof. McClure, T4. Thrumble, T4. Leigh, wounded. Stu Parker, wounded.
It was only then that they realized someone was missing.
Private Robert Foster had been inside the compound, firing from a loophole in the wall. Now the building from which he had been engaging the enemy was little more than a pile of rubble. Somebody had said, ‘I think he's gone back with 6 Platoon.’ But now, with a cold, sickening sense of horror, they realized that Private Foster was still under that rubble.
Night had fallen by the time they returned to Mazdurak, a moonless night that gave the soldiers very little light by which to search for their fallen colleague. They were determined to find him, however, and not only because recovering his body was the right thing to do. If the enemy had retrieved the corpse of a British soldier, especially one killed in a blue on blue incident, it would have been a propaganda coup for them. So it was that these shocked, numb soldiers dug through the rubble piece by piece with their bare hands. Tim Newton was on his way home for leave at the time of the incident, but he immediately returned to the scene, bringing with him the Brigade Reconnaissance Force.
They found his rifle first. Foster himself was buried beneath a thick layer of rubble. His army mates took some small consolation from the fact that he was more than likely killed immediately in the explosion. He was almost precisely underneath the location where the bomb had hit.
George Seal-Coon and Michael Woodrow appeared numb as they described these events, grown men on the edge of tears. It was clear to me that what happened that day would stay with them, and with everyone involved, for the rest of their lives. Woody, who was a father figure to the platoon, put it simply but movingly. ‘You can't help but get attached to them,’ he told me quietly. ‘That's the hardest thing. And then to pull their bodies out of the rubble. As a father myself, I couldn't think of anything worse than to bury children.’
The men were experiencing such a complicated mix of emotions. Sorrow, of course. Anger. But also guilt. Guilt not only that they had left Private Foster in that pile of rubble, but also that they had survived while others – randomly, indiscriminately and through no fault of their own – had died. The guilt of soldiers who survive is a powerful thing. It is one of the reasons why, with almost no exception, they shun the label ‘hero’ that is so often forced upon them. They don't feel like heroes; they just feel like the lucky ones.
I wondered if there was any anger directed towards the Americans who had dropped the bomb on B Company's position. To my surprise, there was none whatsoever. Up on Athens, one of the OPs overlooking Kajaki, I had the chance to speak to 5 Platoon for the first time since we had been on patrol together in Now Zad. They had found the blue on blue as traumatic as everyone, but their attitude towards the Americans was uncompromising. These things happen in war, I was told, and there's no point trying to find a scapegoat.
I told them that back home, there had been a l
ot of anti-American reporting in the newspapers – ‘The Yanks bomb our boys again.’ Was this how they felt? Absolutely not. The lads understood only too well that this was sensationalist, inaccurate reporting designed only to sell papers. The reality was that if it weren't for the Americans, the troops on the ground would have virtually no fast air support. I had seen for myself how crucial that support was and how often it was called in. What happened in Mazdurak that day had been a tragedy that affected them profoundly, but without the Americans, they would be fighting a very different kind of war. A war in which a lot more of them would be killed.
It's still not clear what happened on that day, and the investigation is ongoing, but it seems that in the heat of the battle, information transmitted from ground to air and air to ground became confused. The truth be told, the mistake didn't sound to me like a very difficult one to make; in fact, it's a surprise it doesn't happen more often. Since that time I've heard the question asked more than once as to why troops on the ground, with all the technology that is available to us, don't have some sort of electronic beacon that alerts fast air to their position. It would, at the very least, be some kind of safeguard against this kind of incident happening again.
B Company might have been feeling sadness and guilt after the loss of life, but they were also feeling the need to avenge that loss. And so it was that preparations were made to take the fight to the Taliban once again. The enemy's radio chatter had been intercepted by army intelligence. The Taliban knew that B Company were nearing the end of their tour. They believed them to be tired, demoralized and unwilling to fight. The guys were going out into the field to prove to the enemy just how wrong they were. The Taliban had caused some of their mates to be killed. B Company were ready to return the favour, with interest.
