A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (16 page)

'Next thing, bang bang bang, there's rounds hitting the sandbags in front of me, rounds, like, winging through the sangar from X-ray 58. I saw movement – a gap in the wall that went into the wood line. So I started firing back, but then I realized it wasn't X-ray 58 because rounds were still hitting us. We couldn't tell where they were coming from. Anyway, I looked right and all these people had took cover, turned round going the other way. So the contact helped us really, because it could have been a disaster.'

In truth, the British were probably not as good at exercising 'proportionality of response' as they thought they were. In the heat of battle the logic of that principle sometimes became hopelessly confused – as an experience of Seal's on ANP Hill perhaps illustrated. He had been trained to use the Milan wire-guided antitank weapon, but had never actually fired one and was longing to do so. Each Milan missile, he observed with some satisfaction, cost the British taxpayer £16,500 – 'a bit like firing an XR2 down the lane, I suppose'. One night a suitable target presented itself: three gunmen hiding behind a wall, safe from machine-gun bullets and mortars. He had the safety catch off and was about to fire when he was ordered to stop by a Household Cavalry officer, a troop of whose Scimitar light tanks were then on the hill.

'I thought, "Bollocks." I put the safety back on. Five minutes later an F18 comes in and, boom – a 500lb bomb. And I said to this guy after, "I've been gagging to fire that Milan. I've got something in me sights, I can take it out – why, what's the crack?" And he went, "Well, Fusilier Seal, it's all about proportionality and the laws of armed conflict" and all this crap . . . he said it was the wrong weapon system to use against people. And I said, "What a load of bollocks! Five minutes later you dropped a 500-pounder on them! How does that work?" He went, "Yeah, yeah, good point," and just turned round and walked off. I thought, "You absolute wanker. That was my chance!" He was a nice bloke, mind. Good at his job. But that night I thought he was a wanker. Really posh.'

Matt Seal was a regimental classic. At thirty-four he was the oldest private in his company and known as 'the senior Fusilier'. He was a big man from Birmingham whose middle name was Busby (his father, he explained, had been a die-hard Manchester United fan), although he himself supported Aston Villa. That much was clear from the tattoos that coated his meaty arms and shoulders – the work, he said, of an ex-Fusilier mate who lived in Preston. There was also a fierce-looking British bulldog, a large star with the words 'Strength and Honour' around it, a Samurai warrior attended by a pair of dragons, and the names of his children picked out in Gothic lettering on his forearms.

His Brummie background was typical of the old units from which his Royal Fusilier 'super-regiment' was amalgamated. Fusilier recruits have been drawn from the Midlands and the north-east for well over 300 years. The 'fusil' was a seventeenth-century word for the flintlock musket with which they were once armed, an elite weapon at a time when most European armies were still using matchlocks. The red and white hackle on his beret supposedly gained its colour when it was dipped in French blood at St Lucia in 1778. Fusiliers fought at Badajoz, Inkerman, Lucknow, Khartoum, Alma, Sebastopol, and at Kandahar, too, in 1880. As the
Sun
liked to point out, it was Fusiliers who famously won six VCs 'before breakfast' at the Gallipoli landings in 1915.

Seal was suitably proud of all this. Like many others who took part in Herrick 4 he compared the siege of Now Zad to Rorke's Drift in 1879, when 139 Redcoats held off a Zulu force of between 4,000 and 5,000, winning eleven Victoria Crosses in the process. The difference was that he claimed Rorke's Drift was also among the battle honours won by his regimental forebears. 'Everyone thinks it was the Welsh because of the Michael Caine film,' he said, 'but it wasn't, it was us. There were a few Welshmen, and some of the officers, so that's how it ended up. But most of them were from Birmingham and stuff.' I checked later and found that he was broadly correct. Rorke's Drift was defended by a company of the 24th Regiment, the Second Warwickshires, only nineteen of whom were actually Welsh. The regimental march of the 2/24th, tellingly, was not 'Men of Harlech' but 'The Warwickshire Lad'.

Seal had thought about what the British were doing in Helmand, and come to the conclusion that the deployment was quite justified. 'Iraq is an absolute joke, man, and the sooner we're out of there the better. But, Afghan . . . these people cannot be allowed to just cut about doing what they want – and they do do what they want, don't they? In these places like Now Zad, there's no law. But the normal civvies, they just want to get on with their lives.'

