Frederick Forsyth - The Afghan

He was regarded by his school-and the Paras always checked-as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. He was accepted, and began training at the end of the month, a grueling twenty-two weeks that would bring the survivors to April 1981.

There were four weeks of square bashing, basic weapons handling, field craft and physical fitness; then two more weeks of the same, plus signals, first aid and precautions against NBC-nuclear, bacteriological and chemical-warfare. The seventh week was for more witness training, getting harder all the time; but not as bad as weeks eight and nine-endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales in midwinter, where fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia and exhaustion. The numbers began to thin out.

Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range where Martin, just turned nineteen, was rated a marksman. Eleven and twelve were “test” weeks-just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain and hail.

“Test weeks?” muttered Phillips. “What the hell has the rest been?” After test weeks, the remaining young men got their coveted red beret, and then three more weeks in the Brecons for defense exercises, patrolling and “live firing.” By then, late January, the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept, rough and wet, without fires.

Sixteen to nineteen covered what Mike Martin had come for: the parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out, and not just from the aircraft. At the end came the “wings parade,” when the wings of a paratrooper were finally pinned on. That night, the old IOI club at Aldershot saw another riotous party. There were two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called “last fence,” and some polishing up of parade ground skills; week twenty-two saw the “Pass Out Parade,” when proud parents could finally view their spotty youths amazingly transformed into soldiers.

Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM-potential officer material-and in April 1981 went to join the new short course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, passing out in December as a second lieutenant. If he thought glory awaited him, he was entirely mistaken. There are three battalions in the Parachute Regiment, and Martin was assigned to 3 Para, which happened to be Aldershot in penguin mode. For three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, each battalion is off of parachuting and used as ordinary truck-borne infantry. Paras hate penguin mode.

Martin, as a platoon commander, was assigned to Recruit Platoon, putting newcomers through the same miseries he had endured. He might have remained there for the rest of 3 Para’s tour as penguins but for a faraway gentleman called Leopoldo Galtieri. On I April 1982, the Argentine dictator invaded the Falkland Islands. Three Para was told to kit up and get ready to move out. Within a week, driven by the implacable Margaret Thatcher, a British task force was steaming south in a collection of vessels, bound for the far end of the Atlantic, where southern winter, with its roaring seas and driving rain, was waiting for them.

The journey south was on the liner Canberra, with a first stop at Ascension Island, a bleak button of a place lashed by constant wind. Here there was a pause as, far away, the last diplomatic efforts were pursued to persuade Galtieri to evacuate or Margaret Thatcher to back off. Neither could dream of agreeing and surviving in office. The Canberra sailed on, shadowing the expedition’s only carrier, the Ark Royal.

When it became clear that invasion was inevitable, Martin and his team were “cross-decked” by helicopter from Canberra to a landing craft. Gone were the civilized conditions of the liner. The same wild and stormy night that Martin and his men cross-decked in Sea King helicopters, another Sea King went down and sank, taking with her nineteen of the Special Air Service Regiment, the biggest one-night loss the SAS has ever sustained.

Martin took his thirty men ashore with the rest of 3 Para, landing at San Carlos Water. It was miles from the main island’s capital at Port Stanley, but for that reason it was unopposed. Without a pause, the Paras and the Marines began the grueling forced march through the mud and rain east to the capital. They carried everything in Bergen rucksacks so heavy it was like carrying another man. The appearance of an Argentine Skyhawk meant diving into the slime, but, in the main, the “Argies” were after the ships offshore, not the men in the mud below. If the ships could be sunk, the onshore men were finished. The real enemy was the cold, the constant freezing rain, the exhausting “tab” across a landscape that could not support a single tree. Until Mount Longdon. Pausing below the hills, 3 Para set themselves up in a lonely farm called Estancia House, and prepared to do what their country had sent them seven thousand miles to do. It was the night of 11-12 June. It was supposed to be a silent night attack, and remained so until Corporal Milne stepped on a mine. After that, it became noisy. The Argie machine guns opened up, and flares lit the hills and the valley like daylight. Three Para could either run back to cover or run into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and over forty injured. It was the first time, as bullets tore the air around his head and men fell beside him, that Mike Martin experienced that strange, brassy taste on the tongue that is the taste of fear.

But nothing touched him. Of his own platoon of thirty, including one sergeant and three corporals, six were dead and nine injured. The Argentine soldiers who had held the ridge were forced recruits, lads from the sunny pampas-the sons of the well-off could avoid military service-and wanted to go home, out of the rain, cold and mud. They had quit their bunkers and foxholes and were heading back to shelter in Port Stanley. At dawn, Mike Martin stood atop Wireless Ridge, looked east to the town and rising sun, and rediscovered the God of his fathers, whom he had neglected for many years. He prayed his thanks, and vowed never to forget again.

At TH E time the ten-year-old Mike Martin was capering round his father’s garden at Saadun, Baghdad, to the delight of the Iraqi guests, a boy was being born a thousand miles away.

West of the road from Pakistani Peshawar to Afghan Jalalabad lies the range of the Spin Gahr, the White Mountains, dominated by the towering Tora Bora. These mountains, seen from afar, are like a great barrier between the two countries, bleak and cold, always tipped with snow, and in winter wholly covered.

The Spin Gahr lies inside Afghanistan, with the Safed range on the Pakistani side. Running down to the rich plains around Jalalabad are myriad streams that carry the snowmelt and rain off the Spin Gahr, and these form many upland valleys where small patches of land may be planted, orchards raised and flocks of sheep and goats grazed.

Life is harsh, and with the life-support system being so sparse the communities of the valleys are small and scattered. The people bred up here are the ones the old British Empire knew and feared, calling them the Pathans, now Pashtun. Back then they fought from behind their rocky fastness with long, brass-bound muskets called the “jezail,” with which each man was accurate as a modern sniper. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the old Raj, evoked the deadliness of the mountain men against subalterns expensively educated in England in just four lines:

A scrimmage in a Border Station – A canter down some dark defile – Two thousand pounds of education – Drops to a ten-rupee jezail-

In 1972, there was a hamlet in one of these upland valleys called Maloko-zai-like all these hamlets, named after a long-dead warrior founder. There were five walled compounds in the settlement, each the home of one extended family of about twenty persons. The village headman was Nuri Khan, and it was in his compound and round his fire that the men gathered on a summer evening to sip hot, unmilked, sugarless tea.