‘Play Mr Macy’s rockets again, play Mr Macy’s rockets again,’ they hollered.
Excruciating. I just had to man up and take it on the chin.
5. ALICE, TRIGGER, FOG AND ROCCO
The next morning, our intelligence officer gave the squadron pilots her warts and all situational brief. It lasted ninety minutes, and it brought us right up to date on Operation Herrick.
Everyone listened to intelligence briefs in absolute silence; we couldn’t afford not to. Especially when they were given by Alice. She was not a woman to cross. We all made sure we were in the JHF tent in good time before she started.
Alice was attached to us as an RAF reservist, and she was a big hit. Like Kev Blundell, she took no shit from anyone. Unlike Kev, she was tall and auburn-haired, and, if the occasion demanded, had the temperament to go with it. She was a consummate professional and knew her int inside out.
Alice was lovely; her father owned a plantation somewhere, and she was always chomping on bags of walnuts he’d sent out to her. She’d crack them with her bare hands. She was also immensely clever and highly educated, with at least three different degrees. Alice didn’t need to be in a war zone for a single second. She could have been back at home making a fortune in her civvy job, selling microwave technology to the military. Instead, she’d volunteered for the tour because she wanted to ‘do something interesting’.
Alice won me over the very first day we’d met in the JHF during the handover. She’d listened in respectful silence to the Boss’s long and slightly lugubrious speech – designed entirely to impress her – about the feats he’d achieved inside the Apache cockpit. The Boss’s finale was his Top Gun triumph. He waited for the inevitable oohs and aahhs.
Alice just smiled politely and said: ‘That’s all very good, sir. But I bet you can’t lick your own nipples. I can.’ She’d cracked another walnut and walked away.
Alice had a lot of news for us. As the Helmand campaign had gradually evolved, the enemy were evolving too. The Task Force’s footholds in the north were becoming more substantial. Troops were just beginning to move out, albeit gingerly, on exploratory patrols from the district centres and platoon houses in which they had been holed up all summer. But they were paying for it in blood. A total of twenty-four British servicemen had been killed since we’d left – fourteen of them in the Nimrod air crash near Kandahar. And two-thirds of the province – the far north and its entire southern half – had yet to be touched.
‘Everyone now accepts that it’s going to be a very, very long fight.’
The most substantial strategic change was the establishment of a new district centre in the town of Garmsir, taking the tally back up to five. Fifty-five kilometres from Helmand’s capital Lashkar Gah, Garmsir was the most southerly point of the province that British troops had penetrated. Everything below it was uncharted territory.
‘Literally uncharted,’ Alice said. ‘No maps have ever been drawn of the 120-mile sweep down to the Pakistan border. Not even the Afghan police go there. They used to, but they had a nasty habit of coming back without their heads.’
The Paras had pushed a few exploratory patrols down to Garmsir in September. Each time they were met by fierce opposition, and had to vacate the town after only a few days.
Garmsir was strategically important for both sides. It was the gateway into and out of the province for the Taliban as well as the opium trade. It was a geographical choke point where the Green Zone was at its thinnest. Everything that didn’t want to get picked off by Coalition air power in the desert had to pass through the place.
If we were ever to make progress in the south, we needed a permanent footprint in Garmsir. So the marines launched Operation Anthracite at the start of October 2006, to set up a DC in an old military barracks in the town. Alice revealed that the man given the job of expanding influence in the south was Lieutenant Colonel Rob Magowan, who commanded a 500-strong assortment of ISTAR units, known as the I X Battlegroup.
‘The what?’ someone asked.
‘Information eXploitation, a new unit; they gather and exploit Taliban int.’
But Garmsir wasn’t going well. The Taliban were enraged by the new arrivals, and were doing all they could to oust them. The DC’s occupying force, a company of 120 Royal Marines, had been pinned down there ever since they’d arrived. Under attack day and night, barely able to step outside the decaying base, they stood no chance of dominating the ground around them.
‘Like the worst days of Sangin,’ Alice said.
It was siege warfare, the marines prisoners in their own castle.
‘Now here’s the good news.’ Alice handed out a photocopied stack of lengthy crib sheets. ‘The specific instructions on when you can open fire have been changed. You’ll be pleased to see you’ve got a lot more leeway. Have a good read of this.’
I scanned Alice’s crib. It was welcome news indeed. The powers that be had finally dispensed with the myth that Helmand was a tree-hugging mission.
When we’d first arrived the instructions were as strict as they’d been in Northern Ireland: rounds had to be practically coming in on the Paras before we could engage. Once it had all kicked off at the district centres, we were allowed to attack first on a few occasions as long as it was to save life. But that still left one hand tied behind our back.
Now both hands had been untied – we could shoot pretty much at our own discretion as long as we were comfortable we were killing people that we knew had been up to no good. They didn’t even need to be armed any more.
The Boss whispered, ‘That’s more like it.’
His ever more infamous trigger finger was obviously itching again. I nodded; I didn’t want Alice to catch us talking.
The new instructions would make life a lot easier for us all. It wasn’t quite like war fighting as yet, but the gloves were certainly off. But Alice had more for us. We learned why the generals had taken these steps.
‘This is not the enemy you were fighting in the summer. They are shrewder and meaner. They’ve learned good lessons from the pounding the Apaches have given them. As the days pass they are attempting fewer and fewer full-on assaults. They’re moving to more cunning asymmetric attacks.’
We looked blank.
‘Asymmetric. It’s the new buzz word in the int world. Means suicide bombers, roadside bombs, that sort of thing. Less manpower for greater effect.’
I remembered the suicide bombing just a couple of days before we’d arrived. I’d seen it on the news. It was the first successfully launched on us in Helmand, and it had killed a young commando, Marine Gary Wright. The bomber had rushed up to his Snatch Land Rover as it drove through Lashkar Gah. He was top cover. He wouldn’t have known anything about it.
‘For you guys in the air, it means the enemy have become a lot harder to locate. They use more cover from view and they’re pretending to be locals all the time.
‘The Taliban’s make-up is also changing – which has helped increase their competence, we think. It’s the poppy season now, so there are fewer Tier Three locals but more Tier Two jihadi foreigners. One estimate I saw out of Kandahar the other day put the Tier Twos at 60 per cent of the Taliban’s total manpower. These guys are smarter, mostly better trained and, as some of you have already seen, definitely more committed.’
The mortar team up at Gereshk must have been Tier Two.
‘Also, be aware that their desire to take out an attack helicopter is still very high. Regular intercepts confirm that. They really hate you. But it’s more than that; they know it would do a huge amount for their recruiting to show that the thing that does them most damage is defeatable.’