And now, another day in Helmand was dawning. At 9 a.m., Tootals headquarters staff gathered in the JOC for the morning brief. A few incidents had trickled in over the radio net. Just before 8 a.m., four mortars had landed in the base at Now Zad. This was the most remote of the outstations, about fifty miles to the northwest as the helicopter flew from Bastion. Half an hour later, small-arms fire and RPGs were fired at the platoon house at Sangin. This was the normal back-and-forth violence, the metronome tick of aggression and counter-aggression that punctuated every day. There was nothing to distract Tootal from his usual crowded morning of meetings and briefings.
Then, just after midday, the atmosphere in the JOC changed. Reports of casualties started filtering in from Kajaki Dam. The dam was a prize target for the insurgents. The hydroelectric station there generated power for the whole region. The British troops, who lived in sweltering trenches dug out of the stony hills overlooking it, came under regular Taliban attack. But this sounded like something different. The details were sketchy at first. A sniper on his way to spy out a Taliban position had stepped on a mine and was very badly wounded.
Tootal called up his higher headquarters at Kandahar to request a Black Hawk helicopter, equipped with a winch, to lift the casualty out. He was told there would be a long delay. A CH-47 Chinook casualty evacuation helicopter was available. But it did not have lifting gear.
On a patch of barren hillside in Kajaki, a group of men stood rooted to the ground. Beside them lay Lance Corporal Stuart Hale of 3 Para Support Company. The mine had blown off his foot. Corporal Mark Wright was on his position about a mile away when he heard the explosion. He rounded up some soldiers and medics and they ran down the hill to help. They had gone to Hales side knowing the potential danger they were in. Now they were trying to get him out. They began prodding the gritty sun-baked ground, clearing a path to a spot where the helicopter could get in, then carried Hale on a stretcher to the landing site. Corporal Stuart Pearson turned back along the cleared path. As he bent down to pick up a water container, there was another explosion. Until now, it had seemed that Hale might be the victim of a stray mine, probably left behind by the Russians who had spent years occupying Kajaki. Now the rescuers were hit by a grim realisation. We thought, fucking hell, said Corporal Jay Davis, we are in a minefield now. They are everywhere.
Pearson was only four or five yards away. But every step risked another explosion. He applied a tourniquet and dosed himself with morphine while they waited for the helicopter. It arrived at 1.30, and landed more than fifty yards away across ground that for all anyone knew was thick with mines. There was no question of carrying the casualties to the Chinook. As it lifted off in a cloud of muck and grit, another mine went off, blasting shrapnel into the shoulder, chest and face of Mark Wright.
A medic, Lance Corporal Paul Tug Hartley, moved forward to help. He threw his medical pack on the ground in front of him to detonate any mines in his path. He reached Wright safely. But as he arrived Fusilier Andy Barlow moved back to give him room, treading on a mine that blasted shrapnel into his lower leg. The blast also blew Hartley to the ground and wounded Private Dave Prosser.
All around, men lay bleeding into the dirt. Hunched over the radios, Tootal and his staff had been listening with mounting dismay as the picture grew darker. The only way the wounded and the stranded could escape the minefield was if they were lifted out. Tootal harassed Kandahar for updates on when the winch-equipped Black Hawk would be ready to haul his men to safety. Nearly four hours after the initial request, two Black Hawks arrived. Two American aircrew were lowered into the minefield and, one by one, winched everyone aboard.
When the casualties reached Bastion, Tootal and 3 Paras RSM (regimental sergeant major), John Hardy, were at the landing site to meet them. As the helicopter touched down, they jumped aboard. Six men were stacked across the floor. Three had stumps where one of their legs had been. One was dead. Mark Wright, who had been chatting and joking with his mates during the two and a half hours they had waited to be rescued, had bled to death on the way home. The wounded were hurried away. Hardy and Tootal zipped Wright into a body bag and carried him to an ambulance.
Tootal had been back in the JOC for fifteen minutes when another spate of emergency signals squawked over the radio. There were more wounded soldiers in two of the platoon houses. In Sangin, three soldiers had been hit by mortar shrapnel as they stood in an orchard within the walls of the base being briefed on their tasks for the evening. Mortar fire had injured two more British soldiers and two of their Afghan allies in Musa Qaleh. There was, however, only one Chinook helicopter available to mount a casualty evacuation a casevac.
