CHAPTER 13

R & R

We flew from Bastion to the American base at Kandahar, and from there directly back to the UK where it was surprisingly warm as we disembarked at Brize Norton. I had telephoned Annie from Kandahar and gave her the time for the family to pick me up, but I got it all wrong and they were an hour late. Eventually, my mum and Annie turned up and there was of course a lot of excitement. It was just such a fantastic feeling to be home as forty-eight hours earlier I had been in the field taking incoming fire; now here I was in the arms of my loved ones.

We arrived home in Peterborough and later that day Annie and I went over to my flat in Werrington where we spent some time before returning to my mum’s place where my brother Ben was waiting for me. We then all headed for our ‘local’, the Harrier pub in Gunthorpe, where we met a group of our mates. My mum had been giving them all updates while I was away, so when I walked in you can imagine it was a case of lots of people shouting, ‘Hey, he’s back! He’s back!’ Every time I produced my wallet, everyone told me to put it away and I remember a guy called Jeremy kept shaking my hand and slapping my back so hard it actually hurt, telling me how much he appreciated what we were doing and thanking me for it. I felt so touched and really grateful and of course tried to play it all down, but all I could manage to say, ‘You’re welcome.’ I kept trying to divert the attention away from me and tell them that the guys were still out there, but it was really nice to see such appreciation of what we were trying to do. It was a wonderful and very surreal experience and one I will never forget.

I was lucky enough to be back on my mum’s birthday and she had organised for us all to go out into the city centre to a Chinese restaurant called Imperial Bento’s, a massive place that had only just opened. After that, we moved on to a nearby pub called the College Arms for a few more pints to see the night out before heading home. It was a great night which we all really enjoyed and I ended up collapsing on my mum’s sofa, waking up on the following morning with that ‘Where the hell am I?’ feeling before remembering that I was home on R&R.

I needed to go to see Deano and so made my way to Birmingham and Selly Oak. On arrival at the hospital, I walked round the wards until I found where he was but, as I was a little bit early, I went to buy a card from the gift shop. As I entered and started walking up the ward, I simply did not know what to think or say. I could see wounded men with bandages around their legs and limbs missing and thought, ‘Shit! This is where we end up!’ It was an enormous eye-opener which made me feel so sad for the guys who had been doing their jobs and had simply been unlucky. It also made me feel incredibly fortunate to be healthy and alive, and so far to have come out the other end unscathed. As bad as that may seem, I guess it is human nature to think through what might have happened to you and then thank your lucky stars, so that’s what I did. I had read in the papers before about Muslim women attacking the lads in the wards and it made me feel sick. Surely, if they had become legal British citizens then it should make that kind of behaviour some form of treason. The extra security was clearly evident.

As I rounded the corner towards Deano, his face lit up, despite the fact that he was still being heavily sedated to deal with the actual pain of his injuries. I don’t know, but I guess a familiar and unexpected face always helps.

I shook his hand, which felt slightly fragile, so I was careful not to pull his arm off. I sat down beside him and started to show him his books and stuff that I had managed to bring back from Afghanistan. He slowly opened them without speaking and smiled as he flicked through the pages. As he was doing this, his girlfriend came into the room and said, ‘Hi’ and asked who I was. I told her I was JC and that I was on R&R before explaining that I was Deano’s second-in-command in Afghanistan.

Deano gestured towards a pen and notebook on the side and I passed it over. He very slowly wrote that he could not talk or hear anything and pointed. So I started to write down initial things like, ‘How are you doing mate?’ Thereafter we had a conversation via paper and pen because it was the only way we could communicate with each other. He was deaf as a result of the RPG explosion, added to which he was pretty heavily sedated so it took a while for him to be able to write his replies to my questions, especially after having to decipher my terrible handwriting. He asked what had been happening and, as I began to explain, his parents turned up so after the introductions, I told them all everything I could to the best of my knowledge about what had happened to him, because he couldn’t remember any of it apart from the explosion. I reminded him that he had been covered in fuel and the fact that he had bravely taken his body armour off to enable him to continue to fight, but he couldn’t remember doing so.

Shortly afterwards our old RSM, WO1 Tony Buff, turned up as he had been posted to Selly Oak as a welfare officer and was doing his rounds. He asked me how I had got to the hospital, so I told him that I had travelled over in my own car. He asked why I had not asked for official transport to drive me down and I said that I had not even thought about that but just obtained the address of the hospital and made my way to it. I could have caught a train, using a rail warrant, but that was not really important as I just wanted to see Deano and check he was okay. I would have paid for ten tanks of petrol to see him as he was my team commander and my mate. It was good to see him smile as he read my card. At that point I started to get ready to leave, as I did not want to out stay my welcome. He wrote down for me to look after the guys and I replied, ‘Of course I will. No dramas.’

