Painting the Sand Read online

  ‘This is Staff Sergeant Hughes, Brimstone 42, get me the SAT [Senior Ammunition Technician] now.’ The SAT, WO1 Jim Hutchison, was the in-theatre expert when it came to anything Counter-IED. He was also a close mate and more importantly my boss. Jim had been a bomb disposal operator for almost twenty years and had been involved in just about every confict since the Falklands War. He always offered a cool head in a crisis and what he didn’t know about bomb disposal wasn’t worth knowing.

  Jim came on the phone. ‘All right, pal, how’s it going, the guys OK—?’

  I cut him off, ‘Sapper Sam Jack has been shot. He’s taken a round to the face. It’s bad.’

  ‘Kim, wait,’ he said before turning to the entire Ops Room staff: ‘Shut up!’ he shouted. ‘Anyone who doesn’t need to be here, get out.’

  ‘Kim, I’m back. Tell me everything.’ We talked for the next ten minutes as I gave him a detailed account of what happened. As I listened to myself it seemed unbelievable.

  ‘You need to get over to the hospital when Sam comes in because, to be brutally honest, I don’t think he’s going to make it. I’m also going to throw Sapper Harry Potter on the aircraft. He’s in shock and won’t be any good on this op now. It was a one in a million accident. It wasn’t his fault but he’s taken it badly.’

  ‘Roger, Kim. Stay safe.’

  As I put the phone down I looked over to see the guys carefully putting Sam, who was drifting in and out of consciousness, on a stretcher.

  ‘Sam, the chopper’s inbound,’ Chappy said reassuringly, as he frantically scanned the horizon.

  ‘You’re such a drama queen, Sam,’ I said trying to lighten the mood. ‘All this fuss. There are gonna be lots of hot nurses feeding you grapes and giving you bed baths.’

  ‘Lewis, get Harry ready, get his weapon unloaded. Malley, do the same with Sam’s shooter . . .’

  Then I heard the distinctive sound of a chopper approaching; never before had I been so happy to hear it.

  I pointed at one of soldiers who had secured the compound earlier. ‘You, go and mark the HLS with smoke.’

  A little while later a green cloud of smoke was beginning to form. The helicopter was a US Black Hawk, call sign ‘PEDRO’ and manned by US para-rescue special forces who would go anywhere at any time to save the lives of injured soldiers. Hovering high above was another Black Hawk, scanning the ground looking for Taliban.

  The helicopter landed nose on to the smoke grenade and the immediate area went into brown-out from the dust being kicked up by the rotors. Over my shoulder, I could see three of the team lying across Sam, protecting him from the dust cloud.

  The medic gave the thumbs-up to approach and six of us carried Sam to the chopper, while Harry followed on close behind. The Black Hawk’s side door slid open and Sam was gently eased into the cabin where the medics immediately began their work. A few seconds later the chopper was airborne and Sam was gone. I watched as the helo disappeared into the wide blue sky before walking back to the compound, head bowed and silently praying that Sam would survive.

  The entire team was effectively in shock but as tragic as the incident was there was still a job to do. I pulled Lee and Chappy over to a quiet corner of the compound and told the rest of the lads to get a brew on.

  ‘Sam is in the best place he can be,’ I said, and they both agreed. ‘This is important. Can we still function operationally? We’re two searchers down?’

  ‘We’re good,’ Chappy answered. Lee nodded.

  ‘Good. Then let’s get back to work,’ I replied.

  The team began to search the compound systematically, room by room. The searchers were focused but I knew they were hurting.

  ‘Fuck,’ Malley said loudly to himself. A used syringe needle had stuck into his glove but fortunately had not punctured his skin. ‘There’re dirty needles everywhere,’ he told the rest of the team.

  Needle stick injuries were extremely serious. AIDS and hepatitis were major problems in Afghan and anyone even suspected of being injured was on the first available chopper back to Bastion, where medics pumped you full of drugs.

  An hour later the search was complete and there was no evidence to suggest that the compound had ever been used as a bomb factory. Our first operation and we were the victims of bad intelligence. We all felt that Sam had been injured for nothing and the sense of waste was almost overpowering. I tried to tell the lads that we’d done a decent, professional job but they weren’t stupid. No one said anything but we all knew our first operation seemed to have been cursed. Days of planning, kit prep, equipment checks, briefings, all for an hour’s work with nothing to show for it apart from a seriously injured colleague.

