A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (33 page)

For Brigadier Butler, Hajji Shah Agha's appeal for reconciliation was an eleventh-hour vindication of his strategy. The '
shura
process', as he called it, had in fact begun the previous month with a discreet meeting between Governor Daoud and the tribal elders from Sangin. Daoud had drawn up a fourteen-point plan with them; Butler had commented on the security arrangements. The fourteen-point plan was then picked up by the Musa Qala elders, who were apparently more anxious for reconciliation than their Sangin counterparts. This was the 'tipping point' of popular support for the Coalition that he had hoped to reach: a crucial first chance to drive a wedge between the Taliban and the populace. In his view, the Musa Qala elders were bound to feel let down by the Taliban, who had promised to rid Helmand of the British within six months. Instead, their town had been gravely damaged, many of their menfolk had been killed while fighting for the Taliban as 'hired guns', and the British didn't seem to be going anywhere. Little did the enemy know that Butler was within hours of ordering a withdrawal. 'It was,' said Butler, 'a question of who blinked first.'

For the men in the Musa Qala compound, the ceasefire that took hold at 9.41 p.m. on the evening of 12 September heralded the first night's peace in two months. The garrison, known as Easy Company, had originally been sent there for only ten days. Easy Company was a mixed bag of Paras and Rangers of First Battalion, The Royal Irish Regiment, two platoons of which had been sent to reinforce the battle group in July. In the view of the Household Cavalry squadron commander, Will Bartle-Jones, of all the ground units who fought in support of the Paras – them, the Gurkhas, the Fusiliers – the Royal Irish 'probably had the most horrid time of all'. By the end of the tour three of their number were dead and seventeen were injured, out of a total of about sixty men. Luke McCulloch was killed at Sangin, but it was Musa Qala that they talked about most when I went to visit them.

The fighting there had been as desperate as anywhere, and they were proud of the tenacity of their defence. Towards the end of it they were reduced to a few hundred rounds per GPMG – about ten minutes' worth of firing in a heavy contact. In one month of combat, the garrison fired a quarter of all the 7.62mm rounds used by British troops in the whole of 2006. Meanwhile, the ammunition for the Minimi light machine-guns ran out altogether. It was fortunate that the company of Danes who held the compound before them had left behind several boxes of 5.56mm rifle rounds. Thanks to Nato standardization, these fitted the chambers of the light machine-guns. By pushing the Danish rounds one by one into the expended links, the Minimis were put into action again. Necessity had many children at Musa Qala. When one of the .50 cal machine-guns was destroyed, it was replaced with a dummy; the generators running the water pumps on which the garrison depended were held together with Superglue. The siege of Musa Qala was extraordinary even by Helmand's standards, but what really distinguished the men of Easy Company was that, at the end of it, they were ordered to abandon the compound for which many of them had paid with their limbs and lives.

Even the manner of the garrison's departure on 17 October bordered on ignominy. There were no support helicopters to whisk them back to Bastion: in the delicate atmosphere of the ceasefire, headquarters judged that sending up Chinooks would be too provocative. There was no regular Army road transport for them either. Instead, in an extraordinary departure from usual military practice, the Royal Irish were obliged to leave Musa Qala in a convoy of Jingly trucks provided by the village elders. This was a risky exercise, for although the Rangers were able to line the floors of the trucks with sandbags to give some protection against mine strike, the lumbering Jinglies were otherwise completely exposed to attack. Hundreds of impassive-faced locals turned out to watch their departure, dozens of black-turbaned Taliban clearly visible among them. The British were at least spared the humiliation of leaving behind their weapons. The Jinglies bristled like hedgehogs as they left. 'I wouldn't have been very happy with it,' said Lieutenant Paul Martin, who had prior to this been injured and evacuated. 'There were forty white Toyotas thrashing around the sides and back of the trucks as they left. The boys were waiting for the mother of all ambushes; they said it felt like handing themselves over on a silver platter.' There was no ambush, thankfully; and the Taliban later fulfilled their side of their bargain by withdrawing to at least five kilometres beyond the town.

