by Kemp Ross
Derek, Peter and David had one thing in common: they refused to feel sorry for themselves. I know for a fact that many injured soldiers, on top of everything else, have to deal with complicated feelings of guilt, knowing that their colleagues are dead when they are alive, simply by fluke. ‘I'm lucky’ was a sentiment I heard any number of times, and that's not something you normally hear from the mouth of someone who's lost both their legs. These men all knew how differently their stories could have turned out.
I was astonished and humbled by the determination of everyone I met at Headley Court to stay positive and hold on to their sense of humour. In the TV show South Park, there's a character called Timmy. He's a disabled kid in a wheelchair and, with typical army wit, the amputees at Headley Court have adopted him as an unofficial mascot. The guys with amputated legs have developed a game called Timmy Tennis: two teams on either side of a low net, shuffling across the floor with rackets in their hands. The soldiers had lost none of their competitive edge or team spirit: I was allowed to join in one of their games and was comfortably the worst player on the court.
Our time at Headley Court was short, and though I came away feeling strangely optimistic about what I had witnessed there, I was also very aware that I had not quite seen the whole picture. No matter how brave a face these men put on their injuries, there was no avoiding the fact that for many of them life could never be the same again. Lucky or not, I felt sure that Derek, Peter and the others had their share of very, very dark moments. For them, conquering the psychological scars of their dreadful experiences would be at least as hard as overcoming the physical ones. And as I walked away from Headley Court, I couldn't help the words of one of the fantastic members of staff ringing in my ears. ‘There are no happy endings here, Ross,’ he said. ‘There are no happy endings.’
Maybe. Maybe not. I'd seen a lot of positivity at Headley Court and I realised you could never really know what these men were going through unless you'd experienced it yourself.
My final trip to Afghanistan, in January 2009, promised to be different to the others. My ultimate destination was Kajaki – I wanted to return to the dam in winter to see how different the fighting was and also to judge for myself the increased threat of IEDs in the area. But first I headed to Kabul, the capital, to widen my limited knowledge of the country as a whole and see how the conflict was viewed outside Helmand Province.
We flew to Dubai, where we boarded a flight at what I jokingly named ‘bad’ terminal, because most of the places you fly to from there are pretty bad, by name and by nature: Islamabad, Jalalabad, Bad-dad (or should that be Baghdad?). The Mumbai bombings had just happened, so security was at its highest and our body armour caused a lot of raised eyebrows and extra paperwork to fill in. On our civilian flight to Kabul, everybody around me was talking business – about how much money they were making in Kabul and what they were planning to do with it. I couldn't help raising an eyebrow myself and wondering just how these riches were being made in a place as poor as Afghanistan.
Kabul is situated nearly 6,000 feet above sea level, in a bowl surrounded by the magnificent mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush. It is a lawless place. The ANP and ANA patrol its borders in an attempt to keep suicide bombers out of the city. Crime is rife. But it was not always this way. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kabul was positively cosmopolitan, part of the hippie trail. It was a garden city with trolley buses and trams, with impressive boulevards lined with trees. People would come to Kabul on holiday from Pakistan. It even, for a short while, had its own Marks and Spencer. Make of that what you will.
But then the Soviets arrived. And after the Soviets, the civil war. And after the civil war, the Taliban. The Kabul of today looks nothing like its former self. Parts of it are more like a building site. It looks nothing like Helmand Province, either. The people speak a different language and among the dishdash wearers, you see people in clothes that would not look out of place in Europe. The population of Kabul is estimated to be somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million – there are no official figures; during the Taliban regime, however, there was a mass exodus and that number shrank to 500,000. Today, the Taliban exist in isolated pockets around the city, where they extort money and target victims, but they do not represent the same threat that they do in Helmand Province.
We stayed at Camp Souter on the outskirts of the city, but we didn't go anywhere in the capital unless we were accompanied by the army or a fantastic close protection team courtesy of Armour Group security. On patrol with both the Yorks and the Marines, I was struck by their techniques. Every time they turned a corner or crossed the road they would release a flare in the direction of any vehicle that refused to stop for them. It seemed heavy-handed, but I suppose that when everyone is a potential suicide bomber, you have to be careful. Still, I did wonder how it would go down if the sandal were on the other foot and we had guys in dishdash firing flares across the Shepherd's Bush roundabout.
I was used to sweltering in the Afghan heat, but winter in the north was a different story. On a journey up into the mountains surrounding Kabul the temperature plummeted to minus 12 degrees, reminding me that this truly was a country of environmental extremes. But the view was beautiful and I could see how, in the past, people could fall in love with this place.
We had been invited to visit the British ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. Cowper-Coles had previously been ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia – not someone to shy away from the hotspots, then – but by his own admission this was the most serious, difficult job he had ever done, or was ever likely to do, at probably the most highly protected British embassy in the world. ‘There's no Ferrero Rocher here, Ross,’ he told me. ‘Maybe a can of Foster's after work.’ I could well believe that the embassy staff might fancy a couple of cold ones at the end of the day. It transpired that the ambassador was aware of the programmes – or maybe I was just on the receiving end of some of that ambassadorial charm. One thing's for sure: by the end of the meeting, I could completely understand how Sir Sherard could hold positions of such high importance, even without the help of Ferrero Rocher.
