Ross Kemp on Afghanistan
Ross Kemp on Afghanistan
ROSS KEMP
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2009
1
Copyright © Ross Kemp, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-104655-6
To everyone in the armed forces and their families
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains And the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains And go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Young British Soldier’, from Barrack-Room Ballads, 1892
The Taliban are your problem. You are the Taliban's problem. All of you are my problem.
An Afghan villager to the author, summer 2008
Contents
Prologue
Part One: Herrick 6
1. All Quiet on the Western Front
2. ‘SAS, my arse’
3. The Road to Kandahar
4. Camp Bastion
5. T4
6. Tethered Goats
7. Splash
8. Stand-Off
9. Mr Now Zad
10. Blue on Blue
11. Fighting in Somebody's House
12. The Knock on the Door
Part Two: Herrick 8
13. The Jocks
14. The Garden
15. The Musa Qala Shuffle
16. Going Native
17. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’
Part Three: Herrick 9
18. Adapt and Overcome
19. Pyramid Hill
Epilogue
Glossary
Author's Note
Acknowledgements
Prologue
August 2007. The British base in Sangin, Helmand Province.
I've only recently returned to Afghanistan, I'm still acclimatizing and, not to put too fine a point on it, nature is calling. Not for me, however, the quiet comfort of my home lavatory, with perhaps a newspaper to keep me company as I do what needs to be done; nor even the relatively clean facilities of Camp Bastion.
Not out here. Nothing like.
I pad down to the thunderboxes, wet wipes in hand. They're a rickety line of cheaply cobbled-together cubicles, positioned well away from those parts of the base where soldiers congregate. And with good reason. As I approach, I hear a buzzing sound, then a familiar and unloved smell becomes gradually more intense. It is the unmistakable aroma of human turds.
There are two things that make this aroma more stinky than it might otherwise be. Firstly, they represent the accumulated waste product of three companies of soldiers. Secondly, the turds have been festering and maturing nicely in the midday sun. You can imagine what that does for them. I try to stop myself from gagging.
Inside the thunderboxes I know that whole families of flies will be feasting upon the soldiers' rancid deposits. More than once I've had a swarm of these insects fly out of the pan, up between my legs and onto the edge of my mouth. From one area of moisture to another. My lips clamp involuntarily shut as I suppress a shudder at the thought. It's not the only embarrassment I've had to undergo while sitting on the throne: there's clearly something very funny about a guy off the telly in an army thunderbox. Sometimes I wonder if there's a single soldier in Helmand Province that doesn't have a picture on their digital camera of Grant Mitchell taking a dump.
I take a breath. Not too deep, because I don't want to inhale the smell too much. Before I venture into one of the cubicles, I mutter under my breath, ‘God, I've missed you.’
As if in reply to my sarcastic comment, I get a slightly more putrid whiff.
‘My God!’ I shout. ‘That stinks!’
It's at just that moment that one of the doors opens.
I blink.
Out of the cubicle walks a woman. An intelligence officer. Like me, she's carrying wet wipes and she's still rubbing alcohol gel into her hands – a precaution against D and V, the all-too-common diarrhoea and vomiting. She raises an eyebrow in my direction.
‘Thank you very much,’ she replies.
I open my mouth to try and explain that I meant the thunderboxes in general, not what she just left behind. But the moment has passed and so has any chance I might have had of a candlelit dinner for two at Sangin DC.
I shrug. It's 40 degrees in the shade. I'm hot, sweaty, dirty and more than a bit fragrant. Hardly what you'd call a catch, even without the disadvantage of my big mouth. Still, I wish I'd kept quiet.
I turn back to face the thunderbox. Come on, Ross, I tell myself. Worse things happen at war. You've been ambushed, RPG'd and shot at. Stop being such a pansy. I take another breath, walk towards these delightful fresh-air facilities, open the door and settle down inside.
And not for the first time I wonder just what the hell it is I think I'm doing here, miles from home and in the middle of a war zone.
This book will not tell you what it's like to be a soldier in Afghanistan. No book will. Nor will any TV show, film or documentary. It won't fully describe the blind fear you feel the first time you know an enemy marksman has you in his sights and is doing whatever he can to kill you. It won't fully relate the thrill and excitement of battle. Words are inadequate to convey the intense, brutal, burning heat of the Afghanistan summer; the vicious whipping of the coarse sand against your skin; the blunt shock of knowing that someone with whom you had joked and laughed only that day, is now dead; or the stark, unexpected beauty of flying along the Helmand river. These are things that can be understood only by experiencing them.
