Up until this point it had just been an idea.
I wasn't in any way blasé about going to Afghanistan, but now what had seemed like a wild, exciting plan had turned into a stark reality. It was like joining up, and I don't feel at all shy about admitting that I felt cold fear at what I had let myself in for. Half of me wanted to run away from the whole thing, to hide and pretend I'd never even suggested it. But after all the strings we had pulled and all the meetings we'd had, after Stuart Carver and Ian Robertson had taken the brave decision to let us accompany them on their six-month tour, there was no way we could back out. And my pride wouldn't have let me do that anyway.
Looking back, I think my reaction was a natural one. A normal one. Probably not much different to the feeling any soldier gets when they learn they are about to be deployed. There's a sense of excitement, certainly, but if anyone tells you they're not scared before going somewhere as dangerous as Helmand Province, either they've got a synapse missing or they're lying.
The only thing you can do is make sure you're well prepared for the challenges to come. So it was that eight weeks before the Anglians were to be deployed, we found ourselves heading to the Army Training Estate on Salisbury Plain. Our motives were twofold. We wanted to get to know some of the soldiers and officers we were to spend time with out in Helmand Province; and we wanted to take part in their training. After all, the intention had never been for us to observe events from the sidelines. We were going to be in the thick of it, on ops side by side with the infantrymen as they engaged their fanatical Taliban enemy. It was essential that we knew how to stay safe – and to defend ourselves if necessary.
The army have not always had a happy relationship with the media, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that when we turned up for training exercises on Salisbury Plain we sensed a feeling of edginess, a feeling that we weren't entirely trusted by the regular soldiers, or indeed by the officers. This didn't stop the guys opening up to us, however, and it was clear from the off that morale was high, and that while the Royal Anglians were in no doubt about the gravity of the situation they would face in Helmand Province, they had confidence in the fact that they would be well prepared for whatever the Taliban could throw at them. Company Sergeant Major Tim Newton – a man who would become a good friend of mine – spoke in no uncertain terms about the attitude he felt was prevalent among B Company.
‘They're going to do a job they've been trained to do. And we've been training long enough for it now; they're excited at the prospect of going.’
Tim was right: this was no example of a senior NCO being out of touch with the real feelings of the men, though it should be added that the guys did not have a gung-ho attitude. When I spoke to nineteen-year-old Private Dan Smith and twenty-one-year-old Corporal Aaron Coolidge, they qualified their enthusiasm with an admission that this was going to be no tea party. ‘I don't think we're going to know quite how we feel till we get out there and start taking the flak… You're going to have rounds landing beside you, you're going to be, oh, crap, you know, fucking move out the way, keep moving, keep moving…’ Their expectations didn't do much for my own nervousness at the prospect of what we had taken on.
Any military commander will tell you that the morale of the troops is a decisive factor in the success of any campaign. Lose morale and you lose the fight. Major Mick Aston clearly understood that as he briefed B Company in a chilly barn in the middle of Salisbury Plain. The mood was serious, but not sombre; the guys listened quietly and attentively as Mick told them what they could expect in a few weeks' time. Having already been out to Afghanistan, he didn't pull any punches about the enemy they would be facing. He explained that in parts of Helmand Province there were places where troops could literally point to the location of the Taliban: that was how close the lines of engagement were. But if he was realistic about the nature of the threat, he was equally uncompromising in his assessment of the British Army's abilities.
‘We hear a lot,’ he announced, ‘about what good fighters the Taliban are, how strong they are, that they've been fighting for hundreds and hundreds of years and they're going to kick our arse and all that sort of stuff. Well, I don't fucking believe that for one minute. Although they are quite motivated, let's not be under any illusions: we're pretty fucking motivated as well.’
Nicely put, Mick. Not exactly Henry V, but you could just sense the guys agreeing with what their OC was telling them.
Motivation is essential; but training is even more important if the soldiers' standard operating procedures are going to become second nature. It's nearly impossible, of course, to replicate the sort of environment they could expect on deployment, but Salisbury Plain is about as far removed from the hot, arid deserts of Afghanistan as it's possible to be. It was freezing cold, and there was snow on the ground and a biting wind that seemed to cut through to the bone. It was wretched and miserable, but one thing's for sure: it toughens you up.
For me and the crew the training sessions were indispensable. Basic skills such as alighting from a helicopter, carrying our kit and – crucially – hitting the ground at a moment's notice would be important when we got to the front line. One of my greatest worries about going to Afghanistan was that the team and I would get in someone's way and in so doing endanger our lives or theirs. It was crucial, therefore, that we spent some time accompanying the guys during their mock battle situations.
