Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

The ANA said, ‘Look, they need to go. They need to go.’

‘Just go, then,’ McCarrick said.

At least seven civilians, including the two children, had been killed so far – more than three times what I had reported.

Back in the village the battle had continued. After all the early mayhem it had been hard to get the ANA back on its feet. Pummelled by gunfire, many of them refused to fight. It was Jonno who helped rally the ANA company on the right flank. He got them up and pushed them forward, and they cleared the compound to the right of the village entrance.

Messages on the Taliban’s radio network were saying they were manoeuvring forward, so Breach took a patrol and set up an ambush. At an orchard Breach threw a grenade over the wall – reluctantly, as he was worried about who might be behind it, but Lance-Corporal Alex Temple persuaded him – and they charged in after the impact. It was lucky he had thrown it, as there was a Taliban fighter waiting behind the wall. Initially stunned, he was finished off with a shot. Another fighter, a Pakistani, put his hands up. He was cuffed and dragged away.

The armada of twenty-one helicopters was circling at low-level over the desert. Their cargo of paratroopers was already supposed to be on the ground, but a message had come back to say, ‘Hold!’ So, an impromptu formation was playing chase-the-tail-of-a-snake beneath an orange-tinted sky. They churned around and waited for orders. And all the time they had that sinking feeling that any chance of surprise was gone.

Every spare helicopter in theatre had been scrambled for this moment. The twelve heavy-lift Chinooks with the troops were British, American and Dutch. They had an escort of Black Hawks to provide a communications link. On their flanks they had Apache attack helicopters, armed with rockets and missiles. Circling above them all was the ‘C-2 bird’ – the command and control Black Hawk with Colonel James Richardson, the American (101st Combat Aviation Brigade) commander.

This was the H-Hour: the moment of highest drama, the moment when the mission and the men were at their most vulnerable.

The Landing Zone was supposed to be in the Wuch Mandah, a dry ravine just west of Musa Qala. But suddenly this landing was in doubt. On a ridgeline above this wadi and on the mountains to the west and north were lines and lines of deep trenches and bunkers. All of which could conceal an enemy in ambush. They were supposed – right now – to be engulfed in flames. Rockets, bombs and artillery were all zeroed and set to go.

When the event was planned, the pilots were told to brace themselves for the blasts. ‘This will rock your world!’ they were told. But – for all the planning that went on – someone had failed to get the paperwork done. No enemy was in sight. No troops were in contact. So the ‘pre-emptive fires’ required top-level approval.

There were those in Brigade who could see it coming. The Americans, some said, thought they could just sort out all the approvals once airborne. ‘We can use our own rules of engagement,’ one said. But the aviation that day was under NATO command. And with the fear of killing civilians uppermost in commanders’ minds, it wasn’t down to Colonel Richardson on his own authority to unleash hell on the trench lines.

At about 26,000 feet above the desert, an American B-1 bomber was circling. He was close to his decision point, the moment when he had only enough fuel to make it back home. If a decision on the strike wasn’t made soon, he would have to return to base.

The choppers took another turn .

They were divided into three groups. The British one had four Chinooks. By some miracle of effort, all were fit to fly that day.

The planning for this moment, the pilots recalled, had gone on for days at Kandahar airfield. This was very much an American show, and for the Brits and Dutch it had taken some getting used to. They had come to see themselves as spectators. And they both enjoyed themselves and worried themselves immensely.

It had begun with an initial planning meeting. ‘Well, we’ve gone back into our archives to find the last daylight heliborne assault we’ve done,’ said the briefer. ‘Unfortunately we can’t find one.’

Someone at the back of the room had piped up: ‘There’s a fucking reason for that.’

Flight Lieutenant Nichol Benzie had been deputized to represent the British in the planning. He remembered the obsession of American pilots and planners with organizing a vast volume of pre-strikes. ‘It was prophylactic fire they were after. They just wanted to waste the place,’ remembered fellow pilot Tristan Jackman. They hadn’t seemed to grasp, he thought, that the idea was to liberate Musa Qala for the Afghans, not destroy it.

Benzie remembered a 100-strong gathering when a senior American officer was describing all the bombs that needed dropping just before the landing. In all, they had lined up thirty-four targets to be struck. A British legal officer stood up and said: ‘We can’t do that. You’re not able to do that.

Just then two American soldiers started hollering from the back of the room: ‘Fucking pacifists. Don’t they know we’re at war?’

A senior officer in the US aviation brigade was a huge bulldog of a man whom the British dubbed ‘Al Pacino’. He would end every single briefing, recalled Benzie, by shouting: ‘Let’s do bad things to bad people.’ The classic moment had come just before D-Day, when there was a last-minute run-through of the manoeuvres. People had been shifting paper choppers over a large map. And then someone from the Black Hawks had pointed out they would be low on fuel at a certain point. ‘Al Pacino’ had replied with a steely calm: ‘Right, that’s great. We’ve been fucking planning this for ten days, and you haven’t told us that you’re going to be running out of fucking fuel. That’s pretty fundamental. I’d suggest you all go away and think about this, because at 22.00 hours, the good ideas fucking fairy is dead.’

Then an Apache pilot had said, ‘Got anything for us?’

Al Pacino had replied; ‘Yeah, go away and learn – and work out how you’re going to kill people more efficiently.’

Then there was the Padre who had started to pray: ‘Let the Apache pilots rain down fire on the heads of our enemies.’ All the Brits could think of was, well, hey, this is a whole different culture.

Benzie had known the Musa Qala operation would come in his last eight days of operational flying. His tour in Afghanistan was due to finish at Christmas, and this was to be his last dose of getting shot at. He had started to get spooked. Everyone he was picking up on the medevac seemed to be getting hurt just before their end of tour.

The intelligence had been fearsome. It had been quite specific. The Taliban were waiting in force. They were looking to shoot down a Chinook. Paul Curnow, the squadron leader, would remember the intelligence officer as a tiny woman with a squeaky voice who was standing up and basically ‘telling us that we’re all going to die’.

On the eve of D-Day, it had all got even worse. Benzie’s girlfriend had rung from home to stay she had spotted a story on the Daily Telegraph’s website. The so-called surprise attack was no longer a secret. There was even a detailed map showing a large arrow pointing at Musa Qala from the south-west: exactly the direction where they were intending to fly in. Not good.

They had spent the morning in good cheer though. They had feasted on a special lunch of muffins and fried chicken.

Circling around now, they started to kill time. One of the Black Hawks had a female pilot. As she swept by on the turn, the Chinook pilots started to discuss the female form. Someone suggested to the Black Hawks that they all might pop down to the desert to get a quick coffee break.