On his latest tour in Kabul he'd had more chances to talk to ordinary Afghans, and what he heard had solidified his view that the Taliban were a menace. 'Some of the horror stories that came out . . . There was one lad and his mum in Kabul. We were chatting to him; he spoke quite good English. He came from somewhere in Helmand. The dad had been killed, shot in the face, by the Taliban because they wanted his land. They were living in a shit hole but it was better than Helmand . . . we started realizing how these people were getting shit on from everywhere, and the government aren't doing anything about it, are they?'

His experiences at Now Zad had clearly changed him. 'I had nightmares when we got back. Quite a few, around Christmas. I kept hearing Phil Fanthome screaming. It was horrible to hear. I was under the sangar when it happened. As we drove out [to the helicopter landing site for the casualty evacuation, or casevac] there was a lad lying outside, one of the locals, with a gunshot wound, and an old geezer with him. He was about sixteen. He'd been dicking us for weeks. After the RPG hit he pops out of the alleyway where it was fired from, so one of the lads shot him. He got taken to Bastion. He survived, shot in the leg. I still remember his face. He was there, right next to me. I said, "That's the dicker." I reported him four or five times; he was pacing out the alleyways. I reckon he pulled the trigger too. There's no one else come out of that alleyway. He ended up lying in the same hospital as the blokes he'd RPG'd. It's surreal, but there you go.'

Despite the rough exterior and, one suspected, a Saturday-night-fighting nature, there was a moral, even sensitive soul within. 'I felt quite sorry for the locals to be honest – what little contact we had with them,' he said. 'It's just like stepping back two hundred years. They've got nothing, have they? Absolutely nothing. I was gobsmacked, me. I used to give the kids sweets – throw them out the sangars and that. We didn't have a lot to go round ourselves, like, but they had jack shit.'

The British occupation of Now Zad, he agreed, had brought a great deal of death and destruction. More than 18,000lb of explosives had been dropped on the town by 10 October alone. But he also thought the hearts and minds process was far from being a lost cause. The fact that the Fusiliers could, and often did, offer medical assistance to the locals gave him particular cause for hope.

'No one would come anywhere near us to start with,' he said, 'but one day this guy turned up with two young children, a boy and girl, and they'd been really badly burned . . . it was nothing to do with us. They were carried down from some village. They'd been playing with something phosphorus. When they came in, the guy was shitting himself. Absolutely shitting himself. You could see pure fear in his face. We calmed him down, and the kids got casevaced. One of them died later. And we said to the guy, "What's wrong?" And he said the Taliban had been telling everyone that we were all white infidels, eating babies, shagging women and getting pissed. And they believed it, because something like ninety-six per cent of Now Zad can't read or write . . . And this guy saw that wasn't correct, and that we'd helped him out, and he went back to his village a couple of k down the road and spread the word.'

From then on a steady flow of injured appeared at the gates of the district centre. In many cases it was their only hope of survival, for there was no other medical facility functioning in the region. People often turned up with a gunshot wound ten minutes after a contact, angrily claiming that the British had just shot them. The medics would examine them, only to find that the wound was anything up to a week old. But they never turned anyone away, even when they suspected that the injured had just been trying to kill them. This was the British Army at its most humane.

'Towards the end I felt we were actually doing some good in Now Zad – like we'd actually achieved something. At the beginning, nothing moved in No Man's Land [the urban area to the east of the district centre], but by the end people were coming back to their homes there, to collect their belongings or whatever. There was even one bloke who moved back into his house, right under Sangar 6. The Taliban had used that house to attack the compound when the Gurkhas were there, but he still wanted to move back in. We said, "Crack on, mate!" Very brave.'

Such moments of optimism were rare, however. By the middle of September the pressure of the siege was beginning to tell on Seal. His stint on ANP Hill, although terrifying, had at least passed quickly. The fear and tension of the seemingly endless nights of sangars duty in the compound was of a different order, even on quiet nights, and the stress was cumulative.

'On stag, at night, three in the morning, pitch black, everyone's asleep, there's me and that bloke over there in that sangar, and you'd start flapping. You could hear your heart beating, and you'd start thinking, "Jesus Christ, man, there could be a geezer stood a hundred metres down that alleyway and I wouldn't be able to see him." So you get your night vision up and you'd have it fixed to your eye for, like, two hours. You'd make yourself panic. Then you'd hear something and it would be a dog going through rubbish – every time. There were thousands of dogs. You knew it was a dog, you just knew, but you'd still have to stick your head out and have a look. What if it's a bloke with an AK-47? You'd lean out, and out a bit more, and then bow-wow-wow, and you'd jump across the sangar – Jesus, shit yourself . . .'