  I sat down leaning against one of the compound walls. I opened up my ration pack, got my Jetboil going and began making a brew. I looked around at the guys and they were all lost in their own silent thoughts. The search team had lost a brother on their very first mission.

  I decided to try the Ops Room on the satphone for an update on Sam. A little good news at this point was massively needed. The phone connected and Jim answered almost instantly. I immediately sensed the Ops Room was on edge as well.

  ‘How you guys holding up?’ said Jim. His familiar voice was welcoming.

  ‘As good as to be expected. Any news on Sam?’

  ‘He’s in theatre. He’s critical but still with us. Providing he makes it he’ll be flown back to the UK in the next twenty-four hours. His war’s over. Do you need anything?’

  ‘No, just a lift out of here. We’ve completed our search – there’s no point in us being here now.’

  Jim then handed the phone to Major Elden Millar, the Counter-IED Task Force officer commanding, the guy in charge.

  ‘Kim, how are you?’

  He was one of the best officers I knew.

  ‘All right, boss. The guys are strong but concerned about Sam.’

  ‘Sam’s in good hands. We are trying to get you off the ground. Hopefully we’ll get you back in today.’

  The team’s welfare was now my top priority. We were two men down and therefore not an effective asset for the battlegroup. The guys would have risen to any challenge but their minds were elsewhere and so was mine. It wasn’t as if we were needed on the ground. I wanted to get the guys back to Bastion so decided to speak directly to the infantry company commander. As I walked outside I noticed the younger soldiers looking at me.

  I looked down and saw that my combat trousers had been stained by Sam’s blood. His blood was also on my hands and my body armour. I hadn’t had time to notice.

  I eventually found the OC chatting with a couple of other officers. They were laughing and smoking cigarettes.

  ‘Sir, can I have a word?’ All their eyes were drawn immediately to my trousers.

  ‘Staff, any news on your man?’ the OC asked.

  ‘He’s in theatre undergoing surgery,’ I replied. ‘Sir, as you’re aware, an IEDD team is a mission critical asset and a rare commodity in Afghan. Units all over Helmand are crying out for us. We are achieving nothing here. I need to get my team off the ground back to Bastion and then on to another mission.’

  The OC was sympathetic but explained that it was unlikely ‘the powers that be’ were going to send a helicopter just to take my team back there. I knew he was right but I wasn’t keen on the idea of sitting in a compound for the next forty-eight hours wondering how Sam was. Thoughts turned into doubt, doubt into blame, followed by short tempers and arguments.

  Another few hours passed, the guys were threaders. The odd bit of banter was bandied about but no one was in the mood. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on something else, trying to get the vision of Sam out of my mind. I thought of my son. What was he doing? Was he thinking about me as I was him? My thoughts then turned to my crumbling marriage and all the shit I had to look forward to at the end of the tour. I tried my best to think about the good things in life, my mates, my family. What about Sam’s family? There would have been that knock on the door then t
he horrible realisation that nothing will ever be the same again.

  ‘Staff . . . Kim . . .’ I opened my eyes. The OC and Chappy were standing over me.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked hesitantly.

  ‘You’ve got an aircraft inbound. Be ready to move in five minutes,’ the OC said.

  ‘Chappy, get the boys ready,’ I said but the team were ready to move out. Chappy offered his hand to help me to my feet.

  It turned out that a Chinook was passing near to our location and had been offered to give us a lift back to Bastion.

  ‘Guys, stack up on that wall,’ I said as the sound of the chopper grew closer. I quickly walked over to the OC and offered my hand in thanks. ‘Sir, thanks for your help. Stay safe.’

  ‘You too, Staff. I hope your man’s OK. No doubt we’ll meet again soon.’

  The Chinook touched down in the exact same spot as the Black Hawk that evacuated Sam. The guys filtered out of the compound and headed towards the aircraft’s tailgate.

