You can blame my dad.
I wasn’t fulfilled in the Marines and he knew it. The only part of being at Stonehouse I couldn’t fault was the social life. Plymouth is an amazing place for young people to let their hair down, even when it’s cut to within an inch of its life. I had some great friends there like Mike Jones, good marines, solid people. Away from the nightlife they all seemed to be having more fun than me. All my life Dad’s been the one who’s stopped me walking away from a challenge. So when he said, ‘Maybe you need a change of career,’ I knew it wasn’t me being weak.
‘Doing what though? I don’t want to go back to motor engineering.’
‘What about the Met? I think you’ll find it’s a lot more hands-on than what you’re doing.’
And so I started the process, which is almost as laborious as trying to get into the Marines. It would take time. This was the start of 2002. I’d have eighteen months’ notice to work out first, so nothing was going to happen immediately. It was just a relief to set the wheels in motion.
Some of my mates questioned my decision, obviously, and not only the ones down in Plymouth.
I sound a right miserable sod sometimes. I don’t think I am. That’s how run down the lack of opportunities had made me feel. I just wanted to do what I’d trained for. And if the Marines wouldn’t let me, then I needed to make things happen for myself.
* * *
The problem with contemporary books about Afghanistan is that they’re instantly out of date. Everything I read about the country aboard HMS Ocean seemed like old Pathé newsreels by the time it was announced that HQ & Sigs were heading out there. Things were changing daily. Everything had escalated. Whatever we were going over to do had the potential to be incredibly noisy, as they say in the military.
The Taliban, their rule over the country ended by the US invasion, were hiding in the southern mountains. The plan was to send a brigade of mountain troops as a show of force, not only to prove that we had the numbers, but to demonstrate how quickly they could be deployed in-country.
When 45 Commando had mobilised for Kosovo in 2000, we’d had four months to prepare. This time we had two weeks. Telling Deborah was awkward.
‘How long are you going for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And I’m just supposed to sit here and wait?’
She was mad as hell, but she said, ‘At least you’ll only be in the stores. You won’t be in danger.’
And that was the problem.
A brigade’s deployment is a big deal. But being busy can’t hide being bored. Even in the maelstrom of activity George 1 recognised I was going out of my mind.
‘I’ve got a little job for you,’ he said.
Vehicles are an essential part of modern warfare. We had dozens of Land Rovers in Plymouth ready to go. They were all what’s known as WMIKs (Weapons Mounted Installation Kit) – in other words, they carried enough weaponry to take on a small army. Which is why we needed to get them up to the RAF’s Brize Norton airbase in Oxfordshire asap.
A bunch of us from stores left Plymouth at six o’clock in the morning. It was a cold February morning in 2002, and there we were, wearing goggles, driving roofless vehicles designed for desert operation. I can’t say we looked anything other than ridiculous. At Brize Norton we were told to prep the WMIKs for travel. That means dropping tyre pressures, disconnecting radio and batteries, basically hours of work.
Then a guy said, ‘Have you got your gear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, then, get on the plane.’
That was it. I was going to Afghanistan.
Everything happened so quickly it was insane. There were a dozen of us on the plane, us drivers and others from elsewhere in the unit. We didn’t know each other or our mission. Or even our route. We must have changed planes five times, all the same rigmarole. Get the vehicles, move the vehicles, get yourself on board. And we are not talking British Airways business class. Twenty-six hours later, on our third stop – which we worked out was Pakistan; we weren’t told – we were separated from the Land Rovers and put on a Russian plane. At the time, Aeroflot’s safety record for civilian transport was among the worst in the world. This wasn’t civilian transport.
All of the crew were smoking. Everything was tied together with rope. And I swear where you peed, this hole in the main fuselage, went straight out into the ether. What did it matter, though? I and my eleven colleagues were just equipment being moved from A to B, no different from the Land Rovers. Comfort was never a consideration.
Nor was information. We weren’t told anything. When we landed again I asked where we were. I got one word.
‘Kabul.’
‘Is this our final destination?’
‘Wait over there.’