On Salisbury Plain there is a replica village. It was built during the Cold War, when the threats to national security were very different and the army would be called upon to fight in very different situations. Designed to look like a small Eastern European village, it bears no resemblance to the compounds B Company could be expected to storm in Helmand Province; nevertheless, it gave them the critically important opportunity to practise a key task in Afghanistan: FIBUA, or Fighting In a Built-Up Area. Or, as the soldiers have nicknamed it, FISH: Fighting In Somebody's House.
There are plenty of other differences between fighting on Salisbury Plain and fighting in Helmand Province. The most obvious, of course, is that in Wiltshire you don't have anyone shooting AK-47s or RPGs at you. In order to make the training more realistic, the army have developed a system called Tesex – Tactical Effects Simulation Exercise. It's like a complicated version of paintball. The soldiers wear a special vest and helmet that sense infrared light; the weapons they carry fire a laser. If you get shot, your equipment registers the hit. They can also drop artillery shells and mortar rounds that will take out a whole area and light the soldiers fighting in it. Anyone who gets lit has to stop fighting, because in a real-life combat situation, it would mean they are at best wounded, more likely dead. You can carry on fighting when the game is reset, but it's not lost on anyone taking part in the training exercises that when it comes to the real thing, a well-placed sniper shot means game over. There's no one there to press the restart button. Dying a few times on Salisbury Plain is a pretty sobering experience.
Even more sobering are the amputees who are brought in to add authenticity to the battlefield and to desensitize the soldiers to the horrors that they can expect to encounter. These amputees are people who have lost limbs, often in combat situations. They are convincingly made up with fake blood and gore, so that they genuinely appear to have been gravely wounded. They scream not like actors but with the howling desperation that only a man who has lost a limb and truly feared for his life can know. This is role play taken to its most extreme, an attempt to accustom the troops to the grim reality of warfare, as well as teach them how to perform triage – the process of categorizing the injured according to the severity of their wounds. It's a brutal process, but crucial. When a soldier is down, they would be given a triage category. T1: on the verge of death; T2 wounded; T3 walking wounded; T4 dead. Everyone was fully aware that the likelihood of B Company taking casualties was high, and that T4s were not only a possibility but a probability. As for the amputees, the statistics spoke for themselves. Between April 2006 and September 2007, sixteen soldiers lost limbs in Helmand Province. What these soldiers were seeing on Salisbury Plain was very close to what they could expect in Afghanistan.
B Company consists of three platoons: 5, 6 and 7. During the FIBUA exercise, I was attached to 7 Platoon under the command of Lieutenant George Seal-Coon. The platoon is known as ‘Lucky 7’ and George was to have more than his fair share of luck when we finally made it to Afghanistan. The camera team and I were given our orders: tag along behind the assault section. Mindful of our desire not to get in the way, we were happy to obey.
The purpose of the training exercise was to clear the enemy from the village. In order to make it more realistic, the soldiers were instructed to ignore the first floor of the houses, as all the buildings they were likely to storm in Helmand Province would be single storey. They needed to concentrate on room clearance and methods of entry, all the while ensuring that their actions were appropriate and in accordance with the British Army's rules of engagement.
The rules of engagement, laid down in a document called Guidance Card Alpha, are, in the words of the MoD, ‘directives issued by a competent military authority which delineate the circumstances and limitations under which UK forces will initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered’. To you and me, that means how, when, where and against whom military force can be used. The rules of engagement can change according to the nature of the conflict – indeed they did change during the time I was in Afghanistan in 2007 – but the first rule of engagement for the British armed forces is always this: a soldier has the right to use force in self-defence. The rules are important: make them too loose and a conflict can escalate. But make them too tight and they restrict the soldiers' ability to perform their role effectively. And as I would find out, the Taliban often used these rules of engagement to their own advantage.
One of the lads involved in the training exercise on Salisbury Plain was Private Josh Hill. He had joined the army at the age of sixteen because it was a steady job that would give him the opportunity to see the world. As a kid he had always enjoyed running through the woods with a stick as a gun, so he decided he might as well sign up for the real thing. I couldn't help but wonder how much different his experiences in Afghanistan would be from those childhood games. Josh was a friendly young man with a face that made him look even younger than he actually was. Now that he had reached eighteen – an age when some lads are still at school – he was officially allowed to take a combat role. To my eyes, he looked too young to be facing the Taliban – in fact, he looked too young to be watching a scary episode of Doctor Who – but there was no way he was to be treated any differently from the other soldiers preparing to go to war. Not that he would have wanted to be. It was made perfectly clear to me what the regiment's attitude towards young men like Josh was: he had joined the army now, to kill if need be. He wasn't Mummy's little boy any more and even if some people didn't think of him as a grown man yet, that would soon change within a couple of months of being out in Helmand Province.
