‘Go do the coffees, Piss Boy.’
‘Morning gents.’ Trigger swept past us on his way into the tent. ‘And what a lovely morning it is.’
The Boss obviously also felt better for a night’s sleep. We followed him in. He took his usual spot in front of the map table, facing the room. Billy and I perched on ours, behind his right shoulder.
Trigger turned to us just as he was about to begin. I could see mischief in his eyes. ‘Just got a message from the brigadier,’ he whispered. ‘Thought you might like to hear it. The brigadier wants your citations for Jugroom Fort on his desk first thing tomorrow morning.’
He turned back to face the rest of the room.
‘Right, good morning everyone…’
Billy and I weren’t listening. A giant grin crept across our faces and a very warm feeling spread from our stomachs. By hook or by crook, the system had spoken. The official verdict had been passed. The noose had been cut down in front of our very eyes. We were in the clear.
EPILOGUE
The AAC hierarchy felt quite rightly that Mathew’s family should be allowed time to grieve before the story of Jugroom Fort was made public. Colonel Sexton decreed that until then the whole rescue should remain under wraps.
The MoD asked for some gun tape clips to release to the media in due course – but a still from my footage of Hearn on Geordie’s wing as they flew into the fort was leaked in advance. Within twenty-four hours it was on every British TV news channel and in every national newspaper. The following day it was being broadcast across the world. We were astonished.
Luckily for me Op Minimise was on and we couldn’t phone home for two days. It was no easy task explaining it all to Emily.
There were no official probes into our actions at the fort. Nothing more was ever said about disciplinary proceedings. We did hear that the MoD had asked some pretty serious questions when they saw the official reports. Word filtered out that they were unhappy about the Release to Service stuff, but again, nothing was ever said to us.
There was no second attempt by 3 Commando Brigade to enter Jugroom Fort – which left Geordie with the dubious title of being the British serviceman who’d got furthest inside the place. From what I hear, he still holds it.
In the days that followed, a whole lot of stuff emerged about that extraordinary day. The Taliban’s losses had been considerable. A GCHQ intercept revealed that a senior commander was killed in the fighting. The attack had so enraged them that they hit the Garmsir DC for three whole days and nights in reprisal.
Our CO was summoned to Lashkar Gah for a good old-fashioned interview without coffee with Brigadier Jerry Thomas. It turned out he had rung the brigadier from Kandahar at the height of the crisis to tell him there would be no Apache rescue attempt. It had not gone down well. The brigadier reminded him in no uncertain terms who was in command in Helmand, on the day and again during the interview.
I felt sorry for the CO; he’d been fed incorrect information about what was happening at the fort by his headquarters in Kandahar. He’d stuck his neck out, trying to help, and got bollocked for it in the process. I didn’t care much that he’d bollocked us without asking what had happened first. We had felt betrayed by him, but in the end he’d let himself down, not us. But I struggle to forgive him for his treatment of Major Christopher James, the Boss.
We also discovered that Zulu Company’s commander, a Royal Marine major, had been relieved of his command by Colonel Magowan moments before the rescue began. He’d let the men of Zulu Company down badly. After being given a direct order to prepare the assault many hours before, he’d failed to brief his men and didn’t get the Viking vehicles prepped to cross the Helmand River.
A British company commander had not been dismissed from his post in the field for many years. Understand-ably, it prompted a huge amount of very painful soul-searching among the marines – whose officers’ leadership was traditionally second to none.
Back in the UK, a board of inquiry was established by the Royal Navy Headquarters to find out what went wrong, and why Mathew Ford died. It went into everything: the mission, the initial orders, the Zulu Company assault, why five marines were instantly shot, the sacking, and how Mathew was left behind. It took a year and seven months to complete. Its conclusions were equally painful – and staggeringly honest.
First, it found that Mathew Ford and the four other marines wounded at the fort wall could have been all shot by a Royal Marine machine-gunner on one of the rear Vikings in the Zulu Company attack column, just after 7am. The gunner heard bangs coming from through the wall, and opened fire on the gap, thinking he was doing the right thing. Contrary to what everyone thought, it wasn’t the seething masses of Taliban in the tunnels, the village or the fort that had got any of them after all; it was one lethal burst of friendly fire. The devastated young marine admitted what he’d done immediately and was sent straight home, his nerves shot to pieces.
Mathew Ford was left behind because of confusion over two Fords – Lance Corporal Mathew Ford, and Marine Ford, who was already safe by this point. That confusion existed primarily because Zulu Company were withdrawing under fire and the Sergeant Major didn’t use zap numbers – the special few letters and numbers each serviceman has that are unique to them – to report his casualties.
It also revealed the full extent of Mathew’s injuries. A total of three bullets had entered Mathew’s body; he took a round in the bicep and a round in the chest, as well as the round in the head. When we picked him up, I had only seen the head wound.
The bicep wound wasn’t serious. The pathologist ruled that the chest wound was very serious, but there was a chance that Mathew could have survived it had he received immediate medical help. The chest wound was almost certainly caused by the machine-gunner – the round was analysed and found to be 7.62-mm NATO issue. The pathologist also said the head wound would have killed Mathew ‘almost instantaneously’. It was impossible to ascertain whether that bullet had been fired by friendly or enemy forces, as it had fragmented on entry.
Who fired that third bullet, the head wound bullet and when it was fired are the crucial questions. This is what is most sad of alclass="underline" if the head bullet had been fired by the marine machine-gunner, what I don’t understand is how Mathew could still have been warm on the thermal camera throughout our guarding him, and then still warm more than three and a half hours later when I got to him at 10.40am. There was a ground temperature of five degrees Celsius at the fort that morning – low enough to turn a body cold pretty quickly. He burned white hot on Billy’s FLIR screen lying there all the time.
It’s an anomaly that suggests that Mathew’s head wound could have been caused by a (possibly) ricochet Taliban bullet fired later – perhaps a lot later. If Zulu Company had picked Mathew up before they withdrew, or if we’d got to him earlier, could any of us have saved his life? The answer, none of us will ever know.
That wasn’t all the board revealed. Remarkably, it quite clearly also established that, despite their series of serious errors, the chaos at the fort was to a substantial extent not Zulu Company’s fault. It was found that the company hadn’t been trained back in the UK for war fighting in Afghanistan. Their sacked commander hadn’t done the company commander’s course, and was only put in charge of them four weeks before they left for Afghanistan. And the sub-unit hadn’t even conducted live firing training together – the most basic of all company tasks.
Zulu Company were given the relatively benign job of security patrolling in Kabul for the tour and even this was asking too much from a unit that had not prepared for war fighting in Afghanistan.