3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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‘Dodgy But Workable’. The Joint Tactical Air Controller (JTAC), Lieutentant Barry de Goede of the Household Cavalry, came to join him. But when they tried to get in contact with the aircraft in the area, the radio refused to work. ‘We were beating it, hitting it, taking it apart,’ said Hollingshead. Finally, de Goede managed to raise the Apaches and gave their coordinates. The Gurkhas signalled the air to identify their position and a few minutes afterwards the Taliban positions were raked from the air with 30mm cannon fire.
The next step was to retrieve the vehicles and get out of the wadi. Hollingshead picked five of his men to come with him and lay down covering fire for the drivers. ‘It was one of the proudest moments of my life,’ he said. ‘I said, “OK, you’re coming with me.” Then it was three, two, one, go.’ The young Gurkhas, some of them only nineteen years old, ran forward unhesitatingly, with bullets cracking over their heads and ricocheting off the rocks around them.
Rifleman Rai was determined to get back to his WMIK, and rounded up two others to help him. But moving towards it, they came under heavy fire and had to stop. A little later there was a lull in the shooting and he ran forward on his own. He got behind the wheel and the bullet-shattered windscreen and tried to turn the vehicle round but his path out was blocked by a ‘Pinz’. The temptation to panic was strong. ‘I calmed myself down and told myself it didn’t matter if I got shot,’ he said later.
As they worked forward, firing and manoeuvring, Hollingshead realised that he was way ahead of his men. Before him was a low, flat-roofed building. Something that ‘looked like a bundle of rags’ was lying in front of it. It took him a few seconds to realise it was the body of the RPG gunner who had been shot dead at the start of the fight. As he was taking this in, ‘this guy came skidding out of the building. He looked down at his mate on the ground. He hadn’t seen me’. Hollingshead raised his rifle to shoot. The fighter was wearing a long green dishdasha kaftan and a sparkly skullcap and carrying a Kalashnikov. He had a bushy beard and appeared to be about thirty. He looked up as Hollingshead pulled the trigger of his SA-80. But nothing happened. An empty cartridge case had jammed on ejection, blocking the chamber. He tried frantically to clear it, as bullets from the continuing firefight kicked dust around his feet.
His opponent was only 15 yards away. Hollingshead yelled for help, steeling himself for the burst of fire. No shot came. The man was having his own problems. His rifle had also failed him, and after fiddling with it for a few seconds he ran back into the building. Hollingshead finally cleared the stoppage and laid down fire to keep the gunman occupied while the last vehicles jolted their way out of the wadi. He would later laugh at the ‘Hollywoodesque’ nature of the encounter.
Afterwards, safely back in Now Zad, the Gurkhas relaxed for the first time. ‘Everyone was pretty elated,’ Hollingshead said. ‘We had all succeeded. No one had backed down, or done anything cowardly.’ They had taken only one casualty, an Afghan policeman who was shot in the stomach. It was all the more satisfying because the Gurkhas had not prepared for full-on war fighting of the sort they had just experienced. The company had been put together at short notice and had not practised more than basic infantry drills together. They were supposed to be guarding the camp. But they had been at the forefront of the first big fight of the deployment and they could feel proud of themselves.
While the fight was raging in the wadi, Patrols Platoon were also under fire. Sergeant Ray Davis and Lance Corporal Gav Attwell were in the first vehicles, leading the convoy to the cordon position, when they ran into a group of five fighters. This triggered a firefight that went on for forty-five minutes. The Apaches were called in again.
The helicopters were a British version of an American design and were awesomely destructive. They fired Hellfire missiles and 30mm cannon rounds with explosive tips. The systems were ‘slaved’ to a laser linked to the pilot’s retina. Wherever he looked, the weapon pointed. Like everyone else, Mark Swann, the Patrols OC, had never seen an Apache in action before, and the harsh ripple of the cannon fire took him by surprise. ‘It was cracking right over our heads and for a few moments I thought we were under heavy machine-gun fire,’ he said.
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