Ross Kemp on Afghanistan Read online

  Poppies mean heroin and 93 per cent of the drug on Britain's streets can be traced directly to Afghanistan, of which 66 per cent comes from Helmand Province. The poppies are farmed by ordinary Afghans. The process involves slicing into the head of the poppy with a razor-type implement. The poppy is then left for several days while a milky sap accumulates; this is then harvested and sold on to the drug lords of the area. In a good year an Afghan farmer could expect to make a sum of £1,000 from an area of less than 100 square metres. And in Helmand Province £1,000 goes a very long way.

  The raw opium, however, gets sold on and refined, increasing in value at every stage until it arrives on the streets of Britain – and elsewhere – as the insidious powder that causes so much damage to those who develop an addiction to it. On the face of it, it would seem that the eradication of the poppy fields of Helmand Province is a reasonable objective for the troops in the region; indeed, one of the stated aims of the British deployment in Helmand Province is the elimination of the opium trade. It's more complicated than that, however. Destroy the poppy fields and you would destroy the livelihood of the very people whose hearts and minds you are trying to win. At a stroke, you would send them running into the arms of the Taliban who, despite the fact that the use of any kind of drug is banned under their ideology, tolerate the production of opium because it is intended for export to the infidel drug users of the West.

  In the long term, the plan is to educate the poppy farmers in the cultivation of other crops, but as we prepared for Operation Lastay Kulang, that was a long way off. In the meantime, the hope of the British forces was that other kinds of help could be offered to the Afghan people. Hospitals and schools could be built, bringing much-needed healthcare and education to the region; running water could be introduced to areas that had none. There were any number of positive, constructive projects the British Army could bring to Helmand Province to show the local population that, as well as achieving their principal aim of quelling the Taliban insurgency, they intended to bring practical benefits as a result of their occupation.

  Operations such as Lastay Kulang were intended to disperse the Taliban from the area so that reconstruction could begin, the local people would accept that the British troops were a Good Thing and the Taliban would therefore find it increasingly difficult to gain support among the local population. As with all these things, however, it was more easily said than done while the Taliban remained such an active presence in the province.

  Lastay Kulang was going to be a perilous operation by anyone's standards. The plan was this. B Company – along with myself and the camera crew – would travel north from Camp Bastion in a convoy of Viking, Pinzgauer and Mastiff armoured vehicles driven by the Royal Marines to Forward Operating Base Robinson, or FOB Rob, as it's commonly called. From FOB Rob we would continue to Sangin. The journey to Sangin would be incredibly dangerous. Landmines would be a constant threat and B Company had already been ambushed twice by the Taliban taking that very same route. From Sangin, we were to travel north-east to an area known simply as Jupiter.

  Jupiter is in the green zone. This is a strip of moist, fertile land that borders the Helmand river and which plays host to most of the compounds, fields and irrigation ditches that form Afghan settlements in the region. For obvious reasons, the Taliban avoid fighting in the wide, open spaces of the desert; they prefer these mazes of compounds and ditches where they know the territory, have arms stashed and can rely on a tactical advantage – if not an advantage of numbers and weaponry. For a British soldier, entering the green zone means being prepared for a fight.

  The part of the green zone to which we were headed was, according to the intelligence reports that had been received, where a Taliban leader by the name of Haginika was located. There was every reason to expect that when we advanced upon him, he would dig in and make a fight of it. And when that happened, the camera team and I would be in the line of fire.

  The moment Stuart Carver issued the order, Bastion became a hive of activity. Getting the Vikings, Mastiffs and Pinzgauers – the latter would become my least favourite vehicles on the planet – ready for the journey to FOB Rob was a big deal and one that made it clear what sort of dangers we could expect. The vehicles are surrounded by a kind of metal caging designed to explode RPGs should they hit. It's not failsafe – it all depends on what sort of warhead the RPG is fitted with – but most of the time it works. Our rucksacks, full of the equipment we would need out in the field, were attached to the outside of the vehicles, and boxes of water were loaded inside. Water, of course, is a precious and essential commodity in the desert and while we were out there I, along with everyone else, would be expected to carry and drink 6 litres a day. Equally important were the extra fuel and, of course, ammunition that were being stashed on to the trucks. Nobody watching the loading process could be under any doubt that the convoy about to leave Bastion meant business.

