A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (17 page)

Garrisoning Now Zad was a lonely business, and as Seal hinted, religion stepped into the void for many of them. A padre who arrived towards the end of their tour – 'a Marine padre, with a big round head, red-faced' – was in heavy demand. Indeed, the first impromptu service he held at the compound was so packed that Seal was unable to get in. I had had my doubts about General Dannatt's contention that the Judaic-Christian tradition underpins the Army, but wondered now if I had been wrong.

'I spoke to the padre,' said Seal, 'and he said, "How are you getting on?" And I said, "I'm finding it quite hard, to be honest, sir. I need to get out of here. It's grinding me down now." I said to him, "To be honest, I'm struggling, mentally, in me conscience-wise, with what we've been doing out here." He said, "Do many blokes feel like that?" I said, "I think there's a few, yeah. There's quite a few who said they couldn't get into that church service today." He said, "I'll have another one if you want." So he did, in the room at the top of the central building. There was about ten of us in there. And he said a few prayers and that, and touched on killing people. He was nice. He said, "I know you've done things out here that you may find trouble with God for what you've done. But God understands, and you're here doing a job, and you're here for the greater . . . you've got to look at the bigger picture." It helped a little bit, but not a lot.'

However tough they were, or however tough they thought they were, men engaged in state-approved homicide for the first time needed sensitive handling. At the very least they craved some kind of outside acknowledgement of the 'strangeness' of their experience. Many of the Fusiliers spoke of the impossibility of describing what it was like to their friends and family, whether during or after the tour. 'You can explain it to 'em but they can never understand it properly cos they've never been in that situation,' said Fisher. 'You can only explain it so much.'

There was nothing new about this. I was reminded of a song from the satirical 1960s film and stage musical
Oh! What a Lovely
War
, the lyrics of which were based on a ditty actually sung by British troops in World War One: 'And when they ask us how dangerous it was, / Oh, we'll never tell them, / No, we'll never tell them.'

'You'd have these strange phone conversations,' said Seal. 'They just didn't get it. I phoned my brother once and I'd go, "We got RPG'd twice today," and he'd go, "Didja? Did you watch the footy?" And my Dad sent a tenner once. And I got offered a PlayStation. What were we supposed to do with that when we had no electricity, no batteries? It was the same with the videos, showing them to people back home. They always go, "Are those real planes?" Or the tracers: "Are those real bullets?" And you'd have to explain what tracer is, that only one in five is lit up and there are four more invisible ones for every one you can see. And then they just look at you.'

Some of the Fusiliers who had been redeployed in Helmand at the beginning of 2007 had plainly tired of the novelty of combat. 'I'd be happy now just to stay here [in Cyprus] and go through my Army career without doing it again, you know?' said Dean Fisher. The waning of his enthusiasm was particularly striking. This, after all, was the man dubbed a hero by the
Sun
in November 2006. His photograph had appeared in the local newspaper in Nuneaton, prompting the mayor to phone his father with a request for Fisher to lead the Remembrance Day parade – although he couldn't go because he was too busy preparing for redeployment to Sangin. That district centre, he said, 'was more or less the same as Now Zad, but you had all the new lads there that had never been in a contact before, running upstairs, like, really excited, wanting to get on the guns. I just sat downstairs without a gun, going, "Go on then. Go and do it. I'm all right down here."' Fisher's experience hadn't made him want to leave the Army – yet. 'I wouldn't say that, but it's made me think, like, do I actually want a permanent job here? Because I'm pushing my luck now. Do I want to settle down with a family and that?'

The blooding of his generation had consequences, and one of them was a realization that soldiering was nowadays actually very dangerous. Fisher understood that a career in the Army was a different proposition from what it used to be, and saw straight through the
Sun
's shallow jingoism. Lee Phillips, a forty-one-year-old captain with a twenty-two-year Army career behind him, told me that before Helmand he had fired precisely eleven shots in anger, all of them in Northern Ireland. He fired more than that in the first hour of his arrival at Now Zad. 'I can't remember who said the business of a soldier is not to kill but to be killed,' said Peter Merriman, the battalion commander, 'but what's happening now is fundamentally different. Last year we had five wounded, two severely, and two killed in Iraq on Telic 6. And we've been very lucky. There are some battalions who have had over seventy killed and wounded on their tour of Basra. These are quite big figures.'

