Combat Camera (14 page)

Dogs of War

Jumping onto a helicopter at Bastion sometimes felt like catching a bus, but really it was much more complicated than that. You couldn’t pick and choose your flight time – it was randomly assigned and published in the daily flying programme the night before. That meant, in the planning stages for any given task, you had to set aside a day just to get to your destination, in case you were booked on an evening flight. The same applied for the journey back to Bastion, knocking another day out of the timetable. Thus it was that we spent a lot of our time in Afghanistan just sitting on our backsides.

We’d flown to Lashkar Gah on the morning of 2nd May for a job at the ANP training centre that wasn’t due to take place until 4th May. Because the scheduling for road moves could also be unpredictable, 3rd May was given over to the twenty-minute drive between the two locations.

Lashkar Gah wasn’t the worst place in the world to sit on your backside. It had one of the best canteens in Helmand, a NAAFI selling magazines, ice creams and cold drinks, and a well-stocked library in the welfare tent. Bizarrely, it also had a garden.

While Russ and Ali killed that first afternoon on their laptops in one of TFH’s spare offices, I went over to the welfare tent to find something to read. The library consisted of hundreds of secondhand paperbacks, donated to the military by the British public. They’d been stacked chaotically on a series of uneven bookshelves that ran around the inside of the tent. Lee Child seemed to be the
most popular author, the spines of his numerous bestsellers all faded and broken. His all-action hero Jack Reacher was obviously a big hit with the boys, despite being an ex-military policeman who’d spent most of his career banging up soldiers.

Clearly there was no accounting for literary taste. Fancying myself above all of that, I picked out a pristine copy of
Hangover Square
– apparently it was a modern classic – and walked over to the garden.

It was a curious parcel of land, crowded with flowers and greenery, looking very much like an allotment flown over from some English backwater. Surrounded by concrete walls, it felt entirely cut off from the rest of the base. A trio of Afghan gardeners normally tended to the beds, but right now I had the place to myself. I sat on a bench in the shade at the end of the garden and started to read my book.

I couldn’t get into
Hangover Square
at all. Perhaps I’d only chosen it because I liked the title. The protagonist was apparently some sort of lunatic. I gave up after twenty minutes and took it back to the library, swapping it for
The Hard Way
by Lee Child.

I didn’t go back to the garden, but returned instead to the office to check my emails. A frighteningly gaunt reporter from Agence France-Presse was walking out just as I arrived, called away on an impromptu job. She’d left her laptop in the office, her desktop showing a photograph of a burnt-out car on a desert highway with a dead dog in the foreground.

“Who would have a desktop like that?” I asked.

“A war reporter,” said Ali.

I switched on my laptop. My desktop showed a picture of Monty – very much alive – sitting in my parents’ kitchen, waiting for a biscuit.

I checked through my emails, then started on some research for the upcoming job at the ANP training centre. Recruits graduated from the centre every three weeks, but TFH was keen for us to record the latest passing-out ceremony ahead of the UK coroner’s inquest into the notorious shootings at Checkpoint Blue 25. Our job was to capture footage and stills of newly trained Afghan police officers looking normal and non-psychotic, before distributing it to the British media in time for the opening of the inquest on 6th May.

I read through the media coverage of the Checkpoint Blue 25 killings, dating back to the incident itself on 3rd November 2009. The checkpoint had been built alongside a small crossroads just four hundred metres to the east of Shin Kalay, one of the most volatile parts of Nad-e Ali. Fourteen Afghan policemen lived and worked in the high-walled compound, theoretically enforcing the rule of law. They were supposed to control the road from Shin Kalay to the town of Nad-e Ali itself, but their presence had inspired a surge in violence. The Taliban had taken to attacking the compound almost every day, peppering its walls with small-arms fire, forcing the policemen to abandon many of their patrols.