  It took two days to prepare the vehicles. Personally, I found the process extremely nerve-racking. It didn't seem to worry the Anglians in the same way – when they weren't making preparations they played football in the sun, cracked jokes and seemed quite at ease. Unlike me. I spent those painful final hours before the off speaking to the lads and trying to determine what the camera crew and I should do if the convoy came under attack. Corporal Stefan Martin explained that should this happen, we were to stay in the vehicle until we received orders to the contrary from our section commander, Corporal Kennedy. The inside of these vehicles is cramped and claustrophobic. Most of them are air-conditioned, but if you're unlucky enough to be in a vehicle where the air conditioning is broken, you cook. It's better to be hot and uncomfortable than full of holes, of course; but what became clear during the course of our conversation was that even strict instructions such as the ones Corporal Martin was giving me were subject to change on account of the unpredictable nature of enemy contact; and vehicles – even well-armoured ones like the Viking – were not always the safest place to be. He explained that only a week before a Viking had been involved in an ambush. An RPG had hit a fuel canister that was being stored on top of the vehicle. It exploded, causing burning fuel to drip through the top-gunner's position into the main cabin of the Viking and on to the troops inside. The soldiers had to escape the flaming vehicle under fire from the Taliban.

  Bastion was full of such stories and it was important that we heard them so that we were fully aware of the dangers that could await us, but they did nothing for my nerves. It was difficult to imagine how I would react if I came under fire, but should the worst happen I needed to know how to save my life and, potentially, the lives of those around me. With this in mind, I went to pick up my army trauma kit. This includes a self-pressurizing dressing that can be wrapped around a wound to stem the bleeding as well as a 10mg ampoule of morphine.

  The morphine injection is a crucial piece of kit. Morbidly or aptly – I couldn't decide which – it is housed in a little plastic box called a coffin. The coffin is ripped open to reveal a tube with a red cap at one end and a yellow cap at the other. The red cap is removed to reveal a button; the yellow cap is placed against the skin and when the button is pressed the needle shoots through the yellow plastic and injects the morphine into the skin – although I did hear stories of soldiers getting it the wrong way round in the heat of battle and having the needle shoot straight through their thumb taking their nail off (Billy – you know who you are). The placing of the injection is important: it needs to be located at a distance from the area of trauma. So, if someone has an injury to their lower left leg, the morphine needs to be injected into their upper right thigh. The reason for this is simple: inject the morphine too close to a bleeding wound and the drug will simply seep out with the blood, making it practically useless. Two of these shots should be enough to numb most kinds of pain. If you need any more than that, you're probably not going to make it. And perversely, if an injured man is shouting for morphine it is, relatively speaking, a good sign: it means, at the ver
y least, that he's aware.

  Another important task I had to complete before the off was to apply my blood group – A+ – to all my clothes, including my body armour and helmet, with a thick black marker pen. That way, should I get wounded, the medics would know what kind of blood to pump back into my body. It's a weird feeling doing this, another of those things that brings it home to you what you're about to embark upon.

  The night before we were due to depart for Operation Lastay Kulang you could almost taste the apprehension in the air. To pass the time I visited the NAAFI, where the soldiers could while away the time drinking cups of tea, smoking and taking the piss out of each other. It was going to be an early start and I knew I should at least try to sleep, so it wasn't all that late when I decided to get my head down for the night. I had started wandering back to my pod when I bumped into a guy I knew by the name OH. He was a member of the Grenadier Guards, who were part of the battle group, and our paths had crossed a couple of times. The moment he saw me, he fixed me with a steely stare.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  It wasn't an invitation. It was an instruction. And OH being six foot four and brawny enough to pick me up and throw me, I did as I was told.

