A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (11 page)

According to Angus Mathers, the Now Zad contingent performed well, under the circumstances. They got on well with the Gurkhas, who taught them a lot about how to man a sangar properly, and he confirmed Libby's view that they didn't want for courage. 'They were really quite poorly trained when they turned up, by Chinook, no night vision, just Dougie Bartholomew on his own in charge . . . It was daunting for anyone, let alone at night-time.'

Nevertheless, they 'had their moments', most of them related to the complete breakdown of their supply chain, which was kept strictly separate from the British one. 'They didn't have enough food or water or ammo. Dougie kept asking but nothing ever came up. I don't know why – it was a matter for their high command – but they were never even paid at Now Zad. It wasn't easy to keep them motivated.'

Their fire control discipline was poor, too. Accidents from NDs – negligent discharges – were commonplace. On patrols in the town they could be a liability, as was proved when one of them accidentally killed a civilian interpreter. They were not ready for the intensity of fighting in Helmand in the summer of 2006, and certainly nowhere near ready to garrison outstations such as Now Zad on their own. Rex ordered the ANA to man the compound's two least strategically critical sangars – the one overlooking the main gate and the other on the prison roof in the centre of the west wall – and hoped for the best. Unsurprisingly, when the attacks on the compound grew serious it was the Gurkhas who did 'ninety-nine per cent of the work'.

In the course of July, Rex's platoon repulsed over two dozen attempts to overrun the compound, firing over 30,000 rifle rounds, 17,000 GPMG rounds and 2,000 of .50 cal, and killing an estimated one hundred of their attackers. Yet the return to Bastion was a strange anti-climax. After twenty-four hours' rest they were put back on guard duty almost as if Now Zad had never happened. In December, when the Queen's New Year honours list was gazetted, their achievements again seemed forgotten in the flurry of Military Crosses awarded to 3 Para, and the media hoopla surrounding Bryan Budd, the posthumous recipient of a Victoria Cross – only the second VC to be awarded since the Falklands. There were no medals for the Gurkhas. Five of them, including Hollingshead, Kailash and Nabin, were Mentioned in Dispatches for their bravery, but that was all. They were, perhaps, the victims of their own luck. At Folkestone there was a whisper that the medal tally might have been higher if one or more of their number had been killed.

They didn't much mind. The Gurkhas were used to being slighted by the establishment. The regiment has been squeezed and sidelined over the years, reduced from eight battalions in 1995 (and forty-three of them during World War Two) to just two today. In 2007, after a long legal battle, the Gurkha veterans' pension was finally increased to the same level as the British one. But this victory was spoiled by the Home Office, which continued to resist an effort by forty-four veterans to gain British residency rights, arguing that the men, who had 170 medals between them, did not have 'sufficiently strong ties' to the country.

Still, for the officers who fought at Now Zad there was immense professional pride in a job well done. 'I think I'm one of the luckiest people of my generation,' said Hollingshead. 'I'm twenty-four, I've only been in the Army for three years. But there I was, at the cutting edge of British foreign policy. No other lieutenant that I know of got to command an entire platoon-house.'

For the Riflemen, with their singular reverence for the British Army, there was the promise of honour and glory back in Nepal, and, in a culture that venerates its ancestors, genuine satisfaction at becoming a part of a long military tradition. 'This was our first time in combat,' wrote Rifleman Yam Roka Pun in a contribution to the regimental newsletter, 'and it was hard not to let one's thoughts recall the memories of our ancestors fighting in the World Wars.' Uppermost in 'D' Company's minds was the campaign against the Japanese in Burma, where seven of the twenty-six VCs ever awarded to the Gurkhas were won. Their company battle honour name, Tamandu, recalled the Burmese battlefield where Rifleman Havildar Bhanbhagta Gurung, twenty-four, single-handedly killed a tree-sniper and cleared four foxholes with grenades and his bayonet, before storming a machine-gun bunker from the front and killing its three occupants with his kukri. '
Kaphar hunnu bhanda marnu ramro
', as the Gurkhali motto goes: 'It is better to die than to live as a coward'.