  I counted everyone onto the aircraft before giving the thumbs-up to the loadmaster. Seconds later we were airborne. The relief was almost overwhelming and I suddenly felt exhausted. The helo climbed steeply into a darkening sky. I leaned back and closed my eyes but sleep wouldn’t come. The forty-minute flight back to Bastion seemed to take forever, my stomach turning at the thought of what was waiting for us.

  As the Chinook banked and prepared to land, I could see the vast base illuminated in the dark, like a small English town. I searched for the hospital, where Sam was fighting for his life, wondering whether he was dead or alive.

  The Chinook landed and the team virtually ran to the Army lorry taking us back to the EOD Task Force Ops Room. The drive back was only a few minutes and as we arrived I stood up and blocked the rear of the vehicle.

  ‘Just wait, fellas. We don’t yet know how Sam is. We all want answers, but it’s not going to help us all piling into the Ops Room. Lee, Chappy, with me, the rest of you, weapons away first and meet us outside the Ops Room. No arguments. Get it done.’

  I handed my rifle and pistol to Lewis and headed to the Ops Room.

  The three of us, covered in dirt and blood and unshaven, were not in the mood for any sly comments. The room fell silent as we entered. Jim raced towards me and hugged me like a long-lost brother.

  ‘Shit day,’ I whispered to him.

  ‘I know,’ he replied.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Not good,’ Jim responded. ‘Still not out of the woods but stable.’

  Major Eldon Millar, the Officer Commanding of the EOD Task Force, then appeared from the rear of the Ops Room. His usual calm, relaxed demeanour was absent as he took my hand, shaking it hard.

  ‘Thank you, Kim,’ he said. It felt weird. I’d done nothing.

  ‘Boss, it was the boys who were there for Sam. They did him proud, they did you proud.’

  The OC went outside and addressed the team: ‘Men, Sapper Jack is stable. He’s out of surgery and in Intensive Care. He will fly back to the UK tonight where he will be looked after. His family have been informed and they will meet him at Birmingham in the morning. You’ve had a hard day and have come out the other side. Things have gone bad but you have done well. Our thoughts are with Sam – he is in the best place he can be. Get some well-deserved rest.’

  ‘Sir, how’s Harry?’ Malley asked.

  ‘In shock, but OK. He now needs his friends around him. This was a terrible accident and no one is to blame. He’s blaming himself, and he needs you to be there.’

  The OC walked back into the Ops Room and the lads slowly made their way back to the team tent. Jim and I sat for an hour or so chatting about the day’s events before I returned to the tent.

  Everyone handled what happened to Sam in their own way but I learned a long time ago not to dwell on events over which you have no control. My coping mechanism was not to think about the ‘what ifs’. I knew that I could be killed or seriously injured every time I went beyond the wire but I chose not to think about it. Sam’s wound was horrendous but I locked the image away. I didn’t need a shoulder to cry on or someone to talk through my innermost fears. I had bad dreams while I was in Afghan, dreams in which I lost both legs or had been killed, but I never spent much time thinking or worrying about them. That was my way of dealing with death and the fear of being killed. It didn’t mean that I was never scared. I was but it meant that I didn’t become preoccupied with my own mortality.

  Later that evening Harry rejoined us after the medics had given him the all-clear. He still felt terrible but accepted that it wasn’t his fault that Sam had been wounded. Within an hour of his arrival the piss-taking had started at Harry’s expense – we were moving on.

  3

  Leaving

  Back on 6 April 2009 my team arrived at RAF Brize Norton, the vast base in the Oxfordshire countryside that served as the main point of departure for Afghanistan, twenty-four hours before our flight was due to depart. Over 9,000 soldiers were flying out as part of a ‘relief in place’ – commonly known as RIP – to begin their tour. While we were flying out an equal number – the survivors of the previous Operation Herrick – were flying home. The logistics were unbelievably complex and the entire operation takes place over a four- to six-week period.

  That last night was spent in the awful Gateway House Hotel, a monument to bad 1960s architecture. The ‘hotel’ was based inside the camp and was used to house troops preparing to fly off to combat zones. As a SNCO, I was given a single room but it was nothing to shout home about and only served to underline my anonymity in the vast operation. The hotel room had a single window that couldn’t be opened and contained cheap, stained furniture. It was as if the room had been designed to make the whole experience of flying off to war even more miserable.

