it would be grounded. Parts of the interior are held together by 3-inch-wide silver masking tape and the toilet doors have a tendency to fly open while in use – ‘The in-flight entertainment,’ some wag commented – but, frankly, it’s good enough for ‘our boys’ flying off to war to fight and die for Queen and Country. The TriStar is straight out of the military manual of ‘making do’. It’s what happens when the armed forces have been underfunded for decades. It is, as one senior officer told me, a third party, fire and theft, rather than fully comprehensive, insurance package.
Afghanistan has its own unique smell – it’s the dust in the atmosphere – and it’s on the plane thousands of feet above the desert; for me it’s the smell of fear, death and courage, and there is no other smell like it. The fear, and also the excitement, of being in a war zone are already beginning to build inside me and giving rise to a mix of emotions. I have yet to arrive and already part of me is wishing that I was back home, in a warm, safe house with my family. Instead I’m just minutes away from landing in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Fourteen hours ago I was sitting in the bleak departure lounge at RAF Brize Norton along with several hundred soldiers. All tired, all sad. For them the long goodbye had come and gone – they were just at the start of their six-month tour. Six months of fear, broken up by bursts of excitement and long stretches of unimaginable boredom. There is nothing romantic about front-line life in Helmand: it is hard, dangerous and dirty. Generals and politicians fighting the war from their desks in Whitehall might talk about the importance of nation building and national security, but for the soldiers at the bullet end of the war it’s all about survival. From the private soldier, who joined the Army because it was the only job available after eighteen years on a sink estate, to the Eton-educated Guards officer, winning is coming home alive and not in a Union Jack-draped coffin. Soldiers in Helmand fight for themselves and each other – grander notions are for others to hold.
It was the same for me when I served as a young officer in 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s. Every member of 3 Para knew why the British Army was on the streets of Ulster. We understood the politics, the tribal tensions and the history, but it mattered little to any of us. Soldiers do not fight for Queen and Country: they fight for each other. They do not fix bayonets with the government’s foreign policy objectives ringing in their ears: they do so because they are professionals trained to obey orders. It’s the same in Helmand today. Every soldier still wants to win a medal but he also wants to make it home in one piece.
But with glory comes a terrible price. In Helmand, a front-line soldier stands a one-in-ten chance of being killed or injured; those are not good odds. Looking around the departure lounge at RAF Brize Norton, I wondered which of my fellow passengers would not survive the six-month tour, and I doubt I was the only one with that thought in their mind. The atmosphere was subdued, depressing even. Some soldiers entered the room with eyes reddened by tears, doubtless wondering whether they would ever see their loved ones again. Part of me, sitting here now descending into the Helmand desert, wonders the same.
There was once a time when I thought that as a journalist I was safe in a war zone. It’s a foolish notion. Why should I be less at risk than anyone else? But I believed it nonetheless. I have worked in several war zones – the Balkans, Iraq, Northern Ireland – and I always thought death and injury were something that happened to others. Mainly soldiers or journalists who forgot to obey the rules or who simply pushed their luck too far.
That was until one of my best friends, Rupert Hamer, was killed while on assignment in January 2010 after the US armoured vehicle in which he was travelling was destroyed by an IED. He was working as a reporter alongside photographer Phil Coburn, and the pair were both attached to the US Marines Expeditionary Force when he was killed. They were part way through a two-week assignment and were returning from a shura, or meeting of elders, when the tragedy struck. Phil and Rupert were sitting beside each other inside a 30-ton heavily armoured Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle when they hit a huge improvised explosive device.
The main charge was composed of ammonium nitrate powder and aluminium filings, and when these are mixed together in the right quantities the result is lethal. The explosive was packed into several yellow palm-oil containers buried about 15 cm beneath the ground. The detonator was probably made from a Christmas tree light, or something similar, with the bulb removed. The bomb was one of the largest ever seen in Helmand.
The MRAP more or less remained intact – the front and rear wheels and axles were blown off – but the shock wave which tore through the vehicle was devastating. Despite wearing helmets and body armour and being strapped into their seats, Rupert, Phil and four US Marines all suffered multiple injuries. Phil and Rupert were sitting side by side, but while Rupert died Phil survived, though the bones in his feet were smashed beyond repair and both feet were amputated. Four US Marines travelling in the vehicle were seriously injured and a fifth was killed.
Death in Helmand is random – it has killed the best in the British Army, possibly even the best of the best. Every soldier from private to lieutenant colonel – all the ranks in a battlegroup – have been killed in action in the province since 2006. Not since Korea has the British Army been in such a bloody fight, and every indicator suggests it’s going to get worse.
I last spoke to Rupert less than two weeks before he was killed. It was an unusually warm day in early January. He had called me from Kabul while waiting for a flight to Helmand. I was sitting on a chair in my garden, guffawing with laughter as he relayed in detail all the hilarious events that had befallen both him and Phil in the short time that they had been in Afghanistan.
Rupert was in good form, joking about the Marines’ lack of organization and saying that by comparison they made him look organized. My last words were, ‘E-mail me when you can, and look after yourself.’ As he set off for Helmand, I went to Austria for a week’s skiing holiday with my family. Rupert was killed on the following Saturday, 10 January.
The first thing my wife, Clodagh, said to me after I told her Rupert had been killed was, ‘It could have been you.’ At that moment I vowed never to return. Fuck it, I thought to myself. It’s not worth it. Not for a few stories for a newspaper. But even as the words formed I secretly I knew I would return. The problem for me is that I find war zones exciting places. There is a thrill to being under fire, even risking your life, always in the knowledge, of course, that, as an observer, rather than a protagonist, I was somehow invulnerable. Rupert’s death shattered that illusion, but as the shock of his loss gradually lessened I was soon beginning to convince myself of the need to return.
Rupert always said to me, ‘If you are going to report the war, then you have to see the war,’ and he was right. Just before I left, my 6-year-old son asked me why I was going to Afghanistan. ‘To carry out research for my book and to report on what is happening in the country,’ I told him, hoping that he wouldn’t ask me if I was going to do anything dangerous. ‘Why can’t you just get the information off the internet?’ he responded, looking confused. ‘Because that’s what somebody else has seen and witnessed,’ I replied. ‘I need to see what is going on for myself so that I can write about it.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I think I understand.’
So here I am on a C-130, ten minutes away from landing in Helmand, the centre of a war zone where every day British troops are being killed and injured. So much for never returning. And the news from the front line is not good. In Sangin, a town in the north of Helmand, six soldiers have been killed in the first week of March. Four of the dead were shot by snipers. Taliban shooters are good, and the Army is understandably nervous. Enemy snipers are feared and hated by all armies and run the risk of summary execution if captured. Snipers will go for the easy kill or one designed to shatter morale: the young soldier, the commander, the medic. Morale in Sangin had understandably suffered. Soldiers were being picked off at the rate of one a day. Although the sniper is guaranteed to generate fear, in Helmand the IED, the unseen killer, remains the soldiers’ worst nightmare. A step in
