A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (15 page)

They also asked for extra sets of SOFIE thermal imaging equipment, which would have helped them to pin-point their attackers in the rat-runs around the compound. None was ever forthcoming. The blame for that, according to Jackie Allen, lay with the planners in London who had failed to provide any of the battle group with enough SOFIE. 'It's usually only supplied to specialist reconnaissance platoons and observers. There was an attitude of, "Conventional British forces – why would they need SOFIE?"' But we were static, in an urban environment . . . They didn't anticipate how much it would be needed.'

The biggest complaint, unsurprisingly, was the lack of overhead protection (OHP) on the hill. A small detachment of engineers could have built some up in no time. The necessary materials were not exactly in short supply at headquarters, where the perimeter was protected by thousands of yards of dirt-filled HESCOs.
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The sappers needed to install such defences were in short supply, however, and the few available had been directed not to Now Zad but to Sangin.

If that was the tactical priority, thought the Fusiliers, then again it was fair enough. Tootal was known to be a brave and inspirational leader, commendably attuned to the risks his men faced.
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On one memorable occasion at Sangin he fought alongside his boys, ordering his regimental sergeant major to bring up more underslung grenades so that he could fire them at an RPG man lurking beyond the walls. But as far as the Fusiliers were concerned, Tootal was above all a Para and that meant his first loyalty was probably going to be to the men of his own regiment. The Fusiliers couldn't help wondering whether, had it been Paras rather than Fusiliers besieged at Now Zad, some spare engineers might have been found.

According to the Fusiliers, the Royal Marines who relieved the battle group at the end of October were 'appalled' at the state of the defences on ANP Hill. One of the first things they did was to bring in a section of sappers from 25 Engineer Regiment, complete with mechanical diggers, to dig out the trenches and build up some proper OHP. 'The engineer recce sergeant took one look at the hill and said, "Jesus.
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long have you been here?" ' Swift recalled. 'I told him, " 'Just under three months now." And he said, "And you've been filling ration boxes with pebbles?" ' The sappers later presented Swift with a group photograph, framed and inscribed with the words 'Now Zad – A Forgotten Town'.

Whatever the truth of the battle group's attitude towards its non-Para elements, the greater and underlying problem was that the Task Force was under-resourced for the job it was now trying to do. The shortage of manpower was largely due to Whitehall's early decision to cap the deployment to Afghanistan at 3,300 personnel – a decision partly provoked by continuing military commitments in Iraq. The shortage of the best equipment available, meanwhile, had its roots in years of Treasury under-funding. Put another way, the government had sent a boy (albeit a very tough one) to do a man's job, and the Paras could hardly be blamed for that.

Peter Merriman, Swift's CO, took a kinder view of them than most of the Now Zad garrison. The headquarters arrangements to which Tootal was working, he said, were 'high maintenance' and 'probably not conducive to good communications and briefing'. The Paras had competing priorities to deal with, so it was 'understandable' that Now Zad was not at the top of their list. 'There were a lot of hard decisions that took a lot of their attention. They put their companies where they thought the most enemy activity was, and Now Zad was not on 3 Para's main effort. This was part of the reason why Gurkhas and Fusiliers were put there, I guess.'

There were times, in fact, when there was more enemy activity at Now Zad than anywhere else. But it was certainly the case that Now Zad was 'not on 3 Para's main effort'. By July it was painfully clear to Tootal how overstretched his force had become. For that reason, at a senior commanders conference in Lashkar Gah on 22 July, he proposed pulling out of Now Zad altogether and leaving the town in the control of the ANA and the ANP. The 'main effort' Tootal had identified was Sangin, the town that dominated the upper Helmand river valley, which was strategically and economically vital to the life of the province. Sangin also controlled access to the all-important hydro-electric dam at Kajaki, further north. Now Zad, on the other hand, was thirty miles west of the valley and controlled nothing except its own desert district. Tootal's plan was tactically sensible, but he was overruled. Leaving the town to the ANA and the ANP was tantamount to handing it over to the Taliban, and everyone knew it. The message that such a withdrawal would send to Now Zad's residents was something that neither the British nor Kabul felt they could afford – although, before the summer was out, something very like it was to happen anyway, at Musa Qala. No wonder Swift complained that the platoon-house strategy was following 'political rather than military imperatives'.

