A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (12 page)

By Afghan standards, ANP Hill is a hillock, with flanks that rise evenly for 150 metres to a rounded summit about twenty metres across. But it commanded a good view of the compound, 600 metres to the east, and of the town beyond, as well as the main road to the south-east which connected Now Zad to Lashkar Gah and the rest of the world. The British were not the first to recognize its strategic importance. The remains of an artillery piece, upside-down and twisted among rubble, provided an ominous reminder that the Soviets had also kept watch here in the 1980s. The gun's concrete emplacement was still intact and provided some cover for Gibbons, who appropriated it as the mortar fire controller. The shrine on the summit was a simple hollowing in a rock into which two or three men could squeeze. Apart from that there was no real cover for anyone. There was a trench on the side of the hill facing the town into which about ten people could fit, but it was dug out only to knee height. Later – much later – sappers were able to deepen the trench to waist height with a mechanical digger, and to build up the parapets with sandbags. The Fusiliers, however, had no diggers and no engineers.

When Jon Swift and his men arrived to take over fully from the Gurkhas on 31 July, they were equipped with a single shovel – an Afghan one of uncertain sturdiness – and a pick with one spare head. The soldiers did what they could, yet 'the hill', as the Fusiliers called the position, remained woefully exposed throughout their stay there. 'We tried digging down but it was just solid rock. We were digging every night for at least a week, but only got down another inch or two. So we decided to try and build up. At night we were getting rocks from the bottom of the hill, dragging them up again one at a time . . . Big rocks were best. We didn't even have bags to carry them. There wasn't much – it probably gave us another five or six inches or something. You couldn't do it in the day – not a chance, you wouldn't move during the day – but at night we were straight down there, because it was for your own protection in the end.' Eventually a few bundles of empty sandbags started to come in on each helicopter resupply run, but these were nothing like enough. 'What we needed was twenty to thirty thousand of them.'

The Fire Support Group's arrival seemed to take the enemy commanders by surprise. It was not until the end of the first week that the Taliban attempted a concerted attack on ANP Hill, creeping as close as they dared to launch RPGs as well as firing mortars and machine-guns. The Fusiliers christened that night 'Suicide Saturday'. The attackers generally made easy targets and never repeated the mistake. The RPGs were inaccurate over such a long distance, particularly as their target was elevated and relatively small. Four RPGs exploded in the air above the Fusiliers, too high to do any damage. One lucky shot hit the wall in front of the mortars but failed to go off properly – which was even luckier for the soldiers sheltering there.

The defenders were astonished by the enemy's bravery. 'They've got bigger balls than what I have,' said Dean Fisher. 'The amount of firepower we put down, we completely blitzed on them, but they still kept coming.' Others thought their courage was simply stupid – or else suspected that the fighters were being duped. 'We were told they always removed dead bodies as quickly as possible so nobody could see them,' said Fisher's co-gunner, Stewart Spensley, from Bury in Greater Manchester, 'so maybe they were just being misled. A commander could say, "Well, he attacked last night, but now he's fucked off to Sangin", or something. He wouldn't tell a fighter that his mate had died, just to get him to attack again. That's what I put it down to, anyway. Mad. Stupid.' Whatever the enemy's motivation, the Fusiliers had to admit they had underestimated their abilities as soldiers. 'I heard they'd be just crap, but they weren't at all,' said Fisher. 'They were a lot better trained than I thought they'd be.'

Mortars represented the greatest danger. One lucky shot into a trench could bring disaster, and they stood a far greater chance of finding a target than any RPG. There were several mortar crews operating in and around the town, and now they became busier than ever, signalling the start of a campaign that turned into an extraordinary duel with the Fire Support Group.

The goal for the defenders was to locate the enemy's firing position and send a mortar back along the incoming trajectory. This had to be done quickly, before the enemy had a chance to cease firing and move off. The firing points were always hidden, usually set well back in the town. The Fusiliers would hear the telltale pop of a shell being launched, and scan through binoculars for anything that might betray the enemy's position: a smudge of smoke, a glint of metal, a puff of dust thrown up by the base plate impacting the ground. Their world became ruled by the vicious geometry of the mortar's rise and fall. Timing was critical, for it wasn't a good idea to be standing up as a shell landed. Even a not-particularly-near miss had enough force to blow a man out of his trench. Closer blasts could burst eardrums, causing ears and even eye sockets to bleed.