  He led me silently to the hospital. Once we were there, he showed me four lads who were under his command. They'd been on a night-time patrol down south when they had stumbled upon an IED – an improvised explosive device. The results were horrific. One of them had lost part of his leg and was in a coma; another appeared to be blind in one eye. The two others had taken a lot of shrapnel but hadn't lost limbs. They were awake, but high on morphine. They were covered in pockmarks where the metal and sand from the explosion had burned into them; their skin was stained with black, congealed blood. One of them, his eyes rolling on account of the drugs, started babbling incoherently.

  ‘All right, Grant!’ And then, ‘I haven't got enough points. I haven't got enough points.’

  I turned to OH. ‘What does he mean?’ I whispered. ‘What's he talking about?’

  ‘I'll tell you later,’ OH breathed.

  As we left the hospital, he explained. Because the army payout for injured troops was so poor at the time – and especially so if your injuries were considered ‘minor’ – soldiers are encouraged to pay for ‘points’ from private insurance companies. The more points you have, the bigger your payout should you get wounded. This poor kid, his mind muddled by injury and morphine, was panicking that he didn't have enough points to get anything approaching reasonable compensation for what he had just endured. I learned too that stitches needed to be of a certain length in order for the wounded soldier to receive a payout, so it isn't uncommon for the guys to ask for more stitches. More often than not, the doctors are happy to oblige.

  I walked away from the hospital with a slightly empty feeling. It left a bad taste in the mouth to know that soldiers who risk their lives to protect my liberty – soldiers who earn very little money indeed – are encouraged to pay cash they can ill afford into an insurance scheme to cover an eventuality that is, after all, not unlikely. OH was as moved as I was. We both walked round a corner, sat down and had a brew and a cigarette. I think we both had a slight tear in our eyes.

  And it would be wrong for me to say that this was the only thought that went through my mind as I sought my bed that night. Over the past couple of days I had been forced to confront certain realities about what we were about to do. But those wounded men lying in a hospital bed, they were the bitter truth of war.

  It was with that uncomfortable thought in my head that I went to bed that night, and waited for Operation Lastay Kulang to begin.

  Camp Bastion. 04.00.

  It gets light very early in Helmand Province. The sky was bright as I emerged from my sleeping pod in full gear and with my heavy bergen on my back. The camp was already bustling with activity as the final preparations were made to the convoy of Vikings and Pinzgauers, led by three Mastiffs. The convoy was to travel north, up to the main A1 highway, which travels west to east across the middle of Helmand Province and over the Helmand river. We would head east, through the town of Gereshk, before leaving the road and heading north through the desert to FOB Rob, where we would meet up with the rest of B Company. We would then continue north through Sangin, where the previous year 3 Para had been involved in some of the heaviest fighting of the conflict, before heading out into the desert again to lay up for the attack on our target: a reported Taliban stronghold in the village of Jucaylay.

  I was travelling in a Pinzgauer with our director John Conroy, cameraman Andy Thompson and sound man James Snowdon. Inside the Pinzgauer was hard and uncomfortable and I grew to loathe it. There are other reasons not to like this vehicle, too. Mastiffs are protected by top-gunners with fifty-cals or grenade machine guns; Vikings have GPMGs; Pinzgauers, if you're lucky, have a bloke with an SA80. If I felt vulnerable, imagine what he felt. The only plus side was that the air-conditioning pipe was broken and I was seated right by the outlet, so I had some respite from the incessant heat, which was scorching even from an early hour. Already soaked in sweat and covered in dust that came in from the top cover, I gazed through the window and out into the unforgiving desert landscape with something approaching numbness. As I did so, I tried to rationalize the danger of what we were doing. I guess we've all sat on a plane before take-off and worried that this might be one of the few planes to be involved in a crash. We persuade ourselves, of course, that it's not going to be. We remind ourselves of the statistics. Deep down we know that the plane could go down, but it probably won't. I grappled with the same thought processes as the convoy trundled along the A1 highway. This was a perilous situation, no doubt. But most trucks in Afghanistan don't hit a landmine. Most soldiers don't die. And anyway, landmines are much more likely when you turn off the road. In a situation like that, you persuade yourself that you're not going to be one of the unlucky ones. It's all you can do; otherwise you'll go mad.

