One Dog at a Time Read online

  It wasn’t too difficult for me. My passion for football had peaked as a youngster when I watched Ipswich, the team of my youth, beat Manchester United 6–0 at Portman Road back in 1978. It couldn’t get better than that, especially as both my dad and brother were Man. U. fans. But Lisa fulfilled her side of the bargain too.

  Piling the dogs into the van and walking on the moors to find a rock to climb was now our weekend ritual. As long as we always made it home for Match of the Day in the evening then Lisa was happy. Our relationship was – and still is – built on trust and we didn’t harbour any secrets from each other. I still find it slightly amusing that, out of most of our friends who are married, Lisa and I are the only ones who have a joint bank account.

  By the time I’d finished the day’s climb, the sun was dipping over the eastern edge of Dartmoor. We jumped in the van and headed in search of a country pub, which we soon found down a quiet country lane on the Cornwall–Devon border. The dogs sat happily under our table in the beer garden, as good as gold as they waited for the leftovers from our lasagne and chips. This was probably the closest I got to doing nothing so I relished the hour or so we spent there.

  Lisa and I sat chatting. As was often the case, we fantasised a little about where we would buy a house when we left the forces. Mid-Wales was the clear favourite. We fancied a smallholding near the mountains where we could run a small B&B, I could offer rock climbing and mountaineering coaching and the dogs would have loads of free space to run around.

  But lately America had been coming a close second. I wasn’t sure my potential outdoor business could make us enough money to compete with the ever-increasing cost of living in the UK.

  As the evening closed in, we talked about other, more mundane and everyday things too. But every now and again I would stare into space and my mind would turn to Afghanistan and what was to come.

  I had no idea how life-changing it would be.

  As I sat in the small shack, the northerly wind was hammering the rain against the wall of the corrugated-iron shelter. At times, it was beating hard enough to almost drown out the firing from the range nearby.

  On the battery-powered radio in the corner, BBC Radio Five Live was having a special debate on British troops in Afghanistan. It felt surreal listening to the presenters talk about the place in which I would be serving in less than a week.

  The picture being painted by the debate was not good.

  The lead item on the hourly news that day had been about the identity of the young Royal Welsh Fusilier who had been killed the day before. There was also an update on the crash a few days earlier of an RAF Nimrod just outside Kandahar – all 14 servicemen on board had been killed, including one Royal Marine.

  In recent weeks I’d absorbed lots of reports of this kind, not just on the radio but also in newspapers. In particular, there had been a lot of in-depth reports from the parachute regiment we were due to replace at the end of their deployment, many of them focused on life in the so-called ‘safe houses’ that they were occupying in the more remote regions. Precisely what was ‘safe’ about a mud compound that was surrounded by religious fundamentalists with guns who wanted to kill everybody inside I had yet to understand.

  The reports also explained how the Taliban were trying to wear down the lads by limiting their sleep pattern to a few hours per day. They said the threat from incoming mortars and heavy machine-gun fire was constant. There were also reports on the lack of food and water they were experiencing because of the problems with supply lines. It didn’t sound a fun place to visit.

  I knew I’d joined the marines for all this but at the moment I couldn’t fire up any enthusiasm for it. I was worrying about other things. I knew that Lisa, along with probably every other family member and loved one connected to the lads about to deploy, would be reading the papers and listening to the radio too. From the detailed intelligence reports we got back at camp, I also knew things out there were even worse than the media reports suggested.

  All the secret excitement I had felt about going to Afghanistan had gone. Inwardly I felt anxious and slightly scared. I loved life, I wanted to spend my time with Lisa and the dogs exploring the hills without a care in the world, but it was too late for that now. We were leaving in three days. The possibility of being killed was now very real.

  I knew time would stop while I was out in Afghanistan. There would be no dwelling on things, no wondering about life back home, no more taking the dogs to work with me or sitting in the pub with Lisa or planning our weekend to fit some climbing in. I would have to become totally focused on the job at hand. No privacy, no rest, no respite from the constant threat of being dropped right in the middle of some real nasty shit.

  Added to that, I was now responsible for 20 lads and I knew I had to get on with it and concentrate on getting them – and me – back in one piece. No distractions; just get the job done.

  As I looked around at the lads that made up 5 Troop they too were hanging on every word that came from the radio. Some of them were more or less straight out of training, one even from only the previous week. The youngest of them was just 18, nearly 20 years younger than me. I felt too old for this shit, but that, I suppose, was the whole point of being a troop sergeant; I had the experience to look after these youngsters. After 32 weeks of what everyone tells us is the hardest military training in the world, I felt fairly confident they would produce the goods when we needed it.

  But again I had my niggling worries. Are they really ready? Will they really cope with life on the front line?

  Scanning their young faces again as they listened to the radio, I began to see the apprehension spreading across them. Not good. Only one thing for it, I decided, and stood up.

  I knew we still had another 40 minutes before it would be our turn to practise our last sessions of live firing on the wet peat bogs outside. But a quick half an hour of troop fitness training wouldn’t go amiss in the meantime, I reckoned.

  ‘Right, outside everyone, time for some morale-boosting exercise,’ I shouted.

