‘It was like being hit with a sledgehammer. It just didn’t seem real. One second everything was normal, the next there was chaos and death – it was that quick.’
Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, Signaller, Grenadier Guards
I awake to the news that a soldier who was badly injured in February by an IED in Musa Qala has died the previous evening, 15 March 2010, at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Captain Martin Driver of 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment was blown up while on patrol and suffered a double amputation of his legs as well as serious injuries to other parts of his body. Shortly after he was injured he was evacuated back to the UK and survived for a further three weeks before succumbing to his injuries. It must have been a terrible ordeal for his family but it is a tragedy which has been played out hundreds of times over the past four years.
One more life lost, one more family shattered. At the back of my mind I’m thinking, what’s the point? Captain Driver, like all of those who have died before him, will no doubt be called a hero and I’m sure he was – anyone who spends six months fighting the Taliban is a hero as far as I am concerned – but who will remember him or his family’s suffering in five years’ time? Captain Driver’s loss is another reminder that death in Afghanistan is never far away. Since I arrived two weeks ago, five soldiers have been killed and at least a dozen more have been injured, the majority by IEDs.
By 7.30 a.m. I’m back in FOB Shawqat’s vehicle park, waiting to leave on the next IED mission. Warrior drivers are gunning their engines in preparation for this latest mission and the air is thick with the pungent smell of diesel. Woody is standing at the centre of a small group of soldiers and I can see from the look on his face that there is a problem. The incoming search team – callsign Brimstone 42, nickname Team Stallion – has just arrived as expected, but the helicopter which has flown them in has also extracted the old search team. The plan had been for the two search teams to work together for at least a week so that the outgoing team could pass on all of their knowledge of the local area to the incoming team. That process will now not take place and, to make matters worse, half of Brimstone 42’s kit was put on board the wrong helicopter and is sitting in Sangin.
And so Brimstone 42 are about to go out on their very first mission with almost no understanding of the ground or the local Taliban tactics.
‘It’s not what I would say is ideal,’ says Woody out of earshot of his new team. ‘It’s their first job and they are going to go into it cold. They are a good bunch of lads and some of them have been on operations before, but Afghan is different. You don’t get a second chance here. Fuck up out here and you’re going home in a body bag.’
Brimstone 45 have been called back to Camp Bastion earlier than expected because they are needed to man the High Readiness Force, which is regarded as a greater priority than having them remain in Nad-e’Ali and show their replacement team the lie of the land. If there were more bomb-hunting teams available, commanders would not be forced to make difficult compromises like this.
For many within the bomb-disposal world, however, shortages of bomb hunters is nothing short of scandalous, given that it has been obvious since 2008 that the production and deployment of IEDs against NATO forces, especially in the south of Afghanistan, has been part of the Taliban’s main effort.
In 2008 WO2 Gaz O’Donnell, then a George Medal holder (later awarded a posthumous Bar) and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, confided in me that he was amazed that there were just two IEDD teams in Helmand – back then the main war effort was in Iraq, where roadside bombs were killing British troops every week. Gaz and other members of the EOD group were staggered that senior commanders in the Ministry of Defence in London did not view Helmand as a high-threat IED environment even though the numbers of IED incidents had increased by more than threefold in two years. In 2004 there were just 304 IED incidents – an incident means a find or a detonation – in the whole of Afghanistan. In 2009 the number of IED incidents had risen to over 10,000, the vast majority of which occurred in Helmand. Gaz told me at the time, ‘It suits the MOD to be able to say that Helmand isn’t a high-threat area because then they can justify the numbers. Iraq is a high-threat environment, so there are a lot more IEDD teams in Basra. If they admitted that Helmand was a high-risk area too, then they would have to increase the number of ATOs here as well. The problem is that there aren’t enough ATOs for both operations and we have got the short straw.’
Six weeks after Gaz vented his frustrations to me in August 2008, he was dead and became the first ATO to be killed in Helmand. The number of CIED teams and search teams has increased fivefold but there are still too few and the consequence of this is that practices such as the team handovers, which are designed to save lives and prevent injury, are abandoned.
A message comes via the operations room informing Woody that our mission has been delayed by at least an hour. A few soldiers grunt disapprovingly but most are indifferent to the news. Brimstone 45 have a whole six months ahead of them, so why complain about an hour’s delay? Like the soldiers around me, I take off my body armour, drop it against the wheel of a Mastiff and use it as a makeshift seat. Rushing only to wait is part of Army life, especially in a war zone. I’m staring absent-mindedly out across the vehicle when I notice Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, one of the survivors of an incident which became known as ‘Murder at Blue 25’, heading towards the operations room.
The killings took place on Tuesday, 3 November 2009, a day which began as it always did for the soldiers located at the small British Army patrol base known as Blue 25. The soldiers rose from their beds in the hour before dawn, made tea, loaded their weapons, and waited for the Taliban to attack. It had been the same routine every day for the past two weeks – and the Afghan police whom the troops had been sent to ‘mentor’ joined them.
Led by Regimental Sergeant Major Darren ‘Daz’ Chant, a living legend within the Brigade of Guards, the sixteen-strong unit had been detached to Blue 25 in a last-chance bid to shore up relations between the local population and the Afghan Police. The police were so utterly hopeless that there was every chance that the local population would turn to the Taliban to uphold law and order unless urgent and drastic action was taken. The plan had worked well. The presence of the British soldiers had helped to partially restore the locals’ confidence in the police, who also seemed to appreciate the effort being made by the Grenadiers. But by the middle of the afternoon five British soldiers would lie dead and another six would be injured at the hands of a policeman whom they thought of as a trusted friend. Even in a war as dirty as that being fought in Helmand, the murders were a despicable act and had the potential to undermine the delicate relationship between the British Army and the Afghan Police. As the details of the mass killings broke in the UK, many newspapers questioned the whole nature of the mission in Afghanistan, with several asking why British troops were risking their lives for a nation where individuals employed by the government could act with such treachery.