  So far my time in this country had been spent in military bases or at 12,000 feet in the air. Gereshk was my first experience of the real Afghanistan. I surveyed it from the – I hoped – safety of the vehicle. The sides of the road were crowded with children watching the troops roll through. Many of them were missing limbs because of the mines littered all over the country, left over from the Soviet occupation. The Russians covered Afghanistan with mines. In the mountainous parts of the country they can slip downhill or be dislodged by snow or rain, which makes it difficult to map them because they are constantly moving. As a result, amputees are a common sight and I defy anyone to remain unmoved by the sight of young children without arms or legs as a result of wars that happened before they were born or that they are too young to understand.

  Along the side of the road were plenty of little booths – cafés for the lorry drivers travelling on the A1. From the relative safety of the Pinzgauer I saw the locals stopping at these booths for chai, or tea. They wore traditional Afghan garb – dishdash and headdresses. I saw many older men with dark skin, white beards and heavily lined faces. They eyed the military convoy curiously as they sipped their drinks and it was impossible to tell from this distance what they thought of our presence.

  Gereshk is on the Helmand river. It's part of the green zone and is an area heavily favoured by the Taliban. As we were leaving the town, our top-gunner, David, announced that he thought we were being ‘dicked’ – military terminology for being observed. The worry was that Taliban sympathizers were taking note of our direction and numbers, then speeding ahead on their motorbikes or calling their friends with their mobile phones so that an ambush could be laid up ahead. It did nothing to make our journey any more comfortable.

  The going was slow. Our driver did his best to make sure the Pinzgauer travelled in the tracks of the vehicle in front of us so that we could avoid hitting an IED or a landmine. The Mastiffs at the front of the convoy were mine-protected trucks that have a V-shaped hull that is designed to deflect the blast of a
landmine or IED away from under the vehicle. You wouldn't particularly want to be in one if it hit a mine: the wheels would come off, the chassis would be devastated, but you would probably survive the encounter. With the Mastiffs out in front, the remaining convoy could be a little more confident of not hitting an explosive device – but only if the subsequent vehicles stayed in their tracks. And over a fifteen-hour journey, that's not an easy thing to do, especially with the trucks ahead billowing up clouds of dust. There were also rumours doing the rounds that the Taliban were wise to the army's anti-landmine techniques and had developed a system to foil them. They would find a genuine vehicle track and take a plaster of Paris cast of it, which they would paint the colour of the sand. They would then set a landmine or an IED before laying the cast over it. The device would be hidden and at a cursory glance you wouldn't notice that the track had been tampered with.

  As we trundled out of Gereshk and into the desert, I tried not to think about the implications of being outwitted by the Taliban in that way. Everyone in our Pinzgauer realized how much we were relying on our driver to follow the tracks accurately. If we hit a mine, it would have been like shaking an egg around in a can: we wouldn't have stood a chance. On either side of us were two ranges of mountains that met at a point up ahead. The mountains gave the Taliban cover, which meant that this was a particularly good place for an ambush.

  The heat was intolerable – almost 50 degrees outside the Pinzgauer and like an oven inside. And then suddenly we ground to a halt.

  The convoy stood still in the middle of the dusty, stony earth. Troops exited the vehicles and tried to find out why we had been ordered to stop. Rumours started to circulate. We were being followed by A Company and before long we started to hear garbled, unconfirmed reports that there had been casualties. We knew something serious had happened because we became aware of air support in the skies above us.