A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (30 page)

While passing the destroyed Spartan, Flynn had spotted only two dead bodies, which left one unaccounted for. Further back, Dick had already requested help from Bastion, which arrived about an hour later: two Chinooks full of Paras who, guided by the redoubtable Flynn, assaulted through the town until the ambush site was secured and all three bodies could be extracted. In the meantime, the Spartan and the ditched Scimitar were guarded by an Apache. 'We were in overwatch for forty-five minutes,' recalled the pilot, Captain D. 'We saw a couple of cars approaching from the west out in the desert and went to have a look. When we came back we saw two Taliban guys jumping off the disabled Scimitar. They'd picked up a bag, somebody's rucksack. They'd been hiding in the orchard, waiting ever since the attack to see what they could loot. On the gun tape later on I could see them peeking out. I chased them down with the 30 mil and certainly killed one. The other wasn't in a particularly good way; he hobbled off into the orchard.' The would-be looter was Captain D's only confirmed kill of the tour.

His day would have been memorable anyway, for he was very nearly the victim of a freak accident. Before flying into his overwatch position he had spoken to the JTAC accompanying the Paras to check that their supporting artillery barrage had stopped. In all the confusion the JTAC told him, wrongly, that it had. 'We came back into the overhead. I still don't know if it was my imagination or if I genuinely heard it, but I thought I heard a kind of whiz past the aircraft. Now, I don't know what an artillery shell going past at thirty feet sounds like, but if I had to guess, it would be a zip, a whizzy sound . . . which was followed very briefly afterwards by an incredibly big explosion right underneath the aircraft. I radioed the JTAC again. "Can you just confirm that the guns are cold?" "Er, no," he says! But I wouldn't hold it against him. I badgered him about it in the bar afterwards, you know . . . It would have been very unlucky. It's a big old sky.'

Shocked and battered, the rest of D Squadron retreated to Bastion. 'The miracle of the whole thing was that Compo got out,' said Long. 'Everything was blown to pieces. It was his strength of character that saved him. He had seventy per cent burns . . . no one thought he would survive, from the moment the medics first saw him until today.'

On the evening of 4 August a memorial service for the dead men was held in the cookhouse. The venue wasn't nearly big enough. Half the battle group seemed to be there, not just the Household Cavalry. The loss of the three men was felt by everybody, especially in such vicious circumstances. It was the first major IED strike of the campaign, an escalation of the insurgency bitterly familiar to those who had served in Iraq. Neither Flynn's nor Moses' vehicles could be recovered and had to be destroyed, the former by high-explosive barmines, the latter by a couple of Hellfire missiles. By the end of 1 August, therefore, two Spartans and a Scimitar had been reduced to smoking piles of metal. Operation Nakhod had failed, handing the Taliban a valuable propaganda victory, and prompting a serious rethink of the way the squadron should be used in future. 'That was the first and last time we went into a built-up area without infantry,' said Long.

The weakness of the chain of command had been shown up too. The squadron had deployed to Helmand as a Brigade asset, which meant taking orders not from the battle group HQ at Bastion but from Brigade HQ in far-away Kandahar. The staff there had no 'situational awareness'; they were instead concerned with 'big picture' tactics which, in this sort of close country fighting, did the Household Cavalry no favours at all. 'They were just coming up with orders like, "Go and have an effect in Musa Qala," ' said one officer. 'I mean, what sort of a mission statement is that?' The arrangement was another hangover from the Cold War.

The squadron was structured and trained to operate as a fast-moving reconnaissance unit. Its main intended role was to range eighty to a hundred kilometres beyond the front line looking for concentrations of Soviet armour, allowing the generals in the rear to manoeuvre their tank divisions accordingly. But the Task Force, as the squadron had been pointing out for weeks, was fighting a very different sort of war in Afghanistan. The Scimitars were not being used for reconnaissance but as close fire support for ground troops – yet another example of the Army adapting old ways of thinking to a new kind of enemy. Operation Nakhod was salutary: from 1 August, D Squadron was at last switched to battle group command.