It wasn't easy, being the senior Fusilier. The younger men looked up to him, and nicknamed him 'the Gerber' after the American-made multi-tool (a reflection of his long-standing position in the company's transport section), but that didn't help him now. The only person he felt he could really talk to was his mate Stewart Spensley; but he was out of reach, up on the hill with the Fire Support Group.

'I was feeling the pressure quite a lot, mid-September. I'd come off stag, and me being the senior Fusilier, supposed to be cutting about, looking after the younger blokes, cos there's a lot of young lads out there . . . and I'd be absolutely fucked. You'd be up there for twenty-four hours and in contact for three of them. You'd come down, physically and mentally drained, you're not in the best of moods, you just want to get into bed. And Jackie Allen would say, "What's up, Gerber? You all right?" I'd say, "Not really, no." And he'd say, "You've got to keep your chin up, man, you're the senior Fusilier" . . . I had a few blokes come to me, saying, "I'm struggling a bit here, I'm getting a bit scared." And I think, "Who do I go and chat to? I can't always be the joker."'

It didn't help that his marriage was in crisis. 'The wife said she wanted a divorce, but when we got posted I said, "Wait until I get back, maybe we can work something out." But she wouldn't wait, and posted the papers out. It was horrible, because you look forward to the postbag, you know? And it was my divorce papers. I don't think she had any idea what we were going through out there. And I lost it – I shouted my head off. I think the Taliban must have heard me from the wood line . . . I proper struggled in the week after that.'

Now Zad forced Seal to face himself in other ways. According to local estimates, about 170 fighters were killed during the Fusiliers' time there. Many of these were accounted for by mortars and close air support, but shooting a man was different. The act of killing was more personal, the responsibility more direct. Few if any of the Fusiliers had been called upon to kill a man before, and the first time was difficult for all of them – even for Dean Fisher, the machine-gunner who fired more rounds at the Taliban than anyone. In a contact on the day that Spencer and Fanthome were hit, Fisher shot up a speeding car. 'The body fell out of the passenger door,' he recalled, 'and you've actually seen it and you've done it yourself and the body was just lying there at the side of the car. I was watching through the binos for any more movement, and I was shaking. Shit, I've just killed someone.'

It was no different for Seal. It was his first time, too, despite his twelve years in the Army. As he pointed out, no amount of training can prepare a soldier for the real thing. 'It's not a nice experience. I shot two blokes. The first one . . . I was looking out into No Man's Land from Sangar 3. There are only a couple of points where you can see straight into the wood line. There was this one point, just above the blue garage door – 578 metres, it was a good shot. I was on the sandbags when this geezer just popped up. He had a rifle. He just walked into me sight picture, and I just thought, "Fucking hell." I hit him. He went down, then he got back up again – you know, nearly six hundred metres with an SA80, it's not going to do that much. I went to pull the trigger again, and I had a massive stoppage. Jammed solid. And I thought, "Shit." So I shouted at me mate, Sony, "There he is, blue garage door, just above the razor, one finger left, he's there in the wood line." He said, "Oh yeah, I can see him!" So I said, "Well shoot him then!" Thirty rounds off an LMG, and he missed him. And the geezer dragged himself back into the wood line. Afterwards I sat there and I thought, "Hang on. I just shot someone." I had a brew and that. And I don't think I spoke for the rest of that stag. Not a word to anyone. I just sat at the back. I didn't get to sleep that night. I just lay there all night thinking, "Fucking hell, man, I shot someone." It's something strange. A really strange feeling.'

Introspection was followed by a range of emotions, including guilt. 'You feel like, you know, a bit happy with yourself – I've done me job, it's what I've come here for, know what I mean? He's Taliban and I've got one of them. You feel quite chuffed about it. Then you're feeling, like, you know . . . well, you know, sad. You're thinking . . . well, you know . . . you know . . . the, the geezer's another human being at the end of the day, like. Then you get the feeling, well, you know, bollocks to him, it's either him or me. And then you're thinking . . . I think people get, like, you know, religious then as well. You're thinking, well, in the bigger picture, if there is like a Geezer up there and a Geezer downstairs, what does that mean to me now I've just fucking shot someone? Is that me bollocksed? Am I going to hell or what? And all of that went through me mind that night, for hour after hour after hour. I think I did fall asleep for a couple of hours towards the end. But really strange.'