The burden of decision on whether to open fire or not lay heavily on all the British, and often demanded a degree of judgement and maturity that it was perhaps not always reasonable to expect of them. Gunman or civilian; civilian or gunman? The enemy wore no uniforms in Helmand, and could effectively switch identity simply by putting down or picking up a weapon. For Swift in particular, the responsibility for targeting was awesome. The Army normally tried to account for every bullet fired on operations. Commanders in the field were supposed to fill out forms called a PIP (post-incident pro-forma) or a SIR (shooting incident report) whenever anything happened. But the battle group had deployed so fast and the tempo of fighting was so intense that the standard systems of accountability were somehow forgotten. The regulation paperwork wasn't introduced until 6 October, with the arrival of the Marines. Until then, company commanders often felt accountable to no one but themselves. Even communication with battalion headquarters in Cyprus was difficult. The only means of doing so was by Thuraya satellite phone – the same network used by everyone else in Afghanistan, civilians and the Taliban included. 'The CO phoned us all the time for an update,' said Jackie Allen. 'He couldn't understand why Jon [Swift] kept hanging up on him. Three times in a row! But it was literally because another RPG round was coming in. Jon just had to go.'

The targeting process could also be frustrating, particularly where air strikes were concerned, because it wasn't always easy to persuade air support to attack. On one occasion an Apache pilot declined to fire at two mortar men relocating their weapon under a tarpaulin on the grounds that he couldn't positively identify (or PID) them as enemy fighters. From the air, the pair could have been two farmers shifting a water pump, but to the Fusiliers, who had been mortared from that area of the town for days, and were also in possession of local intelligence about this particular team, the additional visual evidence amounted to a PID. On later inspection of his gun tape back at Bastion, the Apache pilot was forced to admit that the object under the tarpaulin had indeed been a mortar barrel, and ended up apologizing to the Fusiliers.

Arranging a 'pre-fire op' – a planned air or artillery attack on a specific target – could be problematic for other reasons. In one instance the Fusiliers learned through local intelligence the location of a substantial arms cache, but it was out of view of the compound and the only way to destroy it was from the air. Permission for a pre-fire op had to be approved by a body called the Joint Effects Board, which was based in Kandahar or even London. The approval process could take days, and on a battlefield as fast-moving as Now Zad, any time lag could be critical. In this case, much to Swift's frustration, permission to bomb was turned down three times, on the grounds that the suspected cache was too close to a civilian building. Swift then spoke to an operations officer at Kandahar who suggested that he simply ignore the JEB's decision and call in a quick air strike the next time they were contacted. Swift sensibly declined. 'I felt like saying, "So no one at the Joint Effects level wants to carry the can if it goes wrong, but you're ready to let me hang?"'

Eventually, a local source whom Swift trusted informed him that a Pakistani mortar training team had just arrived at the arms cache. Air surveillance revealed a number of suspicious 'pax' [people] milling around the entrance. This was enough for Swift, who called in a 500lb bomb. It was a brave decision, for later that day he was informed by Bastion that the strike was being 'investigated at the highest levels' – by the Brigade Chief of Staff at Kandahar, in fact. As bad luck would have it, this was on the very day that Fanthome and Spencer were hit by the RPG. 'I was going round the sangars, reassuring the guys, thinking, "The next helicopter that comes in will probably be here to take me away . . . given what we'd been through that day I thought it was pretty out of order, to be honest."' He was, perhaps, fortunate that the bomb didn't miss its target: later in the day, an intelligence report confirmed that a Pakistani trainer had been killed. 'At that point I got all sort of bolshie and called Kandahar, and this corporal said, "Oh, don't worry about that, sir, they wrote that off about half an hour ago. LEGAD [the legal adviser from the Army Legal Service] had a look at it and they're fine about it." And I thought to myself, "Thanks a lot – when were they bloody well going to tell me?" That was my darkest day. I was pretty knackered by the end of it.'

