The Circuit (39 page)

I looked at Susan, our young producer. ‘You got that?’ I asked her.

‘Got what?’ she said.

I thought for sure the lieutenant would order the lads to do the drill again before going outside the wire, but he didn’t. He’d ticked his rehearsals box and it was on to the next phase. I couldn’t trust my clients’ safety to that lot if we were ambushed, so I told the lieutenant that if anything happened during the clearance patrol I’d get the CNN team to the nearest point of cover and await his orders.

The lieutenant estimated the clearance patrol would last approximately four to five hours. We would be walking over some very steep and rugged terrain in extremely hot weather conditions. Factor in the altitude (we were operating at between 6,000 and 8,000 feet) and I was convinced that the major hazards we’d face wouldn’t be incoming rounds or RPGs – it would be broken limbs and heat illness.

With that in mind I told Nic and the crew to wear their body armour but leave their helmets behind. The rest of the gear was all essential; Scotty carried his camera and ancillaries, Nic took the tripod, water, a GPS and satellite phone, plus his own individual medical pack and compact video camera (which he lugs with him everywhere). Susan carried water for herself and Scotty, and I had water, the team medical trauma pack, my own GPS and satellite phone and a few odds and sods. In addition, we all had power bars to munch on during the trip to keep our energy levels up. We were quite the little patrol on our own. The only thing we lacked was weapons.
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Together with the platoon we shook out in a basic formation and stepped outside the wire. The patrol would travel to the peak of a mountain and back down to the camp. The lieutenant punched some coordinates in his GPS and gave the troops a reference point to walk towards. We travelled three quarters of a mile down a newly graded, dirt vehicle path and hung a sharp left at a re-entrant carved into a steep hillside. There were narrow goat tracks on either side of the re-entrant; one leading to a small community of poppy growers and the other climbing sharply up the hillside. Goat tracks, especially ones that don’t lead directly to and from populated areas, are prime places to get ambushed or hit by IEDs or anti-personnel mines. Fortunately, the lieutenant was able to radio back to camp and call out a drone to recce the areas we couldn’t see. Once we got the all clear, we moved up the hillside track for six hundred yards before moving off track for the rest of our journey to the summit.

About a third of the way up, the patrol spotted a white sedan and two motorbikes driving along a narrow dirt road. I was very concerned. White sedans are the vehicles of choice for suicide bombings in Afghanistan. The car stopped approximately three quarters of a mile from our position. The driver got out and disappeared behind a large boulder.

One of the soldiers next to me started observing the sedan through the scope of his sniper rifle. I asked the soldier if he could make out the wheels on the car.

‘Mister, I could make out the whites of the guy’s eyes if I could see him,’ he said.

‘Does the vehicle’s chassis look like it’s sitting close to the tyres?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ said the soldier.

‘Does it look like it’s carrying a heavy load?’

‘Why?’

‘Because what I’m wondering right now is did that vehicle stop so the driver can jump out and have a piss? Did he stop to plant an IED? Or, is the car rigged as a suicide bomb?’

The soldier looked up from his scope. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I never would have thought of that.’ Down in Helmund that would be the first thing on a British soldier’s mind.

It saddened me that this great bunch of young lads seemed to have no in-depth counter-insurgency training whatsoever; not in basic tactics as evidenced by their abysmal rehearsal or in what to look for whilst out on patrol. To his credit, the young lad with the sniper rifle had the common sense to observe the sedan through his scope. I had no doubt that with the proper training he could be an excellent soldier.

The driver eventually popped back out from behind the boulder, climbed into his car and drove away. He must have been taking a piss. Lucky bastard. Had our patrol been full of nervous, trigger-happy soldiers, that piss could have cost him his life.

The rest of the way up the mountain was very slow going. We were scrambling over large boulders on a steep incline in temperatures topping ninety degrees Fahrenheit. In between huffing and puffing, the patrol made several stops to rest and take in the views. Scotty and Nic worked through these breaks, shooting b-roll and stand-ups explaining how the ground we were travelling resembled the mountainous terrain in bin Laden’s 2003 video.

