No Worse Enemy (8 page)

‘The tendency the ANA have is ... it’s all a bit “white man magic”. They absolutely love it when it’s working well but when they see the other side, they get a bit
shaky’, said Captain Hennessey. He thought that if the Hellfire had landed just outside the compound or slightly further inside, his section or the family would have been killed. He wrote
later that he was haunted by the thought of what could have been. I imagined what would have happened if the 500lb bomb he’d requested hadn’t been denied.

The fighting continued for hours. Bullets bounced off the walls above our heads, seeming constantly to come from new directions. Nobody knew where to shoot, although that didn’t stop the
ANA, who fired wild bursts into the air. The Brits screamed at them to stop, to conserve their ammunition. ‘Are they shooting
at
anything?’ was the frequent question. The answer
was always no.

Rocket man fired a few more RPGs at something and walked back inside. ‘Taliban finish. One RPG, three Talib finished. Good’, he said, re-tying his bandana and giving me the
thumbs-up. But the Taliban were far from finished, spraying the building with bullets from what felt like 360 degrees.

Some soldiers shouted, ‘Enemy mortars incoming’. We were ordered to spread out. But no mortars hit the compound. Most reports were wrong, or had passed through so many soldiers that
they had lost all meaning. Major David asked the same question into his radio five times, seeking confirmation that the aircraft above us had been replaced and wouldn’t be disappearing to
refuel. Eventually, he was told that new planes would be arriving in half an hour. The forward air controller, who was speaking to somebody else on his radio, said an F15 would arrive in ten
minutes. The person on the Major’s radio said that was ‘Bollocks’. It was chaos.

Inside the compound, the ANA lay on the opium poppies, passing another spliff. ‘I don’t know how they smoke it in the middle of a battle’, said Lance Corporal Jack Mizon,
‘but as soon as they get a few minutes, they start passing it around, laughing and joking. Then a minute later they’re running towards bullets.’

‘I thought it might make them more cautious’, I said.

‘It would make me more cautious!’ he said, laughing. ‘They love it. Smoke a spliff and run at the bullets. The senior ones [British officers] try and stop it but you
can’t. It’s their country; if they want to smoke, let them smoke. They’re never gonna be a British-style army; they’re their own army, so if they’re gonna smoke
they’re gonna smoke. You just have to learn to work with them while they’re doing it.’ Jack was the Grenadiers’s bruiser, both in Helmand and in the pubs near their barracks
back at home. He spoke in a strong North London accent and often described himself as thick and uneducated. But he understood exactly what was going on around him and often articulated it
perfectly, in a few pithy sentences.

One of the ANA soldiers came outside and pointed his gun into the air, holding it almost above his head. It was struck by a Taliban bullet. A piece of metal, the top cover, went spinning into
the air with a twang. When it landed, the Afghan soldier picked it and walked back inside, laughing.

The temperature had topped fifty degrees and we’d been on the move for almost nine hours. Six soldiers, including the medic, had collapsed with heat exhaustion. One had a temperature of
forty-one degrees. Ammunition, water and radio batteries were all running low.

Major David ordered a 500lb bomb to be dropped into a compound beyond the trees, where he was ‘confident’ the largest group of Taliban was hiding. A helicopter would immediately
follow the bomb, to evacuate the heatstroke casualties.

Bullets were still hitting the building. One came right through the door and disappeared into the wall above our heads. Before long, we heard an F16. ‘Thirty seconds until impact’,
said Major David. ‘Charlie Charlie One (all stations) stay in hard cover ... the bomb has been dropped. Out.’

There was silence. Major David smiled for the first time that day. Then there was more silence. ‘Thirty seconds until impact’, said the forward air controller. ‘Please
don’t land on here’, said Snazle, echoing my thoughts exactly. ‘Twice in one day would surely be too much’, said Captain Hennessey.

Through the terp’s radio, we heard the Taliban Commander shouting instructions to his men. Suddenly, the jet was on top of us and everyone curled forwards as the huge bomb exploded. The
compound shook. What was left of the grapes fell to the floor. The terp’s radio went silent. ‘He’s not fucking talking now, is he?’ said Snazle, laughing again.

I looked out of the doorway. A mushroom of huge grey cloud billowed, not a hundred metres away but outside the compound it was aimed at.