There were, on average, sixteen seconds between the pop of the launch and the shell's arrival, depending slightly on the firing angle. The last four seconds before the drop were naturally the worst. The observers, gunners and everyone else would dive for whatever cover they could find, knowing that a direct hit would obliterate them. The dive-to-cover drill became second nature to the garrison, both on the hill and in the compound below. The Fusiliers discovered that the sound of a shell launching was uncannily like the noise of a Land Rover door slamming. They soon learned to close their vehicle doors quietly, or else to shout 'door closing' as they did so. There were many among the company who, six months afterwards, were still unable to hear that sound without tensing up.

'Mortars are the scariest because you know they're coming,' said Jon 'Jackie' Allen, a twenty-six-year-old captain who was put in charge of the Fire Support Group for a ten-day spell. 'With most ordnance, if you hear it you know it's already gone past, but not these things. You hear them fire, and then a whistle in the descent. You'd curl up in a ball, literally with your head between your legs, just waiting for the bang. That helplessness was the most striking thing for me.' Spensley recalled pulling his sleeping bag up over his head and praying for protection from his 'ballistic doss bag'. There was really nothing else that he could do.

The incoming fire was mercifully inaccurate to begin with. A shell would occasionally land near the summit, but many more sailed over or dropped hundreds of metres short. It takes considerable skill to fire a mortar accurately, and a conical hilltop is difficult to hit even for experts. The enemy crews, furthermore, were often amateur in their launching procedures. Tell-tale dust clouds, in particular, gave their positions away. In the early days, Gibbons and the others were able to strike back with an efficiency that even the enemy acknowledged. 'Ah well,' one fighter in the town was heard to remark, with that curiously British sense of fair play that Afghan fighters often seem to have, 'we've been hitting them hard enough. It's only fair they hit us back now.'

In mid-September, however, the enemy tactics changed. First, the tell-tale dust plumes disappeared. The attackers had learned to water the ground around the base plate, or else to place the barrel in the middle of a wet blanket or carpet to suppress the dirt. Second, the number of firing points in the town was greatly multiplied. Instead of staying in one place and launching as many as eight shells at a time, the enemy now fired a quick salvo of three before collapsing the mortar and scurrying off to another firing point. These were pre-prepared and scattered all over the town, allowing a crew to visit several different firing points in the course of a single attack. The Fusiliers now found themselves hunting a very dangerous will-o'-the-wisp. 'It was very frustrating not being able to see them,' said Gibbons. 'We only got one or two minutes to respond when they fired. You could tell the rough direction the mortars were coming from, but two minutes wasn't usually enough to pinpoint them. They were very clever.'

The normal response would be to shell the general area and hope to catch the enemy as they moved to the next firing point, but the risk to innocent civilians was great in this urban battlefield, and the Fusiliers were constrained by their rules of engagement. 'Once,' Gibbons told me, 'on the wood line, I wanted to push out my mortars a hundred metres either way, to blitz the area. We knew where they were roughly and could have got them that way, but [the officers] wouldn't let me because we couldn't positively ID them.'

Along with the enemy's new elusiveness came a far more sinister development: a marked improvement in the accuracy of the incoming shells. There was a point to firing salvoes of three: the enemy had begun to use a standard mortar technique called 'bracketing'. 'The first mortar would land a hundred metres short,' Allen explained. 'They'd adjust their aim, and the second mortar would land a hundred metres long. So you just knew that the third one was coming straight down the chimney. And we had no OHP [overhead protection]. We'd count from the pop. The last four seconds before the drop of the third were the worst.'

The attackers had not raised their game without outside help. From foreign accents overheard in the town, and certain other clues, it was clear that a group of highly skilled mortar instructors had arrived from Pakistan. There was much speculation about where these people had learned their craft. The technique of bracketing could have come from the British Army's own training manuals – and there were some on the hill who muttered darkly that it probably had. The true identity of the instructors was never discovered. They might have learned their techniques in an al-Qaida training camp. They might equally have been rogue ISI operatives,
^*10
or simply ex-Mujahidin Pakistani Pashtuns who had mastered the mortar against the Russians twenty years earlier.