When the Grenadier Guards battlegroup arrived in Nad-e’Ali in September 2009, Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker, the battlegroup commander, knew that if he was to fulfil his orders to secure Nad-e’Ali and separate and secure the population from the insurgents he would have to work hand in glove with the Afghan security forces, namely the police and the military.
‘The three legs of the stool were the International Security and Assistance Force [ISAF], the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police,’ he explained over a coffee one morning in March 2009 while I was embedded with his battlegroup in Nad-e’Ali. ‘We knew that we would have to work with them all if we were to be successful in Nad-e’Ali and if we wanted to make real progress. What I didn’t know when we arrived was that one of the legs of the stool, the police, was rotten, rotten to the core.’
Up until late 2009 the Afghan National Police had not received anything like the same levels of strategic investment afforded to the Afghan National Army and were widely regarded by those British military commanders unfortunate enough to work with them as at best a bad joke and at worst a liability which threatened to undermine the Army’s efforts to win hearts and minds. In Helmand, as in much of Afghanistan, the police were an utter shambles. Many of the officers were addicted to opium and would routinely sell their weapons and ammunition – even to the Taliban – in order to fund their habit. In one case a police unit sold all its supplies of bullets and rockets to insurgents. A few days later the same group of insurgents attacked the police and several officers were killed.
The police were ill-disciplined, untrained, poorly led, and would openly ‘tax’ or steal from the local population, often because they had not been paid by their commanders. Corruption within various units was rife, and young teenage policemen risked being sexually assaulted or raped by senior commanders. While ISAF had concentrated its efforts on building up the Afghan Army, the police had been left to wither on the vine, and for that a price was being paid.
While relations between the British Army and the Afghan soldiers were based on mutual respect, most British soldiers regarded the country’s police as being worse than useless. But there was some sympathy for the police’s predicament. Whereas the Afghan soldiers were often recruited from areas outside of Helmand and lived in barracks or secure camps, the police lived a dangerous life among the people they were supposedly protecting and were often easy targets for the insurgents.
Shortly after the first elements of the Grenadier Guards battlegroup arrived in September 2009, reports began to emerge of some of the dangerous everyday antics involving the Afghan police, which often left the locals in a state of abject terror. Village elders began to complain about the goings-on in one police checkpoint where almost every day the force would be high on drugs and often fire wildly down a road used by civilians.
British soldiers working close to or alongside Afghan police officers had to always be prepared to factor in the unexpected when planning operations, as Lieutenant Mike Dobbin, of Queen’s Company, Ist Battalion Grenadier Guards, explained. An incident which took place on 7 October 2009 typified the problems the British soldiers faced when dealing with the Afghan police. ‘During a routine patrol in Basharan area, my platoon, which at that time was partnered with the Afghan police, found an IED on a major route in the area,’ he explained while giving a summary of his experiences of working with the Afghan police. ‘We were unable to destroy the device because there was no bomb-disposal team with us, so we marked the area with green spray paint to bring it to the attention of locals and to stop anyone driving or walking over it. All of this was much to the frustration of the police, who simply wanted to tear it out of the ground and blow it up.
‘It was clear to us that the insurgents, knowing we had discovered the device, were likely to come back, take it out and replace it in another area with the aim of killing British or Afghan troops. We therefore planned with the police to return that night and ambush them while they did this. At around 9 p.m. I led a twelve-man team up to a cemetery in the area, which was around 500 metres away from the IED’s location. Overwatching the cemetery was a police checkpoint with good arcs of observation across the open ground. The Afghan police knew that we were in the area and that an ambush was being planned. As the patrol pushed on through the cemetery, approximately 300 metres from a checkpoint, the police opened fire, pinning us down with a heavy weight of rocket and machine-gun fire. Eventually, through a series of mobile telephone calls and radio messages, the police became aware that we were actually friendly forces and they stopped their firing, but it was clear that our position had been given away. There was a clear lack of understanding between ISAF and our Afghan partners. We later found that the police unit in the checkpoint were lazy, untrained and highly addicted to opium.’
Another example of the police’s ill-discipline came to light one lunchtime at the police training college in Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s provincial capital. The college was divided into two, a junior term and a senior term, the latter of which were afforded special privileges, such as being first in the queue for meals. During one lunchtime, scuffles broke out between the two sets of students after the junior term managed to get into the lunch queue first. A British soldier who was overseeing the process intervened and tried to restore order, only to have both sets of students turn on him. Those among the crowd who had weapons cocked them and threatened to shoot the young corporal. Order was restored only when the soldier grabbed a rifle from one of the trainees and with a single swift blow managed to knock him out.
One evening early in the tour, the commander of Queen’s Company received a message disclosing that a police checkpoint in one of the local communities was perilously close to falling to the insurgents. Two police outposts, one on each side of it, had apparently fallen earlier that day and five Afghan police officers had already been killed at this checkpoint, and during the recovery of the injured soldiers the police’s casualty evacuation vehicle had been destroyed by an IED.
Lieutenant Dobbin explained, ‘My platoon crashed out in three vehicles at about 1800 hours with orders to hold the checkpoint until dawn. We met some police at a nearby checkpoint and they led us to a point where we took over in the more armoured vehicles due to the IED threat. We rolled into the village at about 2200, driving in on black light – that is, using night-vision rather than white headlights. It’s great for covert insertions but can make driving very tricky. We came to a crossroads at the centre of the village and had to turn quite a sharp corner. The first two vehicles got round with no problem, but the third must have pushed a little over to the left because as it turned the road gave way and the Mastiff slipped into an irrigation ditch. The vehicle weighs 20 tons and many roads in Helmand are not capable of bearing such a weight. Members of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers spent several hours using their incredibly powerful recovery vehicle to pull this out.’
