Spoken from the Front Page 5

  June 2006

  Colour Sergeant Richie Whitehead, Royal Marines

  We had a couple of attacks on the camp [Lashkar Gah] as they [the Taliban] started to get a little bit braver. Or we were perhaps setting one too many patterns – they started to learn what our routine was. The first ever RPG attack was in the early hours of the morning – one or two a.m. It was pitch dark and I was doing my rounds, walking around the base. And a guy with an RPG had literally just walked up to the fence and fired it at a sangar. It missed the sangar and the RPG just went on, like a rocket, straight over the camp and outside again. He had completely missed us from twenty-five metres. How that happened I don't know. I rushed into the sangar, where there was one of my lads, a young Scot named Ted. He had only just come out of training and he was just sat there in amazement saying: 'Did you just see that?'

  I said: 'Yes, but are you all right?'

  He said: 'Yes, but did you just see that?'

  I said: 'Yes, I did. It's OK. It's fine. There's no point dwelling on it.' It was just like a bang and a rocket, like a firework, going off. The RPG just hit some derelict ground on the outside and that was that. But from that point we realized we needed better torches – dragon lights in the sangars – because what we were issued with was not good enough. You could not see out, which meant this guy had just walked up to the fence and fired at us.

  11 June 2006

  McNab: A British soldier was killed and two were seriously wounded in a fire-fight. Captain James Philippson, aged twenty-nine, of 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, was the first British serviceman to die after the deployment to Helmand province: his patrol was ambushed by Taliban fighters outside Sangin. The servicemen were in Land Rovers when the attack happened. Anthony Philippson, the victim's father, said his only consolation was that his son had died in 'the job he lived for'. Apache attack helicopters were called in to support the troops following the ambush. Several Taliban fighters were killed.

  July 2006

  Flight Sergeant Paul 'Gunny' Phillips, RAF

  Flight Sergeant Paul 'Gunny' Phillips, RAF, is forty. He was born and brought up in Dundee, Scotland, and is the eldest of three siblings. He left school at sixteen and began on a Youth Training Scheme (YTS), rebuilding car engines. He joined the Royal Marines in 1985, but left in 1990 and worked in various jobs on 'Civvy Street'. In 1993, he joined the RAF and spent seven years as a storeman, serving three years at RAF Lossiemouth and four years on Tactical Supply Wing at RAF Stafford. In 2000, he began retraining to become a member of the air crew and joined 27 Squadron in 2003. He did tours of Northern Ireland and Bosnia as ground crew and later, as air crew, two tours of Iraq and four two-month tours of Afghanistan. He is based at RAF Odiham in Hampshire.

  I hate to use the term but I am a jack-of-all-trades, really. My role is probably the most multi-skilled job in the air-crew world. To run down my duties: I am responsible for the on-and unloading of passengers and cargo, responsible for voice-marshalling the aircraft by day and night in confined spaces, voice-marshalling the aircraft for underslung pick-up and drop-off, air navigation assistance, radio work, limited search and rescue capability, and air-to-ground gunnery. I can field service the aircraft but not in nearly as much detail as engineers.

  My tours of Iraq were an absolute breeze compared with Afghanistan. Iraq was just a bimble around the desert enjoying the view. I didn't fire one round in anger. But Afghanistan was a massively different kettle of fish. My first detachment to Afghanistan was with the Dutch Air Force from February 2006 to May 2006 [where Phillips received a general's commendation for his work]. I wasn't involved in any enemy contacts whilst with the Dutch. Then I went back out with the RAF in July [2006]. I had been in theatre for three to four days and there was a big op on called Op Augustus. We were trying to grab some high-value [Taliban] targets in Sangin. It was planned as a five-ship [aircraft] insert with 3 Para. It was intended as a dawn raid but it started to slip and all the timings went out of the window. They couldn't get a definite on the [main] target: they were still trying to work out whether this guy [Taliban] was there or not. But the second objective was to land on the HLS [helicopter landing site] and start clearing the area anyway, then sweep through these two compounds where they thought some relatively high-value targets would be. We were out to the east of Sangin holding for a good thirty or forty minutes for the Predator [unmanned aircraft] to clear us in. And everyone was thinking: It'll get knocked off [postponed]. They [the Taliban] will have scarpered. Then somebody, somewhere, decided we were going to go. So we pootled off to the HLS.

