Spoken from the Front Page 7
Then another heavy-machine-gun post opened up behind us. I looked at my co-pilot and these big balls of green tracer were passing close to his head. We were very lucky. But we got out of it. I've never seen that amount of fire before or since. It was good fun. We then got engaged all the way up till we were out of the threat band. But we were lucky. I still don't know how it happened but my aircraft didn't take any rounds. The other two aircraft took quite a few. We were just close to the bank and the fire was coming within inches of the aircraft all around us. We didn't lose any guys, but a guy on one of the other aircraft got shot in the arm.
1 August 2006
McNab: Three Paras were killed in a carefully set ambush as they went to resupply comrades at a remote outpost in Helmand province. The men were in a convoy of twelve armoured vehicles. The ambush was launched by more than fifty Taliban using machine-guns and RPGs. The men who died, along with another soldier who was seriously wounded, had leapt out of their Spartan armoured personnel carriers to engage the insurgents with their rifles. Air support was called in and an Apache attack helicopter killed at least one Taliban fighter. The dead men were named as Second Lieutenant Ralph Johnson, twenty-four, a member of D Squadron, Captain Alex Eida, twenty-nine, of 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, and Lance Corporal Ross Nicholls, twenty-seven, also of D Squadron.
August 2006
Corporal Tara Rankin, 16 Medical Regiment
Corporal Tara Rankin, a combat medical technician currently serving with 16 Medical Regiment, is twenty-nine. She was born in Fiji, the daughter of a teacher, and is an only child. Her uncle, Trooper Talaiasi Labalaba, served in the SAS and was killed during the heroic battle of Mirbat, Oman, in 1972 when nine soldiers from the Regiment fought off a 250-strong enemy force. She was brought up mainly in Britain, and left school at sixteen, in 1996, to return with her parents to Fiji. Rankin had long considered a military and medical career, partly to follow in her uncle's footsteps, so in 2000 she returned to Britain and joined up the next year as a medic. In 2003 she did a tour in Iraq and went to Afghanistan three years later. In March 2007, she married Corporal Simon Rankin, who serves with the Royal Signals. She is based in Colchester, Essex.
I love my job. I've always liked the medical side of things but I thought the Army would be a challenge so I might as well go for it. I like seeing people getting better, being there for sick people, sick relatives or friends. It's the satisfaction you get out of helping them to get better. I do feel I'm a front-line soldier just as much as the men, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm female. It's all about how a female member of the armed forces fits into the environment. If she feels at ease amongst her male colleagues, then she'll fit in well and the men will work well with her.
On 6 August, I was a 7 Para RHA [Royal Horse Artillery] medic, part of a patrol that deployed out on a three-hour ground ops known as Op Snakebite with 3 Para. I was involved as A1 Echelon and RAP Rear [3 Para] alongside our Canadian med team. The main aim was to resupply Musa Qa'leh and relieve Pathfinder Platoon. We carried out patrolling and route clearance. We were reassuring the local population and, at the same time, looking out for enemy forces or any enemy activities around the area.
We had to treat a guy who got shot. He had been in a small convoy helping deliver supplies to Danish troops based near Musa Qa'leh. He was doing top cover in a WMIK [armed Land Rover]. It was one of those unexpected events but anything can happen out here. A young soldier had apparently got shot by a sniper, just after three p.m. The bullet went straight through his head and chest. I was sad because he was only young – nineteen years old – and it was his first tour as well. When he was shot, I was in a Pinzgauer. We were only a few hundred yards from him: first we heard an echo [from a shot] and then a lot of shouting in the distance. The casualty was brought to us in the back of a Pinz. Then he was put on a stretcher. We had expected more than one but in the end he was the only one. There were four of us waiting for him when he arrived: a doctor, who is in charge, a med senior, who was a sergeant, and two other medics, including me.
We knew from the start that he was very badly injured. But we tried to do what we could for him for as long as possible. We got information on his condition from those who had accompanied him. But there was no sign of breathing from the chest and no pulse. Eventually, the doctor had to call it a day after about twenty minutes. It was very sad, but there was nothing more that we could do. I had met him before – he was a funny character, with a great sense of humour. I used to see him in the cookhouse with his colleagues at Camp Bastion to say, 'Hi,' and ''Bye,' or to have a cup of tea.
His comrades were in a bad way too. The shock of losing a colleague, a friend, really got to them. Some were in a state of shock, feelings of mixed emotions, as well as being apprehensive for an hour. We had to treat them in the same way as if they were suffering from battle shock.
August 2006
Major Maria Holliday, QGM, Royal Military Police (RMP)
In the middle of the tour, the brigade set up the Security Sector Reform Cell at the Brigade Headquarters in Lashkar Gah. This basically meant that we were helping the Afghan institutions, like the army and the police, get back on their feet. We had already been helping the army for quite some time, but there was a recognition that the police play a vital role in security too and they desperately needed help with training and mentoring. Although the Foreign Office employed some ex-civil policemen to mentor the civil police, they were mentoring at a higher level, the heads of department, and there was nobody really to mentor the police on the ground. So this partly became our role. We set up a cell and formed a team of mentors to go and help them. There was some training going on that the US provided, but this was us setting up the British effort to assist the process. This unit was formed in Lashkar Gah but the boys were going out on the ground starting in Lashkar Gah and then also in Gereshk, Sangin and Garmsir.
