Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

Then it got worse. Leahy and his troop had reached an alleyway that was open to fire from the side. The men crouched by a wall and then dashed across one by one. At 08.35, as the last stretcher group ran across, Corporal Paul ‘Tricky’ Trickett, one of the bearers, screamed with pain. He had been shot through the leg – his injuries now more serious than anyone’s. Marine Gordon ‘Sulley’ Sullivan, the oldest marine in Charlie, ran back and dragged him into cover.

Charlie Company was four men down.

At that moment, it seemed as if all their enemy zeroed on the alleyway. ‘We were properly pinned down,’ recalled Captain Sim Jemmett, the ‘boss’ of 7 Troop, although he said they needed to pause anyway to treat Trickett.

Kersey and others were lying in the dirt and watching the bullets come over their heads and ricochet around the walls. He was just thinking, ‘Oh my God!’ Afterwards he saw men with cuts on their legs where bullets had shaved them. He saw another section try to reach high ground and watched the dirt kick up around them. Above the din, he was trying to shout, ‘Get back down here!’ He began thinking of an Ali G film when the comedian stood by a wall with thousands of bullets being fired at him and remained miraculously untouched.

Duncan Manning, the OC, had further bad news. The Taliban was firing not only from the north, west and south-west, but from the south- east too. They had been creeping through villages on the far side of the M1 wadi, first one to the north-east and then another on their south-east flank. This was bad. The Taliban had now moved between the patrol and one of its fire support groups on a ridge behind. Engaging them from there would have risked a ‘blue on blue’, fratricide. Only a minor adjustment of a machine-gun barrel aimed at the hostile villages in front could have seen rounds flying across the Mi wadi to hit the marine positions in Khevalabad.

Charlie Company was almost surrounded. ‘Our extraction route was cut off,’ recalled Leahy. The two wadis on either side – the Mi and the Chinah Bypass, by which they had arrived – were both horribly exposed to raking gunfire. The only safe direction was due south towards the ANA and 2 Yorks. But even the path south to them meant crossing open ground in view of the enemy. There was, as Charlie’s operations log drily recorded, a ‘considerable coordination issue’. Beside that, they were also running out of mortar ammunition.

Manning decided to keep his marines moving, dropping a ‘shake and bake’ mixture of white smoke and high explosive to stir up the dust and give them cover. They managed to find an irrigation ditch just short of the Mi which they could move along. But it took them forty minutes to move just 400 yards.

Kersey got the feeling that every escape route they tried was blocked. ‘Right, we are not getting out of this place,’ he thought for a moment. ‘Where are we going to go?’ Their enemy was at 300 degrees around them. They were snuffed in a pocket. ‘I think there were twenty-seven different enemy firing points that day,’ he recalled.

Jonno realized the Afghan soldiers were nearly out of bullets. He announced, ‘I’m going for a resupply.’ He charged over the open fields to the edge of Chinah village, alone and under fire the whole way. The marines’ company sergeant-major, Dave Layton, met him on his quad bike with the ammo stocks. Jonno came back breathless with chains of bullets wrapped around his neck and boxes in his hand. He looked shocked. ‘Never again!’ he grinned shyly.

The two marine troops were popping red and green smoke and phosphorous grenades to help mark their positions as they pulled back south. The fire support group could fire at anything beyond them. But they too were running out of ammo – down to their last 100 rounds of .50 cal.

At 09.30, one hour after Trickett was hit, they finally linked up with the ANA in a compound by the edge of the M1 wadi.

Just then, Layton, the sergeant-major, decided to act. Waiting further south, he was hearing on the radio that the rescue Chinook – now circling over the Kajaki dam – was shortly going to run out of fuel. Jumping into his six-wheeled quad bike, he bounced up the side of the M1 wadi, chased by bullets, and reached the ANA compound.

It took him two runs, carrying two casualties each time. As he moved, the 2 Yorks soldiers positioned the ANA to fire a deafening volley of covering fire. It was 09.54 when the chopper took off from a landing site at the base of the M1 wadi – nearly two hours from when the men were first shot.

The rest of Charlie fought their way back with an Apache helicopter now hitting the Taliban to the west. An F-15 jet strafed an attempt by the Taliban to creep up on the fire support team on the nearby ridge.

At the end of it all, Jemmett reflected that after being almost completely surrounded it ‘should have been complete carnage’. Only the coordination they had achieved in the chaos, and the fact everyone kept their nerve, had kept them all alive. More than 19,000 bullets had been fired that day, including 10,170 from light machine guns, 123 sniper rounds, 3,075 bullets from the .50 heavy machine guns. There had also been three Javelin missiles fired.

That night Lunn wrote in his diary: ‘So be careful what you wish for!’

Under a deep blue sky, Major Jake Little was standing by the river bridge and inspecting the new sandbagged defences that Lieutenant Simon Farley and his platoon were putting into place with the Afghan army. There was an air of panic in the town behind them. The district governor had fled. The police had locked themselves into their central station. Few children ventured on the streets, and those that did cast a wary and dispirited eye.

To the north, across a table-flat desert of sand that stretched to the edge of the mountains, Little and Farley began to notice what looked like the gathering clouds of a dust storm. To the military eye, it meant one thing only: the approach of a large convoy of vehicles.

Up there into those dark peaks and canyons was Taliban country and the town of Golestan. It had just fallen to the enemy. Delaram, where Jake and his B Company, 2 Yorks, had arrived yesterday, was expected to fall next.

The commander of the convoy – an American special force reservist – came to tell his sorry tale in Jake’s makeshift headquarters, the bullet-marked compound of the absent governor. Setting off three days earlier to reconnoitre a route up the mountain gorge into Golestan, the convoy had been clinically and savagely ambushed. Nineteen Afghan soldiers were dead, some of them captured then executed by the Taliban.