That was it. No explanation. It was pitch dark. Apart from a few runway lights and the glow of a building I assumed to be air traffic control, the only other thing I could see was the Russian plane. Ten minutes after dropping us off it left again. Almost immediately another aircraft landed and taxied to a stop. Its back doors opened and we were told to board.
Now this was a proper warplane and, judging by the amount of Brylcreem and the number of moustaches and guns, very obviously an American one. The mood among the US troops already on board was exactly as you see in the movies. Loud, brash, gung-ho. We took off again and when, after about an hour, we landed it was like a scene from Good Morning, Vietnam. No creeping into an airport this time. Wheels touched down, the aircraft taxied for a few minutes, braked to a halt, then the party started. The huge tailgates opened, a fierce red light came on and out of speakers that must have been 3 feet tall they started playing Elvis Presley’s ‘A Little Less Conversation’ at full volume. It was surreal. A proper American touchdown. The whole presentation was only ruined by the sight of a dozen totally green Royal Marines, forty hours into serious sleep deprivation, staggering bleary-eyed out into the darkness.
Talk about making an entrance. But no sooner had we disembarked than the tailgates closed, the plane taxied away and the bunch of us from Plymouth were left, once again, alone and scratching our heads.
I sat on my bergan, looked up at the stars and thought, What the hell has just happened?
* * *
We sat on the end of the runway for hours. As exhausted as I was I couldn’t sleep. No one did. We didn’t talk, either. We had become zombies.
I’ve never seen such darkness. No light pollution at all. I knew we were on a runway because that was where we had landed, but beyond that, nothing. As morning began to break I could make out vast shapes in the distance. Mountains, in every direction I looked. Memories of the Soviet forces chasing their own tails across that landscape came flooding back. How did people even survive up there? It was cold on the runway. It had to be freezing up there.
Eventually we heard engines. From the other end of the runway headlights emerged from the gloom and three Land Rovers, identical to the ones in which we’d started our journey, pulled up. Driving one was George 2 from stores, the man in charge of the air defence troop.
‘Welcome to Bagram,’ he smiled.
We drove in silence pretty much in a straight line for a couple of miles until we arrived at a dusty field where a couple of olive-green military tents were waiting for us. I was surprised we didn’t have to put them up. Using head torches, we claimed our own berths. There was no electricity, no utilities. It didn’t matter. We only wanted to sleep.
What seemed like seconds later we were woken for breakfast. Stepping, blinking, out of the tent, I looked over was the runway we’d driven down. It was like an old war museum. The shells of burnt-out Russian planes, military and civilian, lined the runway, which was itself pockmarked with craters made by heavy artillery shells. Clearly the last invaders had come under serious fire as they fled the country. Decades later, nothing had been repaired or replaced.
To the east of the runway some aircraft hangars were still intact, and had been claimed by the forces of the various nationalities in situ. The Americans had one, we had one and a few other European countries were in the process of renovating their own. They were in the process of building their own little camps.
The role of an advance party hasn’t changed much since Roman times. Back then the vanguard would arrive and start erecting tents for the legionnaires. Two thousand years later that’s exactly what we were ordered to do in a large field next to one already claimed by the Yanks. Each tent was large enough to sleep a dozen men and leave them room to live, work and administrate themselves. Behind us came the engineers to wire in generators for electricity. In four days we erected sixty of the bastard things, which in conditions at home would have proved tiring. In Bagram it was torture.
The swing in temperature from middle of the night to middle of the day was like opening a fridge, then an oven. We all started the fatigues with a warm jacket. By eight there were layers coming off. By nine we were pretty much naked. Of sixty tents I’d say that fifty plus were put up by men wearing little more than pants and a rifle. It was hard, hard work but at least we were only working with canvas and tent pegs. Around our field there was a team of engineers constructing a wall out of ‘Hesco bastion’ – 3-foot-square wire-mesh and hessian cages built up like a Lego wall, which are then filled with aggregate as protection against explosions and small-arms fire. The Americans had already established a quarry just off site. All day long a convoy of trucks went to and fro, filling the Hesco cubes with earth and rocks. By the time the lads were finished our tents were no longer inside a field. We were in a fortress with bombproof walls 12 foot high and 3 foot thick. In the neighbouring fields the Americans had built the same.