I sent a young officer down there to Garmsir: a young lieutenant and a sergeant too. In terms of learning experience, they certainly learnt a great deal because that was a very difficult area to work in. It was full of insurgents, and the only people on the ground in Garmsir were British soldiers, Taliban and Afghan police. All the civilians had long gone: it was far too dangerous. Lieutenant Paul Armstrong and the sergeant did what they could to mentor the police but it was hard work. They had quite a nasty incident where a lot of the guys they had been mentoring were blown up by a roadside bomb. Some died, and others had horrendous injuries. After the incident, the police brought their injured to the British camp. The lieutenant was giving first aid to the guys he had been mentoring and that was quite hard for him because he was only a young guy and, of course, he had formed a bond with them. They had been working together for a few weeks.
The Afghan police are under-funded, under-manned and in a very difficult position. No doubt some may have family ties to elements of the Taliban, but the one feeling I did get was that we were all on the same side, that there was a common enemy. In fact, they were constantly being targeted – and they were losing more police than we were [losing] soldiers. They were targeted on a regular basis, occasionally in their homes but mainly at check-points, small police stations and in their patrol cars. Of course, they didn't have the fire-power that the British had, or the fire-power of the Afghan National Army. They were limited in what weapons they could hold and they were quite vulnerable in a lot of respects.
We started off with just three of us at the headquarters in this new cell. I then detached an RMP section to it and there was also an infantry platoon dedicated to it. There were no Afghans as part of the cell; our team would go out to Afghans. We formed two teams and they would go to the check-points and to the police stations and initially we were trying to establish exactly what was in Helmand province because it was quite difficult to discover how many police actually existed there. Having the chance as a late-entry officer to command a company on an operation such as Op Herrick was fantastic. That sort of oppo
rtunity doesn't come along all the time and I just found the whole experience very rewarding.
There were times when we had some near misses. Seeing the boys come back safely off the ground when they had been near to an incident was always a relief. I liked the Afghans, very tough, resilient people. They were generous. They didn't appear underhand or out for themselves as individuals. They were a united entity.
August 2006
Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Parkhouse, 16 Medical Regiment
We treat a lot of civilians out here and it was this that led to the most surreal situation I've been involved in. We had a call, first thing in the morning, from a mobile operating group out on the ground. We were just finishing a shift at about six o'clock in the morning. The call said that a local villager had brought in a severely burnt child. At that time we were trying to unload civilians back into their own [civilian] system rather than have them clogging up the military hospitals but we went to pick up the child. There was no danger to the HLS and we weren't fired upon. The child had quite significant burns. There was no way the local hospital could deal with that so we brought her back [to Camp Bastion]. By the time we had arrived, we had a call from the same call sign saying that the father had brought in another six burnt children for us to pick up.
What had happened was, this villager had had a fire in his house during the night. At first light, he went to the call sign to chance his luck with a burnt child – to see what the Brits would do. Because we went to pick her up, he obviously thought, Right, fine. I'll go back to my village to pick up the rest of them. So he brought the rest of his burnt family to the call sign. Then we decided we'd go back but try to offload them to the local hospitals because civilians are a huge drain on our resources. Now, one of the things we have noticed in Afghanistan is that the locals use gentian violet as a type of antiseptic. You mix it with water and it goes bright purple. They paint it on everything.
But on this occasion, the Chinook landed on its marker, nose first. So when we came out of the back, we were quite disoriented. We didn't know which way the casualties were going to be. So we walked round the back, and suddenly it was like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. You had these huge Household Cavalry men – six foot four all of them – walking towards us in a line with these children. Some of the children were walking, despite quite serious burns. And they were all covered in this gentian violet. From head to toe they were blue. They had big blisters on the heads and whatever. There were about six, most of them under twelve, but there were a couple of about eighteen months and a baby too.
I felt I was dreaming. It was absolutely bizarre. We actually got them back to Camp Bastion. We'd had to resuscitate a couple back on the aircraft. We had to intubate this small baby, which is difficult at the best of times, but especially when you are in a Chinook. In the end, those with minor burns we sent out to local hospitals but we kept two on intensive care for – well, they outlived my time there. I think they stayed for about six weeks. Once or twice they were almost switched off [their life-support machines] because they were unlikely to make it and they were reducing our capability for our guys. But we continued to treat them and, in the end, they got better. They were actually discharged – amazing.