The helicopter, with the Immediate Response Team of medics aboard, was ordered to go to Sangin first. One of the wounded, Lance Corporal Luke McCulloch, had been hit in the head and looked close to death. The casevac chopper was flown by Major Mark Hammond of the Royal Marines. The flight took twenty minutes. As Hammond began his final approach, the JOC fizzed with tension. This was when the helicopters were most vulnerable to the Taliban RPGs and heavy machine guns. The loss of a chopper would not only be a human disaster. It would be a huge victory for the Taliban, and could lay the ground for a British tactical defeat. There was already talk in London of pulling out of the farthest-flung platoon houses to minimise the risk of a helicopter being shot down.
As the Chinook swooped towards the landing site, Hammond saw green tracer fire flowing towards him from the fields, thickly planted with tall crops that lay south of the base. Reluctantly, he swung the Chinook away and headed back to Bastion.
He and his crew had been on the ground only a few minutes when they were ordered off again, this time to try to retrieve the two casualties at Musa Qaleh. The base doctor there had warned Tootal that he could keep one of his patients alive only for another six or seven hours. Musa Qaleh was the helicopter crews most hated destination. The landing site was in the middle of a built-up area full of insurgent firing points. When they reached the town at 8.15 p.m., the Taliban were waiting. One of the escorting Apaches saw two RPGs swish past the Chinook, missing it by 10 yards. To attempt a landing would be suicidal. Again Hammond was forced to return to base. When they arrived at Bastion they found their chopper spattered with strike marks. One round had hit the root of a rotor blade, inflicting potentially lethal damage.
Tootal decided to risk another attempt before the night was over. A replacement was found for the damaged Chinook. Artillery batteries and aircraft were put on alert to batter Taliban positions around the two bases as the helicopter darted in. Hammond, along with his three crewmates and the four members of the medical team, took off for Sangin once more. He brought the Chinook into the landing site low and fast. As it settled in a whirlwind of dust, a Spartan armoured vehicle raced up to the back ramp, where the crew snatched the casualties aboard. The helicopter had barely touched the ground before it was climbing again, chased by streams of green tracer spouting from the Taliban positions. The sound of the engine was drowned out by the ear-battering din as the crew returned the fire from the door guns.
The ambulances were waiting at Bastion to hurry the casualties away to the base hospital. It was too late for Luke McCulloch. The twenty-one-year-old, one of the contingent of Royal Irish Regiment soldiers fighting alongside the Paras, was pronounced dead before he got there.
The ambulances were waiting at Bastion to hurry the casualties away to the base hospital. It was too late for Luke McCulloch. The twenty-one-year-old, one of the contingent of Royal Irish Regiment soldiers fighting alongside the Paras, was pronounced dead before he got there.
In the course of the day Mark Hammond had experienced enough danger to last most pilots a lifetime, but he volunteered for a last, risk-laden task. For the second time that night he went back to Musa Qaleh. Tootal had racked up every aircraft available, amassing an escort of Apache attack helicopters, A-10 Tankbusters and a Spectre gunship to shepherd the Chinook in. As the chopper arrived, just before 1.30 a.m., the aircraft strafed the Taliban firing points around the base. Despite the barrage, the insurgents managed to launch an attack and bullets cracked around the Chinook as it touched down, picked up the wounded and climbed into the night.
The Chinook finally arrived back safely at 2 a.m. Before he collapsed into bed, Stuart Tootal found time to write up his diary. It had been an extraordinary day, one that those involved in its dramas would never forget. He had spent the previous fourteen hours endeavouring to get our wounded out from three different locations. Two died on the way and three have had legs amputated. Some will return to combat and some will not.
There had been many times since the Paras had deployed when he had turned to RSM Hardy before heading to his cot and said, That was a day of days. But there had not been a day like this one. There had been tragedy, he wrote, but also much courage, both by the wounded and those who went to get them. There has been sorrow, sadness, fortitude and even humour. A difficult day, no doubt, but one to be proud of, having seen the way people have behaved.
His last thought before he dropped into an exhausted sleep was, I really dont want tomorrow to be like today but it just might be. It might actually be worse.
2
Green On Go
3 Para had a saying: Be careful what you wish for. When word got around that they might be on their way to Afghanistan, everyone welcomed the news. There was a feeling that a major operational deployment for the Parachute Regiment was long overdue. It had been twenty-four years since they were involved in heavy fighting. That had been in the Falkands, a campaign that loomed large in the Para legend.
