A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (10 page)

Eventually the inevitable happened. Lance Corporal Cook of the Signals Squadron had just finished repairing one of the field telephones that connected each of the sangars to the Control Tower, and which had been damaged by sniper fire, when he was shot in the back. The bullet struck his right scapula, entering just below his body armour. It was the garrison's first serious British casualty. The landing site was secured and Cook was evacuated within two hours.

The arrival of snipers and mortar teams from the enemy's rear had important implications for Operation Herrick. The marksmen were evidently not locals, for they had not been present at the start of the siege. The question for the commanders at Bastion and Kandahar, and even for the MoD back in London, was this: from how far back in the rear had these specialists come? Their weapons, the Gurkhas were able to determine, were high-velocity Dragunovs, modern 7.62mm weapons much used in Iraq. In Ramadi in April 2004, an entire twelve-man squad of US Marines was wiped out by a single Dragunov marksman. Had the techniques of that insurgency spread to Afghanistan?

The NDS men had heard no Arabic voices in the town, but there were undoubtedly some foreigners out there, and this was troubling. The Taliban had always been an inward-looking organization, distrustful of foreigners and resistant to their ideas, but here was evidence of change. The NDS men detected Urdu-speaking Pakistanis, even Farsi-speaking Iranians. Pakistan and Iran had hosted huge numbers of Afghan refugees over the last twenty-five years, so it was conceivable that the foreign accents belonged to locals who had come back, but that didn't seem likely. An Iranian-numberplated vehicle briefly glimpsed in the town seemed to be a top-of-the-range 4_4, and brand new. What were these people doing here? Was the garrison now a honey-pot for the bees of an international jihad? The implications were scary. An internationalized insurrection would be far harder and more dangerous to contain, not just at the tactical level but regionally and globally as well.

The Taliban never again came as close to a breakthrough as on the night of 13 July, although there were some other narrow escapes for the Gurkhas. As was the case in every Helmand platoon-house, their salvation was air support. The Royal Air Force alone dropped seventy-one 500lb bombs and launched 1,400 rockets in 2006. Many of the photographs I was shown at Folkestone featured tall columns of smoke rising above the town as another 500-, 1,000- or 2,000-pounder fell into it. On every video clip the troops later posted on YouTube, there is someone off-camera whooping with mixed awe and joy as the bombs detonate and the ground shakes beneath the garrison's feet.

The definition of 'danger close', at least as the JTACs had been trained to understand it, was repeatedly ignored during Herrick 4. In some cases the proximity of the air support was unprecedented. On 16 July a British Apache was called in to clear a building only ten metres from the compound, a hot spot directly beneath Sangar 3 known as the 'clinic'. The Gurkhas had tried to dislodge the enemy with grenades. One of them even went into the compound's fetid latrine block and posted a grenade through the tiny ventilation window there, although to no effect. The Taliban had also lobbed grenades of their own over the compound wall.

'How accurate is your 30 mil?' Charlie Aggrey recalled asking, once the circling Apache had identified the clinic.

'I can put them through the window if you want,' the pilot replied.

The Gurkhas, clutching their helmets and crouching low in their sangars, could hear the helicopter's hot and smoking shell casings clattering down into the street outside. Some, they claimed, had even landed on their helmets. Afterwards, when the pilot radioed for confirmation that he'd hit his target, Aggrey was able to tell him that the incoming fire had been replaced by the sound of screaming. In Sangar 3 they could even smell burning flesh – the 'smell of war', as one of them put it later.
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A turning point for the garrison came that same day, for it was on the evening of the 16th that the reinforcements Rex had constantly been requesting at last arrived.

Reports of the fighting at Now Zad had been circulating in Camp Bastion for over a week. For Paul Hollingshead's platoon, back in the humdrum guard duty role at Bastion for which they had first been deployed, this was an anxious and frustrating time. Hollingshead was a particular friend of Mathers' – they were lieutenants of the same age who had been through Sandhurst together – but he had no means of contacting him himself. Only Task Force HQ really knew what was going on, and the officers in possession of hard information from the front were rightly cautious with it. For this reason the stories doing the rounds of the troops were often greatly exaggerated. Rex's men, it was whispered, had at times run out completely of food, water, ammunition; the defenders had had to fix bayonets; they had played 'hot potato' with the enemy, scooping live grenades from the sangar floors where they had landed and hurling them back over the compound wall; there was even a gruesome rumour that the Taliban had flung body parts at the Gurkhas. None of these things was true, although the hot potato story in particular is still widely believed within the Army, a piece of Herrick 4 mythology that refuses to go away.

