by Kemp Ross
The officers and sergeants performed a debrief at which they went through the details of the latest op and assimilated what knowledge they had gained from it about the enemy's positions and how they reacted to our strategies. Nick Calder considered the operation a success – not least because Delta Company had chalked up two confirmed kills, thanks to the sharp shooting of Lance Corporal Gordon Pollock, who was going to have a much more interesting tour than he thought. ‘For the lads to come across two Taliban bodies is a good thing,’ he told me. ‘It makes them realize they're having an effect on the enemy and getting a bit of their own back on the Taliban.’
Nick seemed sure that the sight of a couple of dead Taliban would be a boost to the guys' morale, and I didn't doubt him. I wondered, though, if there were any other feelings these young men experienced having taken another person's life. Guilt, perhaps? Sorrow? I was soon put right. Private Nigel Campbell was the youngest guy in the company and he had also taken a man's life. ‘I don't feel guilty,’ he told me. ‘He shot at us first. If it had been any of the other boys, they'd all have done the same thing.’ The lads sitting around nodded their agreement. There was no misplaced bravado. They weren't gung-ho. Private Campbell admitted to me that he was sad it had fallen to him to pull the trigger; but there was a shared acknowledgement among the men that this was their job. If the situation called on them to kill, they would kill, and they all knew that the opportunity to do so would be presented to them once more in just a couple of days.
Or at least it would have, had circumstances not dictated otherwise.
It was the second morning after we had returned from Operation Cap Fox that the first cases of D and V were diagnosed. After that, the guys started dropping like flies, including Nick Calder and his second in command. The camp medics identified it as a viral outbreak, which meant that those who had succumbed to the illness had to be quarantined from the rest of the base. The sick men were placed on camp beds and covered with a dome-shaped netting. They were given water and rehydration sachets and left to sleep. As the day went on, the outbreak grew worse. People started projectile vomiting spontaneously and the medical team had to work flat out to control the virus. Medic Lance Corporal Andy Pettiford gave me a guided tour of the isolation area. It looked like a scene of the plague in days gone by. Even in the open air, you could smell the illness, a horrible mixture of vomit, shit and that nasty sweet odour that pervades hospitals all over the world. The men were absolutely wretched, lying in the shade of their beds, barely able to move and with a sickly pallor on their faces. I noticed again as I looked at them just how thin they all were. Andy agreed with me. ‘Too thin,’ he said. ‘Well, underweight compared to what they should be. I've lost three and a half stone since I've been out here.’
If the D and V continued, there would be a lot of weight loss to come. ‘On a scale of one to ten, ten not being very good, I'd say it's a close nine.’ (Nick Calder himself lost three stone during the tour, weight he couldn't afford to lose, and a stone of which came off during the D and V outbreak.) What none of us knew was that the medics' resources were about to be pushed to the very limit. On a scale of one to ten, we were about to hit fifteen.
It was a day into the D and V outbreak that the word came in. Afghan nationals had been wounded in some unspecified incident. The injuries were bad enough for them to risk the wrath of the Taliban insurgents and seek help from our medics. The British base was, after all, the only place for miles around where they could get emergency treatment.
As soon as they knew that casualties – six of them – were on their way, Dr David Cooper and the team of medics he headed up started making space for them, setting up beds and preparing equipment. With twenty D and V patients under their care at the same time, the medical team must have felt more than a little harassed, but they appeared calm enough as they waited for the Afghans to arrive. Until, that is, the base started to receive indirect fire. A 106 rocket flew over the DC and, thank God, exploded in the wadi beyond. Had it been on target, it would have killed a lot of people.
All thoughts of IDF and D and V went out of the window, however, when we saw the state of the injured. A number of them were children, one of them small enough to be cradled in the arms of the soldiers who were all rallying together to help. An older man had a wound to his abdomen. A good handful of his guts were hanging out of his body like fresh offal and he moaned with untold agony as the medics cut the clothes from his thin body. A six-year-old girl wailed pitifully. She had a shrapnel wound to her back and was clearly in terrible pain. An older Afghan man – her father perhaps, or even her grandfather – held his gnarled hands to her head; but he seemed unable to find any words of comfort. How do you explain something like that to a child so young?