I was very proud of the CNN crew. Despite the rough conditions Nic, Scotty and Susan were holding their own. Some of the soldiers, meanwhile, were in a lot of distress. All of them were loaded down with mountain warfare kit including body armour, helmets, operational waistcoats, weapons, ammunition, comms and water bags fitted on their backs like day sacks. Half of the lads were coping well with the harsh conditions but the others were labouring intensively. A captain and a sergeant went down with heat-related problems.

It didn’t help matters that the lieutenant was leading the patrol along a very difficult route. At times we almost needed mountaineering equipment to negotiate the huge boulders and overhangs. I didn’t expect to travel along graded tracks the whole time but I did expect the lieutenant to set a course that would enable us to more easily break contact with the enemy should we be attacked.

I spotted several different routes we could have taken. I asked one of the sergeants why we were climbing such bad ground when there was easier terrain to travel.

The sergeant nodded towards the lieutenant. ‘He has the GPS,’ he said.

I took that to mean that the lieutenant was following a direct bearing to the top of the mountain. It was crazy. A soldier needs to use the ground to his or her advantage. Unlike a compass, a GPS enables a soldier to contour the ground and plot the most advantageous path. The lieutenant hadn’t done that. He was following a bearing blindly.

The sergeant and I scanned the area again and soon agreed on an easier route for the journey down. He asked me if I had prior military experience. I told him I’d spent twenty years in the SAS. The Americans must have amazing communications skills because before we reached the top of the mountain, every member of the patrol knew my background.

The journey to the summit had been unnecessarily difficult but the view up top made it all worthwhile. We could see clear across the border into Pakistan where the mountains of the Hindu Kush rise up to 16,000 feet. It was an incredible feeling knowing that I was working with the first western TV news crew to film that view. The Circuit may have its considerable faults but at that moment I wouldn’t have traded my job for anything.

We began our descent along a course determined by the young lieutenant. After a wee bit of cajoling on my part, he allowed us to take a break. During the stop, I asked the lieutenant, privately, how he’d decided on the route up. As I’d suspected, he answered that he had followed a direct bearing from our departure point. I mentioned in the most tactful way I could muster that if he’d factor in the contours of the ground as opposed to following what the GPS said was the quickest way, it could help his troops avoid heat problems. I also explained how he could use the ground to his advantage in a contact scenario.

I half expected the lieutenant to tell me to bugger off. Instead, he thanked me for my input and said he’d send a recce to find an easier path down the mountain. I told him not to bother; his sergeants and I had already agreed an alternative route. He grinned and told me he was still learning. I told him not to worry as I was in my fifties and I was still learning too.

Back at the base, I made myself a brew, sat outside my tent and looked through my binoculars at the ground we’d covered with the patrol. I was exceedingly grateful we hadn’t encountered any insurgents that day. They could have hit our patrol and dissolved right back into the mountains. The soldiers stationed at the base may have had howitzers and air support at their disposal, but those are blunt instruments for taking out guerrillas, especially in steep, rocky terrain.

I could understand flying soldiers into Nuristan for border operations and flying them back out, but from where I was sat, establishing bases in the province seemed absolute madness. I seriously doubted whether the potential goodwill generated by PRTs justified the risks involved in executing them. There weren’t even enough troops in Kala Gush to secure the immediate ground around them.

I woke early the next morning to the sound of Nic’s cot buckling underneath him – again. I didn’t get it. Nic’s not a heavy lad. I jokingly told him to stop sleeping with his wallet in his back pocket; all that money he earned as a correspondent was putting him in danger.

The commander had set aside several hours that day to personally show CNN development projects his PRT was running in the area. The tasks included a girls’ school located in the nearby village of Kowtalay and a medical day clinic the base’s doctor and a few medics were holding in a neighbouring village. Before leaving the base, the commander assigned soldiers to look after each member of the CNN crew. I understood his motives and I didn’t feel as if my toes had been stepped on. Still, I had every intention of doing my job. If things went pear-shaped, the soldiers’ priorities could shift whereas my focus would stay fixed on my clients.