The situation in the village was very complex. There were several police commanders, working independently rather than together, and a sizeable Taliban force which had been emboldened by a series of dramatic successes against the Afghan police.
Lieutenant Dobbin continued, ‘That night we tried to understand the situation … there were three police stations on the one crossroads. The Taliban had attacked them with machine guns and rockets from seven separate firing points surrounding the crossroads. The three stations, one in the tower, one in a mosque and one in a school, each had their own problem. The tower had poor policemen, lots of weapons and limited ammo; the school had good policemen, few weapons and limited ammunition; the mosque had poor policemen, good ammo supplies, few weapons. Annoyingly, the three commanders would not speak to each other or distribute the resources.
‘I split my men, five to each station, and we sat out the night with no attacks. The following day it became clear that many of these police were high on drugs and fairly ill-disciplined. Then something remarkable happened. A police commander whom I had heard of but never met walked into the village at the head of an Army patrol with a civilian, who was clearly under arrest. The police officer, Lieutenant Daoud, caught an insurgent red-handed connecting a battery to an IED and was about to blow up the patrol, which was composed of soldiers from the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment.
‘I chatted to him about what had happened and he then told me this amazing story of how, just days earlier, he had been blown up by an IED while travelling in his police ranger [a four-wheel-drive Toyota], resulting in the death of the other two officers in the vehicle. He survived with only minor injuries. A week before that he had been walking to the police station on his own when he was ambushed by eight Taliban gunmen. He took cover in a small shop on this crossroads and had the locals filling his magazines with ammunition while he kept the Taliban away. He was hugely respected by the locals because he was forceful in his zero-tolerance approach. The ISAF mentor who worked with him said he was outstanding but because of his tribe he was not the commander of the checkpoint. He was extremely blasé about being attacked and ambushed and almost killed and, as with other competent police commanders, realized that he was a wanted man by the Taliban.’
Lieutenant Dobbin, a fresh-faced 24-year-old and one of the most inexperienced but highly regarded junior officers in the battalion, also forged a close relationship with another capable Afghan policeman, Commander Israel.
‘He was an extraordinary individual, very brave and very capable and highly regarded by both his men and the population, but bizarrely he seemed quite happy in the knowledge that he would not be alive for much longer. Both Israel and Daoud had the air of a European ski instructor, weathered, relaxed and totally unfazed by fairly extreme situations. Both men were relatively quiet individuals. I think Daoud was local. I know Israel was a local to the area in which he served.
‘During one patrol with the Afghan Army we were being watched by the insurgents and could hear them chatting on their radios (our interpreter was listening in and translating for us). Over the radio they began to talk about the fact that they could see Israel with us and what they would do to him if they caught him – he was clearly well known to them for them to pick him out from an eighty-man patrol. When we told him what they were saying he just smiled and carried on. That was the type of character he was and I had a great deal of respect for him.’
It would be wrong to condemn the entire police force as an incompetent and corrupt organization – that was almost the whole picture but not quite. There were a few commanders of quality who often demonstrated outstanding bravery which within the British Army would have been worthy of official recognition. But it was clear that officers like Daoud and Israel were the exception rather than the rule. Within weeks of arriving in Nad-e’Ali, Colonel Walker knew that he would have to invest a great deal of time and effort in improving the local police if he was to make headway in the battle for hearts and minds.
Nad-e’Ali is a large, highly populated area of central Helmand. It covers an area of 250 sq km and has a population of around 200,000. Colonel Walker’s battlegroup numbered 1,500 men, which gave him just six men for each square kilometre of ground.
It was clear almost immediately to the Grenadier Guards that Nad-e’Ali was not a hotbed of insurrection; instead the Taliban exploited local grievances between the farmers and some of the more powerful figures in the community. The Taliban offered an alternative, and possibly more secure, existence which, in some cases, managed to capture the public’s imagination. The local population had relatively simple demands – they wanted to be able to farm safely by day and night and have freedom of movement within the district – and they would ultimately support whichever side could deliver.
By the time the Grenadiers arrived in September 2009, the insurgents had managed to create a series of screens and guards which kept ISAF troops away from the people the Taliban were trying to control. Colonel Walker explained to me how he set about the task of separating the local people from the Taliban and making life more secure for them. ‘We had to prove to the people that the Afghan government was more effective at providing for their needs than the Taliban were. We had to make them active participants in the success of their community. Everything we did would be done by, with and through the Afghans. Each of my six company groups were tasked to protect the community of the main population centres, which we had asked the governor to identify, and then we set about creating freedom of movement between them to stimulate the return to normality.
‘The second part of the plan was to work with the Afghan security forces and merge ourselves into one single entity with the single purpose of defeating the insurgents. The last object of the plan was to defeat the insurgents when we met them. One of our greatest concerns was civilian casualties. We observed and were told that the insurgents would deliberately seek us out in a fight to goad an over-reaction in order to kill civilians, so I had to ask the men to react with courageous restraint when attacked by insurgents, so as to reduce the risk of civilian casualties, and often they would have to walk away from a fight. But I did ask them to observe the enemy’s vulnerabilities and their predisposition to set patterns in our area, a crime I would not tolerate among my own soldiers but which the Taliban were happy to tolerate, and thus we would try and seek to discredit the Taliban fighters in the eyes of the community they would claim to be protecting. By discrediting the Taliban you create the conditions for reconciliation and reintegration. So the rules were pretty simple: don’t kill civvies and ruthlessly pursue the insurgents on our terms.’