The Scimitars were equipped with excellent night vision optics and a fast and accurate 30mm cannon. They looked like small tanks; and that, in a country with a long memory of the scorched-earth policy executed by Soviet armour in the 1980s, was perhaps the most useful weapon of all. On 23 July, when Major Dick was ordered to resupply the Gurkhas at Now Zad, he made a point of manoeuvring his vehicles noisily and as often as possible around ANP Hill. 'We only had about eight Scimitars up there, and the Taliban panicked. We heard later that they had said they were surrounded, that we had eighty to a hundred tanks on station. They definitely don't like tanks.'

Whatever the locals may have thought, Scimitars are not tanks. They, along with Spartans, are actually classed as CVR(T)s – combat vehicles reconnaissance (tracked) – and at eight tons apiece are the lightest mobile armour the Army possesses. In Iraq the troops could rely for support on twenty-five-ton Warrior fighting vehicles, and even fifty-five-ton Challenger II battle tanks. These, however, had been deliberately excluded from the Helmand mission. This was mainly because of the difficulty of keeping them fuelled and supplied by air, but also because some in Whitehall thought the bigger vehicles would be too intimidating. The deployment of Scimitars was in keeping with the 'soft' intentions of Herrick 4, in other words; but the IED strike at Musa Qala suggested that something heavier might have been a good idea after all.

Even as CVR(T)s, the vehicles were far from the best available. Musa Qala, according to Major Will Bartle-Jones, who took over D Squadron halfway through the tour, demonstrated that the cannonless Spartan was 'not really a fightable vehicle'. Its only weapon system, a turret-mounted 7.62mm machine-gun, was squeezed into a tight circle of other equipment that severely restricted its arc of fire. 'You almost need hands like a Tyrannosaurus rex to operate it – a cocking lever here, the firing system here.' Reloading it or clearing a stoppage required the gunner to climb halfway out of the narrow turret, which was never designed for a man wearing body armour. 'You can fire it, but one stoppage and you're in deep trouble. At Musa Qala the Spartan was constantly having to fire one round and re-cock each time.' The problem was being addressed with the addition of a second gun system on a separate pintle. 'That'll be easier, but the gunner will still have to climb out of the turret to operate it. It's just another quick fix from the Army.' The British vehicles certainly compared badly with the Canadian light armoured vehicles alongside which they sometimes fought. The Canadians didn't even have to open their hatches, because their guns could be controlled from the interior with a joystick and CCTV.

'We could buy LAVs off the shelf tomorrow. Why don't we?' Bartle-Jones shrugged. 'In the end, everything comes down to money.'

The squadron's communications equipment was badly out of date. The most important piece of it was the TACSAT, the tactical satellite radio that linked a vehicle to HQ. There should have been a set for each of the four troops, deployed as they were at different locations across the province. Instead there was one TACSAT for the entire squadron, and it could not be used on the move without a special antenna – which they did not have, although the Canadians did.

It was a similar story with the air-conditioning. The need for it had been identified years before in Iraq, but although the necessary extra equipment had been ordered, it still hadn't been fitted. Temperatures in the high fifties (130 to 140°F) were therefore the norm inside the vehicles. The metal became so hot that the crews had to keep their sleeves rolled down and wore gloves to prevent burning. 'The environmental health guys went down into a vehicle to see what we were complaining about,' said Bartle-Jones. 'But they went first thing in the morning, when it was at its coolest. They only ran the engine up for two minutes. Even so, they came back with a temperature reading of 53°C.' It did not help that the crews could not turn off their engines while on operations. Thanks to a built-in thermal cut-out switch, they were often unable to start up again if they did so. By far the hottest position inside was the driver's cab, particularly in the Spartans, whose operators are obliged to sit by a hot air vent from the engine. The crews reckoned the temperature there could touch 70°C.

'Heat stroke was a problem almost immediately,' said Major Dick. 'On our very first op we had a guy, Ramon Rayner, whose core temperature got up to 41.7°C. That's 0.3°C from the temperature that an egg starts to turn white in a frying pan.' Trooper Rayner was semi-conscious and babbling. His crewmates tried to rehydrate him with a drip from their standard-issue medical pack, but could not insert the needle because the rubber cannula had softened in the heat. He was saved by the brigade's token attachment of Estonians, one of whose six-wheeled 'Sisu' vehicles happened to be nearby. Their machines were twenty years old and had been bought second-hand from Finland, but they had air-conditioning. Rayner was transferred aboard and his life very probably saved.

