Medic! Man down! Under fire with British troops in a Taliban ambush
THE cry that went out was bloodcurdling: “Medic. Medic. Man down. Man down.”
As the air filled with the rattle and crack of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades smashed into nearby walls and exploded overhead, a British soldier had been shot in the chest. Three Afghan soldiers, one with a serious head wound, lay injured yards away.
Orders were screamed as men from the 1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment scrambled for cover, diving into irrigation ditches and sheltering behind mud walls. Rifles were levelled, bayonets fixed and fire was returned. The noise was ground-shaking.
Goats that had been grazing nearby bolted as their herder and his young son hurled themselves to the ground behind the British soldiers, the boy in tears. Bullets smacked the long reeds on the nearby Helmand River.
“Incoming. Stay down,” Major Dom Biddick, 32, commanding officer of A Company, called to his men, as calm and composed as he had been throughout the day.
After almost 24 hours of tramping through the Sangin Valley in temperatures of 120F, Biddick and his 70 soldiers were pinned down by a Taliban ambush. We were on foot and had no vehicles for cover and no heavy weaponry; and we were in the open.
For four days last week The Sunday Times accompanied the men of A Company. We had met them in their base in Sangin and joined them as they planned part of what an army spokesman described as “the most challenging infantry operation since the Falklands”.
The target of Operation Ghartse Ghar was a Taliban stronghold at Jusyalay, just north of Sangin, from where the insurgents launched daily attacks on the British and Afghan outpost of Inkerman, a small observation post 2½ miles from the main base. The men from the Fighting Ninth, as A Company is known, knew the fight would be fierce: the aim was to skirt the Taliban positions, surround them and trap them.
So as not to alert the enemy, we had walked for nine miles through the Taliban’s back yard. We tramped through a maze of poppy fields and irrigation ditches and waded through rivers. The pace was painfully slow. We were watching for ambushes, landmines and signs of the enemy.
The translators with the unit constantly scanned radios, listening in to Taliban conversation, and not an hour went by without the promise of an attack. “The British are walking – get ready,” one intercept said.
Now it was 5.35pm and the men were exhausted. The kit they have to carry – up to 80lb of body armour, food, ammunition, radios and water – weighs them down. Dehydration and heat exhaustion could be as deadly as the enemy.
The sun was about to set and the soldiers were sharing jokes, eating their “scoff” and drinking water. Morale was high. They were glad to be alive after a day in which various members of A Company had already been in five firefights with the Taliban, killing at least 13 insurgents. They thought they could relax now, but they were wrong. The hunters were about to become the hunted. “Where the f*** is that coming from?” screamed Sergeant James “Spunky” Seaman, 33, his ginger beard covered in grime. “Find the f****** firing point and quick.”
Shots pinged around him and frightened Afghan soldiers accompanying the British cried out in confusion. The fire was coming from two directions. Rocket-propelled grenades were being launched from across the river and, along with small arms fire, from our other flank. The speed and accuracy of the attack took everyone by surprise.
Just 25 yards from where I had flung myself to the ground, “Badger”, as he is known to his mates, was hit in the chest. The bullet ricocheted off his body armour and lodged in his wrist. He was lucky to survive.
The ditches and mud furrows gave us some cover, but the high reeds and mudwalled compounds provided ideal hiding places for the insurgents. They were hard to spot and knew the ground. They were also fleet of foot: they had no body armour and stored their ammunition and food nearby. Twenty minutes after the attack began, the Taliban made their getaway. Someone spotted them going into a nearby compound.
“What air is on station?” asked Captain Charlie Harmer, 29, his easy smile disappearing for an instant. Circling overhead was an American B1 bomber that had dropped a 2,000lb bomb on a Taliban compound earlier that day, killing eight fighters.
“It can’t do the job,” said Seaman, his second-in-command. The British soldiers were under strict orders from Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Carver, their commanding officer, to avoid civilian casualties.
Instead, an Apache helicopter was called in. Among its crew was the only female gunner in Afghanistan. “The boss says she’s well fit,” said one of the men. She was soon to prove deadly as well as beautiful.
Intelligence was filtering in that the Taliban’s leader was one of the two most senior commanders in the Sangin Valley. His 55 or so loyal fighters were believed to be bolstered by 15 fearless warriors from the Waziristan region of Pakistan, and it was said that he had six suicide bombers ready to attack.
The British outnumbered the enemy by two to one. Generally they prefer odds of three to one, but the Taliban of course lacked air support. The Apache identified insurgents in the compound and its 30mm cannon boomed into life, followed by the sound of the rounds hitting their target.
“That’s an exciting sound,” said one soldier.
“That’s the sound of death,” said another. The fighting died down after the Apache attack, but supplies were running low. “Everything is low: ammo, food and batteries. Everything except morale, which is high,” grinned Lieutenant Bjorn Rose, 25.
Intelligence suggested the Taliban would attack again soon, but no strike materialised. I left on a supply helicopter the next day, exhausted, dirty and hungry. On the ground, the men of A Company still had days of fighting ahead of them.
As for Badger, his near miss had put him in jubilant mood. “Who wants my grot mag,” he said, pulling a lads’ magazine from inside his badly damaged body armour as he waited for a helicopter to take him for treatment. “I don’t need it any more – I’m going home to see my girlfriend soon.”
