A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (13 page)

Gallows humour was an important coping mechanism for all of them. 'There were times in contacts when we were just looking at each other and laughing – it was that mad,' Spensley recalled. 'We got incoming, and Fish stayed in his trench, which was the other side of the bit of OHP we'd tried to build. And it landed about two or three metres from that, and all we saw was a cloud of dust – we thought it had landed in the trench – and when the dust cleared we ran in to see him and he said, "Halloahh . . ."'

'There was that time when me and you was over the back of the hill and I had flip-flops on, because I'd been airing my feet,' said Fisher.

'Cos of the heat,' explained Spensley. 'We only had, like, one pair of socks each, for a lot of it. So you'd wash your socks and let them dry, and you didn't want to put your sweaty boots on . . . My combats had no knees, no arse or anything, all just worn away.'

'We were sat over the back with the mortars, just for a chat, you know, cos we're sat with the same people every day. And we'd start arguing between ourselves . . . And we got contacted, and I'm running back over the position in flip-flops with tracer going everywhere.'

'He's just in front of me. I'm going, "Come on, Fish, hurry up, hurry up, keep going," and there's rounds pinging off everywhere. And then we got in the trench and just looked at each other and went "phhh" – started laughing.'

Nick Groves also spoke of a strange, stoical hilarity that infected the hill's defenders. 'It got to the stage where the whole thing became a bit of a joke, it was so constant,' he said. 'I think this is the British Army way – what people cringingly describe as laughing in the face of adversity. There's no point in worrying or crying about it. You're here, it's happening, and it's happening so much that it becomes quite amusing . . . the surreal becomes quite normal. I remember an RPG came in close once, and we had this massive debate about whether it was an RPG-7 or an RPG-9 . . . it became that every day.'

Sniper attacks were common, too. No Fusilier was ever shot by a sniper's bullet, but they often came close. 'We had one of our lads, Frankie [Canham], who stood up and a round pinged off a rock not far from him,' said Spensley, 'and he looked round at us and said, "Was that at me?" And we all went, "Yeah!" Then he got fired at again and he just run off. I don't think he realized; they weren't too far off. There was one sniper who was close all the time – a metre or so.'

There was no let-up in the counter-sniper battle begun by the Gurkhas. The enemy gunmen, according to Jon Swift, were 'very sharp. Over a week they'd build up a little position for themselves, brick by brick. That's very difficult to spot over a distance of five or six hundred metres.' Fortunately for the garrison their two trained snipers, Corporal Matt Foster and Lance Corporal 'Sully' O'Sullivan, were 'just outstanding at saying, "Sir, it's been built up, there was one less brick on there last night . . ." They used to spend hours just scanning the ground, learning it inch by inch. That was one of the benefits of being there for so long.' Foster and O'Sullivan eventually recorded one confirmed kill each.

Remarkably, only one Fusilier on the hill ever cracked under the psychological pressure. 'He got scared,' said Allen, 'and there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone was scared. He just reacted slightly differently. He had to be brought off the hill . . . once he was out of that environment and we put him in a sangar in the compound, he was fine.'

Although the compound felt safer than the hill, its walls and sangars hardly offered more security against mortars. During one such attack Greaves, who was in charge of the company's light-calibre 51mm mortar section, was about to dash from the cover of the Control Tower to oversee the response. He was clearing the doorway when Swift suddenly ordered him to 'Wait! Wait!' Seconds later a mortar detonated just where he would have been running. A soldier's sixth sense had saved a comrade's life once again.

The compound was also more vulnerable to attack from RPGs than the hill. Mortars may have been more frightening, but it was an RPG that eventually found a target. It was ten a.m. on 6 October, a Friday, when the sangar on the south-west corner took a direct hit. Until then the sangar had been regarded as the least dangerous in the compound because the majority of attacks were directed at the other side. Unlike the area to the east, however, the streets overlooked by this sangar were still partly inhabited, which allowed the RPG men to pass themselves off as civilians as they moved to within 120 metres of the walls.

The RPG burst through the front left corner of the sangar where it struck two ammunition tins, setting off about twenty rounds (Swift brought the shredded remains of the tins back to Cyprus as souvenirs). The detonated rounds miraculously hit no one, but shards of tin blew everywhere, along with shrapnel from the grenade. 'There was a split second of total silence after the explosion,' recalled Captain Lee Phillips, 'and then there was this deep, terrible screaming.'