Another difficulty for Swift was that the British were not in sole control of the Now Zad area. Herrick 4 was an ISAF operation, but the Americans had a separate and overlapping mission, Operation Mountain Thrust, which had begun in June. Mountain Thrust involved 11,000 troops, and was geared not to winning local hearts and minds but to the capture of Osama bin Laden and the destruction of al-Qaida and its Taliban allies. As the garrison sieges intensified, the difference between the two missions inevitably became less and less clear. Helmand was still dotted with US Special Forces units pursuing their own agendas. At the very least, close coordination between the allies was called for. Instead there was often an amazing lack of it.

'There was one night in September,' recalled Matt Seal. 'I'd just come off stag [sentry duty] and there was a boom-boom-boom. I thought we was getting mortared. It sounded quite close. We looked out and saw this Spectre gun-ship. You know the way they lase their targets? The finger of death? It's like an alien abduction, man. It was just smashing, for about forty minutes, over towards Saddle Two, five or six k from us, absolutely hammering. We didn't know what it was. We got told afterwards that it was a US Special Forces op. That was quite mad that night.'

The American Rules of Engagement were different from the British ones. Some in the Task Force suspected that proportionality of response was not always a US priority, and the surprise appearance of one of their gun-ships over Now Zad seemed a case in point. The Spectre is not exactly a weapon of minimum force. Its armaments include a howitzer that can fire a 44lb shell every six seconds, a 40mm cannon that fires a hundred rounds a minute, and a pair of 20mm Gatlings that fire 7,200 rounds a minute each. It can carry ten tons of ammunition per sortie; at the end of a night's work, its crews were said to use shovels to clear the empty bullet casings from the aircraft floor. It was certainly a weapon to have on your side, but what was it doing over Now Zad? This was supposed to be the Fusiliers' Area of Operations, yet Swift was not consulted about the operation or even informed of it until a few minutes before it began.

It was the kind of incident that caused bad blood between the allies. There was a constant mutter among the British that US Special Forces units, in particular, were sometimes too quick to call in air support when they ran into trouble. The accusation spilled over into the press in the summer of 2007, when a commander at Sangin reportedly requested the withdrawal of US Special Forces from the district, so damaging was their effect on the British campaign for hearts and minds. Most locals, of course, made no distinction between the US and the UK, Mountain Thrust and Herrick 4; the foreign soldiers, and especially their air bombs, were all one to them. The British complaint was not academic. Garrisons like Swift's really did have to deal with the consequences.

'This car comes driving down the main bazaar one day, and I was on stag right at the front,' Seal recalled. 'It looked a bit dicey – a geezer in the front, with two people in the back at either side. It looked like there was something in between them. The boot was open – it was an estate car. I said, "There's something dodgy about this." It could have been a suicide bomb. I got my gun up, safety catch off. There was dead bodies in the back. There'd been a bombing raid the night before, six or eight k away, nothing to do with us. We saw it happen but we didn't call it in. They'd bombed some white 4×4 thing – apparently it was Iranian or Taliban or whatever – and these guys said, "You bombed us, we're nothing to do with the Taliban, blah blah blah, and these people are dead." And there's people crying at the front gate and all this sort of caper.'

The situation then turned darker. As the grief-stricken driver and his passengers ranted at the sentries on the main gate, a stray dog appeared and began to drag the body parts out of the back of the car. Seal, looking on from his sangar, laughed. 'It's a bit sick really, but when you're in that situation you've got to laugh or you'd end up crying your eyes out every day,' he said. 'I was in stitches. I'm like, "Jesus Christ, look, check this out!"' A dozen other Fusiliers crowded to the front of the compound for their own look at this surreal black comedy.

Then things suddenly threatened to run out of control. 'I looked right and there's, like, a football crowd walking up the road! And we'd never seen that many people before, you know what I mean? About forty, forty-five people, all blokes, walking towards us. And I said, "Here, gunner, check this out." This was developing into a potential riot at the front gate. So the QRF [Quick Reaction Force] are crashed out – that's only about twelve blokes – and we didn't have a proper front gate then, it would have been a bit mad. And I'm thinking, "Shit me, man, this is gonna go tits up."