It was as the medics were trying to tend to the injured that the cultural difference between the Afghans and ourselves was thrown into sharp relief. Dr Cooper and his team had to access the wounds of the injured, a number of whom were female. For an Afghan female to show her body in public is, of course, contrary to the custom of that part of the world. So it was that some of the older men held a flowery sheet in front of the women as a makeshift screen so that the doctors could get to work on them. The look on the faces of these men made it quite clear that, even though the British troops were trying to save lives, they found the whole situation quite frustrating. That moment taught me a lot about the Afghan peple and how difficult it is to judge them by the way we live.
In a matter of minutes this basic outpost in the middle of the Afghan desert had become a bustling emergency room. Everyone momentarily forgot the D and V outbreak as the medics treated these people, whose injuries were genuinely life-threatening. A baby girl, injured by shrapnel and her little face distorted with distress, wriggled around on a military stretcher as two medics did what they could to save her; her condition remained serious. I had assumed that the man whose guts had been exposed and who was now lying motionless with an oxygen mask over his face was the most critical, but Dr Cooper corrected me. The casualty who worried him the most was the six-year-old girl. He'd had to put his fingers into her side to pull out shrapnel, but she also had a serious chest injury, which had caused internal bleeding. A chest drain had been inserted to help her breathing, and they had decompressed the chest itself by inserting a needle into the cavity. Dr Cooper explained that if there is air on the outside of the lungs, the lungs can't open up and you suffocate. Had the little girl not been brought into the DC, that's what would have happened.
It was heartbreaking to see these children in such a state of distress, and it was clear that the situation could deteriorate at any moment. ‘The one thing that I've learned since being here,’ Dr Cooper told me, ‘is that kids will hang on and hang on until suddenly…’ He clicked his fingers. ‘They go very, very quickly.’ I looked at one of the children, a pretty little girl, who was sucking on a lollipop, a gift from the troops. She occasionally cried out as tiny bits of shrapnel were pulled from her back and neck. Dr Cooper also explained to me that these Afghan children were so undernourished that when treating them he prescribed only a fraction of what he would give a healthier Western child; a normal dose of morphine would kill one of these kids because they are so much smaller for their age.
The medical team did everything they could. Their facilities, however, were limited and it was vital, once the patients had been stabilized, to evacuate them to Camp Bastion, where they could receive better treatment. As we waited for the MERT to fly in, I watched one of the soldiers cuddling an injured baby as if it was his own child – an image that will stay with me. The baby was momentarily soothed by the attentions of its surrogate father, even if the soldier had blood spattered over his latex gloves.
The MERT arrived in a Chinook, its blades kicking up a dust storm all over the landing zone. The wellbeing of the injured was out of Delta's hands now. In fifteen minutes they would be at the new hospital in Camp Bastion. As the Afghan nationals were ferried away, I was left to reflect on t
he realities of this war. Since British troops had gone into Afghanistan, nearly 150 had been killed. A substantial number. But we have absolutely no idea how many civilians have died. Nobody keeps a statistic, almost as though it's not worth knowing. But I can assure you of this: it's a lot more than the ISAF forces and it's a lot more than the Taliban.
What I had just witnessed was simply a small snapshot of the horrors the Afghan people have had to undergo. It was a great relief to all of us that they had been sent to Camp Bastion and word later came through that they all made a full recovery. Many more don't.
In retrospect, I suppose that having a guided tour of the D and V isolation area wasn't my best idea ever. It was only a matter of time before I came down with the dreaded lurgy myself. The night after the casualties were evacuated to Bastion, I started to feel the first rumblings of what would become a very nasty bout of that vicious little virus.
The whole camp now had the high, sweet smell of illness and I started to feel rough as evening approached. My body ached, so I took myself off to bed and fell asleep. It was the middle of the night when I awoke. I was shivering, my head was thumping and I went from very cold to very hot. It was, I knew from experience, a bit like having malaria. I also knew that the world was about to fall out of my bottom. Climbing out of bed, I fitted my head torch – a dusky red light, as white light can be more easily seen by any enemy spotters – and started the urgent, uncomfortable walk to the thunderboxes.
As I approached, the smell of shit and sick hit my nostrils. Certain of the thunderboxes had the letters ‘D&V’ scrawled on them to stop the spread of the disease. I'd half hoped that I wouldn't get to see the inside of those cubicles; now it felt as though I was going to get pretty intimately acquainted with them. Inside my chosen thunderbox was a sheet of plywood with a seat and a metal drum underneath. The interior of the drum swarmed with flies even at night. As I glanced into it with the light from my head torch, I saw what I can only describe as a mauve-brown porridge. The porridge was moving, thanks to the flies that had settled on it and were now feasting among the little white islands of tissue paper.
I didn't have time to be revolted. I dropped my pants, sat my pretty little arse on the seat and evacuated my bowels. The process clearly disturbed the gourmet meal going on down below. The flies swarmed up between my legs, one of them scoping out the moisture on the corner of my firmly closed mouth with the pinpoint accuracy of an F-16 bomber. I knew perfectly well that the fly had just been dining on the porridge, so I flicked it away in a movement that must have made me look as if I was suffering some kind of muscular spasm.
My mouth wasn't the only area of moisture. I'm sure nobody reading this really wants to picture the crack of my arse, but in the interests of accuracy I have to report that the flies found their way there too. Yum.
I cleaned myself up as best I could and then started to stumble back to my bed. By the time I was halfway there, however, I had to turn back again. A matter of urgency – all of a sudden you forget about the flies in the need to rid your system of this stuff. You can't quite forget about the smell of poo and sick, however, so as I retook my seat, I held my breath and had my T-shirt pulled up over my nose, knowing that the smell of vomit would eventually make me vomit.
All I wanted to do was lie down on my bunk and die; but each time I tried to get to bed, I had to do an about turn and run back to the thunderbox. My tender backside grew increasingly sore the more it was wiped clean. The trouble was that every time I stood up and started to move, it set off the need for another bowel movement. So it was that I found myself sitting in the cubicle and shimmying like a teenager at a disco. Well, perhaps not quite like a teenager at a disco. I wasn't the only one to hit upon this technique to rid myself of the foul liquid my body was trying to expel. All the lads did it. In fact it even had a name: the Musa Qala shuffle. There was a definite skill to getting it right, though somehow I doubt it will ever find its way on to Strictly Come Dancing…
The sanitary situation in the middle of that viral outbreak was like something out of the Crimea. But what else could anyone do? It wasn't as if there was a fully appointed bathroom with marble tiles and a bidet out there in the desert. Far from it: the following morning a couple of the Jocks would have to remove those metal drums full of sloshing excrement from the thunderboxes and set fire to it. You can imagine the smell. Or maybe you can't.
The next day I was given a handful of rehydration sachets and told to go back to bed. Having been up all night, I was happy to oblige. Delta Company's next operation was only a day away and like the rest of the men I wanted to make sure that I was fighting fit. But before I hit the sack, I padded off to the thunderboxes yet again. Time for one more Musa Qala shuffle. Better safe than sorry, after all.
To the north-east of Musa Qala, in the shadow of Mount Doom, were two towns: Qats and Small Qats. These were Taliban strongholds and the targets of Delta Company's next mission. The D and V outbreak had subsided – this was the day after I had been sent to bed with my rehydration sachets; whether everyone was fully well enough to go on what promised to be a very dangerous mission was a different matter. We couldn't become complacent, though. Delta had to take the fight to the Taliban if they were to stop the insurgents overrunning the town.
As Nick Calder briefed his men under Hesco that morning, he explained that intelligence reports suggested there could be high-ranking commanders in these towns. There was also some slightly less useful information, courtesy of the Afghan special police force, the NDS. According to their top-secret intelligence, we could expect there to be enemy in the areas through which we were travelling. We'd be able to recognize them because they'd be wearing sandals.
