No Worse Enemy (9 page)

Rocky, the ANA Captain, didn’t want to clear Rahim Kalay, because he thought the Taliban had just moved into some nearby trees, and were waiting to attack. ‘These poor soldiers have
not come here to die in vain. War has its own tactics and I am not going to be in the front. I’m not a boy of fear, I wouldn’t go back to the womb of my mother from where I have come. I
would obey you and go to anywhere you send me, even unarmed, because you are my boss. If I don’t go you can shoot me but please let us fight this war with our own tactics. The enemy has
entered those orchards. If I move forward I will be destroyed.’

Major David, one of the most thoughtful and considered soldiers I’d ever met, lost his patience. He interrupted this speech, snapping: ‘The best thing is just to do what you’re
told’ and walked away.

That was translated as ‘Yes, that’s fine, do whatever you want to do.’

I left the Grenadier Guards. They’d been told they were to rest, as they had been out on operations for seventy-four days. I was persuaded to believe in the ridiculous idea that I could
get a helicopter ride back to Bastion, go out on operation with the Light Dragoons and return to the Grenadiers before they headed back into the Green Zone. Instead I spent three days in a tent,
waiting for a seat on a chopper that never materialised. In the meantime, the Grenadier Guards were told that rather than heading back to camp for showers and some good nights’ sleep in an
air-conditioned tent, they would be taking the town of Adin Zai.

While I was desperately trying to get back to them, the Guards had walked towards the town and had immediately come under fire. By the end of the first day, they had dropped twelve 500lb bombs,
lost one soldier and had two seriously injured. They thought they’d killed around eighty Taliban fighters. I regularly heard such assertions but the overall numbers of Taliban never seemed to
drop. I never saw anywhere near enough bodies or blood to back up the claims of enemy casualties. The Taliban were very good at evacuating their dead and injured, but not that good. I assumed they
exaggerated their losses on the radio, perhaps to ease their escape or possibly to keep the British focused on buildings that had long been abandoned.

By the time I reached them, the Grenadiers had taken Adin Zai and the Taliban were about to start their counter-attack. The first thing I saw as I ran from the Chinook helicopter was Company
Sergeant Major Snazle on his quad bike, towing what looked like two bodies in a trailer. As he came closer, I saw that they were Afghan soldiers, apparently close to death. I solemnly asked what
had happened: ‘One shot a dog. The bullet went through the dog and bounced off the floor and the wall. The fragments hit one in the leg and the other in the belly. They’ll be
fine’, he said, with equal measures of annoyance and amusement. The rest of the Grenadier Guards told me it was even worse than Snazle had described: the ANA had missed the dog.

I walked with Major David through destroyed compounds. Most seemed to have taken direct hits. Within what remained of the outer walls, everything was reduced to rubble. We stopped at one of the
first they had assaulted when they entered Adin Zai. It was possible to see where the rooms had been but the walls, roofs, supporting beams and even a tree now lay in a mangled heap, spilling on to
the path where we stood. ‘This one had a large enemy position in it. Actually, coming back here now you can smell the bodies, so probably some enemy dead are still lying under the
rubble.’

‘I don’t feel bad’, said Major David, ‘because we had to do what we did. There’s always going to be a slight tinge of sadness that human conflict leads to this and
that there’s no way of dealing with it other than fighting.’

I followed Sergeant Major Snazle to a large house on the edge of Adin Zai: the soldiers’ base for a few days. Everyone was relaxed; most didn’t bother to wear helmets or body armour.
An ANA jeep was parked outside, with a DShKa (‘dushker’) gun mounted on the back. A small crowd gathered to watch an ANA soldier fire it. Every time he fired, he lost control and
bullets shot high into the air. Others ricocheted off the ground, far away from the Taliban positions. The gun was too powerful, even when the soldier grabbed it with both hands and sat back,
trying to use his weight to keep it steady. His British mentors screamed at him to shoot
down
. Others shouted the now familiar question: ‘Are they shooting
at
anything?’
The answer was still ‘no’.

