Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

Cloaked by the dark, Charlie Company of 40 Commando had left just after 03.00 from the Kajaki FOB and crossed a bridge over the Helmand River. They turned left through the village of Tangye. Two years back it had been a bustling bazaar, but now it was just an empty street.

Formed up into two rifle ‘troops’ (the marine equivalent of a platoon) plus a headquarters and sniper unit, the patrol headed due west and then turned up a dry riverbed they called the ‘M1 wadi’ after Britain’s main north–south motorway. They pushed up it and then turned left into a smaller wadi they called the Chinah bypass. Between the ‘bypass’ and the larger riverbed lay a piece of land shaped like an upright cigar. At the bottom was the village of Chinah. And in the middle of the cigar, about three-quarters of a mile from its base, was the village of Khevalabad, the target for their patrol and the estimated position of the FLET – the forward line of enemy troops.

Moving up the Chinah bypass just after 04.00, the Afghan army team led by Lunn and Jonno were the first to peel away to the right to start clearing into Chinah village. Detached from Jake Little’s B Company to mentor the Afghans at Kajaki, their job today was to cover the rear as the marines pushed onwards. At 04.50 – twenty minutes before first light – the marines turned right out of the bypass and made their first break into Khevalabad.

Like Lunn and Jonno, all the marines found as they moved from compound to compound under a brightening sky was an eerie, empty village. The only Taliban fighter they saw was in a village about a mile to the north-east. Major Duncan Manning, Charlie Company’s officer commanding, ordered the snipers to fire a warning shot. The man went into a firing posture. Manning ordered lethal force. A precision shot from a .303 sniper rifle echoed across the hillside.

Half an hour later and it seemed to be all over. Manning ordered photographs taken for future reference, and at 07.05 he ordered a withdrawal. One of the corporals, Jon Kersey, would remember thinking, ‘Bloody hell, they are not going to fight us. Where are they?’

Lunn’s and Jonno’s soldiers had pushed north after finishing their clearance of Chinah village. They were now in compounds just south of a little rise they called Pyramid Hill, just south of Khevalabad.

Over the radio, they heard the marines calling the FOB and asking them to get the breakfast going. They were going to be back in early.

That was when it started. The tck-tck-tck-tck of incoming rounds. Manning sent a flash radio message at 07.10 to the FOB: ‘Contact… gunfire… wait out!’

At first, as Jonno and Lunn listened, it was sporadic. A burst of gunfire from villages ahead to the north. Then silence. Then they saw a burst from the west, aimed at the marines. And then it came straight at them, piercing the air with the crack of incoming.

As he heard the bullets, Jonno’s face creased into a grin. He couldn’t help it. The buzz came naturally: a rush of adrenalin.

‘This is it… Finally!’ thought Jonno. Wasn’t it funny? Seventeen years in the army. The men looked up to him. He had a reputation. But he still had to admit that he had never been in action.

The previous night, he and Lunn had stayed up putting the world to rights – with a bit of cursing of their marine brethren. They had been up for two weeks now in Kajaki, the supposed mother of all of Helmand’s front lines. Almost no action. And in what there was of it – a couple of minor skirmishes – the marines were hogging the sharp end all for themselves. The 2 Yorks and their Afghan soldiers were only there, it seemed, to act as rearguards or to screen the flanks. Not that Jonno and Lunn had really blamed the marines. Here they were with fifteen Afghan soldiers and nine of their own pitched alongside some of the supposedly fittest and most highly trained soldiers in the whole British military (you didn’t call the Royal Marines ‘the army’ unless you really wanted a scrap). Somehow, Jonno and Lunn had agreed, they needed to prove themselves. And this was their moment.

Jonno moved up to talk to Lunn, his platoon commander. They stood by a wall.

‘Boss, are you all right?’ he asked. A pause. Then: ‘This is FUCKING brilliant!’

Jonno was beaming with excitement. The two men updated each other and then shook hands and prepared to move off. Just as they did, a volley of bullets splashed into the wall beside them. The pair dived away.

‘WHOAAH!’ they shouted in unison.

They had just broken a rule that said a platoon commander and his sergeant should not get caught together in the open. ‘Learning time,’ thought Lunn.

Up in Khevalabad, the marines had ‘gone firm’ – lying or crouching in firing positions. Many were up on the roofs to cover a wide arc of fire. Most of the enemy bullets were coming from the north, although Lunn’s ANA had just reported spotting a small group of Taliban coming up on their southern flank – right between the Afghans and the marines. The report, recalled Manning, ‘came as such a shock that the position had to be repeated several times to confirm it.

Manning deployed his 7 Troop down to investigate. By now, he was already calling in mortars. An F-15 fighter jet had arrived to assist. Over their radio network, the Taliban had announced: ‘Get ready for the big thing!’ There was suspense.

At 08.04 a burst of gunfire then hit 8 Troop from their rear-left, a position, recalled Manning, ‘that we were not expecting’. It caught one section on a roof exposed. Three marines – Lance-Corporal Matt Kingston, and Marines Anthony Deakin and Nick Clarke – heard the bullets strike around them and they rolled desperately off the mud roof and on to the ground beneath.

Two of them at first thought they had just broken their ankles. In fact, Kingston had. But when they looked down, they saw blood spurting out. All three had been caught in the same burst of Taliban machine gun and were hit in their feet or ankles.

The first-aiders and medics got to work. Pete Leahy, the 8 Troop sergeant, stood still for a tiny moment, looking at the scene – boots coming off, dressings on, tourniquets being wrapped round. For many young lads, he knew, this was their first taste of real danger. But they all seemed to go into auto-pilot. ‘Fucking hell! When it rains it pours!’ he thought, and then got back on the radio and calmly reported he had taken three casualties. The network went silent.

The three injured were carried south first on top of plastic ponchos, with a man holding a handle on each corner. When that proved too difficult, they strapped them on to the portable ladders they carried with them. For Corporal Kersey it was to be the ‘hardest thing I have ever had to do in my time in the Corps’. The weight was phenomenal.

The taking of casualties transforms a battle, particularly when the victims are wounded not dead. For every man down, the marines needed at least four men to carry them on a stretcher, with a fifth to carry their heavy kit. So three men injured needed fifteen men to get them to safety. Said Kersey: ‘The lads were already carrying some seventy to eighty pounds, maybe a hundred pounds of kit, plus their weapons… So we had four lads who had to carry each of them casualties and you had to carry their weapons, their kit, put it on your back, on top of your kit and run as well. I have never done anything so physical in my entire life.’

They went at first through the compounds of Khevalabad, while the other troops and the fire support positions kept up the covering fire. The F-15 dropped a 2,000-pound bomb to the north-east across the M1 wadi, where it looked as though the Taliban were trying to flank them.

By now, Camp Bastion was reporting ‘wheels up’ of a rescue helicopter. Ominously, though, the Taliban radio network announced: ‘We are waiting for the helicopter.’