Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

The Royal Marines patrol from Alpha Company had been out for nearly six hours now, pounding out from the FOB to explore the villages up north. The intelligence reports said up to thirty foreign fighters were lying in wait. But it was no good just sitting in the base and waiting for an attack.

Back at brigade headquarters, staff were reporting a level of Taliban activity across Helmand that had not been seen since the green zone clearances of Operation Palk Wahel in September. New fighters were coming in from Pakistan, said intelligence, and others were slipping down from the north. All in all, the brigade staff thought, it was a clear attempt to divert the British from their pressure against Musa Qala.

All day long the marines overheard the taunts over the Taliban’s radio network. Every other moment, they had heard an order to attack and a reply saying, ‘I’m ready.’ But no one had seen anything. Nothing had happened. So they had started heading home. Two close combat troops provided the combat strength. 2 Troop was in the lead; 1 Troop had the rear. The company headquarters was in the middle. Everyone was on foot.

About a mile and a half from the FOB, some of the marines had begun to see some strange things, like some well-dressed farmers fiddling with a haystack, just seeming to be moving stalks for no particular reason. They had passed a man whose mobile phone rang and he hadn’t even moved to answer it. Then three men were spotted running into the trees with weapons. Most of the patrol were in the open then, stretched along a mud track by the side of a drainage ditch. Everyone started jogging to reach some kind of cover.

‘There was a small pause,’ recalled Andy Brownrigg, the company sergeant-major. ‘It was almost like it was a gentleman’s agreement that we will wait for you to get into a hiding place and we will get into our hiding place.

The opening shot of the ambush that became known as the ‘Battle of 9/11’ was fired at 16.06.

As machine-gun fire began and RPGs came whooshing over, everyone dropped down. A few men were knocked to the ground by a blast from one grenade. Most of the headquarters ended up in the ditch, pinned down by the gunfire. But they knew they had to reach solid cover to start getting organized. So they dashed one-by-one for a nearby walled but isolated compound. It was a trap. The only entrance, and the roof of the small building inside, were easily raked by enemy fire.

Marine Gary Ogden, a twenty-six-year-old medic with trademark orange-tinted sunglasses, was lying behind another of those little mud banks, firing shots at a couple of Taliban he could see.

‘I glanced back at the compound entrance and I could see the rounds striking the wall and a figure screaming for a medic,’ he recalled. The man in the entrance was Captain Paul Britton, the twenty-seven-year-old fire support team commander, whose job was to call up guns, mortars and aviation. ‘Rounds were hitting the doorway all around him, and I wondered why they weren’t hitting him, said Ogden. With the air filled with the crack and thump of bullets, Ogden picked himself up and charged across the field.

Britton had only just reached the compound after dashing from a ditch. He arrived to see a smear of blood dripping down the walls and a machine-gunner, Corporal James Fletcher, being dragged down with his leg looking lifeless. Fletcher had been on the roof when an RPG blast showered him and his gun team with shrapnel. Marine Matthew Fenwick, an ammo bearer, caught shards of metal in his legs and ankles. Fenwick was a reservist whose job back home was a lifeguard at a Bristol leisure centre.

‘As I put my head up on the roof,’ recalled Fenwick, ‘I could hear the rounds coming over my head. I knew it was going to be pretty intense.’

Fenwick spun round to pull another machine gun on to the roof when he heard a boom and a felt a sharp kick from behind. ‘The next thing I know I am on the floor upside down thinking, “What the hell was that?”’

Things then got even worse. A section leader, Corporal Simon ‘Si’ Greening, moved forward to the compound entrance to yell at his men in the ditches around. They saw him staggering backwards shouting, ‘Fuck, I think I’ve been shot!’

Britton and Major Adrian Morley, the OC of Alpha Company, who was just running in, caught Greening as he stumbled. They ripped off his body armour and clothes and tried to put on a field dressing as Ogden finally came running into the compound. Ogden started going over Greening front and back to look for the entry and exit wounds. He had been shot in the side, bypassing his armour.

‘As I rolled Si back he passed out,’ said Ogden. ‘I think the OC thought he was dead or on his last legs. But I checked his carotid [artery] and found he was fine. His heart was racing like a bastard, but he was still with us.’

Ogden started putting a needle line for an intravenous drip into Greening’s arm to give him some fluids to replace the blood loss.

Then Ogden was being called over to treat Corporal Fletcher. ‘The RPG took all the muscles off Fletcher’s legs, tore his legs to bits. There was lumps of flesh everywhere and so much blood coming out of him,’ said Ogden. ‘It was fucking chaos. He came down totally out cold.’

Others had put tourniquets on both of Fletcher’s legs to block off the blood flow. Without them he would have been dead in minutes. They followed up with field dressings. Ogden found his breathing was OK but was worried about the blood loss. He also checked Fenwick and decided he was stable.

Then Ogden was called back to Greening whose field dressings had come loose and who was pumping out blood again. Blood was also beginning to drain into his lung. Ogden could put a chest drain in, but that would lower his blood pressure massively, so he delayed that option. Greening then woke up and started chatting and ‘giving me a load of shit’, said Ogden.

It was 16.09 when the watch keepers at FOB Inkerman got the radio message that Alpha Company were three men down – just three minutes after the contact had begun.

Inkerman got on the radio network to Carbon Zero, the operations centre of 40 Commando’s Battle Group North. Their day had already been fraught. In the early hours, a vehicle leaving Sangin district centre, 4 miles south of Inkerman, had rolled into a water-filled ditch, killing Lance-Corporal Jake Alderton of the Royal Engineers. Then a Chinook landing at Now Zad narrowly escaped being struck by mortars. And just as the battle outside Inkerman began, a fire fight erupted in the main street of Sangin bazaar. An Afghan soldier was seriously hurt. There were now two simultaneous requests for a rescue helicopter.

Meanwhile, just as it couldn’t get any worse, another fire fight began erupting with a US special force unit operating across the river from Sangin. Three serious gun battles were going on at once.

And that was just in the north of Helmand. Down in the southern town of Garmsir, the Gurkhas were just pausing for breath after a four-and-a-half hour battle that had led to serious injuries. It was the most sustained attack down south for the last two months.

Most of Alpha Company were still in the ditches in a storm of bullets, facing Taliban that had ambushed them from multiple directions and was now on the move – threatening a deadly flank through head-high maize and deep ditches. It was hard to spot their firing points. Sometimes it was just the rustling of the corn that gave them away.