Nothing Sacred (16 page)

A LITTLE OVER
three years ago, and a bare six months before Gabe had been flown out of Afghanistan in the back of a Hercules, hooked up to a drip and en route to a German hospital, he had been seconded to an infantry platoon for a rotation at a forward operating base halfway up a mountainside in the north-eastern Kunar Province. It was a place of deep valleys and high, creased mountains, green with holly trees and tall cedars and had a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the country: hard-to-reach villages crawling with insurgents and steep trails so perfectly suited to ambushes that walking them felt like a direct challenge to Death himself.

The powers had wanted Gabe to see more combat, prior to them anointing him for greater things. They liked their majors to have seen bloodshed up close, to have a reputation for valour that, they felt, wouldn't be earned taking armoured vehicles on patrol around friendly villages. You can't order men into battle, they said, if you're not steeped in combat yourself. Captain Gabriel McBride needed to go and get his hands dirty.

Kunar Province was the ideal post: Forward Operating Base Lucifer had seen more contact with enemy forces than the next three FOBs put together. If there was going to be killing, this was where it was going to happen.

Gabe was leading the platoon and had only a few short weeks to win them over, to impose his will on them. There was an incumbent platoon at Lucifer, a battle-hardened regular infantry platoon of Rifles who were coming to the end of their rotation. It was their job during those weeks to show Gabe's new platoon the ropes, take them through the enemy positions across the valley from FOB Lucifer, lead them up the trails, introduce Gabe to the elders in the surrounding villages, and explain who could be trusted and who was, in all likelihood, concealing a cache of enemy ordnance in their home even as they looked in his eyes and shook his hand.

‘This group of Rifles, 7 Platoon, who we were taking over from, they'd seen it all,' says Gabe. ‘They'd been ambushed, double-crossed, pinned down. Four of their platoon had been killed and seven more evacced out with serious injur ies. You could see it in their eyes and the way they spoke about the local population – pure hatred.'

Gabe has found another bottle of whisky and opens it, sets it down as he thinks back to that time, places himself back among his men. ‘Doesn't usually work like that, in the army. Doesn't get personal. But these men, they'd had enough. Never expected to see the things they did, have to do what they'd done. Six months is a long time at the sharp end, isolated in a place like that.' He shakes his head. ‘The place was hell on earth.'

The men of 7 Platoon had reached a point where morality took a back seat to expedience and where ordinary values of right and wrong, good and bad, had long since ceased to have any relevance. Dirty, demoralised and disgusted by the acts that they had witnessed and committed, they had crossed a line. They were now not so much professional soldiers as officially sanctioned killers.

Gabe picks up the bottle, looks at the label, but he is not reading it; he is three years and five thousand miles away on a dusty mountainside.

He looks at me, says, ‘You sure you want to hear this?'

‘I'm a big boy.'

Gabe shakes his head in irritation at my flippancy. ‘Never told anyone before. Nobody outside the army.'

‘I think I have a right,' I say. ‘After what just happened.'

Gabe is still looking at me, his eyes empty. He nods. ‘Fair enough. Don't say I didn't warn you.'

I nod Gabe to go on and he puts the bottle down, takes a breath as if he is about to leap from a dangerous position, and resumes his story.

It was about six days in when it happened, six days spent shadowing 7 Platoon who seemed to know the area so well it was as if they had spent a lifetime on the mountain trails, had been born in its shadow. Apparently innocuous piles of rocks and junctions of paths had particular names, after colleagues who had lost their lives there: Cooper's Crossing, Fox's Hole; Dizzy's End. Gallows humour, though any humour there had been in that platoon had died months ago.

They had been patrolling a high trail, only a few hundred metres beneath the summit, at the point where the tangle of holly trees gave way to cedars so large and ancient they seemed to pre-date the arrival of man; laid lengthways, their trunks would be taller than two men. Gabe was walking with a lance corporal named Creek who, of all the jaded 7 Platoon, was the only soldier who had retained any trace of humanity, perhaps because he was a late arrival, flown in to take the place of a fallen colleague. He was a short, slight man who still greeted the everyday horrors of life at Lucifer with an intelligent cynicism; he stood apart from his fellow soldiers and was treated by them with disdain and suspicion. Gabe believed that he feared them.