If the strategy was to succeed, the Grenadiers would have to work with and develop the capability of the police and, most importantly, get the public to trust them. One of the areas where they began this process in earnest was in the hamlet of Shin Kalay, which is sited on one of the main transit routes into the district centre, about 2 km west of the main British base. The local police commander was corrupt and brutal and had almost single-handedly managed to turn the entire population towards the Taliban. He was replaced by the senior police commander in the district, but the police unit had failed to build a working relationship with the local population, who had started to drift towards supporting, or at least accepting the presence of, the Taliban.
Colonel Walker set about taking the Taliban’s influence away from the district centre, clearing a route to the Nahr-e-Burgha canal, and building a protected community around Shin Kalay. These changes would allow the Grenadiers to build a central belt of prosperity that would then serve as a example to the rest of the district of the advantages of going along with their government.
In addition Colonel Walker decided to embed elements of his tactical headquarters within the police unit in Shin Kalay, who would act as mentors for the officers and help them win the trust and respect of the locals. The battlegroup’s tactical headquarters was composed of a mixed bunch of soldiers with a variety of different skills whose role on operations was to ‘fight’ the battle by establishing a communications network, assist with casualty evacuation, ammunition resupply and prisoner handling, as well as providing a bodyguard for the commanding officer.
WO1 Darren Chant, as leader of the small force at Blue 25 on the outskirts of Shin Kalay, was a man who set high standards and demanded that the battalion’s officers and men adhere to them. On a previous tour of Afghanistan in 2007 he carried a wounded soldier in full kit for 2 km across uneven ground, all the while chatting about drinking, fighting, and his beloved Inkerman Company. Two members of the Royal Military Police, Corporals Steven Boote and Nicholas Webster-Smith, were also part of the team. Also present was Sergeant Matthew Telford, the regimental police sergeant, who was effectively the second-in-command of the patrol base and was known as ‘the daddy’. ‘If you had a problem you went to see him and it would get sorted, and it worked the other way too. If he had a problem he would come and see you. He was a giant of a man,’ recalled Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, 31, a veteran of twelve years’ service, another member of the team. The Grenadiers, like all Guards regiments, do not have the rank of corporal. The equivalent rank in the Guards is Lance Sergeant.
Also serving with the tactical headquarters were Lance Corporals Liam Culverhouse, William ‘Woody’ Woodgates, and one of the battalion’s Fijian soldiers, Lance Corporal Peniasi ‘Nammers’ Namarua. Junior members of the unit included Guardsman James Major, who had been with the battalion for just under a year and at just 18 was one of the youngest members of the unit, Guardsman Steve Loader and Guardsman Pete ‘Treacle’ Lyons.
When the Grenadier Guards arrived at the police compound, a former pharmacy, they were greeted by an ill-disciplined and shoddy bunch, some of whom wore police uniforms while others wore their own clothes. The compound was dirty and bullet-riddled. The police kept irregular hours, carried dirty weapons, were dishevelled, and clearly lacked respect for themselves and one another. Almost immediately Sergeant Major Chant began to stamp his authority on the situation. He explained to the commander that he was there to help and improve the police’s relationship with the locals, but it was clear to everyone, including the police, that life was about to change.
Forty-year-old Daz Chant was a physically imposing man with a huge character. Those who knew him said he was a ‘force of nature’ who was ‘cast from the original model of the Guards sergeant major’. He was ultra-fit and Para-trained, having once served with the Pathfinders, a specialist reconnaissance unit of 16 Air Assault Brigade. Within the battalion he was feared and loved in equal measure. He worked hard and played hard and expected everybody else to do the same. Back in Britain his wife, Nausheen, whom he had met at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst when she was a civilian administrator there and he was an instructor, was pregnant with their first child.
The arrival of Chant and his team was a life-changing event for the Afghan police. The ‘please yourself’ ethos which typified the core of the police’s command structure was over. The twelve-man police unit would report for duty every day, in uniform, looking smart – no arguments. Within a week the unit had been transformed. The compound ‘stood to’ every morning before first light, the police saluted Sergeant Major Chant whenever they saw him, but, most remarkably of all, their relationship with the local community began to change.
‘The sergeant major was in his element,’ recalled Colonel Walker. ‘He had the police eating out of his hand. He had turned this rag-tag bunch into a unit which was relatively well disciplined. They were turning up for work on time, in uniform, wearing the proper head dress, with clean weapons. He had managed to instil a bit of pride. He also managed to make an impact with the locals, who would come up to him and tell him their problems, calling him Mr Daz.
‘After about two weeks I told Sergeant Major Chant that I was going to need him back at the headquarters, I had other things for him to be doing, but he kept saying, “Just a few more days.”’
On that fateful November day at Blue 25, as the soldiers stood to at dawn they spotted some suspicious movement of civilians in a couple of empty compounds which had previously been used as Taliban firing points. They had patrolled down to the site a few days earlier and ringed the murder holes in the walls with white spray paint so that in the event of an attack they would be able to easily identify the firing positions.
The Taliban had launched a couple of attacks against the base in recent weeks and Daz Chant wanted to be ready for anything. As the dawn sun began to climb into the cloudless Helmand sky, the haunting sounds of the call to prayer echoed around the kalay. Rather than wait for the Taliban to attack, Daz decided to seize the initiative and quickly issued orders for a patrol down to the abandoned compounds. The patrol was fully ‘kitted up’ and prepared for anything the Taliban might throw at them. But an extensive search of the compounds found nothing. Whoever had been there had gone. With the excitement over, the soldiers withdrew back to the base and began their usual morning routine. The British soldiers washed and shaved and had their breakfast of Army rations and hot, sweet tea, followed by a first cigarette of the day for those who smoked.
After breakfast Lance Sergeant Baily and Sergeant Telford recced a set of emergency helicopter landing sites close to the base which could be used if a casualty evacuation proved necessary. The location of these sites would be changed every few days just in case they were identified by the Taliban and booby-trapped with IEDs.
