Spoken from the Front (10 page)

One particular incident springs to mind. The chief of police
for Helmand province in Lashkar Gah asked me to go and
visit a young girl called Leila. She was sixteen and had been
put into the prison in Lashkar Gah. The reason she had been
jailed was that she had run away from her family and had
gone to Kandahar. She was hoping to get married to a young
lad there but she had been found in Kandahar, arrested and
taken back to Helmand province. The chief of police was concerned
that if she was released back to her brother – who was
the head of the family because she did not have a mum or
dad – she might be subjected to an honour killing because she
was said to have brought shame on her family by running
away.

I did chat with her in jail in early September, towards the
end of the tour. I went to the prison in Lash, and doubled it
up with a check on a detainee, caught by the British, who had
been sentenced and put into the prison. I asked the prison
governor if I could visit the girls in the prison. It is the same
prison as the men but the women were held separately. I was
led through a myriad gates and compounds and eventually
reached the women. There were five girls with some little
children because they take the children into prison with
them. There was a female prison warder, and they were
all dressed in civilian clothes. I was asking, through an
interpreter, why they were there. A seventeen-year-old girl
had been given a seven-year sentence for adultery and a
fourteen-year-old had been accused of adultery. She was
awaiting sentence, but she was so shy and frightened, she
kept hiding her face. You could see she was a young teenage
girl. I remember thinking there was no way that girl had
committed adultery or, if she had, it had not been of her own
volition. It was awful to see her. In the UK, if everyone got
locked up for committing adultery, half the population would
be in prison!

There was a female medic who had gone with me to the
prison as well – we took some toys and sweets for the kids
because we knew there would be children in there. To start
with, the sixteen-year-old we had gone to see wasn't there,
but while we were chatting, she came back. She had just been
in court and I managed to speak to her. She was very feisty: I
was quite impressed with her. She talked through an
interpreter but you could tell from her tone of voice that she
was quite defiant. I asked why she had run away from home.
She said she had gone to Kandahar because she wanted to be
a policewoman. In Kandahar, there were a number of policewomen
but there were none in Helmand province. All police
were male in Helmand. She said she wanted to become a
policewoman and she wanted to get married but she was
adamant that she did not want to be released to her brother. I
asked her if she would be in danger and she was quite noncommittal.
I went back to the chief of police and I passed on
my concerns to him, but he was in a difficult position because
it was going to be dealt with by the courts and Afghan law.
I often think about Leila because I have no idea what
happened to her. I passed the information on to a lady
working for the Foreign Office, so she was aware of the case
before I left.

McNab:
Christopher 'Has' Hasler was told that he had become the
first flying officer [he is now a flight lieutenant] since the Second
World War to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).
This is his previously unpublished CO's report in which Hasler is
recommended for a gallantry award:

In May 2006, Flying Officer Hasler was detached with his
Flight as part of the Joint Helicopter Force (Afghanistan), JHF
(A) in support of Operation HERRICK. Hasler flew initially as
a co-pilot, owing to his relative inexperience, but soon proved
capable of fulfilling the role of aircraft captain. Hasler was
actively involved in many high-risk sorties and displayed
consistently the highest standards of gallantry and professionalism.
Towards the end of his tour he was appointed
captain for a number of key missions.

At dawn on 7 July 2006, Hasler led a formation of two
Chinooks into the area of Sangin. The mission was to provide
an essential resupply and extraction for a 3 PARA BG
[Brigade] Company. The dangers involved were extremely
high. The day before, Hasler had attempted the same mission,
but he had to abort because a Paratrooper had been killed by
enemy fire while securing the helicopter landing site. To
mitigate the risk to the aircraft, Hasler elected to land in an
'unlikely' site in order to achieve surprise. The site was
surrounded by buildings on three sides and would make the
landing particularly difficult. Undaunted, Hasler displayed
great bravery, maturity and handling skills well beyond his
experience, in leading his formation into Sangin and landing
his aircraft successfully, just after dawn. He then safely offloaded
the vital stores before manoeuvring his aircraft
quickly, but with supreme accuracy, to allow a number of
troops to embark. Again, Hasler needed the highest degree of
skill and composure to do this. As he repositioned, he
intentionally placed the aircraft's rotor disc just above a
single-storey rooftop. Any error would almost certainly have
resulted in catastrophic damage to the aircraft. The mission
proved to be a complete success.