  Around a hundred of us were woken at about 4 a.m. I showered and shaved and then making my way to the canteen for a cooked breakfast before boarding a coach to the departure terminal. There was a dreadful sense of finality about everything. Everyone, irrespective of rank, was caught between the dread of departure and the desire to get on with the job – but that didn’t make leaving any easier. The departure lounge was like something out of the 1970s where customer care was the lowest priority. The room contained a couple of gaming machines, a corner where you could play on an X-Box and a kiosk selling weak tea and Haribo sweets and that was about it. At one end was a large window offering a view out onto the runway and our transport, an obsolete RAF Tristar, illuminated by spotlights and surrounded by fuel trucks and loading vehicles.

  Brize Norton is a miserable place to start a journey into a war zone. It is bleak, anonymous and impersonal and on the day we departed it was dark and pissing with rain. Hundreds of soldiers milled around the depressing fluorescent-lit departure hall and I couldn’t help but wonder who among them wouldn’t make it home. The young spotty-faced soldier straight out of training, his vocal bravado masking his fear? Or the veteran sergeant, who’d already chalked up a couple of tours in Iraq and Afghan? Or the young officer straight out of training and wondering whether a career in the Army after university was such a clever career choice after all? Or me – would I survive? After all in the end it was all about luck.

  No one ever goes to war thinking they are going to get killed. Every soldier assumes it’s going to be the other bloke who gets shot or steps on a bomb and makes the final journey home in a body bag. I suppose that’s always been the case, from the battle of Agincourt to the Somme. That’s a good thing. The belief that it’s your mate not you who will be killed builds teamwork. If soldiers thought they were going to be killed, they’d only be interested in their own safety. We’d constantly be looking out for ourselves and not each other. The team would break down, you’d stop watching each other’s backs and of course the concept of self-sacrifice, laying down your life to protect your mates, goes out of the window. So you check your own kit and each other’s. You make sure the guy watching your back is switched on a
nd motivated and you ensure that you stay alert when you’re watching his. Despite convincing ourselves that we weren’t going to get killed, we also knew that not all of us were going to make it home in good shape.

  They had said their tearful goodbyes, given their final hugs and promised their love ones they’d stay alive. I slumped into a row of moulded plastic chairs and surveyed the room and then it struck me – half of the soldiers surrounding me were kids HMG was sending to fight a dirty war in the world’s biggest shithole.

  Some of them were so young – I mean really young. Teenagers, aged eighteen and one day. Army rules state that you have to be over eighteen to die for your country. It was a hangover from the days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1971 a seventeen-year-old off-duty soldier was murdered in a brutal triple killing. The incident led to the raising of the age limit for soldiers serving in Northern Ireland to eighteen and that subsequently became the benchmark for all operations. In 1982 several Paras just under eighteen years old were allowed to travel to the South Atlantic and took part in the Falklands War but that was against the official policy.

  During the war in Afghanistan, the Army needed every soldier it could get. Lads would join up at sixteen and a half, complete their recruit training, join a battalion, undertake their pre-operational deployment training, but were still under the age of eighteen by the time their unit deployed. So they were left behind waiting, ticking off the days, until they reached eighteen – the very next day they would be sent to war.

  Some of those at Brize on that miserable day were barely out of puberty – now they were about to join a war against a ruthless and brutal enemy. Jesus, how must their mothers have felt. You could see the fear in their eyes, what they were thinking. Back home their mates were on the piss, shagging their girlfriends and here they were on their first trip out of the UK to a hellhole and many wouldn’t be coming back.

  Operation Herrick 10 ran from April through to October 2009. Each Operation Herrick lasted six months so there were two a year every year from 2006 to 2014. But Operation Herrick 10 was a bitch. The casualty figures for 2009 show that ninety-one troops were killed in action and over five hundred were wounded. It became clear during the pre-deployment training that it was going to be a tough tour. No one wanted to talk about casualties but we could work it out ourselves. In 2008 the stats showed that 47 soldiers and Royal Marines had been killed fighting the Taliban, while 235 had been wounded. So working on those stats you had a 3 per cent chance of being killed or wounded in battle – as I said earlier that meant it was going to happen to the next guy.