After shaking hands with everyone, I went outside. I must admit that I had to choke back the emotion as it had been so hard to see Deano like that. He was the heart and soul of every occasion, the party animal and larger than life, so it was terrible to see him in this state and I felt guilt and sadness.

I drove back home and, as I arrived, I could smell that Annie had been cooking. I walked in and said, ‘Hi!.’ At that point I had a few tears with Annie as I thought about what had happened and the fact that I usually worked with Teddy and so it really should have been me in that ambush. Annie told me that Deano was just doing his job and leading his section, and no one could have known what was going to happen; indeed she reminded me that it might have been me that got hurt in place of someone else after I had switched to being a mortar man, so it was wrong to blame myself. She was right, of course, and I guess such emotions are simply one of the many mental challenges of being a soldier on active service.

A few days before I was due to go back, I decided to throw a party at my flat in Werrington and so set about buying in all the meat for the barbecue. As it was a beautiful sunny day, we set up a gazebo in my postage stamp sized garden at my flat. I recruited the help of my mate, ‘Dodgy’ Dave, who is an absolute legend on the barbecue and I would challenge anyone to find a better man at donning the apron and cooking a barbie. As his job was a plumber and he had come straight from work, his girlfriend had brought his clothes across for him and he used my shower to have a wash and change and then he was straight out to sort the barbie.

People started to arrive: Jodie, obviously Annie, my brother, Bones and Leanne, Cheryl, Hailey, Rob and Michaela, Ozzy and Becky, Leah and so on. We made the most of my flat and garden, with fairy lights strung up in the gazebo. Everyone ate great food and got nicely pissed, laughing and talking, which was great.

Suddenly Rob, who had been drinking Vodka and Red Bull and had been fine earlier, changed and sort of snapped. In fairness to him, he took it outside as he continued to go totally nuts. I was a bit worried because he was a bit close to my neighbour’s car, but this was all very strange because it was just not like him at all, so I sent Ozzy outside to see if he could calm him down and find out what the hell it was. It was no use, as he just became worse and neighbours started to come out as we tried to restrain him because he was lashing out as we attempted to calm him down and prevent from doing himself and anyone else any damage.

The trouble was that we all ended up on the floor in a scuffle and the next thing we knew the police had arrived with blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, then jumping out and running towards us with batons fully extended. We all jumped up and were saying, ‘Whoa, whoa! What’s all this for? I said to the police, ‘Calm down fellas, this is a storm in a tea cup.’ They told us in no uncertain terms to get off Rob and ran towards him. I just said, ‘What’s this all about? I live here,’ and pointed to my flat. ‘We’re just having a party, we’re all mates.’ Meanwhile, I was trying to calm Rob down and help him because he had had a bit too much to drink.

The coppers told us that they had received a telephone call reporting three guys kicking the crap out of one another on his own. Of course we all laughed and said, ‘No, no. He’s a mate and he’s clearly drunk and got all upset and we were trying to calm him down, restrain him and find out what the hell he’s upset about. He hasn’t caused any damage or harm apart from disturbing my leaving party and is just a bit upset about something.’ The policeman turned to me and said, ‘Oh right. So this is your party, is it?.’ I thought, ‘Oh f..., here we go’ and began the process of giving a statement and confirming details.

At the end of it all, they slapped handcuffs on Rob and put him in the van, while a growing mass of neighbours looked on. This is a pretty quiet part of Werrington and it certainly was not normal for police to be storming the street, so literally everyone was out and standing around staring. Rob had now been packed off and his girlfriend had also left, so we went back inside. Annie was obviously quite upset, saying that it was all right for me because I was off again, but she now had to live in this area with everyone looking at her, judging her and thinking we were some form of chavs. I could see her point and said, ‘Right, I’m not having that’ and said that I would go and talk to them. They were all still out there, so I just addressed the massed crowd and said, ‘Look, this was clearly nothing to do with Annie, it was simply a guy who drank too much and we were as shocked as everyone else, but these things happen and it’s just one of those things.’

The police, of course, realised pretty quickly that this was the case and put Rob in a cell for the night to sober up and let him go on the following morning with no charges. The rest of us meanwhile went back and continued to drink and party until the wee early hours of around 4.00 or 5.00 am without further incident. Apart from that little bit of excitement, it was good humoured, a great laugh and a fitting send-off. Annie and I collapsed into bed when everyone eventually left and we drifted off to sleep, only to awake needing the essential proper breakfast and got on with it.