On 14 July, Hasler commanded the third aircraft of a fiveship
Chinook assault into Sangin, a Taliban stronghold and
area of recent high enemy activity, as part of Operation
AUGUSTUS. Hasler's aircraft was the last of three to land in
the first wave; the second wave of two Chinooks eventually
aborted their landing due to the heavy weight of enemy fire
on the landing site; fire from enemy who were awake, fully
alert and expecting the landing. Although a heavy fire-fight
against 30–40 Taliban was already under way, and there
was a strong possibility of the assault force being split
and overwhelmed, Hasler displayed tremendous bravery and
commitment and skilfully landed his aircraft, even though
small arms and Rocket-propelled Grenades were being fired
at his and other landing Chinooks. Whilst under effective
enemy fire, Hasler held his nerve and his aircraft on the
ground to allow his troops to disembark into the hottest of
the helicopter landing sites, before taking off. Hasler's brave
decision to do this enabled overpowering numbers of friendly
forces to quickly suppress the enemy positions and for the
mission to succeed with minimum UK casualties.

Throughout his 10-week detachment, Hasler displayed
great courage and composure, despite his relative inexperience.
He maintained the highest standards of
professionalism and airmanship in what was an extremely
arduous, high-tempo flying tour in the most demanding,
high-risk environment in which the Chinook Force has
operated in its recent history.

Colour Sergeant Richie Whitehead, Royal Marines

I was taking out one of the multiples. The intended multiple
commander [MC] was still on course back in the UK so,
because I was a spare floating MC, I was helping out everyone,
showing people the lie of the land. We – a section of
twelve blokes – were out on the southern side of Lashkar
Gah, the southern side of the airport. We had recently had
IEDs handed in so we were looking around the airport
making sure there was no suspicious business. Even though
we had got GPS [global positioning system] and maps, it was
pitch black and nine times out of ten you made a wrong turn
– and I did on this occasion.

In and around a built-up area, I came to a dead end. It was
around midnight. I said: 'It's my fault. U-turn.' Everyone
was giving me numerous shit over the radio so we turned
around and started to come back. But as we'd turned our
headlights had gone over the horizon at some stage, and this
had been picked up by somebody. So we were just about to
drive out of the built-up area, a dead-end alley that I had
gone down, when all of a sudden there was Dushka fire at
our vehicles from the left. A Dushka is a 12.7 Russian
machine-gun. A big, heavy, slow thing. So, obviously, we
stopped, switched our lights off. I was in an open-top
WMIK and we reversed back in. All the lads had broken
cover, contact reports had been sent, etc., etc. As soon
as it happened, I thought: No, they [the Taliban] do not
drive up to you this close in a town centre and have a
pop shot. We were on the south side of them – they
were closer into town. If it had been the other way [around],
they could have escaped into the desert, but they were
not going to escape into town. They wouldn't have done
that because they knew we could call other people in.

There were three of us in the WMIK: me, a driver and a
gunner on the back. Within a minute, I knew it was a police
check-point that had fired on us. From the position and
knowing where I was, I realized they were ANP. I had visited
the check-point days before. All the lads were getting ready
to fire back but I held them off. I told them to chill out. We put
lots of para illum [parachute illumination flares] up in the air
so they could see us. We were four vehicles – two WMIKs,
two Snatch [lightly armoured Land Rovers]. We did this but
they kept firing at us. We were not firing. The outcome of me
firing or killing ANP at that stage would have wrecked all the
hard work that 16 Air Assault and 3 Commando Brigade had
done. There were about eight of them. It took forty minutes.
Every time we went to move, I was stuck. They were firing at
us, mistaking us for Taliban even though we had lit up the
area. They could see our vehicle. Whenever we moved forward
or back, or put up para illum, or flashed our lights – the
Snatch vehicles had spotlights on the top – they fired at us.
None of the vehicles got hit but we were pinned down. They
were 350 or 300 metres away. Not far. But I couldn't go forward
or back. I let zero – the Ops Room – know. They wanted
to send out more people but I said, 'No,' because it was gonna
cause more chaos. Then they [the ANP] were going to think
they were getting attacked. So our interpreter – he was at the
back of one of the vehicles and his English was reasonably
good – he turned the air blue. He was swearing about these
'poxy, useless police'. So we called them on his loudhailer.
And I said to tell them: 'We are British servicemen.' I told him
that they must stop firing because, if they didn't, we were
going to have to fire on them and we didn't want to do that.

