скачать книгу бесплатно
Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan
Patrick Bishop
Afghanistan, 2008. After their eighteen-month epic tour of Helmand Province, the troops of 3 Para are back. This time, the weight of experience weighs heavily on their shoulders.In April 2006 the elite 3 Para Battle Group was despatched to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on a tour that has become a legend. All that summer the Paras were subjected to relentless Taliban attacks in one of the most gruelling campaigns fought by British troops in modern times.Two years later the Paras are back in the pounding heat of the Afghanistan front lines. The conflict has changed. The enemy has been forced to adopt new weaponry and tactics. But how much progress are we really making in the war against the insurgents? And is there an end in sight?In this searing account of 3 Para’s return, bestselling author Patrick Bishop combines gripping, first-person accounts of front line action with an unflinching look at the hard realities of our involvement in Afghanistan. Writing from a position of exclusive access alongside the Paras, he reveals the ‘ground truth’ of the mission our soldiers have been given. It’s a sombre picture. But shining out from it are stories of courage, comradeship and humour, as well as a gripping account of an epic humanitarian operation through Taliban-infested country to deliver a vitally needed turbine to the Kajaki Dam.Frank, action-packed and absorbing, “Ground Truth” is a timely and important book that will set the agenda for discussion of the Afghan conflict for years to come.
GROUND TRUTH
3 Para: Return to Afghanistan
PATRICK BISHOP
To Douglas and Richenda
Contents
List of Illustrations (#u76d2de45-7ab0-5344-8b5e-b194e8c60f16)
Maps (#u74fb49bb-1920-587e-a887-e99bf0f42e55)
Introduction: A Big Ask (#u64b38552-2e86-5a38-8c7f-e2c18ad0542a)
1 Going Back (#u531d8c42-ebf9-53cf-a682-d9df2515ceeb)
2 Through the Looking Glass (#uf5d20307-c16a-58a5-89ea-f074dcb3187e)
3 KAF (#u9f5669f5-3060-58c3-9779-df725b940200)
4 Hearts and Minds (#u52e56d45-5231-5b93-ad86-a48b4f4d67dc)
5 Hunting the Hobbit (#u3a48b9df-95ba-50c6-9d46-3766654110a6)
6 Green Zone (#u50a1e0f5-d9f5-5183-9de8-c2effd6b299a)
7 IED (#ud29743c2-ffc1-5934-8b6c-6ec3a3fd5cb6)
8 The Stadium (#u856ba3dd-2917-5dbf-9b09-df969d5839ae)
9 Facing the Dragon (#u82590977-624c-53a6-9b51-7183f27902d0)
10 Sangin Revisited (#u3c0548ee-ed40-577f-a62f-774b10381772)
11 The White Cliffs of Helmand (#u157c0566-696f-5ca4-a3ff-2897da24c58b)
12 Convoy (#ud81421a2-04ae-5b69-adba-9564ce7bb5cf)
13 The Enemy (#ubbda79ce-48fc-56b0-ba63-b0b5633d8858)
14 Close Quarters (#ue069b2bd-a725-570b-81bf-911daeee9041)
15 Fields of Fire (#ud7517ceb-c04e-5561-bb93-e91fc8d7e299)
16 ‘Something our Parents will Understand’ (#u22c31cd5-8224-5f32-ad23-ea517c43f181)
17 Homecoming (#u2db09de8-39c9-5f95-a76f-f811aae797ef)
Abbreviations, Acronyms and Military Terms (#ud79ea267-6f97-577c-817e-fd3df565b981)
Acknowledgments (#uc0e52105-8023-54f4-827b-ab767f98ed32)
By the Same Author (#u3bdc6045-72f3-5bc1-8fd6-95b9394f50f9)
Index (#uc84329f9-56fe-5da3-ad0e-6dce41d2d3d1)
Copyright (#ulink_99ecd758-f475-5c43-878d-62a2a501e302)
About the Publisher (#uc692d775-86f8-5e0d-8ba8-2a55f3ccce9e)
The following account is based on interviews with the soldiers of 16 Air Assault Brigade. The author has made his best endeavour to report events accurately and truthfully and any insult or injury to any of the parties described or quoted herein or to their families is unintentional. The publishers will be happy to correct any inaccuracies in later editions.