The trigger for the decision to send reinforcements was the news of another casualty, Rifleman Baren Limbu, who was hit in the thigh by a ricocheting rifle bullet in the Control Tower and now required evacuation. The relief force, appropriately, was headed by Hollingshead's platoon together with a small mortar and machine-gun team of The Fusiliers – the first of the long-awaited reinforcements to arrive from Europe. Hollingshead had been hanging around the Ops Room and asking to be sent back for days. His men, he said, were 'itching for it'. A strong sense of
esprit de
corps
had developed among the men of 'D' Company in the few short weeks that they had been in Afghanistan together. Hollingshead was given half an hour to get his men together.

'I didn't know what to expect,' he told me. 'All I knew was that Dan and Gus [Rex and Mathers] were having a hard time. I thought we might have to fight house to house, so we took as much as we could carry, a GPMG for every four men with ammo all over us. Normally there's only one GPMG for the whole platoon. We looked like bloody Rambos. It felt like a rescue mission.'

As the four-tonner left to take them to the landing site, the Gurkhas in the back started cheering.

'That was another moment I'll not forget, a proper Gurkha moment. The driver asked me what the boys were cheering about. I just looked at him and said, "We're off for a fight."'

When they arrived, Rex immediately ordered them to occupy ANP Hill – a move that ended his reliance on Muhammadzai's men to hold that crucial piece of ground. 'It was just the greatest relief to have my own boys up there,' Rex confessed. 'I never felt tactically secure with the ANP watching my back. Losing the hill was not an option.'

The hill was promptly attacked with mortars, and more heavily than at any time previously, which itself suggested that the ANP had had some kind of arrangement with the Taliban. It was another wild night.

'Dusk was coming on and there was tracer coming from all the corner towers,' said Hollingshead. 'We got up the hill, set up the SF [supporting fire] guns and were straight into it.' Hollingshead remembered seeing the barrel of the .50 cal on the hill glowing red in the darkness. At the height of the fighting he led his men in an impromptu chant of 'Aya Gurkhali!' ('The Gurkhas are upon you!'), a battle cry that he guessed hadn't been heard for half a century. 'I know it was corny,' he said, 'but we were pumped up. It just felt the right thing to do.'

Relief for the Gurkhas finally came on 30 July when they were replaced by more Fusiliers. The attempt to garrison a town with a single British Army platoon was an experiment that Task Force HQ did not repeat. The Fusilier relief force eventually amounted to most of a company. Rex's men were supposed to have been supported in their defence by a detachment of the Afghan National Army, the ANA. In practice, the ANA were of little use. There were just fifteen of them at Now Zad, supervised by Captain Dougie Bartholomew of the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT), which had been attached to the battle group from the earliest planning stages. Small units of supervised ANA were now scattered across the province.

Like the Coalition's alliance with the ANP, the main purpose of the OMLT (or 'Omelette' as it was inevitably nicknamed) was political: a way of demonstrating that the British were not foreign occupiers but an assisting ally, operating in Helmand at the invitation of the government in Kabul. In the long term the OMLT was even more significant, for it represented an eventual exit strategy for Britain and her Coalition allies. The idea was to build up a national army capable of maintaining security and holding back the Taliban on its own – an 'Afghan solution for an Afghan problem', as the official mantra went – and the best and quickest way of achieving that was to train the ANA in the field.

The ANA/OMLT project had got off to a shaky start, however. Despite the years that had passed since Karzai's election, the ANA training programme was still hopelessly under-funded. According to some officers involved, little priority was given to the OMLT at Brigade Headquarters in Colchester when Herrick 4 was being planned. Few had anticipated that the ANA would be involved in such hard-core fighting so soon; the OMLT focus, it was thought, would be on further training. For this reason, vital equipment such as night vision goggles, radios and even vehicles were reassigned to British combat units who, it was judged, would have greater need of them. Thus it was that when the OMLT officers arrived in the spring to meet their new charges, they found a rag-tag, under-equipped force that was far from being what the British Army would consider 'operational'.

