> Tales from the valley of death - heat, horror and a chuckle - 06 Aug 2007 - NZ Herald: World / International News

Tales from the valley of death - heat, horror and a chuckle
Page 1 of 4 View as a single page 5:00AM Monday August 06, 2007
By Mark Townsend

He was pinned down by Taleban fire for five minutes, his body smothered in masonry as rocket-propelled grenades thumped into the wall behind.

Private Meighan Kenny escaped. He always does. Sixteen times he has been shot at by Taleban fighters since he arrived in Helmand last April.

He has led men through scores of Taleban compounds. In their murky maze of antechambers he has often literally bumped into the enemy.

Kenny turns 21 in three weeks. "I'll get there, don't you worry," he grins, blue eyes squinting against the searing heat of another afternoon in Afghanistan.

Kenny's experiences are not unique in a campaign marked by ferocious firefights in brutal conditions. This is the story of a week spent on the front line with young soldiers who daily share death, scorching heat and the laughter and banter of mates.

In the British Army's forward operating base at Sangin, every soldier from the 1st Battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment has a tale.

Teenagers describe the high-pitched whistle bullets make as they fizz past the face. Rocket-propelled grenades make a "strange hiss".


Privates tell of lying face down in the shallow furrows of a poppy field as Taleban machine gun fire sends spurts of soil into the air beside them.

Young men talk matter-of-factly about how they cradled the brains of an Afghan soldier in the middle of enemy territory as they waited for a helicopter to save his life.

It is a campaign where platoons with an average age of 19 have tracked beyond Taleban lines for 12 days, and where soldiers have sweated so much their shirts have rotted off their backs.

At times, the fighting has been so relentless that front-line platoons have fallen to less than a third of full strength because of battle injuries, heat exhaustion and sickness.


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Tales from the valley of death - heat, horror and a chuckle - 06 Aug 2007 - NZ Herald: World / International News