29 August 2006
Corporal Tara Rankin, 16 Medical Regiment
On this one occasion, we had deployed out to Sangin on one of the typical twenty-four-hour ops [Op Bhagi]. We usually go out from [Camp] Bastion. It was the early hours of the morning – about three o'clock. I was still a 7 Para RHA medic now attached to C Company [from 3 Para]. We had been doing what normally happens on ops – patrolling, carrying out route clearance, reassuring the local population and, at the same time, looking out for enemy forces or any enemy activities around the area.
One of our guys [3 Para B Company] was shot as he was out on top of a building with his company near Sangin. It was about lunchtime and he had been shot in the neck-shoulder by a Taliban bullet. There was a doctor and medics in the area and we worked as a team. It was my medic colleagues from the Household Cavalry and 3 Para who did most of the treatment. By the time I got to the scene he was already 'packaged' and ready to be flown out. He was drifting in and out of consciousness. Shortly afterwards he was evacuated in a Chinook.
I knew the guy who had been shot quite well. He was Sergeant Paddy Caldwell and he was married to a friend of mine, who is also a medic. I had known him since 2001, when I was doing my basic training. I first heard when he was identified by his call sign over the radio and I thought, Oh, no. He's one of the last people I'd thought would get hurt. He's a lovely man – very family oriented, down to earth and someone who really cares for other people regardless of who they are and what profession they belong to.
I saw him again the next day in the main hospital at Camp Bastion. He was still in a bad way – he was about to be flown back to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham to be treated and to have an operation. I felt very worried for him and his wife and I just hoped he was going to be all right.
We were heading back into Sangin via these wadis, which were filled with water. As we were peeling back into the compound, we came under heavy enemy contact. Normally you have a contact left, right or centre, but this was from all sorts of directions. I realized there was a guy behind me who was taking time to catch up, as you normally do on your first manoeuvre. But I think it was the shock of being in that situation first time round as a young soldier – he had just come out of training – that got to him [and made him freeze].
He was the GPMG [general purpose machine-gun] gunner. But he was in shock. As much as I tried to reassure him and keep him going, it didn't work. I had to take his weapon and told him that we had to do something about it [the situation] because my normal A2 weapon wouldn't do much. Everyone was trying to locate where the enemy firing position was. So the guy holding the GPMG just went: 'Go ahead. Have it.' I set it up [to fire] applying the principles of usual marksmanship, principles that we have been trained in to use the GPMG. It was a quick target identification. I had seen who was firing at us from a compound. After notifying the platoon commander, I saw the guy fire out of the window. He was a [Taliban] sniper.
So I set the GPMG up on a tripod while under fire. Rounds were actually coming from all sorts of directions, left, right. There were so many things that were going on but all I cared about was getting the guys – all of us – back safe and sound. I wanted to make sure that we had actually pinpointed where the enemy firing was coming from – especially the sniper we needed to concentrate on.
From 300 metres, I identified the shooter. I saw his head popping out of the window. He was shooting from a double-storey building. It was the pharmacy building. I shouted to the platoon commander: 'Look out for that second-storey window in the pharmacy.' He looked for about five seconds and he still couldn't see it. At this stage, I thought: Right, something's got to be done about this because otherwise the whole platoon will be wiped out. There was nowhere to take cover.
I did the usual target indication as I used the clock-ray method. I was saying: 'Right, twelve o'clock facing, enemy on second window, double-storey window. Target seen,' and they [her comrades] said: 'No.' So I gave it a bit of time and did it again. I said, 'Target seen.' The reply was the same: 'No.' I said: 'Right, everyone, hold your fire. I'm about to fire to indicate the target.' Then I fired. I don't know whether I was excited or in shock. But the guy came out of the window. I saw him drop out of the window and I held my breath. But he was dead.
We have to abide by the Geneva Convention. As a medic, you're only supposed to carry a weapon to defend yourself and your casualty if need be. But at any given time and place, I have to adjust myself to the situation and the environment. I think for me, at the time when that incident happened, being a soldier came first – before my work as a medic. Women can take a full combat role. There are some out there who do. Not all females can do it, but there are some. Anyway, then we retreated back to the Sangin compound. On ripping back into the
compound [still under fire], I thought: I can't run as fast as the bullets are going past me. But by now, the guy next to me had recovered from his little shock period. I handed the gun to him. I said: 'Thanks, you can have it back now.'
30 August 2006 [email home]
Captain Charlotte Cross, Territorial Army
Captain Charlotte Cross, of 3 Military Intelligence Battalion (Volunteers), in the Territorial Army (TA), is thirty-six. She was born in south-east London. She is the daughter of an advertising consultant and a schools administrator and has an elder brother. She has combined a non-forces career with service in the TA for more than a decade. A biology graduate from Bristol University, she worked in publishing, then at the BBC's Natural History Unit before becoming a journalist. She joined the TA in 1997 because she was looking for a new challenge, and opted to work in the Intelligence Corps. After TA officer training at Sandhurst, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant. She deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 as part of the PsyOps (Psychological Operations) team. Cross is single, and now works as a television reporter for the British Forces Broadcasting Service.