A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (34 page)

His task was relentless. On average, he reckoned, he slept for about four hours in every twenty-four. It was also lonely, for he had no real friends with whom he might share his private thoughts and fears. The only other Royal Irish officer was the second platoon commander, Captain Mark Johnson, to whom he was not especially close. He had never worked with his sergeant, Steven Gilchrist, before. 'You try not to show them how much you're affected by anything, or how much you're tired, because you're the commander. You can't afford to take a wrong decision. I had to get on with it, bottle it up and not let things show. They don't want a friend, they want a leader in that type of situation. Although McKenna, my driver in Iraq – he got to know me very well. He'd make me smile, give me a cigarette. He'd know I hadn't slept in three days.'

Dwelling on the proximity of death did no good to anybody. Martin dealt with morbidity by trying to focus his men's minds on the day to come rather than anything that had just happened. This was the real point of his 'evening prayer' sessions. Too much exposure to what he called 'blood and guts . . . the Vietnam thing' could cause mental devastation. An early illustration of this truth came on 6 August with the death of Andrew Cutts, a private in the Royal Logistics Corps. During a resupply operation in which the Royal Irish were also involved, the nineteen-year-old from Blidworth in Nottinghamshire was providing cover for a WMIK as it crossed a wadi near Musa Qala when he was hit by a bullet that exited through an eye. His vehicle was stuck in a bottleneck, and because of its exposed position two or three minutes went by before anyone could begin to administer first aid. The shock and anguish of watching Cutts at their feet was too much for his crewmates. 'The guys in the back of the WMIK were badly affected. They were screaming; it was slap-in-the-face stuff. The whole team had to be extracted by Chinook.'

Looking at carnage, Martin concluded, was 'not necessary'. But sometimes it was unavoidable – and he was shocked at how he, personally, became hardened to the sight of it at Musa Qala. 'Your heart slowly does become colder – or black,' he said. In the early hours of 27 August a signaller, Lance Corporal Jonathan Hetherington, twenty-two, from Port Talbot in South Wales, was shot dead. Five days later a mortar exploded on the Alamo, this one at head height. Two Royal Irish, twenty-eight-year-old Lance Corporal Paul Muirhead from Bearley in Warwickshire, and Ranger Anare Draiva, twenty-seven, from Suva in Fiji, were hit. Muirhead – 'Moonbeam' to his mates – died of his injuries five days later; Draiva, known as 'D', was killed outright. In the scramble to evacuate the pair from the roof, Martin ordered one of his Rangers to grab the other end of Draiva's stretcher. 'There wasn't much left of him,' said Martin, 'but I didn't think of it. Because it was something I was dealing with all the time, what with us and the civvies and the ANA getting wounded and all the other bits and pieces.'

Not long afterwards, Martin was approached by a corporal.

'"Boss," he said, "I think you need to have a word with -- [the Ranger who had just helped Martin with the stretcher]."

'"Why, what's wrong?" I said.

'"Well," he said, "he's on his hands and knees in his sangar, crying his eyes out."

'"Ah," I said. "Right. I missed that one. Right."'

Martin hadn't appreciated that it was the first time this Ranger had had to deal with somebody 'in bits' and had forgotten the impact this could have. He ordered him out of his sangar and spent three-quarters of an hour trying to soothe him. 'I gave him the choice of staying off the sangar, but I really wanted him to go back on to keep his mind busy.' Martin was nothing if not a conscientious officer, and he still felt guilty about the incident. 'I became a little bit complacent in command. I spoke to him about it. I hope I didn't let him down.'

Following the 2 September attack, from the field hospital at Kandahar Martin was sent first to Selly Oak in Birmingham and then to a specialist unit at the nearby Queen Elizabeth hospital, where doctors could monitor the shard of shrapnel which had lodged so perilously close to his heart. He was glad to be there. 'I didn't have people running up and down the ward having nightmares, screaming themselves to sleep like they do at Selly Oak. Everyone understands the need to have people who shared the same experiences around you . . . you've got a common bond. But for me it was the opposite. I was glad I was on my own, with my family. The last thing I wanted to subject them to was visiting with people with no arms and legs and having dramas – extreme mental dramas – getting up from their bed and running down the street. That's not necessary.'