Occupying a foreign country, you really do start from scratch. While we were building our little slice of Britain there were engineers constructing a hospital, offices, shops – anything you would find in an average town. In a few days the masses would descend. Bagram needed to be ready to cope with anything.
Punishing and monotonous as the work was, I enjoyed being in a small group, rather than just one of the hordes gearing up to arrive. I liked seeing the nuts and bolts of the operation. Watching this incredible place being built from the ground up was eye-opening. By contrast, being kept out of the loop in Oman had nearly driven me mad.
The main runway ran along one side of the fortress and on the other side was a road that had been named Disney Drive, which linked everything up. You didn’t veer off the road if you could help it, for nother relic of the Russian invasion was the huge number of landmines all around the area. Our field had supposedly been cleared before we’d set up the tents, but that didn’t stop me finding something suspicious on day 1.
‘Er, guys,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a situation here.’
I had been hammering a peg into the ground when it hit something metallic just under the surface. Everyone dropped what they were doing and ran over. They all said the same thing.
‘Don’t move.’
The good thing about being in the advance party is that there’s always a bomb squad around. Two guys came running over, boxes of tools and blast suits with them. They cleared the earth from the device next to my hand, then had a poke around. I’m kneeling there in my Y-fronts thinking, This is not how I want to go.
‘It’s okay,’ one of them said. ‘It’s dormant. It’s been there too long.’
We found a good dozen more before we’d finished, all of them equally dud. But, as the bomb squad guy said, ‘We’ve cleared hundreds of live ones. This area’s riddled with them. You can’t take any chances.’
Every country has its own way of doing things. The Norwegian approach to clearing a minefield was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I watched one morning as a soldier pulled on a bomb suit and then was helped into what looked like weird clown shoes. They were made of plastic, and huge. That wasn’t the weird part. While he stood there another soldier inflated his shoes with an air pump and sent him out with his mine detector into a known minefield. It’s ingenious, really. Fully inflated his shoes were so wide and flat, like airbeds, that his weight, and thus the pressure from each steps, was spread over a large area. A landmines is usually detonated by pressure when a person steps on it or a vehicle drives over it, although there are other trigger mechanisms. When the Norwegian team did find something, they would detonate it from a safe distance and move on. As bizarre as this method looked it was incredibly efficient. Compared to the British, who are trained to inch along with metal detectors, the Norwegian soldiers cleared that field in record time.
As I said, all cultures have their own ways of clearing explosives, as I was to find out. When we weren’t building at Bagram, my little advance party took our turn on guard duty. I remember one of the first of these stints, when. I was in the tower looking out over the airfield. The Norwegians were clearing a field which no one from the coalition forces had been in before. On the other side of the field there was a farmer ploughing his land with a donkey. Suddenly there’s this big explosion. My radio crackles into life. Alarms start going off. The whole camp thinks we’re under attack. All around me I can see men and women scrambling to stand to, weapons ready. I’m the only one who can see that not only are we not under attack, but that all the Norwegians are fine – which can’t be said for the three-legged donkey over in the farmer’s field.
I managed to get the message across to HQ and then I watched, mesmerised, as the farmer, who had been at the plough being drawn by the donkey, brushed himself down then pulled out a pistol and shot the badly injured animal. Then he walked over to another field, got hold of another donkey, hitched it to the plough and continued to work as though nothing had happened. I guess it’s what you’re used to.
The farmer’s laissez-faire approach was understandable, heroic even. He’d lived among landmines for most his life. His kids’ behaviour, on the other hand, was a bit harder to swallow.
On my first night-time watch I was back in the same tower. I could see over the same farm plus two or three others further away. Even with the camp’s generators we kept electric light to a minimum at night. It didn’t matter. My night-vision goggles (NVGs) allowed me to see as far and as clearly in pitch black as I would be able to at midday. It was clear that the locals didn’t know this.