  I was in the third cab of the first wave because there was going to be a three-ship to drop off three platoons. There were two ships coming behind us to drop off another two platoons. We must have been a couple of hundred metres from the HLS on the approach and somebody said: 'There's a group of people on the HLS.' I was on the left-hand – the port – gun and I stuck my head out of the window and there was this big group of [Afghan] civvies just stood in the middle of the HLS with these three honking-great twenty-ton Chinooks heading towards them. They got the message and started to leg it. As we went over the top of them, they were still running under the aircraft. They were running across the HLS and I thought: I don't know whether they've got weapons or not but I'm not going to give them the opportunity to use them if they have. So as we went across [the HLS], I waited until the aircraft was about twenty feet beyond them and I put a burst of fire down as warning shots. And I've never seen so many people cover a hundred metres so quickly. They got the message and they got out of there pretty sharpish.

  Just prior to that happening, the number-one cab had got opened up on quite heavily. It turns out that this HLS was fairly well defended and it went from being fairly benign to being like Star Wars in nano-seconds. I was in Has's [Flying Officer Christopher 'Has' Hasler's] cab. There was tracer going everywhere – both outgoing and incoming. It turned into a two-way range fairly rapidly. We had just touched down by this point and we were being fired at from two positions. Ginge [Flight Sergeant Dale Folkard] was on the right-hand side, but he couldn't really fire at anybody because the number-two cab was in his way. On the left-hand side, I saw a couple of muzzle flashes from about eleven o'clock. It was from like a small ditch with a tree-line just behind it. I never felt any rounds coming in but I certainly saw the muzzle flashes so they got the good news [fired upon]. And then I could see silhouettes running from one compound to another.

  I thought: I've just been opened up on from about fifteen metres from where they are now. So they got the good news as well. But we managed to get the guys [the Paras] off and shortly after that the aircraft departed rather rapidly. We must have been on the ground for thirty or forty seconds. So there were two definite firing points there and there must have been four or five individuals moving from one compound to another. I was firing an M60 [machine-gun]. Sometimes you can tell if you've hit people and sometimes you can't. That time I couldn't because it was that dark. We had all the tracer going off and I was firing a weapon with my [night-vision] goggles on, which had backed down slightly. So you really are firing at a muzzle flash. But once I started firing at the muzzle flashes they stopped firing so, at the end of the day, I achieved my aim because I either suppressed them – or killed them.

  That was the first time in my life that I had been in a contact. It was memorable. Frisky: massively so. You can feel the adrenalin pumping. The minute you know something's happening you can almost hear your heart pounding in your ears. You don't really notice it at the time but [you do] once you have a breather and take stock. Once we'd lifted out, we had a quick check: everyone was OK, no holes in the aircraft. I must have looked like a startled rabbit. I said [to Ginge]: 'Fuck me, that was sporty.' I was bouncing around in the back of the cab like a little boy, all excited. I looked over at Ginge and he was just sitting there going, 'Fucking hell.' I said: 'I can't believe we just got away with that,' because I thought someone somewhere was going to get wh
acked badly. But we managed to get three cabs in and three cabs out and nobody got a pasting.