The ambassador wanted to conduct our interview in a specific location, so we travelled from the embassy with his close protection team in two armour-plated four by fours through the streets of Kabul as he pointed out the sights. While admitting that Kabul looked rather like Berlin in 1945, he appeared genuinely optimistic about its future. ‘One of the exciting things,’ he told me, ‘is how it has grown since 2001. Buildings have been put up again, roads have been resurfaced, telephone cables are up again. And you can see that there's a lot of economic activity going on.’ Of course, it wasn't all rosy. ‘There's a big terrorism problem here, but there's also a law and order problem associated with the drugs trade – local petty warlords, kidnapping. What worries ordinary Afghans as much as terrorism and the Taliban is the threat to law and order – guns everywhere, people are poor and unemployed and they take matters into their own hands.’
During the Taliban regime, of course, the law and order problem was much less pronounced – not least because if you stole, you had your hand cut off. In Kabul today, there is still a small contingent that would like to see the Taliban return for precisely that reason: they see them as offering swift justice. These people are in a minority, however. Cowper-Coles was of the opinion that most Afghans knew they had had a ‘test drive’ of Taliban rule and had no desire to return to it. To emphasize his point, he was taking us to a location that served as a grim reminder of the realities of Taliban rule.
It was a swimming pool, empty and unused, on a hill that dominates Kabul. It had been built by the Soviets for altitude training and it enjoyed a spectacular location with its view of the Hindu Kush, the presidential palace and the tombs of the kings. But there was something about this place. You could tell that bad things had happened here, and indeed they had. It was here that many Taliban executions took place. The condemned man or woman was taken to the top diving board, and then eith
er shot in the head or hanged in front of a crowd. ‘For many Afghans,’ the ambassador told me, 'it's a place of terrible memories.
‘This is a broken country,’ Cowper-Coles told me. The question was: how could it be fixed? ‘We're here to help the Afghans help themselves. We're not here to colonize. What I see is that gradually, as you've seen happening in Helmand, our troops move out of a direct combat role and into a training and mentoring role.’
But what then, I wondered, in a country that is under the sway of local warlords and tribal elders? Surely they couldn't just be swept aside? The ambassador agreed. ‘A strong centralized constitution is not necessarily right for this country. We've got to ensure that there are decent governors, and that the tribal elders are empowered.’
As for those warlords who remain actively involved in the drugs trade: ‘Well,’ Cowper-Coles told me, ‘it's horses for courses. Some of them have really performed such atrocities and are responsible for such appalling murders and exploitation that they'll never be acceptable. But there are others where it's a much greyer issue and they need to be dealt into the settlement.’
And the Taliban? Could they ever really be part of this country's future? Cowper-Coles's view on this was enlightening. If Kabul fell again to the Taliban, he explained, ‘the millions of women, the millions of girls who are back in school, back in work, back in public life, would be shut away again. Everything we've achieved since 2001 would be swept away.’ But he was careful not to tar all members of the Taliban with the same brush. ‘We need to recognize that there are many people supporting the Taliban who are simply local Pashtun religious nationalists who are in it because they are unemployed, because they're disillusioned with the Afghan government, not because they want to oppress the people. We need to reach out to them. There needs to be a proper process of reconciliation.’
Standing there by that swimming pool where so many terrible things had happened, I couldn't help hoping that this reconciliation came soon. I knew, though, that while the Taliban insurgency continued to rage in certain provinces, reconciliation was a long way off.
During my stay in Kabul our close protection team took us on a walkabout so that we could meet members of the local population, to see if they were as positive about the presence of the ISAF forces as Cowper-Coles believed them to be. It was by no means a scientific survey, and we did come across a handful of locals who hankered after a return to the days of Taliban rule. But almost overwhelmingly, it appeared that the occupying force was welcomed.
In a village on the outskirts of Kabul, where new housing was being built brick by brick, I chatted to men, some with shaved faces and jeans. ‘Foreign forces are good,’ they told me. ‘It's because of them that security is established. If they were not here it would be the same civil war and fighting.’ What about the suicide bombers who plagued the city? ‘It's un-Islamic. It's a wild act against humanity.’
I wondered if the locals could predict a time when the ISAF forces would leave and the ANA could keep the peace. ‘One hundred per cent. Our hope is that the people of Afghanistan stand up on their own two feet and become self-sufficient. The assistance and cooperation of foreign forces are needed for the time being until our security forces are capable of standing on their own.’
In other words, we'll take your help while we need it, but once we're back on our own two feet – see ya later. And the truth is, I couldn't agree with them more. As Cowper-Coles said, we're not there to colonize: we're just there to help. (I also reminded myself, however, that there are many Western companies making money from the conflict in Afghanistan, from catering to construction to supplying hardware. It's in their interests for the war to continue…)
Before I left that village I was reminded of the fact that the Afghans, despite needing the help of outsiders, are far from helpless. I caught sight of a man watching us. His appearance was far from modern: he wore a black dishdash and sported a long, perfectly shaped beard. He was a mountain man, a sheep trader who brought his wares into Kabul on a regular basis. I went over to speak to him. Nearby were the footings for a building: an enormous hole, perhaps two storeys deep. The sides were sheer and there was no way of getting in and out of it. As we walked past, for some reason the microphone came off the boom and toppled into the hole.