So he spoke to them. All of a sudden the firing stopped.
You could see the interpreter was irate and I was trying to
calm him down. So I got everyone back on the vehicles, put
our hazard warning lights on and we lit the sky up with the
last of our para illum. Then we drove down. The ANP were
all laughing because they thought it was hilarious. I was
obviously not laughing. I grabbed their commander, took his
name to pass on to the chief of police. And our interpreter
was still swearing. We cleared it up and all came back. Thank
Christ for that. For forty-five minutes they were regularly
firing with their AK-47s, their Dushka. It was a genuine
mistake, but that one was a bit too close for comfort.

Captain Charlotte Cross, Territorial Army

Sorry I haven't been in touch for a bit but I'm sure you've
heard there have been quite a lot of deaths/serious injuries
out here, and so Op Minimize has been on ... constantly. Plus
there's been a bit of a siege mentality in camp ... We had
reports of hordes of Taliban on the horizon getting ready to
surge into Lashkar Gah, so everything stopped while we
waited to be attacked ... I admit I didn't sleep very well for
a few days. My body armour is SO heavy. I don't think I'd be
able to run very fast or very far in it.

So life's been eventful since I got here 2 weeks ago. We had
our first 'incident' on camp on my first night here ... having
had no sleep the night before I was pretty knackered, but was
woken up at midnight by my new boss dressed in full
webbing and helmet, etc, complete fighting order, telling me
the camp was under deliberate attack and could I please get
dressed!!! Plus we had a casualty. The medical room is down
the hall from my room, and I recognized that strong smell of
disinfectant. So I got up, got dressed, and then basically we
all spent a few hours hanging around in the corridors wondering
what was going on ... Mainly I was worrying about
my lack of ammunition, because having just arrived I'd only
been issued one magazine [more magazines were due the
next day]. Eventually we were all sent back to bed. I slept in
my clothes, just in case.

The next morning, we were told the ANA in town had
decided to shoot a group of stray dogs. The ANP or some
other ANA thought they were being attacked and returned
fire in the general direction of our camp – and some bullets
came over the wall, went through one of the tents and hit a
captain in the leg. Apparently he'd jumped up when he heard
firing, but if he'd stayed in his bed he would've been okay!

Workwise, there is so much to do and everything takes so
long. Plus we're a bit short-staffed, most of my PsyOps
section were sent down to Garmsir with about 17 other Brits
and a few Estonians helping about 100 local Afghan forces
beat off a Taliban advance. Constant fighting for 6 days. And
I mean constant fighting. One of the Royal Marine corporals
from my team got sent down there (I rather hopefully gave
him a video camera, but he didn't get it out of his bag). He
manned a 50-cal gun and fired 1,600 rounds. And a sgt major
from my battalion got shot in the arm. Garmsir is incredibly
strategically important because it's the furthest south ISAF
[International Security Assistance Force] have been and it's
the main crossing point down there over the Helmand river.

We had a visit on camp from a woman from a Canadian
NGO, who told us about the state of the IDP [internally displaced
people] camps on the outskirts of town ... children
starving, people being recruited to the Taliban for the price of
a day's food, the usual desperate plight of those displaced by
war. The politics, though, is phenomenally complicated in
that we as ISAF troops cannot be seen to help these people
unless they become a military threat. We can't just go and
give them food, because they can't become dependent on us.
It's up to the Helmand governor to do that, to help his own
people. But nobody seems to be doing much about it. Aid,
when it's given, often ends up being sold in the bazaars – still
in its UN wrappers. We see it as we drive by. What can you
do in a country which blocks your efforts to help at every
turn? It's very frustrating.