The training exercise was noisy and chaotic. The soldiers' SA80s, as well as firing lasers, were shooting blanks. Men were screaming orders which, more often than not, became confused as they were passed from man to man down the chain of command; enemy combatants dressed in dishdash – the Afghan robes we could expect the Taliban as well as regular Afghan villagers to be wearing – were shouting at each other. Smoke was rising from the ground and a sense of urgency filled the air. If the intention was to recreate the confusion of a battle situation, it seemed to me at the time that they were doing a very good job; in fact, I would soon learn that the real thing is several degrees more intense.
I watched from the sidelines as young Josh Hill clambered out of the ground-floor window of one house with a ladder and crossed a few metres of rubble to the window of a second enemy house. It was a painfully slow process: he struggled with the ladder, dropped it and tripped; as he leaned the ladder against the window of the house he was trying to enter, one of his mates climbed it and stepped on his fingers; he then spent far too long attempting to climb it himself. If he'd been under genuine fire at the time, the results of this clumsy attempt at FIBUA could have been disastrous. If this was the dress rehearsal before the opening night, I think anybody there would have been hard pressed to say it went without a hitch.
The camera team and I would not be carrying weapons in Afghanistan. However, as British citizens, we had the right to defend ourselves should we be the last men standing. Colonel Carver made it a condition that we were familiar with all weapons systems used by the British Army before we left for Afghanistan. For that reason, it was essential that we should be proficient with the SA80 A2, the standard rifle of the British Army. Corporal Stuart Parker gave us the low-down. The SA80 A2 is well liked by the troops, unlike its predecessor, the A1. SA80 stands for Small Arms for the 1980s, but in fact the weapon is based on a design from the 1940s, developed as a result of the army's experience of combat in the Second World War. The A1 was unreliable and much maligned during the First Gulf War; in 2000 it was overhauled by Heckler and Koch. This was the military equivalent of having your Mondeo looked at by BMW. The resulting A2 is far more reliable and able to mount a 40mm grenade launcher. The SA80 has been used in all the conflicts in which the British Army have been involved since the mid-1980s: Northern Ireland, the two Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and now, of course, Afghanistan.
Before I even fired the weapon, Stuart Parker gave me a quick tour of its capabilities. For close-quarters battle, he explained, a bayonet was fitted on to the end. These bayonets have been carefully designed to be thrust into the body and to give what Stuart described, in a delightfully military term, as ‘rib-parting capability’. One edge is kept permanently blunt to help it split bone and a long indentation along its length – the ‘blood drain’ – is there to allow the air to get in and prevent a suction effect.
Stuart then took me to the firing range, where I was to see just how well I could handle the weapon. It was difficult at first to hit the mark, as the rifle I had been given had not been zeroed to my eye, but that only made the exercise more authentic because if I were to pick up an SA80 on the battlefield, that wouldn't be set up for me either. I'd had some experience with guns on the range before but this was different because it involved running, kneeling and then shooting. It's one thing taking time to aim at your target; it's quite another going from moving to being very still, and my first few shots went wide of the mark. I began to get the hang of it, however; I even started to enjoy it – even though I knew I was going to have to put up with a bit of ribbing from the lads if I failed to make the grade. The fact that I had portrayed an SAS soldier on screen made it too irresistible for them not to take the mick. In the end I passed the exercise, though hardly with special forces-like accuracy. ‘SAS, my arse,’ commented the guy reading out the scores. Everyone laughed. At me or with me? I wasn't sure, but I knew I had to take their teasing in good heart if they were ever going to accept me into their confidence.
I was pleased that I had done reasonably well, but I also knew it would be a different kettle of fish if someone was actually firing back at you. If that's the case you often need more than a rifle and the SA80 is just one part of the infantry's arsenal. Over the days that followed I was introduced to a whole range of weaponry that would be used in the fight against the Taliban in Helmand Province. The .50 calibre machine gun – or fifty-cal – would be one of the infantry's most valued weapons. It's not new – the same weapon was used during the Second World War, as well as in Korea and Vietnam. I was soon to learn, though, that along with the GPMG – the General Purpose Machine Gun – it's the most effective weapon in Afghanistan. The fifty-cal is too heavy to carry, so it's generally mounted on a tripod and fixed to the top of a vehicle or on top of a building and it's often used by Fire Support Groups – teams that deliver artillery fire from separate locations to help infantry on the ground – from tactically superior situations. From these locations it fires its destructive rounds at a ferocious rate. The Taliban don't like it. When they see fifty-cal rounds, they run like hell.
