1 Going Back

      He had imagined this moment often during the last two years. Now, after an hour-long climb along a rocky, sun-baked ridge line, it had arrived. Corporal Stuart Hale shielded his eyes from the mid-morning glare and looked down at the corrugated hillside. The slope was the colour of khaki, bare apart from a scattering of rocks. It was just like a thousand others that undulated across Helmand. There was nothing to show that it was here that his life, and the lives of several of his comrades, had been swept so traumatically off course.

      His mates left him alone to enjoy the satisfaction of having made it up unaided. It was cool up here after the baking heat of the valley, quiet too, the silence disturbed only by the occasional boom of mortars in Kajaki camp and the rustling noise the bombs made as they flew past.

      Eventually he spoke. ‘I was up there when I spotted them,’ he said, pointing to a crag above. ‘They looked like Taliban, and they seemed to be setting up a checkpoint to stop people on the road down there.’ That morning, 6 September 2006, he had grabbed his rifle and bounded down the hill to get a better look. When he reached a dried-up stream bed he hopped across without thinking. ‘Normally I jump with a two-footed landing’ cause that’s how you’re supposed to do it. A good paratrooper lands feet and knees together. But this time I got a bit lazy and just jumped with one foot.’ The lapse was a stroke of luck. It meant that only his right foot was blown off when he landed on the mine. The detonation was the start of a long ordeal for him and the men who went to his rescue. Four more soldiers were injured and two lost limbs. Corporal Mark Wright was killed.

      Hale was rescued after hours of muddle and delay. Back in hospital in Britain he was plunged into a new trauma. Recovering from surgery, he suffered vivid paranoid hallucinations. He believed the doctors were plotting to kill him and that his girlfriend was so horrified by his injuries that she was frozen with fear on the other side of the ward door, unable to face him.

      Eventually the nightmares passed. Hale did everything the doctors and physiotherapists asked, determined to regain as much as he could of the fitness he had been so proud of. Now, two years later, he was standing on the peaks above Kajaki, a welcome breeze drying the sweat on his face, after climbing 300 metres up a goat track on one real leg and one artificial one.

      In the summer of 2006, Stuart Hale was a private soldier, serving as a sniper in Support Company of the Third Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. 3 Para had formed the core of the battle-group tasked with bringing stability to the province of Helmand, which until then had been virtually ignored by the international force occupying Afghanistan. Helmand was a peripheral province, a pitifully backward corner of a very poor country. No one knew precisely what would happen when British troops got there. Certainly no one anticipated the storm of violence that blew up after the Paras’ arrival. From June onwards, all over the province, the soldiers were pitched into exhausting battles with bands of Taliban who fought with suicidal ferocity to drive them out.

      The British were soon stretched to snapping point. They found themselves stranded in remote outposts, dependent almost entirely on helicopters to get food and ammunition in and to take casualties out. At times it seemed they might be overrun. But, showing a bravery and determination that have hardened into legend, they clung on. Their courage was reflected in the medals that followed, a haul that included a VC, awarded to Corporal Bryan Budd, who died winning it. Another thirteen men from the battlegroup were killed. Forty more were seriously wounded.

      Now the Paras were back. Since they had bid a thankful farewell to Helmand in the autumn of 2006, three more British expeditionary forces had arrived, fought for six months, and gone home. In that time another fifty-four soldiers had been killed and scores more seriously wounded. The arrival of 16 Air Assault Brigade in the spring of 2008 put more troops than ever on the ground. They lived in fortresses planted near the main settlements and the rough roads that joined them together. They were squalid places, unsanitary, cramped and uncomfortable. But despite their gimcrack construction they looked as if they were going to be there for a long time.

      There was no end in sight to Britain’s Afghan adventure. Even the politicians who had launched the deployment into southern Afghanistan in a cloud of optimism admitted that. In the summer of 2006 the 3 Para Battlegroup had won virtually every encounter they had fought and killed many insurgents. No one knew an exact number but a figure of up to a thousand was mentioned. These were heavy losses for a small guerrilla force, living off the land and among the people. The beatings had forced them to change their tactics of reckless, head-on attacks. But they seemed as determined as ever to keep on fighting. As long as they did so there was little chance that progress would be made with the activity that the government said was the real point of the British deployment. The soldiers were there to make Helmand a better place, by building roads and schools and hospitals, but more importantly by creating an atmosphere free of fear within which Afghans could begin to take charge of their lives.

      Looking down from the ridge line towards Route 611, the potholed, rocky track that links the mud villages strung along the Sangin Valley, it seemed to Stuart Hale that morning that, if anything, things had gone backwards since he was last there.

      On the day he was wounded, he had decided to descend from the OP and engage the Taliban himself with his sniper rifle, rather than calling in a mortar strike on them. ‘I didn’t want there to be any risk of collateral damage because there were women shopping, kids playing,’ he said. ‘The place was really thriving.’ Now he looked down at the silent compounds, the empty road and the deserted fields. ‘No one wants to live here any more,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s a ghost town.’

      The area is called Kajaki Olya. It lies a few kilometres from the Kajaki dam, a giant earthwork that holds back the Helmand river. British troops had been sent to Kajaki in June 2006 to help protect it from attacks by the Taliban. The insurgents saw it as an important prize. Its capture would be a propaganda triumph that would also give them control of the most important piece of infrastructure in the region. The chances of them succeeding were tiny. In the regular squalls of violence that swept Kajaki it was the civilians who suffered most. The number of innocents killed so far in this Afghan war is not known, but it is many more than the combined total of the combatant dead. Soon, living close to Kajaki became too dangerous, even for the farming families whose customary blithe fatalism always impresses Westerners.

      But now it seemed that life was about to get better, not only for the people around Kajaki but in towns and villages all over southern Afghanistan. We were waiting for the start of a big operation, the high point of the British Army’s 2008 summer deployment. If it succeeded it would give much-needed support to the claims of the foreign soldiers that they were in Afghanistan to build and not to destroy. 16 Air Assault Brigade was about to attempt to realise a project that had been under consideration for two years. It had been postponed several times on the grounds that it was too dangerous, and probably physically impossible. The plan was to deliver the components for a turbine which, when installed in the dam’s powerhouse, would light up Helmand and carry electricity down to Kandahar to turn the wheels of a hundred new projects. It involved carting the parts on a huge convoy across desert and mountain and through densely planted areas of the ‘Green Zone’ where the Taliban would be lying in wait. The Paras, together with a host of other British and