In Kabul, the Musa Qala deal was hailed as a kind of victory for 'people power'. 'A lot of Afghans including people in the Ministry of the Interior were very much in favour of it,' said General Richards. 'They saw it as the sort of thing one had to do.' On the other hand, the enemy leadership in Quetta successfully portrayed the British pull-out as an important victory of their own. There was no more evocative symbol of the Coalition's discomfort, in Afghan eyes, than British soldiers retreating from battle in a fleet of battered local trucks. Besides, fourteen weeks later the deal collapsed, and the Taliban did indeed reoccupy the town.

The details of how this happened remain sketchy. What is certain is that the Americans, whose tough-talking General Dan McNeill took over ISAF command from Britain's more accommodating General Richards on 4 February 2007, bombed and killed the brother of a local Taliban leader called Mullah Ghafoor. Machiavellians, noting that the Americans had never approved of the Musa Qala deal in the first place, suggested this was done with the intention of precipitating its end. If it was an American ploy, it certainly worked. Mullah Ghafoor accused the Coalition of breaching the ceasefire agreement; the Coalition retorted that the bomb had been dropped outside the town's agreed five-kilometre exclusion zone. Wherever it fell, Ghafoor was incensed, and he stormed into the town to accuse the elders of cooperating with the foreigners. The elders, very bravely, disarmed and ejected Ghafoor and his henchmen. But Ghafoor returned, this time with a larger group, and threw the elders into prison. There were allegations of torture. Several tribal elders were reportedly murdered. The Taliban were indisputably back in charge.

There were plenty of people, some Royal Irish among them, who thought that the Musa Qala deal was not the British Army's finest hour. They had more right than anyone to feel bitter about the platoon-house policy. Not surprisingly, many of them wondered what so much sacrifice had really achieved. 'I think some of the blokes looked upon it in a bad way,' said Martin, one of the platoon commanders. 'They thought, "Why did we do that? How come we lost three men – for what? What exactly did we do if only to hand it back again?"'

I'd asked to meet no more than three or four members of the Musa Qala garrison, but in the event, at the Royal Irish battalion's headquarters at Fort George on the Moray Firth, a sprawling eighteenth-century monument to the Hanoverian suppression of the Jacobites, I met about twenty of them. It was a strange and intense experience. Unable or perhaps unwilling to decide whose story should be told, the officer in charge had invited along anyone who was interested. For eight hours they rotated through my interview room in groups of threes and fours, even queuing in the corridor outside in their anxiety to tell their tale.

Each wore a huge, misshapen beret known as a caubeen ('originally for carrying potatoes', one of them explained); the officers carried a heavy gnarled walking stick fashioned from blackthorn. They came from both sides of the Irish divide, although Ulster was naturally the biggest recruiting ground. They had names like McKeown and McKenna and O'Driscoll, with accents to match. Others were English, and there were also a significant number of Commonwealth soldiers in the regiment, particularly from Fiji. The differences between them didn't seem to count for much; it was clear that their shared experiences had created a powerful bond between them. In fact, Herrick 4 appeared to have brought these men closer together than any unit I had previously seen. They called themselves a 'Band of Brothers' without irony. All of them, unusually, had volunteered to go to Helmand. Most of them were twenty-one years old.

There was a fierce fighting spirit at work at Fort George that felt distinctly Celtic. When I suggested, stupidly, that they had become honorary Paras during the defence of the district centres, one of them replied, with stony seriousness, that it was the Paras who had become honorary Royal Irish. They were certainly well qualified for the type of urban counter-insurgency warfare required in Helmand. Years of practice in Northern Ireland had made them experts in house arrests, cordon-and-search operations, the confiscation of weapons and the setting up of vehicle checkpoints. 'It's exactly what we do,' said Martin. 'We're extremely good at it.'

I was unsurprised to learn that Gerald 'hearts and minds' Templer, the architect of the counter-insurgency in Malaya half a century ago, had been an officer in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, one of this regiment's forebears.

Martin and the others had been back in Scotland for months, yet most were still driven by adrenalin, still chattering about what they had seen and done. One or two of them were still in slings or plaster. Many of them pressed snapshots and email addresses on me, and were understandably keen to know when their names would appear in print.