  1 July 2006

  McNab: Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, aged twenty-four, of the Intelligence Corps, became the first British Muslim soldier to be killed in the 'war on terror'. He died in an attack by the Taliban on the British base at Sangin. Hashmi's family spoke movingly about how, as a devout Muslim, he had been committed to bringing peace to Afghanistan. Zeehan Hashmi said of his brother: 'He was a very happy young man but very cheeky and mischievous. He was very daring – he had no fear of anything. He was a bit of a joker who could really make you laugh, but also make you cry if he wanted to.' He was the fifth British soldier to die in the past three weeks. Corporal Peter Thorpe, aged twenty-seven, of the Royal Signals, was killed during the same attack, which injured four other servicemen.

  7 July 2006

  Flight Lieutenant Christopher 'Has' Hasler, DFC, RAF

  We had to go into Sangin because the boys on the ground were out of water and ammo. As we came in, the aircraft were engaged but, sadly, a guy was killed as he was trying to secure the HLS. So we were called off by the troops. We went back to Bastion. We still needed to get in there and we needed a new plan. Satellite imagery of the area showed us there was just enough space between two buildings where I could put the aircraft down. We had a roller conveyor in the back – pallets on wheels – that we had to get off. But the aircraft on the ground has to move forward as you push on these crates to get them off.

  We got there, landed, and there wasn't much room. It was daylight. I was moving forward and the disc was getting quite close to the building, which was higher than the disc. I was out of ideas. I can hardly take the credit but the boss just said: 'You've got to do something here.' So I sort of did a 'wheelie' on the back two wheels. It's a skill we all practise – two-wheel taxiing – but I had never had to do it with a building six inches under the disc. I had to go on the back two wheels and move the heli forward with the building just underneath. So that was interesting. I managed to hold it on the back wheels while they got the crates out and loaded the body on and some of the wounded.

  Because it was so hot [swarming with enemy], it was decided the Apaches would light up with their guns an area where we thought the enemy would be. It was a bit odd. As I was doing my thing, just outside the left-hand side, they were lighting it up. To start with I thought it was incoming but later I learnt they were rifling the enemy. It was a bit disconcerting, though, to see these big red balls next to me. But they were just missing us. There was a bit of incoming too, but not much because the Apaches were doing their thing. We were there for quite a few minutes ...

  July 2006

  Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Parkhouse, 16 Medical Regiment

  I first came under fire on one of the earliest jobs I did. We were going in to pick up some seriously injured casualties and the locals – the Taliban – decided to put on a fireworks' display for us. It was the first time I realized that somebody was actually shooting at me – well, nah, I prefer to think they were shooting at the helicopter that I just happened to be in. I got over it by saying to myself: 'Let's not personalize this. They don't know me from Adam. They're just trying to shoot the vehicle I'm in and, actually, the pilots here are exceptional so I'm probably going to be okay.'

  But it was easy after that incident because now I just don't look out of the windows: problem solved! Sometimes you don't even know when you've been fired upon although, with the ballistic protection, you can sometimes hear the bullet hissing. At the time [of coming under fire], it's often not scary because you're so focused on what you're doing.

  But on this occasion [when he was first under fire] we were going into Musa Qa'leh, which was always notoriously difficult to get into for lots of different reasons. You could see the green tracer fire coming up towards the Chinook, and just as it started to flare in, you could also see the smoke from the RPGs going across and it was very obvious at that point that they were waiting for the helicopters to come in. We were going to pick up casualties that had suffered mortar injuries. We had a four-strong MERT on board and anything up to ten or twelve soldiers with us. We were landing on an unsecured HLS. It was around eleven at night. Pitch black as you go in. You could see some of the lights from the buildings but at that time most of the town centre of Musa Qa'leh was fairly uninhabited. The only locals in Musa Qa'leh then were ones who were trying to do you harm. And everything was pitch black in the back. Basically, they used to use two ways of getting in to an HLS: either flying very high and then diving down very quickly or low-level flying sometimes down at fifty feet and there would be a lot of jinking around. This landing was the latter: flying low and jinking around. But the problem with Musa Qa'leh was electricity pylons, which kept the pilots very busy. The air-crews were fantastic; how they got us in and out, I don't know. And they didn't have the luxury of not looking out of the windows! They had the tracers coming straight at them.