  As I pulled on my waterproof camouflage jacket, I didn’t see too much movement; in fact, only one of my marines had made a move to go outside.

  ‘Any time today, ladies,’ I said in a louder voice.

  ‘But it’s raining, Sergeant,’ Tim, one of my keenest and youngest marines, piped up.

  ‘Well, I’m sure the Taliban will understand and let us shelter indoors when it rains out there,’ I replied in my most sarcastic of sergeant voices.

  ‘But it doesn’t rain in Afghanistan, does it?’ said another marine.

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  ‘I guess geography is not your strong point then?’ I looked once more around the room. ‘Move it, NOW.’

  Saying goodbye is never easy. Saying goodbye and not knowing when you will be back is the worst feeling in the world.

  I looked at Lisa and knew she was holding back the tears. I didn’t think my attempts at the steely commando face were working too well either.

  ‘Pack it in or you’ll have me crying in a minute,’ I said, trying to smile, but it didn’t make either of us feel any better.

  Even Fizz and Beamer knew something was up. They somehow sensed that the packed bags outside meant I was going away. Neither of them raced to get their leads as they normally did when I opened the front door. Both just sat upright in their beds looking at me. I bent down and shook both their heads in turn.

  ‘Fizz Dog – you are in charge, be good – no chasing squirrels, all right?’

  She just continued to look at me with her sad big brown eyes, a confused expression on her face.

  ‘I hate this,’ I said, shaking my head and holding Lisa for the last time.

  I held her for not nearly long enough. I kissed her quickly as tears rolled down her face, and turned straight for the door. I walked out into the early-September morning without looking back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Covert Operations

  AS THE LA
ST echoes of the explosion faded, the view from my vantage point seemed unchanged. Apart, that was, from the smoke that was rising, mushroom-like, into the early-morning sky.

  Down below me nothing was moving in the tightly packed alleys, compounds and basic mud dwellings of the town. Not even the usual morning birdsong broke the silence. As I had been finding out lately, incoming mortar rounds tended to have that effect. Like the rest of the locals, the Afghan birdlife hid away when the firing started and emerged again only when it stopped. It would be a while before they returned to their favourite perches in the sparse line of trees to the north of the mud-walled district compound (DC), that myself and the 53 marines of Kilo Company now called home.

  It was only two weeks since we had arrived in the small market town of Now Zad. During the short time we had been here the Taliban had managed to keep us occupied nearly every day.

  They tended to hit us with their mortars first thing in the morning or about half an hour before it got dark at night. The Taliban weren’t stupid; they knew we would be able to home in on the muzzle flashes from their weapons at night with ease. They used the dark to move around the woods instead.

  Taliban Central, the expanse of woods where they felt safest, was on the other side of a large wadi – a riverbed that’s dry save for when it rains – that the locals used as a road during the dry season. We, naturally, had named it the Taliban Motorway. Apparently, even the might of the Russian Army had not been able to penetrate the woods and tame the Mujahedeen resistance, which was not a great confidence booster if it was true.

  As the last of the smoke from the mortar round impact faded, I scanned the far distance with my weapon sighting system but could see no fleeting movements that might give the bad guys away.

  At first sight Now Zad looked exactly like a scene straight out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Nothing had changed in hundreds of years. There was no electricity and sanitation was non-existent. The ever-present dust lined the inside of our nostrils and mouths and stuck to everything we owned. The stink of human waste was bad, especially on the sunnier days we were still getting in the run-up to winter.

  The surrounding landscape was, it had to be said, spectacular.

  To the south the flat expanse of the Afghan desert plain stretched into the distance, barren and uninhabited apart from the nomadic goat herdsmen who somehow eked out a living in this unforgiving place. But five or six kilometres to the west, north and east of the town the mountains rose suddenly from the desert floor. To the north a sharp, dome-shaped peak called Narum Kuk ran from west to east, overshadowed by the vast ranges of the Zar Kuh Kuhe Mazdurak Mountains in the far distance.

  The only greenery for miles was found close to the mountains. An abundance of trees and small hardy bushes grew along the line of the Taliban Motorway stretching away to the north-east. The plants and shrubs owed their survival to the winter rains from the mountains that thundered unpredictably down the deep-sided wadis. As we were finding out, the town had been plagued by some of the worst fighting seen since the coalition forces removed the Taliban from power. Sitting at the head of the Sangin Valley, Now Zad was a transit stop for the Taliban to resupply as they headed west towards two other important strategic locations, the main dam at Kajacki and the market town of Sangin, both of which – like us – were taking their fair share of punishment. Our attackers were probably using us as target practice while they were passing through to one of these two locations, I guessed.

  There was no guarantee that any of the roads in or out could be safely travelled, so the only way in had been by helicopter and that had been a major operation. The army regiment we’d replaced had been holding this isolated outpost from the Taliban for more than 100 days. They had arrived, like everyone else, believing the politicians who said they were on a peace-keeping mission that would last for three years and would not require them to fire a single round.

