Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan

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.