Even in a war zone, some things are almost more important than life and death. For example, it doesn’t pay to forget your wife’s birthday. Carly’s happened to be on 23 May, a couple of weeks after mine, and so I rang her from the ops room. She wasn’t celebrating with a slaughtered goat on a spit. She was taking the boys for a well-earned break to Spain. It was a bizarre conversation, if I’m honest. I was happy for her, I really was, although I’m not sure I showed it. I’m not sure I could have. The world she was describing seemed a million miles from where I’d been over the last weeks. The things I’d seen, the things I’d done. There was no way to share them down a dodgy phone line. Not in a way she’d understand. In fact, I wasn’t sure she’d ever understand.
She was aware of the news in general but we danced around specifics.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Are you eating enough?’
‘Food’s not the problem. It’s the bloody heat.’
‘I don’t know what you’re moaning about. That’s why we’re going to Spain.’
I could see a clock from where I was sitting so I knew it was time to wrap up.
‘Love to the boys.’
‘Okay, be safe. Phone me in two weeks and I’ll tell you all about it.’
And that was it. I hung up the phone, left the ops room and climbed on board a waiting helicopter.
Carly and the kids were going to the Costa Brava. I was going into battle.
* * *
While Carly had been packing her suntan lotion, I was packing my rifle. The one that had already taken a man’s life. She wasn’t the only one heading off. The whole of J Company was flying out to the region where the young marine had lost his life. The mission was simple. We were going, in numbers, to put a stop to the insurgent supremacy in that area.
And avenge a fallen comrade.
It was big deal. There were fifty-five of us flying in on a ten-day mission. The plan was for J Company to act as a lure, essentially, to engage with Taliban aggressors in one area while an engineering division could begin to secure the region and start to rebuild the villages and supply routes destroyed by the insurgents. Our destination was a compound in the Nad Ali part of Helmand, about four kilometres east of our usual area of responsibility, a long march or a short drive away. But our helicopters weren’t to take us there. First we were going to Bastion for mission briefing and to ensure everyone knew their specific AORs (areas of responsibility). Nothing was left to chance.
All my lads were up for the fight. The loss of a marine to an IED was tragic and each of us was itching to right that wrong. None of us contemplated the same fate befalling us. I don’t think you can if you’re about to step into a live battlefield. Which is why I was actually a bit pissed off when the padre came to find us on our last night at Bastion.
Some guys do draw comfort from a man of the cloth reminding them that there is more in Heaven and Hell than we experience on earth. I’m not one of them. As I said to Fergie, ‘Someone doesn’t think we’re coming back alive. They may as well have sent a damn vulture.’
With the encouragement of knowing Command knew more about the scenario we were entering than they were letting on, we finally set off. It was a big deal. There were four groups made up of personnel from my lot, Kamiabi, M’lord’s Taalander and Al’s 2ic and Kaz, the Canadian medic, from Omar. Al stayed behind because of problems in his own area. There was also an HQ element present, including our Sunray Steve McCulley and his 2ic, Captain G-side, plus several FACs (forward air controllers). Obviously where we were going could require bombs being dropped from aircraft, and these were the guys who could do it on the hoof.
We flew at night, as 23 May turned into the 24th. I don’t know how the helicopters took off. Each man was carrying so much – water, a roll mat, shovels, sleeping bag, tons of ammunition, surveillance equipment, extra batteries, extra clothing – we barely stumbled on board. A couple of guys had to be helped just to stand up. It was worse the other end. Because of the terrain the closest the choppers could land to the compound we were going to inhabit was still 600 metres away. Just the idea of the walk made you feel tired. Luckily, then, we got a rest as soon as the helicopters took off.
Just not the kind we were expecting.
No sooner were we on the ground than John, my translator, was tapping me on the shoulder. As usual his walkie-talkie was pinned to his ear.
‘Rob, Rob, you need to listen. This is not good.’
He handed me the radio. It was going banzai. Even though I couldn’t understand the language I could tell the tone was animated beyond belief. And the amount of chatter was off the charts. Someone had kicked the hornet’s nest.
‘John, tell me everything being said. I need codenames, everything. Something huge is going on.’
Sometimes the Taliban would jump on the radio and make threats just to intimidate us. On those occasions there’d be just a couple of voices doing the talking. You figured there weren’t exactly troops waiting behind them.