The area was a building site and, as Westerners, our first thought was to go and find a ladder. We didn't get a chance. Without a word, the mountain man unwound his headgear, attached one of the children who were following us around to the end of it and lowered the kid into the hole. The child threw the part back up to me before the mountain man pulled him straight back up.
Once the kid was safely out of the hole, one of the close protection guys turned to me. ‘Adapt and overcome,’ he said.
Adapt and overcome: it was what the Afghan people had been doing for years. As I left Kabul I couldn't help thinking there was a lot more adapting and overcoming to be done in the future. But there was, at least, light at the end of the tunnel. Nobody seemed to think that the Taliban were likely to take back power in the city and that, to my mind, counted for a lot.
The same could not be said, however, of Helmand Province. Here the insurgency was as ferocious as ever, and now that my time in Kabul was over, I prepared to return.
19. Pyramid Hill
For me, as for many people, Kajaki is a place of memories.
It was here, just over a year ago, that three soldiers from the Anglians had died in the friendly-fire incident in Mazdurak. It was here that I had spoken to their grieving colleagues. And it was from here that I had joined them in a mission to deny any equipment left behind in Mazdurak to the enemy.
Now, of course, the Anglians were long gone. Today, Kajaki was home to, among others, 45 Commando Royal Marines, Victor Company. The Marines' job was not to expand the FLET but to protect the dam which, when it is fully operational, will provide electricity to nearly 2 million people in southern Afghanistan. Maintaining the status quo is not straightforward. The area surrounding the base at Kajaki had always been littered with legacy mines, but I had heard that the threat from IEDs had hugely increased in the time that I had been away. The Taliban, it seemed, were starting to learn that they could not defeat the ISAF forces simply with guns, because we were always going to have greater and more advanced firepower than them. And so the war had become dirtier.
IEDs aren't like soldiers. They don't need to be fed or watered. They don't need to be trained or counselled. They require no clothes or heat. They don't have to go off and pray. They don't have to sleep. They just sit there on the battlefield 24/7, waiting to do their devastating, deadly work. And having seen at Headley Court what IEDs can do to people, I was more than a little apprehensive about going out on the ground again in this dangerous part of a dangerous province.
It was warmer than Kabul, being further south, but never much warmer than 5 or 6 degrees – a big difference from the intense heat I'd experienced during the summer tours. We arrived at Kajaki from Camp Bastion by Chinook in the evening, having flown along the Helmand river and up over the dam before turning round to access the LZ. As soon as we were on the ground and unloaded, that impressive helicopter rose straight up into the sky like a flying saucer, disappearing mysteriously into the blackness of the encroaching night before skimming back to Bastion along the river, popping flares as it went, with its Apache escort flying high overhead.
The Marines were somehow different to the other guys I'd met. Whereas the soldiers I'd been with previously would come back from ops and – quite understandably – allow themselves a bit of down time playing cards or Nintendo or whatever floated their boat, many of the Marines couldn't sit still. They had to be doing something all the time: boxing with each other or making things or fixing things. They were forever tinkering with their vehicles; the thunderboxes had a huge excavation underneath them to act as a makeshift cesspit. The food at Kajaki was the best I'd ever eaten at a forward operating base. I don't know why – maybe because it was wint
er and the supply chain was better. (The Marines were quick to pull me up for using the wrong lingo in their presence: food was no longer ‘scoff’ but ‘scran’; a cup of tea wasn't a ‘brew’ but a ‘wet’.) All in all, the base was in much better nick than when I first went out.
Even though the Marines were different in some ways, they shared similar concerns to other soldiers I had met, the issue of pay being one of them. One lad, for instance, explained to me, as I chatted with the FSG one morning, that his missus back home worked in a call centre and earned more than he did. Their biggest fear was becoming an amputee. The same lad told me of a mate of his who was paralysed from the chest down at the age of twenty-one thanks to a previous tour of Afghanistan. I'd like to say I was surprised, but I wasn't. Amputation had already happened to several guys on this tour and given that they spent most of their time fighting in a minefield, it was a very pertinent fear.
The Marines had one advantage, however, that the lads I'd met at Headley Court hadn't had. The WMIK Land Rovers, which offered scant protection against IEDs, had been replaced by the British-made Jackal. Wes, one of the FSG, showed me pictures of a Jackal he had been in when it had hit an IED. He and the other two lads had managed to escape pretty much unscathed. He laughed about having got a cracked rib. Then he gave me a tour of an actual vehicle. ‘They're brilliant pieces of kit,’ he told me. ‘Compared to the old WMIKs they're a lot better. You hit a mine in one of the Jackals and you'll probably survive, just with cuts and bruises.’ That was a definite improvement; but of course, you can't travel everywhere in a vehicle. An infantry soldier can't avoid moving on foot, and it wasn't long before I joined them doing just that.