At around 9 a.m. Daz Chant and his men went out again to picket, or guard, the main route to allow a British Immediate Replenishment Group, a supply convoy of armoured vehicles, to safely pass through Shin Kalay. But on this occasion the police refused to go on patrol with the soldiers. Such acts of petulance were nothing new. Afghan soldiers and police officers alike would often refuse to go out on patrol with the British soldiers, usually claiming they were too tired. Route clearances are long and boring but always potentially dangerous. A route must be cleared of IEDs before a convoy can pass through, and it was little surprise that the police had no interest in joining the soldiers. The Grenadiers used to call the practice of guarding the route ‘street lining’ in reference to their ceremonial duties back in London, where they would stand at attention on either side of the road waiting for a Royal cortège to pass.
While the soldiers were picketing the route, Sergeant Telford and Lance Sergeant Baily were preparing a lesson on how to use trip flares. The device uses the light of the flare to illuminate an area of tactically important ground, such as a track or a stream crossing. The flare ignites when a wire ‘guarding’ an area of ground is ‘tripped’.
Daz was keen for the soldiers to receive some sort of military training every day to ensure boredom wouldn’t set in and to keep the soldiers sharp. The lessons was planned to take place at around 3 p.m., when the soldiers had finished lunch and completed some general duties. Just before the patrol returned, Lance Sergeant Baily, the tactical headquarters signaller, who was responsible for all communications, had noticed that one of his radio antennae was broken. The only way of establishing communication with the main base was to move the radio set onto the roof and hope for a better signal.
The relationship between the soldiers and the police had been pretty good. But there was one individual, named Gulbuddin, whose behaviour and attitude had started to irritate some of the soldiers, especially Lance Corporal Culverhouse. Gulbuddin was likeable enough but had the annoying habit of grabbing some of the soldiers’ backsides, which on two occasions had almost led to a fight. His behaviour forced Sergeant Major Chant to have words with the police commander. On one occasion the Afghan grabbed Culverhouse from behind and tried to force him to the ground. The lance corporal reacted angrily and a scuffle broke out which only came to an end when Sergeant Telford stepped in.
After lunch Lance Sergeant Baily, who by now had established a radio link with the battalion headquarters, was joined on the roof by Lyons and the two RMP corporals, Steven Boote and Nicholas Webster-Smith, and the four of them shared a welfare box of goodies such as cheese and onion crisps, biscuits and boiled sweets sent to the troops by members of the Women’s Institute. It was a sunny, late autumn day and for a few moments the soldiers forgot about the war, the constant fear of death and the Taliban as they relaxed together. The talk was of home leave, wives, girlfriends and the English football premiership.
Baily stayed up on the roof, leaning against a wall reading a well-thumbed paperback while keeping an ear open on the radio. Down in the small courtyard below the soldiers began to assemble for the lesson, sitting on a small wall which had become the communal gathering place. In one of the buildings where the troops slept, Lance Corporal Culverhouse and some of the other soldiers were having a competition to see who could catch the most mice. Then, without warning, the killing began.
A volley of machine-gun fire split the still afternoon air. Another longer burst followed, then another and another. The deafening sound seemed to fill the compound and could even be heard at FOB Shawqat, nearly 2 km to the east.
Daz Chant was the first to die. It is thought that he was less than 2 ft away from Gulbuddin, who moments earlier had been on guard duty, when the Afghan fired the first volley. The burst struck Chant in his unprotected flank. Assuming they were secure within the confines of the compound and among comrades, none of the soldiers was wearing body armour. Sergeant Telford, 37, died next, killed almost instantaneously by the same burst of fire from Gulbuddin. Steve Boote, 22, was shot through the head in a second burst of fire and also died. Young Jimmy Major, 18, had also been hit several times and was close to death, as was 24-year-old Nicholas Webster-Smith.
Gulbuddin fired burst after burst into the bodies of the dead and the wounded before moving into the troops’ sleeping quarters. The soldiers instinctively ran for their weapons when he burst through the door and fired another burst from his AK-47 into the corridor. Russian-made 7.62-mm short rounds ricocheted off walls, causing even more chaos and confusion.
Lance Corporal Culverhouse was hit six times in the first burst, with bullets striking him in the head, both arms and both legs. Lance Corporal Woodgates, Guardsmen Lyons, Bone and Loader and Lance Corporal Namarua were also hit by the same lethal volley. They didn’t stand a chance.
‘I remember getting hit in the face with something and I remember shouting and swearing,’ recalled Lance Corporal Culverhouse, who lost an eye in the attack. ‘I remember saying, “Fucking hell, what was that?” and I covered my face and turned around to see the back of an Afghan, one of the police officers, shooting the lads. It just all went so fast, and then when he saw me he just basically unloaded a magazine, firing at me. He only managed to hit me six times. Thank God.’
Culverhouse was lying face down in a bloody, crumpled heap on the ground when Gulbuddin walked over to him. The wounded soldier, by now in agony, squeezed his eyes shut tight, held his breath, and prayed.
‘The guy came and checked that I was dead. I heard his footsteps and I could hear dust being kicked away from his feet. And then it stopped, and then it went back, so I don’t know what he was doing at the time. I know he must have been checking I was dead because he stood over me. When I was playing dead, I was thinking, he’s going to shoot me again, he’s going to shoot me again. But he didn’t.’
Up on the roof, Lance Sergeant Baily’s initial thought was that either the compound was being attacked by someone very close or one of the soldiers had opened fired at an insurgent.
‘I was a bit confused because when you come under fire you usually get a crack where the bullet passes close by, but I didn’t get any of that. I sent an initial contact report to HQ: “Contact. Wait, out.” That’s when the screaming started. I heard screaming downstairs and I thought, someone’s giving orders down there, but then it became apparent that it was a painful scream, a really agonizing, grating scream, the sort of thing you hear when someone’s in a lot of pain. It will live with me for ever.