I was scanning the area and I noticed activity at the first farm. I saw a teenage boy, aged about sixteen or seventeen, and watched as he walked round to the field where the sheep and goats were kept. He went in, selected a goat, then walked it back the way he had come, towards the farmhouse. Then he tied it to a tree, pulled his trousers down and started having his way with the creature.
Just when you think you’ve seen everything … That is not something they teach you in PDT. It was gross, but I couldn’t stop watching. I thought at first the boy might be an exhibitionist, but I could tell that he had no idea we were watching. He couldn’t see us, why should we be able to see him? I’d like to report that was a one-off. In truth, every time I stood on night duty I’d see at least one young man and one (arguably) lucky animal.
When I wasn’t playing Peeping Tom on the locals there was training to be done. I’d try to get my run out of the way in the early morning, because by midday the heat would begin to takes its toll. We would go for firing practice on the range the Americans had built at the end of Disney Drive, and there was a certain amount of interaction with local Afghans, most of who seemed to be trying to sell us ancient military kit, including weapons, that the Russians had left behind when they pulled out in 1989.
‘Fun’ was a good word for those early days at Bagram. The real work started when the manpower began to arrive. The air defence troops sent their advance party who made up the majority of the guard force. Then the Brigade Reconnaissance Force (BRF) started to arrive, the troop in charge of surveillance and reconnaissance – the troop I wanted to join. The motor transport people flew in, then many of the signallers. They all had a lot of equipment, but the one thing they all had in common was that they needed more – and that meant returning to my day job with George 1. Instead of handing out blankets, however, we were supplying body armour and weapons, but knowing you won’t be using any of it yourself is a bit soul-destroying.
But I had a plan. Half a plan, at least. One of the last groups to arrive was 45 Commando, but it was them I most looked forward to seeing. They had their own camp near to ours, and because I still knew a lot of the Arbroath lads I started hanging out there as much as possible. Part of the reason was socialising. The rest was tactical: if there was any chance of networking my way out of the store room to do anything in the field, anything at all, then I needed to take it.
It had worked in Kosovo. Why not here?
As it turned out, it was a few mates I had in the BRF who proved the most helpful. One of their sub-units, the Tactical Air Control Parties, were light on manpower. It’s a specialist job, like most from HQ & Sigs, and highly prestigious. The TACPs are the people who go into theatre, establish where an enemy threat is located, then direct an air assault to that precise spot. A TAC Party comprises an officer – the main man, whose job is close air support (CAS) – and two signallers. It’s quite a sexy job and, depending on the scenario, can be very dangerous. In this case, given where they were being sent, it was decided the TACPs needed protection, so each three-man team was bolstered by another two bodies. We didn’t need to be specialist, we didn’t need to know about signals. Our basic requirement was to be able to protect the talent and carry extra supplies and ammunition (although the fact that I did have a signals background didn’t hurt).
Each mission was to last for ten to twelve days, so getting George 1 to sign off on me disappearing for nearly a fortnight was my biggest hurdle. But he knew that I was desperate to get out in the field, to see real action, and he wasn’t going to be the one to hold me back.
‘Cheers, George,’ I said, ‘I owe you.’
‘Yes, you do.’
The irony wasn’t lost on me that of all the crap decisions I’d made, the best opportunity looked like being the one decision that I hadn’t taken.
* * *
I was genuinely excited at being involved. Even the thought of the journey was getting the adrenalin going. All the helicopter training in the world cannot prepare you for the thrill of actually boarding a CH-47 Chinook for the first time in anger. It’s such an iconic military symbol. Its huge size, the twin rotors, the way the tailgate just drops down so you walk up the wide ramp at the back, the fact that it’s been around since the 1960s, its incredible top speed of 170 knots (nearly 200 mph/320 kph) – it’s the stuff of legend.
I wasn’t the only one excited. In the run-up to the mission the ground crew started ripping everything out of the Chinooks. It looked like they were searching for something. In reality, they were cutting out all excess weight. Because Bagram itself was already 1,500 metres above sea level, by the time we got into the mountains we’d be so high and the air so thin that the choppers would have to work harder to maintain lift. Hence stripping out anything that wasn’t mission critical. Who needs seats anyway?