Bullets sank into the walls around us again. Another air strike was called. As the plane circled, preparing to drop another bomb, the Brits and Afghans showered the compound with a horrendous
rattle of constant fire to stop the Taliban escaping.

As ever, there was no way to check for the presence of civilians. ‘Heads down, twenty seconds’, said Major David. The explosion rocked our compound. This time, the silence lasted; it
looked like the fight was finally over. ‘Hopefully that’s given them enough of a headache to stop’, said Major David. According to the pilots, the forward air controller reported,
fifteen Taliban had been killed. But through the terp’s radio, we could still hear someone talking.

We were hit by more fire from more angles than any time that day. The pattern was depressingly familiar: millions of pounds’ worth of the latest weaponry was dropped, a silence of perhaps
twenty seconds followed, and then the Taliban popped straight back up and started firing again.

Another soldier – the biggest in the squad – collapsed from heat exhaustion, slumping back against the wall and sliding down until he was in a deep crouch, trembling and mumbling
deliriously. The sight of this huge man collapsing so completely made me think he must be suffering from some kind of shell shock. The soldiers around him were shocked too. For a few seconds they
froze, watching him. Then they ran over, tore off his clothes and poured water down his back and into his mouth.

More bullets hit the compound, this time from a direction exactly opposite to where we thought most of the Taliban were. We were surrounded, with no way of escaping. Hedgerows they might have
been behind were strafed from the air. Ditches were sprayed with heavy machine-gun fire from the roof. Mortars were fired. The soldiers tried anything that might discourage them.

I heard a strange but vicious chopping sound in front of us. It sounded like a thousand tiny zips being pulled closed all at once. ‘Flechettes’, said the soldier next to me. Also
called ‘shipyard confetti’, flechettes are nail-filled rockets that shower thousands of small steel darts across a wide area. ‘You wouldn’t want to be the poor fucker under
that’, said another soldier, in tones of pity, rather than glee.

Suddenly, and for no obvious reason, the attack stopped. Perhaps the Taliban, who’d probably only been three or four groups of four or five fighters each, had run out of ammunition.

At about 4 p.m., the huge soldier I’d watched collapse was loaded on to a makeshift stretcher and carried by six struggling soldiers. We walked wearily back to the patrol base. Almost
thirteen hours had passed since the Grenadiers had entered the Green Zone; eight since they had first come under attack. The depressingly familiar trend had continued. An area had been cleared but
couldn’t be held. It would have to be fought for again, another day. As the sun started to sink away and stop punishing us for a few hours, the news came in over the radios. The Taliban had
retaken the compounds.

On the way back, I rested against a wall, next to Lance Corporal Mizon, for whom this was the latest of many bad days. Two weeks earlier, his platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Falorin Kuku,
had been blown up right behind him. A week after that, he’d been in the front of the jeep hit by the suicide bomber. One of his friends had been killed and four others wounded.

‘I expected it to be bad but these last two weeks have been fucking ... ... really bad.’ I said it was a lot for someone to take. ‘I suppose it is but I try not to think about
it.’ He wetted his lips and shrugged slightly: ‘I’ll be alright.’

It didn’t help they found it hard even to see the Taliban. ‘They’re up for it, as you’ve seen today. We’ve gone two kilometres in about seven hours, which is fuck
all. They’re hard to fight. It’s rare you even see them. Most people here haven’t ever seen them. And as soon as it’s getting a bit rough and they look like they’re
gonna get it, they drop their weapon, pick up a pitchfork and they’re Farmer Joe for the day.’

‘Does that make you suspicious of everyone?’

‘Yeah, especially after that suicide bomber. I don’t trust anyone. I don’t let no one near me any more. If someone’s coming towards me on the same path, I cross the
path.’ He looked down; suddenly, you could see the impact of it all. ‘I just want to go home’, he said. A lost little boy, not the GPMG-carrying bruiser who was always first into
the fight that everyone else saw.

He found it hard to understand the Taliban. ‘They fight as if they want to die. They’re the kind of people that believe when they die they’re going to wake up with twenty-seven
[sic] virgins. How can you fight against someone like that? Someone who doesn’t give a shit. If as soon as I died I’d go back to Tottenham, I’d be running at the bullets.