‘The best thing that I could do was to stay on the roof until someone tells me what has happened. As the radio operator my job is to stick by the radio come what may. I’m the link to the outside world and, apart from anything else, I had left my body armour, helmet and rifle in the ops room downstairs. Then there was another burst, this time from inside the accommodation. That’s when I thought, fucking hell, someone’s inside and they are shooting. At first I thought the Taliban had managed to get inside the base and were attacking the soldiers. It was really confusing and you can imagine the sense of panic.
‘I dived into the sangar behind me and the guy on duty was armed with a general-purpose machine gun, I saw his rifle behind him, so I grabbed hold of it and waited for the Taliban to attack us. Then one of them came up the stairs and said, “One of the ANPs has just gone mad and is shooting everybody. We need medics. People have been hit.” I got straight onto the radios and began feeding the information back to the headquarters.’
The whole shooting incident lasted around thirty seconds. A thin veil of blue gun smoke hung over the central courtyard. Nine of the sixteen British soldiers were dead or injured.
By this stage Gulbuddin had already fled the compound and disappeared into the surrounding countryside, leaving in his wake a scene of bloody chaos. Neither the British troops nor their police counterparts had time to react. Many of those injured had not even realized that they had been shot by a member of the police. Shortly after Gulbuddin fled, the Taliban began shooting at Blue 25, an act which has led to the suggestion that Gulbuddin was a Taliban agent and the attack was part of a well-coordinated plan. There is no real evidence to support such a claim and the Taliban could have simply been responding to the sound of shooting inside the base.
Meanwhile, in the area where the soldiers slept, one of the beds had caught fire. A round had ignited something in one of the rooms and ammunition was starting to explode. There was a real possibility of a major fire breaking out. Fuel jerry cans were close by but further damage was prevented by one of the interpreters, who grabbed the cans and moved them to another room.
Up in the sangar, Pete Baily sent a request for medics. He also sent one of the soldiers down to the scene of the crime to find out the full extent of the casualties. ‘I needed to know who had been hit and where. I needed that sort of information so that I could get the ball rolling. At this stage I still didn’t know that we had fatalities.’
When the soldiers returned to Baily, they broke the news that Sergeant Major Chant was dead. ‘I was in a different world at that time,’ Baily recalled. ‘It was like being hit with a sledgehammer. It just didn’t seem real. One second everything was normal, the next there was chaos and death – it was that quick. I was reeling. Nothing made sense. The thought going through your mind was, this isn’t real, it can’t be happening. I thought, now I’m in charge, and I was terrified. My initial instinct was to man that radio and get any information I could back to the headquarters – that was my job. At one point it was like a training session where you are suddenly hit with all of these different scenarios to see how you would react. It just felt like that, it was unreal.’
Daz Chant and Sergeant Telford had been killed instantly. Guardsman Major hung on for a little while longer. He had been hit in the torso but a bullet had passed through his head. His friend, Guardsman Alexander Bone, had tried to keep him alive but his wounds were simply too grave. Corporal Boote had also been shot through the head and had died instantly. Despite sustaining severe injuries, Corporal Webster-Smith made it onto the helicopter, but died later.
Lance Corporal ‘Woody’ Woodgates was the most seriously injured. One bullet had hit him in the leg and two more had hit him in the lower back and exited his body through the stomach. ‘He was carried upstairs and placed in the sangar,’ Lance Sergeant Baily explained. ‘The whole situation was still really confused and the rooftop was the safest place to be. The gate was open, the police had gone, we had mass casualties and there was always the chance of a follow-up attack. The only thing going through my head was: get the guys to cover their arcs [of fire], look after the wounded, and pretty much wait for the cavalry to arrive. Woody was in a really bad way and at one stage I didn’t think he was going to make it. He was in a lot of pain and all the medical kits were downstairs. He was screaming for water and morphine and was drifting in and out of consciousness. I put Woody in the sangar on his own because he was the most seriously wounded and I had one guy looking after him. I kept talking to him, encouraging him to hold on, telling him he was going to be OK. At one point he stopped talking. I had thought he was gone, dead. I was shouting out his name and then I went to have a look in the sangar. There was blood everywhere but he was still alive.
‘At that stage I wasn’t really sure how many dead and injured there were. Liam was downstairs, he was too badly wounded to be moved, and one of the terps [interpreters] stayed with him. I was really scared at the time and I just grabbed hold of that radio like it was a lifeboat and started passing over all the information. I sent the message to the headquarters that Sergeant Major Chant was dead. He had his own callsign, which was “Mongoose 99 Charlie”. I sent the message “Mongoose 99 Charlie is down”, which meant that the sergeant major was dead, then I sent “Mongoose 96 is down”, which was Sergeant Telford. I was just in automatic mode. I knew that the HQ would want to know as much as possible; they needed to know who was killed and injured and it was down to me to pass on as much info as possible.
‘The radio operator at the other end was fantastic, he was very calm and simply said, “Yep, Roger.” He didn’t panic at all. Every time I sent over details of the dead and injured I just got a “Roger” – and that’s what I needed. God knows what they thought was happening in the ops room, it must have been mayhem. I can’t remember a lot of what I said or what I did. The adrenalin was pumping and things happened so quickly, but I do remember passing over the callsigns of the dead.’
Back at Shawqat the news was greeted with disbelief, but immediately, like a well-oiled machine, the operations officer and his team began organizing the casualty evacuation. An emergency air medical evacuation request was sent to Camp Bastion informing the hospital that there was a mass-casualty situation with at least four dead and four T1 – the highest level – casualties with multiple bullet wounds.
The order was simultaneously given for the soldiers from the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team, the OMLT, pronounced ‘omlet’, who formed the Quick Reaction Force (QRF), to charge down to Blue 25 to assist with the casualty evacuation and to help in the event of a full-scale Taliban attack.