I thought I’d be flying with just my group, led by a CAS officer called Phil Guy. The more planning that went into these Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols (LRRPs, pronounced ‘lurps’) the more those plans started to change. Our revised mission orders were to fly out, dominate an area, comb it for Taliban and, if successful, take them down. You can’t dominate with five people. In fact, given the hostility of the enemy and the terrain, it had been decided to send larger groups – or ‘multiples’ – into each site. We’d have snipers, surveillance experts, mountain leaders, you name it, the full works. Each Chinook would carry a dozen men. On occasion five multiples would mobilise together. If this mob couldn’t locate and destroy a group of enemy fighters, then nobody could.
When the Chinook took off for the first time I was smiling like a kid. One of the usual TACP guys caught me.
‘I wouldn’t look so happy if I were you.’
‘Why?’
He gestured to the cockpit.
‘Female pilot.’
Then he pulled a worried face and went back to talking to his mate.
I wasn’t the only person who heard him and, men being men, we shared a moment of joking about the pilot’s handbag getting caught on the clutch, whether she’d be able to park, that sort of crap. Totally out of order. In one respect, though, it turned out we weren’t far wrong. The female pilot couldn’t park. But then, no one would have been able to.
We’d been flying for a couple of hours when the Chinook slowed and came into the hover, and Phil Guy said, ‘It’s too steep to land. We’re blade-sailing in.’
Everyone else knew what this meant. I got a rough idea when the giant back doors started to winch down. The temperature might have been over 300 degrees on the ground but the wind that came howling in was Arctic. When I caught my breath I could see what the plan was. The tail ramp was lowered until it protruded by about 3.5 metres. Once it was fully extended like a drawbridge the pilot inched us towards the ridgeline until she got a touch. Phil gave the ramp a stamp then waved his arm.
‘Move out.’
One by one everyone checked that their equipment was tight on their backs, cocked their weapons in case of a hostile reception the other side, then ran down this temporary airborne ramp onto the waiting mountain edge. No one thought once about the 3000-metre drop on either side of the 3 x 4-metre ramp. In fact, the guy who’d mocked the ‘woman driver’ was first off. He was a total wind-up merchant. He had absolute confidence in his pilot. And by then, so had everyone else.
Phil’s biggest concern was whether Taliban forces were near by. A dozen men scurrying down a ramp, one at a time, would be easy targets, like picking off fish in a barrel. The most irresistible target, though, was the Chinook itself. As soon as the lads hit terra firma they went into full cover mode, scanning everywhere for potential threats. One single shot fired and the helicopter would pull up and away. You had better not be on the ramp when it did.
I admit I had to take a couple of breaths while I waited in the chopper to join them. I could see it in my mind: you’re carrying so much weight, one gust of wind and you could be lifted right off. And that’s if a sniper doesn’t get you. What the hell am I doing? Suddenly it was my turn and the time for doubts was gone. ‘Come on, Rob,’ I said, ‘let’s do this,’ and off I ran into thin air. It was incredible, really. The only thing more impressive was watching it from outside. That Chinook did not budge a millimetre. I’ve driven on bridges less stable than that ramp. The only mistake came from one of the lads, who shot off so quickly he slipped and his bergan went over the side. That was eerie, watching it plummet for seconds before it struck the mountainside hundreds of feet below. Moments earlier it had been attached to his arm.
When we were clear Phil gave the word and the chopper pulled forwards, the ramp still down. Every second counts when you’re a potential target. As the door wound shut the CH-47 gave a little pirouette so the pilot could salute us all. I can assure you now that that is the first and last time I ever doubted the ability of a woman in the Marines. Anywhere, in fact. So I guess some good came out of my time in Afghan.
The area secured, Phil had a word with the guy who’d dropped his bergan and told him to go and fetch it. I was assigned to go with him. To this day I can’t believe we did that. Two men walking and scrambling for a couple of hours on their own in hostile territory would be unheard of today.