This could not have been more different. I couldn’t keep up with the stream of handles John started rattling off. I managed to scrawl a few on my glove but the list kept coming. Within minutes I had run out of space and had to use my sleeve.
This was not intimidation. This, whatever it was, was real.
John was repeating everything verbatim, not really processing the content in his own head. Suddenly he froze.
‘They’re saying the Americans have landed,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘where? We have to warn them.’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘The Americans have landed here. They’re talking about us. They can see us.’
Shit.
I radioed to the front of the group. All the leaders were hearing the same thing.
‘Everyone down!’
Steve gave the command but we were all thinking it. Using NVGs in the darkness I saw we were in the middle of a field, surrounded at its perimeter by a thick cover of trees. There were taller crops where we needed to get to that offered some visual protection, but they would do nothing against bullets.
At the front Steve and his team had their heads down. How had the Taliban known we were coming? What were their plans? And how serious was the threat?
That soon became very clear.
‘Rob, they’re saying they need to “move the big thing”,’ John said. ‘They’re saying, “Get as many as we can. Don’t let the Americans leave that field alive.”’
We lay there for what seemed like an eternity, listening to Afghan chatter. Knowing that every unintelligible word spoken is a part of a threat against your own existence is an odd sensation. One of my lads snapped.
‘This is ridiculous. Can’t the checkpoint send transport?’
I laughed. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there isn’t a checkpoint till we get there.’
It was the same scenario as our desert jaunt. To keep intel about our movements to a minimum, no one had been informed of where we’d be staying. Not even the family currently living there. Unfortunately for them, the compound we were heading to had been identified by Bastion as the perfect size and location for our company. The plan was that an advance party, including translators and Afghan forces, would go and negotiate rental of the compound. That, we hoped, was going on while we were lying in the field. I wished it would all hurry up.
‘If we’re not careful this will be “watermelons” all over again.’
Nerves were becoming frayed. Sod the kit we were carrying, we all just wanted to run. Impossible weight versus impossible wait. As the dawn came up, it just made us more determined. I saw children and women beyond the trees, all rushing, all fleeing, desperate to head in the opposite direction to us. There was mad panic, no other words for it.
What the hell do they know that we don’t?
Eventually we were given the order to move out. The residents at the compound had put up a good fight. But faced with moving out with generous compensation or being evicted at gunpoint by the Afghani forces with no compensation, they’d done the sensible thing.
This was good news, but for it to mean anything we had to get there before the heat got too great to walk in – and while we still had our lives. Not everyone was up for it. We’d barely made it to the cover of the crops when my 2ic for the operation, Snake, toppled forwards.
Your first instinct is attack but the only noises we heard came from him. Our medic Kaz broke the line and ran up.
‘Stomach cramps,’ he said. ‘He needs water.’
Dehydration is a massive problem in normal conditions. Carrying the loads we were, it could kill you. While we were treating Snake I got a radio report that M’lord had gone down with the same complaint. Two others followed moments later. They also had diarrhoea. No sooner did I hear this than Snake started suffering the same way.
‘It’s a virus,’ Kaz announced. ‘We need to get them quarantined.’
Before that we had to get them – and everyone else – to safety. It was already a challenge with just our baggage. Supporting four ailing teammates made it nigh on impossible to travel at any speed other than a shuffle.
When we finally emerged from the tall crop field I could see a dusty track, not dissimilar to what passed for a main road at Mulladad.
The walk along the track was on high alert. Guns were held at the ready, alternately pointed left and right, up and down. Extra men guarded the wounded and their helpers. It was like walking along Garnzi Street, except here we were not alone. Despite the early hour, dozens of young men on scooters bombed up and down the track, all of them craning their necks to get a good look at us as they passed.
‘If we got biometrics on half this lot we’d win the war,’ Fergie said.
I didn’t doubt him for a minute.
The atmosphere was as tense as the going was tough. When we finally made it inside the compound’s 3-metre-thick walls I thought my knees were going to buckle. Some of the lads already there had gone one stage further. The compound was large – it needed to be to fit us – with an orchard at one end, and a stream on the outside of the walls. Where the owners had extended their plot beyond the stream it actually ran under the wall at one point and into the compound. I was still throwing my baggage down while a dozen or more guys were already jumping in. After the night we’d just had no one could blame them.