In addition to me and the CNN crew, our patrol included the commander, thirty-two troopers and two civilians attached to the PRT: a Nuristan specialist from the US State Department and an engineer. Both civvies were very nice grey-haired men in their late fifties. I may not have agreed with the strategic value of their projects, but hats off to them for spending what should have been their retirement years doing good deeds in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces.

We all piled into a convoy of eight Hummers and headed toward Kowtalay. The village looked like a picture postcard in the distance; a clutch of quaint buildings nestled in an emerald valley along the banks of a crystal-clear, rapidly flowing river. The Hummers were too heavy to drive over a suspension bridge crossing the river into Kowtalay, so we parked on a hill and finished the journey on foot. Each vehicle was assigned two soldiers both to protect the Hummers and to cover us from the hilltop.

As soon as I dismounted my vehicle, a soldier walked up to me. ‘I’m with you,’ he said.

I didn’t think anything of it. As we were going along, I stepped out of the line of march to look for possible signs of ambush ahead of the suspension bridge. The soldier stepped off with me.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

The young soldier grinned at me self-consciously. ‘Um, I’m your bodyguard, man.’

I laughed.

‘Seriously,’ he said.

I sized him up. He seemed a good-natured lad, definitely in his early twenties and in very good physical condition. But that didn’t make him a bodyguard.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘If shit happens, how are you going to respond?’

‘I’m going to get you to safety and cover you,’ he said.

It was ridiculous. There were sixteen infanteers covering us from the hilltop and a further sixteen in our little patrol. If four soldiers were busy looking after me and the crew when a contact ensued, the foot patrol’s defensive response would be reduced by a quarter.

‘No, you’re not, mate,’ I said. ‘There aren’t many of you on the ground so if shit happens I’ll get myself and my clients to safety while you return fire.’

The young soldier thought about it for a few seconds and smiled. ‘Fair enough,’ he said and we cracked on.

The girls’ school in Kowtalay was still under construction. We arrived to find a group of girls dressed in brightly coloured clothing playing on a patch of waste ground next to what appeared to be a very well built shell. A group of tents nearby served as temporary classrooms until the building was finished.
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The commander was beaming over his nearly completed school and the civilian engineer was also bursting with pride. He gushed, and rightly so, about the craftsmanship the local workforce had put into the building. Considering the obstacles the Americans were encountering daily in Nuristan, the project was a big feather in their caps. Whether it would actually secure the loyalty of Kowtalay was another matter. The PRT had assembled a group of local men for CNN to interview. From their expressions, the men didn’t strike me as being particularly overjoyed by the American presence in their village or grateful for their new school.

After Kowtalay, we walked to a neighbouring village where the medical PRT was in full swing. There was a large queue of locals outside the clinic, from the very young all the way up to the very old. The ailments were equally diverse, ranging in severity from toothaches to malaria, with a scattering of tuberculosis in between. A doctor and several medics from the base had been treating people for more than two hours when we arrived. They looked shattered. I asked the doctor how long he planned on staying. He told me that after the next patient it was vitamin pills only.

The day clinic was a nice gesture but it was doubtful it would have any real impact on the lives of the villagers. In a stable environment a clinic can go on for weeks if not months until a permanent medical facility is built. This doctor couldn’t be on the ground longer than a few hours without endangering himself, his staff and the villagers. That’s because an unintended consequence of PRTs is that they draw insurgents like a red rag to a bull. When insurgents first moved into Nuristan, they operated in the caves hidden deep within the mountainsides and left the villages alone. The PRTs were drawing them out. A few days after our tour, we learned that a suicide bomber killed seven Afghan police stationed near Kowtalay. It made me wonder about the future of the girls’ school. It was by far the best building in the village. Girls’ school one day, Taliban headquarters the next? Not an unrealistic scenario given the way Afghanistan was going.