FIND ME UNAFRAID
The English market town of Salisbury can be a bleak place on a winter’s day. Four o’clock in the afternoon, the market traders are packing away whatever they’ve failed to sell beneath awnings flapping in the wind, people are hurrying from one place to another, coats zipped up to their necks and hands thrust deep in pockets. It doesn’t look like a place with one of the UK’s most important cathedrals, let alone somewhere so intimately connected with the world-famous Stonehenge, just up the road.
Josh Boggi has just returned from training in Mallorca. On such a grey day, and with the queue for the dentist so long he decided to abandon it altogether, he must be tempted to turn round and go straight back to the Balearics. We sit by the window of a coffee shop and he tells me his story.
His surname – soft ‘g’, to rhyme with ‘dodgy’, ‘podgy’ or ‘stodgy’, three adjectives which could hardly be less applicable to a man so decent, so fit and so dynamic – is Italian. His grandfather came over from Tuscany after World War Two with his siblings: seven brothers and one sister. They all opened restaurants in the East End of London, which in itself sounds like the pitch for a comedy film or family drama. Josh’s father served in the Royal Engineers for more than a decade, and for as long as he can remember Josh wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps and become a sapper (a combat engineer who, among other things, lays roads, builds bridges and clears mines).
In January 2004, aged just 17, he signed up and underwent basic training – phase 1, general training, to a base level of military competence, and phase 2, specific training for the Engineers themselves. He was then selected for 9 Parachute Squadron, an airborne detachment of the corps with a history so long and distinguished that you can chart much of Britain’s wartime and post-war military history through its service records: the Dunkirk evacuations in 1940, the 1944 defence of the bridge at Arnhem, clearing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem after the 1946 Irgun bomb attack, the Falklands in 1982, rebuilding Rwandan infrastructure after the 1994 genocide, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and of course three decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
It was a history of which Josh was well aware. ‘The minute you put the uniform on you feel proud. Grown-up.’ He loved the British Army and everything it offered him. He’d always been a sporty kid, particularly keen on football (‘I was a goalie. All the nutters play there’) and ice hockey, the latter a craze sparked by seeing the Mighty Ducks movies. Now he could not only indulge his passion for sports and adrenalin but get paid for it too.
Every soldier who joins up itches for real combat, and there was plenty around for Josh. All British operations in Afghanistan went under the codename ‘Operation Herrick’, with each new order of battle receiving its own ordinal. Josh was first deployed as part of Herrick IV in 2006.
For six weeks nothing much happened. Then it all kicked off.
The 9 Squadron were sent in to Musa Qala, a dusty town in Helmand Province, to assist the Pathfinder platoon stationed there. The soldiers controlled a central compound of low cement and mud buildings surrounded by a 10ft wall, and a 10ft wall was nothing when the compound was surrounded by a maze of rubble-strewn buildings. Paradise for the Taliban militants using those buildings as cover and a nightmare for the men inside the compound, knowing they could be attacked from any direction and at any time.
Which is exactly what happened.
‘I was 19 years old,’ says Josh. ‘The moment the first bullet flew past my ear, it was like, “shit just got real”.’ Every time the British troops dropped one militant, another two would pop up. It was like a nightmare pitched at the exact intersection of the Alamo, Rorke’s Drift, a spaghetti western and a video game. The Pathfinders had been in Musa Qala some weeks already and were exhausted and jumpy, particularly at twilight – ‘the witching hour’, they called it – when they most expected the attacks to start again. They were running low on food, water and ammo, and they had no more batteries for their night vision devices. They needed resupply, but any kind of air support was out of the question: it was too easy for the Taliban to shoot down any helicopter which came near, and they’d all seen Black Hawk Down.
There was only one thing for it: a forced relief ground mission. A Danish squadron was on its way from Bastion, but it wasn’t as if the Taliban were going to wave them through with open arms. Josh’s men were tasked with clearing a way for the Danes, come hell or high water. It’s 60 miles from Bastion to Musa Qala, but it took 9 Squadron and the Danes five days to make the journey, and even then it needed fixed bayonet fighting and six 1,000lb bombs on Taliban positions before they could break into the compound itself.
Hell of an introduction to war.
It was Josh’s first tour of Afghanistan, but it wouldn’t be his last. He went on Herrick VIII in 2008 and again on Herrick XIII in 2010, when he was deployed to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Khar Nikah. On the last day of the year, New Year’s Eve, Josh was second-in-command of a search team sent out to clear a suspected Taliban compound. It was a patrol which, if not exactly routine, was hardly uncommon: get out, perform the task, get back in again. Simple enough.
But for Josh it all felt off, right from the start. Not by much – more a sense that the world had slightly tilted on its axis, that things were slightly out of alignment – but not by much was quite enough when it came to a place like Khar Nikah and the narrow margins between safety and danger, between life and death.
They went out of a different gate than usual.
Narrow margins.
The muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer at sunrise as always, but for once the ululations sounded menacing and ominous, sending a slow cold sweat crawling down Josh’s spine.
Narrow margins.
Josh concentrated on the basics. Tread in the footsteps of the bloke in front of you. Keep your distance. Keep your eyes open. Keep looking. Never get complacent, not for a second. A second is all it takes. No one on Herrick XIII underestimated the Taliban. They were very good fighters (certainly those blokes who’d served in Iraq as well rated them far more highly than the Iraqi insurgents), their predecessors had seen off everyone from the Soviet Army back through the British in Victorian times and beyond, and they could rely not just on each other but also on what the Westerners called ‘Tier Two’ – those who weren’t proper Taliban but helped them out with supplies, cover and so on.
The 9 Squadron liked to Grand National rather than mousehole: that is, they preferred to climb over walls rather than blast their way through them. Grand Nationalling was quicker, saved materiel and was less likely to advertise their presence. The problem with Grand Nationalling was that if the Taliban saw you doing it they’d shoot, and it was hard to shoot back when scrambling over a wall. So this time Josh’s men went the explosive route: two half-bar mines and in through the breach point. Each time they marked the safe area, where they’d swept for mines, with white lines either side.
Narrow margins.
Mine, prime, breach … Mine, prime, breach … Watch the white lines.
The day slightly off; that strange sense of foreboding.
Josh took a step to the side … Just one.
One was quite enough.
A beautiful cloudless day in the Golden State, warm enough for Sarah Rudder to be sitting outside by the pool even though it’s not yet mid-morning. An all-American scene for an all-American girl, even one who