What I hope this book does give you is some small idea of what it's like for a young soldier fighting today on the front line of Britain's war on terror. I hope it gives you some insight into what it is we demand of our armed forces, and what sort of war it is they are fighting. There is a myth, I think, among the public at large that modern wars are fought from a distance, with smart bombs and technical wizardry, that the days of infantrymen fighting mano-a-mano, risking their lives, are at an end. If I've learned one thing during my time in Afghanistan, it's that this couldn't be further from the truth. Wars are still fought by men with spears. The spears might be more advanced than once they were; but our safety and liberty is still being defended by young men livin
g and dying in the field.
This is not a political book; nor is it meant to be. The whys and wherefores of the war in Afghanistan are for more experienced political minds than mine. I'm interested in the soldiers. How they live, how they fight and how they cope with the intense and incredibly difficult situations they find themselves in. I've experienced in some small measure what it is that they go through, and if this book and the films that I've made on the subject have captured a small portion of that then I'm content. Because I feel very strongly that it's a subject that deserves to be explored.
Unlike the thunderboxes. I miss many things about Afghanistan, but I don't miss them. And if the female intelligence officer I so gravely insulted happens to be reading this, all I can do is offer my most sincere and heartfelt apologies…
Ross Kemp
London, 2009
PART ONE
Herrick 6
1. All Quiet on the Western Front
When I was a kid I had a dog and an airgun, and I used to take them both for walks. Why I felt I needed an airgun in the quiet fields of the Essex countryside I don't quite know. I suppose I was just that kind of child. One day, though, my mum gave me something else to take on my walk. Something a bit less macho. It was a book.
Reading wasn't really my thing at the time. My brother Darren was a regular bookworm, but not me. Clearly my mum had decided to do something about it, so she had hunted out a book that she thought would capture my imagination. Like most young boys, I had an interest in things military – nothing out of the ordinary, just the regular fascination kids of a certain age have. The book my mother had bought me was a war book. It was called All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a veteran of the First World War, and I still remember lying down in the field, the dog snuffling away under a hedge somewhere and my airgun by my side, and starting to read it.
It tells the story of a young man of nineteen who is deployed to the Western Front, the zone in France and Belgium, characterised by the horrors of trench warfare, where the German forces engaged their western enemies. Here he witnesses the terrible effects – both physical and psychological – of intense combat. It is a harrowing read. I was transfixed by the description of war. I was just a child, of course, who had never seen any real fighting apart from the usual playground aggro, but even so I was struck by how authentic those words appeared to be. To this day I remember the description of a young man under fire, hugging the ground and wanting the earth to swallow him up.
It was not until a good thirty years later, however, that I finally understood just how real that emotion was. And it was not in the damp fields of East Anglia with a dog and an airgun at my side but on the parched earth of a country I had probably not even heard of back then, surrounded by young men carrying SA8os who hadn't been born at the time I was reading that book, and with AK-47 rounds zipping inches above my head. The events depicted in All Quiet on the Western Front happened nearly a century ago. Warfare has changed – not as much as some people think, but it has changed. What has not changed is the way a soldier feels when they know someone is trying to kill them.
I always wanted to be an actor, never a soldier, and for years the world of the military was about as far removed from my own life as it's possible to be. When I started making documentary films, however, it struck me that there was very little out there that gave anyone a real idea of what it was like to be a soldier at war in the modern day. There were news reports, of course, by established and insightful journalists who argued the rights and wrongs of our recent military escapades. There were great war films that claimed to be authentic but were nevertheless brushed with the gloss of Hollywood. But nothing I had seen or read seemed to me to shed much light on the life of an ordinary infantryman on deployment in the dangerous parts of the world in which the British Army finds itself in the twenty-first century. I started to feel strongly that this should change.
At the time Iraq was the focus of everyone's attention; Afghanistan was somehow below the radar. My original thought had been to go to Iraq, not to comment on the politics or the whys and wherefores of that controversial war, but just to see what life was like for the soldiers out there. It never happened. I went back to making films about gangs; the political events in the Middle East evolved and moved on. But the idea in my head refused to go away. It was resurrected when I learned that a group of soldiers with whom I felt a certain connection – the First Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment – were soon to be deployed to Afghanistan as part of Herrick 6. (Operation Herrick is the codename under which British operations in Afghanistan are conducted.)
Recruiting from East Anglia and the East Midlands, the Royal Anglian Regiment has a long history and is a result of a series of amalgamations of regiments from the east of England. I knew something about them because as a young man my father served for several years in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, one of the regiments that eventually became part of the Royal Anglians, and had seen active service with them in Cyprus. In addition, I was born and brought up in Essex and all my family come from Norfolk. Had I ever been tempted to join up, it is more than likely that the Royal Anglians would have been my first port of call.