Some names have been changed or omitted to protect operational security.
List of Illustrations (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d)
Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith © Sergeant Anthony Boocock, 16 Air Assault Brigade photographer/Crown Copyright
Major Stuart McDonald © Tina Hager
Sangin schoolroom © Patrick Bishop
A Para leads women to safety © Jason P. Howe/ConflictPics
‘A’ Company patrols a poppy field © Captain Ian McLeish
Paras patrolling in Hutal © Tina Hager
Colour Sergeant Mark Kennedy with children in Qal-e-Gaz
© Captain Ian McLeish
‘A’ Company at a Maywand Base © Marco di Lauro/Getty Images
Paras navigating Maywand ditches © Jason P. Howe/ConflictPics
6 Platoon, ‘B’ Company patrol outside Hutal © Tina Hager
‘Gungy Third’ aboard a Chinook to Inkerman © Patrick Bishop
FOB Inkerman sangar sentry © Patrick Bishop
Privates Ben Biddulph and Andy Shawcross at Inkerman © Patrick Bishop
End of patrol at FOB Inkerman © Patrick Bishop
Sergeant Major Stu Bell © Patrick Bishop
Captain Ben Harrop © Patrick Bishop
Paras tabbing along a Mizan route © Christopher Pledger
Sergeant Chris Prosser at Inkerman © Patrick Bishop
Paras run to board a Chinook © Christopher Pledger
‘A’ Company prepare to assault © Captain Ian McLeish
Tabbing back to base in Zabul © Sergeant Ian Harding, 16 Air Assault Brigade Photographer/Crown Copyright
‘B’ Company patrol in Mizan © Christopher Pledger
Corporal Marc Stott © Patrick Bishop
Lieutenant Fraser Smith in Band-e-Timor © Patrick Bishop
Arrival at Kadahar Stadium © Marco di Lauro/Getty Images
Lance Corporal Andy Lanaghan with an ANA soldier
Paras patrol Kandahar City © Sergeant Craig Allen, Parachute Regiment Photographer/Crown Copyright
Bathing in the Sangin irrigation channel © Patrick Bishop
Sangin civilian © Patrick Bishop
Taking a breather in the Sangin Green Zone © Patrick Bishop
Corporal Mike French © Patrick Bishop
Corporal Bev Cornell © Corporal Bev Baljit Kaur Cornell
Corporal Marianne Hay with her dog Deanna © Patrick Bishop
HET tractor and trailer rig © Patrick Bishop
Satellite image of Kajaki dam by kind permission of Regional Command South
Major Stuart McDonald and Brigadier Huw Williams in Kajaki Sofia © Sergeant Anthony Boocock, 16 Air Assault Brigade photographer/Crown Copyright
Kajaki District Leader Abdul Razzak announces the ceasefire is off© Patrick Bishop
Major John Boyd © Patrick Bishop
A 500-pound bomb at Kajaki Sofia © Patrick Bishop
Corporal Stu Hale © Patrick Bishop
Flying the 3 Para flag © Christopher Pledger
Endpapers
‘A’ Company regroup after an air assault in Maywand © Jason P. Howe/ConflictPics
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgments in future editions.
List of Maps (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d)
Introduction: A Big Ask (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d)
When 3 Para arrived back in Colchester in the autumn of 2008 after their second tour of Afghanistan in three years, their commanding officer, Huw Williams, pointed out the difference between his generation of soldiers and the very young men he was leading.
‘When I joined the army we thought we would have to go Northern Ireland and might possibly have to go somewhere else to fight,’ he said. ‘But these guys knew when they joined that they would be expected to go off, more or less straight away, to a full-on war.’
A British soldier’s job today is much more difficult and dangerous than it was in the last decades of the twentieth century. Then it was easily possible to go through an entire career without hearing a shot fired in anger. Now, a new recruit to a combat unit is virtually certain to see action. Thanks to Afghanistan, before long almost everyone will have a war story to tell. Since the British Army went there in force in 2006, about 40,000 servicemen and women have come and gone. That represents more than a third of the country’s ground troops. Some of them have now been twice. Force levels are rising steadily. There is no end in sight to the conflict and no obvious short cut that would allow an early but honourable exit. A spell in ‘Afghan’, as the soldiers call it, is becoming as routine as an Ulster roulement was thirty years ago.