For the Gurkhas' parents, meanwhile, there was a mixture of relief, fear and pride – a response no different from that of the parents being interviewed by their local newspapers all across Britain in 2006. Kailash confided, 'My mum and dad, when they heard about Now Zad, said, "Please don't do this job any more. Everything you need is here." But I told them, "No, I want to be a soldier. It's my hobby."'

The lack of public acknowledgement of what his men had done predictably bothered Dan Rex the most. He was that kind of officer: solicitous, thoughtful, attached to the men he commanded, and with a deep appreciation of Gurkha culture. The lack of recognition for him personally mattered not at all. 'I took a hundred and ten men in there. I brought them all back out alive. That's reward enough for me.'

He smiled. He clearly meant it.

3
The Dragon's Lair

The company of The Fusiliers who spearheaded the reinforcements for Helmand announced on 6 July were based at Dhekelia in Cyprus – a post-Empire anomaly just as strange, in its way, as the continued existence of the Gurkhas. Dhekelia was one of two Army bases on the island that amounted to almost a hundred square miles of sovereign British territory, retained by the Crown when Cyprus gained independence in 1960.

I was picked up at Larnaka airport by 'A' Company's commander, Major Jon Swift, who drove me almost immediately to a drinks party being thrown by his Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Merriman. Traces of Empire were evident even in the dress code. We joined the battalion's officers wearing 'Planters', which – though no one quite seemed to know why – turned out to mean light-coloured cotton trousers and a smart shirt without jacket or tie. We stood about drinking gin slings in a garden where bougainvillea rioted and a military band played gentle jazz below a blue and white marquee. I wondered whether there was something wilful – pathological, even – about this dreamy outpost of British civilization. Such institutional resistance to modernization may have been ludicrous, but I recognized that it was also precious, for the party was precisely the kind of thing that made the Army unique.

Swift, thirty-three, my host for the next two days, spoke in fast, efficient bursts that added to the sense of competence and ambition he exuded. His favourite word was 'gleaming', although others used it too. Like the acronyms that peppered the Fusiliers' sentences, it was a part of the private language of this close-knit community. In his office I watched Swift communicate orders with a look and a word or two that were incomprehensible to me but were always immediately understood by his NCOs, and found myself almost envying the professionalism and pride in their organization that this secret code implied.

Dhekelia was never an easy posting for company commanders. The resort of Napa, with its bars and nightclubs full of sun-burned lovelies from home, was off limits to the troops. But it was also fewer than fifteen minutes from the base, and on both mornings I spent at the barracks I was woken by the bark of a sergeant major as a miscreant or two from the night before was quick-marched around the parade ground, their hangovers pounding in time to their feet. I recognized this cliché of military life from, for instance, George MacDonald Fraser's McAuslan novels, but I still thought I detected a discontent in the air that wasn't normal, a sense of boredom, disillusionment – mild rebellion, even. Swift and his officers seemed powerless to prevent the boys from going off boozing in the town, no matter how much leave they cancelled or promotion they withheld. Even on the way from the airport, Swift had been speaking sharply on his phone to a Fusilier who had found an excuse for delaying his return to base from England, and was effectively AWOL. There was a lot of talk among the troops I later spoke to about leaving the Army, of taking a permanent rest. Futures were being reappraised, alternative careers mooted. 'A' Company, it seemed to me, were having some difficulty in recovering from the shock of Helmand and readjusting to their peacetime role. The Fusiliers presented the perfect snapshot of an Army that, in General Sir Richard Dannatt's words, was 'coping, just'.

Many units were sent into action faster than was normal during Herrick 4, but none so fast as this one. They expected to be deployed at short notice: for eight months the battalion had been the Army's designated Theatre Reserve Battalion, or TRB, and as such lived from day to day at twenty-four hours' 'notice to move'. This was why they were headquartered in Cyprus. The Mediterranean location meant, at least in theory, that the men were pre-acclimatized to the heat of the nearby Middle East, the world's most reliable cockpit of war. All the same, the speed of the deployment to Helmand was exceptional. Swift was completing a staff course at the military college at Camberley in Surrey when he received a text message 'warning him off'. Staff College is a period in an officer's career that is traditionally treated as sacrosanct; only the direst emergency is ever allowed to interrupt it, even in wartime. Swift had therefore been expecting to finish his studies before moving, with his wife, into a new house at Dhekelia. His head was full of military theory and preliminary arrangements for moving furniture, not preparations for combat. Within a day, however, he was on a plane to Cyprus, and twenty-four hours later he was at Bastion, where he found himself in charge of a company he barely knew.