‘The ANA aren’t much different’, he said. ‘As soon as the bullets go down they get stuck in but they don’t put no flank protection down, they don’t bring no
water or food and as soon as they’re hungry they come to us. “I want water, I want food.” Well, I haven’t got no water meself. If we wasn’t here, they wouldn’t
get no water. If we wasn’t here they wouldn’t give themselves flank protection or rear protection. If a mine goes off, we get down, stand still and poke our way out, carefully. It takes
hours and hours. They get in a straight line and just walk through it. They’re all gonna get blown up. But that’s their way of thinking.’

I asked how many times he’d fought for ground and then had to give it up again. ‘It always happens, you take ground then you lose it. There’s no one to hold the ground.’
In the past, they had established small patrol bases, supposed to be taken over by the Afghan police. But the police hadn’t turned up.

When we finally got back to the base, most of the soldiers collapsed on the floor. They struggled to string sentences together, if they tried to speak at all. Most stared straight ahead, so
exhausted they appeared to be in shock. How could they have been through all that only to end up handing the ground back to the Taliban?

The next day, I asked Major David what had happened. ‘The resistance was so fierce and it very soon became apparent that without a considerably larger force it would have been extremely
difficult to hold there.’ I asked if it was pure chance that the family – indeed, a section of his men – hadn’t been killed by the Hellfire missile. Major David was
admirably honest. ‘I was fortunate that none of them were injured. I directed that attack. I gave clearance for it to fire and the responsibility lies on my shoulders. In this instance,
I’m extremely lucky that there were no casualties, either friendly or civilian. But that is combat. In the confusion that follows an engagement like that it’s extremely difficult
sometimes. Yesterday was probably the hardest day I’ve had in seventeen years of service and I think all the others who fought in it would agree. It was eight hours of unrelenting combat
against a canny, wily and determined enemy who was prepared to fight to the death to defend the ground that they held.’

I asked if so much damage and trauma – five compounds bombed and one flattened – wouldn’t lose the support of the local people or even make them turn to the Taliban, if they
hadn’t already. ‘It’s a fine line’, he said. ‘I think if we were completely indiscriminate in our fire then yes, we could lose support quite quickly. But we always try
to minimise collateral damage. Yesterday, I agree we were reasonably lucky that the family weren’t injured but these are the risks in this kind of combat. When the ANA spoke to that family
afterwards, they said the Taliban had forced them to stay in that compound. They are very canny. They understand, probably more than our public at home, that any collateral damage plays directly
into their hands. The civilians yesterday said that the Taliban said “we won’t kill you, we’re just here to protect you”, but they also made them stay in the compound,
knowing that they would probably be killed or injured by the coalition air strike.’

Major David thought that seven Taliban had been killed and six injured, out of probably fifty fighters. I asked how fifty fighters with old AK47s had managed to cause 160 British and 130 ANA
soldiers, with air support, so much difficulty. ‘I’d have had an easier time if I’d had only had British troops under my command. The ANA have come on leaps and bounds but their
command and control isn’t quite as advanced as ours. My men took significant risks yesterday to push them forward. Or should I say pull them forward? As such, it’s a significantly
harder battle to wage.’ While their job was supposed to be to act as mentors for the Afghan Army, they were still commanding them. When I asked what had happened to the ANA’s company
commander, Major David couldn’t quite stop himself from breaking into a huge smile. He was a bit more diplomatic than most of his men: ‘He manages to locate himself in the safer rear
areas on most occasions. Yesterday, he was not present and I had to command his companies.’

I followed the Grenadiers as they cleared the abandoned village of Rahim Kholay. We walked into a small valley filled with walls, buildings and caves, hiding perfect bunkers, trenches and firing
holes; invisible until you were so close you’d be dead. They were deserted, but there was no relief, no joy at this lucky break. Their exhaustion was so complete it was impossible to care.
Even when mortar fire sent the ANA, who were ahead of us, sprawling, there was no reaction. No one had enough energy or strength left for fear, anger or the desire to fight back. Only when the ANA
started moving dangerously close to another British position did Hennessey, Mizon and a few others send jeeps to cut them off and direct them back into the village, where they were less likely to
get into trouble. ‘It’s like herding cats’, said Hennessey. ‘Cats with guns.’