Theirs is a name from my childhood. My brother and I used to watch British troops being transported along the old A12, which ran alongside our house. One day, when I was about ten, a Bedford truck full of troops passed us and one of the soldiers grabbed a beret from his mate and threw it towards us. Lose your beret in the army and you face having to pay a fine, so it was obviously just a bit of horseplay for the soldiers in question. I was intrigued by it and wanted to find out where it came from. It transpired that the cap bore one of the insignias of the Royal Anglians.
So it was that when I heard that this regiment was to be deployed to a major war zone, the flame of the idea I'd had of spending time with the British Army was reignited. And if I was to join the First Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment, it was to Afghanistan – Britain's front line – that I would have to travel.
If history has taught us anything, it is that Afghanistan is a deeply dangerous place for British troops. Or, indeed, any foreign troops.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the political geography of the area looked very different to the way it is now. Afghanistan's southern border was with British India; to the north were the lands of the mighty Russian Empire. The Russians feared the northward expansion of the British Empire; the British viewed Russia's southward expansion as a threat to their interests in the Indian subcontinent. The rivalry between Russia and Britain became known as the Great Game and Afghanistan, sandwiched between the two, became the playing board.
In 1838 the British in India became worried that the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed, had started to ally himself with the Russians to the north. Claiming the need for a trustworthy ally on the Indian border, they sent a large force of 20,000 British and Indian troops over the treacherous mountain passes into Kabul, where, in 1839, they toppled the leader and installed Shah Shujah – the country's former leader – as ruler of Afghanistan, claiming that they were merely reinstating him to the throne that was rightly his. Nobody was fooled, however: this was regime change, pure and simple.
Shah Shujah had a tenuous grip on power, so two brigades of British troops remained in Kabul, along with two British politicians, William McNaghten and Sir Alexander Burnes, to advise the new ruler. He was entirely reliant on British arms to quell insurgencies and British money to buy the loyalty of the Afghan tribal chiefs. There were approximately 4,500 British soldiers in the country at that time. In addition, 12,000 British and Indian civilians had followed the army to Kabul and for two years they lived in a British encampment just outside the capital.
The British troops, however, were not popular guests among the Afghan people. In November 1841 an insurrection broke out in Kabul. Sir Alexander Burnes was viciously murdered. The British Army was vastly outnumbered and its base surrounded. A truce was agreed and the Afghans made it clea
r that they wanted the British to leave. And that's what might have happened, had the son of the ousted leader Dost Mohammed not arrived in Kabul and, reportedly, murdered Sir William McNaghten.
The British and Indians – more than 16,000 of them – began their withdrawal in January 1842, intending to march the 90 miles to Jalalabad. They didn't have much choice: to have stayed in Kabul would have been to have signed their own death warrants. Afghan winters can be harsh, especially in the north where temperatures can drop to –10 or below, and many died from exposure to the biting weather in the first few days of the withdrawal. And when the British reached a mountain pass called the Khurd Kabul, they came under attack.
What was at best an ignominious retreat became a disastrous, bloody massacre. The Afghans knew the territory and they had hate on their side. The British – men, women and children – were massacred in one of the bloodiest scenes that part of the world has ever known. Many were cut down by the Afghans; others continued to perish in the harsh mountain snows. One man, a British Army surgeon by the name of Dr William Brydon, escaped the carnage and successfully reached the British garrison at Jalalabad. He explained what had happened. Fires were lit and bugles sounded in order to guide any survivors to safety.
None came. After a few days it became clear that of the 16,500 who had left Kabul, Dr William Brydon was the only survivor.
The First Anglo-Afghan War had been a grisly disaster for the British and that one episode revealed Afghanistan to the British for what it was: a country of great strategic importance, filled with a brutal, inhospitable terrain and inhabited by a fiercely proud, warrior-like people.
A place where invading armies were likely to come a cropper.
There were plenty of reasons for the British Army not to let me take a documentary team to Afghanistan: reasons of safety, tactical reasons, PR reasons. When we first approached the Ministry of Defence (MoD), half of me expected them to reject our suggestion out of hand. They didn't. Quite rightly, however, they wanted to vet us, to make sure that our reasons for taking a camera crew into a war zone were the right ones. The last thing they wanted was a journalist with an agenda who would turn them over and misrepresent them; and nobody wanted a team out there with the wrong attitude who would endanger their own lives and those of the soldiers.