It’s a major principle of the Marines that you never leave a trace of where you’ve been. They beat it into you at Lympstone. They’re normally talking about litter, So the idea of abandoning a whole bergan would make their heads spin. Whenever we leave anywhere we burn everything we’re not carrying out. It’s a huge element of fieldcraft.
We got down and up the mountain without incident. Whatever intelligence had led us to this particular rockface, it was out of date. We marched every day and found no trace of Taliban. Returning to Bagram without a shot being fired was anticlimactic for everyone. For me, it was worse because I had to pick up my store duties. George 1 was sympathetic, but he did say, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
I knew he’d had a hard time during the Falklands conflict. He’d told me stories of desperately trying to dig a hole in the mountainside to escape the fire from the Argentinian snipers picking off his friends. It had changed him, he knew that. But he also knew you can’t tell a testosterone-filled young man not to be excited about getting his first real taste of action.
* * *
I thought my next release with the TACP had more potential. The American forces active in Tora Bora – a Taliban stronghold in a complex of caves to the east, close to the border with Pakistan – had suffered casualties. The men on the ground couldn’t get to them. You never leave a man behind, alive, wounded or dead, so choppers were scrambled to collect the bodies. It’s frightening how quickly it all came together. One minute I was in the store, the next I was suited up and piling into the back of one of seven idling Chinooks. We were in the air before the rear doors were even up. It was that kind of mission.
Near the target area the Chinooks split up. From what I could see from the window and make out from the radio chatter, we were all surveying different points of the danger zone, scanning for Taliban threats. The noise of seven Chinooks is deafening. Anyone on the ground not intimidated into fleeing is either brave or stupid. Or on a suicide mission – a very real possibility in that region. We all put down at vantage points above the stranded Americans and secured the area. Down below the emergency boys – US Special Forces sent in to rescue or recover the casualties – were in and out in minutes. Job done.
Two missions, no shots fired, lethal or otherwise.
Maybe next time …
My enthusiasm levels never dropped. The patrols were all potentially extremely dangerous. I always believed that the next mission would be the one. Five or six sorties in, however, the closest we had come to enemy weapons was by accident.
A patrol had ventured into a village to question the locals through interpreters. The rest of us formed a security cordon around the village.
‘No, no, no one bad here,’ a village elder was saying. ‘The Taliban have never been here.’
While he was talking one of the lads leant against a wall for a breather. There was a crash and the next thing we knew he was on his back in a pile of rubble – surrounded by high-end machine guns. The building was a massive ammunitions cache, and obviously everyone in that village would have known this. Not that the elder was giving anything away.
‘I don’t know how they got there. The Taliban never come here.’
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You learn never to take what the locals say at face value. So when in another village an Afghan said, ‘You might want to check that cave in the mountain because the Russians used to use it,’ we immediately thought it would be either a red herring or a trap. Phil led us up, on full red alert. We took the cave from several directions at once – and unearthed the largest haul of explosives ever found in the country. Tons of the stuff. Much of it was Russian, but there was a lot more that had been stockpiled more recently. We called in the bomb boys and they detonated the lot, taking down much of the mountain in the process.
Yet despite one false lead after another, you could never drop your guard. Just because we weren’t being shot at, there were plenty of other patrols suffering casualties and losses. The threat was definitely there – just never ‘there’ there. I lost count of the times we arrived at a scene to find clear evidence of Taliban activity but no bodies. They were either very lucky, or very clever.
Two months and half a dozen missions in, my most exciting contribution had been coordinating a landing site with the supply helicopter so we could get refills of water. As the highest level of infantrymen, marines are trained to carry more weight than other troops, and in a mountain patrol most of that weight will be water. Even Green Berets can’t carry enough for a fortnight, though, so every four days fresh packs would be despatched. Because I was part of the Tactical Air Control Party, nine times out of ten I was the guy managing the resupply. We’d mark out a secure landing area, the chopper would touch down for however many seconds it took to chuck out the food and drink, then it would bounce back up and away.
It’s important that every man is responsible for his own supplies. We carried enough meals for five days. Each one is in a silver-foil packet that you heat in boiling water then rip open and hold as you eat the contents. It sounds basic, but the food itself was okay.