At the height of the attacks in October 2009, the commanding officer of 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Walker, had met with village elders in Shin Kalay to discuss the violence. This shura led to the establishment of a British mentoring team at the checkpoint, consisting of a dozen Grenadier Guards and two corporals from the Royal Military Police (RMP). They moved into the compound in the last week of October under the command of Regimental Sergeant Major Darren Chant, a former instructor at Sandhurst who’d previously served with the Parachute Regiment’s elite Pathfinder Platoon. Noted for his height and build – a colleague had described him as a “man mountain” – he’d already
distinguished himself on a previous tour of Afghanistan in 2007, carrying a young guardsman who’d just lost his leg in a bomb blast for more than a mile to a MERT landing site.

Most of the team at Blue 25 had been plucked from Lieutenant Colonel Walker’s tactical group – police mentoring was not their area of expertise – but the soldierly discipline imposed by Sergeant Major Chant, along with the input from Corporals Nic Webster-Smith and Steven Boote from the RMP, produced immediate results. Within days of their arrival, attacks on the checkpoint had tailed off, and the Afghan policemen had returned to their duties.

One of the guardsmen, Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, told the
Daily Telegraph
:

“Even for the ANP, they were a pretty shoddy bunch. We turned up and were confronted with this bullet-riddled compound. The ANP were lounging around drinking tea. Not all of them wore uniform: they didn’t seem to have any regular patrolling programme. Some slept in the compound, others in the village, and they seemed to come and go as they wanted.

“But the sergeant major got among them, imposed some discipline and began to work and nurture them, and they really responded. After a few days they were back in uniform and were patrolling with us every day. We were making real progress.”
*

On the afternoon of 3rd November, the team were chatting in the compound’s courtyard with a number of their Afghan colleagues. Just back from a patrol, they’d removed their helmets and body armour and put their weapons to one side. They were sitting on a step that ran around the edge of the compound’s main building, relaxing in the gentle sunshine.

Suddenly one of the Afghan policemen, known only as Gulbuddin, stepped into the courtyard and opened fire on the soldiers with an AK-47. They were all lined up for him, and never stood a chance. Sergeant Major Chant was one of the first to be hit, along with Sergeant Matthew Telford and Guardsman James Major. Sitting near them was Lance Corporal Liam Culverhouse, who made a run for it.

“It just all went so fast,” he said. “When he saw me, he just basically unloaded a magazine firing at me. He only managed to hit me six times, thank God.”

Lance Corporal Culverhouse was hit in both arms and legs, and blinded in one eye.

Gulbuddin moved from the courtyard into the main building, still shooting. He hit eleven British soldiers in total – killing five – before fleeing the compound. The Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack, although British commanders had suggested the rampage was more likely the result of a grudge. Gulbuddin himself was never caught.

A preliminary hearing into the killings at Blue 25 had already taken place on 11th February 2011. It was told that drug use was commonplace amongst the ANP, with Gulbuddin known to be a regular user of cannabis. Coroner David Ridley told the hearing in Trowbridge, Wiltshire: “There is a culture that the smoking of opium or cannabis is, to them, like to us the smoking of cigarettes.”

The hearing was also told by Paul Kilcoyne, representing the families of Sergeant Telford and Guardsman Major, that drug use amongst the ANP was rife: “They would smoke drugs so they couldn’t walk straight – and these are people with our weapons.”

It was obvious the full inquest was going to paint a pretty appalling picture of the ANP. The preliminary hearing heard that more
damning evidence was to come, detailing the ANP’s penchant for skipping training, ignoring their mentors and sometimes refusing to go out on patrol. The deaths of the five British soldiers had made headlines around the world, so the inquest was likely to generate a fresh wave of negative press.