All too soon it was time to head back to Afghanistan. I decided that I would take my car back to the barracks as I would be back again in three months, and so my car should be fine there. We said our farewells and there were a few tears and many cuddles, especially as I was far more aware of the dangers than previously. I then left on the long journey back to Elizabeth barracks in Pirbright, Surrey, feeling very lonely after two weeks of being with my loved ones and friends.

Following our arrival, the first thing for those of us who had been on R & R was to go and sign for all of our kit. We spotted Macca, who had been shot just underneath the armour plate in his body armour, hobbling along on a walking stick. We shook his hand and he told us that we really should try to avoid getting shot because, in his words, ‘It f...ing hurts.’ I told him that I remembered seeing the state of him on the stretcher and that I needed no persuading – I did not want to be shot.

A lot of the barracks were still being re-furbished and so I took over a bed in B Company’s lines and slept for a while before ordering a Chinese takeaway and playing poker well into the night. Soon the minibus arrived to take us back to RAF Brize Norton, where we were processed in the same way as my initial trip to Afghanistan, before embarking on the aircraft.

We arrived at Kandahar and stayed overnight before boarding a Hercules C-130 for the flight to Camp Bastion and the pods on Camp 501 for a couple of days while we waited for the helicopters to fly us out to Nowzad. B Company had also come off MOGs after Operation LASTAY KULANG and was now based at Nowzad, minus 5 and 6 Platoons who had been involved in another operation, GHARTSIGHAR, which took place during 20 June to 5 July. The number of attacks by the Taliban were on the increase and intimidation of the locals was spreading, so the aim of Operation GHARTSI-GHAR was to rectify this situation by pushing the Taliban back even further and preventing them from re-infiltrating the Green Zone around Sangin, thus taking the pressure off the city itself. The plan was to allow the locals to be able to move back into the city without having the threat of the Taliban on their doorstep all the time.

The initial stages of the operation were recorded as follows in the Battalion’s tour magazine:

Both A and B Companies made long approach marches through the Green Zone at night, in order to be in position to block the enemy’s potential escape route across the Helmand River. After an almost 12 km night approach march, both companies were in almost continuous contact for the whole of the following day. They remained in the Green Zone and the fire fight lasted for nine days. Once again, large numbers of the enemy were killed with far fewer escaping this time. As an act of desperation, the Taliban used a twelve-year-old boy to place an IED in the Sangin bazaar which detonated, killing the young boy and two policemen. This single incident was the turning point for public opinion as it caused outrage, resulting in the amount of information about the Taliban received from the local population being quadrupled. Most importantly, the Taliban’s perception that the area was a safe haven for them was shattered and the locals began to realise that there was an alternative to suffering intimidation. Reconstruction efforts were boosted following this operation with significantly more locals coming forward with proposals for a number of projects, particularly for irrigation projects and improvements.

5 and 6 Platoons were in the Green Zone in the thick of the main part of Operation GHARTSI-GHAR. Meanwhile 7 Platoon was in Nowzad and the FSG was on ANP Hill, which was just outside the town but still provided 360 degree views around the entire area due to its elevation. The FSG could see exactly where the platoons were and knew exactly the location of the Taliban.

While we were waiting in Camp Bastion, we helped to sort a mountain of mail for distribution. A few of the guys from C Company arrived back from their R & R at this time and, having been in the company, I knew a few of them. One of them was a guy called Tony Rawson whose nickname was ‘Nicey’ the reason was as simple as it sounds: he was one of the nicest blokes you could be fortunate enough to meet and would go out of his way to help newly joined soldiers joining the company and not knowing anyone, which is always a bit daunting. I also saw Si Mercer who showed me all his photographs of what C Company’s FSG had been getting up to in Kajaki in the north of the province. It was good to catch up with them and to find out about Robbo, Tom, Dan and Cas and all the guys in the snipers and FSG.

Colour Sergeant Bill Shand had told us that it would be a few days before we were flown out, but that later that day he appeared and informed us that we were moving out immediately. We swiftly packed our kit and shortly afterwards were on the flight to Nowzad which proved uneventful. On its final approach, the helicopter swept in low and let off a couple of flares, landing us in a small wadi just behind ANP Hill. So there I was, a couple of weeks of peace now ended and the next three months of this tour of operations to get through, which would prove to be far from plain sailing.