Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

‘What’s happened? Where is everyone?’ he shouted. At first he thought it was Wagstaff’s vehicle that had blown up. He couldn’t see Lance-Corporal Simon Cooper. ‘Where’s Coops?’ he said.

He heard Cooper reply. ‘No, no, it’s not me. I’m here. It’s Jack.’

‘Where is he?’ said Richards.

Cooper said, ‘I don’t know. I just saw him get blown up in the air and went over… you know… the vehicle.’

The ground around the vehicle was hard, sharp rock. It was hard to see how anyone could have hid a mine or booby-trapped bomb in there. Campbell and Richards started searching around for Jack Sadler, walking round the burning vehicle and searching in the rocks. The medic, Pete Langhelt, started treating the casualties who’d been found.

Richards decided to climb up what amounted to a 6-foot cliff to get a better sight. And as he got over the brow, he saw Sadler lying on the ground with his body armour in tatters and blown to one side and his helmet nowhere to be seen. It was clear he was in a bad way, and Richards shouted to Campbell, ‘He’s here. I found him.’ Campbell worked his way round so he could see Richards, who shouted to him, ‘Get a medic!

Sadler was still breathing, weakly, but he was unconscious and so could not feel any pain. His mouth was full of blood, and it was clear he’d suffered traumatic injuries.

By now the wrecked WMIK was burning with an intense flame. More and more half-inch (.50 calibre) bullet rounds were cooking off in the heat, and also phosphorus grenades that spewed molten white-hot metal. Richards lay down next to Sadler and used himself as a shield between Sadler and the vehicle. He put a plate of body armour next to Sadler’s head. He wanted desperately to move him but could see it wouldn’t be easy. He talked to Sadler, trying to get a response and trying at the same time to keep his airways clear.

The explosions were getting louder. It was hard to tell if it was all coming from the vehicle or if by now they were under some sort of attack. Richards remembered: ‘It was just loud, very loud. The whole vehicle was on fire, and there were parts of the vehicle like suspension springs and weapon systems blown everywhere. And the force of the explosion was enough to set everything off; so it felt like, within seconds, all the ammunition was cooking off. It was just whizzing everywhere. So, you’ve got all the rat-a-tat. You’ve got the explosion of the Claymore mines on board and the phosphorus grenades, which are particularly nasty. Some of it hit my helmet.’ Sadler’s clothing even caught fire from something.

It felt like hours that he was all alone waiting for help. It was probably less than two minutes. Even though he had a background in teaching first aid, there was just too much for Richards to deal with alone. Finally the young medic, Peter Langhelt, showed up after moving round from the other two injured. Richards saw Langhelt appear from behind a rock. With all the heat, smoke and flying bullets, he seemed reluctant at first to break cover. Richards shouted out and gestured with his arms. ‘You’ve got to come over. I can’t move him!’ Langhelt looked as if he was gasping something, but Richards couldn’t hear. The medic’s eyes were like saucers.

Richards shouted again: ‘Pete, look, you’ve just got to fucking get over here, mate, because he’s going to die.’

Langhelt summoned up the courage and sprang into action. ‘He was absolutely fantastic,’ Richards would say later. They realized they would have to find a way of moving Sadler out of range of the bullets and the heat from the burning WMIK. ‘It was the most intense heat that I ever felt because, when I lay down, it was just on my back. It felt as if the whole thing was just melting down.’

A big Fijian, Private Tamani Rabakewa, ran up with a stretcher, and they got Sadler out of the heat and down to the safety of a depression where the battery sergeant-major, Paul Hodgson, had found a place for a helicopter landing site.

Phillips had been busy meanwhile organizing the arrival of the medevac chopper. He had also called for air support after Taliban radio chatter suggested they were preparing to launch an attack on the now-static convoy. An RAF jet dived down and screamed over them in a show of force to the Taliban – and a show of solidarity to the BRF.

It was probably another thirty minutes before the Chinook arrived. Langhelt and Richards fought on desperately to save Sadler. They tried to stop his bleeding and, after many attempts, managed to get a needle into his collapsing veins to start replacing fluids. They worked in the back of a Pinzgauer. Hodgson kept popping his head in, saying, ‘How’s he doing?’

The other two injured appeared OK. Bellman might have broken his back. He couldn’t move but was otherwise lucid. Wylie had a big cut to his face but it was mainly the shock that was affecting him. Both were conscious and able to talk.

The Chinook came in, and they put Sadler on. After it left the BRF still had to clear through what now appeared to be a freshly laid minefield. All they had was a couple of metal detectors that looked to the soldiers ‘like something out of the Second World War’. Phillips was just wondering who to order to go first when Cooper stepped forward and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ He went ahead with others, and then the convoy just drove off.

The voice of the Commander of Joint Operations, Lieutenant General Nick Houghton, came booming out of the speakers in the meeting room like the Wizard of Oz.

Houghton, reporting by video-phone from the nuclear bunker at the Permanent Joint Headquarters in west London, was the link to the men on the ground. Today, he was briefing Whitehall on the operation to take Musa Qala. He warned the generals and civil servants present they should prepare for the worst. People could die in the coming days. The operation might just prove to be a walk in the park, or it could be much, much worse. Most likely, it would be somewhere in between, but ‘we have to brace ourselves for the extreme of the arc,’ he said.

According to several sources who described it later, the meeting was tense, unusually so. Normally sensitive debates would be resolved outside such formal meetings. But today’s business was pressing, and troops were already pushing forward. Today, the Whitehall officials were as nervous as cats. The prime minister was due to be heading out to Iraq and then Afghanistan, and then to return home to announce his new strategy for the war. The coincidence of timing was extraordinary. And if Musa Qala went wrong…

Two months previously, Gordon Brown had been in Basra during the Conservative Party conference. When he announced that 1,000 troops would be home from Iraq by Christmas, he was roundly condemned for playing politics with the army. Coupled with the perception that he had just bottled out of calling an election, it had sent Brown’s popularity nose-diving in the polls.

Houghton, the sources remembered, revealed the H-Hour for the landing of airborne troops was just three days away, and the push into Musa Qala would fall on the day when the prime minister would arrive in Helmand.

‘Does it have to be so soon? Can’t it all be delayed?’ asked an official.

The Foreign Office explained that the ambassador, Cowper-Coles, shared their concerns about the timing. This operation could skewer the announcement of the new Afghan strategy. What if civilians died? Karzai would not hesitate to confront Gordon Brown, even in public.

‘This whole thing could be “lose, lose” for the prime minister,’ somebody warned. It risked undermining any proper attention being paid to his statement to parliament.