Against this backdrop, I had to find something positive to say about the ANP. The training centre on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah had opened just a few weeks after Gulbuddin’s rampage at Blue 25, its launch brought forward as a result of the killings. Since December 2009 more than 3,000 recruits had graduated from the centre, completing an eight-week training programme that focused not only on policing skills, but also on reading and writing.
*
An eight-step vetting process had been introduced at that time, collating biometric and fingerprint information on each new recruit. Police pay had also increased, the monthly salary for a new recruit rising by a quarter to 8,250 afghanis – or about US $165 – in the immediate aftermath of Blue 25.
^†

Drug abuse was still a problem, but the latest figures did at least suggest that things were getting better. In February 2009 the BBC obtained emails from an unnamed UK official who estimated that 60 per cent of Afghan police in Helmand were using drugs.
^‡
In March 2010 a report by the US Government Accountability Office found that up to 40 per cent of recruits in regional training centres were testing positive for drugs. Most recently, in January
2011, the commanding officer of the Police Development Advisory Training Team in Helmand, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Griffiths, said that over the past four months the number of new arrivals at the Lashkar Gah training centre who’d failed an initial drugs test had fallen from 8–10 per cent to less than 2 per cent.

Lieutenant Colonel Griffiths had quoted the figures in person at a briefing in Whitehall to an audience of journalists, but I couldn’t find them reproduced anywhere by the British media (I only discovered them by trawling through the press archive on the MoD’s official website). The 60 per cent figure was easy to find in the above-mentioned BBC report, as was the 40 per cent figure (most prominently on the
Daily Mail
’s website on 14th March 2010, under the headline “Nearly Half of Recruits for Afghan Police Fail Drugs Test”), but the 2 per cent figure proved elusive.

At a national level, of course, the media took no interest in good news for one very simple reason: it was
boring
. It didn’t sell newspapers and it didn’t boost the ratings. Only really terrible news could be relied upon to excite the people, so marketing our optimistic take on the ANP to the British media was going to be a struggle. My only hope of reaching a UK-wide audience was to persuade the bigger media outlets to run our coverage of the training centre as part of a companion piece to their coverage of the inquest. A then-and-now feature on the ANP, for instance, would give the story some added context and depth.

I wasn’t holding my breath, however. The bigger media outlets didn’t call on the Combat Camera Team for context and depth. They called on us for combat footage.

Fortunately, the smaller media outlets were a lot less discriminating. Working in local news, they had to be. I knew only too well the pain of trying to fill a bulletin with reheated stories about
council cutbacks, the amount of chewing gum stuck to the city’s pavements and the alarming rise in the number of pigeons shitting on park benches. I’d made a living out of it for ten years. Anything that was just a little bit different would get snapped up.

Out of curiosity, I searched for “Lieutenant Colonel Adam Griffiths” and found him on a couple of websites local to his home in Oxfordshire. He’d been interviewed by the
Oxford Mail
prior to his deployment – his photograph appearing under the headline “Army Officer Returns to Afghanistan to Train Police”
*
– and he’d also spoken to Oxfordshire’s Heart Radio.
^†
Because of his Scottish links – he commanded the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 5th Battalion, Royal Regiment of Scotland (5 Scots) – he’d also been interviewed by the Glasgow-based
Daily Record
(“Scots Troops Fly out on Mission to Train 4,000 Cops in Afghanistan”)
^‡
and also the
Paisley Daily Express
,
^§
based in the Argyll’s recruiting patch of Renfrewshire.

Obviously local and regional
^¶
news came with a reduced audience, but that was better than nothing. Lt Col. Griffiths had by now flown back to Oxfordshire and been replaced by Lt Col. Fraser Rea, the commanding officer of 2nd Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles (2 RGR). Like his predecessor, he was based at Lashkar Gah in a tent just a few yards from the TFH office. Cornering him for an interview would be easy, but I also wanted to speak to his deputy, Major Paul Temple, who ran the training centre itself. In my opinion, he would make for the more interesting home-town story, being the man who lived and worked alongside
the recruits. I couldn’t find any pre-deployment interviews with him on the Internet, but that was probably because 2 RGR were normally based in Brunei, out of sight and out of mind of the British media. That in itself was no obstacle to a home-town story, of course – I’d simply target the media in the town he was born, pitching the story along the lines of “Local Man in Charge of Training the Afghan Police”.