Wherever the instructors came from, they were bad news for the Fusiliers. It was two long weeks before the British regained the upper hand. 'There were some hugely lucky escapes,' Lieutenant Nick Groves told me. 'When the mortars landed you stuck your head up and the first thought was, "Has it landed next to me?" But somehow they always landed in empty parts of the trenches, or literally right on top of the sandbags . . . a foot the other way and four blokes would have been taken out. That happened a lot.'

Groves was from south London. As a teenager he had once worked as a ball-boy at Wimbledon. One day he fielded balls for the teenage prodigy Anna Kournikova. Needing to adjust her skirt during a packed Centre Court match, the bombshell from Moscow summoned her coach to hold up a towel to protect her modesty. Groves, standing on station at the back of the court, was treated to an unforgettable private view. Ten years on, the projectiles being lobbed at him and his men were a lot more dangerous than tennis balls. More than fifty mortar rounds landed fewer than twenty metres from someone on ANP Hill – easily within killing range. On five occasions, shells landed within five metres. One shell even dropped directly down one of the mortar barrels and burst it open like a peeled banana. Fusilier Jim Allan had been crouching next to it. His life was saved by Lance Corporal Chris Freeman, who had a sixth sense about this particular incoming round, and yanked him down into a trench by the scruff of his body armour a second or two before the shell hit.

Jackie Allen described the panic that ensued when a mortar was launched during a section changeover, when there were briefly as many as seventy-five men on the hill and the garrison was at its most vulnerable. 'A mortar popped. Everyone looked at each other. Was that a Land Rover door slamming? There was another pop. It was mortars. Suddenly, everyone was running . . .' At such times the Fusiliers could resemble a mob of meerkats bolting for their burrows. 'I was sitting at the wheel of the wagon, about to go back down the hill. I just scarpered in it. Was that the right thing to do? I don't know. Maybe not. But there wasn't much space up there.' The company sergeant major, 'Jimmy' Greaves, was in a truck bringing up water and rations. 'He was arriving at the top when the signaller who was riding top-cover just got out and ran . . . he didn't mention any mortars to the CSM. Jimmy was just left there looking at all these people running about, going, "What's going on?" That mortar missed, luckily. An hour later, though, the Taliban switched targets from the hill to the compound. They followed me down! And everyone was, like, "Right, get back up the hill, you!"'

Most at risk were the machine-gunners, whose positions at the front of the hill were particularly exposed. 'I think the worst one that I seen was when we was in the trench,' said Dean Fisher, the hero of the
Sun
. 'It hit the front edge and then just rolled down away from us. It was a blind.'

'I was out spotting one day cos we had incoming,' said Spensley. 'One of the rocks we'd dragged there was pretty big. And normally when I was looking out I'd lean against it – we had the binos on – and it landed fifty metres off. We didn't hear any more incoming. And then one landed three or four metres in front of me, the other side of the rock. And [fellow gunner] Frankie Canham went, "Are you all right?" and I just went, "Uh-huh."'

The machine-gunners were good friends who had been brought closer together by their shared experience on the hill. Spensley's girlfriend, whom he'd met on leave in Bury two months earlier, was pregnant with his first child; Fisher and another gunner, Duncan Grice, had already been designated as godfathers.

As machine-gun specialists these three were called Drummers rather than Fusiliers. The title was no anachronism. In common with the supporting-fire platoons of other regiments, they were all required to play a musical instrument and to take part in public ceremonies. Grice really was a drummer; Spensley and Fisher were both flautists. It was hard to equate delicate musicianship with their combat role. I'd already seen footage of the Drummers in action on the hill, pouring murderous torrents of tracer fire at an enemy position below, as someone off-camera, probably Fisher, commented, 'Night night, Mr Taliban!' Almost every unit in Afghanistan had filmed themselves at one time or another, and spliced the best bits on to a souvenir DVD, usually to a heavy metal soundtrack. 'A' Company's DVD, entitled
Apocalypse Now Zad
, was set to Iron Maiden's 'Out of the Silent Planet', a pseudo-religious number about death and destruction on a cosmic scale. Given how far the Fusiliers had diverged from the hearts and minds mission, this was apt enough. In one contact, Fisher and Spensley fired over 9,000 rounds between them, punishing who knew how many Afghans with death. 'Remember that contact with the two RPG men in the woods?' said Spensley. 'We must have hit them just as they were about to fire. They fell back and fired them straight up, phwoom! And someone went, "Mortars, incoming!" And I went, "No, that's RPGs, we just shot 'em!"'