3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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machine. ‘Chinooks are the ultimate battlefield helicopter,’ said Flying Officer Chris Hasler of 18 Squadron RAF, who won a Distinguished Flying Cross piloting them. One of the squadron’s ships was over twenty-five years old and had seen service in the Falklands. Age hardly made any difference. Fixed-wing aircraft have a main spar running through the fuselage and wings that have a limited lifespan. Choppers go on and on. ‘Helicopters are almost like Lego sets,’ said Hasler. ‘You can bolt things on, take blades off, put in a new engine, but you still have the same frame. You can make a [Chinook] pretty new just by replacing some bits.’
The trouble was there were not enough of them. Seven were assigned to the task force, of which only five were serviceable at any one time, while the rest were in for maintenance. The heat and dust of Helmand made it a tough environment for rotary aircraft and regular checks were essential. The number of flying hours was restricted for safety reasons. In order to get the most use out of the helicopters, Tootal suggested that they be moved forward to Bastion from Kandahar where they were based. From the beginning the pilots spent most of their time at Bastion, accompanied by a small engineering detachment who lived in a tent alongside the machines, permanently caked in the dust that was kicked up every time a chopper flew in or out.
The Paras were thankful for the Chinooks and grateful to the crews who flew them. They only wished there were more of them. None was available. The decision to carry on spending the bulk of the RAF’s budget on fixed-wing fighter planes designed for a war with the Warsaw Pact countries which would never be fought had severely limited the air force’s ability to do the tasks that now made up most of its duties.
Tootal knew it was inevitable that his soldiers would have to respond to unforeseen events. But if there were too many of them, the battle group could end up as a solely reactive force and lose sight of its original stabilising and reconstruction mission. Tootal felt that the force was paying too much attention to Daoud’s demands and worried that local people would regard his soldiers simply as agents of the new governor. Daoud was unknown and untried. Bitter experience had taught the inhabitants to assume he was corrupt and self-seeking until he proved himself otherwise.
Even as Tootal was thinking this, another urgent request from Daoud was on its way. One of his key supporters, Haji Zainokhan, was in trouble. He was stranded in a village in the Baghran valley, about a hundred miles from Bastion in the north of the province, surrounded by Taliban who seemed intent on murdering him. On 24 May ‘A’ Company was sent to rescue him. They took off in two Chinooks with two Apaches hovering protectively alongside. Haji had got caught out while visiting some relatives. He had a bodyguard of twenty policemen, but felt they did not offer sufficient protection.
The helicopters flew low, following the contours of the river valleys. Given the reports of a Taliban presence it had been thought wise not to tell Haji when exactly they were coming, or how. Will Pike, leading ‘A’ Company, knew where the village was but not the precise location of their man. Just before they landed, they called him on his mobile satellite phone and told him to get his men to light a bonfire. The helicopters touched down into a scene of bucolic calm. ‘It was perfectly peaceful,’ said Hugo Farmer. ‘It was actually a very nice place.’ The chief and his entourage were loaded on and flown back to Bastion. He was, Pike remembered, ‘pretty chipper, pretty chuffed’. One of his police bodyguards was little more than a boy and seemed terrified of flying in a helicopter. ‘One would think that being left to the Taliban would be more frightening,’ Chris Hasler, who was flying one of the Chinooks, noted in his diary. ‘Each to his own, I suppose.’
The operation had gone off well but it was not what ‘A’ Company were supposed to be doing. Their energies were meant to be focused on delivering the Sangin effect, establishing the ‘ink spots’ that would bring stability to the province. ‘A’ Company was never to put the plan into practice. The ever-shifting dynamics of the Helmand mission were changing again. The Paras and the Taliban were about to collide.
On 4 June the Paras set off on what was billed as a ‘cordon and search’ operation. Their target was a mud-walled residential compound, 70 yards square, on the eastern outskirts of Now Zad. According to the sketchy information available, it was thought to be an ammunition and weapons dump, possibly a Taliban bomb factory and a safe house for insurgent commanders. The idea was to secure the compound, seize the materiel and grab any Taliban who might be there.
The job had been handed to them by the Americans. It was part of Operation Mountain Thrust, their ongoing hunt for ‘high-value’ Taliban and al-Qaeda targets. It seemed a relatively straightforward task. The intelligence brief warned that there might be some Taliban present, but not enough to pose a major threat. ‘Cordon and searches’ were a staple company-level activity in Northern Ireland. They had also been practised in exercises before the deployment. The terraced streets of Ulster and the empty desert of Oman, however, were very different propositions from the mud-brick mazes of Helmand. The operation was to turn into one of the epic clashes of the Paras’ tour, a six-hour fight in which virtually everyone involved got their first, hard look at the face of battle.
Altogether there were about a hundred men taking part. The mission would be led, once again, by ‘A’ Company, the ‘Ops One’ company at Bastion. 10 Platoon of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, garrisoned in the Now Zad district centre together with some Afghan police, and Patrols Platoon, who were in the area, were tasked with setting up an outer perimeter to seal off the area. Then ‘A’ Company would arrive by air to capture the compound. The Gurkhas would take the local district chief along with them to give the operation an ‘Afghan face’. Air power was on hand to come in and blast the enemy if needed, in the shape of A-10 jets and Apache helicopters. As it turned out they were to play a vital role.
This was a battle group operation and, as commander, Tootal went along with his headquarters team to oversee it himself. Even before he hit the ground, it was clear that the Taliban were waiting and eager for a fight. The Gurkhas had set off from the Now Zad district centre at 11 a.m. to establish their sector of the outer cordon around the target compound. They were expecting an uneventful day and thought they were unlikely to encounter anything more than a handful of fighters.
There were about thirty in the convoy, including eight or nine Afghan police. It passed through a village on the northern edge of a town called Aliz’ay, and along a wadi that led southwards. Rifleman Ananda Rai was driving the lead WMIK when they came across a small group of men who were apparently civilians. One of them broke away and ran into a house. Rai thought he had taken fright. But then he re-emerged carrying an RPG launcher. He ‘screamed and dropped to one knee’. The RPG streaked across the bonnet of the vehicle.
Rifleman Kieran Yonzon was providing ‘top cover’, manning the .50-cal. He saw the man with the grenade launcher but he was only a few yards away and Yonzon could not bring the heavy machine gun’s long barrel down to bear on him. Instead, he jumped down from his perch, snatched up his rifle and fired three shots, which killed the attacker. Another man popped up from behind a wall and fired fifteen or twenty rounds towards Yonzon.
Then unseen gunmen, crouching in the trees lining the far side of the wadi, opened up with more RPGs, a heavy machine gun and rifles. Lieutenant Paul Hollingshead, a twenty-four-year-old from Southport on Merseyside who had joined the Gurkhas after university, was three or four vehicles back in the convoy. He scrambled out of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover and started shooting back. Everyone was trying to get out of their vehicles to find cover and return fire. ‘It was very, very quick,’ he said. ‘If we’d stayed in the vehicles we would have been cut to shreds.’
It was the first time Hollingshead had been on the receiving end of an RPG. ‘They made the loudest bang I had ever heard,’ he said. Rounds from the heavy machine gun were smashing chunks out of the wall behind him.
The Apaches were hovering over the target compound about a mile away,