3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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who were in the town were expected to be able to put up.
The laconic Giles Timms set off with about half his men. They were pleased to be doing something definite at last. The reports suggested that they would meet strong resistance from the Taliban on arrival. When they landed in Now Zad on 22 May, everything was calm. The smiling chief of police was there to escort them in. At the police station there was little evidence of an epic battle. ‘There was a reasonable amount of brass and empty cartridge cases lying around,’ said Timms. ‘But there was no real evidence that Taliban had tried to make a concerted effort to take the place.’
Now Zad seemed to be dealing with the crisis admirably. It was ‘a bustling little market town. Not every single shopfront was open for business but maybe two-thirds were.’ They undertook an initial vehicle patrol through town. ‘We got some funny looks, some scowls from people. But we didn’t get taken on. It was just like a normal market town and still was when we left.’
‘B’ Company stayed for twelve days. They got to work building up the defences of the police station, which sat on the main street, refreshing themselves with Zam Zam, a sickly, strangely addictive soft orange drink. They were starting more or less from scratch. The existing fortifications amounted to no more than a few rice sacks filled with dirt. The police contingent had been in the habit of standing at their posts for only half an hour each evening before retiring to smoke dope. They were all from elsewhere in the province, Lashkar Gah and Gereshk. Their wages were poor and they often went unpaid. Many failed to return after going off on leave. ‘They were pretty much a joke really,’ said Timms. ‘The moment we arrived they said, “We are glad you are here, we can sleep now,” and took no further part in defending their district centre.’
Corporal Chris Prosser of Support Company, who went with Timms’s men, felt some sympathy for them. They were, at least, ‘trying to do something for their own country’. The Paras built six sangars. They put Afghan policemen alongside them on the front gate so the people of the town could see that this was a joint effort. Despite the apparent normality, there was an undercurrent of sinister activity in the town. Intelligence reports warned that the Taliban were watching the new arrivals. ‘They were basically dicking us,’ said Prosser. ‘Trying to work out the layouts, how many people we had, what sort of weapons, basically the general set-up in Now Zad.’
One night there was a report that an attack was imminent and the garrison was ordered to stand to. But nothing developed, and on 2 June the Paras handed over to a small force from ‘D’ Company of the 2nd Battalion, The Royal Gurkha Rifles. Now Zad was to turn out to be a much hotter assignment than the Gurkhas’ original task of protecting Camp Bastion. When ‘B’ Company returned later that summer, the place was unrecognisable. ‘It was a complete war zone,’ said Timms. ‘Nobody was there any more. The shops were shut. A lot of the buildings had been demolished by air strikes.’
By answering the Afghan government’s distress signal, the British were now committed to the defence of Now Zad. Tootal’s intention was to support the Afghan forces rather than to do their job for them. The day after ‘B’ Company’s deployment, despite the established risk of ambush, an enormous seventy-six-vehicle convoy was put together to deploy a fresh company of ANA soldiers to FOB Robinson near Sangin and take out those who were there. It was led by the CO of 7 RHA and boss of the OMLTs, David Hammond.
The job of screening the convoy along the 70-mile route from Bastion was given to Mark Swann and Patrols Platoon. ‘It was quite a tricky task because the vehicles kept getting stuck and it took twenty-odd hours to get up there,’ he said. When they finally arrived at FOB Robinson, Swann was handed another task. The Canadians ordered Colonel Hammond to press on the extra few miles to Sangin town itself. Once again, the Afghan government was claiming that disaster was imminent. The district centre, the administrative compound that was the symbol of its flimsy authority, was supposed to be under siege.
Hammond asked Swann to carry out an old-fashioned recce, probing forward to establish whether the Taliban were present, and if so, where exactly they were. Effectively, this meant driving around until they were shot at. After the long journey chaperoning the lumbering convoy, Patrols Platoon were exhausted. ‘My boys were absolutely chinned at this point,’ said Swann, ‘but we had to do it.’ The platoon was mounted in WMIKs, modified Land Rovers. The acronym stood for Weapons Mount Installation Kit, a reference to the rig that allowed a heavy Browning .50-calibre machine gun to be bolted on to the back. The man on the gun could swivel the weapon through 360 degrees and lay down a devastating stream of fire that could rip up anything short of a tank at a range of 1,300 yards. The firepower was further boosted by a 7.62mm GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun), which was operated by the vehicle commander from the passenger seat. The Rover’s 4.2-litre engine made it fast and powerful and its manoeuvrability was impressive if it was not too heavily laden. The WMIK looked like the descendant of the Vickers gun-toting jeeps driven by the Long Range Desert Group which operated in North Africa and was the precursor of the SAS. Swann and his men saw themselves as belonging to the same tradition.
It was the middle of the night when Patrols got their orders. The cover of darkness would be welcome. But it also increased the risk of running into one of the unmarked minefields left behind by the Soviet army. It was wiser to wait for first light, and the platoon took the very welcome opportunity to get their heads down for a few hours.
As they set off at dawn, intelligence warned that the Taliban were preparing an ambush. Swann altered course and set off on a dogleg, diverting from the straight route to town. They arrived at Sangin District Centre unharmed and called Lieutenant Colonel Hammond and the Afghans, telling them to follow the route they had taken. Swann had been impressed by the incident. He said later: ‘This was the point when I thought that this was not going to just be a few stray rounds being fired at me by some young lad trying to prove something. These people are organised.’
Hammond and the Afghans occupied the district centre and toured the police checkpoints. The local security forces denied that they were facing any serious threat from the insurgents. That did not mean that the Taliban were not there. The atmosphere seemed tense to Swann as he drove around Sangin. ‘People ran away when we approached. Through our optics we could see people in the distance getting down into what could only be described as firing positions. We couldn’t see the weapons so we didn’t engage … you saw people prowling.’
One of their Pinzgauer carriers broke down. The edgy atmosphere persuaded Swann to order his men to strip it and rig it with explosives. ‘We thought if we are attacked now we are going to have to leave this vehicle and we can’t leave it to them.’ These were the sorts of procedures associated with war fighting. At dusk a Chinook flew in to lift the ‘Pinz’ out.
The Paras were beginning to get a practical understanding of the sort of enemy they were facing. The Taliban had shown that they were determined. They were also tactically cunning and used their knowledge of the terrain to mount well-thought-out ambushes. Furthermore, they could count on a degree of support from local people. Some of this was extracted through coercion. But some, as the shoot-out on Route 611 suggested, was given willingly. All this gave the insurgents a robust self-confidence. The realisation was growing that they meant it when they boasted of driving the British out.
Back in Bastion, Stuart Tootal was growing increasingly concerned at the direction the mission was taking. The Now Zad diversion was unwelcome. It meant fixing troops that needed to be mobile if they were to function properly in one location. The need to resupply them would place a further strain on the helicopters. The battle group could not function without support helicopters. Helmand had few roads, which made land movement predictable and vulnerable to roadside bombs and ambushes. The troops would have to rely on the Chinooks to transport them around the battlefield, supply them with food and ammunition and get them back to the base hospital when they were wounded.
The Chinook was developed by Boeing as a heavy-lift aircraft and came into service in 1962. It is still in military and civilian use all over the world. The variant used by the RAF – the CH-47 – dated back to 1966. It is a big, blunt beast, nearly 100 feet long with twin engines and two 60-foot rotors throbbing in tandem. It can fly high, with a ceiling of 18,500 feet, which made it especially useful in mountainous Afghanistan.