If the move was disorienting for Swift, it was probably more so for some of the men under his command. The sixteen-strong Fire Support Group, with their two mortar barrels and two GPMGs, had been in Bastion for two days when they were flown up to man ANP Hill for the Gurkhas on 16 July – the first of the Fusiliers sent to Now Zad. At Bastion this advance party was in the middle of a training session when the order came through. They were given precisely fifty-nine minutes to board a Chinook. 'We were running around like mad things trying to get ready,' said Sergeant Martyn Gibbons, a mortar fire controller. 'They showed us a map in the JOC [Joint Operations Centre] and said we were going to have to tab up this hill about five grids away. I said, "What, with all our kit? It's a good job we're packing light." I thought it was a normal 1:50,000 map. We didn't have any maps of our own . . . It wasn't until we got to Now Zad that I realized the map I'd seen was 1:5,000 scale, and that the hill was next door, just about.'

On the landing site at Bastion, with six minutes to go until darkness set in when the Chinook would be forbidden to fly, although the squad was all aboard with the rotors turning there was still no sign of any mortar ammunition. A forklift truck came hurtling round the corner at the last minute. It was left to Swift and his NCOs, who had come to see the men off, to burst open the packaging and pile as many shells into their laps as they could manage in the time remaining. 'Their faces were a picture,' Swift recalled. 'Blokes had been dying on operations in the district centres. They knew why they were going to Now Zad at such short notice: it could only be because the shit was hitting the fan there. What really worried me was that I didn't even know some of these guys. I thought, "What if one of them doesn't come back? How am I going to write to a mother when I don't even know who the son is?"'

Gibbons and the others were told that their mission would last for two days; they didn't come down off ANP Hill again for 107 days. In their time at Now Zad the Fusiliers fired 1,500 mortars, 10,000 light machine-gun and rifle rounds and 89,000 GPMG rounds. They called in over thirty air strikes in the course of 149 separate contacts, during which they were attacked with everything from small-arms and sniper fire to mortars, RPGs and 107mm Chinese rockets. One of the Fire Support Group, Dean Fisher from Nuneaton, personally fired 40,000 rounds through his GPMG. He returned to Cyprus soon after his twenty-first birthday to find himself the subject of a two-page spread in the
Sun
, complete with photographs. 'Hero Dean', it said, beneath the banner headline, 'As Tories play politics,
^*9
THIS is what our boys face'.

And they hadn't even packed a clean pair of socks.

Their arrival represented another turning point in the struggle for Now Zad. Until then the Gurkhas had been the only garrison without mortars at their disposal. The accuracy and firepower of the mortars now provided by the Fire Support Group made further frontal assaults on the compound almost impossible. The gunners were trained to man, fire and hit their targets within seconds, and the mortars were no less effective. In theory, the minimum distance a mortar round can be dropped from friendly forces is 250 metres; anything less is categorized as 'danger close'. At Now Zad, the mortar crews regularly put rounds down just fifty metres from the compound walls. Since an 81mm mortar is usually only accurate to within forty metres, this was close enough to whiten the hair of any range instructor. It was a peculiarity of Helmand, however, that the mortar's 'beaten zone' was much smaller than at home. Gibbons, who had a professional's passion for mortars, explained that a combination of altitude and heat caused the shells to fly so accurately that adjustments to target were typically as little as five metres, allowing 'danger close' ranges to become the norm.

The Taliban responded in the only way they could: for the next three months, the main focus of their attacks switched from the compound to ANP Hill. The Fusiliers were in action almost from the moment they arrived. The first thing the mortar crews did was to set up the barrels and fire two or three rounds in order to bed in the base plates. The usual procedure is to shoot into a convenient empty space, but Gibbons found himself zeroing his weapon on a real target. He had barely caught his breath from the climb up the hill when his second round killed a group of four Taliban in the town.