It was Paul Martin's story that impressed me the most. He had been on holiday in Jamaica when the call for reinforcements came through, and was thrilled when he was selected to command one of the two Royal Irish platoons. 'Anyone who has done the platoon commander's course would be the same,' he said. He was twenty-nine. Like many others in his regiment, there was a long tradition of soldiering in his family. It pleased him very much that his platoon was called 'Barossa' after the 1811 Peninsular War battle in which an earlier generation of Ulstermen had fought. Like other young officers I had met he seemed much older than his years. The softness of his brogue was at complete odds with the brutality of the experiences he described so matter-of-factly. At times I caught a faraway look in his pale blue eyes, and a certain tautness of expression that made me ask if he was suffering from latent exhaustion, or even some kind of delayed battle shock. 'I'm OK,' he replied with a smile. 'The medical officer said to me, "I'm not worried about you now, but I'll be watching you extremely closely the next time you're in a contact. You just don't know how you're going to react."'

Martin was one of what his regiment called 'The Magnificent Seven'. In the early hours of 2 September, during an attack which seemed slightly heavier than usual, a mortar dropped neatly on to the centre of the 'Alamo', as the tallest building in the Musa Qala compound was known. An eight-man section of Royal Irish were manning the roof and seven of them, including Martin, were caught in the spray of shrapnel. 'It was a bit of a blur when the explosion went off,' he said. 'It kicks up an awful lot of sand and dirt and dust and stuff. Everyone is very disorientated. You're deaf, you're bleeding through your ears and your eyes because the explosion has just gone off so close to you . . . everybody's the same.' The only one unscathed was Sergeant Steven Gilchrist. 'I was on the .50 cal one minute, and the next, everyone was lying there screaming – apart from me,' he recalled. Six of the men, who had been crouching behind the low wall that ran around the edge and therefore had their backs to the blast, received 'lower leg injuries, elbow injuries, that sort of thing'. Martin, standing in the middle of the roof because he was commanding the defence, was not so lucky. 'I was hit in the spleen, the lung – that bit just missed my heart – and the top of my left arm,' he said. 'I've still got three pieces left in me. I was extremely lucky. I didn't realize it at the time . . . The lung thing was the biggest thing because of the breathing. You think it's just a scratch. The adrenalin's pumping, everything's happening, you're trying to do the best you can, stay in command. But I was starting to choke down on blood so I couldn't command any more and had to drop down off the roof.'

The strike was controversial. Some suspected that it was not a Taliban mortar that had done the damage but a stray shell from a British 105mm battery which had been bombarding the town from out in the desert. Martin was ultimately operated on in Kandahar, where the surgeons presented him with a piece of shrapnel from his body. He had intended to bring it back to Britain for forensic verification – 'just for my own piece of mind, you know' – but lost it in the confusion of repatriation.

Martin actually thought it more likely that the Taliban had been responsible. Over in Sangin, a major relief-in-place operation had 'flushed out an awful lot of people'. Many of the fighters besieging that garrison had simply decamped northwards to Musa Qala until the Paras had finished sweeping the town and they could re-infiltrate down the valley at their leisure. By September, Martin observed, avoiding a confrontation that they could not win in this way had become standard Taliban operating procedure. Among the fighters who had temporarily quit Sangin, unluckily for Martin, was a highly skilled mortar specialist. A night or two before the Alamo was hit, intelligence revealed the details of a conversation between this newcomer and the local Taliban commander. 'They obviously knew each other – it was all very convivial. The commander was asking, "How long are you up here for?" It was almost like it was a holiday break for this guy. And then we heard the commander asking him to stay on for a couple of weeks, to lend them a hand, because we'd given them a thrashing recently . . . The change was dramatic for us. This guy was very accurate, and we started to lose people at that point.'

When Martin was hit, his platoon had been at Musa Qala for a month. As a commander, he explained, one of his greatest challenges was to protect his men from the worst psychological effects of being so close to so much death and serious injury – a job, he made clear, that left little time to think about himself. Every evening at Musa Qala he gathered his platoon together for a briefing session he called 'evening prayers', when the men were encouraged to speak their minds. 'Musa Qala was a close environment. I found myself knowing what questions they were going to ask before they asked them: what's happened, what about the RAF, what about casevac procedure, why, why, why, boss . . . they were quite an interesting bunch.' He acknowledged that it was sometimes difficult to justify the orders from above – about 'why they had to go into the same position [where] someone had just . . . had their head blown off. Or et cetera, et cetera. That's a hard thing to do, being a commander. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. How do I keep the men motivated? How do I do it? How do you push them on?'