The root problem with the CVR(T) fleet was its age. Some of the Scimitars had been in service since 1969. However tough their exteriors, they required surprising amounts of maintenance to keep them operational in the harsh environment of Helmand. They were designed to go out on long-distance patrols and return to base, where mechanics from REME, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, could rectify any fault. Instead, individual troops were increasingly fixed in place in the outstations, where there were no proper maintenance facilities and all spare parts had to be flown up by Chinook. Securing spares was difficult even at Bastion, for the supply chain from Britain was already creaking under the strain.

It was no surprise to the Household Cavalry when, six weeks into the tour, the vehicles began to break down. With the engines running for so much of the time, moving parts were bound to wear out. The heat burned out laser sights. Track links and bar armour got bashed and bent. Gearboxes seized, fuel bags split, and the torsion bar suspension systems started to collapse. Back at Bastion after the disaster of Operation Nakhod, Dick warned battle group HQ that he needed at least five days to overhaul his vehicles. Forty-eight hours later, however, he was ordered northwards for a second try at relieving the platoon-house at Musa Qala. His formation had barely covered a kilometre when three of his four Scimitars broke down and had to limp back into camp. Even then the lesson was not learned. The following day he was told that the squadron would be needed at Garmsir, a hundred miles to the south, in three days' time. This time, Dick flatly refused. Had his vehicles even been capable of travelling that far, which was doubtful, they would be horrendously vulnerable in the event of a mine strike or any kind of breakdown.

The crews battling to keep their vehicles in working order were taking enough risks as it was. On 12 August, at Sangin, Lance Corporal Sean Tansey, twenty-six, of Number 2 Troop, was crushed to death when a jacking strut collapsed as he tried to replace a snapped torsion bar on a Spartan. It was a major job that would ordinarily have been carried out on a hard standing at Bastion or Kandahar, but through necessity had been attempted in situ in the soft and dusty earth of the compound. Number 2 Troop, commanded by Lieutenant Toby Glover, had been sent to Sangin on an operation that was supposed to last seven hours; when Tansey died they had been there for thirty consecutive days. It was eighty-two days before their four vehicles were withdrawn for a proper mechanical overhaul. 'The boys were just about coming back online [after the deaths of HCR colleagues Johnson and Nicholls] when the news came through,' recalled Major Bartle-Jones. 'It was difficult for them to take, especially because Sean wasn't killed by enemy fire. It was just a sad accident. But they got on with it superbly. They were magnificent.'

This was cousin Tom's moment. Glover's troop was due for relief in four days' time, but with Tansey's death the changeover was brought forward. At first light on 13 August, Tom flew up in a Chinook at the head of a dozen men, the new and untried commander of the late Ralph Johnson's Number 4 Troop. Glover met him on the drop zone with a cheery high five and a handover letter, before piling aboard and disappearing back over the horizon in the Chinook Tom had come in on.

The four vehicles he had inherited were in a bad way. Only one Scimitar was in full working order; the other had been cannibalized to keep the first one going, and had no clutch and had lost much of its bar armour. The Spartan still had no suspension and was 'completely bust'. Even the Samson recovery vehicle, though just about roadworthy, needed a complete new set of track. It was to be a fortnight before they were all working again. Much of Number 4 Troop's first week was spent guarding a small company of engineers who left the camp each night to collect spoil to pack out HESCOs, a wall of which they were building as fast as they could around the desperately exposed compound. The garrison, led by Major Jamie Loden of 3 Para's 'A' Company, were well and truly besieged by now. Mortar and rocket teams in the surrounding tree lines, particularly in an area to the north-east known as Wombat Wood, had had weeks to gauge the range to the compound and were unnervingly accurate with their shells.

The Paras felt trapped and frustrated. This was not what they were supposed to be doing. They were a manoeuvrist group who had been trained to take the fight to the enemy, not sit in a com- pound being bombarded. The Fusiliers at Now Zad had been specifically banned from conducting foot patrols or any other sort of deliberate operation in the town, but the same stricture did not apply to Loden's Paras. Sangin was a part of the battle group's 'main effort' now, a key Helmand valley town in their overextended battle ground. Loden felt certain that they would never dominate the district if they stayed in the compound, so he determined to mount a series of aggressive patrols to deliver what HQ had begun to call 'the Sangin effect'. His men were more than ready for it. As a poem scrawled on a compound wall illustrated, aggression was what the Paras did best: