A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (31 page)

Message for Terry Taliban

Watch out Terry, we're hunting you down.

There's nowhere to hide in Sangin town.

You shit yourself when .50s are fired.

No point in running you'll only die tired.

Got A10s on call for brassing you up.

No food or water we don't give a fuck.

So do one, Terry. You've plenty to fear.

We run this town now. The Paras are here . . . Airborne for ever.

A patrol left the gates on Tom's second day. With flanking support from the Scimitar and the Samson, the Paras fanned eastwards through the town. Then they were attacked and came back again under more or less constant fire. That afternoon, Terry Taliban retaliated with a sustained mortar attack from Wombat Wood, as well as small-arms fire and RPG attacks from multiple firing points in the town.

Two days later Loden tried again, this time pushing a patrol out to the south-west. Tom hadn't taken part in the first patrol because his troop didn't have enough working vehicles. This time, however, he was determined to accompany them – 'I wanted to get out on the ground,' he said – and commandeered a WMIK
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in order to do so. Together with the Scimitar and Samson, he set up a position on the Helmand river's flood plain that would give covering fire to the patrol.

In a lane between fields of tall wheat and maize the Paras came across two young 'dickers' on motorbikes, and arrested them. Soon afterwards they bumped into a Taliban patrol coming the other way. A twenty-minute fire-fight ensued during which the captives, handcuffed and blinded by black-out goggles, were killed by fire from their own side. The patrol began to pull out towards base, hotly pursued through the crops by gunmen who seemed unaware that the dickers were dead, and were intent on getting them back. The Paras turned and mounted one and then another snap ambush.

Then, as they fell back on the three Household Cavalry vehicles which were pounding the fields beyond with machine-gun and cannon fire, the small-arms fire was switched to Tom and his men. There was little threat to the Scimitar and Samson, but Tom was now in a lightly armoured WMIK. 'It basically had some bits of body armour bolted to its sides,' said Tom. 'It's a typical British Army piece of kit.' He manoeuvred the WMIK behind cover and hoped for the best. Meanwhile the Samson, commanded by Lance Corporal of Horse Leigh Preston, became stuck in a bog as it tried to jockey into a better firing position. The crew, still under attack, were forced to abandon their vehicle and run for it under covering fire from the Scimitar and the WMIK.

Miraculously, the entire patrol made it back to base without anyone being killed or injured. It was Tom's first time in a contact – the first time he had been shot at, or indeed shot at anything other than a target on a range – and it had been a very close-run thing. The abandoned Samson, close enough to the district centre for the garrison to be able to watch over it through the night, was recovered with great difficulty the following day with the help of the engineers.

The pattern of Tom's war was set. Months later he showed me a DVD compiled from footage taken by the garrison. ('The amount of video footage that has gone around,' he remarked. 'Everyone was filming themselves at Sangin.') It was of a higher quality than other tour compilations I had seen. Indeed, there was a terrible, spell-binding beauty to parts of it. Tree lines erupted into flames as though choreographed. Mortars popped, machine-guns hammered and helicopters clattered in satisfying counterpoint to the compiler's soundtrack, 'Zombie' by the Irish band The Cranberries – a lament on the futility of violence, inspired by an IRA bombing atrocity in Warrington in 1993. 'When we arrived at Bastion there were big calls for us to come on,' said Tom. 'It was "Bring on the Cavalry". It was another Charge of the Light Brigade.' But three Household Cavalrymen were dead now, and there was no charging, no manoeuvring for the men at Sangin. Tom's troop hit their mechanical low point on 18 August, one week into his time there, when they had just one working Scimitar and a commandeered WMIK between them. Two days later, a fresh crisis overtook the garrison when another patrol, this time to the north of the base, got into a heavy fire-fight in a field of maize. This was the celebrated engagement that won Corporal Bryan Budd, twenty-nine, a posthumous VC. Two of his eight-man section had been badly and simultaneously wounded in an attack on a group of gunmen, and two others were hit in the plates of their body armour. This in itself was a kind of record. The press later reported that every man in Budd's section had now been hit in some way during their tour. This time, the enemy were no more than eighteen metres away. To give his men time to get clear, Budd charged forward, firing as he ran – and was never seen alive again.

The Paras were in deep trouble. Back at the compound, Loden had already sent forward the rest of his company to secure the casualty collection area when he learned that Budd was still missing. He needed to push his troops further forward again to rescue him, but now he had run out of manpower. The folly of the platoon-house policy was once again laid bare. The Soviets had struggled to secure Afghanistan with an army of 104,000. In a region as volatile as this one, a town like Sangin would have been garrisoned by a battalion at least – as many as 400 men. Yet the British had gone to Helmand with only 650 combat troops, and could barely field a single company for an outstation the battle group's own commanders now considered a cornerstone of their mission.

Loden's solution was to scratch up a platoon from anyone who was left in the base. The sentries on the perimeter formed one section, leaving each sangar manned by a single man. A second section comprised four engineers, two snipers, and the two military policemen who were at Sangin to investigate the accident that had killed Sean Tansey. And the third section, made up of two REME mechanics and the crews of the disabled HCR vehicles, was commanded by Tom.

The beauty of being in a fast-moving reconnaissance unit like the Household Cavalry, Tom always said, was that it offered a unique perspective of any battlefield. One of the reasons he had chosen the regiment when he passed out of Sandhurst was that being in armoured vehicles promised to be so much more interesting than infanteering. The dummy 'section attacks' he had practised in training had never much appealed to him. Now, however, he found himself rushing out of the compound gates on foot, with orders to picket the route up to the contact point to prevent the Paras from being attacked from behind.

No sooner were his men in position than they were shot at from across the river. 'It was awesome,' he said. 'I was pretty sure where their firing point was, so I shouted at the others to follow my mark and fired back with tracer rounds . . . I don't know if we got them, but the shooting certainly stopped.'

They weren't out there for long. The Paras had pushed forward and found Budd's body, surrounded by three enemy dead lying where he'd killed them at the edge of the maize field. Budd was put on a quad bike and then the entire patrol doubled back into the compound, harassed by mortar and small-arms fire all the way.

It was fifty-two days before Tom left Sangin again – fifty-two days of terrifying attack and counter-attack, interspersed by desperately dangerous patrols. On one occasion a carload of fighters tried to ram one of these, but was diverted from its course by sheer weight of fire. Automotive problems permitting, the HCR always went along to provide fire support. And if they were not out on patrol, they were detailed to go out and protect the detachment of engineers who, as well as endlessly collecting more spoil, had begun to construct a motorized ferry across the river to the north to improve the garrison's 'manoeuvre capability'.

There was little sleep for any of the defenders. The incoming fire seldom ceased. Nevertheless, Tom soon became used to life in the compound. It is obvious from his private diary that the extraordinary quickly became routine, until only the most unusual incidents were worth recording. On one occasion, a Scimitar went into the town to suppress a firing point that had already been hit so many times from the air that it was known as the 'JDAM building' (a JDAM is a joint direct attack munition – a satellite-guided bomb). The Scimitar was firing at a range of only thirty-five metres when a 500lb bomb was dropped on the same target – a redefinition of the phrase 'danger close'. On another occasion, an RPG man tried to shoot a Scimitar at close range but was hit by one of his target's high-explosive shells first, obliterating the fighter and causing the grenade to streak straight up into the air.

The diary entry for the evening of 21 August, written up only eight days after his arrival, was so typical that I almost skipped over it. Two 107mm rockets were fired from Wombat Wood, followed by a five-minute barrage of RPG and machine-gun fire that turned the metal 'tank sheet' under which he had just been sheltering into a sieve. A Scimitar manoeuvred up a newly built earth ramp and suppressed the wood line with twenty-one rounds of high explosive. An air strike was called on a rooftop firing point on the JDAM building once again. On this occasion three bombs were dropped, along with mortars and artillery fire. 'Establishing that we could have no more effect on the ground,' Tom wrote, 'Corporal of Horse [David] Simpson and myself sat next to the ISO container
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by the tank park with a cup of tea and enjoyed the fireworks.'

The occasional quiet day, when intelligence suggested the Taliban were regrouping or waiting for reinforcements, was almost more noteworthy than the periods of violence. At such times the soldiers took turns to bathe in the stream that conveniently ran through the compound – a welcome respite from the remorseless heat.

'That night in the accommodation,' runs the diary, 'Tpr [Rich] Hannaford found a Black Widow spider under his bed. Tpr [Jason] Glasgow having played with it for a while in a shoebox destroyed it under the sole of his shoe.'

At the end of August, the Paras' 'A' Company was relieved by 'C', together with a platoon from the Royal Irish Regiment. There was no relief for Tom's troop, however. An attack a week later, on 6 September, brought renewed tragedy when a group of Royal Irish was caught by a mortar shell as they gathered for a briefing in the compound's orchard. Four were injured, two of them seriously. Tom's Spartan, back on the road, was used to casevac them to the helicopter landing site – a terrible task that had become all too familiar to the crew. One of the injured, Corporal Luke McCulloch, twenty-one, died of a shrapnel wound to his head long before he reached Bastion. He was a popular soldier who had completed two tours of Iraq and another in Northern Ireland. His mates, who nicknamed him 'Skywalker', nailed a clover-embossed memorial to a tree where he had fallen. The orchard was known from then on as 'McCulloch Lines' – an old Royal Irish term for a defensive rear position. The following month, McCulloch's devastated father posted a memorial poem on the Army Rumour Service website, which had filled with messages of condolence. 'My son, L/Cpl Luke McCulloch of 1 Royal Irish' it was headed. 'Killed in Sangin in the compound while eating lunch'.

No farewells were spoken
we did not say goodbye
you were gone before we knew it
and only God knows why.

We seldom ask for miracles
but today just one would do
is to leave the front door open
and see you walk right through.

We would put our arms around you
and kiss your smiling face
because you were one in a million
and no one can take your place.

Not long before the fatal attack, Tom had requested an armourer to come up from Bastion to clear a stoppage on a Scimitar cannon; he had also asked that the armourer pack a new pair of boots for Corporal of Horse Simpson, whose originals had completely worn out. Earlier in the siege a column of Canadian LAVs had made its way to Sangin to deliver emergency supplies. Even then, the Canadians were astounded by the conditions the British were living in. 'They were running out of food and were down to boiling river water,' one officer wrote in an email home, which was passed to the press at his request. 'They had tried to air-drop supplies but they had ended up landing in a Taliban stronghold (thank you, air force) . . . We headed off to what can only be described as the Wild West. When we arrived the locals began throwing rocks and anything they could at us. This was not a friendly place.' The Canadians were supposed to drop their supplies and leave again, but a mortar attack came as darkness fell and they were forced to stay. 'We were attacked with small arms, RPGs and mortars three times that night. I still can't believe that the Brits have spent over a month living there under those conditions. They are a proud unit and they were grateful but embarrassed that we had come to save the day. And as good Canadians we didn't let them hear the end of being rescued by a bunch of colonials!!'

It was through such fragments of news that the world woke up to what was happening at Sangin. The first journalists to reach the town, ITN's Bill Neely and his cameraman Eugene Campbell, did not arrive until 20 September, fully four months after British troops had first arrived there. It was this ITN report that stunned Tom's family, watching at home as Neely's Chinook was ambushed and three RPGs whistled at head height between two HCR vehicles, one of which was commanded by Tom. In his family's words it 'looked like hell on earth', although to Tom it was just another day at Sangin. Neely stayed for forty-eight hours, during which time he was also able to film two small-arms attacks on the compound, and the Paras retaliating with Javelin missiles – a source of some satisfaction to the garrison, who for some reason had worried that there might not be anything very spectacular for ITN to film.

Tom's time at Sangin had undoubtedly been the most exciting time of his life. He was understandably proud of how the garrison had pulled together, and still on a high when I saw him at the end of 2006, a few weeks after he had returned to Britain. 'It was all hands to the pumps,' he said. 'It was a great team effort and a huge bonding experience. Getting the job done – that's the British Army's forte.' His Officer Commanding, Will Bartle-Jones, observed that he could hardly stop talking about it.