There are some similarities. The skills and drills honed on the terraced streets of Belfast and Londonderry and the fields of Fermanagh and Tyrone have proved surprisingly useful in the river valleys of Helmand.
The differences, though, are far bigger. Ulster was grim, but Afghanistan is harrowing. The violence is deeper, darker and more disturbing. There were no suicide bombers in Northern Ireland. Life in Afghanistan’s front-line forts is harsh, squalid, exhausting and dangerous. Soldiers know that once they step through the gates they are facing six months of knackering patrols, regular fire-fights and the constant nerve-fraying fear that the next step they take may trigger a buried bomb.
They are operating in an extreme climate in wild country among people whose culture, try as the soldiers might to understand it, remains baffling and opaque. There’s nothing in the recent memory of the British Army to draw on for help. You have to go back more than a hundred years to match the experience. Any soldier reading Winston Churchill’s account of his time with the Malakand Field Force fighting Pathan (Pashtun) tribesmen in the North West Frontier in 1897 would feel a buzz of recognition at his tales of Tommies and their native allies battling with heat, thirst, slippery local leaders and opponents steeped in a culture of violence.
‘The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has… been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour,’ he wrote. ‘That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.’
(#ulink_82e6466f-3736-54db-abd3-71e4ab8f70a2)
The strain of a tour is enormous, reflected in the number of soldiers diagnosed with mental disorders.
(#ulink_96778f4a-c44b-5d3b-bfd4-6c81f637134a) But the burden also lies heavy on the folk they leave behind. For those with families, Afghan duty means being absent from hearth and home not just for the six months of the deployment but also for lengthy pre-operational training exercises. By the end of 2010, some members of 3 Para will have done three Afghan stints in five years.
It is, as the soldiers say, ‘a big ask’. It is not as if they are going to fight in a popular cause. British public opinion remains resolutely sceptical about the value of the campaign. Most people seem unwilling to accept the government’s assertion that by fighting in Afghanistan we are defending the home front against a threat as great as that posed by the Nazis. The scepticism shows no sign of eroding. Progress, military and political, is deemed to be non-existent or far too slow to merit the cost in blood, money and effort.
At the same time, the public are full of admiration for the soldiers. The standing of the services in civilian eyes is probably higher than at any time since the Second World War. It is not difficult to see why. Their culture of stoicism and comradeship are points of light in a world of blighted materialism and egocentricity They remind us, perhaps, of the way we like to think we once were.
The soldiers are pleased to be appreciated. But they, who pay the price of Britain’s policy, do not share the civilians’ pessimism. From what I have seen and heard, there is no significant reluctance to serve in Afghanistan and if necessary to do so again and again. ‘Are we prepared to do it?’ asked 3 Para’s former regimental sergeant major John Hardy. ‘Yes we are. Every time.’ The soldiers are driven back by a number of impulses. One is professional satisfaction. Almost every soldier in a volunteer army welcomes the prospect of action. Another is their sense of duty which has stood up well to the climate of self-interest prevalent in civilian life.
But there is more to it than that. Soldiers have a refreshingly clear-cut sense of right and wrong. They sympathise with the Afghan people, caught between the cruelty of the insurgents and the venality of the authorities, and want to help them. The job is tough and dangerous and brimming with frustrations and disillusionment, but the prizes of safety at home and a better Afghanistan are considered, if they can be won, to be worth it. The soldiers’ enthusiasm, though, is finite. A military stalemate will eventually lower morale and degrade performance. If there are no signs that the Afghan government is serious about governing, that process will accelerate.
The phrase ‘ground truth’ is a military expression, meaning how things are compared with how they are imagined to be. Soldiers know the ground truth better than anyone; yet, it seems to me, their voices have not been given the attention they deserve. They have some extraordinary tales to tell. This book reveals some of their stories as well as their thoughts, fears and anxieties about a conflict that, for good or for bad, is shaping both them and us.
* (#ulink_29902772-68a9-58b3-8983-ff29345e161e) Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, Project Gutenberg, E-Book #9404.
* (#ulink_d67bf342-e943-5f6c-92e0-9ffb4735e217) In 2007, according to the Ministry of Defence, 375 Armed Forces personnel who had previously served in Afghanistan were assessed as having a mental disorder.