But it did mean that, when the first attack came, we were caught – quite literally – with our pants down.
* * *
Steve McCulley lined up the four multiple commanders and gave us each a quarter of the compound – now christened Checkpoint Toki – to look after. I immediately got to work organising my sentries on the mud buildings’ roofs and building protective walls of sandbags around other virus casualties under a tree in the courtyard in the centre of the compound.
The sandbag nest was still under construction when the first shot came.
It missed everyone and everything, but it got our attention. The sentries and the lads building the walls dived for cover to return fire. At the same time I heard further shots coming in from points all around the compound. There was so much noise, so much shouting, so much confusion. One thing emerged: all the sentry points were being attacked at once.
This is not coincidence.
I ran to take a position on the roof of one of the buildings. Out of the corner of my eye I could make out Kaz and the other swimmers dragging their semi-naked carcasses out of the stream and grabbing their rifles and uniforms. What I didn’t see was the RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) soaring in from the south. But I heard it. And I saw where it hit.
I’ve read and heard lots of accounts of the Taliban being a backward culture – and, in my opinion, they largely are. But not militarily. There were occasions in Afghan where I would have doffed my cap at some of the tactical decisions they made if I hadn’t been trying to kill them.
This was one of those times.
The initial rounds fired at all four sentries at once drove every able-bodied marksman onto higher ground to return fire. That was precisely the moment at which the insurgents launched a series of RPGs into the centre of the compound.
The grenades themselves landed far away from anyone. But the reach of the explosion was massive. The shrapnel spray flew in every direction. White-hot shards of metal scarred the walls, the trees.
And our men.
Snake, M’lord and the others resting in the shade were all caught by the wave of metal. M’lord was struck in the neck. Snake was hit from behind, between the shoulders. One of the engineers clearing the compound got shrapnel in his foot. They weren’t fatal injuries but they were all nasty and all required medical attention. Plus, the attack was still going on.
Confusion reigned. We had no idea where the threat was coming from. We hadn’t got our bearings, we hadn’t patrolled, I personally hadn’t even looked at a map since Bastion. And, unlike the insurgents, we were afraid of hitting civilians. We needed a target, plain and simple.
The distinctive muzzle flash of a rifle flared from just above a wall about 30 metres in front of us. That was enough to go on. The lads opened fire. As we did, other shots came in from new positions. They were 360 degrees around us and maximising the advantage. Even the bullets that missed us ricocheted off the compound walls like a deadly pinball. At least each time they fired we gained new targets. For two hours it was all-out shooting, total mayhem. We were lighting up the entire area. No wonder the women and children had been fleeing earlier. This had all been planned down to the second.
In the first sixty minutes I was confident that we had superior technology and training. In the second sixty I remained resolute. As we entered our third hour, however, the doubts started to creep in. Our machine guns were awesome weapons, but they were tearing through the rounds.
‘Lads,’ I said, ‘you need to slow down. Much more of this and we’re going to run out of ammo.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ Fergie said. ‘We need to end this.’
As darkness began to fall I contacted Steve.
‘One of my snipers has seen muzzle flash about 200 metres north. Permission to engage with the 66?’
‘Hold fire,’ he said. ‘I’m bringing in air support.’
A couple of minutes of later there was the familiar roar of a French Air Force Mirage jet overhead. I assumed it was going to drop a bomb. It banked for a couple of seconds, then levelled out and opened fire with a massive 90-degree strafing run of cannon fire across the tower building.
It was devastating and loud and it did the trick. After that everything went very, very quiet.
* * *
I’m not saying for a second that the Mirage killed the entire opposition during that manoeuvre. But it did demonstrate the almighty power at our disposal. That coupled with the knowledge that our NVGs were far superior to theirs, encouraged the insurgents to put away their guns.
At least for the time being.
We needed to patch up the wounded, so as many men as the medics needed jumped on that. There were also fires that needed to be extinguished, inside and outside of the compound, and ballbearing bombs that had hit but not detonated requiring attention. The majority of the men, led by Damo and his boys, were on security detail. Steve McCulley was superb at directing the best people to the right jobs. For me he had another task.