The 81mm mortar is another powerful weapon. It fires shells at low velocities and high-arced trajectories. The rounds can be fired so high in the air that they can hit aircraft – a problem if you have air support, but the teams that run these weapons are incredibly efficient and good at their jobs, and mortar fire is an essential part of the infantry's weaponry.
The grenade machine gun fires 40mm grenades at a rate of 340 per minute. It's accurate and deadly. Not as destructive, though, as the Javelin anti-tank missile. A single shot from this machine costs approximately £60,000, but you get a lot for your money. It's a fire-and-forget missile that comes with a reusable Command Launch Unit, or CLU. The operator can look through the CLU and lock on to a target. Then, even if the target moves, the missile will follow it. It's an amazing weapon to watch. The missile is ejected relatively slowly from the launcher. It appears to hover for a few seconds while, like a dog after a bone, it sniffs out its target. Then it powers up and when it hits its mark, its destructive capabilities are astonishing. Of course, a weapon like this isn't much good in close contact, but for long-range, moving targets it can be invaluable. And although it's called an anti-tank missile and is not designed to take out infantry, I've seen it used in that way. In fact, I've seen it used to take out one person. Sixty grand to kill a single Taliban – it's no wonder war is an expensive business. One of the company told me he wanted to be a Javelin millionaire by the time his tour was over. I don't know if he managed it, but he probably wasn't far off.
The need for the troops to train properly with these weapons was brought home to me pretty sharply that first day. I was standing by the Javelin during the training session, wind blowing through me and snow on the ground. I watched as the weapon was fired. Instead of reaching its target, it fizzed and dropped about 30 metres away from us like a firework that had failed to explode – a very big firework with the capability of taking out half a football pitch when it went bang.
I stared at it in horror for a few seconds, then turned to the range master. ‘What do we do?’ I screamed at him over the howling wind. ‘Run?’
‘It's a bit fucking late for that now!’ he roared at me.
I started backing off, edging away from the weapon that was sizzling on the ground in front of me. If it had gone off, there was no way I'd have made it to Afghanistan. In fact, there was no way I'd have made it off Salisbury Plain. Thankfully, the technology of the weaponry is such that the missiles don't arm themselves until they've travelled about 100 metres in case such things happen. It brought home to me, though, what a dangerous environment soldiers work in even when they're not on the front line.
Some bits of our training went better than others. During a mock contact, the platoon to which the camera team and I had been assigned found themselves stuck in the crossfire between the rest of B Company and the ‘enemy’. If live rounds were being fired, we'd have been dead. Subsequent to that, during the night exercises, similar mistakes were made; the platoon seemed to be confused, not knowing what to do as orders were shouted and rounds cracked overhead. It was a quiet group of soldiers that received a no-holds-barred bollocking from Sergeant Ben Browning. The lads assembled under canvas. They did their best to hold their heads high, but they couldn't hide their sheepishness and disappointment in themselves as they sat around with the embarrassed grimaces of pupils being told off by their teacher. This was no schoolmasterly ticking off: it was a robust reminder that this was more than just a game of soldiers. ‘It just wasn't fucking acceptable tonight. Just because you don't know what's going on, it's no excuse to stand around walking up and down the line. Who sent the schmooly out?’
There are two kinds of schmooly – a type of flare – both of them generally sent up by mortars. One of them lights up the sky, the other sends out an infrared light. If you're wearing infrared goggles it means your enemy is displayed without being able to take advantage of the light. But it's essential that the schmooly lands in the right place, as otherwise the advantage is given to the enemy – and that's just what had happened that night.
A sheepish private raised his hand when Sergeant Browning asked the question. ‘Fucking hell, buddy,’ Browning told him, his voice at once comradely and chiding, ‘it's got to go over their side. All you done was fucking light us up.’
Nobody was under any illusion that if these battle situations had been replicated in Helmand Province, there would have been casualties. As for the camera team and me, we could only hope that the training we had received on Salisbury Plain would be enough to keep us safe if and when we finally came under enemy fire.