The 7 Platoon leader was up front, setting a hard pace, when a rigged grenade went off by the side of the trail, a sharp crack throwing up a shower of black dirt, which blotted out the tree-dappled sunshine for a moment. Even before the dirt fell back down to earth, they could hear the screams of the platoon leader; the grenade had shredded his legs and given him serious groin injuries, torn open an artery. But his screams were soon overlaid by the sound of incoming fire, AK rounds zipping through the air and ripping the bark off the holly trees, spitting up dirt where they fell short. Both platoons hit the ground and rolled off the trail to lower ground, looking for cover from holly trees and cedar tree logs left behind by long ago lumber companies; the weight of incoming fire was so great that they could do nothing but lie there and wait for it to lessen.

‘It was like, above our heads, there was a ceiling of bullets and noise. Anyone put their heads up, they were going to die,' says Gabe, a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘Nothing to do. Nothing.'

But 7 Platoon had been in this position before. Besides, the injured man was their platoon leader and a man they respected, even loved. In this foreign land of shifting rules and unfathomable morality, he was all they had to rely on.

As his colleagues put up covering fire, shooting above their heads from where they lay without taking any kind of aim, one soldier crawled up to the screaming platoon leader and stuck syringes of morphine into his neck, using first the platoon leader's and then his own, the soldier's battle-dress soon slick with bright arterial blood. He shook his head helplessly as he administered to his superior officer, knowing that there was nothing to be done, that he was bleeding so fast that he would be dead in minutes and that he was powerless to do anything except keep him comfortable. As the platoon leader's life ebbed away, the incoming fire died down until there was silence, broken only by the soldier whispering to his platoon leader, ‘It'll be all right, it's nothing,' hushing him as his screams turned to whimpers and he slowly and quietly died on a shaded trail on a mountain in a faraway country he probably had not even heard of five years ago.

‘You could feel it immediately,' says Gabe. ‘Like a change in the weather. Nothing was said, but this, killing their platoon leader, this was it. Gloves off, blood up.'

It had been a classic insurgency ambush, fast and unexpected and unanswerable. They had picked off the commanding officer and that had been enough of a victory for them, more than enough, a huge tactical coup. By this time helicopters were in the air and zeroing in on the platoons' position, a surveillance plane flying three thousand feet above. The insurgents wanted to put as much distance between themselves and the dead platoon leader as they could, and fast.

Still, normally the helicopters would have finished the insurgents off as they ran, firing on them from above in a display so destructive and awesome, Gabe says, it seemed as unequivocal as God's vengeance. But the brass had had enough of pointless tit-for-tat killing; they wanted warm bodies, something that could answer questions, could be paraded in front of the TV cameras and used as propaganda.

Without a word, 7 Platoon left Gabe and his newly arrived soldiers and headed off down trails they had spent six months patrolling, guided by the surveillance plane turning lazy circles above, so high in the blue sky it was out of sight. Even if they'd wanted to follow, Gabe said, half a year of life at Lucifer had honed the Rifles platoon to a level of fitness that his soldiers couldn't hope to match, their fury adding another adrenal kick to their pace. Gabe left half of his platoon to carry down the body of the dead officer; he took the rest and headed off in the direction of the departed 7 Platoon.

‘We got to the village ten, twelve minutes after the other platoon,' says Gabe. ‘The insurgents had headed there, didn't even realise there was a plane up above watching them. Led us to their front door.'