Lieutenant Colonel Walker was out visiting another checkpoint when he was told that there had been a contact at Blue 25. The colonel’s convoy was only 5 km away from the incident but the threat from IEDs buried along most of the transit routes effectively meant that it would take at least an hour to reach the stricken troops. In November 2009, as it is today, only routes which are overwatched by ISAF troops, the police or the Afghan Army are effectively risk-free. All others must have every inch checked by troops equipped with mine detectors. Any IEDs discovered are then ‘marked and avoided’ or cleared in situ. There was no ATO in the commanding officer’s convoy – being such a rare asset, the ATO and his IED disposal team were already deployed on another operation.
Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Colonel Walker, who was clearly still shaken by the deaths of his soldiers, told me, ‘We heard over the radio that there was a contact at Blue 25. It took two or three seconds to sink in and I thought, damn, that’s my team. We were told that it was under attack and I felt, well, if it’s under attack, I know the position, it’s fortified, the boys will be in it, the sergeant major will be all over it – I’m happy. Patrol bases and checkpoints were being attacked pretty much every day so when the contact report came over it wasn’t really anything to worry about – it wasn’t an unusual event.
‘I was almost inclined to say, “OK, fine, no matter, give me an update when it’s over.” Then we were told that it was serious and that there were casualties. We immediately headed off [towards Blue 25] and then it came over the radio that there were ISAF dead, which is just chilling when you hear that as a commanding officer.
‘It trickled in that there were three dead and that it was a mass-casualty situation, which sounded horrific. Then we were told that there were four dead and the remainder were seriously injured and the evacuation was taking place. At that point your heart just sank. We were only 5 km away, but on these roads, with the threat of improvised explosive devices, that is around forty-five minutes to an hour away.
‘So we made our way down and going through your mind is the worst – you’re asking yourself, who’s dead? I knew there were four dead and I knew that they had been shot from inside the base. But that was all I knew.’
The scene within the courtyard resembled a slaughterhouse – four dead soldiers lying down together, with gaping wounds caused by the effect of a high-velocity round at close range. The soldiers who witnessed the carnage were almost paralysed with shock.
Lance Sergeant Baily recalled, ‘It was surreal. Something in me took a step back and let the training kick in. When the lads told me that the sergeant major and Sergeant Telford were dead something in me just said, “You’re in charge now, mate,” so I got on with it. So I detailed guys out in their firing positions and waited for the operational mentor and liaison team to arrive. When they got there I made sure they knew where the emergency helicopter landing site was – the helicopter was inbound at that point. I was also on the radio for the whole time. When the chopper came, we covered the arcs to make sure that the insurgents weren’t about to attack the casualty evacuation. When the helicopter did arrive there was some sporadic gunfire from a tree line a few hundred metres from the base, but it was short-lived and had no effect.’
The OMLT medic arrived and immediately set about categorizing the wounded into those who would survive and those who were close to death. He also had to confirm that those who had been assumed to be dead were actually dead. Even for a trained medic the scene was shocking.
Lance Sergeant Baily described the courtyard of the compound where the killings took place as a ‘scene out of a murder movie’. ‘It was absolutely horrific – those memories will never leave me. There was blood everywhere and kit all over the place. The dead were just lying where they fell.’
The need now was to get the seriously injured back to Camp Bastion as quickly as possible. The living were the priority, not the dead; they would have to wait. The most seriously injured, Lance Corporal Woodgates, Lance Corporal Culverhouse and Corporal Webster-Smith, who was by this stage very close to death, were the first to be extracted by helicopter. The rest of the injured were taken back to FOB Shawqat in an armoured Pinzgauer vehicle, at which point it was discovered that one of the bullets had nicked an artery in Lance Corporal Namarua’s leg and he had started bleeding profusely, but the blood flow was quickly stemmed by the medics who had arrived with the OMLT troops.
Lance Sergeant Baily and those not injured then began the process of clearing the rest of the rooms in the compound to make sure that there were no other gunmen hiding. ‘After we cleared the rooms, I had to go through a list of all the guys we had at the base and categorize them as either dead, injured or alive. I was pretty much on autopilot at that stage. The guys who had survived uninjured were sitting around smoking. They were very quiet, I don’t think anyone was speaking. One of the guys looked at me and I said, “Are you all right?” and he broke down, so I went over to him and gave him a hug. It was the only thing I could think of at the time. I then looked at the terp and he started crying too, and I gave him a hug as well. I thought to myself at that stage, I can’t cry now, I’ve got to keep it together for these guys.’
Meanwhile Colonel Walker headed straight for his headquarters, where on arrival he was met by the senior major, Andrew James, who had known and served with Daz Chant for the past eighteen years.
Colonel Walker continued, ‘I was met by the Senior Major when I arrived back at Shawqat. The look on his face told me everything and he said that the sergeant major was dead. It was a desperate blow, but by that stage I somehow had kind of expected that to be the case; no one had mentioned his name before that. And then he explained that Sergeant Telford had been killed, a very gentle man, and that one of the [Royal Military Police] corporals had been killed and that Guardsman Major had been killed.
‘Jimmy Major had just joined us and was going to be 19 in a couple of days’ time, and this was his first tour. Then later, some time after, I learned that the second RMP corporal had died, and your heart sinks. It was a treacherous act, it was monstrous. Gulbuddin was a man the sergeant major had helped train and they were killed then, when they were unarmed and off their guard. So you take a pause, you take a breath, and realize you have got to take control of the situation and deal with the living.’
Colonel Walker went down to the regimental aid post and visited the casualties, during which time the survivors began to arrive back at the main base. The injured and some of the survivors were in a state of shock; others became very emotional as the enormity of what had just happened began to sink in.