‘I need someone to go out and do a battle damage estimate.’
We need to check if we killed anyone.
‘Are you up for it, Rob?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Great. Get going.’
I took six men. All marines, no interpreters, no medics. It’s the minimum we needed and the maximum we could spare. I decided to leave behind the ECMs (electronic countermeasures). They were too heavy and we all had jelly legs from the morning. Also, they might not survive the route I was planning.
The insurgents may have packed up shop for the night but there wasn’t a man in Toki who didn’t believe that IEDs would have been installed outside the main gate the second we’d all locked ourselves in. There was no way of leaving in a hurry without major risk.
‘What about the stream?’ I suggested. ‘We could all swim out there.’
Sometimes the worst ideas are the best. And we’d get to cool down.
I led the boys into the courtyard, we stepped into the stream and waded towards the wall. Then I held my breath, dived under and swam. It was barely two strokes but knowing you can’t come up because there’s a fucking great wall above your head adds that frisson of pressure. The risk that twenty Taliban rifles will be pointing at your head when you pop up adds to that frisson.
I emerged the other side unscathed. I looked up and saw the reassuring sight of three snipers on top of the wall covering our exit. As we waded upstream, they were with us every inch of the way.
I thought I knew alertness. I thought Garnzi Street had pushed me to the limits of my awareness. This was different. Different class. Different scale. If I had a ‘Spider-Sense’, Spider-Man’s hyperawareness, it was operational. I was aware of every insect hovering over me, every bird chirruping behind my back, every rustle of leaves as the wind picked up.
Slowly we inched our way up to where the jet had made its strafing run. I couldn’t help being impressed. There were massive holes the size of two fists where each round had gone through the walls. If I say that our bullets were just bouncing off these same targets you will have an idea of how powerful a Mirage’s armoury is.
Using just hand signals – like you see in the movies – we inched cautiously around the building. Weapons ready, postures aggressive, Spider-Sense turned up to the max. As we approached the north-east – and final – corner of the building I put my hand up.
Stop.
I could hear something. Someone.
I turned to face the lads. ‘Around that corner,’ I whispered, ‘could be an insurgent. On your toes.’
I counted down from three with my fingers, then we swung around the corner en masse, rifles hot.
And saw an old woman peeling fruit.
She was just sitting there. An old lady in rags, minding her own business. Obviously it looked like a trap. We scoured the ground for tripwires, the walls for IEDs, the windows for snipers. Nothing. I radioed in that I wanted an interpreter. In the meantime, with one lad remaining with the woman, the rest of us turned the building inside out.
Nothing. No one. Not a single body.
You don’t like to think of anyone being killed but, when you’ve got four good mates with serious injuries back at base, part of you wants – needs – some payback. We just didn’t have any. There were no blood trails, no signs of injury even. The Mirage had ended the fight, but the score stayed resolutely the same: Taliban 4–Royal Marines 0.
By the time we’d searched the building some locals had started to appear. They were trying to talk to us but I kept them all at a safe distance. Friend or foe? When you don’t share a language it’s impossible to tell. Only when the recce lads arrived with an interpreter could I begin to relax.
The old woman said, ‘The Taliban were here.’
‘I know that,’ I said, through the interpreter. ‘Tell me about them.’
She shrugged, still shaving her pears. ‘They come and go when they please. I don’t stop them, they don’t hurt me. These people –’ she gestured to her neighbours – ‘they don’t help them but they don’t oppose them either.’
‘Are you on our side or not?’ I said.
‘I’m not for you or against you. But I do wish you hadn’t come.’
Other villagers said the same thing.
‘Go home. We don’t need you. We are safer when you’re not here.’
‘But the Taliban want to rule you with violence.’
‘It is what it is. But they don’t have helicopters.’
I told the old woman and everyone else the same thing: ‘We are here to help. We are here to rebuild your village, to guard your safety, to protect your rights as Afghans. We don’t want anything from you. Trust us, please. We are not the enemy.’
We weren’t – I believed that. But almost everything else was a lie. L Company would do all the good deeds I promised. The purpose of my lads, and J Company as a whole, was very different. But I could hardly tell the locals that. How do you explain ‘We’re here to draw fire away from our colleagues?’ Or ‘We’re here to put your lives in danger.’
And, I was about to discover, our own.