It was another six weeks before Martin's platoon returned to Scotland, by which time he was well enough to be able to meet them off the plane at RAF Kinross. In the relative tranquillity of Queen Elizabeth's, Martin had begun to think about the formal two-week 'decompression' period that all troops returning from theatre are obliged to undergo, and had worked out what was wrong with it. 'I was lying in hospital, getting myself back on the straight and narrow, and I thought, "Let's look at this." When somebody dies or is severely injured, the last time any of us sees them, or me for that matter, is as we put them on to the back of the Slick [support helicopter] . . . and then they are gone. And the next day brings new things to keep you busy and occupied. There's no closure on it.' At Martin's instigation, therefore, and with the full support of the battalion medical officer, the first three days of the returning platoon's decompression period were spent on a bus. 'We drove down south to England to visit graves. The whole team – two platoons' worth. Fifty or sixty blokes! Paul Muirhead's family were there. It was good. A lot of them laid a bunch of flowers or whatever, and gave the mother a hug. Then we all went to his local pub. A really nice English pub. A couple of drinks with the mum, stepdad, brother and stuff. They didn't want us to leave.' But leave they did, back up to Morayshire via other graves and the hospital at Selly Oak, where they paid a surprise mass visit to their recuperating injured. Martin's only regret was that they couldn't 'do' Anare Draiva because he was buried in Fiji.

The aftermath of Musa Qala affected the Royal Irish in different ways. Many of the younger men were astonishingly upbeat. Lance Corporal Michael Diamond, twenty-one, who had been heavily involved in the horror of the ambush which killed Andrew Cutts, was typical. As a teenager he had been a promising golfer, and had even been offered a chance to turn pro, but he had joined the Army instead and had no regrets. 'I'd never give up the experiences I've had in the last three years,' he said. Like others in his group, he saw even his platoon's strange retreat from Musa Qala in the best possible light. 'I was happy the ceasefire was called,' said one. 'It was an experiment for Herrick 4. That was our achievement.'

Yet the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder often lurked beneath the surface bravado. Even Diamond's group admitted to bad dreams, and that it had taken some time to readjust to normality. 'My first day back I went for a haircut in Inverness,' Diamond said. 'It was fireworks season, and somebody let off a banger a couple of feet away. I took cover under a car.' It was harder for others. 'My wife saw a change in me when I came back home,' said Ranger Craig McLean. 'I was drinking. I was arguing. I went for medical help, I couldn't sleep. I had dreams about [Luke] McCulloch. About six weeks after I got back, it hit me. I just sat in any room thinking about it, 24/7. I couldn't do normal stuff in the house, I was always cracking up. It was that bad – waking up at night at the same times that I did in Afghanistan. There's a psychologist on the base you can go to, but the boys don't go because they don't want people to talk; they think it's gay. The boys here who haven't been to Afghanistan yet are in for a big shock. We tell them what it's like but it makes no difference.'

Among the last Royal Irish I spoke to was Ranger Stuart Devine, from Liverpool. He had served alongside Luke McCulloch in Iraq, and had spent seven weeks at Sangin. He remembered Tom Burne and the other 'Tankies' of the Household Cavalry well. He had also taken part in the operation to relieve the Gurkhas at Now Zad in late July. ('The camp was stinking. It was the most destruction I'd seen in my life. We'd levelled the place, like . . . They were pretty broken, man – they were glad to see us.') He seemed tougher and more cynical than most of his contemporaries. 'Well, it's a chance to save money, so it is, you know?' he replied when I asked him how he would feel about another tour in Helmand.

Devine offered one of the most acerbic analyses of the tour I had heard. His assessment of the strategy that had sent him and his mates to the northern areas was damning. 'We'd have been better not to have bothered,' he said. 'All that happened is the Taliban moved in and the civilians moved out and the towns got destroyed. Every time you kill one he's bound to have a friend, a father, a brother . . . You might have people saying we won, we killed all these people. But you can go out there and kill as many as you want. There are millions of them, and the more you kill, the more they'll fight.'