A young soldier was delighted to be given permission to fire a Javelin missile. (Each rocket costs about £65,000, three times the soldier’s annual salary.) Javelins are designed to
destroy tanks but in Afghanistan they are regularly used to attack Taliban fighters. The missiles come in huge shoulder-mounted tubes, each with an infra-red monitor attached. A target is selected
on the monitor and the rocket is fired, high into the air. You think it must land miles beyond its target. But just before it’s too late, it turns, moving almost vertically down. It’s
as if it had forgotten where it was going, then remembered at the last minute. Then, it accelerates furiously towards its target. The missiles plop absurdly out of their tubes, falling towards the
ground briefly, before roaring up and away. This always looked like a mistake, no matter how many times I saw them fired.

The Taliban fired back. Although they weren’t getting anywhere near us, they were very hard to kill or even see. Air support was called in and I saw a shiny white missile skim through the
air over my left shoulder, landing just in front of us. A huge piece of hot metal fell at our feet. I thought I’d seen another mistake; the missile had come down barely a hundred metres in
front of us. But it was perfectly accurate. It had landed exactly where the Taliban were. I put on my helmet and body armour.

The battle lasted into the night, more like an air show than a war. The range and power of the weapons dropped on the Taliban made the Brits cheer and the Afghans whoop and giggle, as if they
were at a karaoke party. The climax came when a jet flew over and fired a Gatling gun at the trees in front of us, turning them into a row of fireballs whose black smoke rose high into the air. We
saw the flash of the explosion, then its sound rolled slowly towards us across the field; one of the most evil noises I’ve ever heard. A deep and powerful roar (this version, the Vulcan,
could fire up to six thousand rounds a minute) that made my internal organs quiver. The Taliban must have thought the foreigners had Satan on their side, burping fire from above.

There was a brief silence. Then the sound of small arms fire came back. Pathetic-sounding after the air show but impressive in its defiance. I wondered if maybe the air support wasn’t as
accurate as was claimed. Or perhaps the Taliban were so used to the planes and helicopters that they simply dived into ditches whenever they appeared, making anything short of a direct hit a waste
of effort. A few soldiers admitted to admiring the Taliban, some for their tactical ability but mostly for their bravery. ‘Even when they’re on to a complete loser, they insist on
pushing forward’, said Major David. ‘On the one hand, you have to admire that determination. On the other hand, you just feel rather sad. It’s just a shame that they don’t
seem to be able to surrender, which would save us a lot of pain and hurt.’

I asked him how much he thought this engagement had cost. The overall British effort in Afghanistan had just topped a billion pounds. ‘Um, I wouldn’t really want to hazard a
guess’, he said, laughing. ‘But, um ... a lot.’ His radio operator appeared, smiling. ‘I-comm indicates at least forty enemy dead, sir.’

The Taliban were so persistent, without any hope of assaulting the compound, that I eventually grew tired and went inside to sleep, bedding down on a pile of ration boxes in the back of an ANA
pick-up truck. About 2 a.m., the sound of another 500lb bomb exploding woke me up. But once I realised it had landed outside the compound, I fell asleep again.

The Grenadiers moved into a recently-abandoned small compound not far away. Jack Mizon had been on the roof when the neighbouring compound, fewer than fifty metres away, had been destroyed by a
500lb bomb, again by mistake. The ANA found a girl’s bike, which they rode around inside the building’s walls. Major David moved into a tiny watchtower on the roof, where he finally got
some time to himself.

The Taliban had faded away, so everyone had a few days off to sleep, eat, clean their weapons and play with the ANA. Ryan Lloyd taught them Monty Python-style drills and a young, boyish-looking
Grenadier got a few excited by spending all day with his shirt off. Some of the other Brits played along, pointing at him, saying, ‘hey ... jiggy jiggy?’ He got very uncomfortable when
the Afghans started touching his nipples, looking like they were about to lunge.

