friendly, especially the children. One child came out and offered a jug of cold water. Teenage boys and older men responded well to the soldiers’ carefully rehearsed few words of Pashto. Tootal visited the local hospital and police station and asked what could be done to help their security and provide for their needs.
Even though it was not yet summer, the temperature was 40 degrees Centigrade. Patrolling on foot, wearing body armour and carrying a weapon, ammunition and radios was very hot and heavy work. After two hours on the ground, Tootal noticed how the troops’ concentration and awareness of their surroundings faded as they coped with the effects of heat and fatigue. After nearly five hours, everyone on the patrol was thoroughly ‘licked out’.
The first encounter with the citizens of Gereshk had gone off well enough. But ‘A’ Company’s commander, Will Pike, was not convinced that the mood of the town was welcoming. ‘There was a volatility to the situation,’ he said. ‘I described it as “West Belfast with an Asian tinge”. The patrolling we did there was not dissimilar to what I had done in Belfast. It might seem benign. But there was an edge there.’
Moving slowly through the narrow streets, smiling and radiating good intent, the Paras began to notice that their progress was being marked by the sound of whistling. As they passed, they saw men whispering furtively into mobile phones. They soon suspected that they were being ‘dicked’. ‘Dicking’ was a term from Northern Ireland. It was the name given to the warning system operated by IRA sympathisers to let the gunmen know British troops were approaching. The Taliban were invisible. But the Paras now had little doubt that they were there.
Mark Swann was walking along with his interpreter at his side when a truck drove by
absolutely full of men in black turbans, brown trousers and dishdashas [the cotton nightshirt-like garments worn by Afghan males]. They had black beards and were wearing eyeliner – why I don’t know. The interpreter grabbed me and said, ‘Taliban, they are Taliban!’ I asked which ones and he said, ‘All of them.’ They drove through the middle of the patrol then shot off. As we turned the corner, we saw them sitting on top of the hill watching us. As we dog-legged left they also peeled off in the same direction.
It was not the Paras’ intention to initiate a confrontation with the Taliban. The rules of engagement stated they could shoot only when their lives were clearly threatened. Swann decided to get his men away as quickly as he could. He recalled later: ‘That’s when I thought, this is actually quite sticky.’
An incident on 1 May seemed to reinforce this impression. Stuart Tootal made another visit to the town for his first shura – council – with Gereshk officials and elders. The meeting was friendly. The district administrator, Abdul Nabi Khan, spelled out his main concerns: worries about security and the lack of decent schools and health facilities. Tootal had arrived at the administrator’s compound in an armoured ‘Snatch’ Land Rover. Soldiers from the patrols and sniper platoons had moved in the night before to secure the complex. As they left the meeting at midday, a warning came over the radio that a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives was on his way to try to catch the party as it left. This, Tootal recorded, ‘added a degree of … urgency to the extraction’. As they hurried away from the compound, the lead Snatch got stuck in an alleyway.
For a moment, chaos threatened. There were six vehicles in the convoy, trying to turn around on a sloping dirt path, now surrounded by a small crowd of curious children, while a Taliban car bomber was possibly bearing down on them. Tom Fehley, the officer commanding 2 Platoon of ‘A’ Company, was in charge. Very soon he had imposed some ‘grip’ on the situation and the vehicles turned round and moved off to the northern suburbs of Gereshk, where they formed a defensive ring and waited for Mark Swann and his men, who had been patrolling in the town, to catch up. They were making slow progress. The backstreets of Gereshk which they had to pass through to reach the rendezvous were ‘rat-runs, dead-ends, alleyways, things like that’.
Eventually, they linked up with the convoy. As they climbed aboard the vehicles to head back to base, ‘all of a sudden there was a burst of automatic fire’, said Swann. ‘I’m sure it was only from an AK rifle, but a burst of automatic fire in our general direction.’ Four or five bullets kicked up puffs of dust from some nearby walls. No one saw where they came from.
It was a classic ‘shoot and scoot’. No one was hurt and the decision was taken to extract immediately. By the standards of what was to come, the incident was barely worth recording. But the contact, in retrospect, took on a symbolic importance. It was a sign that no matter how positive the Paras’ relations with the local population and authorities might seem, there were men among them who wanted to kill them.
The news of the contact, minor though it was, galvanised the battle group. When Swann got back to FOB Price he was called up immediately by his friend Matt Taylor, the Battalion Ops Officer. They had been commissioned into the Paras at the same time and there was a friendly rivalry between them. ‘He was saying, “Right, don’t tell me, you’ve had a contact before me!”’ In the other companies there was some mild annoyance at the fact that it was ‘A’ Company which had been the first to come under fire. This, it was feared, would only boost its members’ already considerable opinion of themselves.
The flurry of excitement in Gereshk proved to be exceptional. The town remained relatively quiet throughout the rest of the deployment. This did not mean, however, that the process of reconstruction was able to take hold there.
The effort was meant to be coordinated through the ‘Triumvirate’ made up of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and DfID. DfID had a presence in Lashkar Gah, where the PRT was supposed to have its headquarters. Until there was stability and security in Helmand, however, there was little for the department to do. The functioning of the Triumvirate was hampered by personnel problems. The head of the MoD’s Civil–Military Cooperation (CIMIC) team was unhappy in his post, and on 21 April it was agreed that he should return home.
At the same time, DfID’s attitude was causing the Paras bafflement and dismay. The department’s officials seemed anxious not to be associated too closely with the military presence for fear that they would come to be regarded as the enemy by the people who they were there to help.
Their approach was exemplified by the story of the Gereshk hospital washing machine. Captain Harvey Pynn, 3 Para’s regimental Medical Officer, had taken up the cause of providing a functioning laundry for the hospital. It was just the sort of ‘quick impact project’ the soldiers were supposed to identify and pursue.
Pynn came from a military background. His father was in the RAF and his grandfather had been an RSM in the Parachute Regiment in the 1950s and 1960s. He was attracted to an army career but he also felt a vocational pull towards medicine. He combined the two by joining the Royal Army Medical Corps after studying at Guy’s and St Thomas’s. Following a stint with the Royal Greenjackets he joined 3 Para in the summer of 2005.
In normal times the MO’s job was to look after the general health of the battalion. In war, there was the crucial duty of keeping the wounded alive until they could receive proper treatment. Pynn believed in being where the fighting was going on. He got his wish. The battle group overturned the normal procedure and posted their doctors forward with individual companies rather than keeping them back at base. He and other battle group MOs were to find themselves doing most of their work in the platoon houses, rather than at the high-tech hospital that had been set up at Bastion.
Pynn had a strong idealistic streak. He took the development side of the mission very seriously. When ‘A’ Company deployed in Gereshk he set to work surveying the health provisions in town. He was welcomed at the hospital and shown round. The conditions were grim. There was a resident surgeon and anaesthetist but very little equipment. Above all, the place was dirty, and bloodstained