The OMLT was headquartered at Camp Tombstone, just next door to Camp Bastion, a location intended to enhance Anglo- Afghan cooperation. But while that looked good on planning schedules, the camps were separated by their own gates and perimeter fences, so that in practice there was little contact between them. Morale at Tombstone was never high. When pep-talking political dignitaries visited Bastion – Des Browne, say, or David Cameron as Leader of the Opposition – the liaison officers were careful to include a quick visit to Tombstone on their itineraries. But there was no disguising the fact that the OMLT camp was an adjunct to the main event across the road. The ANA units housed there looked, and felt, dispiritingly like a forgotten army.

The recruits, most of them drawn from poor, non-Pashtun areas to the north of the country, were badly paid and sometimes of very questionable quality. On one occasion, a group of ANA turned up for target practice on the nearby rifle-range without any of the ammunition recently assigned to them. On enquiry, the OMLT officer in charge learned that they had sold it all in the local market. Their spokesman was genuinely astonished when the officer remonstrated with them. 'But we got a very good price for it!' he said. Another OMLT officer, Captain Will Libby of the Royal Green Jackets, later explained to me how most of his men could not drive. 'My ANA company arrived in a convoy from Kandahar in early May. When they caught sight of Tombstone, two kilometres out, they broke formation and made a charge for the gates. Four of their vehicles crashed.' They tended not to wear watches. Few could read or write. Many of them were short-sighted and wore no glasses; others were in poor health, with disorders as serious as tuberculosis, for which they had never been screened. It was not uncommon, when an inspection or parade was called and the head-count did not tally, for an OMLT officer to be informed quite matter-of-factly that the missing man had died in the night.

The worst problem, however – at least in Libby's view – was their almost total lack of
esprit de corps
. 'It wasn't their fault. Their initial training was done up in Kabul under ISAF supervision. The officers were trained by the French, but the junior NCOs and all the rest were trained separately, by the Canadians, so they didn't know their officers from Adam. And that's reckoned to be an essential part of training in most Western armies . . . At Bastion we focused on the importance of bonding, teaching NCOs to teach their blokes. But the officers got selected on nepotistic lines . . . there was a huge disparity between the best and worst of them in terms of experience and quality. The lack of kit and preparation led to units being hastily bolted together, which led to lack of trust between men and NCOs and officers.'

For whatever reason, of the 1,100-strong ANA
kandak
, or battalion, deployed with the British on Herrick 4, 360 had deserted by July. Fixtures and fittings at Camp Tombstone, which had been built specifically for them by the Americans at a cost of £68 million, were reportedly stripped out and stolen; even some washroom taps and sinks went missing.

Most worrying of all was evidence that, like the ANP, certain members of the ANA were guilty of freelance banditry on the roads – an allegation apparently confirmed when a BBC correspondent, David Loyn, covertly filmed an unofficial ANA checkpoint in action. Loyn was succinct in his criticism when he asked, 'What is the point of sending our young men to die in support of a regime that cannot begin to police itself?' Some of the ANA highwaymen, no doubt, were deserters who had held on to their useful uniforms, but as far as their victims were concerned this made no difference. Who could tell which was which? It meant that public confidence in the new Afghan Army was being eroded long before it was even fully formed.

Despite all that, the picture Libby painted of the ANA was not entirely negative.

'They were asked to fight alongside people they didn't know. They didn't know where they were going, or why, sometimes. They were far from their homes, with minimal training, on a salary of four dollars a day – about a third of what the Taliban paid their fighters. Given those circumstances I reckon we might desert, too.' The deserters were always in the minority, he insisted, and many of those who stayed behind were 'ballsy . . . They had different motives for joining up. Some hated the Talibs, some believed in the state, some were just plain bored with their lives and were looking for adventure. But there was a growing sense of pride in their new units . . . Given time, they'll be fine. The honour system and the pride that all soldiers need are built-in with Afghans. They were much rubbished, but at least they were there.'