Spoken from the Front (37 page)

But we have bad days out here too. It's never nice when
you lose somebody. I think we tend to take it personally,
which is bizarre because we don't know these guys. We don't
know them from Adam but we still consider them to be ours.
We had this guy with a wound to his body. There was a long
extraction [rescuing the patient] because they were TIC
[troops in contact] for a long time. Unfortunately, we had to
circle for several minutes before our forces were able to secure
the landing site. Then, eventually, we had to go down and
pick him up. So he had been down a long time and he came
in cardiac arrest.

We continued doing our usual bits, securing the airway,
opening up his chest both sides, pumping in as much fluid as
we could. He was covered in absolute crap because he had
clearly been dragged through ditches and whatever to get
him out – to be extracted. I knew pretty much that he was
unlikely to survive and I just realized that there was another
family, in about four or five hours' time, who were going to
be destroyed. You know it. Their world in four or five hours'
time was going to be shattered. There is nothing you can do,
absolutely nothing. And sure enough he died. But you take it
personally. You shouldn't, but if you reach for perfection,
now and again you're going to be disappointed.

Sergeant Hughie Benson, The Royal Irish Regiment

On one occasion we were conducting a route clearance. It was
a road that runs south to north through Musa Qa'leh. There
were twelve of us Brits – but there were another hundred
Brits clearing the route and providing protection on the west
flank in the Green Zone. We were in the urban desert with
sixty ANA and twelve of us, broken down into two teams of
thirty ANA and six of us. We started about six in the morning
and at about midday all was well. The route clearance had
gone fine and everyone started extracting. We were the last to
extract. And what they [the Taliban] had done was they let us
push through inside the urban desert and then infiltrated
behind us. I say infiltrated – they never actually had to
fucking go anywhere. They had just come out of their compounds,
armed themselves and waited for us to come back.
So at this stage we were cut off from the patrol base.

When it started, we were about a K and a half – 1,500
metres – away. They [the Taliban] were between us and the
PB. So we started moving back. The team that was on
the road were engaged with RPG and small arms, and,
straight away, we were hit as well from the north. So we
started extracting, back towards the enemy behind us. Again,
another planned attack on their behalf. We started coming
back towards the PB. And then we were hit by those between
us and the PB – and we were cut off. At one stage, there were
thirty ANA and my team lying on their belt buckles on the
floor behind a wall about two foot high. And the walls were
just crumbling. PKM, small arms and RPGs were all fired. A
couple of RPGs went over the top of us and hit the wall. Then
they were airbursting the RPGs above us: deliberately trying
to get them to blow up above us so that the stuff [shrapnel]
came down on us. We actually got cut off from one of the
squads of ANA – about fifteen of them. They were on the
other side of the alleyway – they couldn't get across because
of the walls. So we RVed [rendezvoused] at a rally point. I
managed to get shots back, only because we were trying to
get out of there, to be honest.

The ANA in the sangars [at the patrol base] had identified
one of the firing points so they started engaging with a
Dushka [Soviet-made anti-aircraft machine-gun], the equivalent
of our 50-cal. We had a sniper that was at the base and he
had pushed up to the top and engaged the enemy. We had
people coming to help us but, in the end, we couldn't wait.
We had to move.

That was probably the closest I've come to getting shot. We
heard the bullets coming in around our feet and they were
also hitting the wall we were hiding behind. And the wall
was crumbling around us.

Major Jonathan Hipkins, Royal Military Police (RMP)

I'm sometimes asked what is the bravest thing I've come
across in Afghanistan. I didn't witness this incident but I discovered
that a young twenty-year-old from the RMP had
been exceedingly gallant when he reacted to help save the life
of Lance Corporal Tom Neathway, who was twenty-five
when he lost both legs and an arm in a Taliban IED attack. I
had to look into exactly what Lance Corporal Chris Loftus
had done and ended up having to write his citation. His
unpublished citation – which resulted in him being
Mentioned in Dispatches – is detailed here:

On Tuesday 22 July 2008 Lance Corporal Loftus was operating
as part of a 7 man Section of X Company, 2nd Battalion The
Parachute Regiment. Whilst conducting a reassurance patrol
to the north of Kajaki, Loftus' sub unit was directed to occupy
a local compound in order to provide 'over-watch' to the
north of the Area of Operations. A short time after establishing
the position and without any warning, an Improvised
Explosive Device detonated approximately 10 metres away
from Loftus' position. As a result of the explosion, the Royal
Military Police Junior Non-Commissioned Officer was blown
off his feet and stunned. Whilst picking himself up, Loftus
heard one of his comrades screaming for help and, without
regard for his own safety and despite suffering from shock, he
immediately went to the aid of his wounded colleague. Upon
arriving at the location of the explosion, Loftus could see that
his comrade had suffered traumatic amputation of both legs
and extensive injuries to one of his arms. Despite the horrific
scene before him, Loftus remained calm and, together with
another member of the Section, carried out first aid treatment;
applying four tourniquets in an attempt to save the life of the
wounded Parachute Regiment soldier. Shortly after they had
started medical treatment, the patrol came under attack from
Rocket Propelled Grenades and Small Arms Fire. Despite the
threat to his own life, Loftus did not flinch from his duty and
courageously remained by the side of the wounded man in
order to treat and reassure the casualty until a Medic arrived
to take over. Loftus then remained in the open assisting the
Medic in lifting the gravely injured soldier onto a stretcher
and then onto a waiting quad bike. Once the casualty had
been safely evacuated, Loftus returned to the scene of the
explosion and whilst still under sporadic harassing fire, coolly
reverted to his Royal Military Police role, taking a number of
post incident photographs and recovering the casualty's
military equipment in order to assist in any future police
investigation.

Throughout this incident, Loftus displayed a high measure
of physical courage and, despite the very real risk to his own
safety, a resolute determination to help his wounded
colleague. The fact that the casualty survived is testament to
this young Royal Military Policeman's fine performance
under the most testing of conditions; a performance made all
the more remarkable considering that Loftus has only been a
Royal Military Policeman for 18 months and is engaged on his
first operational tour. He is strongly recommended for the
award of a Mention in Dispatches.

Captain Nick Barton, DFC, Army Air Corps

I have never dwelt on how many I have killed [as an Apache
pilot]. We debrief everything: you watch it all [recorded film]
in slow time on a big video screen. You know if there is any
doubt you don't engage. But once you have made the
decision to engage, then you need to engage accurately and
to kill. There is nothing worse than if you rush it and you can
only get twenty rounds off. You want to be in a position
where you get the whole hundred rounds in one pass and
guarantee that the target is neutralized.

For perhaps 50 per cent of our engagements, you probably
don't see anyone [the pilots are firing at buildings or treelines].
If it subsequently came out in an int [intelligence]
report that five women were killed in a building you had
fired on, you would feel absolutely terrible. Fortunately I have
not had any of those. We [the British Apache pilots] have
probably only had one example of it and he [the pilot] was completely
right to do it [to open fire]. They'd had two guys firing
a mortar out of one end of the building and, on the other side,
inside the building, there had been two women. It was in self-defence
under the correct Rules of Engagement and, prior to
firing, he had checked the building and not seen any women. It
would be difficult to take but I suppose one must console oneself
in that he had done everything right at the time. We have
good squadron camaraderie and attitude to debriefing. After a
mission, we will debrief everything and we will talk about it.
This helps with our drills and improving our support to the
troops as well as dealing with difficult scenarios.

I have been in a night-time scenario in Nad Ali that, taken
out of context, could be seen to be quite damning from our
gun footage. Our guys had been contacted. They had been
caught in an ambush, which they had pre-seen but could not
get the Rules of Engagement to engage on. They were
subsequently contacted and they swiftly dropped two 500-pounders
from a B1 [bomber] because that was all they had
on station. They were pretty sure they got one [Taliban], but
they were still tracking another with an ISTAR [intelligence,
surveillance, targeting, acquisition and reconnaissance] asset.
They tracked him for over a K and a half through the fields. We
were on high readiness from Bastion – a ten-minute flight time
– and were woken up and launched as soon as the initial
contact occurred.

When I arrived on station at approximately three in the
morning, I had one guy in the middle of the maize-field. It
took quite a while picking him up at night. When I actually
saw him, I had no doubt in my mind that this guy was one of
the original men from the ambush, still rapidly on the run in
the middle of a field using the high crops as cover. I was flying
at about 2,000 feet with night-vision goggles on. I had all
the Rules of Engagement and fired, and I made sure I did it
pretty clinically. That sounds shocking. I fired a burst of
twenty [rounds], then readjusted and then I fired probably
eighty or a hundred rounds at him. Once you have caught
him, once he is on the run, you make sure you hit him really
hard. You just want to be professional and clinical.

We video everything we do and watch it not only to
improve our weaponeering, but also to record every
engagement for any Rules of Engagement questions or
investigations. Taken out of context, without the background,
this footage would be quite shocking in its cold harshness.
The fact that we video everything does put the crews under
additional pressure in a way that, perhaps, the rest of the
Army does not face.

Major Jonathan Hipkins, Royal Military Police (RMP)

We have just had an incident whereby a British forces ground
call sign conducted an offensive operation up near FOB
Inkerman. During that operation, they received intelligence
to suggest that a certain compound was being used as a formup
point to launch an attack by enemy forces on them. They
pushed a couple of snipers forward to reinforce the evidence
they had got through intelligence. And the two snipers saw
two individuals on the roof of a particular compound that
they believed was being used as a form-up point and they
saw the two individuals carrying long-barrelled weapons.

On the basis that they felt an imminent threat from that
compound to them, they decided to launch a strike by
GMLRS, the multi-launch rocket system. And they basically
hit the compound as a pre-emptive strike to neutralize the
enemy threat that was contained within that compound.
Unfortunately it appears, and there is no way they could ever
have known this, there were civilians inside the compound
and unfortunately a female was killed. Two of her children
were killed as well and two other children were put in
hospital along with the owner of the compound's second
wife, who subsequently lost a hand. His nine-month-old baby
was also hospitalized and went up to Kabul and lost an eye
in a subsequent operation.

And part and parcel of my job was to look at whether or
not British forces were at fault in the actions that they took
that day. So I managed to get hold of the man who owns that
compound, the father of the children, the husband of the
wife. He was at Kandahar hospital. He was visiting his
injured second wife, and his two injured children were there
too. I managed to reach him through the International
Committee of the Red Cross. So I had this thirty-four-year-old
man in my office in tears talking about the incident where he
had lost most of his family and the very serious wounds to
the rest of his family. And for me, at that one moment in time,
and even now just thinking about it, I felt a tingling down the
back of my neck. This poor bloke had gone through a hugely
traumatic experience and I had to basically try and find out
whether he felt British forces were at fault, whether Taliban
were present there that day and whether or not there was
anything, in fact, that we could do to recompense him for the
loss that he had suffered.

It's a very sad example of the nature of the conflict here in
Afghanistan. And really it brought it home to me how these
guys suffer no end. British forces always try and do what is
right in terms of limiting collateral damage. But it doesn't
mean that I am not acutely conscious of the fact that a number
of individuals out there have died – innocent people have
died – at the hands of British forces. Accidents will always
happen, but it's still just as sad, still another person's life.