Spoken from the Front (36 page)

Sergeant Hughie Benson, The Royal Irish Regiment

The fighting season didn't really start until all the poppy
crops had been harvested and we moved to Musa Qa'leh. We
had massive contacts there. It got to a point when you were
out on patrol and you were getting hit on patrol or you would
hit them, either way, just about every day. Then you
would come back and they would hit the base, sometimes
with mortars, or indirect fire or Chinese rockets, or whatever
they had. Sometimes you would have a small-arms shoot and
a couple of times we had full proper co-ordinated attacks on
to the PB: Satellite Station North in Musa Qa'leh – it's the
most northern patrol base.

The contact that still sticks out most in my mind is when
we were caught in a big ambush. It was during the day –
early morning, about half past eight. We had been out for
about two hours. Bear in mind that it gets light about five
o'clock in the summer. We were with sixty ANA: two teams
of thirty. And there were twelve OMLT. We were in the Green
Zone and at that stage the corn was waist to chest high. The
team that was caught by an IED was on the right flank, close
to a canal. We were patrolling north. The team on the right-hand
side had gone 'firm': they had stopped and provided cover for
us. They told us to move forward, past them. We started pushing
up so we were about 200 metres ahead. They moved off,
then went 'firm' again – and then the ambush began.

It was initiated with an IED attack. They used a remote
control: it had a command wire. They had the remote about
thirty metres off to the flank, so that went off and then the
electric charge went down the cable into the centre of
the IEDs. And the IEDs were a daisy chain of twelve, which
went off at the same time.

I was about a hundred metres away when they went off.
There were six British blokes and a few ANA that were hit.
The front call sign and the call sign behind the OMLT were
actually on it [the IEDs]. But to this day I cannot believe how
lucky they were. There was a wee lad, a British guy, who lost
his right leg. His left leg was damaged. He had flash burns to
his face and eyes. He was A Company. He was one of the
team in Satellite Station North. It was Ranger Andy Allen. He
was nineteen. He received immediate first aid from the guys
and we were lucky because we had a CMT [combat medic
technician] with us, Ranger Kelly. He and Ranger Fox were
the first two there.

I wasn't sure who was caught in the blast. But as we started
moving forward, we were engaged from two sides with
PKM, small-arms fire and RPG. It turned into a large
fire-fight.

At one stage, we were lying in a ditch and the corn on the
cob was popping above our head. I had an SA80, a rifle. We
also had GPMG and UGL [underslung grenade launchers]
with us. The ANA had their PKMs, M16 rifles, RPGs. We're
talking maybe twenty Taliban. It was pretty hairy and on two
sides as well. It was fairly flat but they had occupied compounds
and tree-lines, and they were engaging us from there.
To begin with, we could see nothing – until we got about and
could see where they were coming from. We got eyes on [the
enemy]. Regardless of what was going on, the first thing we
needed to do was to try and set the conditions to get Ranger
Allen extracted. Believe it or not, the ANA were very good.
Their company commander straight away launched teams to
where he needed them to go, though obviously it was after I
had prompted him. Straight away we had sent a contact
report on the radio. Then, once we realized someone was
injured, we sent a message: '1 x casualty, catastrophic bleeds
to the right leg. Amputation.' The team that was in contact
were still trying to stabilize him [Ranger Allen]. Bear in mind,
we've only got six blokes, and once one of them gets hurt,
there are only five left to carry him. So the team commander
that was with them and myself were co-ordinating the plan to
get him out.

The first thing we had to do was to get him to a pick-up
point for the QRF [quick reaction force] to come and collect
him. But we had to sort that out while we were in a contact as
well. It felt like it lasted for ages, but maybe the entire contact
lasted seven minutes max. The Taliban then ran out of
ammunition; they just bugged out back into the compounds.
Back into the Green Zone. I didn't personally get rounds off
but the boys did. We definitely would have hit people [the
Taliban]. During the contact, their closest call sign would
have been 100 to 150 metres away at one stage. Once we
started returning fire, the gap then increased to maybe 200
metres – because they start retreating. But what they were
trying to do was to get closer [to where the IEDs had gone off]
and try and disrupt the guys dealing with the casualty. But
they had no chance because there were sixty ANA and the
rest of the OMLT.