  The Paras had left Afghanistan after putting down around 87,000 rounds of ammunition and with little, militarily speaking, to show for it. Despite having suffered around 250 casualties, the Taliban were still there, still hell-bent on disrupting the efforts of the ISAF to stabilise the country and allow rebuilding to take place. I was hoping that would not be the case with us; I was hoping we would fare a little better.

  ‘You think they have finished with the alarm call? I had just picked up my breakfast, the bastards,’ Hutch – one of my more experienced section corporals – muttered, without once coming off of aim from behind the GPMG machine gun propped up on the sandbags in front of him.

  Sure enough, when I looked in the back of the sangar I saw bacon and beans deposited all over the lower sides of the rear sandbags. Hutch’s breakfast had landed there when he had hastily taken cover.

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said. ‘Don’t they normally fire three in a row though? That was only two.’

  Hutch said nothing.

  ‘Anyway, you could do with losing a few pounds. They’re doing you a favour.’

  Back in Plymouth Hutch was one of those who went to the gym to stay in shape, not get in shape. Married with kids, he was as keen as they came for a young corporal marine, although I imagined his wife would probably have been happier if he had taken a different career path.

  I kept scanning the woods but there was no sign of the mortar crew. Where the hell were the little buggers? I soon had my answer.

  ‘Hill to all stations – incoming,’ a voice screamed through my headset, signalling that the lads in the observation post on the hill above the town had noticed the giveaway puff of smoke in the distance.

  ‘Heads down, here we go again,’ I yelled down into the compound beneath me, where the lads who were off watch had gathered to see what all the excitement had been about. ‘Incoming. Get under cover now.’

  They looked up at me with glum resignation in their eyes before turning and running back to the safety of the old police cells we were using for our accommodation.

  The slowly growing howl of an incoming mortar as it arches across the sky sounds good only in movies. Right now it was scary as hell, not least because it was a complete lottery as to where it would land.

  Luckily for us this mortar crew didn’t seem that competent.

  I heard an explosion behind me, well away from our compound, and looked up once more to survey the damage to the once thriving town. Not that it would’ve mattered had it hit another building near us. There were no people living within 200 metres of our compound; it was just too dangerous. The buildings closest to us along the main bazaar road were just rubble, with nothing but piles of twisted metal and snapped wood where doors and shop fronts once stood, their contents long since ransacked.

  There were people still living in the northern part of the town, but we hadn’t patrolled that far away from the compound yet so we didn’t know how many were there. Given the devastation the constant battles had caused, many of the locals in this southern part of town had done the only sensible thing, packing their bags and moving further south until it was over.

  Their decision seemed even wiser now as the lads on the hill opened up with the heavy machine guns in the direction of the mortar firing point. That one lucky spot of the smoke from the mortar tube had been enough. They had obviously found the enemy.

  In the sangar it was almost impossible to hear anything over the ‘thud thud thud’ of the 50-calibre machine gun firing over our heads.

  ‘Hey fatty, guess we miss breakfast again,’ I yelled over to Hutch.

  This time he turned his head towards me, his eyes alive with adrenalin, and gave me the finger before resuming his fire position.

  We had flown direct from the UK to Camp Bastion, the main British concentration in Afghanistan, just over a month ago. The vast camp, named after the first British soldier to be killed in the conflict, sat in the middle of the Helmand desert surrounded by miles of nothing. There was no tarmac road, only the dusty worn tracks that led there through an unforgiving desert.

  Bastion
was the biggest tented camp of its kind. Impressively, it was built by the Royal Engineers in 2006 in about 12 weeks. More than 4,000 British servicemen and women currently called it home.

  Most of the camp was made up of row after row of identical tented walkways. Trying to find the Expeditionary Forces Institute (EFI) shop that sold cans of fizzy drink and chocolate bars was a mission in itself. Quite why the EFI sold swimming goggles when there was no hint of a swimming pool for over one thousand miles was a question I never got answered.

  Temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit were not uncommon in the midday Afghan sun. To quote Robin Williams in the film Good Morning, Vietnam, it was ‘hot, damn hot, crotch-pot cooking hot’. Just walking around Bastion meant that sweat stains grew under the armpits of my combat shirt and I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like when I had to run around the desert with full kit. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about putting any weight on out here, I’d told myself.

  Apart from the heat, the worst thing about Afghanistan during those first days was the dust: it was everywhere, absolutely everywhere. It was in our sleeping bags, on our hands, under our nails, sometimes in our food or clogging the mouthpieces of our water bottles and, especially annoyingly, lining the inside of our combat helmets.

  During the brief few days we had spent at Bastion the dust had become a really irritating part of our everyday life. I didn’t have to tell the lads to clean their weapons daily, they just did it. But as soon as we ventured outside the accommodation tents, their work was undone. Within moments small gusts of wind deposited fine layers of dust on the newly cleaned metal, which stuck to the rifle oil like superglue.

  It was even worse when we went out on to the open ground where we practised our drills. There the dust clouds would rip across the desert plain like monster tidal waves gathering speed as they charged towards us. When we got back inside our faces would be caked in the stuff, the dust stuck to our sweat like a beauty parlour-style mudpack that you’d pay a fortune for on the High Street. The only dust-free area was where our combat goggles had protected our eyes.