Rain (20 page)

About 30 km north of Loy Kabir

12th January 2010

Will,

Haaaaaappy New Year!

If this doesn’t find you neck-deep in a barrel of grog somewhere I am going to find you and kill you. You should see me at the moment; we’ve been on the ground, in the ulu, living off the wagons for more than two weeks now in the freezing, freezing brass-monkeys cold, and I look like a frostbitten Patrick Swayze from
Point Break.
Well, that’s what I think I look like, but the lads say I remind them of Compo from
Last of the Summer Wine.
Impertinent bastards; I’ll have them all flogged when we’re back. Apologies for the length of this letter, mate; it’s going to take about eight blueys or so to get all this down and you’ll probably get them all on different days and in the wrong order, so I’ll number them at the end. We’re having a maint day in the desert, and my wagons are in pretty good order, so all the boys are just getting their heads down. I thought I’d write and give you the low-down. Bugger all else to do.

It’s been a busy old time since Christmas; I thought winter tours were meant to be chilled out. Not this one, it’s been madder than a dog in a bag. I don’t even want to know how much 30 mil we’ve got down range in the last days. I think the squadron’s on something like fifteen confirmed enemy KIA. Basically, the much-heralded op that we were going to do came good just after Christmas. Op Tor Barcha IV, aka Op Certain Death. There’s this town I told you about beforehand, I think, Shah Kalay, which is where the governor of Loy
Kabir lives and his militia rule over it. They’d completely fucked up and on Christmas Day were holed up in their compound, being attacked from all sides by the local Taliban. The town was about to fall, and so on the evening of the 26th, after a manic day of battle prep, we sent out this relief column (that makes it sound like Mafeking!), C Squadron with all our Scimitars and then loads of infantry crammed into Mastiffs, with the plan to drive deep into the desert in a massive feint to the north overnight, and then in the morning swing south to appear on the ridge line overlooking the town. Then four Chinook loads would bring BG Tac and a company of ANA and we’d go through the town together, the infantry clearing the objectives and us in intimate support through the alleyways.

The town was split into five objectives around compounds that we thought the enemy would base in, Objectives Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev and Princess Grace. So called because our Ops is a massive Cold War nut and they’re all names from ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. Bardot was the northernmost, and was the police station. We’d secure that, link up with the militia, and then move south through the town, clearing each objective over the day. We’d hang around for a couple of days afterwards, leave the ANA company and the
OMLT
there as a bolstering force, and then come back for tea and medals. Sound simple? It was a total clusterfuck.

We set out at dusk on Boxing Day. The sight was pretty impressive, about twenty vehicles storming through the sunset up this wadi, plumes of dust streaking into the sky and each looking like that pillar of fire that guided the Israelites in the Bible, with the sun bouncing off them. Except that everyone for miles around could see them too; I’m surprised you didn’t notice them back in London. We might as well have had a man in a clown suit flying a plane trailing a banner over us that said
HI GUYS, WE’RE COMING TO RESCUE THE MILITIA IN SHAH KALAY
for all the subtlety we were displaying. And they guessed our feint. At night, at about 2100, we
broke up out of a wadi into the open desert, and had to go through this VP between a couple of compounds. No biggie, we just had to barma it. So Clive’s troop, who had just taken over the Mastiff job from me and so had to barma for the squadron, had to do it. It was their first time doing a proper barma and they were taking for ever. We watched through the
BGTI
(that thermal sight we have on the Scimitar; it’s epic – you can see anything and everything), and my gunner and I were going mental at how much time they were taking. And then the weirdest, weirdest, most horrible thing. Before I heard it, I saw the explosion in front of me on the thermal screen. On the BGTI, if it’s warm then it appears black; if cold it’s white.

So there they are, the barma team, picked out black against the white, and then this massive black blot appears as the IED explodes, and then disappears. And then we see the four boys again, but this time it looks like there’s five of them. We soon realize that what we thought was a fifth man was the blown-off legs of one of them, Trooper Ransome, and suddenly the net goes mental with the casevac. We watched as the legs kept on getting yellower and yellower, until by the end you couldn’t see them as they had lost all their warmth. Both at the thigh. He’s twenty-one. Good lad as well. Really good. A real scallywag – mischievous, LOVED scrapping. And now, well, whatever awaits him. The MERT came in to get him out and we got ready to crack on.

But then behind us, at the very back of the column, there’s this massive other explosion; one of the Mastiffs at the back has been hit. No one’s hurt, and we don’t know what on earth it was. Pressure plate?
Command wire
? Legacy mine? Either way, it fucked the Mastiff. And every one of the Scimitars had been over that spot. If that had hit one of the Scims then that would have been three KIA, no doubt. Turret ripped off and everything. But yet again the Mastiff sailed through. So we had to wait for another six hours for the
SVR
to recover the wagon, take it back to Newcastle and then come back to rejoin us.

So it’s now four in the morning, and we’re still in the wadi. The leader decides to ditch the feint to the north and just head straight for the town. H-Hour was at 0600, and that’s when the helis are inbound, so we race hell for leather to the north of the town. But the ground is awful, dunes set solid by the frost, and even the tracked Scimitars are slipping and sliding. It’s the dark of the moon, and no lights allowed, so the column’s a nightmare to control. The Mastiffs on their wheels are all over the shop, and one of them nearly overturns traversing a slope. It is a total, total nightmare, and we’re all exhausted when we finally get to the
LOD
.

So we get to Shah Kalay at dawn, and there’s now a white flag over the police station; the Talibs are in it. So we’re going to have to fight from the get go. The helis land with Tac and some of the ANA. The helis go back to pick up the rest of them from Newcastle, and the plan is that when they’re all here we’ll start the advance. So the CO comes up to my wagon with the Ops, and we’re looking over the ridge at the town, when suddenly the ANA start running down the hill, about a platoon of them. Before we can do anything the Talibs at Bardot open up on the ANA in front of us, and they’re butchered. Like the opening of
Saving Private Ryan.
All hell’s breaking loose, and it’s going to be twenty minutes at least until the next heli load appears. So the CO gets Frenchie to get us onto the ridge, and we all just start blazing hell into Bardot as Clive’s troop goes forward in his Mastiffs to get the casualties out. It was 0630 now, and there’s already four ANA KIA, and ten Cat As and Bs. All momentum had been totally pissed up the wall. The CO is going spastic at the ANA.

And so the infantry re-org behind the ridge, as we keep pummelling away into the Talibs as they stick their heads up to fire at us, and then as 2 Troop sit on the ridge giving us covering fire, the infantry and my troop go back down into the bowl, this time with a wall, and I mean a wall, of fire over us. It felt like the end of the world was happening above our heads. And then the infantry start
running, and we reach the wall of Bardot. They blow it with a mousehole and then storm through it. I turn the turret round to protect the 30 mil and ram the wall, and then we’re through as well, expecting to walk into a hell load of fire. But there’s nothing; the Talibs have slipped away at the last minute. The CO’s there as well, and he’s thrilled as their absence means we’re going to squeeze them into the middle of the town. Oh yeah, I should have said, the Warrior company were seconded to us for the op, and they drove over from Musa Qala for it, and are lined all along the ridge to the south of the town, so no Talibs can escape.

We had a short halt in Bardot, and swept the militia station in the middle of it for IEDs. I’d been in that building about three months ago, and it gave me the creeps. An evil place. And when we went in there we found five of the militia hung up from the ceilings by wire, their ears cut off and stuffed in their mouths, stripped naked and covered in whip marks and burns. Good look.

But the advance south continues. The next two objectives, Budapest and Alabama, follow a similar pattern, with token resistance around the clusters of compounds, a few bursts from an AK that slows the advance, but then they leg it and by 1200 we’ve got back on track and hold about two thirds of the town. The governor’s driven over from Loy Kabir by this point with a load of ANP, so we’ve now got Brits, ANA and ANP cutting about the area. My troop’s at the head of the push, with the infantry crowded behind my wagons as we go over the fields between the objectives, which is ace as it’s all a bit Normandy 1944, but when we get in among the compound clusters it’s terrifying, as the tempo is too high to barma properly and we’re channelled wherever we drive. And with the advanced notice they’ve had, I just know that they’re going to have laid IEDs in the alleyways for the Scims, so every metre south we drive I’m wincing, expecting an explosion at every moment. Dusty and I are standing in the turret ramrod straight, like pencils, so if we do hit something we’ll just fly out like missiles from the turret and hopefully land on a pile
of straw somewhere. Yeah right. Probably land in a compound and get hacked to death by some mental family.

And then we’re on Khrushchev, and this is where they’re standing to scrap. As it turned out later, they’d prepared it as a defensive position amazingly, and it takes the infantry a good two hours to clear it. At one point the CO and the Ops are in the lead assaulting section, and as my wagons are outside the compounds we can hear one hell of a firefight inside as they go through the position, grenading and mouseholing. But then it’s clear, and there are six enemy dead and two prisoners. And then, in a final stand, two RPGs come at us from Princess Grace, one of them I swear going straight between Dusty and me, and so we just blitz it. No more fire comes from it, and when we push south and get to it we find a final two dead, torn to shreds by our 30 mil.

It’s odd, but I didn’t feel anything. Nothing at all. When I saw the bodies I felt anodyne. All I had done was to remove a threat. That was all. I know the dead enemy had families, I know they had nicknames, had jokes and rivalries. But when I looked at them I saw them as one step closer to going home. I had this strange thing earlier in the tour, a dream about a man dressed in black with a white headdress, as I thought I’d seen him when we were in Shah Kalay back in September. One of the dead in Princess Grace was wearing exactly that, and when I saw him I felt like something had been lifted from me.

By evening we had the town secured, for the loss of three Cat B
GSWs
from the infantry lads and two further ANA KIA as well as about a dozen Cat Bs and
C
s. So it was a hell of a fight really. No holds barred. No IEDs at all until the very end, when the Warrior company started to move off from the southern ridge and hit one. We saw the dust plume from about 2 km away. A lad in the back, a lance jack – can’t remember his name – was killed. The angel flight comes in for him, they self-recover the vehicle, which wasn’t even that badly damaged, and then suddenly they’re off, and it’s just Tac, the ANA and C Sqn left in the town.

The squadron hung around Shah Kalay for four days or so, trying to get the ANP who are replacing the militia to get out and patrol the town. But they were dreadful. You couldn’t fault their enthusiasm in the mornings, but by afternoon they’d lost all interest. And while their fighting spirit is good, their kit is just non-existent, and they were begging us for anything – clothes, water, food, batteries. It’s their own country for Christ’s sake. It’s like having someone to stay in your own house and then asking them for washing-up powder, soap, keys and the code for the burglar alarm.

I remember what you wrote back in the summer – how on earth are they going to be trusted to fend for themselves when we’re gone? I’ve got a theory about this actually, that Dusty and Dav helped come up with. Here goes. At the moment we’re playing a tennis match, us v. the Taliban. We’re pretty good and have much better tactics and kit than they do, but they’re playing at home and know their way around the court better. So it’s pretty even. The problem is though that there’s someone on the sidelines who’s going to have to replace us halfway through and carry on the rally for us when we leave. Now imagine – and stay with me on this one – that this someone isn’t a bloke at all, but a monkey (Alan Partridge’s Monkey Tennis finally gets a series!!) who’s never wielded a tennis racket in his life. And so we, at the same time as continuing the rally, have to teach this monkey not only how to play tennis, but then how to win some points and eventually the match. So sometimes we let him do a shot or even a whole rally on his own, and sometimes he wins a point with an amazing cross-court dipping forehand that he’s plucked from nowhere, but at other times he just lies down and goes to sleep and we have to rush in and save the point. On other points he just starts smoking crack, or throws his racket away, and in the worst instances he actually starts attacking us with the racket – did you hear about that green on blue down in Gereshk last week? Mental, mate, mental. Now, give us a few years, until 2018, say, and I reckon we can give you a monkey who’ll take on anyone – Borg, McEnroe,
Federer – but we ain’t got that long. It’ll be a wonder if, by the time we leave, the monkey will be able to sustain a rally. I don’t think that’s going to work its way into any counter-insurgency manuals, but you get my drift. They’re great scrappers, the ANA, but we both know scrapping’s the easy part; it’s everything else that’s hard.