Thanks, NDS. I really don't know what we'd do without you.
Operation Small Qats was to last twenty-four hours, departing at 14.00 that day. There was a definite sense of apprehension. As we were sitting in the Mastiffs driven by 2 Scots, Alan ‘Goody’ Goodall admitted to me that he had been to church the previous Sunday – ‘church’ being a service held in a tent by the company chaplain. It's not uncommon for the men to turn to religion more as their tour of duty progresses, some of them to give thanks for the fact that they are still alive, some of them to deal with the doubts and insecurities that inevitably arise when your life is being threatened – to get rid of the voice in their head asking what the hell they're doing out here, or at least to get its volume turned down. Goody had been given a shiny souvenir coin for going to church. He never struck me as being a superstitious man, but he carried that coin with him for good luck. ‘Not that we'll need it,’ he said. ‘Because we'll be fine.’
Hope you're right, Goody. I really hope you're right.
Each Mastiff was armed with a fifty-cal or grenade machine gun and a Javelin weapons system. You'd have to be suicidal to launch an attack on a convoy like that. Trouble is, the Taliban sometimes are. As always it was an uncomfortable ride with the threat of incoming from above and IEDs from below, but not as uncomfortable as it was for the guys in the lead vehicle, who were unable to drive in anybody's tracks, so avoiding the threat of a mine strike.
An emaciated man, Nick Calder had a plan. Normally Delta Company headed north from the DC in order to launch their attacks on the Taliban positions. On this occasion, however, we travelled east along the wadi and into the desert. Once we had moved out of the range of any Taliban dickers, we would head north. The Mastiffs would drop us off in the shadow of Mount Doom, where we would rest up overnight. The following morning we would be able to attack Qats and Small Qats from the east and, with a bit of luck, catch the enemy by surprise.
We made slow progress – four hours to cover 7 klicks. The ground ahead of us had to be constantly swept for ‘legacy’ mines – so called because they're a legacy of the Soviet occupation – so it was with some relief that we reached the base of Mount Doom in one piece. We overnighted there – cold scoff and no fires. I had a crafty smoke with one of the boys – even that was against the rules,
as in theory the glow from the end of a cigarette is enough to give away your position – and then settled down to get some sort of kip. I lay on the ground, having kicked a load of stones away to make a reasonable place to sleep. It doesn't matter how hard you try, though. There's always one stone digging into you, making you feel like the princess and the pea. Nobody went for a piss more than two metres from the vehicles: a legacy mine had been found nearby and no one was sure if we were in a minefield.
Four hours later the sun rose on day two of Operation Small Qats. As we readied for the off, the lads organized a sweepstake on the time of the first contact. I opted for 07.45. We loaded ourselves on to the Mastiffs, which then dropped us on the outskirts of the green zone before heading back up to the higher ground in the desert to provide fire support and, should we need it, medical evacuation.
I marched with Delta Company into the heart of the green zone. It was eerily quiet: most of the inhabitants had bugged out, so we took that as an indication that the enemy had ID'd us and knew of our arrival. It was only a matter of time before the contact began – we'd poked our stick into the hornets' nest and the hornets were on their way. In order to spread out our forces, Delta split up into its platoons – one-zero, two-zero, three-zero and the TAC, which was OC Nick Calder and his team, including the forward observing officer Axel and Bruce, the JTAC. On this occasion I stayed with the TAC.
I was only metres away from Nick Calder when the firing started. I dived into a ditch, and then followed Nick to the cover of a compound wall. Nick looked back at me. ‘Seven forty-five,’ he said with a grin. ‘Bang on!’ Looked as if I'd won the lottery, but the popping sound all around wasn't the opening of champagne bottles. It was the crack of AK rounds, and then the whoosh of an RPG sailing over our heads. We pushed forward, one-zero platoon giving us covering fire from about 150 metres away. As we dodged the Taliban's fire, however, Nick received bad news over the radio. One of Delta Company had been shot.