The Paras had returned from the South Atlantic wreathed in glory. There were two VCs to add to their hoard of medals. They won famous victories at Goose Green and Mount Longdon. But in the interval between the Falkands and Helmand they had done little war fighting. They were not sent to the first Gulf War and were given only a subsidiary role in the second. The Kosovo deployment in 1999 was uneventful. There had been the odd exciting excursion, like the mission to Sierra Leone in 2000 when 1 Para helped rescue eleven Royal Irish Rangers held hostage by the rebel West Side Boys militia. But 3 Paras duties in recent years had mostly involved gruelling but increasingly routine tours of Northern Ireland and Iraq.
By the summer of 2005, when the rumours of a deployment to Afghanistan began to gain substance, everyone was ready for a demanding task that would allow them to measure themselves against the soldiers who had gone before them.
The Parachute Regiment was one of the youngest in the British Army. But in its short life it had developed a strong identity and a powerful sense of its own capabilities and worth. The formation of a permanent airborne force was Churchills idea. The new regiment was intended to bring together the fittest, most motivated and resourceful men available. Its purpose was to cause the maximum damage to the enemy with minimal or no support. It was expected to operate behind enemy lines undaunted by overwhelming superior enemy forces. Its spirit was summed up in its motto, Utrinque Paratus Ready for Anything.
The first British airborne assault took place in February 1941 when a small band of daredevils jumped into southern Italy and blew up an aqueduct. In the remaining four years of the war the Paras built a tradition as illustrious as that of many of the ancient regiments they fought alongside. They were in North Africa and took part in the invasions of Sicily and Italy. They played a key role in the Normandy landings, notably at Merville, where they knocked out a gun battery protected from air attack by 12-foot-thick concrete, which threatened the invasion fleet.
They were at the heart of the most famous airborne operation in history, Market Garden. The Paras, alongside two airborne divisions of Americans and one of Poles, were dropped 100 miles behind the German front lines to clear a corridor across the Netherlands for the advancing Allied armies. The 10,000-strong British 1st Airborne Division was all but wiped out and the key bridge at Arnhem it was tasked to capture remained in German hands. But the episode established an imperishable reputation for courage, resolution and coolness that was celebrated in the film A Bridge Too Far. During the Suez crisis in 1956, 660 paratroopers dropped into El Gamil airport in darkness, securing it in the face of heavy opposition.
Memories of Merville, Arnhem and Suez still colour the Para ethos. New recruits might not know the name of the last prime minister but one, but by the time they finish their training they will be fluent in the history of the regiment. This pride in the past provides a reservoir of spiritual strength to draw on in hard times. We are here to uphold something that has gone before, said John Hardy, the 3 Para RSM. In nasty moments in Helmand, when fortitude was flagging, he would remind his men that their performance was under scrutiny, asking them, The blokes who went through the war, through Arnhem what would they think?
The path to the Parachute Regiment is long and hard and strewn with obstacles. After an initial three-day selection, would-be paratroopers begin six months basic training at the army training centre at Catterick, a sprawl of brick blocks, plonked down in the rolling farmland of North Yorkshire. Inside its gates someone, somewhere always seems to be barking a command. No one walks and everyone marches. A surprising number are hobbling, poling themselves along on crutches. The chances are they are Para candidates whose limbs have failed to withstand the rigours of the course.
The training washes out the unfit and the unsuited. The final selection, for officers and men, is made at Pegasus Company known as P Company. It is designed to sort out whether or not you have the Para DNA. It is a rite of passage that those who have endured still talk about with pained awe years afterwards. It is above all a test of determination. The thing about P Company, which is difficult to explain to anyone who hasnt done it, is that its not really a physical test, its a mental test, said Captain Hugo Farmer, who won a Conspicuous Gallantry Cross in Helmand. If you want it and you are determined enough, you will pass it. You have to have a reasonable degree of fitness, obviously, or you will fail early on. But it is people who are mentally tough that are wanted. Thats the most imporant thing.
P Company lasts three weeks. The first two are taken up with daily battle marches with kit, squad runs and intensive circuit training sessions designed to physically exhaust candidates before the final Test Week begins. This starts with a stint on the Trainasium an aerial assault course over high, narrow walkways and a tower built out of scaffolding and wood. Candidates are ordered to do an illusion jump, which means running along a plank suspended 30 feet up and launching themselves at a cargo net 15 feet away. In this way, the instructors test whether the candidate can handle heights. It also tells them whether he will throw himself from a height without question. It takes quite a lot to run up to the end of the plank and launch yourself off not knowing whether you will make that net or, if you do, if you will bounce off, remembered one survivor.