The potential impact on retaining trained men was clear, and so was the threat to recruitment figures in the future. 'I think the CGS [General Sir Richard Dannatt] was spot on when he said the problems for the Army would come later, in five or ten years' time,' Swift said. 'We're in OK shape now, but he's right when he says the present tempo isn't sustainable.'

The official psychological effect of so much combat was looking pricey for his company. Eight of the 128 men who went to Helmand had reported to the medics with symptoms of suspected post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and Swift worried privately that there were more to come. Captain David Baxter, a doctor, worried about this too. He explained that PTSD was still poorly defined medically. The symptoms, which include depression, alcohol and drug abuse, flashbacks and nightmares, take an average of thirteen years to present themselves and there is no predicting who is going to suffer from them.

The battalion was acutely conscious of the dangers and worked hard to foster what they called 'a supportive environment' for the troops returning home. First the men underwent a period of 'decompression' in the form of an obligatory holiday in Kuwait. (Fisher didn't think much of this, mainly because the beer on sale there had been alcohol-free.) Then they were subjected to two days of lectures designed to teach them to spot the symptoms of PTSD in themselves and in their mates. For the first few days back at barracks they were also ordered to keep on the combat kit they had been wearing abroad. 'I thought it was rubbish, but it works,' said Baxter. 'It makes the transition to home more gradual.' Drinking too much was something the medics watched particularly carefully for. 'It's fine if they go on the piss with their mates for a bit, but if they're still at it after four weeks, alarm bells start to ring.'

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Falklands campaign was marked in June 2007, and among the slew of newspaper articles accompanying it was one claiming that 300 veterans had since 1982 committed suicide – fifty more than were killed in the conflict itself. Baxter questioned its accuracy – 'people commit suicide for all sorts of reasons', he said – but acknowledged that it was disturbing all the same. According to Robert Marsh, a spokesman for Combat Stress, the ex-Services mental welfare charity, the fighting in Helmand represented an even greater mental health time-bomb than the Falklands.

The fact that the combat in Afghanistan was the most intense in a generation played its part in this, Marsh explained; so did the fact that the MoD's 'Harmony Guidelines' – according to which there should be a twenty-four-month interval between six-month operational tours abroad – were being routinely ignored. But the main reason was the nature of the war the troops were fighting. The conflict in Helmand was 'asymmetrical'. In the phrase coined by retired general Rupert Smith, the author of the influential book
The Utility of Force
, it was 'war amongst the people' – an environment that brought special psychological pressures that were absent in the conventional wars of the past.

'Lots of people join the Army to have a fight, but they've got that now; they've done it,' said Baxter. 'They tell me, "I'm out now. I've killed someone, and now I'm off to become a good family dad." I've heard that ten times in the past year, all from infantry guys and across regiments. It will be interesting to see how the Army copes medically in the future with all those suddenly leaving.'

'You don't think it affects you that badly, but it does,' said Fisher. 'I was sat down with one of my mates in a pub in Coventry and I was thinking, "Why am I feeling like this? I should be enjoying myself." But you just feel really down in the dumps. Just sat there, thinking to myself.'

'I didn't know how to fill me days when I was on leave,' said Stewart Spensley. 'It was, like, what shall I do? All your friends and family are still going out to work, and, like, you go home and . . . I wasn't too bad, cos one of the lads who lost his leg out there [Fusilier Barlow, in a mine incident near Kajaki] lives just down the road from me in Bury, and we used to go out on the piss together. But other times he was down in London, at Headley Court [military hospital, in Surrey], and I just sat there wondering, "What can I do?"'

'I couldn't sit down for more than fifteen minutes,' said Duncan Grice.

'I fell out with my missus on leave,' said Fisher. 'You get used to having a phone call – that phone call relationship – but as soon as you spend more than a week with them, that's it, you're at each other's throats, cos you're not used to doing it.'