If there had been no casualties, a follow-up would have
been carried out. But at that stage the main effort was to get
the wee man [Ranger Allen] in. I set the conditions and
positioned the ANA where I wanted them to go. We created a
kind of corridor for the casualty to get extracted down. He
was taken on a stretcher to a pick-up point where we were
met by Warriors [mini tanks]. We were very lucky again, the
four Warriors had just returned to Musa Qa'leh DC and they
were parked outside the gate when they heard the explosion.
So they started to move and, by the time all this had finished
and we had got to the pick-up point – it was maybe just two
minutes before the Warriors rocked in. Ranger Allen survived
but, because of injuries to his left leg – due to the infection –
he has actually lost that leg as well.

Once Ranger Allen had been extracted, the ANA and ourselves
regrouped and pushed north again in order to clear the
area we had been ambushed in and to secure the IED
location. A number of small engagements occurred on the
follow-up but nothing that caused concern.

But it had been a very well-planned ambush. Twelve IEDs
going off which were spread at the distance the boys
normally patrol at: five to ten metres apart. But fortunately no
one else was badly injured. A few of the boys got blasted into
the canal. There were a couple of minor cuts and bruises, but
there was nothing else. We were unbelievably lucky.

Captain Alan 'Barney' Barnwell, 845 Naval Air Squadron

It is quite pathetic to think we were looking forward to
coming out here [Afghanistan]. But you do. You get used
to doing the job [in Iraq], and it's nice to do a slightly different
one. And it has certainly been a new experience here. We
managed to get hit within ten days of arriving in theatre. It
was getting dusk and we were heading west. I had decided
that we would fly low-level rather than high-level. It was my
decision, but it was not necessarily the right decision because
we got hit. We had just done our third trip into FOB Rob
[Forward Operating Base Robinson] and we were heading
back out to [Camp] Bastion with six pax [passengers]. I had
made distinct efforts to cross over the Green Zone at different
locations – two K between them.

The problem was the time of day we were going back. It
was obviously knocking-off time for the Taliban, having done
their work in the fields. And he [his attacker] had clearly got
back to his basher [home] and was sitting outside, having lit
the fire, and was having his brandy and cigar, with his AK-47
sat beside him, when he heard the slap-slap-slap of a
helicopter zooming back across. So he decided he'd have
a quick blast at us as we flew past at around eighty feet, doing
120 knots. I didn't see him on the ground but we saw the first
set of tracers coming up from the five o'clock position and he
must have fired. We saw five or seven tracers.

So we broke off to the left, with my door gunner trying to
get a bead on it. Obviously, his neighbour, about 200 yards up
the road, had heard 'Joss Taliban' doing his rounds and he
thought: I can't have him doing a few rounds without me
having some too. So another position opened up on us as
well. But it wasn't particularly accurate this time. One went
across the nose – a couple of rounds of green tracer. This time
my gunner did manage to get a bead on him and he fired off
sixteen rounds back at him from our GPMG.

We continued to do some manoeuvring to get out of the
kill-zone. We got over the desert, where there was nobody [no
enemy around]. We looked at each other, had a bit of a laugh,
then quickly checked out all the instruments to make sure
everything was OK in the aircraft. We checked it for vibration
and there was nothing wrong. The guys in the back were by
now starting to grin and get some colour back in their faces
because I think it was the first time they had been shot at in
an aircraft as passengers. It was the first time I had been shot
at in an aircraft with small arms as well, but never mind.
So we then had a fifteen-minute journey back to Bastion,
where we checked everything out and had a laugh about it.
We gave the gunner a hard time for only getting sixteen
rounds off when he had a box of 200. When we landed we got
refuelled, went to our parking spot and I said: 'You'd better
get the engineers up to have a quick look, just in case.' So they
came up and they said: 'Hmm, seems to be a lot of fuel
coming out of the bottom of the cab, boss. Oh, yeah, and
there's a hole in one of your rotor blades as well.' So we had
taken two rounds: one in the fuel tank and one in the rotor
blade. I guess it was a narrow escape. All it takes is one bullet
in your head and that's it, isn't it? So that was close enough.

