Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

They turned and reached a knee-height wall that covered a wide courtyard. Brasher pulled his shotgun out and delivered all five rounds. He dropped the shotgun and reached for his M4. At that moment, a gunman emerged from a doorway opposite – the same man who had rolled into the ditch and escaped with his weapon. This time, he was faster on the draw. Brasher had just raised his gun sights when the enemy’s bullets leaded across, kicking up the dirt and knocking him back behind the wall. A chunk of his arm was missing. There was bare bone and blood was spurting out. Brasher thought his whole arm had gone.

‘2–7 is down. Repeat: 2–7 is hit. We need a medevac,’ one of the squad reported, using Brasher’s call sign.

‘Medic! Medic!’ screamed Brasher, whose lungs were still intact. ‘Those motherfuckers!’ The medic, Specialist Spencer Brooks, was already right behind. He wrenched a tourniquet around Brasher’s arm to stem the flow of blood. The bullet had gone through his forearm, shattering the bone, cutting a nerve and then blowing away most of his triceps muscle.

Brasher was still by the wall, and the firing was as intense as ever. ‘You gotta get up and move because we’re still exposed,’ someone told Brasher. He stumbled back down the alleyway with Brooks.

McGovern, the platoon leader, was still with the other squads behind a wall where they had first been pinned down. But he had not needed his radio to hear Brasher’s profanities up ahead. He felt his stomach churn. Was Brasher going to die? And, with Brasher gone, how many more was he going to lose? But the worst thing was the sense of powerlessness. He could not see the compound from where Brasher had been hit. He could not tell what was happening up forward. McGovern told one squad to stay behind, and he took the other over the wall to get straight into the battle.

Sergeant Billy Lee, just twenty-one and from Metter, Georgia, was point for the new squad charging forward and counted himself one of Brasher’s closest friends. As they approached, Brasher was yelling out: ‘Go kill those motherfuckers! Go kill those motherfuckers!

But as Lee arrived and looked at Brasher, he was not listening to his words – just reading his mind from his dark, intense stare. Lee got filled with the killing rage. McGovern had told him to take the enemy’s compound. Lee looked behind him. His team were following. He ran up to the low wall and leaped across. He was aiming to reach the first door on the left of the courtyard. He glanced back again. He had been running too fast. No one else had made the jump. They were behind the wall and Lee was alone and totally exposed in a courtyard ringed by Taliban in every doorway and at every window. He got shot and fell.

‘Hey, I’m hit! I’m hit!’ he yelled.

He lay clutching a bleeding hand and getting scared. Everyone else got behind the wall. They unloaded with everything they had – grenade-throwers, machine guns and their M4s. There was a sheet of lead above Lee’s head. It gave him protection but it also meant he could not get up.

‘Get me out, get me out, I gotta get out. Stop firing for a second,’ yelled Lee.

But it seemed the shooting just carried on and carried on. Then just a brief pause. Lee shouted, ‘I’m coming.’ He leaped back over the wall.

‘Ah, my fucking hand, my hand.

He rolled into a ditch and shouted again, ‘Oh I’m hit, I’m hit, I’m hit.’ Lee was losing it. But Doc Brooks told him he was fine… calmed him down.

McGovern realized it was time to pull out. They had two men to medevac and they had already pumped the enemy compound full of ammo. Time to finish them off, he thought, with a JDAM bomb – or two.

Sergeant First Class Shane Summers was watching the battle from the clifftop by the Roshan Tower, and he dropped into Brasher’s and McGovern’s radio frequency so he could help spot targets for them and give them fire support. It was Summers who got his fire team on to the radio to call off the Apache when he heard Brasher’s angry calls for a ceasefire.

Summers watched as the medevac began and 2nd Platoon withdrew from the enemy compound. He called down to Sergeant Verton: ‘Hey, are you guys all clear?’

‘Yeah,’ said Verton.

Summers gave the order to the machine gunners. It was time to go cyclic – holding the trigger down on fully automatic and just letting the belts of ammunition run through the guns until the guns just couldn’t stand any more.

Kingsman Lee Bellingham had not heard the blast. But now he could hardly hear anything. He was in a strange, silent world, and the events taking place were moving weirdly slowly.

Just before they went up the hill, Jonno had shouted back to the men to get down in the back: a standard drill for steep slopes, in case you rolled. ‘Top cover, get down halfway but don’t close the hatches,’ he said. ‘That way if we get contacted you can reach for your gun.’ It was only just mid-morning, but everyone was getting hot, hungry and thirsty. They knew they had hardly made any distance from the camp the previous night, and there was still at least another 9 miles to go. And in a convoy, thought Bellingham, ‘that’s a long way.’

Up ahead on the track out of the wadi was a big Afghan ammo truck, a Bedford, bogged down and blocking the path with its drive-shaft broken. Captain Nick Mantell was standing next to the truck, trying to think of a way of towing it out. Cagey was there too. Jake Little and Andy Breach had gone off looking for a bigger vehicle that could pull it out. The American gun trucks had already tried and failed. Everyone else in the convoy had either been in front of the truck before it got bogged down or driven past it in the last half-hour. Just two British vehicles – a WMIK with Fong at the wheel and Jonno’s Vector – remained stuck behind.

Fong had already tried to get past by taking a steep path to the side of the truck, but his WMIK kept losing power that day. It would not go. ‘The thing was my vehicle had been working fine, but that morning I don’t know what happened to it. It didn’t want to go past the truck.’

Jonno came on the radio: ‘If you can’t get up there then we’re going.’

They were halfway up the hill when the soldiers in the back heard the engine struggling. The Vector was getting bogged down: its wheels were spinning, and it was digging down into the sand. That must have been how it struck the anti-tank mine, probably one left behind by the Soviets. By now, several vehicles had been round exactly that route. They probably loosened things up.

Bellingham must have been knocked out. When his mind started working, he saw smoke everywhere. He felt a thud when the back of the Vector went into something. He popped his head up out of the hatch and saw his machine gun was in bits, cut in half. A piece of the engine was on top of the vehicle. He ducked back down and looked at the others. The interpreter, Tawfiq, was trying to open the back door. Bellingham grabbed him and shouted out, ‘Minefield,’ although he couldn’t hear his own screams. That was just instinct. He hadn’t really thought about it yet. The medic, Matt Hughes, was in a lot of pain, and a soldier on board from the Royal Military Police, Corporal Greg Jeffrey, seemed to have dislocated his shoulder. Both of those climbed out, then Tawfiq, who had hurt his wrist.

Bellingham tried to shout to Jonno up the front. There was lots of luggage – bags and ammunition – between the back of the cab and the front. He tried to clear a way through. But there was black smoke everywhere, and rubber was burning. He could taste it in the back of his throat. But it was still silent. He could see nothing for the smoke, and hear nothing too.