The garrison had drilled for this event, and those nearest the sangar reacted with the efficiency of automatons. Training, as they all said, took over. This allowed them to blot out the horror of the blood and the screams of pain and pleading from the two victims, Fusiliers Clive Spencer and Phil Fanthome, so loud they were audible on the hill. Spencer, who had been about to replace Fanthome in the sangar and was at the top of the ladder at the time of the strike, had a broken jaw and lost five of his front teeth. Fanthome was in a much worse condition.

The pair were quickly brought down from the smashed sangar and injected with morphine. As mortar and machine-gun fire began to pour on to the suspected fire point from the hill, the doctor, a Navy surgeon on attachment, checked Fanthome's backside for internal shrapnel wounds. Fanthome, reassuringly, had the wherewithal to shout, 'Fucking hell, doc, you Navy hom!'

Just over an hour after the strike a Chinook touched down to take the injured men to the hospital at Bastion. Swift, who went with them to the helicopter landing site, recalled pulling a poncho over Spencer's face to protect his wounds from the swirling dust; Spencer, morphine-addled and terrified that he had been written off for dead, was deaf to all his OC's assurances and kept snatching the poncho away again.

Throughout the crisis the garrison also had to look to their defences. Some of them, Swift noticed, seemed almost paralysed by the sight, even more so by the shocking sound of two of their own getting injured. Even worse, the section manning Sangar 6 had instinctively dived into cover. Swift, touring the compound with reassurances that the injured would live and that screaming was 'not a bad thing, particularly with head injuries', rushed forward and ordered them all to 'Stand up! Stand up!' It was crucial that they did so, he later explained, if the enemy were not to press home their advantage. Sangar 6 stood and almost immediately spotted a suspect threesome, one of whom was pulling something from a motorbike bag, and opened fire with the GPMG, injuring one of them. Then, just as the rescue helicopter touched down, several vehicles and motorbikes were seen in a compound to the north, gathering for an attack. The enemy compound was mortared and then rocketed by a passing US jet.

Swift prided himself in doing the simple things well. In the officers' mess in Cyprus it was firmly believed that tight discipline and quiet professionalism were an important reason why so few of them were injured and no one was killed. According to Allen, the company 'was a special outfit. There was no bullshit.' Despite the heat, Swift insisted that his men always wore helmets, body armour and uniform when on duty – in contrast to certain other units who were photographed manning machine-guns in little more than swimming trunks. The compound was kept scrupulously clean – 'gleaming', indeed. They only moved about in pairs, and only then when necessary. And despite the need to conserve water – a need, admittedly, that was not as urgent as it might have been because Now Zad was blessed with its own well, albeit with a pump that frequently broke down – the men were ordered to wash regularly, and (again, unlike certain other units) to shave. Beards, Swift reasoned, might be necessary for British troops interacting with the locals, but not for those engaged only in fighting them. Some garrisons in Helmand were later dangerously depleted by outbreaks of diarrhoea and vomiting, but thanks to good basic hygiene Swift's company suffered only one serious case of the dreaded 'D&V' in more than three months.

Time passed quickly for the garrison when they were under attack. Then, and for about three hours afterwards, according to Groves, 'there was this huge buzz . . . everyone was on an adrenalin high. Looking back on that time, it went really fast.' There were, however, long periods when the men were not in contact, and in some ways these times were the most trying of all, especially on ANP Hill. 'I thought the hardest thing was not having nothing to do,' said Spensley. 'It was really really boring. There was five of us overlooking the town. I'd say after about a month we'd run out of much to say to each other. When you're living with each other that long you start snapping at each other. We exhausted each other's conversation.' What conversation there was tended to centre on when they were going to get out of there, and what they were going to do when they did. Napa, the out-of-bounds nightclub strip in Cyprus, featured often in their talk – 'a brilliant place when you're on the piss', Fisher said.