When Gabe and his soldiers reached the village, it was like a ghost town, every door and window shuttered, like Dodge after a gunslinger had walked into town. The 7 Platoon soldiers were dispersed, sitting or lying or crouched against walls, some smoking impassively, some drinking water, some weeping with their hands splayed over the faces in grief for their dead leader. Nobody spoke. Gabe walked to the house where the insurgents had been seen to go to, looked in the door, saw a row of untidy bodies, small streams of blood on the dirt floor, the dozy buzz of flies within the hot gloom: the aftermath of a slaughter.

‘The place was so quiet, the whole village,' says Gabe, clumsily pouring a splash of whisky. ‘Just us, the bodies, couple of goats bleating. I spoke to one of the soldiers, asked them what had happened. Told me they'd cornered them, got into an exchange of fire.' He lifts his glass and gazes at it but does not drink. ‘Thing was, none of the dead men had any weapons.'

Strangely, Gabe does not seem particularly concerned by this detail. He imagines that they dropped their weapons off at a cache, threw them down a well, got rid of anything that could incriminate them as insurgent fighters before they reached the village. Whatever, these men were, beyond doubt, the same men who less than an hour before had killed 7 Platoon's beloved leader. They had had it coming, armed or not. This was war and Gabe was a pragmatist: he accepted what had happened without question. I do not know what this says about my friend; do not want to think about it. Perhaps, like Gabe says, it just is what it is.

But once the choppers had arrived and left, and the platoons had regrouped and the dust had settled, there was one soldier who could not accept the fact of the insurgents' slaughter with such equanimity. Creek, the recently arrived lance corporal, regarded what had happened as a war crime. If you ask me, he had a point.

‘Wouldn't shut up about it,' said Gabe. ‘No, he didn't say anything to his platoon; he wasn't crazy. But he kept coming to see me, asked me what I was going to do about it. Told me I could not let it drop, I had a responsibility. Mr Geneva fucking Convention.'

Gabe looks at me and there is a challenge in his eyes, as if he is daring me to agree with Creek, take Gabe to task for not having immediately condemned the Rifle platoon's actions. I do not respond. I have experienced nothing approaching what Gabe has had to go through; I am not arrogant enough to believe my opinion counts for anything. Gabe takes my silence as it is meant, nods to himself, continues.

‘I told him to leave it. I was the officer in charge. It was my responsibility to look after my men, to instil discipline, to keep them safe. I told him to keep quiet, that it wasn't worth it. Told him they'd make sure his career was over if he said anything.' He sighs, deeply, a shudder in it. ‘They rotated out two days later and I forgot about Creek, about that damned 7 Platoon. Three months later I come back from Lucifer and one of the first things I hear is that Creek is dead, shot through the head by a British bullet.'

Creek had been shot while out on routine patrol. But despite being killed by a British bullet, his death had been ascribed to enemy action. So many British weapons had been taken by the insurgents it was assumed that this was the explanation; no shadow of suspicion ever fell on the other members of his platoon. Nobody ever suspected he had been killed by his own.

‘I told him to keep it quiet,' says Gabe, his eyes on the table and his voice, which since a child I have rarely heard so much as waver from its precise and cold delivery, is barely a whisper. ‘I didn't help. Refused to. And he was right, of course he was right.' Gabe shakes his head slowly at the table, still unable to reconcile himself with what he had done, what he had not done. ‘I was his commanding officer.' He looks up suddenly, his eyes tortured with grief. ‘My fault. Hundred per cent. On me.'

Massacring a dozen insurgents in cold blood, Gabe could live with. But not the premeditated murder of a soldier who he had liked, respected, and let down when in a position of power, a position to make a difference. He had started to investigate, asked questions, lobbied officers higher up the chain of command to conduct a proper inquest into the shooting of Lance Corporal Creek. He'd had, Gabe says, some success. Then he had walked past an IED disguised as a lump of camel shit and the next thing he knew he was in Germany and he was missing a leg and he would never see active service again.

‘Ever wondered what creates monsters?' says Gabe, holding his glass up to his face. ‘Six months at Forward Operating Base Lucifer. That's what.' He downs his drink and blinks slowly, shuttering those blue-ice eyes, and I have never seen anybody look so desolate.

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