Apache

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We were in part of a network of ten identical tents, five on each side of a covered corridor. The squadron had a couple of these pods: REME and attached personnel in one, aircrew and ground-crew in the other.

The first tent on the right was a recreational room with a TV and a table covered in sun bleached newspapers and old dog-eared paperbacks. On the left was the ablutions block for the network’s fifty or so inhabitants. It contained six showers, six sinks and six toilets – all stainless steel. You were guaranteed the most uncomfortable crap in the world there, and not just because they didn’t have any seats. In the winter, the rims were ice cold, and in the summer they were so hot they scalded your arse. Hovering the Apache was a doddle compared to hovering over the tin rim.

There were around a hundred identical pods in Bastion in total, arranged in long rows. A latticework of walkways lined with black mesh grilles connected them, and roads with irrigation ditches to their sides, all walled with identical Hesco Bastion bollards.

Losing your bearings and walking into fifteen different tents before you found your own was all too common – and made you feel like a real tit. But you quickly learned to recognise tiny landmarks, like a flagpole, a regiment’s insignia or a different coloured Portaloo.

‘John looks knackered, doesn’t he,’ Billy said as we unpacked.

It was true. John had developed a manic stare, skin stretched over his cheekbones and huge bags under his eyes. We knew that look all too well; three months ago we’d seen it every time we’d stood in front of the shaving mirror.

We’d never have conceded it to anyone in our sister squadron, but the sitreps we’d got back at 9 Regiment’s North Yorkshire HQ proved they had been just as busy as we were on our first tour. Perhaps more so. The Helmand Task Force’s first six months had been a true baptism of fire.

British forces had first been deployed in April 2006 as part of a dramatic expansion of NATO’s role in Afghanistan, to establish a secure environment for reconstruction, development and government. We’d had troops in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001. But while the capital and its northern surroundings had, as a result, remained relatively secure, the rest of the country had dramatically deteriorated.

In many areas, President Hamid Karzai’s government existed only in name – hence his derogatory nickname, the ‘Mayor of Kabul’. Warlords and, increasingly, rich opium barons held the real reins of power. With nobody to stop it, the heroin business boomed. The opium poppy crop doubled or tripled every year. Every local official who mattered, even slightly, was in the traffickers’ back pockets.

Nowhere was the spiralling anarchy worse than in the south. Huge swathes of the four southern provinces – Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Nimruz – were run by the drugs tsars as their own lawless fiefdoms.

With attention drifting away from Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush were adamant that what they had started five years earlier in Afghanistan should be properly concluded. At their insistence, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force’s remit was widened to take on the mountainous eastern provinces, then the western flatlands, and finally the barren deserts of the south.

The Dutch deployed to sparsely populated Uruzgan and Nimruz, and the Canadians to Kandahar. The British government volunteered to take on Helmand – the hardest nut of all to crack. It was the biggest province, and produced a staggering 42 per cent of Afghanistan’s total raw opium.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Army had failed to control Helmand with a whole motorised rifle division of 12,000 fighting soldiers. Twenty years later, we were going to try it with less than a third of that number. And of the 3,300 the British government initially sent, less than a quarter were fighting troops. The British Army has always relished a challenge. This one was called Operation Herrick.

Not even the most cynical military planners dared to imagine the viciousness and intensity with which the resurgent Taliban would oppose our arrival. Forming an unholy alliance with the drugs lords, the Taliban threw everything they had at the Paras of 16 Air Assault Brigade. Its small infantry force was spread out across five thinly manned and remote outpost bases across the north of the province – known as platoon houses or district centres.

A never-ending supply of holy warriors swarmed over the Pakistan border to fight alongside local guns for hire and launch wave after wave of attacks on the DCs at Sangin, Kajaki, Musa Qa’leh, Gereshk and Now Zad. Day and night, each was pounded with small arms, RPGs, rockets and mortars. Each turned into a mini Alamo.

The army had not seen fighting as sustained and desperate since Korea. It was as bad as anything thrown at either American or British troops during the occupation of Iraq; and, a lot of the time, it was worse.