Not dropping our standards ran through everything. Even up a mountain thousands of miles from home we were all expected to be as fastidious as ever, from how we ran our camp to how we administrated ourselves. That meant proper areas for toilets that could cope with up to fifty people, proper positions dug into the earth to sleep in – and of course perfectly smooth faces. Because of the need not to waste water we didn’t wash, we cleaned our teeth without toothpaste, but what we never skimped on was shaving. There was a practical application, however. The threat of a chemical attack was very real. We all carried gas masks, and these seal a lot more efficiently if they’re not having to be fitted over a beard. So going unshaven was a practical concern, although it was clearly not one shared by the Americans, who proudly wore their moustaches and designer stubble and thought they looked the dogs’ bollocks.
Not everyone agreed with them. One day we were working our way around a series of villages to the east of a wadi – a dried-up riverbed. Being lower than ground level the wadi gave us natural cover in which to sleep. This was a big mission, five Chinooks’ worth of personnel lined up along the bed. The routine stays the same: sentries through the night and a full company ‘stand to’ with weapons primed first thing in the morning and last thing at night, the two most likely times to be attacked. Anyone not on radio duties will take up his position, ready to respond to any threat. We must have done this fifty or sixtly times in one place or another. Not once did we see a soul – except this time.
A sentry spotted the threat first. Walking towards us was a group of six young Afghan men, all armed. I could see at least two AK-47s and recognised other variants. These boys were not messing around.
So why were they so exposed, and in broad daylight?
My first instinct is that they’re a distraction. Is some greater threat creeping up on us from behind? But the sentries on that side shake their heads.
Nothing.
So what are these fuckers doing?
This is it, I’m thinking, action stations.
Card Alpha was operational. The ROE were clear. We couldn’t fire a lethal shot unless attacked. The decision Phil Guy and the other officers had to make was, at what point did a threat become an attack? For all we knew these Afghans were weighed down with bomb vests. If they got close enough they could decimate us without firing a shot.
What the hell are they doing?
I can feel the tension in the wadi. Everyone’s at 100 per cent readiness. Phil’s radioing in for advice – for clarification on Card Alpha. Then someone calls out, ‘Captain – look at their guns.’
Anyone near a pair of bins grabbed them.
What the …?
Sticking out of the muzzle of every one of the Afghans’ rifles was a flower. Poppies, mainly. I wasn’t buying it. It made no sense.
If this isn’t a diversion, I don’t know what is.
Phil summoned the interpreters. This is where those guys earn their money. They’re not infantry-trained but they still have to get out into the front line.
In their own language they called out what I assume was ‘What’s your intention?’
The men stopped and waved and smiled. Then one called back, ‘We’ve come to visit the brave British men.’ And that’s when I noticed they were all wearing makeup.
Phil gave the order and we spilled out of the wadi to surround them. They didn’t look scared, or threatening. They actually looked happy. The chat among thems was gleeful, if anything. I asked an interpreter what they were saying. He looked almost tongue-tied.
‘They’re saying how pretty you all are with your lovely shaved faces!’
I’ve heard it all now, I thought. These men, of an obvious persuasion, had risked their lives to get a look at the famous clean-shaven marines. They were sick, they said, of staring at hairy Afghans and stubbly Yanks.
We’re only human, so a bit of flattery earned them a cup of tea and a bite to eat from our foil ration bags. Then they skipped off as menacingly as they’d arrived.
* * *
My tour in Afghanistan was coming to an end. I’d arrived in February. It was now May. In one of the camps near by I’d chat to few of the Special Forces guys I’d met. They were seeing action every time they left camp. It was torturing me that the TACP kept having near misses.
‘Maybe you’ll get lucky next time,’ one of them said. ‘And we can come and tidy up for you.’
‘Fuck you.’
Little did he know it, but our luck did change. Although not for everyone. A lot of our LRRPs were to the south of Kabul, to Gardez, to places of interest along the Pakistan border. For my final sortie we were in Khost, south-east of Gardez and close to the border. On this occasion the intel was solid. Massive recent Taliban activity, so another operation for fifty of us. But we didn’t fly out immediately. There was a gap of several days while support vehicles made the journey by road. I knew what result that would bring: another missed opportunity. Even so, HQ had to get one right eventually. Didn’t they?