In his personal message to commanders at the end of Herrick 4, Brigadier Butler judged that the Taliban had been 'tactically defeated for this war-fighting season'. At the same time he acknowledged that the defence of the district centres 'may have appeared meaningless and at too high a cost in blood and treasure', but argued that 'the operational and political imperatives of maintaining these "strategic pegs" was, and remains, essential'. Devine was clearly one of those who thought the cost had indeed been too high. Butler had spoken in person to the Royal Irish at the end of the tour, yet Devine remained profoundly unimpressed by the words offered. 'The way he described it, he said the reason the platoon-houses were set up was to fight the Taliban so that in the south QIPs could go in and fix the place up. But nobody went into Gereshk and did anything. When we came back from Sangin, all they'd done was build a road. And there was never any Taliban there anyway. Gereshk is all about the drugs trade. And it was the same in Lashkar Gah.'

Butler repeated his justification in a foreword to
The Battle for
Helmand
, an official account of Herrick 4 produced in glossy soft-back by the Para Regiment's own publishing arm in 2007. 'The Brigade deployed to make a difference to the ordinary Afghan,' he wrote. 'Not only did the brave men and women make a genuine difference, but they also set some really solid foundations for the Other Government Departments, the Royal Marines and subsequent follow-on forces to build upon.' But how solid were these foundations, actually? What, specifically, had the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office managed to achieve in Helmand in the year since Herrick 4? Butler argued that Sangin had been transformed into a functional market town, with little overt sign of its recent past as a centre of the narco-trade. However, it was Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, which really mattered. If reconstruction was failing there, what hope was there for the province as a whole?

I asked Adam Holloway, a Conservative MP, a member of the Commons Defence Select Committee and a former officer in the Grenadier Guards. Deeply suspicious of the MoD's claims of progress, in 2007 he twice visited Lashkar Gah to discover his own 'ground truth', travelling incognito and at his own expense. It was an unprecedented and possibly foolhardy thing for a serving MP to do – 'the ambassador in Kabul went ape-shit when he found out', he told me – but the ammunition he found with which to pepper the Defence Secretary in select committee meetings made it worth it. 'There has been little reconstruction in Lashkar Gah worth speaking of,' he said. 'Des Browne keeps saying that we've spent seventeen million dollars there. But when I looked I discovered the money had mostly been spent on ANP checkpoints, which often aren't even manned at night because the police are too scared . . . All that checkpoints do is to make it easier for the cops to rob road-users.'

It was not entirely the Defence Secretary's fault if his view was rose-tinted. His primary source of information, according to Holloway, was the PRT, the military-run Provincial Reconstruction Team in Lashkar Gah, whose view of the ground from their fortified base was monocular. 'The PRT people hardly ever get out of their base, for security reasons,' Holloway explained. 'When you go there it's like Salisbury Plain with the heating switched up. But the difference of opinion on the other side of the wire is huge.' The PRT reported back to the MoD, who put their own Panglossian spin on events for their own reasons: politics, funding, careers, institutional ethos. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news. Again and again, Holloway found, the authors of upbeat official accounts of progress were deeply pessimistic in private. He called this phenomenon 'groupthink', and the net result was that the minister was being misled. 'The MoD, like the Army, take a "can-do" approach. That's healthy, but I worry that they themselves are allowing their willingness to obscure the scale of the challenge. Even now we've only got about seven thousand people in Helmand. Is that really enough to control it?'

Part of the explanation, he thought, lay in the speed with which British troops were rotated through Helmand, which led to a syndrome he called 'short-tourism'. 'The first two months of each rotation are spent working out what to do, the next two are spent fighting, and the last two on justifying the outcome,' he said. 'You get these strange little spikes of progress in each tour's closing signal report to PJHQ. If you're an MP, and your only source of information is the MoD, you'd think everything was going swimmingly in Helmand. But the military are only deluding themselves.'

Holloway was certain that Afghanistan would be won or lost on 'what the little villager thinks', and equally certain that the high expectations of Western promises were still not being met. 'We're spending money but we're doing it doctrinally, through DfID, and we haven't got time for that. People want their lives changed. And so they have been, but so far only by bombing. Since Herrick 4, all they've had is war-fighting. Britain has spent £1.6 billion so far on the military effect. Just think how much development that kind of money could buy . . . We're ignoring the key people in all this, imposing the will of the central government while ignoring the wishes of local
shuras
, and we're at the tipping point, poll-wise.'