NATO’s intelligence about enemy strengths before we arrived was poor. They estimated 1,000 Taliban fighters spread across both the Helmand and Kandahar provinces. By August, the estimate for Helmand alone was upped to 10,000.

One of the greatest problems the Task Force faced was the distance it had to cover. At 275 miles long and 100 wide (a total of 23,000 square miles), Helmand is not much smaller than the Republic of Ireland. Ensuring every DC had enough ammunition, food and water was a logistical nightmare. At times some of the guys ran dangerously low; down to their last few hundred rounds and the emergency rations they carried in their webbing.

In September, the brigade reluctantly abandoned the most distant DC at Musa Qa’leh, more than fifty miles from Camp Bastion. It was too dangerous to land Chinooks anywhere near it, and a ground resupply couldn’t break through the besieging Taliban’s lines without a full on battalion-strength attack.

The guys holding the other four DCs just stuck it out with sheer grit and the odd Apache gunship in support. As the RSM of 3 Para declared with relish, ‘We’re paratroopers – we’re supposed to be surrounded.’ It was a hell of a feat, especially as so many of the lads were on their first operational tour.

It was all a bit of a far cry from the public aspirations of the man who signed the deployment paperwork, Defence Secretary John Reid. He told the House of Commons that he hoped the troops would come home having ‘not fired a single bullet’. He’d also somewhat optimistically termed the mission ‘nation building’.

Actually, between June and October 2006, the Paras and their supporting cap badges ended up firing a total of 450,000 bullets, 10,000 artillery shells and 6,500 mortar rounds. In addition, and between May and August 2006 alone, the sixteen Apache pilots of 656 Squadron put down 7,305 cannon rounds, 68 rockets and 11 Hellfire missiles. I don’t think it was quite what John Reid had in mind.

Our defiance came at a heavy price. A total of thirty-five servicemen were killed in that first six months: sixteen in combat, fourteen when a Nimrod MR2 spy plane crashed, four in accidents – and one committed suicide. A further 140 were wounded in action, forty-three of them seriously or very seriously. It all meant we didn’t have much time for nation building.

And there lay the real problem. It wasn’t just kinetic – we were also fighting a war of minds. We could carry on killing Taliban forever. But it wasn’t going to win over the local Afghan people in whose name we had come. We had to deliver them a better life, and soon. All we’d achieved so far was to turn their streets, orchards and fields into lethal battle grounds.

Most Helmandis were still perched on the fence, waiting in the time-honoured Afghan way to see which side looked like winning. British soldiers were welcomed wherever they went; there was little love for the Taliban. Yet if our presence made things worse, they’d cosy up to the other side soon enough.

The Taliban knew that too. They understood that reconstruction was pretty bloody hard with a war going on. There’s an old Afghan phrase their mullah leaders loved to quote: ‘They have the watches, we have the time.’ They didn’t need a spectacular knockout blow – just a constant, paralysing war of attrition.

The squadron’s first foray into Helmand had been quite something. I sat on my cot and wondered what this tour would bring. The Taliban were becoming more successful at killing us as time moved on. They learned lessons quickly from each contact and adapted immediately. By sheer luck we hadn’t yet lost a helicopter but it was only a matter of time. They’d been getting better whilst I’d been planning my retirement. I’d be the one playing catch up, not them. I needed to be lucky every second I was in the air; they only needed to be lucky once. There were no two ways about it – for the first time in my whole military career, I was genuinely concerned that I might not come home alive.

‘You know what Billy? I’ve got butterflies.’

‘Yeah, right. Probably that Gurkha curry in the Kandahar cookhouse.’

Billy was not in a sympathetic mood. He was too busy hanging up his impossibly well-pressed uniforms.

There was no point letting it gnaw away at me; however I played it, what was for me wouldn’t pass me. I couldn’t wait to climb back into the cockpit and get stuck in again. I’d always loved being on operations, ever since my first Northern Ireland tour as a young Para.