  As we prepared to land, one of the [MERT] team had comms with the pilots using a helmet system, getting updates on the casualties, and the rest of us were scurrying round the cab getting kit out and preparing, putting drips up, making sure the oxygen was switched on, getting out extra equipment we might need depending on what we thought the injuries were going to be. And it was extremely noisy. You can't use normal radios in the back of the helicopter because there's too much ambient noise. So most of it's done by sign language, or standing beside somebody and yelling in their ear. And this is where the team approach is very important.

  Retrospectively, it's all quite exciting stuff. In Musa Qa'leh, you want to be on the ground for as little time as possible. The back ramp goes down, the guard force – ten or twelve strong – pile out to their perimeter. They are, basically, maybe twenty or thirty metres away from the aircraft, because as soon as you move about ten metres away, you lose a visibility because of the fine dust. And it was pitch black. So they did that and then the medical team came on with the casualties – because there's no way you can have a verbal handover under the rotor blades. So, they had written something down about the casualties and their treatment. Then they brought the casualties into the cab on stretchers and put them in the designated space on the aircraft where we felt was appropriate. Where you put anyone depends on the type of injury because you may want to put him head first or feet first because helicopters don't fly flat, they fly nose down. So it may be more important to have them head up if they have head injuries, or if you're worried about them bleeding out then it's feet up. But they are usually positioned in stretchers on the floor – often strapped down on the floor.

  You have to work out with the pilots their plan of evacuation. Were they going to do a few minutes of low flying or were they going to, as soon as they could, go up to fifteen hundred feet? Nine times out of ten we would like them to go up because, as soon as they get up there, there's a more stable platform for us to work on, and as soon as they get up high, they can put some ambient light on in the back. But sometimes that's not possible – once again it comes down to communication with the air-crews.

  On this occasion, we were on the ground for no more than sixty seconds. It felt a lot longer. There were three casualties and then we just had to make sure the order was right for us to do interventions. With multi-casualties, the team would break down and the paramedic would often sort out those who, on the face of it, were the less seriously injured. Paramedics are used to working by themselves. The senior clinician and the ODP [Operations Department practitioner] usually work as a team on the worst casualty, and often the RAF flight nurse would have a roving role. She had the comms with the air-crew. She was our link, as well as helping out when we required a third pair of hands.

  On this occasion, the three casualties had mortar injuries. Basically, they were on guard duty in a sangar on a perimeter wall and a mortar or RPG had got lucky, struck it and penetrated the sangar.

  One guy had serious head injuries with a broken right leg and he
was unconscious. We knew he was going to be the worst one because the other two were conscious, which is always a good sign. If they're able to talk, by definition they have a good airway and enough blood pumping around them to keep them conscious. It's very basic signs you're looking for, though it doesn't mean they don't need help.

  The ODP and I started working on the guy with the serious head injury and at the back we left the paramedic to assess the two who were conscious. He very quickly did an assessment and he basically gave me the thumbs-up, which meant their injuries were nothing too serious – and we could concentrate on dealing with the casualty in front of us, as he was the most seriously hurt. He was there on a stretcher. At the same time, we told the flight nurse, who was in comms with the pilots, that, as soon as we could, we'd get the pilots to send a message back to the hospital confirming how serious it was. We were also letting them know how serious it was. We can categorize our injuries in various ways. At that stage, we were using the T1, T2, T3 system. T1 was critical, T2 was serious, T3 was minor, walking wounded. This guy was T1 – and the other two were T2s. If someone is requiring a stretcher to move, they are a T2. The flight time from Musa Qa'leh to Bastion is approximately twenty-five minutes. As soon as the pilots have done their stuff and got us up there to fifteen hundred feet – which is usually within twenty seconds – we get some basic light on.