3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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the spirit of a people who, however incapable they might be of living together harmoniously, were united in their hatred of outsiders.
The Paras had known about the deployment for months. Rumours had been circulating since the previous summer and they had been officially ‘warned off’ to prepare to go in August 2005. They were used to false alarms. But this one sounded genuine. For many in the battalion this was the news they had been waiting for all their military careers.
Sergeant Craig Mountford was coming up for thirty-five when the buzz started gathering volume. He had started his working life as an apprentice welder in Stoke-on-Trent but had always liked the idea of army life. He had first heard about the Parachute Regiment through their exploits in the Falklands. He was attracted to them by an early reality TV show, The Paras, which followed a group of recruits from day one of basic training to acceptance or rejection. In 1989, aged nineteen, he joined up. So far, though, his operational experiences had been disappointing. ‘It was really frustrating,’ he said. ‘We weren’t getting a look-in. We were constantly being told – “Right, you are being stood by, you are going to go.” And we never went. This isn’t warmongering. You just want to do your job – go away on operations, to see what it is like, to experience it.’
In the spring of 2003 the second Gulf War seemed to offer great possibilities. In the end ‘it was just a case of securing a couple of oilfields, patrolling in Basra and that was it. We didn’t do any war fighting as such’.
With the news of the Afghanistan deployment, Mountford began to think again that he might finally see some serious action. ‘It was in all the papers. Mad Max country. The lawless Helmand province.’ But by now he was inclined to be sceptical of media prophecies. ‘They said the same about Iraq. Fighting through to Baghdad. Millions were going to be killed. Initially everyone thought it was going to be good, but then it began to die away. We started thinking, “It probably won’t come to anything. It probably won’t happen.”’
Iraq had been an anticlimax for most of those who had been there. Hugo Farmer went to Basra on his first deployment with the Paras in December 2005. He was unlikely to be satisfied with the sort of duties that awaited him. Farmer was twenty-six. He had had a stellar university career, graduating from Bristol with a double first in Chemistry and Law. His first ambition had been ‘to make as much money as possible’. The City snapped him up. It did not take long for him to decide that a career in corporate finance was not for him.
My life was pretty rubbish. There was very little satisfaction and lots of work that seemingly went nowhere, lots of people above me justfying their existence by creating heat and light but not actually doing anything substantial or proper. I would be in the office by eight a.m. Initially it wasn’t too bad. I would be gone by seven p.m. But then I switched teams and it was eleven p.m. You go home, shower, go to bed and you get up and it all happens all over again. You couldn’t guarantee you weren’t going to be in the office at the weekend.
Farmer felt he was ‘becoming a grey man’. He was haunted by the example of one of his colleagues, only a few years older, who had a wife and child and was saddled with the huge mortgage needed to buy the sort of house his status demanded. ‘He was a beaten man,’ he said. ‘He was resigned to the facts.’ There were lots like him, ‘treading the same old boardwalk, just getting richer and fatter and older. I thought to myself, “I need to change tack here. I need to do something interesting.”’
Farmer had no soldiers in his immediate family but knew some from university and thought they were ‘fun-loving, always doing interesting things’. There was a friend of the family who had joined the SAS. He thought to himself, ‘If he can do it then I can.’ A little research told him that 50 per cent of the SAS had started off in the Paras (the figure now is 58 per cent). He left his job even before he had been accepted at Sandhurst. He went there in January 2004, sponsored by the Paras, and arrived at ‘A’ Company under Will Pike in the early autumn of 2005.
Most of the time in Iraq, Farmer led 1 Platoon on patrols along the border with Iran. He found it ‘actually quite interesting’. The only real threat was from IEDs – improvised explosive devices made from artillery shells which the insurgents planted by the roadside and detonated remotely when a patrol passed by. There was an easy way of countering it. The patrols, operated in armoured modified Land Rovers, simply kept off the roads, an easy thing to do in the flat country bordering the Shatt al-Arab waterway which marked the Iraq–Iran frontier.
Their task was to stop Iranians sneaking in bombs, weapons, drugs or any other contraband. The border was long and porous and smuggling was part of the local economy. Farmer thought it ‘a very good introduction as to how to run a platoon on operations … It wasn’t high tempo by any stretch of the imagination but it was a nice way to learn.’ The Paras were also supposed to mentor the Iraqi border security forces. That meant visiting border posts strung along the frontier, ‘making sure they had the right equipment, making sure that they were trained and knew how to run it, and also to give them a warm fuzzy feeling that they were being looked after and that what they were doing was important’.
Iraq did not prove an uplifting experience for many in 3 Para. The Iraqis themselves seemed feckless and ungrateful. Martin Taylor had, like Farmer, turned his back on a conventional, modern career. After a media studies degree at Sussex University he spent two and a half years working for a recruiting consultancy and commuting to London from Kent every day. His family and friends were surprised when, restless with his life, he started talking about the army. ‘But the more I looked into it the more I heard people saying, “I can see you doing that sort of thing.”’ He initially applied for the Royal Artillery but after his second term decided he wanted to join the Parachute Regiment.
He too spent his first operation patrolling the border. Taylor was cheerful, good natured and inclined to think the best of people, but he found it ‘an enormously frustrating chore. For some reason the Iraqis just did not want to help themselves. It was frustrating just watching these guys living in squalor.’
If there was a lesson to be learned from Iraq, it was how not to do things. Stuart Tootal had watched the aftermath of the triumph of America’s ‘shock and awe’ strategy with an expert eye and increasing dismay. He believed that ‘our approach was fundamentally wrong. We rather assumed that once we’d finished the fighting it was merely a case of putting a new government in place, and we underestimated the difficulty of winning over the consent of the people for that regime. What we failed to achieve from the outset was proper security, and [we] stood by allowing a lot of looting to go ahead. And then we didn’t improve the lot of the people.’
Tootal’s background in counter-insurgency studies convinced him that there was much in Britain’s imperial past that could be applied to the present. He was impressed with the example of General Sir Gerald Templer, the high commissioner appointed by Churchill in 1952 to find a solution to the communist uprising known as the Malayan Emergency. It was something he shared with another British officer, Lieutenant General David Richards, who had been appointed commander of ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan), which was due to take over the whole NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) operation in Afghanistan from the Americans. Templer had wielded complete control of every aspect of military and civilian life in Malaya and had devised an intricate committee system that integrated counterinsurgency operations with the reconstruction effort. He once declared: ‘the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people’, thereby coining a phrase that would echo through counter-insurgency operations ever after.
The political situation in Afghanistan, which had a democratically elected government under President Karzai, would not allow such overt control. But there was one aspect of Templer’s approach in Malaya which could be applied without offending political sensitivities. This was the application of the ‘ink spot’ theory. It held that the best way of tackling an insurgency was to concentrate on securing specific towns and improving local services, including schools, hospitals, sewerage, water, roads and electricity. Life would then be so good that no one would want to support the rebels and the uprising would wither away.
John Reid had presented the situation in Afghanistan as another emergency.