3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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to challenging circumstances, which includes having to decide when it’s appropiate to adopt a non-aggressive posture. They’re very good at it.’
But even after thirty-four years the events in Londonderry were still remembered. As he set off at the head of Patrols Platoon, the battalion’s reconnaissance unit, Captain Mark Swann was aware of the need to make decisions that ‘not only benefit your soldiers but will also reflect on you in the best way possible. People will say, “This bad thing happened in this village. Typical Parachute Regiment soldiers,” regardless of how we behaved before then. One incident would very quickly give us a bad reputation’.
‘A’ Company were fully committed to the mission. ‘We went there believing that this was a winnable situation,’ said Martin Taylor. ‘Yes, be prepared for very significant contact with the enemy. But we thought the vast majority of people would be on our side and we could win their trust and they would think perhaps the Taliban can’t help us and the British can.’
It was in Gereshk that the first attempts were made to reach out to the local population, and it was ‘A’ Company which was given the task. Gereshk was relatively prosperous by Afghan standards. In the calm that followed the overthrow of the Taliban, the UN had installed pumps that provided clean, fresh drinking water. There was also a hydroelectric plant that supplied energy to about five thousand legal subscribers and an unknown number who simply hooked up a line to the main cable. There was a thriving market and shops on the main street. In its time, it had seen foreign armies come and go. The dominant building was a crumbling fort where the British had held out for sixty days during the First Afghan War. The Paras would be operating from a Coalition base on the outskirts. When ‘A’ Company got there they found that the camp was still being built and they would, initially at least, have to function without an ops room. They were also unimpressed by the state of the sangars – the base’s defensive fire positions. ‘We set to work for the next month tearing things down and building things up,’ said one of the new arrivals. ‘The message was, the Parachute Regiment is here and we are going to start establishing our authority.’
The compound was on the north-west outskirts of Gereshk and was known as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Price. To get into the town meant crossing a major road, Highway One, which loops through southern Afghanistan from Kabul. ‘A’ Company started patrolling immediately. Troops were taken to the edge of town by vehicle and then continued on foot. Walking was considered safer than driving. You were mobile and presented a smaller target. The streets were narrow and if you were stuck in a Land Rover you were vulnerable to the suicide bombers who, it was thought, could be preparing to descend on the town. It also reduced the risk from IEDs, which had already been discovered on surrounding roads.
Stuart Tootal joined the first patrol on 29 April. The Paras’ arrival attracted great interest. The local people seemed reasonably friendly, especially the children. One child came out and offered a jug of cold water. Teenage boys and older men responded well to the soldiers’ carefully rehearsed few words of Pashto. Tootal visited the local hospital and police station and asked what could be done to help their security and provide for their needs.
Even though it was not yet summer, the temperature was 40 degrees Centigrade. Patrolling on foot, wearing body armour and carrying a weapon, ammunition and radios was very hot and heavy work. After two hours on the ground, Tootal noticed how the troops’ concentration and awareness of their surroundings faded as they coped with the effects of heat and fatigue. After nearly five hours, everyone on the patrol was thoroughly ‘licked out’.
The first encounter with the citizens of Gereshk had gone off well enough. But ‘A’ Company’s commander, Will Pike, was not convinced that the mood of the town was welcoming. ‘There was a volatility to the situation,’ he said. ‘I described it as “West Belfast with an Asian tinge”. The patrolling we did there was not dissimilar to what I had done in Belfast. It might seem benign. But there was an edge there.’
Moving slowly through the narrow streets, smiling and radiating good intent, the Paras began to notice that their progress was being marked by the sound of whistling. As they passed, they saw men whispering furtively into mobile phones. They soon suspected that they were being ‘dicked’. ‘Dicking’ was a term from Northern Ireland. It was the name given to the warning system operated by IRA sympathisers to let the gunmen know British troops were approaching. The Taliban were invisible. But the Paras now had little doubt that they were there.
Mark Swann was walking along with his interpreter at his side when a truck drove by
absolutely full of men in black turbans, brown trousers and dishdashas [the cotton nightshirt-like garments worn by Afghan males]. They had black beards and were wearing eyeliner – why I don’t know. The interpreter grabbed me and said, ‘Taliban, they are Taliban!’ I asked which ones and he said, ‘All of them.’ They drove through the middle of the patrol then shot off. As we turned the corner, we saw them sitting on top of the hill watching us. As we dog-legged left they also peeled off in the same direction.
It was not the Paras’ intention to initiate a confrontation with the Taliban. The rules of engagement stated they could shoot only when their lives were clearly threatened. Swann decided to get his men away as quickly as he could. He recalled later: ‘That’s when I thought, this is actually quite sticky.’
An incident on 1 May seemed to reinforce this impression. Stuart Tootal made another visit to the town for his first shura – council – with Gereshk officials and elders. The meeting was friendly. The district administrator, Abdul Nabi Khan, spelled out his main concerns: worries about security and the lack of decent schools and health facilities. Tootal had arrived at the administrator’s compound in an armoured ‘Snatch’ Land Rover. Soldiers from the patrols and sniper platoons had moved in the night before to secure the complex. As they left the meeting at midday, a warning came over the radio that a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives was on his way to try to catch the party as it left. This, Tootal recorded, ‘added a degree of … urgency to the extraction’. As they hurried away from the compound, the lead Snatch got stuck in an alleyway.
For a moment, chaos threatened. There were six vehicles in the convoy, trying to turn around on a sloping dirt path, now surrounded by a small crowd of curious children, while a Taliban car bomber was possibly bearing down on them. Tom Fehley, the officer commanding 2 Platoon of ‘A’ Company, was in charge. Very soon he had imposed some ‘grip’ on the situation and the vehicles turned round and moved off to the northern suburbs of Gereshk, where they formed a defensive ring and waited for Mark Swann and his men, who had been patrolling in the town, to catch up. They were making slow progress. The backstreets of Gereshk which they had to pass through to reach the rendezvous were ‘rat-runs, dead-ends, alleyways, things like that’.
Eventually, they linked up with the convoy. As they climbed aboard the vehicles to head back to base, ‘all of a sudden there was a burst of automatic fire’, said Swann. ‘I’m sure it was only from an AK rifle, but a burst of automatic fire in our general direction.’ Four or five bullets kicked up puffs of dust from some nearby walls. No one saw where they came from.
It was a classic ‘shoot and scoot’. No one was hurt and the decision was taken to extract immediately. By the standards of what was to come, the incident was barely worth recording. But the contact, in retrospect, took on a symbolic importance. It was a sign that no matter how positive the Paras’ relations with the local population and authorities might seem, there were men among them who wanted to kill them.
The news of the contact, minor though it was, galvanised the battle group. When Swann got back to FOB Price he was called up immediately by his friend Matt Taylor, the Battalion Ops Officer. They had been commissioned into the Paras at the same time and there was a friendly rivalry between them. ‘He was saying, “Right, don’t tell me, you’ve had a contact before me!”’ In the other companies there was some mild annoyance at the fact that it was ‘A’ Company which had been the first to come under fire. This, it was feared, would only boost its members’ already considerable opinion of themselves.
The flurry of excitement in Gereshk proved to be exceptional. The town remained relatively quiet throughout the