A handful of paperbacks did the rounds: Bernard Cornwell's
Sharpe
novels, a thriller by Stephen King, several Sven Hassel books with titles like
The Legion of the Damned
and
The Bloody
Road to Death
. They had a pack of cards, bought from one of the outgoing Gurkhas, a clever entrepreneur who demanded and received $20 for it. Someone made a chess board, with pieces fashioned from spent ammunition. They erected a makeshift wooden sign, a photograph of which later appeared in the
Sun
, that read 'Welcome to the Dragon's Lair – Home of Fire Support Group Second Fusiliers'. They also played pranks on one another – particularly, for some reason, on Spensley. Someone tried to set his helmet on fire; someone else urinated in his water bottle.

'In the ration packs you get the orange screech, you know?' said Spensley. 'I had a bottle and drank three-quarters of it, and went in Fish's trench, and we were sat there when something happened. I was looking out the front of the trench over his gun, and as I was looking out he must have swapped me bottle. And one of them had pissed in it, and I reached down to take a swig. He started laughing, and I sniffed it and went, "You dirty bastard."'

'It was little things like that that put your morale up,' Fisher said with a grin.

Meal times provided another important distraction. 'The ANP used to bring bags of potatoes up,' said Fisher. 'Just to waste time, me and Spenny used to go and rough the spuds so we could make chips. That used to be the highlight of our day, didn't it?'

'We used to give the locals money to go and get us stuff as well,' Spensley added. 'They used to rob us blind, but we couldn't go anywhere. So he was charging, like, fifty dollars for some oil and potatoes and that.'

'Pakio, his name was. One of the ANP blokes. We used to feed him every day, give him, like, chocolate and sweets and everything. He couldn't speak much English but we taught him some, didn't we?'

'His name was Hajji, but when we got up there he was walking round the hill going "PA-KIO!" So that's what we named him. He was a good one, the best one there. He used to make you chips – try and sell you a mess tin of potatoes for, like, ten dollars, so you'd go, "No, you cook 'em. You cook 'em and we'll give you ten dollars." He was all right.'

Despite the occasional supplement, the Fusiliers' diet was dreary. The ration pack menu was supposed to vary, but often didn't. 'The worst one I had was eighteen days of getting the curry,' said Spensley. 'I don't eat curry anyway. In the end I broke. I just threw it.'

More seriously, the garrison began to suffer muscle wastage and to lose a lot of weight. This was partly because it was so difficult to keep fit. The men tried at first to do sit-ups and press-ups in their trenches, but after a month their enthusiasm for exercise dried up in the stupefying summer heat. The other reason was that the standard issue ORP – operational ration pack, or 'rat pack' – was never designed for continuous use. Although in theory it contained the right amount of calories and vitamins to sustain a man, the Army's own guidelines stated that a soldier's every tenth meal should be a fresh one. The Fusiliers didn't see a proper fresh meal for over three months. And not all of the rat pack's contents were always eaten. The heat made cooking easy – the soldiers simply left their food out in the sun for a bit – but it also turned a chocolate bar into an unappetizing mush. The Fusiliers didn't know it, but the chocolate in an ORP is heavily vitaminized; all of the ration pack has to be eaten if men surviving on it are to remain properly nourished. After their tour was over, Swift was contacted by scientists from QinetiQ, the privatized arm of the MoD's former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. No unit, Swift was told, had ever lived exclusively on rat packs for so long; the Fusiliers' experience was therefore of considerable scientific interest. It was even grounds, Swift understood, for a rethink of how the long-established ORP was physically constituted.

Swift did his best for his boys. In a quiet moment he wrote to Twinings, the upmarket tea manufacturer, and appealed to their sense of patriotism in the most sententious terms. Much to his surprise, four huge boxes of teabags arrived at Now Zad a fortnight later. 'Guaranteed to make you feel at home,' it said on the packaging. The men were suspicious at first – they were more used to drinking Tetley's – but in the end the tea was a great success. 'Sir,' said one of them, 'this English Breakfast Tea is really quite good.' Much encouraged, Swift fired off equally beseeching letters to Gillette, Kenco, Batchelor's Supernoodles and Lambert & Butler ('about the only fags that squaddies smoke,' said Swift), but never received a reply from any of them. Twinings' generosity – or perhaps their marketing department's eye for a good opportunity – turned out to be a glorious one-off.