Major Jonathan Hipkins, Royal Military Police (RMP)

Part and parcel of the job is to look at incidents in which
British forces appear to have injured, or even worse killed, a
local national – it's called the shooting incident review
process. I look with policeman's eyes to see if I feel there is
any act of negligence or criminality – in essence to see
whether it's prudent to conduct a formal police investigation.

I review, in a sterile environment, documentary evidence:
statements written by people who were there on the ground.
So, for me, it is possible to divorce myself to a certain extent
from what has gone on out there in a particular incident on a
particular day. It doesn't mean that I don't find it sad when,
as has just happened, a local girl, who was just six years of
age, was killed as a result of a number of smoke rounds fired
by mortars that were utilized on a hill to screen friendly
forces. The [British] soldiers on the ground took all reasonable
steps to make sure there were no local nationals in the
area, thus limiting collateral damage, which is in accordance
with the Rules of Engagement. And it was unfortunate. They
just didn't see that there was a girl in the field on top of the
hill. She caught a fragment of mortar shell that went into her
chest, and she subsequently died from that wound. But she
was so young and she was an innocent. War should be about
adults fighting adults. It shouldn't be about kids. But at the
end of the day there is only so much you can do in order to
limit collateral damage. But I can sit here confident in the
knowledge that British soldiers, certainly from what I have
seen in all the shooting incident reviews that I have done,
have taken every possible step to limit collateral damage here
in Afghanistan.

Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Parkhouse, 16 Medical
Regiment

Over the past three years, I have dealt with high-energy
wounds and low-energy wounds. A wound caused by a rifle
round, a military rifle, will always be serious because the
bullet, or the round, is travelling so fast that it has such a lot
of energy, or potentially an awful lot of energy, to dump into
the body. It is not just the hole that it drills through, but the
energy it passes through the body. Even though the round
might be only 5mm in diameter, the hole it can produce can
be big enough to put your fist through. And that is purely due
to the energy transfer because the momentum is mass and
velocity. It's the velocity that's important when you're talking
about a rifle bullet.

If you're talking about mortar shrapnel, by most standards
it's travelling fast, but it's actually travelling quite slowly.
But it's a big hunky piece of metal or stone or whatever, so
that would cause damage to what it passes through. So
with a hole caused by an assault rifle, you will often see a
small hole where it hits the body, but the exit wound is
huge. If it's in an arm, it can take the limb off effectively.

The wounds we were seeing have changed since Op
Herrick 4 in 2006: a lot of those injuries were caused because
of gun battles. They were full-on Wild West gun battles so a
lot of the injuries we were seeing were gunshot wounds.
There was just the odd mortar attack. Whereas the injuries
that you see now, in 2008, are much more commonly
associated with IEDs, booby-traps, mines, things like that.
This is due to the fact that the Taliban have realized they can't
win a gun-fight and they are putting their efforts now into
IEDs – they're laying hundreds. The wounds now are
multiple amputations, traumatic amputations. The new
vehicles are saving a lot of lives, but we are finding multiple
fractures, spinal injuries – head injuries due to the concussion
effect of the explosion.

I am married but no kids. My wife, Helen, is excellent.
She's ex-forces so she knows the score. I think for all people,
the families, it's harder on those who are left behind. At the
end of the day you come out here, you're fed, you're watered,
you're looked after. All you have to do is get up in the morning,
do your job and go to sleep. You don't have to worry
about the bills, you don't have to worry about going to work,
servicing the car, paying the tax. All the crap of life is done for
you, so it's the people left at home who have the harder time.
They have the separation, and the worry about what the
other half is doing.