Major David sat on the roof, outside his little room, taking in the scenery and sudden peace. His hair had grown long and blew in the wind, and he had a thick salt-and-pepper beard. ‘Down
here in the Green Zone it’s pretty spectacular, with the fauna and flora. It’s quite easy to forget where you are at times and that there’s some bunch of lunatics out there that
want to kill you. It’s easy to transport yourself away from what’s going on here, just because of the natural beauty of it all.’

The Grenadiers were relieved by the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters and drove back to Camp Bastion for some rest. They had been out in the field for eighty-two days. Captain Hennessey was
first out, as he was due two weeks’ leave. ‘In seventy-two hours I’ll be in Chelsea’, he said, climbing on the back of a quad bike, wearing a bandana and sporting a
recently-grown moustache, ‘...in the bath, with a glass of champagne.’ Lance Corporal Mizon was also heading home on leave, back to Tottenham. In Britain, their lives were as different
as their accents.

Back at Bastion, everyone attended the repatriation ceremony for Guardsman Daryl Hickey, the soldier who’d been killed as they had entered Adin Zai. His coffin, draped in a Union Jack, was
loaded on a Hercules plane to be flown home. ‘I was looking forward to coming back’, said Mizon, ‘but I didn’t want to come back to my friend’s funeral.’

As the plane took off, everyone saluted. In return, it too saluted, dipping its right wing before climbing into the clear blue sky.

After four weeks at home, I was back at Camp Bastion. This camp was designed to accommodate 2,300 soldiers; it now held four thousand and the number continued to rise.
Building was happening everywhere, as the army struggled to house the expanding population of soldiers. Other than the major bases in Kabul and Kandahar, which have airstrips, cafés,
showers, beds and complete networks of perfectly smooth roads, this was the only place I ever saw serious construction in Afghanistan.

On the military flight in, we’d been handed a plastic bag containing a Yorkie bar, two Tracker bars, a tube of Polos, some Starburst chews, a bag of KP nuts and a small carton of syrupy
orange drink. English MREs (‘Meals Ready to Eat’) were the same, with the addition of a packet of biscuits and a vacuum-packed main course and desert. The food was designed for English
winters; in the Afghan summer it took ten minutes to wipe melted Yorkie off everything else before we could eat.

I waited with the soldiers for ninety minutes, until a battered coach arrived to take us across the base to the huge warehouse, RSOI-5, where soldiers in transit slept. It looked like a factory
farm. Hundreds of neatly-arranged and tightly-packed old metal bunk beds, holding two dirty mattresses each, were lined in rows under bright, naked lightbulbs. The bunks squeaked so loudly and
disproportionately that calling it a ‘dormitory’ seemed a cruel joke. Soldiers arrived, left, or fidgeted in the heat, creating a constant chorus of frog-like croaks and squeaks that
made it impossible to sleep unless you were exhausted, which most were.

The next day, as I queued for food outside one of the three huge ‘scoff tents’, a soldier told me that we were achieving nothing, it was not our fight, just Blair sucking up to Bush.
He claimed this was the majority view. He said he spent every day and every night counting down the time until he went home. Most of the soldiers deployed to Afghanistan never leave the safety of
bases like Camp Bastion.

It was my third stay in Bastion and I was beginning to understand how the soldiers felt. I needed a ride to Sangin, to rejoin the Grenadier Guards but there were so few transport helicopters
that it took five days to complete a journey that could be driven in forty minutes. The road to Sangin couldn’t be used because it had been dotted with IEDs. It was no different for the
soldiers, unless they were wounded. Even those going home on leave had to wait for days on end and those days weren’t added to their time.

There was nothing to do while I waited except try to avoid the heat. This was almost impossible, because the air-conditioning in the tents didn’t work. One Naafi, with a dry bar and a
small supermarket, served the entire base. Its generator could only power half of the building so the bar never opened. In the supermarket, drinks didn’t stay in the fridge long enough to get
cool. The only magazines on sale were lads’ mags, the gossip weekly
Heat
and for some reason,
Bizarre
, which is an odd mix of porn and gore, mostly real. There was lots of
excitement when a double-decker
Pizza Hut
bus arrived one day. When it eventually opened, some soldiers came down with salmonella poisoning and it was immediately closed.