Where we set up camp was barren desert. We parked the vehicles, dug trenches to sleep in and settled down for the evening. We were almost certainly a tad blasé by now. I was sitting on my bergan talking shit to the guy next to me. Others were sleeping, some were eating, some were playing cards.
And then some were shooting.
Out of nowhere the sound of repeated gunfire tore through the silence. The sentry was unleashing all barrels.
‘Fuck, we’re under attack!’
We’re all dressed for action. Our weapons are within reach. We can be up and aiming the dangerous end of a rifle outwards in seconds. I did and so did everyone else around me.
And we were all too late.
In the distance was the smoking husk of a van. Next to it were the dismembered remains of an Afghan national. All around me were ten men high-fiving each other for a successful defence of the camp. And, more importantly, a successful kill.
That adrenalin spike you get when you think your life’s in danger takes an age to subside. The more I heard how the sentry had spotted a van acting mysteriously and radioed the other sentries to stand to, the more I wished I’d been on look-out duty. The driver had stepped out of the van and lined up to shoot at the one sentry he could see. As he did, the sentry fired back. At the same moment ten BRF boys stood up from the trench. One of the guys had a UGL 23 – an underslung grenade launcher fitted beneath the barrel of his rifle – and scored a direct hit on the van. It and its passengers were destroyed on impact. The rest of the lads emptied a magazine each into the hostile.
Bloody typical, I thought. Why wasn’t I on sentry duty?
And that was it. That was my Afghanistan. Thrilling at times, but ultimately unfulfilling. The government, more interested in the bigger picture, declared our mission a success and the order was given to pull out. If that mission had been to prove how quickly the brigade could deploy, how much intelligence it could gather and how few casualties it would suffer. then it had been a success. But on a personal level, it had offered more than it delivered.
Everyone left. One day 45 Commando were there. The next day they weren’t. My camp emptied itself just as fast till the only marines still hanging around were those who’d arrived first. Every single tent we’d erected we now had to take down – and burn. Cheaper, it’s said, than carrying them home – and the Marine code said we definitely couldn’t leave them behind. And then, suddenly, we were done. I looked at the field. What had been a bustling community for four and a half months was an empty shell. A ghost town.
I didn’t have high hopes for the journey home. We were put on a bus with no suspension to Kabul airport, about 60 kilometres due south. I could imagine that the bus’s aircraft equivalent was already waiting for us. At the airport we sat in a tent, waiting for our flight. A large white jumbo jet landed, taxied to a halt and completely blocked our view. I couldn’t believe it when we were told that it was there for us. It was an Icelandair passenger plane. Civilians would be on board. What the hell were they going to think of us?
I never found out. The stewardesses, on the other hand, could not have been lovelier. The food and the drink and the beautiful flight attendants just kept on coming. It was the happiest I’d been since I’d boarded that Chinook.
Just my luck, I thought, if we get shot out of the sky before I’ve tasted everything.
* * *
When we built the fire at Bagram, it wasn’t just the tents that burned. I felt my love of the Marines die as well. It just hadn’t lived up to my expectations. As I watched the flames I knew I’d done the right thing in applying for the Met. My girlfriend, Deborah, certainly thought so. No sooner was I back than we decided to take the step of moving in together. We both needed some commitment in our lives.
We all had a break. Back in Plymouth I started on some more courses, this time aimed at transitioning me from the military into civilian life. For the rest of the year my marine ‘work’ took a back seat. They knew I was leaving, I knew I was leaving. It was just a matter of counting down the days and trying to stay busy, which I managed to do successfully beyond Christmas and into the new year. And then one day I bumped into George 2. I hadn’t seen him since Afghan.
‘Are you coming with us?’ he asked, as bullish as ever.
‘Coming with you where?’
He pulled a face.
‘Where?’ he laughed. ‘Iraq of course. We leave in two weeks.’
Ohhhhh shiiiiittt …