'Me ex-missus, when I got back, wanted to try and spend all the time in the world with me,' said Spensley, 'but I just weren't interested. I said I'd rather be out with me mates or have a bit of time on me own . . . I suppose that's life, isn't it?'

Martyn Gibbons, the mortar fire controller on ANP Hill, was not in Cyprus when I met him, shortly before the Dhekelia trip, but at Headley Court hospital. He was in a wheelchair, recovering from an SPG-9 recoilless rifle strike at Sangin. He was lucky to have survived it with just his legs smashed; if the missile had struck a few inches higher he would certainly be dead. The recoilless rifle is a misnomer, for it is neither a rifle nor recoilless. A Russian-invented, tripod-mounted weapon designed to penetrate tank armour, it fires an 82mm missile at 700 metres per second – more than twice the velocity of an RPG. The missile certainly penetrated Gibbons. It exploded against the sandbags in front of him, but ten inches of tail fin carried through and came to rest in his left thigh, the hot and smoking metal poking out on both sides like an arrow in a cowboy hat in a Lucky Luke cartoon. 'I was ecstatic when I saw him,' said Baxter, who attended him in his sangar, 'because he was screaming so much. It proved his airways were clear.' Part of Gibbons' stomach muscle was later taken out to patch up the gaping wound. He had kept the tail fin as a souvenir. When he was better, he said, he planned to tip it with silver and mount it on a stand at home.

His wife Kim was visiting at the same time. They were older than the average patient, he thirty-two, she thirty-one, and I found them good company as we sat chatting on a roof terrace where the sun shone. They were from Rochdale in Greater Manchester, and spoke with an uncompromising Lancastrian accent that exuded maturity and common sense. The accent fitted the man. Gibbons was the epitome of the experienced sergeant: courageous, uncomplaining and unshakably philosophical, a steadying influence at Headley Court among the injured teenagers and twentysomethings even from other regiments.

He had escaped from Now Zad unharmed, only to be sent almost immediately on a second Afghan tour, this time in support of the Royal Marines. 'I had a bad feeling about this one from the start,' said Kim. 'He's been in Bosnia, Kosovo, Ireland – but this was the worst. I was sure something was going to happen to him.'

The most stressful thing, she said, was the endless waiting for news. The troops in Helmand were permitted only twenty minutes of phone calls home each week – a cause of much bitterness among the troops, who pointed out that even British prison inmates were allowed thirty minutes. In response, early on in Herrick 4, the phone time allowance was duly raised to half an hour. At Now Zad there were three satellite phones available, but there was only one charger, and one or two of the batteries were usually flat. Phone calls were often interrupted by incoming fire. Sometimes, thanks to a communication lockdown across the battle group, they couldn't be made at all. This was to ensure that the first to hear the news of a death or serious injury was the next of kin, and that they heard it through official channels rather than on television – a humane policy that was nevertheless tough on everybody else connected to the deployment. 'You'd hear that someone had been hit but I never knew if it was him or not, or even if it was one of the Fusiliers. You'd wait for twenty-four hours sometimes before hearing he was OK. That happened quite often, actually.'

Marooned on the base in Cyprus with their three young daughters, Kim found it hard to carry on with life as though nothing was happening. There wasn't much support from the other Army wives, since only five members of her husband's company were married, and these women weren't particular friends of hers. The problem, in the end, was loneliness – a common complaint among Army wives and partners, but particularly acute for this battalion. A posting to Cyprus used to be seen as a cushy number – 'the tour in the sun', as it was known – but there was little time for sun-bathing at Dhekelia for this over-committed Army. In 2006 the Theatre Reserve Battalion was on deployment almost all the time. 'In the last fifteen months I've seen my kids for a total of three,' Gibbons said.

To the Fusiliers, the MoD's 'Harmony Guidelines' were a bit of a bad joke. Not everyone's relationship was as strong as the Gibbonses'. In 2006, according to Jon Swift, there were six divorces and ten separations within the battalion. Matt Seal's was obviously one of them. There had been talk recently in senior military circles of altering the length of the standard six-month tour, but that didn't impress Kim. 'It won't make any difference,' she said. 'The TRB will still be out there all the time. What we really need is a bigger army.'