The colonel, who was originally commissioned into the Irish Guards, had come to rely heavily upon Sergeant Major Chant, whom he described as ‘my conscience, my right-hand man’. He went on, ‘From the first day that I took over command of the battalion through to the day the sergeant major died I would consult him on every significant decision concerning soldiers or the regiment.
‘The tragedy is that as I was going through the formalities of writing up notes on the incident my instinct was to turn to the sergeant major and say, “Right, what do we do about this?” But obviously he’s not there and that’s when you realize you are on your own at that point.
‘I missed him very, very quickly and I still do, but for the battlegroup he was a really big personality and this will come out in the telling as people remember him. He has left us a great legacy; every word he said will be remembered. Yes, he was a living legend, but my God now he is preserved.’
Back in the safety of the camp the survivors had to relive the horrific events by writing formal statements which would form the basis of an inquiry by the Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch.
It was at this stage that Lance Sergeant Baily came close to breaking down for the first time since the attack. ‘I was writing down what had happened and I looked up and one of my mates from the signal platoon walked in. He had this moustache he had been growing and because I had been away for two weeks I hadn’t seen it. I looked up at him and I was just on the cusp of crying when I noticed the moustache and I just burst out laughing and said, “What the hell is that?” It was literally a “laugh or cry moment”.
‘There have been a couple of times when I came very close to crying but I just got a grip of myself and said, “No, not yet.” I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t let it affect me until I get home. I told my wife what had happened on the phone before the news broke, and said, “This has happened but don’t worry, I’m OK.”
‘That night when I went to bed, I closed my eyes and I was back on the roof again and I was thinking what a complete idiot I was for not having my body armour and helmet. I did get to sleep and there have been a few nights when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve spoken to a few people about events but really only when I felt that I needed to. Sergeant Telford was a good friend and I knew how hard losing a good friend was going to be. I had known him since I joined the Army and I have lost other friends before – two were killed on our last tour here in 2007. Having been through that experience before, I knew that I had just got to crack on and do my job.’
Slowly the news began to circulate that Corporal Webster-Smith had also died and that Lance Corporal Woodgates was in a very critical condition. Many of the soldiers who knew the dead were reduced to tears, while others were angry and felt a sense of deep betrayal that a police officer could cold-bloodedly murder men who had been helping him bring law and order to his country. There were fears that some soldiers might exact some form of retribution on members of the police. But the Grenadiers reacted with the utmost professionalism. There was no reaction, no calls for retribution, just a deep sense of personal loss.
The wounded were soon confronted by mixed emotions: elation at their survival but also guilt arising from the belief that they may have been able to do more.
Guardsman Loader, who a month earlier had lost one of his best friends when Guardsman James Major was killed, was mystified as to how he survived the attack with just a single bullet wound to the hand. ‘I don’t know how we managed to get out of that situation and still manage to be here, all right, talking and walking. I have never, ever seen so much blood in my entire life, all over the floor, all over me, all over my legs, all over my hands. It’s lumps of blood. I’ve never seen lumps of blood before like I did then.
‘It’s hard to explain, I just really do not know how we survived. Someone must have been watching over us. Because I thought that was it. So many times, at so many points, I thought that was it. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Every single move that I made, the thought before it was, what if I do this and I run into him? I mean, so many thoughts of, what if I do this and because of this it’s the reason that I die today? So there was so much going through my head, my whole body was in overload. I didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what to do.’
Lance Corporal Namarua, who had been hit twice and was incapacitated, also pretended he was dead as the policeman ran around shooting. ‘That’s when my mind started going about my little one and my wife, and have I done enough, you know, with the insurance,’ said Nammers in the days after the attack. ‘I was the last one to get shot, it’s like my fault for not getting the bloke. I feel guilty for not doing anything. You know, I should have killed him. I should have killed him that day.’
Guardsman Lyons, who had also been shot in the hand, said it was just luck that he survived and others didn’t. ‘You know it’s just the luck of the draw, whether it’s you or not. And this time I got lucky. That’s what it comes down to, just luck.’
Despite the tragic events of 3 November there was no time for the soldiers to mourn and little time to dwell on the events of that day: life was simply too busy. The soldiers needed to remain focused, because lives depended on it. When I arrived at the base twenty-four hours after the attack there were no outward signs of the tragedy except that the Union Jack was flying at half-mast and the names of the dead had already been added to a plaque in a courtyard close to the operations room. I assumed, wrongly, that the soldiers’ morale would be at rock bottom but there was nothing to indicate the trauma of forty-eight hours earlier. It was only when I spoke to individual soldiers that the pain of recent events bubbled to the surface and eyes became watery with grief.
The incident led to a cull of poor policemen, and there were a lot of them. Three senior commanders, all known to be corrupt, were dismissed and a massive round of drug testing was undertaken. All those who tested positive were sacked. After the cull, just thirty-five serving police officers remained in the whole of the Nad-e’Ali district. By the following March a new police training college had been established in the area and over 500 new officers were trained. Despite some advances, however, corruption and drug abuse are still endemic in parts of Helmand, the police force is still largely illiterate, and public trust in the organization remains low.
Suddenly the vehicle against which I am leaning thunders into life and someone shouts, ‘Be ready to move in five minutes.’ I stand to put on my body armour, tighten the chin-strap of my helmet, and wait to be assigned a vehicle for the move.
The hour-long delay seems to have heightened the tension among the search team. The casual confidence of Brimstone 45, who a few days earlier breezed through their final mission, is absent. Apprehension is etched on the faces of all the soldiers. The younger members of the team look slightly lost and have an awkward demeanour. There is no banter, no horseplay. The troops’ pristine uniforms and pallid complexions only seem to exaggerate their vulnerability to what awaits them beyond the wire. All eight know they are about to enter a war zone, where the threat is deadly and hidden and there is every chance that not all of them will make it back home in six months’ time.